The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (28 page)

We finished bathing and Read was waiting for us when we got outside.

“The first orders of business is to get all of you into clothes a little more appropriate for co-mingling with polite society here in Ain,” he said in that erudite way, his words a machine-gun spill of perfect syllables.

“We are goina make a shopping trip to...the marketplace, and we’ll see if we can’t find the three of you something to clothe—to put clothes, different clothes, on your bodies.”

We went back to the place in the bazaar where we’d seen clothes the previous day. The merchants were very glad to see us again. After I picked out something that looked more Ainean, I came out to the crowd-choked street where a man in a velvet top hat was playing a rousing jig on a hammered dulcimer with yesterday’s shirtless minstrel, who was now sawing at a fiddle.

The music took me back to the Renaissance Faires that I’d attended in the past, but I didn’t feel like I was
in
one here. The world was more than
authentic,
it was deeply
actual.
It was
vero nihil verius
, the real deal. No one here was someone else at home. No one here drove here from Cincinnati, none of them were selling food made with ingredients purchased at Walmart, there were no candy wrappers on the ground.

The thought was profoundly refreshing.

I lingered, listening to the music. After a few minutes, the man playing the fiddle stopped playing and indicated a hat on the ground with his foot. “Oi-ye, if you like our music, spare us a coin, bout it?”

“I’m afraid I’m tapped out, guys,” I said, shrugging. “I don’t have any money on me.”

“Nice new garb. Fair talents for it, I wager? High quality, that Salomon Spearing does. Best clot’ier in the market. You look right handsome.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling awkward. “I guess.”

“I don’t tink you’re lickin up what I’m trowin down, you,” said the fiddler, “I’m sayin I know you’re carryin, and the music deserves a piece of it, don’t you tink?”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t have it. A friend of mine bought this, I’m serious.”

He seemed to think it over, and played a sad little three-note groan on the fiddle.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. Noreen beamed, demonstrating her new sundress, laced corset and boots. As I surveyed her outfit, I felt a swell of affection. She was ethereal, she was gorgeous. “What do you think?”

“You look good. What about me?” I asked, turning in a circle to show off my vest, flat-crowned hat, and slacks.

“Hmm,” she said, and rolled my shirtsleeves up high like a Marine. “There, now you look the part.”

Sawyer came up behind her and tickled her, making her yell and laugh. She turned and hugged him, then held him at arm’s length. He had chosen one of the brown goat-hair ponchos and a Boss-of-the-Plains. A ribbon of colors was embroidered into the edge of the poncho.

“Wow,” Noreen grinned. “You look like Clint Eastwood!”

“That was the idea, baby,” he said, waggling his eyebrows. I whistled the trill from
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly,
and they both cracked up laughing.

“Are you folks finished primping and preening? You kids got expensive taste,” asked Read, appearing out of the crowd. “The Deon wants to get going as soon as possible, our ride leaves just before lunch and we let you all sleep late.”

The boy snapped awake in the dead of night. Something had hit the roof.

He sat there tangled in his dank bedclothes, listening for something else, anything, another noise to tell him it hadn’t just been part of his dream. He’d been flying through the clouds over the countryside on the back of a winged creature whose face he could not see.

Several minutes had passed and he was about to lie back down and try to drift off when he smelled acrid smoke. He got up on his knees and looked out the window.

Six men stood in the cull pen. One of them was holding a liquor bottle with a rag stuffed in the neck; as the boy watched, he lit the rag with a match and lobbed the bottle high into the air. It struck the roof with a thump and rolled off with a thin rumble, sliding off into the woodpile by the window, where it broke and turned into a blinding fireball.

“Pack!” shouted his father from somewhere in the farmhouse.

The boy slid out of bed and moved across the room, but as he took hold of the doorhandle, he heard the rip of gunfire.

A body hit the floor.

Pack stood there, frozen with indecision, then turned and opened his closet. He threw himself inside and shut the door, then pried open the hatch in the back and slid into the crawlspace on his belly. He pulled the board back into place and dragged himself to the hole where the pump pipe rose out of the dirt.

He wedged himself into the ditch by the ice-cold pipe and listened, lying on his side in a grimy puddle.

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 1 “The Brine and the Bygone”

Bunkers and Battleships

O
UR RIDE TURNED OUT
to be a train, a great seething black behemoth that was still loading up cargo when we arrived. I admired it as we crossed the platform of the modest red-brick train station where Walter Rollins was waiting for us. A throng of passengers ebbed and flowed around us, boarding the train, shouting to hear each other over the hiss of the mechanism. There were a handful of green-armored men strolling up and down the platform, checking tickets and helping the elderly with their luggage.

“It’s a beauty, eh?” asked the Deon, one hand on his hip and the other tapping his leg with his hat. “Top of the line chug-bucket.” It was a standard old-school steam engine, a bulbous coal-fired locomotive with a smokestack and a brass bell, with an Ainean-language designation painted in white on the conductors’ cabin.

Walter put on his Boss and climbed onboard the caboose. We found a private sitting-room on one of the passenger cars and filed onto the bench seats inside. There was another Kingsman gunslinger joining us that I remembered from the
Vociferous.

His name was Jonty Garrod. He was a short old fellow with big expressive hound-dog eyes, and a thin beard that had yellowed around the mouth from cigarette smoke. He was tapping filler into a rolling paper as we sat down, so I opened the window.

A wind blew in and made his braided pigtails kick out behind him.

“What’s a matter, boy? You got tender lungs? Smoke make you sick?” he asked with a tremendous grin, showing off the gap between his two front teeth.

“No,” I lied. “It’s just such a pretty day, I thought we should have it open.”

“Anybody ever tell you that you ain’t worth a damn at lyin?”

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I sat down across from him and folded my arms. Sawyer and Noreen came in and sat by Garrod, leaving Read and the Deon to fill out the rest of my bench. Jonty packed the cigarette and lit it...soon, the private cabin reeked of sweet, pungent smoke.

It didn’t smell like any tobacco I’d ever seen, so I asked him what it was. The train sighed heavily and began to move.

“Pear leaves,” Garrod said.
Pahr leaves.
“No, it ain’t the Acolouthis, so don’t ask. Kids always ask me if it’s the Acolouthis, and I allaway says
no, it ain’t. And no, you can’t have any.”

“What’s the Acolouthis?” I asked.

Garrod’s face fell. He glanced over to Walter and said, “Where’d you dig this one up?”

“You know where we got them, you old smokey,” said the Deon. He had his feet kicked up on the bench across the cab, slumped down in his seat with his hat over his face and his arms crossed. “You were there.”

“Kid, you really
are
ignorant as shit like they say.”

“It is because they are from the other-world like Lord Eddick was. The one with the skint head is Eddick’s bastard. They don’t know any better because they are wholly alien to this world.”

I was blown away.

I had no idea Rollins had the scoop on us, or that he was even okay with it. What
really
shocked me was that he knew about my father and that he’d come from Zam/Earth. I registered the disbelief on Sawyer and Noreen’s faces as well.

Sawyer picked up the Deon’s hat, and there was a stern glare underneath it. “You mean you
knew?”

“I suspected as soon as the bastard told me who he was,” said Walter.

“Why didn’t you say anything? You knew about his dad?” asked Sawyer, and he let the hat plop back onto Walter’s face.

“I didn’t know
everything.
I’d heard stories, when I was a boy, from my father. I overheard them late one night, Clayton, Normand, and Eddick, talking about the other-world, where Eddick had come from. I don’t suppose that’s something that could stay a secret for long between men as thick as they were.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I said, echoing Sawyer.

“It’s not exactly common knowledge,” said Walter. “The only people that knew about it were Normand, my father, Ardelia Thirion, myself, and perhaps Jonty Garrod here, the Quartermaster of the Southern Kingsmen. After you told Mr. Read here about it, he came to me as I was getting ready for bed last night and informed me. When I told him I already knew...well, you’ve never seen such a fit.”

Read grinned sheepishly. I sat back, my mind awhir, and looked out the window.

The train had left the station by now, and we were entering a flat scrubland. The wind had kicked up and was sucking the Quartermaster’s smoke out the window. We rode for a little while like that, watching the yellow and brown desert scrub whip past the car.

“Aren’t you glad I didn’t say anything?” asked Walter. “You know how people get when faced with the unknown. Your weird clothes were enough to set the people on the ship and in Salt Point on edge. If they’d known you three had stepped right out of scripture, they’d peg you for madmen and not have anything to do with you.”

He sat up and jabbed a finger in my direction, and at Sawyer and Noreen as well. “You might even be dead by the side of the road, with a highwayman’s bullet in your heads. You lucked out, running into us, you did.”

I had to agree.

In the next cabin over, there was apparently a traveling band, because presently a raucous music started up with lots of stomping, clapping, singing and swooping of violins. All it took was a sly smile and soon our own cabin had erupted in applause and stomping of feet.

The train wound through the desert for hours, occasionally passing through little hamlets strewn across the hardpan countryside of Ain like pickup sticks. Some of these villages were little more than a collection of pueblos clustered on a hillside.

They were populated by dark-skinned, sheepskin-wearing men that perched squatting on the terraces and at the bases of crumbling walls. Sleek, hulking white elk-beasts milled about grazing on the coarse and rare grasses. Their horns curved in great arcs over their shoulders, tremendous loops of bone like ivory scimitars. Read told me that they were the
Pohtir-nyhmi
beasts they’d mentioned at the Vespertine.

There were also townships along the way, and several of these we stopped at to disgorge passengers and pick up new ones. A bald man in a long green tunic embroidered with golden threads came into our cabin complaining that there was nowhere else to sit, and we all agreed to let him stay with us. I was discomfited by the way his throat swelled like a balloon from time to time like a toad, turning from a pale pink to a translucent white. He was sitting quite close to me and I realized that his eyebrows were not comprised of hair but of tiny quills.

When he noticed me staring at him, the man smiled beatifically and I looked out the window, embarrassed.

These larger towns wheeled past in pale panoramas of sandstone edifices, like thousands of sandcastles in succession. I saw blunt, low forts made of massive bricks, their ramparts, towers and corners bulbous and soft-cornered. At a distance, those looked like tall sand dunes with windows cut into them.

There were also tall and majestic cathedrals with spindly towers, all covered in honey-comb mosaics of sea-colored tiles and limned with gold etchings of fantastic beasts that writhed and rampaged across their sides and over their keystones.