WHEN A SUDDEN CLATTER of hoofbeats spilled Rivas out of the night’s web of dreams, he decided that he’d been premature yesterday in deciding that his fever was abating. His skin was hot and dry and tight and his breath was arid in his head and the bright morning sunlight seemed to be making faint rainbow auras around everything. His head was murky with the sort of unspecific depression left behind by a night of heavy drinking or the worst sort of nightmares.
He rolled over into a crouch on the pile of cardboard that had been his bed, and he squinted around at the weedy yard. A collapsed, rusty swing-set leaned against a fence near him, and the cardboard freshly shoved under it reminded him that when he’d gone to sleep last night the Jaybird girl had been sleeping there. So where was she now? He stood up, feeling dangerously tall and fragile, and stumbled out of the yard to the tree he’d tied the horses to.
One of the horses was still tied to it. Rivas peered around, blinking tears out of his eyes and wishing that his nose would either produce a sneeze or stop tingling, and finally saw her, fifty yards down the street, riding the other horse.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Uh…” Why hadn’t he learned her name? “Hey, girl!”
She looked over her shoulder, then reined in and rode back to the tree, which he was now leaning against. “What?” she said.
“Where are you going?” He had to squint to look up at her against the bright blue sky.
“The Regroup Tent,” she said impatiently. “Where did you think?”
“Well, Christ… you weren’t going to wait for me?”
“I thought you were sick.”
“Oh!” he said, nodding in exaggerated comprehension. “I see. You thought I might slow you down.”
“Right.”
He throttled his anger by reminding himself that she was a vital stage prop in his role as a stray Jaybird… and just for a moment, though he suppressed the thought almost instantly, he knew he’d have ditched her in an instant if she’d been sick and of no use to him.
“Well, I’m not sick,” he said. “This is just an allergy. I’m allergic to these… bushes, here. Okay? So wait for me. And don’t run off without me again, hear?”
She blinked at him in some surprise. “It’s the duty of every strayed follower of the Lord to return to the fold as quickly as possible.”
“Well, sure,” he said, intrigued by the hint of an Ellay accent in her voice, “but not so hastily that you’re likely not ever to get there at all. One girl alone, why… you wouldn’t get two miles before you’d run into a snake or a punch-bee or a rapist or another couple of pimps.”
She seemed genuinely puzzled. “But my soul would be in the Lord’s hands. Why should it upset you?”
He spread his hands and opened his eyes wide to show her how sincere he was. “Because I care what happens to you, that’s why.” She waited while he saddled his horse and got onto the animal by half climbing the tree.
The girl didn’t speak as they rode slowly down the sunlit street, but she looked vaguely troubled.
“Didn’t I save you from those two guys who killed your friend?” he reminded her after a couple of minutes.
“Yes,” she said. Phone poles stood every few hundred feet along the left side of the road, and sun-rotted rope rings dangled from some of the cross pieces, way up there where only birds could get to, and a couple still held yellow sticks of forearm bones. At about every twenty-fifth hoof clop the horses passed through the shadow of another pole. “But…” the girl said after a while, “we aren’t supposed to care about each other that way…. That’s for the shepherds, rescuing is… and even they don’t do it because they care about us but just because the Lord wants us.”
Rivas glanced at her with some respect. Very good, sister, he thought. You’ve got clear eyes for a birdy chick. She caught his look and smiled uneasily before looking away.
Rivas let his gaze drift to the buildings in the middle distance ahead, standing out there among the heat shimmers like broken, discolored teeth in green gums, and he let his eyes unfocus so that it all became just blurs of color. As the morning wore on, he wished he’d taken Nigel’s hat as well as his slingshot. The hot sun made it feel as if his fever had spread out from him and infected the whole world, like a spilled beer gradually soaking through a whole book, so that the pages tore or stuck together in clumps, and all continuity was gone. He could remember, if he tried very carefully, who he was, how old he was, and what his purpose was in being here; but during this monotonous southward ride he didn’t need to keep all those things in mind, and so he just rocked with the motion of the horse and, unless something roused his attention, thought about nothing at all.
Don’t put on the act for me, old boy. I know you hate ’em all, every one of ’em.
He frowned and focused his eyes. Where had he heard that recently? Who was it that had said that to him? He couldn’t have been sober at the time, or he’d remember. Unless he’d been overpoweringly sleepy…?
It’s me you love. Me only.
It was last night. A dream? Yes, of course it had been a dream, a fever-warped one. He tried to remember something more about it, but couldn’t.
At midmorning he killed two doves with Nigel’s slingshot, and as he was awkwardly butchering them another sentence from his dream came to him. You’re too ashamed to admit it, the voice had said.
Rivas paused, the bloody knife hovering over one of the half-dismembered birds, and he tried to remember what the dream had been about and who in it had been saying these things to him. Then he remembered seeing something in the dream… a person… himself? Was he looking in a mirror? And why, of all things, did he see himself sucking his thumb?
He finished butchering the birds, and started a fire by dampening some shredded cloth from his shirt with Currency and then banging together various rocks and bits of scrap metal until some sparks fell on the shreds and ignited the alcohol vapor. Then he spitted the doves and cooked them over a fire of powdery old lumber pieces. His companion didn’t seem surprised when he let her have one of the birds, served with a mock flourish on a Ford hubcap, but she didn’t look pleased either.
“What’s your name?” Rivas asked her between bites as he leaned back against the big splintered sign that shaded them. He’d whimsically chosen it for their lunching spot because of the archaic message painted on it in big stark letters: ALL CANNIBLES HEREABOUTS CRUCIFYED—NO EXEPTIONS.
She gnawed a charred breast for a few moments, then said carefully, “Sister Windchime.”
He smiled. “I like that. I’m Brother—” What, not Pogo, “—Thomas.”
“It’s nonessential for you to like my name,” she said irritably. Rivas remembered that nonessential was a pretty harsh term of disapproval among Jaybirds. “And why do you have that bottle of money?” she went on.
“To sterilize wounds and start fires,” he said virtuously. “Why? You don’t think I’d drink it, do you?”
“How long have you been a follower of the Lord?”
“I was recruited when I was eighteen,” Rivas told her, truthfully.
“Huh,” she said. “You can’t have taken the sacrament very often if you’re still walking around at your age.”
Unable to think of a reply, he just shrugged.
She leaned back against the sign and pitched the breast bone into the fire. “I don’t—what’s the matter?” she asked, frightened, for he’d leaped to his feet and his face was gray.
“Uh—” He turned and squinted back the way they’d come. “Nothing. But we’re wasting time. Let’s get moving—if we crank, we can be at the Regroup Tent tonight.”
He didn’t begin to relax until they were mounted and riding south down a well-preserved highway, and even then he kept glancing back anxiously; for he’d suddenly remembered a little more of his dream and he was pretty sure now that it hadn’t been a dream at all, that he really had been mockingly spoken to, very late last night, while he was feverishly half awake—spoken to by the hemogoblin whose face was somehow a caricature of his own.
And he was sure, too, that the glimpse he’d remembered earlier, the glimpse he’d thought was of himself sucking his thumb, had actually been a fevered memory of seeing that thing sucking its sustenance from his self-inflicted knife wound.
When the sun was near meridian two columns of smoke appeared in the south, and a third began upwardly staining the blue sky within the next half hour. Rivas and Sister Windchime couldn’t hear anything but the grasshoppers and lizards in the dry grass around them, but every time a long straight length of street offered a chance to see some distance, Rivas stood up in the stirrups and peered, trying to see through the mirage ripples and guess whether the troubles ahead—whatever they were, some consequence of the advance of the San Berdoo army, he supposed—would obstruct his progress toward the Regroup Tent.
After a while the street they’d been following turned sharply to the southwest, and they had to strike out across the fields and flattened housing tracts. Eventually they were fortunate enough to find a southward-snaking dry riverbed, and they rode down the middle of it for almost an hour before noises from ahead made Rivas call to Sister Windchime, softly, “Stop.”
“What is it?” she asked, already a little nervous herself.
“I don’t know exactly, but I’m pretty sure it’s people coming this way. Whoever it is, we don’t need ’em. Come on,” he said, quickly hopping out of the saddle to the gravelly dirt, “let’s get up the slope here.”
Sister Windchime dismounted and they led the horses up the eroded slope. After the first few minutes of dusty scrambling they were in shade among trees, and at the crest of the slope they found a segment of narrow paved road still not quite reclaimed by colonies of tall asphalt-crumbling weeds and the downhill tug of the annual floods.
“Quiet now,” Rivas whispered. “We’ll just let ’em move on past us and then be on our way again.”
Over the rustling of the branches around them he could now hear a sort of windy ululation and a faint metallic clatter—but it wasn’t until the first scream raised startled crows from the trees ahead that Rivas realized what must be going on. It’s a band of hooters, he thought.
Though he’d several times talked to people who’d survived hooter attacks and once or twice come across the remains of people who’d run afoul of them, Rivas had never seen a band of them himself, and he wasn’t eager to. He was glad he and the girl had found concealment, and he hoped everyone down there in the riverbed would be too busy to note the tracks of two horses on the dusty bank.
Again, and more loudly now, came the eerie fluting sounds, discordant and choppy.
“It’s hooters, isn’t it?” the girl whispered.
“Yeah,” he said. More fervently than ever he wished he’d grabbed Nigel’s hat. The shift from motion in sunlight to stillness in shade had got him disoriented again, and thoughts were as hard to hold onto as lively fish in a bait tank. He caught one, and was able to add, “Probably running down some luckless fugitives from the troubles along the coast.”
Branches framed a segment of the gravel riverbed below, and as the hoarse yells and thudding footsteps and the clatter of bicycles got louder, Rivas kept his eyes on it. Almost unconsciously he had taken out the loaded slingshot and hooked it over his wrist. He felt Sister Windchime’s hand close tightly on his shoulder, but he couldn’t spare her a glance to see what her expression was.
“What are you going to do?” she whispered.
“Nothing, don’t worry. This,” he whispered, raising the slingshot, “is just in case they try to come up here.”
Minutes passed and the sounds grew louder and sweat tickled his forehead and neck. Damn, he thought tensely, why do there have to be all these obstacles? All we want is to get to the Regroup Tent, get back to where we belong, in the hands of the Lord. The affairs of the world are ephemeral, I believe that, and the ways of the Lord are all important, I believe that too—so why must the world’s ways always be so noisy?
A particularly raw scream erupted only a short distance ahead, and seemed to shake the leaves. Someone was cursing exhaustedly and a child was sobbing.
“We’ve got to help them,” Sister Windchime whispered.
Rivas glared sternly at her. “Are you backsliding, sister? Everyone dies, and if they are of the Lord it’s a cause for rejoicing, and if they’re not then their death means less than that of a fly.” Though it’s noisier, he amended. “Perfect yourself before you take it upon yourself to improve the condition of others.”
Tears glittered in her eyes. “Well, that’s,” she faltered, “that’s all…true, of course, it’s logical… but this”—she waved downward—“this is real.”
“The world seems real, sister,” he told her gently. “With the cleverness of its illusions it tempts us to participate in them. Why, this show today is probably just a test which the Lord has sent to measure our strength. Be brave and do the right thing.”
He had turned to look at her, but now a motion below made him snap his head back. A horse had appeared below; a little girl rocked in the saddle and a man was jogging alongside with the side-to-side weaving of total exhaustion. All three creatures were covered with dust and spattered with blood.
Then a rattling, glittering construction had flashed across his view, and the man fell to his knees with a sob, and coins of bright red blood began rapidly appearing under him and around him on the smooth stones—
—and in the same instant Sister Windchime put her heels to her horse’s flanks and went avalanching down the slope.
Rivas, though swearing with fright and rage, was right behind her.
The cloud of dust they raised in sliding and scrambling down to the riverbed made it hard to see anything, but to his left Rivas heard the skid and clatter of one of the hooter bikes turning around, and he lifted the slingshot and faced that direction. Then he could see the thing through the dust: the two high-wheels that stuck out to the sides at an upward angle looked like the eye-stalks of some big metal insect, and under the cross bar that connected them he could just see the rider, hunched over the pedals; the bike was still leaning way over from its sharp U-turn as it bore down on Rivas, and the starboard high-wheel was spinning from having touched ground.
Rivas held his arm straight out, and fright made him risk the slingshot’s elastic by drawing the stone all the way back to his mouth. He let fly and then without waiting to see the effect vaulted off his horse and landed in a crouch on the gravel. As he squinted around for Sister Windchime he fitted another stone into the slingshot’s leather pouch, and when he heard quick, rhythmic fluting ahead of him he drew the stone back and peered.
One of the marauders was off his bike and running forward, whirling his slotted sword over his head to produce the alarming, nearly musical noise, but before Rivas could aim at the man, the bike whose rider he’d shot at careened past between them, leaning all the way over so that its starboard high-wheel was rolling along on the ground and the left one stuck straight up in the air like a dish being spun precariously on top of a pole. The rider was gone. When the bike had rolled on past, Rivas saw the slotted sword glittering as it tumbled away through the air, and the man who’d held it was in the process of sitting down; the seat of his pants hit the gravel only a moment before the back of his head did, and then Rivas saw Sister Windchime—she too was off her horse, and with an expression of horror on her face was straightening up and stepping forward like a pitcher following through after a fast ball.
The harsh squeak of pebbles grating together made him look to his right. Another of the weird bicycles was racing along a course diagonal to him, its rider pedaling furiously and holding his sword back for a chop at either the girl on the halted horse or Sister Windchime. Both possible victims looked off balance and confused.
Knowing that he wouldn’t have time to reload and try again, Rivas turned carefully on his heel, tracking the bike and trying to aim at a point a bit ahead of the rider and wishing he’d spent the day practicing his marksmanship. When he saw that in another moment it would be too late, he let fly, and then yelled with triumph when the rider seemed to dive off the bike; the man tumbled along right beside the riderless bicycle for a few yards, then lagged behind, rolling more slowly over the stones.
Quickly Rivas crouched and fumbled another stone into the sling, then tensely turned all the way around, scanning both banks and the riverbed in both directions, and while he was doing that he heard the first bike roll to a stop fifty yards away, and a moment later heard the second one crash janglingly into the bank. He saw the three sprawled hooters, and Sister Windchime, and the girl, still on her horse, and the man still kneeling beside it… and there didn’t seem to be anyone else. Rivas straightened and let the slingshot’s elastic relax, and the wind that was sweeping the kicked-up dust away was suddenly cool on his sweaty face and chest.
He tucked the slingshot back into his belt and trudged over to the kneeling man, who had begun yanking at the tail of his own shirt, presumably trying to make a bandage for the jagged, energetically bleeding gash in his upper arm.
“Here,” croaked Rivas, then got control of his voice and went on, “let me get that with a knife.”
“Thanks,” the man whispered.
As he ripped Lollypop’s knife through the cloth, Rivas looked up at the little girl on the horse. She was staring off into the distance with a half frown, as if trying to remember where she’d left something. He decided that there was nothing to be gained by speaking to her and focusing her attention. He’d cut a wide strip of cloth free and was knotting it around the man’s arm when Sister Windchime gave a little startled scream.
“This one’s still alive, brother!” she called fearfully.
Rivas gripped the knife more firmly and looked up. The second man he’d shot had rolled up onto his hands and knees and was coughing a lot of blood out onto the stones. The line of his profile seemed too straight from forehead to chin, and it occurred to Rivas that the front of the man’s face, including his entire nose, was gone. Rivas stood up and walked over to the nearest sword, picked it up and looked at the other two fallen marauders. The first one he’d shot at was lying somewhat bunched-looking against a rock, and had pretty clearly suffered a fatal injury of the spine; the man Sister Windchime had flung a rock at was staring wide-eyed and unblinking straight into the sun, and Rivas felt safe in ignoring him too for now. He approached the crouching, retching one.
Though his face was a horrid red tangle of exploded flesh and bloody beard-fringe from the bridge of the nose on down, the eyes were bright and alert. He gargled something that sounded to Rivas like, “Go ahead.”
Rivas did, and then with sick, weary disgust flung the fouled sword away and plodded back to the kneeling man. He had to keep fighting off a dizzy, fatalistic certainty that this hot afternoon, characterised by dust in the throat and fingers sticky with drying blood, wouldn’t ever end.
The man had finished tying and adjusting the bandage, and though it seemed to have cost him half his soul, had stood up and was hanging weakly onto the saddle horn.
“I’ve got,” said Rivas, “money. Brandy. To sterilize your wound.”
“Screw that,” the man said. “Let me… sterilize… my stomach with it.”
“Right.”
Peripherally Rivas noticed that Sister Windchime didn’t evince any disapproval at all as he walked to his horse, unstrapped the bottle and carried it back to the man. He uncorked it and handed it over.
“Cheers,” Rivas said.
“Happy days,” the man responded, then tilted the bottle up to his mouth. Bubbles wobbled up through the amber inside, but not a drop spilled. The man finally lowered it and handed it back, with a sharp exhalation and a breathless “Thanks.”
“Sure you don’t want to splash some on your bandage?” Rivas asked. “It kills germs.”
“Germs,” the man echoed contemptuously. He looked around. “They all dead?”
“Seem to be.”
Sister Windchime had quietly moved up behind Rivas, and now she shyly asked, “Why were they after you?” She pointed at the horse, whose harness bore cut straps but no pouches or saddle bags. “You haven’t got anything.”
“Not anymore, no,” the man agreed. “They started after us just north of Stanton. Everybody’s running from the Berdoo army, hooters as well as city citizens. We had some supplies originally, but had to cut ’em loose—less weight for the horse, and we kept thinkin’ we could lose these boys while they were grabbing our scattered food. We kept going up steep hills and across bad terrain, but they’d always find a parallel street and be right back on us in a half hour at the most. And then this afternoon when they knew we had no supplies left but they still kept after us, that’s when I knew they were as hungry as everybody else and our poor couple of pounds of salted pork hadn’t done them enough good. They wanted fresh meat.”
“Well,” said Rivas, “now they are fresh meat.”
The man gave him an unreadable stare. “Not for me, thanks.” He cautiously let go of the saddle horn; and reeled a little but didn’t fall. “They killed my wife—this kid’s mother—a hundred yards back. We’ll head back and bury her and then be on our way. We’re much obliged to you people for saving our lives.”
Sure, thought Rivas helplessly as he watched the man take the horse’s reins and begin to walk back. I’ll bet we bought you and your little girl another whole two days of life. Six hours less for you, maybe, and six more for her, but averaged out, say two days. Jesus.
Sister Windchime touched him hesitantly. “I’m sorry, brother,” she said. “I feel terrible about it. Of course you’ll report me to the disciplinary committee.”
At first Rivas thought she was sorry for having put a fast rock into the face of the dismounted hooter, but when he looked at her he realized that she was apologizing for having intervened in a worldly quarrel; and for having done it even as he was virtuously pointing out to her the doctrinally correct course.
“It was a singularly strenuous test,” he told her with kindly condescension, now faking the tone he’d somehow been sincerely taking earlier. “I’ll report that fact to them.”
“Thank you, brother,” she said earnestly. With a humble, short-stepping stride she walked back to her horse and, with an ease that infuriated Rivas, swung up into the saddle.
After he managed, to flounder onto his own horse they set off down the gravel track. Rivas waved as they passed the slow horse with the girl in the saddle and the wounded man walking alongside—there was no answering wave—but Sister Windchime, he noticed, frowned unhappily and looked away.
A few minutes later they passed the collapsed, ripped-up body of a woman. They didn’t alter their pace.
“They,” said Sister Windchime after a while, “are going to die, aren’t they? Soon?”
Rivas glanced at her. “One way or another, yeah. They won’t make it to a town.”
“Then it didn’t do any good, did it? Interfering. All we did was… delay them a little, in their trip to the Dogtown gate.”
Rivas was busy worrying about his episode of unfeigned birdy orthodoxy up on the hidden slope-crest road, and even this slang confirmation of his guess that she was an Ellay girl didn’t make him want to talk. “Right,” he said shortly. “Goddamn waste of time.”
For another half mile they rode on in silence while the sunlight began to cast a warm light on the greenery to their left and silhouette it to their right; then Sister Windchime said, “Why do I feel like you have to do what you can to help? Even when you know in advance it won’t do any good.”
“Because you’re sinful,” said Rivas impatiently. “Now shut up, will you?”
“Would it be all right,” she ventured a little later, “if we stopped for a few minutes? I think I need to do some more Sanctified Dancing.”
Rivas groaned. “We’re in a hurry, okay? Do it in the saddle.”
After that they rode on in silence, Sister Windchime stiff with resentment and Rivas frightened—frightened of what he was getting into and of what was happening to his mind.
They carefully avoided all other groups of fugitives and by early evening they’d reached their destination. Viewed from above as they crested the last of the rounded, brush-covered hills, the huge Regroup Tent in the valley below them looked, Rivas thought dizzily as he swayed on the back of the horse, like a vast bony beast huddling under a patchwork blanket big enough to drape around God’s shoulders. Up where they were, Rivas and Sister Windchime were still dazzled by the red sun sinking over the Pacific Ocean, but the tent was already in shadow, and lamps and torches bobbed like fireflies in the valley.
In spite of himself, Rivas slowly turned his head to the southeast, knowing what lay in that direction. And yes, there it was on the far side of the Seal Beach Desolate, the Holy City, its wall just visible as a pale rectangular segment on the horizon. He shivered, not entirely because of the cold sea wind that stirred the dry grass on the miles-separated hilltops.
With no sensation of relief he let his gaze fall back into the dark valley that lay open to him below his horse’s hooves. He remembered how easily and totally he had succumbed to the mind-sapping techniques of Sister Sue and her band, and how difficult it had been to float back up into his own identity. I didn’t even know how old I was, he thought now with a tight mix of sadness and panic. And this afternoon I delivered all those birdy homilies to this girl sincerely!
Only for you, Uri, he thought as he nudged his horse forward and down, would I do this.
In less than a minute the chilly sea wind and the sunlight and the view of the ocean were behind and above him. Up from below came warmth and the smell of rancid cooking oil.
“Not so fast, Brother Thomas,” called Sister Windchime behind him. “Your horse will trip in the shadows.”
“How nonessential of you to remember my name,” he snarled without looking back.
Rivas had been to the Regroup Tent only once, more than a decade ago, and in the years since he’d forgotten how big the thing was. Now as his horse slid and clattered down the slope, kicking up a plume of gray dust that was red lit at its breeze-flattened top, he began to remember details: that there were streets and tents inside it, and that the highest sections of the roof were seldom visible from inside because of the upwardly pooled smoke from all the cooking fires, and that for half an hour or so at night, especially after a hot day, you could hear a low whistling that was the warmer interior air escaping through the stitching of the million seams.
The path leveled out and, having given vent to some of his apprehension by his plunging descent, Rivas reined in and waited for Sister Windchime to catch up. It’d be idiotic to ditch her now, he told himself, after you’ve put up with her all the way down.
She stared at him when she rode up alongside. “You’re a strange one, Brother Thomas. You act so bitter, but I’ve never seen anyone so anxious to get back to the Lord.”
He made himself smile. “Being away makes me bitter. I’m sorry. I’ll be perfect when we get there.”
“I think we should both take the sacrament as soon as we get in, don’t you?”
“Well—of course,” he said wildly. “Let’s go. You can lead for a while—I think I may have lamed my horse a little there.”
As she nudged her mount ahead, he let his horse follow at its own pace and weighed his choices. It would look good, he had to admit, to rush in begging for the sacrament; the problem was that they’d probably be given it. So did he want to use the drunk defense—there was the third of a bottle of Currency—or the newly discovered pain defense?
Somehow, taking into account his weariness and fever—and the fact that he couldn’t approach the tent with the liquor—the answer was inevitable. He pulled the bottle out of his shirt, held it down where the girl wouldn’t see it if she turned around, and with his good hand he thumbed the cork out. He heard it rustle in the dry grass. And then every time it was clear that her attention would be devoted for a few moments to guiding her horse, he’d raise one arm as if pointing out emerging stars to her, and behind this cover—in case anyone below might be looking up—he’d raise the brandy bottle and swallow a couple of mouthfuls. The warm fumy liquor choked him, but he forced down gulp after gulp, and when he knew that one more drop would undo all his labor he let the nearly empty bottle fall noiselessly into a thick green bush. He’d ridden a few yards further before he realized that the bush was wild anise. He halted his horse and goaded it back, then with a cry toward Sister Windchime he swung his leg over and jumped into the bush.
He buried his face in the greenery and as he heard the thudding of her horse’s returning hoof beats he ripped up handfuls of the ferny plant, shoved them into his mouth and chomped them up.
To his surprise he felt her hand on his shoulder and realized that she’d actually dismounted to help him, or at least to satisfy curiosity. “Are you all right, Brother Thomas?”
He got up unsteadily, his recent actions having accelerated the alcohol’s invasion of his blood stream. “Yeah, thanks, I was dizzy—” He brushed bits of greenery out of his hair and spat out a leaf or two. “Dizzier than I thought, not really well enough to ride all day, I guess… went to sleep and fell off, and I… banged my head a good knock on the ground just now.”
He grinned foolishly at her. Perfect, he thought. I killed the brandy smell on my breath and at the same time established an alibi for any drunken lurching or babbling I may do: Poor guy—evidently a concussion. And I get to be drunk, too.
“Let’s walk the rest of the way,” said Sister Windchime. “Wait here while I get the horses.”
The sky was a deep cobalt blue by the time they’d wound their way down the increasingly well-constructed path to the valley floor, and when Rivas looked up he saw that a lot of stars were already visible, seeming to hang not too far above the highest peak of the tent. Lowering his head, a bit jerkily, he saw several makeshift towers like the ones that had ringed the field in the Cerritos Stadium, and, closer at hand, an approaching figure silhouetted by the cooking fires behind it. The figure was tall and broad and carried a staff, and for one moment of drunken panic Rivas thought it was the same shepherd who had stomped his pelican and shot him, and whom he’d killed, the day before yesterday.
“Children,” rumbled this shepherd, “welcome home. What band are you from?”
“I’m from Brother Owen’s,” said Sister Windchime.
“I… don’t remember,” said Rivas. He remembered Sister Sue vividly, but he wanted to get the concussion established right away.
Sister Windchime came in right on cue. “Brother Thomas has been feverish all day,” she explained apologetically. “And on the way down the path a little while ago he fell off his horse and bumped his head.”
Good girl, thought Rivas. “We’d like to take the sacrament, please,” he said.
The shepherd clapped him on the shoulder. “Of course. I imagine you’ve missed merging with the Lord.”
The man had turned toward the light now as the three of them approached the tent, and Rivas could see the kindly smile curling the mouth behind the beard. Careful, he told himself; they practice that you’re-home-now smile. Don’t relax.
A dozen cooking fires hazed the air of the valley floor and made the many lamps and torches glow like lights seen through fog, and as the shepherd escorted Rivas and Sister Windchime on a looping course toward the tent, unseen people called greetings to them through the smoke and glare and darkness: “Welcome home, stray sheep!” “Merge with the Lord!” and “May you enter the Holy City soon!”
Oh, thanks, thought Rivas, nervous in spite of the brandy. He was trying to figure out what it was that had changed since his previous visit. Something—some smell or noise—was missing.
Under wide hooked-back flaps the tent’s main entrance was “a twenty-foot-tall arch spilling out a delta of yellow light against the increasing darkness, and as they approached it Rivas could see brightly painted canvas tents inside and robed figures striding about. It occurred to him now what the missing piece of furniture was—there weren’t any far-gone communicants speaking in tongues. The other time he’d been here, the valley had echoed day and night with their babbling.
“A jaybush will be administering communion before very long,” the shepherd told them as he led them inside, “so it might not be a good idea to put anything in your stomachs right now, but I’ll find you a tent where you can relax for a—are you all right?”
Goggling around at the lanes of colorful tents and the spiderwebs of cables far overhead, Rivas had stumbled and fallen to his knees, but as he got up, muttering apologies, he saw only concern in his companions’ faces.
“Merging with the Lord will help clear your head,” the shepherd assured him.
Rivas nodded solemnly, trying to re-establish his dignity.
“It will be a well-attended ceremony,” the shepherd went on. “Several bands are here to pick up their strays, and one of the bands is going directly from here into the Holy City!”
“Called home at last after their hour of wandering in the wilderness,” quoted Rivas drunkenly.
“Amen, little brother,” said the shepherd.
To someone perched on those high cables, thought Rivas an hour later as he peered up into the smoky heights of the tent, this line of Jaybirds would look like the outline of a huge snail, all looped around and around in a spiral.
He stood up on his toes and craned his neck, but he couldn’t see the white-robed jaybush anymore. The old man had wordlessly entered the tent and begun walking through the coiled gauntlet toward the center; Rivas had nervously dropped his gaze when the jaybush passed directly in front of him, but when a few minutes later the man made his next pass on the other side of the line of people in front of Rivas, he sneaked a look… and reflected, not for the first time, that it was hard to tell jaybushes apart. Like every other one he’d ever seen, this one had a craggy, browned face and an ivory-colored beard.
Suddenly from the center of the coil he heard an agonized gasp and the clopping thud of a heavy fall, and he realized that the distant mutter he’d heard an instant earlier had been the jaybush’s formal exhortation: “Merge with the Lord.” He could now hear the faint creaking of clothes and the change in everyone’s breathing as the people in the spiral tensed in anticipation. Many closed their eyes and seemed to go into a trance, and Rivas knew that if any of the far-gone men present were on the brink of entering the speaking in tongues stage—women, of course, never deteriorated that far—it would happen about now. Got them old sevatividam blues, thought Rivas.
And, sure enough, two men in the line ahead of him started up at the same instant, in such effortlessly perfect unison that even their inhalations were exactly synchronized. “Hmmm,” they said. “Hmm?” Now joined by two more, they went on in a rush: “Yes, yes, it’s boiling down nicely now, let me see—yes, I think I can even taste the heaviness…. Help me boil it, children, gently, each of you lend me your little flame….”
Quickly but calmly several shepherds trotted into the spiral, pausing in front of each speaker in tongues just long enough to deliver, with all their strength but apparently no animosity, a devastating punch to the belly.
Finally there was just one speaker still working—“Always welcome, newcomers are, oh, quite a group, how tasty, tasty… yes, children, let’s see if we’re strong enough to squeeze it, shall we? Summon a triton for your sea-king to make a hot dinner of, ho ho ho….” and then an echoing punch silenced him too. All through these noisy interruptions the metronomic “Merge with the Lord,” and subsequent thumping collapse, had been continuing without any change in pace.
Rivas wished he could sober up just for a minute and think clearly. My God, he thought, they speak in English now! It’s a much eerier-seeming trick now that when it was just gibberish. How do they do it, so perfectly in step with one another? Do they rehearse it? Impossible, most far-gones can’t even feed themselves….
And why do the shepherds silence them now? They never did when it was gibberish.
What are they afraid might be revealed?
“Merge with the Lord.” A scream, then a rattling thud.
Rivas wondered where Sister Windchime had wound up. Some of the new recruits were crying—the sacrament was a fairly scary spectacle to someone not used to it—and he wondered how deeply that vein of worried doubt ran in her, and what would be the effects on her of today’s events and conversations. He looked around as much as he could without turning his head but didn’t see her. Oh well, he thought. She’s not my responsibility. He closed his eyes as if in a trance and waited for the jaybush to get to him.
When he opened his eyes again and blinked around, he was startled to see that considerable time had passed. In front of him was a circular clearing littered with bodies, some limp and some twitching and huffing as if with bad dreams; a few people were on their feet out there, gaping around in a sort of drugged bewilderment. The jaybush was only two people away to Rivas’s left, and he wished he’d stayed in his nap or trance or whatever it had been just a minute longer, so that he wouldn’t have seen the sacrament coming.
“Merge with the Lord.” A young man jackknifed forward, and the tremendous crack as his head hit the hard-packed dirt made Rivas guess he was killed. He tried to concentrate on how he wanted to fall himself—bending the knees so he’d sit down first, try to get the arms up around the head—but a woman behind him was crying so loudly that he could hardly make his drink-fogged mind work.
The jaybush stepped up to the boy next to Rivas. “Merge with the Lord,” spoke the white-robed figure, extending a hand. The boy hissed sharply as the touch was made, seemed to struggle to remain upright, then blew out noseful of blood and went down like a dropped armload of firewood. Some of the red spray dotted the jaybush’s robe, but there was already some drying blood spattered on the hem.
“No,” wept the woman behind Rivas. “I don’t want to go to the Holy City. Not so soon.”
Something about her voice struck the drunken Rivas as familiar, and he turned to look at her. She was about thirty, a bit overweight, and tangled black hair hung over her reddened eyes.
He heard the jaybush step in front of him at the same moment that he recognized the woman as Urania Barrows, and even as he opened his mouth to say something to her the jaybush’s cold, bony finger touched the back of his neck.
He wasn’t drunk now, though he was vaguely aware that he had been recently and would be again soon, as soon as he got back into his body. In the meantime it was pleasant to be able to see in the dark and move without using any muscles… though he was careful not to move too fast or too far, for he knew it would be easy to scoot right up into the sky and forget the way back.
The big tent was far below him. He was level with the hilltop where he and the girl had paused earlier this evening, and he was still rising—must have bounced hard off the ground back there—but so slowly now that he knew there was no cause for alarm. It was nice to be alone up here, distantly aware of all the others way off there to the south east. They were linked now to the cold, sentient thing that couldn’t reach him; every few seconds he perceived yet another of them going there… no, more like becoming there, and stopping being in the tent… and much more distantly there were a few isolated awarenesses in the dark ness to north and east… one fairly conspicuous one, as a matter of fact….
Suddenly he was certain that something out there in those miles of darkness was aware of him, was watching him. And he knew he could see it if he cared to, for he wasn’t seeing with his eyes now….
But he was frightened, and was willing himself down, trying to put some hills between himself and that awareness out there in the dark; it was all he could do to move, and it occurred to him that fright in its pure state, without the hormones and reflexes of a physical body, was paralyzing, and that if he hadn’t just been in a body recently he probably wouldn’t have been capable of any motion at all.
The thing out there knew he was retreating, and he could feel its amusement.
Soon, it said, though without words. It’s always been me you loved best. Only.
He didn’t choose to see it, but he realized that it didn’t matter, for he knew precisely what it looked like. It looked like himself.
And just before the hill rose up and blocked the night sky in front of him, he caught a faint hint, more an attitude than a thought, of the thing’s ambition: below him, in the tent, was a physical body steadily deteriorating; out there in the hills was a physical body steadily solidifying. Was there a link, was there some sort of transference at work that was only symbolized by the transfer of blood? Was that thing becoming him? Would it one day complete itself and walk off, leaving him in a mindless little cellophanelike bag sharing the wind currents with dandelion seeds?
Just as he was about to be swallowed up by the tent that had been growing nearer and nearer beneath him, he realized that he had picked up another half thought from the distant thing: it was glad he had used the drunk defense rather than the pain one, because the thing didn’t want any… any… what word, he wondered, expressed the flavor of the concept? Something like brothers, he decided as, inside the smoky tent now, he let himself be drawn down to his body; something like… rivals.
Sound crashed back in on him so abruptly that he jumped like a startled cat, and his brandy-fouled digestive system rebelled at the sudden movement; he rolled to his feet and with clenched teeth and sweat-cold forehead sprinted out of the tent without looking at anything, and on the dirt track outside rid himself of a lot of the brandy and a surprising amount of wild anise. Fortunately it wasn’t an uncharacteristic response to the sacrament.
After a while he walked back, dug his heels into the dirt and leaned his weight back against the fabric of the tent. It gave a little, and he wound up resting comfortably at a twenty-degree angle, facing east. Well, he thought, at least I didn’t get down on my hands and knees this time and go woof woof woof. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths of the dawn-chilly air.
Suddenly it stuck him—dawn air? And yes, the sky behind the black hill was a little paler than black. Christ, he thought with instant panic, was I out all night? Has Uri’s band left?
He floundered back upright and looked around. A few hooded figures were still hunching back and forth across the clearing in front of the tent, and he made himself walk swayingly over to one of them.
He grabbed the person by the shoulder. “Listen,” he babbled, “I… was supposed to be… I’m a member of that band that was supposed to go to the Holy City, you understand, but I just now recovered from the goddamn communion. They haven’t left yet, have they?”
The person—Rivas couldn’t tell in the dimness if it was a man or a woman—yanked its shoulder free of his hand. He couldn’t see tears on the blur of the face but he could hear them in the voice as the person choked, “I—don’t know. Ask the ones there by the entrance.” The figure hurried away from him and was almost instantly enveloped in the shadows of the eastern hill.
Not feeling at all reassured, Rivas reeled to the tent entrance, which was still brightly lit from within. “Has the band heading for the Holy City left yet?” he croaked at the half-dozen people clustered there. “I’m, uh, supposed to be, like, with them, all right?” He glared around belligerently.
Dark hoods turned toward him, but against the light from inside the tent he couldn’t see faces. “They left hours ago, brother,” a man said in not a very friendly tone. “And their shepherd oversaw the loading of them all into a wagon, and he made sure he had every one of them, even the unconscious ones.” The man took a step closer. “What’s your name, brother? Trying to get into the Lord’s city by lying is a pretty serious sin.”
Another robed and hooded figure stepped forward from the group. “His name is Brother Boaz,” said Sister Sue. “Grab him, he—”
Rivas was off and running through the darkness toward the path that led up the hill, hearing nothing but the hard quick thumping of booted feet close behind him and his heart laboring in his chest, and he was wishing he’d done some exercise during his years in Ellay; and then an open hand slapped him solidly between the shoulder blades and he went flailing forward, off balance, his feet unable to keep up with his plunging body, and he hit the ground in a long grinding slide that left him retching in a cloud of dust as he struggled to get air into his impact-emptied lungs.
Strong hands yanked him roughly to his feet; he’d have collapsed again immediately but the two men held him up and turned him around, back toward the tent. Sister Sue was walking up to the swaying trio, and in the brightening light Rivas could just see her broad, savage smile. “He’s a redeemer,” she told the figures following her. “He’s the one who killed our shepherd in the Cerritos Stadium. He knows a way to resist the sacrament.” She stopped in front of him and her ferally happy gaze made him squint defensively. “But he’s… susceptible, aren’t you, little brother? He can be made to be uncertain about things like who a musical instrument belongs to, and how old he is. Yes.” She laughed softly and reached out and touched Rivas’s abraded, bleeding cheek. “Yes, I think that after a couple of administrations of the sacrament while you’re securely tied up, and then being kept awake and chanted over for about seventy-two hours, you’ll be completely repentant, don’t you think, and eager to tell us all the details of your sins.”
Rivas realized that he’d never been truly scared before now. “Look,” he quavered, trying to keep from breaking down and crying and probably wetting his pants too, “look, you don’t have to. I’ll tell you right now, Christ, everything, all of it, I swear, please—”
Sister Sue laughed again, affectionately. “No no, little brother. We’ll do it our way—the Lord’s way.” She turned to the four figures behind her. “He’s strong with fear. All of you hold him. Get a rope around him—but not around his neck. Soon enough he’ll be happy to merge with the Lord, but right now he’d certainly rather take his own life.”
With stout leather thongs they tied him to two big timbers which had been crossed and bolted together to form a big standing capital X, and a wide basket of woven bamboo was wedged over the tops of the beams as a sort of roof. The X stood over on the seaward side of the big tent, by the trash pits and the latrines; people seldom lingered on this side normally, but the sight of someone being disciplined roused morbid curiosity even in Jaybirds, and when the news about Rivas got around the shepherds had to set up a sticks-and-string boundary fence to keep the crowd back. The bright dawn had given way to an overcast sky, and the clouds whirled occasional skirts of rain across the valley, leaving patterns of round, dark pockmarks in the dust.
Rivas’s ludicrous spread-eagled position was uncomfortable from the start, and during the morning it became increasingly painful in his shoulders and back; his arms would eventually have become entirely numb if he hadn’t kept flexing them against the bindings, and wiggling his fingers… though by midmorning he had to roll his head around and look up to see if the fingers really were moving as ordered. The most tormenting things were aches and itches that he couldn’t do anything about, and the way his nose kept tickling as if leading up to a sneeze which never came, and his consuming hangover thirst. Blood and sweat slowly dripped from him or soaked into the wood, and he couldn’t get rid of the idea that as every drop left him the hemogoblin out there in the wilderness became stronger and more solid, and that as every dragging hour eroded Rivas’s alertness and capacity for connected thought, the thing out there became more intelligent.
At around noon the rain became steady, and soon after that it began coming down hard in battering sheets that raised a foggy spray of splashes from the muddy ground and rattled a loud, continuous drum-roll on the tent and the hillside and the basket above Rivas’s head. His black hair was slicked across his forehead and his clothes were darkly plastered against him and the breath seemed even hotter in his head because of how cold he was. The crowd of Jaybirds dispersed reluctantly, and before long they had all gone back inside the tent.
Rivas had by now become almost calm. He knew he was not as strong, mentally or physically, as he’d been at twenty-one, and that if he became a Jaybird again now he probably would not again succeed in escaping the dreadful faith. But he knew too how short was the lifetime of the average far-gone—and he suspected that he’d be gone, and definitely far, in record time. Sister Sue had been right this morning in guessing that he’d gladly have killed himself rather than wind up here… but now he could see little difference between the two courses. And it seemed to him that there was something fitting about not dying until everything one ever had was used up… not dropping the glass until it was empty and even gnawed a little—There was a term he’d heard once… test to destruction…. To learn how much punishment something can take before breaking, you eventually have to break it….
… He could think of a lot of smooth rhymes for “break it”….
At least, he thought feverishly, I won’t wind up an old man. He spoke hoarsely into the rain: “I never did want to wind up an old man.”
Then, and it scared him even though he could tell it was just delirium, he thought he heard the hemogoblin’s voice from miles away across the rainy hills: Well then I’ll come over and wind him up.
He shuddered, and shook his head to clear it of all these morbid, self-pitying ideas. There you go again focusing only on Rivas, he told himself. You’re just fascinated by the Gregorio Rivas story, aren’t you? Especially the tragic ending.
What about the Urania Barrows story? She may be just a supporting actor in your story, but what about hers? Or is yours the only one there is, and when you’re not actually looking at people they disappear or collapse like stage costumes that aren’t currently in use? Now that would be an interesting position for you to take, Rivas; maybe even if you somehow get out of this you’ll just end up as Noah Almondine’s main successor in the art of cutting out paper dolls.
He couldn’t hear over the thrashing hiss of the rain, but through the deeply moored timbers of his rack he could feel the thudding of approaching footsteps. He closed his eyes so that they might think he was unconscious…. The jaybush might just touch him anyway, but it was worth a try.
“Brother Thomas!” came a sharp whisper.
Rivas’s eyes snapped open. A robed and hooded figure stood in front of him, holding a knife. “Sister Windchime?” he rasped.
“Yes. I don’t want to get my hair wet or they’ll know I’m the one that did this.” Quickly she plowed the knife edge down the gap between Rivas’s right arm and the wood, and as he shook off the slimy loops of wet leather she did the same for his left arm—and then had to hold him up with her free hand, for he’d started to fold helplessly forward. Reaching down, she cut his legs free too, and Rivas reflected dazedly that this was one strong young lady. “Now run,” she said. “No one should ever deforced to take the sacrament.”
“Thank you,” Rivas gasped. “I—”
“Go, damn you!”
“Right, right.”
Rivas ran wobblingly toward the seaward hill, his shoes splashing in the new mud, and when he got to the slope he crouched behind one of the scrawny bushes at the foot of the hill until he got his breath back and stopped seeing a rainbow glitter seeping into his vision from the sides.
After a few minutes he scrambled to the next bush, then to a boulder he could lie behind, then to a shallow gully…. Half an hour later he thought he heard shouting in the wind, but it was hard to be sure, for by this time he was well up into the inland end of the valley, and the patter of the rain on stone and leaves, and the trickle and splash of newborn streams, tended to drown out more distant sounds.
He paused, though, and looked back down the valley. The Regroup Tent was a gray mushroom far away, difficult to distinguish from the bulks of the hills because of the mile of veiling rain that hung between it and him.
He grinned. Redeemer, redeem thyself. So long, Sister Sue.
Late in the afternoon he found a building—once some kind of office, apparently—and decided that smoke against this gray-mottled sky would not constitute much of a risk, so he frictioned up a fire of plywood shelves and antique invoices in the open doorway and warmed himself and baked his clothes dry. He tried not to torment himself with thoughts of food or—though he had managed to slake his thirst at a pool of rain water—liquor. Finally, dry and warm and at least not much sicker than he’d been this morning, he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do right now except, with massive reluctance and not even a drink, review his situation.
Well, he told himself, Uri’s gone now, but everything you could do you did do. You not only have Barrow’s five thousand fifths, you earned them: you took the sacrament twice; you were actually shot, though nobody’ll believe that; twice a hemogoblin attached itself to you; you had to kill four men; and if it weren’t for the unlikely intervention of that girl, Sister Windchime, you’d be a grinning, babbling moron at this very moment. Oh, and that guy knocked you down this morning, and damned hard, too. And you cut hell out of your thumb. And God knows if you still have a job at Spink’s.
He glanced around at the rusty, dusty old filing cabinets and wondered if any of the generations-dead people who’d worked here had been in the habit of caching some liquor somewhere. One heard of such finds occasionally.
Suddenly and shamefacedly he remembered the incomparably greatest suffering he’d sustained during the course of this last, unsuccessful redemption: the loss of Uri herself! For thirteen years he’d planned to go find her as soon as he’d got some real money and could give her the kind of life, she deserved, and for these last three days he’d been out actively risking his life to find her… and now she was gone, snatched from him just at the very moment—what a touch—the very moment when his three-day search, no, thirteen-year pilgrimage, was within seconds and inches of being completed!
He was sure to get some good lyrics out of all this.
Then with an unwelcome clarity that memory can rarely manage, he re-heard how Barrows had described him four nights ago: “…Just a kind of shrewd, cunning insect.” And though he’d laughed then, all at once he was astonished at how thoroughly Barrows had understood him. My God, Rivas thought now, you’re going to get some lyrics out of this, are you? Sister Windchime may be birdy, but she’s twice the human being you are, boy.
Well, he replied to himself defensively, I’m a professional songwriter—what am I supposed to do, pretend I don’t derive my songs from the things that happen to me?
No, clown, what you’re supposed to do now is the same thing you were supposed to do yesterday. Go get Uri.
But they took her into the Holy City.
So?
So no one has ever come out of the Holy City except a few jaybushes and shepherds. Even Norton Jaybush himself hasn’t been seen since entering there ten years ago. Everyone knows that a redemption attempt ends when the quarry goes in there. And no, I don’t think such an unheard-of effort is called for by the unheard-of price I screwed Barrows into paying. (Though how on earth could I have bargained for Uri’s soul?)
Now memory replayed a statement of his own, one he’d made to Barrows that same night: “Evidently she’s worth five to you, but not ten.” So what do you tell yourself, boy? he thought. Evidently she’s worth a cut thumb and a few scares, but not worth putting your life on the table on a long-shot chance?
Against this question he involuntarily held up a sheaf of treasured images: his apartment on First by the North Gate, with rain and night outside and himself inside with warm lamplight and a pipe and a drink and a book; long summer afternoons with the feet up on a sunny balcony rail, and a friend or two, and a cool beer standing right where his hand could reach it; the pleasant certainty of new pretty girls to charm and impress and possibly take to his bed, and the equally pleasant certainty of being comfortably alone in that bed later….
And at length he realized, bleakly, that all this did not balance the scale. Not when Uri’s life was what was being weighed. He had to go to Irvine and get into the Holy City and get Uri out.
God damn her, he thought fervently, for getting us into this.