1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  Bud Royce laughed harshly. “How the hell do we stop an army if we don’t fight ’em?”

  “We make it cost too much for them to get here. They might decide to turn back.”

  “Right.” Royce smiled sarcastically. “What do you suggest, missy?”

  “That we turn Mary’s Rest into a fort. Like the cowboys used to do in the old movies, when they knew the Indians were coming. We build walls around Mary’s Rest; we can use dirt, fallen trees, sticks—even the wood from this place. We can dig ditches out in the forest and cover them over with brush for their trucks to fall into, and we can block the roads with logs so they’ll have to use the woods.”

  “Ever heard of infantry?” Royce asked. “Even if we did build traps for their vehicles, the soldiers would still crawl right over the walls, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe not,” Swan said. “Especially if the walls were covered with ice.”

  “Ice?” A sallow-faced woman with stringy brown hair stood up. “How are we supposed to conjure up ice?”

  “We’ve got a spring,” Swan reminded her. “We’ve got buckets, pails and washtubs. We’ve got horses to pull wagons, and we’ve got three or four days.” Swan walked up the aisle, her gaze moving from face to face. She was still nervous, but not so much now, because she sensed that they wanted to listen. “If we start working right now, we could build a wall around Mary’s Rest, and we could figure out a system to get the water to it. We could start pouring water onto the wall even before it’s finished, and as cold as it is, it wouldn’t take long for the water to freeze. The more water we use, the thicker the ice. The soldiers won’t be able to climb over.”

  “No way!” Royce scoffed. “There’s no damned time to do a job like that!”

  “Hell, we gots to try!” the skinny black man said. “Ain’t no choice!”

  Other voices rose and fell, and arguments sparked. Sister started to shout them down, but she knew it was Swan’s moment, and it was Swan they wanted to hear.

  When Swan spoke again, the arguments ceased. “You could help more than anybody,” she said to Bud Royce. “Since you were a captain in the National Guard, you could figure out where to put the ditches and traps. Couldn’t you?”

  “That’d be the easy part, missy. But I don’t want to help. I’m getting the hell out of here at first light.”

  She nodded, staring at him serenely. If that was his choice, so be it. “All right,” she said, and she looked again at the crowd. “I think whoever wants to go should leave tomorrow morning. Good luck to all of you, and I hope you find what you’re searching for.” She glanced again at Robin; he felt a thrill of excitement course through him, because her eyes seemed to be aflame. “I’m staying,” she said. “I’m going to do what I can to stop the soldiers from destroying what we’ve done—all of us, each and every one. Because it wasn’t just me who grew the corn; it was everybody. I put the seeds in the ground and covered them with dirt, but somebody else built the bonfires that kept the dirt and the air warm. Other people kept the bobcats and crows away, and more people picked the corn. How many of you helped dig the spring out? Who helped gather the apple cores and worked to put this building back together?”

  She saw they were all listening, even Bud Royce, and she had the sensation of drawing strength from them. She kept going, powered by their belief. “It wasn’t just me. It was everybody who wanted to build things back again. Mary’s Rest isn’t just a bunch of old shacks full of strangers anymore; people know each other, and work together, and take an interest in the hardships everybody else has, because we know we’re not so different from one another. We all know what we’ve lost—and if we give it up and run, we’ll lose it all over again. So I’m staying right here,” she said. “If I live or die, that’s all right, because I’ve decided to stop running.” There was a silence. “That’s all I’ve got to say.” She went back to sit beside Josh. He put a hand on her shoulder and felt her trembling.

  The silence stretched. Bud Royce was still on his feet, but his eyes weren’t as hard as they had been, and his forehead was creased with thought.

  Sister didn’t speak either. Her heart swelled with pride for Swan, but Sister knew full well that the army wasn’t coming just for the crops and the fresh water. They were coming for Swan, too. The man with the scarlet eye was leading them there, and he was going to use the human hand to crush her.

  “Walls covered with ice,” Royce mused aloud. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Hell… it’s so crazy, it might just work. Might, I said. It won’t stop the soldiers very long, if they want to come over bad enough. Depends on what kind of weapons they’ve got. We break enough suspensions and axles in vehicle traps, and they might think twice.”

  “Then it can be done?” Sister asked.

  “I didn’t say that, lady. It’d be a mighty big job, and I don’t know if we’ve got the manpower to do it.”

  “Manpower, my ass!” Anna McClay told him. “What about womanpower? And we’ve got plenty of kids who can work, too!” Her rowdy voice drew shouts of assent.

  “Well, we wouldn’t need too many people and guns to hold the walls,” Royce said, “especially if we leveled the woods and didn’t leave those bastards any cover. We don’t want ’em sneakin’ up on us.”

  “We can fix it so they won’t,” a small voice said. A brown-haired boy of about ten or eleven stood up on the bench. He’d filled out since Sister had seen him last, and his cheeks were windburned. She knew that under his coat there would be a small round scar just below his heart. Bucky said, “If they’re north of here, we can take a car and go find ’em.” He drew a long-bladed knife from the folds of his coat. “It wouldn’t be nothin’ to hide in the woods and pop a few of their tires when they wasn’t lookin’.”

  “It sure would help,” Royce agreed. “Anything we can do to slow ’em down would give us more time to dig and build. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to post lookouts about fifty miles up the road, either.”

  “I doubt you’ve had much time behind a wheel,” Paul told Bucky. “If I can get a car that doesn’t sound like an elephant in heat, I’ll do the driving. I’ve had a little experience in hunting wolves.”

  “I’ve got an axe!” another man said. “It ain’t too sharp, but it’ll get the job done!”

  Other people stood up, volunteering. “We can tear down some of the empty shacks and use that wood, too!” a Hispanic man with a pale violet keloid on his face suggested.

  “Okay, we’ll have to round up all the saws and axes we can find,” Bud Royce told Sister. “Jesus, I guess I always was half nuts! I might as well go the whole shell! We’ll have to assign the work details and thrash out the schedules, and we’d better get started right now.”

  “Right,” Sister said. “And everybody who doesn’t want to help should leave and stay out of the way, starting this minute.”

  About fifteen people left—but their places were instantly filled by others from outside.

  As the crowd settled down again Sister glanced at Swan and saw the determination in her face. She knew that Swan had, indeed, made her decision—and she knew also that Swan was not going to be persuaded to flee Mary’s Rest and leave everyone else there to face the soldiers.

  So, Sister thought, we take it one step at a time. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

  “We know what we have to do,” she told the crowd. “Let’s get to work and save our town.”

  Eighty

  Robin being cool

  The hurting sound echoed through the freezing air, and Swan flinched. She pulled back on the rope bridle, checking Mule to a walk, and steam burst from Mule’s nostrils as if he, too, had heard and been disturbed by the noise. More hurting sounds came to her, like the quick, high whine of notes played on a steel guitar, but Swan knew she had to endure them.

  They were the sounds of living trees being chopped down, to be added to the four-foot-high wall of logs, brush and dirt that encircled Mary’s Rest and t
he crop field.

  Over the hurting sounds, Swan heard the steady chipping of axes at work. She said, “Go on, Mule,” and she guided the horse along the wall, where dozens of people were piling up more brush and timbers. All of them looked up and paused for a second as she passed, then returned to work with renewed urgency.

  Bud Royce had told her, Sister and Josh that the wall needed to be at least six feet tall before the water was poured onto it—but time was getting short. It had taken over twenty hours of nonstop, backbreaking labor to get the wall to its present height and circumference. Out on the rapidly receding edge of the forest, work crews headed by Anna McClay, Royce and other volunteers were busy digging a network of trenches, then hiding them under a latticework of sticks, straw and snow.

  Ahead of her was a group of people packing stones and dirt into chinks in the wall, their breath wisping up into the air. Among them was Sister, her hands and clothes grimy, her face reddened by the cold. A length of sturdy twine was draped around her neck and looped to the handle of the leather satchel. Nearby, Robin was unloading another wheelbarrow full of dirt. Swan knew he’d wanted to go with Paul, Bucky and three other young highwaymen when they’d headed north the day before in a gray Subaru, but Sister had told him they needed his muscle on the wall.

  Swan reined Mule in and got off. Sister saw her and scowled. “What’re you doing out here? I thought I told you to stay in the shack.”

  “You did.” Swan scooped up a double handful of dirt and jammed it into a chink. “I’m not going to stay there while everybody else works.”

  Sister lifted her hands to show Swan. They were crisscrossed by bleeding gashes, made by small, sharp-edged stones. “You’ve got to save your hands for better things. Go on, now!”

  “Your hands will heal. So will mine.” Swan packed more dirt and rocks into a hole between two logs. About twenty yards away, a number of men were wrestling more logs and brush into position as the wall grew higher.

  Robin looked up at the low, ugly sky. “It’ll be dark in another hour. If they’re anywhere near, we might be able to see their fires.”

  “Paul’ll let us know if they’re getting close.” She hoped. She knew that Paul had volunteered for a very dangerous job; if the soldiers caught him and the boys, they were as good as dead. She glanced at Swan, her fear for Paul nagging at her. “Go on, Swan! There’s no need for you to be out here tearing your hands up!”

  “I’m not different, damn it!” Swan suddenly shouted, straightening up from her work. Her eyes flashed with anger, and crimson burst in her cheeks. “I’m a person, not… not some piece of glass on a damned shelf! I can work as hard as anybody, and you don’t need to make it easy on me!”

  Sister was amazed at Swan’s outburst and aware that the others were watching as well.

  “I’m sorry,” Swan said, calming down, “but you don’t have to shut me away and protect me. I can take care of myself.” She looked around at the others, at Robin, and then her gaze returned to Sister. “I know why that army’s coming here, and I know who’s bringing them. It’s me they want. It’s because of me the whole town’s in danger.” Her voice cracked, and her eyes teared up. “I want to run. I want to get away, but I know that if I do, the soldiers will still come. They’ll still take all the crops, and they won’t leave anybody alive. So there’s no need to run—but if everybody here dies, it’s because of me. Me. So please let me do what I can.”

  Sister knew Swan was right. She, Josh and the others had been treating Swan like a fragile piece of porcelain, or like… yes, she thought, like one of those sculptures back in the Steuben Glass shop on Fifth Avenue. All of them had focused on Swan’s gift of stirring life from dead earth, and they’d forgotten that she was just a girl. Still, Sister feared for Swan’s hands, because those were the instruments that might yet make life bloom from the wasteland—but Swan was strong-minded and tough far beyond her years, and she was ready to work.

  “I wish you’d find a pair of gloves, but I guess those are hard to come by.” Sister’s own pair had already worn out. “Well,” she said, “let’s get to work, then. Time’s wasting.” She returned to her task.

  A pair of tattered woolen gloves was held up before Swan’s face.

  “Take them,” Robin urged. His own hands were now bare. “I can always steal some more.”

  Swan looked into his eyes. Behind his tough mask there was a spark of gentle kindness, as if the sun had suddenly glinted through the snow clouds. She motioned toward Sister. “Give them to her.”

  He nodded. His heart was racing, and he thought that if he did something stupid this time he would crawl in a hole and just cover himself over. Oh, she was so beautiful! Don’t do something stupid! he warned himself. Be cool, man! Just be cool!

  His mouth opened.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Sister’s eyes widened. She straightened up from her work and turned toward Robin and Swan.

  Swan was speechless. Robin wore a horrified grin, as if he realized his vocal cords had worked with a will of their own. But now those words were out in the air, and everybody had heard.

  “What… did you say?” Swan asked.

  His face looked like he’d been weaned on ketchup. “Uh… I’ve got to get some more dirt,” he mumbled. “Out in the field. That’s where I get the dirt. You know?” He backed toward the wheelbarrow and almost fell into it. Then he wheeled it rapidly away.

  Both Sister and Swan watched him go. Sister grunted. “That boy’s crazy!”

  “Oh,” Swan said softly, “I hope not.”

  And Sister looked at her and knew. “I imagine he might need some help with the dirt,” Sister suggested. “I mean, somebody really ought to help him. It’d be faster if two people worked together, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.” Swan caught herself and shrugged. “I guess so. Maybe.”

  “Right. Well, you’d better go on, then. We can take care of the work here.”

  Swan hesitated. She watched him walking toward the field and realized she knew very little about him. She probably wouldn’t care for him at all if she got to know him. No, not at all!

  And she was still thinking that when she took Mule’s reins and started walking after Robin.

  “One step at a time,” Sister said quietly, but Swan was already on her way.

  * * *

  Josh had been hauling logs for eight hours straight, and his legs were about to give out as he staggered to the spring for a dipper of water. Many of the children, including Aaron, had the responsibility of carrying buckets of water and dippers around to the work crews.

  Josh drank his fill and returned the dipper to its hook on the large barrel of water that stood next to the spring. He was weary, his sprained shoulder was killing him, and he could hardly see anything through the slit of his Job’s Mask; his head felt so heavy it took tremendous effort just to keep it from lolling. He’d forced himself to haul wood over the objections of Sister, Swan and Glory. Now, though, all he wanted to do was lie down and rest. Maybe an hour or so, and then he’d feel good enough to get back to work—because there was still so much to be done, and time was running out.

  He’d tried to talk Glory into taking Aaron and leaving, maybe hiding in the woods until it was over, but she was determined to stay with him. And Swan, too, had made up her mind. There was no use trying to change it. But the soldiers were going to come, and they wanted Swan, and Josh knew that this time he was powerless to protect her.

  Underneath the Job’s Mask, pain tore through his face like an electric shock. He felt weak, close to passing out. Just an hour’s rest, he told himself. That’s all. One hour, and then I can get back to work, broken fingers and busted ribs or not. Good thing that face-changing bastard gave up! I would’ve killed him!

  He started walking toward Glory’s shack, his legs like dragging lengths of lead. Man! he mused. If those fans could see old Black Frankenstein now, they’d really hoot and holler!

  He unbuttoned his coat and
loosened his sweat-damp shirt collar. The air must be getting warmer, he thought. Sweat was running down his sides, and the shirt was stuck to his chest and back. Lord! I’m burning up!

  He stumbled and almost fell going up the steps, but then he was inside the shack and peeled his coat off, letting it slip to the floor. “Glory!” he called out weakly, before he remembered that Glory was out digging trenches with one of the work crews. “Glory,” he whispered, thinking about how her amber eyes had lit up and her face had shone like a lamp in the dark when he’d given her the spangle-covered dress. She’d hugged it to herself, had run her fingers all over it, and when she’d looked at him again he’d seen a tear stealing down her cheek.

  In that instant he’d wanted to kiss her. Had wanted to press his lips against hers and nuzzle her cheek with his own—but he couldn’t, not with this damned shit all over his face. But he’d peered at her through the narrowing slit of his one good eye, and it had come to him that he had forgotten what Rose looked like. The faces of the boys, of course, remained in his mind as clearly as snapshots—but Rose’s face was fading away.

  He’d given Glory the dress because he’d wanted to see her smile—and when she had smiled, it was like a glimpse of another, better world.

  Josh lost his balance and stumbled against the table. Something fluttered to the floor, and he bent over to pick it up.

  But suddenly his entire body seemed to give way like a house of cards, and he fell forward onto the floor. The entire shack trembled with the crash.

  Burning up, he thought. Oh, God… I’m burning up…

  He had something between his fingers. The thing that had fluttered down off the table. He held it closer to his eye and made out what it was.

  The tarot card, with the young woman seated against a landscape of flowers, wheat and a waterfall. The lion and the lamb lay at her feet, and in one hand she grasped a shield with a phoenix on it, rising in flame from the ashes. On her head was what looked like a glass crown, shining with light.