The Western Lands (19 page)

But the Prince doesn't like it. He crouches slightly and swings from the hip, and cuts the Saxon's head clean off. It rolls across the grass snarling incredulously. The seconds look on appalled.

"Unerhört! Unerhört!"

"Mein Gott, Er hat den Kopf ganz abgeschutten!"

Many of these encounters involve
almost
certain death for both contestants, but any duel where both duelists are
sure
to be killed is ruled out, not by any formal decree, but by deep biologic disgust. To take a long chance is good. To kill yourself is a revolting act, like self-castration.

Two boys stripped to the waist face each other with flails, thin strips of perforated steel dipped in stonefish venom. One cut will cause death in a few seconds of hideous agony. Their eyes blaze with total hate. They are much alike. More and more alike. One boy utters a piercing scream and leaps forward—
swish
,
a miss.

He jumps back. They circle, eyes narrowed to slits of calculation. (The flails have handles of flexible steel or springs. The exact degree of flex is a fine point of flail fighting.)

A feint to the face, then drop to a low crouch for a sweeping leg swipe .. . just a graze, but enough. The onlookers nudge each other.

"This is tasty!"

The boy is
riding
the pain. The ground undulates under his feet.
Whack
. . . a solid hit across the arms and chest.
Swack
. . . He gets one back across the face and neck. Both are dead before they hit the ground, faces swollen out of human semblance.

The flail lends itself admirably to the administration of poison, since instead of one dart or arrow you have only the question of choice: which poison?

Neferti is flail shopping . . . fountain pen and swagger stick flails . . . little curved talon knives in this umbrella model. The hollow undersides can be packed with goodnesses . . . ten centipedes and a cup of crushed brown recluse . . . the gangrenous sores rot to the bone in seconds . . . built-in poison dips . . . or you can spray it on from a tasteful atomizer . . . bits of sawblade sewn into leather. Or, if you prefer something folkloric, obsidian chips with deerskin thongs marinated in black widows, datura, aconite and blue krait venom . . . two-handed flails with scalpel blades and lead weights can take off a leg . . . ten-foot bullwhips with six-inch tips of double-edged steel tapered to needle points.

Neferti picks a cane with bamboo-strip flails steeped in curare and blue-ringed octopus.

Last Chance is a town where a high premium is placed on courtesy. Since the challenged has the choice of weapons, a barroom bully doesn't know what he might be getting into . . . a dogfight with World War I biplanes, a medieval joust or a motorcycle duel with bicycle chains. A contestant with no special skills may insist on the deadly 50-50: one gun loaded, one with blanks, the choice by lot. Both contestants fire simultaneously at point-blank range. Or two pills, one milk sugar, one cyanide. Both contestants swallow and wait.

The 50-50 is the most dreaded of all duels, since the factor of skill in combat is ruled out. Quite ordinary courage can sustain a duelist in a pistol or sword encounter; 50-50 is something else.

The antagonists face each other across a table. On the table are two cups of tea and two white capsules on a silver tray. The first choice is decided by a throw of dice or other random procedure. He selects one of the tablets and washes it down with tea. The other swallows the other tablet. Then they wait . . . it's the waiting that makes the difference. How long? You can rig the capsules to dissolve in a certain length of time. Can be anywhere from sixty seconds to twelve hours.

Here is a cigarette duel. Dissolving time is the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. They light up and look at each other.

"I aim to finish smoking mine!"

The other laughs, a dry, rustling sound like a scorpion eating its mate. "You know how it hits? Like a bolt of lightning . . . throws you right out of your chair."

"Throws me?"

"Who else? I'm a blessed cat."

"Famous last words."

The survivor pissed.in his pants from the relief.

Most people back off from a 50-50. A 50-50 can empty any bar.

"You say something?"

"Not me, mister. Gotta get home to my aged mother with an opium suppository."

Whether it's skill or 50-50 depends on who gives the challenge. And what constitutes a challenge?

"Why you 50-50 stumblebum, come out from behind that cyanide tablet and act like a man."

"Can't take a straight chance can you, pistol boy?"

"Fuck you, kamikaze kook."

Then suddenly a pistol man will challenge a 50-50, or a 50-50 will challenge a pistol. He is allowed ten days training. How many good pistol shots have had the experience of taking someone to the range who never fired a gun before and the novice does better than he does?

And sooner or later a 50-50 knows his luck will run out.

The atmosphere of Last Chance is polite, deadly, purposeful. For Everyman comes here to find
his
enemies, and Everyman who gets this far has deadly enemies to whom he can never become reconciled and who can never be reconciled to him. You will meet your enemies in Last Chance sooner or later. Meanwhile there are hotels and restaurants for every taste and pocket-book.

If certain rules prevail, they prevail only sporadically and in certain areas. There are fair-game slums where anything goes and the whole place teems with assassins, since a lot of richies don't want to meet their enemies on fair terms. Much easier to hire someone to grease him from ambush or call him out. But these professional duelists do not last long.

Right now Kim is looking for this Deputy Sheriff known as Zed Barnes. He was a crotch shooter, so they called him the Honey Badger. According to legend the Honey Badger always goes for the crotch in a fight.

Once Kim was out pissing in the early morning sunlight.
Zummmmmm
. . . he felt the wind of Zed's 30-06 miss by half an inch from three hundred yards.

"I'm going to get you, Honey," Kim vowed.

He gets out his short-barreled .44 Special and his double-barreled 20-gauge shotgun pistol, gets on his strawberry roan and starts looking.

And he puts on a steel jockstrap comes to a point in front.

Honey has fled to Mexico with twelve assholes like him. Some of them had worked in the Belgian Congo, where they turned in severed black genitals and collected the bounty, and there were Putumayo rubber-boom guards and foremen. He occupies a small Mexican town in Chihuahua, extending his territory by enlisting all the creeps from the area—boys who set cats on fire . . . now there's a likely lad to work for Honey.

He prospers and plants his informers everywhere. Those suspected of treachery were tortured to death for the pleasure of Honey and his sycophants who, if they fell from favor, provided future entertainment.

Now, when Honey finds out Kim is in Last Chance shaking the tree, he can't pass up this chance to rid himself of his most dangerous enemy. Zed knows he don't have a chance on equal terms. He plans a long-range shot with his telescope-sighted 30-06.

Honey comes into town disguised as a dirty old prospector and walks over to the counter in Scranton's Saloon and General Store.

"Ham and eggs!"

He eats it.

"A pint of whiskey!"

He drinks it and rolls up in his filthy sleeping bag.

Got himself hid good.

Now Kim knew Zed would come out of his
queréncia
and try it, because Kim was becoming an obsession with Zed. Every time anything happened, like he gets the shits, Kim must have hired the kitchen staff to poison him. He had a loyal cook boiled alive in lard. His closest associates are moving back from him.

See, he
has
to try it, just as the opponents of Hassan i Sabbah had to try it. The Sultan can't get it up?
It's the Old Man.
And the Sultan threw all his good concubines to the crocodiles.

Zed has to come. And Kim will know him when he comes by the most distinct thing about a man: his smell.

Bloodhounds can trace a man through a city, through millions of other human smells. But Kim has a Pharaoh Hound. He can sniff through the centuries. He gives the hound a sniff of Zed's dirty underwear he got from Zed's houseboy, the only one Zed thinks he can trust at this point.

Pharaoh Hounds don't bark or whine. When they get the scent the ears and muzzle flush red. The redder they flush, the closer the quarry.

Kim walks into Scranton's with his Pharaoh Hound and it just so happens the Old Prospector wakes up and the hound takes one sniff of the prospector and his ears turn a bright rich red and so does his muzzle, and Kim says, "All right, Barnes, come out from behind that Old Prospector."

Zed's face is a thing to see: abject panic. His lips crawl back from his teeth and his eyes bug out and he makes a galvanic snatch for his Sidewinder, the .45 bullets loaded with diamond-back venom, enough to kill five men in each bullet. But he misses and hits a passing cow that gives one despairing
mooooo
and drops dead in its tracks. Kim disintegrates him with one shot that takes out a wall of the store.

Now, Mr. Scranton, the storekeep, has runned to the cyclone and vegetable cellar when he seen the dog's ears turn red. He asks Kim to pay for his store, plumb mint and about two hundred in canned goods vaporized right off the shelf, smells like beans and tomatoes right down into the timbers, he has to tear the whole place down and start over, and worst of all it stinked like vaporized Zed Barnes, the vilest stench a man could gag on.

So that was it with Zed Barnes, not really a worthy opponent, but that 30-06 whistling by Kim's prick, that had to be leveled out and evened up.

They say Adam was made out of clay. Well, Zed Barnes was made out of vulture shit. Ain't nothing too dirty for God to put his hands in it to make more creatures to buy his shit and produce it. "Increase and multiply."

They need
more more more
to fill factories and offices and
more more more
to consume the shit produced.

So he starts faking it. He is putting out human stock without the names. Literally Nameless Assholes, NAs. Their name is mud. Their name is shit. Without Angel, Heart, Double or Shadow. Nothing but Remains, kept operational by borrowed power overdrawn on the Energy Bank . . . physical bodies animated by bum life checks.

Knocking Zed out could start a panic, as the human stock drops off the board. They are selling short at gorilla level. It has already dropped to pigs and is going down fast.

7

The Road to the Western Lands is devious, unpredictable. Today's easy passage may be tomorrow's death trap. The obvious road is almost always a fool's road, and beware the Middle Roads, the roads of moderation, common sense and careful planning. However, there is a time for planning, moderation and common sense.

Neferti is inclined to extreme experience, so he gravitates toward the vast underworld of the Pariah Quarter, the quarter of outcasts, of the diseased, the insane, the drug addicts, the followers of forbidden trades, unlicensed embalmers, abortionists, surgeons who will perform dubious transplant operations. Old brain, young body? Old fool has a young body but not the sensibilities of youth. He has sold his soul for a strap-on.

It may be said that any immortality blueprint depending on prolonging the physical body, patching it together, replacing a part here and there like an old car, is the worst plan possible, like betting on the favorites and doubling up when you lose. Instead of separating yourself from the body, you are immersing yourself in the body, making yourself more and more dependent on the body with every stolen breath through transplanted lungs, with every ejaculation of a young phallus, with every excretion from youthful intestines. But the transplant route attracts many fools, and the practitioners are to be found in this quarter.

London, Paris, Rome, New York . . . you know where the streets and squares and bridges are. To reach a certain quarter, you have only to consult a map and lo, a string of lights will show you how to reach your objective on the subway.

In Waghdas, however, quarters and streets, squares, markets and bridges change form, shift location from day to day like traveling carnivals. Comfortable, expensive houses arranged around a neat square (all residents have a key to the gate) can change, even as you find your way there, into a murderous ghetto. Oh, there are maps enough. But they are outmoded as soon as they can be printed.

Neferti uses this method to orient himself and find the Pariah Quarter: place yourself in a scene from your past, preferably a scene that no longer exists. The buildings have been torn down, streets altered. What was once a vacant lot where one could find snakes under sheets of rusty iron is now a parking lot or an apartment building. It is not always essential to start from a set that no longer exists. There are no rigid rules, only indications in this area. Do you pick just any place? Some work better than others. You will know by certain signs whether the place you have chosen is functional. Now, get up and leave the place. With skill and luck you will find the location that you seek in Waghdas.

Neferti seeks out the vilest slums of the Pariah Quarter. He is dressed in the inconspicuous garb of a traveling merchant with a single bodyguard. They encounter an obstacle course of beggars. Neferti tosses a coin to an armless leper, who catches it in the suppurating hole where his nose used to be and hawks it out into a clay pot in a gob of pus and blood. Other beggars squirm forward, exhibiting .their sores. The bodyguard lashes out with a flail of copper weights and the beggars shrink back, spitting and drooling hideous curses. One turns and raises his robe and jets out a stream of shit, smirking over his shoulder. They turn into a wine shop where Insult Contests are held. These contests are illegal by order of the Board of Health on the grounds they pollute the atmosphere. But in this quarter anything and anybody goes. It's an art rather like flamenco.

One of the creatures who lounge about in female apparel is seized by the Insult Spirit. He leaps up and focuses on a target, imitating every movement and mannerism with vile hate and inspired empathy, thrusting his face within inches of his victim.

An English Major is reduced to hysteria as his monocled, frozen face cracks and a stream of filth pours from his mouth, words that stink like vaporized excrement. He screams and rushes out, followed by cackling laughter.

The victorious insult queen stands in the middle of the floor like a ballerina. He turns and looks at Neferti, feeling for a point of entry, like a questing centipede. Neferti hurls him back with such force that he flattens against the wall and sinks to the floor, his neck broken.

The others spread out in a semicircle. Neferti lashes out with his poison sponge flail. Faces and arms swell and turn black and burst open. He holsters his flail. (Flails are holstered by pushing the handle up through the bottom of the holster like an octopus retreating into its lair and pulling its tentacles after it.)

Neferti adjusts an imaginary monocle. "Let's toddle along and leave these rotters to stew in their own juice. They're filthy."

He stops in a cosmetic shop to rub perfumed unguents on his face and hands, and dusts his clothes with shredded incense.

They proceed to the Encounter Inn . . . bar along one wall, a few tables. The Bartender is a beast man, a baboon cross with long, yellow canines. When Mandrill vaults over the bar, prudent patrons take cover. Now he fixes his baleful little red eyes on Neferti. His glare glazes with reluctant respect. He becomes obsequious.