Authors: Gene Wolfe
Castleview (24 page)
THE FURIOUS ARMY
Sissy AND Long Jim had put his sweat-soaked saddle blanket and heavy stock saddle on Boomer again. Sissy rode, with Long Jim walking at her stirrup. “I’m still worried about Judy,” Sissy confessed.
“There’s many more that bear the king’s blood.”
Sissy ducked beneath a limb. “You mean the old king in the tower?”
Long Jim chuckled, a deep grating that made Sissy think of stones sliding upon stones, far beneath the ground. “Nope, not him. Viviane’s brother.”
“Is that Judy’s father?”
Long Jim did not reply. If they were following any path, it was one Sissy could not see. They had climbed and descended stone-strewn hills, and traversed wide meadows pastured only by deer. Now Boomer’s hooves were silenced by bright mosses, and trees rose before them and behind them, trees five and six feet through the trunk, trees that were often hollow and more often dead.
“Where are we?” Sissy asked after a long silence.
“On the border.”
An east wind was rising, stirring and groaning, a cold wet wraith summoned from the world’s night side by some necromancer.
Its gusts sent damp leaves flitting forth like bats; one clung to Sissy’s cheek until she pulled it off.
Its gusts sent damp leaves flitting forth like bats; one clung to Sissy’s cheek until she pulled it off.
“This can’t be the Canadian border. Can it?”
Long Jim shook his head, like a man awakened from a deep sleep. “Between your country and Viviane’s.” He stopped to glance up at Sissy, and Boomer halted at once. “Border’s both places, like. They say they don’t know where they are, ‘cause when you’re walkin’ border land you’re in the two together.”
“I see,” murmured Sissy, who did not. The lost wind sighed in her ears. She kicked Boomer with her heels until he resumed his slow walk.
They forded a creek, Long Jim leaping from rock to rock, Boomer wading in icy water as high as his knees and pausing in midstream to drink.
“I don’t think it will hurt him,” Sissy said. “He’s pretty well cooled off now.”
If Long Jim heard, he gave no sign of it. He crouched on the farther bank, bending to scrutinize the soft earth.
Sissy clucked to Boomer, slapped his neck with the reins, and dug her heels into his sides again and again. At last his head came up and he resumed the troublesome business of picking his way, in iron shoes, over slippery stones.
Safely across, she dismounted. Long Jim was standing again by then, but she bent to examine the overlapping hoofprints that he had been studying. After a moment she said, “Those were sure as heck a couple of big horses.”
“He come across where we did. Went upstream there, headin’ for the lake.”
“You know who it is?”
Long Jim nodded. “Green man.”
“Mr. Greenman?”
“Don’t matter to you,” Long Jim told her, “and we’re not goin’ that way.” Without a backward look, he plunged into the wood, moving at the swift lope of a backwoodsman in a hurry.
Sissy called, “Mind if I walk, too? I was getting chilly up there, and it’ll give Boomer a rest.”
There was no reply. She set off after him, half walking and half running, leading Boomer by the reins. The trees were smaller on this side and more thickly set. She reflected that riding would hardly have been faster, and she would surely have been badly scraped before they had gone half a mile. Briefly she lost sight of Long Jim as he detoured around a blackberry tangle, now largely leafless.
I don’t care, Sissy thought. All I’ve got to do is keep headed this way.
She was jogging now, with Boomer trotting slowly behind her.
Then Long Jim was gone again, dropping down into some gulch or ditch. When she reached it—there was another stream at the bottom, one that had cut a twenty-foot cleft in the hillside—the banks looked too steep for Boomer, too steep, almost, even for her. She was forced to lead him a hundred yards down the slope to find a place where both could cross.
“We’d jump this, boy, if you were fresh,” she told him, and knew she lied. Fresh, with an expert like Lisa on his back and a proper jumping saddle, Boomer might have made it; but Sissy herself would never have found the nerve to try it.
East, she thought. We were going east.
Earlier the sun had broken through occasionally to daub the underbellies of the thunder-haunted clouds with cerise and lend shadows to the moss-draped trunks. Then the wind had been in her face; now she tried to keep it there.
Once she thought she heard a truck, and she veered in that direction; but after a quarter mile or less the woods became an impassible tangle.
It was dark by the time she turned back. “I wish I’d eaten more carrots,” she told Boomer. “And I wish I had a carrot here to give you.”
He nodded in the dark. She could not see his head, but she felt the motion of the reins.
Again it seemed to her that she heard an engine and the hum of tires. She recalled the castle, abandoned, as it had seemed,
save for flitting figures glimpsed at a distance, the lost girl, and the aged king. It came to her fully now for the first time that the castle had not belonged in the reality she knew at all, that such a place could hardly exist anywhere, and certainly could not exist here, in this forgotten and countrified corner of upstate Illinois.
save for flitting figures glimpsed at a distance, the lost girl, and the aged king. It came to her fully now for the first time that the castle had not belonged in the reality she knew at all, that such a place could hardly exist anywhere, and certainly could not exist here, in this forgotten and countrified corner of upstate Illinois.
At length it occurred to her that from Boomer’s saddle she might be able to see the lights of the vehicles she had heard. She mounted and found that his night vision was better than her own; he threaded the tree trunks at a slow walk, seldom making an error. She watched for headlights but saw none; nor did she hear the sound of a car or truck again; the wind was quartering now, and she did not dare rein Boomer around to face it. Horses were supposed to have a wonderful sense of direction. A horse, or so she had been assured, will always find his way back to the stable, back to oats and corn and water. Sissy hoped fervently that it was true.
She had been riding for what seemed like an hour or more when she heard a familiar voice: “Sissy, you are lost? I too am lost.”
“Sancha! Is that you?”
“I am here. I see you. Can you not see me?”
Boomer caught the smell of another horse and whinnied. The other replied—old friends happy to have met again.
“Sancha, where are you?”
“You are coming toward me, do not concern yourself. But you do not know the way back?”
“I’ve been giving Boomer—” Abruptly he shied, and Sissy was nearly thrown.
“It is the blood, Sissy. The smell disturbs him.”
“Are you hurt?”
There was no answer.
Tired as he was, Boomer broke into a nervous trot. Sissy tried to rein him up, but her right leg slammed into a tree, and for a moment the pain was so intense she thought she might faint.
Then Boomer stopped, as it seemed, of his own accord, head tossing, dancing sidewise. A second or two passed before Sissy realized that Sancha had hold of his bridle.
“You must dismount, Sissy. I wish to kiss you.”
She had been only frightened before, alone and cold, afraid that she might walk and ride all night without ever finding her way back to Meadow Grass. Suddenly she was terrified. She had been a child, trembling in the dark; now the tiger had come. As violently as she could, she slapped Boomer’s haunch. He reared, pawing air, so high it seemed that he might fall backward.
A cold hand touched her own, and the reins fell from it. Someone—Sancha?—was kissing her knee, kissing the spot where some stub of limb had torn her skin, kissing away her blood.
Light stabbed the trees, wandered away, returned to pick out Buck nibbling at a fern, his reins at his forefeet. Sissy jabbed her heel into Boomer’s side with all her strength. He wheeled, and the shaft of yellow light stabbed Sancha’s blood-smeared lips and cheeks.
Long Jim rumbled, “Well, well. Look what’s here.”
For an instant Sissy thought he meant Sancha; but it seemed he meant himself, because he turned his light upon his own face; it appeared unchanged, save as any man’s face will change when lit from below, yet surely there was some horror in it. Sancha screamed, a high, uncanny wail of dismay and despair …
And was gone.
The light vanished too, and Long Jim’s face with it. Sissy heard Buck’s saddle creak as Long Jim settled himself. At last she managed to ask, “How did you find me?”
“By lookin’. With a horse an’ all I figured you’d keep up. After a while I seen you weren’t behind me and turned back.” He clicked his tongue to Buck.
Sissy said, “Just a minute, I’ve got to find the reins.”
“He’ll steer you better’n you him.”
“You’re probably right. Okay, I’m ready. Can I ask you where you found that flashlight? I don’t think you had it this afternoon.” Buck, Sissy sensed, moved off at a fast walk, his steps scarcely audible; a twig snapped as they brushed past it. With her knees and heels, she told Boomer that he might go too.
“Out of a car. Figured I needed it worse’n they did. You know I used to work at the track? Stable hand and so on. Been a long time since I been on a horse, though. Viviane wants me to drive for her, mostly.”
“You must know what it is I want to ask you,” Sissy said. “What will you do if I ask it?”
“Answer you, I guess, if I can.”
“All right then. What was the matter with Sancha? I know her, or I thought I did, and she’s never been like that before. And why was she so afraid of you?”
It was a long time before Jim replied. They turned at the bottom of the hill. The trees were larger again now, as well as Sissy could judge from their loom in the dark. Certainly the ground was more nearly level here.
“You a church-goer?” Jim asked at last.
“No, not really.”
“I never was neither. They don’t believe what they preach—that’s what always sent me huntin’ or fishin’ instead. I was married awhile, and once the minister come over. Some of it’s right, though.”
For a moment, the moon broke through the clouds. Sissy saw Long Jim slumped in the saddle, ten feet ahead of Boomer’s nose. “What do you mean?”
“A livin’ man has got a soul, a spirit in him. One anyhow, an’ maybe two or three. You believe that?”
“I don’t know,” Sissy admitted.
Long Jim sighed, or perhaps it was merely the wind. “I do. That’s the difference between us, see? Now suppose a person—what’d you call her?”
“Sancha. Sancha Balanka.”
“Suppose she was just about dead, some way. Maybe a doctor might think she was. Sometimes a heart will beat so slow that a doctor listens and goes away before it ever does. Flesh cools down like a snake’s. He signs the paper then, nowadays, and the person goes to the undertaker’s. He drains out the blood—they do that—and pumps in embalmin’ fluid, and that kills ’em. In the old days they’d have to dig ‘em up an’ burn ‘em, or cut off the heads, or maybe stake ’em down.”
Sissy shook her head. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this. Taking it seriously.”
“You asked me. You want to hear or not?”
She shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“All right, that’s what happened to your friend, only she ain’t got to the undertaker yet. What you seen wasn’t her, or anyhow not all of her, just the part that wants to stay alive no matter what. Now you’re goin’ to ask me what a thing like that would need a horse for.”
“Yeah,” Sissy said. “I guess I am.”
“Really it don’t, but it wants to think it does. It wants to think it’s the whole girl, see? So it’ll ride a horse if it can, or maybe drive a car, and act like it was the real person, the body and everythin’. Only if somebody holds up a mirror to it, that makes it face up to what it is, and it’ll skedaddle.”
“I’m not buying a bit of this,” Sissy told him. “I’m not buying any of it. But why—”
The crack of a rifle interrupted her. It was neither near nor far, neither loud nor faint, but a distinct flat report, the sound a soldier hears when he is fired upon by a sniper half a mile off. After it, faintly at first, came the drum of hooves, followed by the snarl of engines.
“It’s him!” Long Jim shouted. “By God, it’s him!”
“It’s who?” Sissy asked. “Is it Greenman?”
The quick tattoo of Buck’s gallop was the only reply. She urged Boomer forward, and he went willingly, not galloping but trotting with surprising speed, dodging trees that Sissy herself could hardly see.
Another shot, its hollow boom nearly lost in the hysterical keening of the engines. A different gun, Sissy thought. So now there’s somebody else shooting—it’s a shoot-out at a drag strip and why the hell am I riding into it?
She struggled to rein Boomer up, but the edge of the woods was already far behind them, and the yellow glare of headlights lit the open ground before them like a stadium. A huge man upon a far bigger horse than Boomer came thundering down on Long Jim and Buck; twice she saw the flash of Long Jim’s automatic before the horses met like linemen in the closing seconds of the final quarter of the hardest-fought football game ever played and Buck was thrown back end-over-end, spinning and rolling and tumbling like a kicked puppy.
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