Homeward Bound

by James Axler

  Now Harvey Cawdor, baron of the ville, stood there with his woman at his side.

  "We welcome you, Master Thursby, to Front Royal. You will understand that we must take precautions—" he stretched the word out to an absurd length, as if he savored every elongated syllable "—precautions… against them that trespass against me. You saw our crop of flowering trees as you came here, Master Thursby?"

  "Yes, Baron." Ryan made a half bow to the shadowy figure.

  "Good, good, good. You see, dearest, that here is a man of culture and understanding who will be welcome. Not some ragged and double-poor fucking bastard who would covet everything I own!"

  Ryan took a deep breath. The change from the effusive and elegant welcome to the foul words—delivered in a rising and hysterical scream—was totally unexpected, bringing to Ryan the realization that his older brother might well be full-crazy.

  "Where are the other visitors, brother? Brother Thursby?"

  At that moment the door opened again, and Krysty Wroth came in, wearing a dark blue blouse and knee-length skirt of the same Front Royal livery. Her ankle boots were of plain untanned leather with a low, stacked heel. She'd used a piece of thin cord to tie back her cascade of hair. Even in the poor light of the vaulted room it still blazed like a coronet of living fire.

  "Brother, wel… Come… sister. Sister welcome. Is she…?"

  Ryan heard a woman's voice for the first time, pitched low, but with the crack of a command to it. The bulky figure of the man shifted sideways a few steps, until it stood directly beneath one of the torches.

  Then, at long last, Ryan was able to properly see his brother. He had the same clumsy, shuffling, crablike walk with the right leg trailing and the right shoulder lifted in an unsightly hump. His face was partly in shadow, but Ryan could detect that there was some malformation of the mouth and nose. After so many years it gave him a thrill of vicious pleasure to see that his parting punch into his brother's hooked nose had been so brutally successful.

  But above all of this was the astonishing way that Harvey Cawdor had grown grotesquely fat.

  Not plump. Not just obese. But grossly, obscenely fat. He wore a flowing gown, like a cerise bed sheet, but it couldn't conceal his size. A quick guess put him around the 350-pound mark. His clothes were covered in delicate filigree embroidery, in woven patterns of silver and gold. His chubby hands were smothered in rings, one with what looked like a human eye set in a stone of amber.

  Lady Rachel moved, with an infinite grace that caught Ryan's attention, to stand near the lord of the ville. Her face turned away from the light to peer down into the gloomy cavern of the hall at the man and the woman. She was taller than Harvey Cawdor, slim and elegant, wearing a gown that looked like black velvet, soft as sin. Her hair was cropped to her narrow shoulders, dark and lustrous. Her cheeks were very pale, and her eyes had vanished like gemstones of midnight jet in the hollows of their sockets. She wore no facial makeup, and her fingers were long and strong without any jewelry.

  "Is the woman mutie?" she asked in a soft, caressing, melodious voice.

  "No, she's not, Lady Rachel," Krysty replied in a loud, ringing voice, startling Ryan as he felt it wash over him like a breath of fresh air. Only then did he realize that the room carried the scent of some floral incense. One of his father's serving women had used something like it. The odor was clinging and sickly sweet, like the rotting meat that attracts the most beautiful of butterflies.

  "Where are the others of your party, Master Thursby?'' the lady asked. "There are two more men and then two more that have fled our hospitality into the unfriendly Shens."

  "True, my lady. Doctor Theophilus Tanner and his…and Lori Quint. I am Floyd Thursby, as you know, and this is Krysty Wroth, from the ville of Harmony." He turned as the door opened once more. "This is Jak Lauren from the far south of the Deathlands."

  The woman on the balcony gasped aloud. "Azrael! His hair, husband!"

  "Mutie. A mutie, here in the heart of my ville. Take him, guards! Slit his throat and in the boar pit for my precious pets."

  "He is not a mutie, great lord," Krysty said. "His hair is natural. Where he comes from it's as common as red or black hair."

  Harvey Cawdor laughed, shaking like a massive cherry jelly. " 'Great lord!' Rachel, did you hear? The red-hair is… I like her, like her, like her." His voice edged up the scale toward a falsetto shriek that made the torches dance and flare into bright flames.

  At that moment, as quick and neat as ever, J.B. came into the room, glanced up at where the lord and lady of the manor stood and folded himself into a bow so deep it held the taint of parody. Fortunately neither of the Caw-dors seemed aware of that. Ryan introduced him.

  "John Barrymore Dix, from Cripple Creek in the Rockies. A man with a great skill with all blasters and weapons."

  "Could use him, Rachel," a slobbering Harvey said. "Lotsa blasters going home, sweet home on the range. Need a good man to put them together again, again."

  "Now that we've seen you, you can eat with us," Lady Rachel Cawdor called down. "And you can all tell us more about yourselves. Then we can decide whether you… what happens to you."

  There was a third person behind the ornate pillars of the balcony, indistinct and shadowy, with a pale round blur of a face. The clothes were as dark as Rachel Cawdor's, with what looked like a chain of gold around the neck. It held a single large amethyst, cut so that its facets reflected bolts of violet light across the room.

  As quickly as he appeared, the person vanished, moving with a gentle ease, not making a sound. Ryan looked again at the space where he'd been, doubting his own sight. But he noticed that Krysty had also seen him.

  She mouthed the single word "Jabez" to Ryan.

  Suddenly the audience with the rulers of Front Royal was over.

  Rachel had begun to show signs of a strange unease. Her hands fluttered around her mouth, like startled birds, and she rubbed at her lips, chafing the skin of her cheeks. When she spoke, her voice had dropped, becoming rapid and urgent. She told Ryan and the others that they should wait for the sec men, who were posted at each corner of the large hall, to take them to their quarters for the night.

  "We eat at six in the evening. Don't leave your rooms, or you'll be killed on the spot."

  It was said with a chilling finality. Ryan watched them go, his brother shuffling haltingly like a mountain of blubber after his wife. One thing was sure: Lady Rachel Cawdor wasn't someone to screw around with.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  LOCKED AWAY in the heart of the castlelike ville of Front Royal, Ryan and his friends found that the day passed with infinite slowness.

  They had been taken away by the sec patrols, along winding passages, up and down narrow stone staircases, to what Ryan thought must be the third or fourth floor of the fortress. Each of them was pushed firmly into separate rooms, the doors slamming shut behind them, keys grating in locks.

  To his amazement Ryan found that he was in a chamber that had once been his nursery. The pictures on the walls of stags and boars being torn apart by ferocious hounds were gone, and the draperies were now of plain blue material. The window, which was barred, looked out over the scum-covered moat across the strip of cleared land to the rolling waves of the forest ocean.

  Shelves—mainly empty—lined the wall that had once held Ryan's toys and the handed-down model blasters and soldiers of his two older brothers. Morgan's toys had been well used but serviceable. Harvey's had been generally in mint condition, but with sly damage: a leg severed from a soldier, or a wing cut through on a USAF F-4C Phantom.

  There had been something about the shelves, something that Morgan had once shown him. There was some way to get behind it into the room next along the corri-dor, which had once been used by an earlier baron for his illicit affairs with serving maids. There had been a simple catch, Ryan remembered, but it had been too high and too stiff for him to reach easily.

  There was a sliding panel in the center of the heavy oak door
, and as Ryan glanced at it, the square moved back silently. An eye appeared briefly, staring in at him. Then the eye was gone, and Ryan thought he glimpsed the violet flash of an amethyst before the panel closed.

  If there was a hidden doorway between his room and the next one, it was dangerous to try to find it with someone manning the spyhole. Ryan went back to the window, looking out toward the west over the blue haze of the distant mountains.

  He knew Jak Lauren was in the first room along the corridor, and he thought Krysty had been put in the chamber on his right, the chamber that he remembered had the connecting door. It was a possibility worth hanging on to.

  Several times during the afternoon he saw or heard someone watching him.

  There was a rainstorm at four o'clock. He could hear a bell chiming the hour from the central tower of the ville, a sound that once again plunged his mind back twenty years to his childhood. He remembered standing in this very room, staring out through the window—before it was barred—watching a bald eagle, with a monstrous wing-span of more than twenty feet, pluck a young foal from the meadow and carry it off, whinnying. The mare had run below in hopeless, desperate circles.

  His thoughts went to Doc and Lori, out there in the sheeting rain that came slanting in gray clouds from the west. The trails were so complex that he feared they would have become lost, though the girl sometimes displayed an uncanny sense of direction. And there was also the hope that Nathan Freeman would have been able to find them and lead them to the wag. But what could they do against the massively invulnerable pile of stones that was the ville of Front Royal?

  "Not much," he muttered to himself.

  JUST BEFORE FIVE a tray was brought in by a young man with hard eyes and the kind of formal clothes that a sec man wears when he wants you to know he's a sec man. There was a cup of milk on the tray and some biscuits.

  "Baron and Lady Rachel eat at six," he said. "You'll be ready."

  "I'm not going anywhere," Ryan replied.

  "No. You're not," the sec man said. He backed away to the door, shut it firmly and turned the key in the lock.

  Through the brief gap, Ryan noticed a pair of crimson-uniformed sec guards with their M-16 carbines carried at port arms. Despite his gross personal appearance, Baron Harvey ran a tight ville.

  Or Lady Rachel did.

  There was another flurry of a storm around five-thirty, with surging clouds of dark green and purple skating across the pale blue sky. Lightning crackled through the dark chem clouds, throwing violent shadows across the room where Ryan waited patiently.

  The door opened at five to six.

  Krysty smiled at him from the corridor. "Don't know 'bout you, lover, but I could eat me a mutie buffalo, horns an' all."

  "Pretty mouth, lady. Shut it or lose it," said the sergeant who'd brought them in from Shersville. His eyes met Ryan's stare, and he came close to a smile. "You 'nother wants to try me, One Eye?"

  "I'd kill you," Ryan replied, voice quiet and neutral.

  "You reckon?"

  "I know. You're big and strong, but you're also soft. You gotten used to breaking the arms of women and kids."

  "If the baron says what he usually says, we'll have a chance to see if you're right, One Eye."

  "I'll wait."

  "Threats are cheap." The sergeant grinned, but Ryan could hear that the edge had gone from his voice. The arrogant confidence had been eroded a little by Ryan's calm manner.

  "Not a threat. It's a promise. One day you'll learn the difference."

  J.B. and Jak joined them in the passage, each with a trio of guards at the shoulder. J.B. made the fortress clothes look like a neat military uniform. The albino boy had already ripped the sleeves out of his jerkin and wore the breeches low on the hip to give himself greater freedom of movement.

  "This way," said the sec officer, heels ringing on the stone flags.

  They ate in what had always been the old banqueting hall of the ville. Ryan's father had told him that the region around Front Royal had mainly been hit by missiles that killed but didn't destroy. Ryan later came to understand that the missiles had been neutron bombs. It explained why the ville itself was in such remarkable condition for a prewinter building.

  The table was the same. Hewn from two pieces of an enormous oak tree, it had been sliced through and joined to give room to seat at least twenty a side. The four "guests" sat together, Ryan and Jak opposite Krysty and the Armorer, at the far end of the table, farthest away from the log fire that crackled and spit brightly and noisily. Sec men, as silent as statues, stood at regular intervals around the perimeter of the hall, and more watched from the gallery on the second floor. The light came from a dozen multibranched candelabra on the table and burning torches spaced along the four walls of the room.

  "No elec?" Krysty asked. "Must have."

  "Yeah. Most is wind- or water-generated. Storage batteries in the cellars. Always been a tradition here at the ville to use candles and lamps and torches like those."

  "Stand for Lord Harvey Cawdor, Baron of Front Royal and his wife, the Lady Rachel!" a voice bellowed from near the fireplace. The four friends stood up, chairs scraping on the rush-covered stone floor.

  In the brighter light of the great hall, Harvey Cawdor was even more grotesque than at first sight. Ryan upped his guesstimate of his brother's weight to four hundred pounds, contained in a billowing coat with horn buttons. It was a dark maroon color and seemed to have used up enough material to make a fair-size tent. The clothes were designed to try to minimize his deformities, but nothing could conceal the crooked back or the dragging leg.

  The wide belt of polished snakeskin held two small holsters with the gleaming butts of twin Colt pistols peeking from them.

  Harvey took a reinforced carving chair at the head of the long table, waving a hand to his wife to sit on his right side.

  Rachel Cawdor was in her middle thirties, and it looked as though she worked hard to keep her appearance down in the twenties. The reward was that in the half-light of the big chamber, she could pass for twenty-nine. Maybe.

  Her black hair supported a narrow silver coronet that sparkled with diamonds. The piece was a Cawdor heir-loom, and Ryan felt a flush of surprising anger at seeing the murderous slut flaunting it. Her dress was a blue velvet so deep that it could be taken for black. A silver brooch shaped like a long-necked flamingo, its tail a mass of different colored precious stones, decorated the low front. She nodded to Ryan and his friends, totally ignoring her husband. On her arm was a small purse of scuffed black leather, at odds with the rest of her immaculate appearance.

  The chair to the left of the baron remained empty.

  "Is… ?" Harvey said, getting an almost imperceptible shake of the head from his wife. "Ah, no matter, matter is energy is mass and matter. Doesn't matter to me. No damn matter."

  Once they had both seated themselves, Ryan and his three friends also sat down. The table was so long that they were twenty yards away from Rachel and the baron.

  Harvey Cawdor clapped his hands and servants, dressed in the livery of the ville, appeared bearing platters and tureens and great serving dishes. Ryan had somehow expected it would be the same blue dinner service with the willow pattern design that he'd eaten from during his childhood. As the meal began, he realized why that no longer existed. The Baron Cawdor was an intemperate and violently clumsy eater.

  There was no question of soup followed by fish, followed by game, followed by salad, followed by a main course of meat with desserts and then cheese and fruit. Everything came at once. The servants lined up at the far end of the table while their lord and master ladled out slopping portions of anything that caught his eye. He piled it all into a bowl in front of him that must have been able to hold five gallons of liquid or thirty pounds of solid food.

  At that distance it was difficult for them to see what precisely went into the bowl, but the servants eventually made their way to the guests' end of the table. Lady Rachel only indicated a small portion of steam
ed fish for herself, with a spoonful of sugar peas. She took only water to drink.

  Ryan had rarely seen a more spectacular array of food. There was steak and great hunks of horsemeat, marinated in white port wine, lamb cutlets with a red fruit sauce; pork, overfat, smothered in honey and wild ginger; flounders, served with toasted almonds; bowls of shrimps, wallowing in a pepper sauce and crabs, still in their shells; meat that Krysty identified as turkey, pallid and waxen, dripping with melted goat's cheese and crushed peppercorns; tomatoes and onions in sour cream, sprinkled with mushrooms and little green berries; a thick gray-brown soup that had, unnervingly, dozens of hard-boiled eggs bobbing greasily around in it; potatoes and rutabagas and beans, minced and fried in gravy.

  There were also bowls of fruit, cooked and raw, mostly in sweet and sickly sauces that drenched them. There was water to drink, or a thick lilac-colored liqueur that had an unusual taste.

  "Like something a gaudy whore would bathe in," J.B. muttered, struggling to conceal his disgust at the scented flavor, opting for the water instead. He followed Rachel Cawdor's example and took only a portion of boiled fish and a side helping of vegetables.

  Ryan chose a steak, finding it grievously underdone, blood seeping from the meat before he even laid a knife into it. He ladled some fried beans on the side and discovered they'd been soaked with grated red chilies that almost took the skin off his tongue.

  Krysty contented herself with a chipped goblet of springwater and some of the potatoes, which had been fried in butter. She also took a couple of slices of the whole wheat bread from the wooden board, which was carried by an elderly man with trembling hands who kept his head bowed and didn't look at any of the guests. He repeatedly muttered, "Thank you, my lord, thank you, my lady, thank you…" regardless of the sex of the person he was serving at the time.

  With a shudder, Krysty noticed that the old servant's hands had been branded several times, and his fingers and knuckles showed the unmistakable signs of having been brutally broken more than once.