Finn whirled past, hugging the young girl. On the far side of the hut J.B. was still almost suffocating in the embrace of the giantess. It might have been a trick of the flickering oil lamps, but Ryan could have sworn at that moment that the Armorer’s feet were a good eighteen inches clear of the planking.
But all of that blurred compared to this totally unexpected confrontation. The Trader had known a little about Ryan’s background. About the lost eye. About the emotional scars.
But even the Trader had only known the small glimpses of the past that Ryan allowed him.
Now this
For a moment of scorching rage, Ryan was tempted to reach out and snap the scrawny neck of the diminutive old man to still his babble forever. But that would bring everyone in Moudongue down on them.
Oddly, it never occurred to him that the stranger might be chattering lies, might just have a snippet of useless information that meant anything or nothing. Somehow Ryan knew that this was the revelation that he’d feared for many long years.
“I think I know you. What’s your name?”
The face contorted into an expression of vulpine cunning. The old man wiped a gnarled hand over the stub-bled cheeks.
“Like to know, wouldn’t yer, Squire Cawdor?”
Ryan eased aside the shirt, showing the butt of the SIG-Sauer pistol. “Name?” he hissed.
“Ryan? What does” began Krysty, recoiling as he turned to look at her, the one eye glowing with a manic light.
“Let it lay, woman,” he snarled.
“I don’t rightly recall what my true name is,” muttered the old man, licking his lips and speaking so softly that Ryan had to lean close to catch the words. He winced at the stale alcohol on the breath.
“What do they call you?”
“Pecker.”
“Pecker?”
“Yeah.”
A vacuous smile slithered across the wrinkled cheeks. The old man touched his stomach with his right hand, smoothing the torn shirt. He moved his hand lower, fondling himself, demonstrating how he’d earned his nickname.
“You know Ryan?” asked Krysty.
“Sure. Knowed him. Years, back. He knowed me then. Don’t know old Pecker now, do yer?”
The man put his head to one side like a bird sizing up a juicy morsel of food. Then Ryan remembered himremembered his real name.
“Bochco. Harry Bodice. You were mythe dog-handler at the ville.”
“Harry Bochco.” The man tried the name out for size, running it around his mouth, repeating it and finally shaking his head in bewilderment. “Sometimes past I don’t recall. You say it, then it was so. But I recall you.”
“Then tell it,” said Ryan wearily.
Against the noisy maelstrom of the Cajun dance, unheard by anyone else, the old man told it.
Chapter Eight
“FRONT ROYAL WAS THE biggest, strongest, richest ville in all Virginia. The nukes hit it hard, but the land’s good. Fertile. Plant a bullet, and it grows a blaster. Baron Cawdor held it, in the Shens, from his father and his father ‘fore him.”
The music and the dancing swirled about them, but Ryan and Krysty were locked into the old man’s story; the girl heard it for the first time; Ryan tasted the bitterness of old wounds, feeling the empty eye socket beginning to throb with ancient pains.
“Home like a fortress, deep in the hills. Oh, sweet Lord, those blue-muffled hills and the rolling forests. I swear it were near heaven. Ryan here, Lord Cawdor, was the youngest. Bravest. Proudest. Best with blade or blaster. Finest”
“Get on, man,” snapped Ryan.
“But only as he grew some. There were three in the litter. Morgan was oldest, and like Ryan here. Cherished him when we were little. Runt of the lot when young, Ryan was. The middle brother”
“Harvey,” whispered Ryan, barely conscious that he’d spoken.
“Aye, Harvey. Curse his fucking name. Twisted like a windblown rowan tree. I recall that when he were but ten years old, he took this kitten and a white-hot dagger and pushed”.
“Fireblast!” Ryan closed his good eye, fighting for self-control. “Keep to the center of the story, or I’ll fucking Go on!”
“You were only fourteen when Harvey struck. Your older brother, Morgan, was out with a landwag train, meeting up a trader from the Apps. Stickies mined the wag. None lived to tell.”