The rowdy songs had momentarily ceased, and a young girl, her skin afflicted by disease, stood at the center of the long hut and sang a slow, sad ballad, alternating lines in French and English. Around her, the dancers had slowed, with everyone holding their partners tighter.
My yesterdays are always here,
Tomorrow is another now.
And none may say when life will end
And no man may say how.
Krysty had moved closer to Ryan, sensing the dreadful tension and memories roused in him by the old man’s story.
” They said it was stickies,” stressed Pecker. “I was there with me dogsyou said it was dogs, Lord Cawdor?”
“Don’t call me that, Bochco. The name is Ryan Cawdor now.”
“Where was I?”
“The dogs. After the stickies mined the landwag and butchered Morgan.”
The old man giggled suddenly. “Them dogs was Yeah, I was there with the dogs. The baron sort of figured that there was something didn’t set right ’bout it. There was boot tracks in the hillside ‘bove where the mine had been triggered.”
“Boot marks?”
Pecker started to sing to himself in a warbling, fragile voice. One or two of the Cajuns looked around, but nobody took much notice.
Well, I traveled four and forty miles
Mebbe was only three
But boots upon a stickie,
I never more did see.
“It was Harvey. I knew it then. Couldn’t prove it, but I knew it.
“Then he poisoned your father’s mind. The baron believed you’d a hand in Morgan’s passing. Harvey kept whispering in his ear, like tainted honey. The baron near lost his mind with grief. Then, when time was right, Harvey sprung his trap on you.”
Though he fought against it, Ryan’s right hand rose jerkily in the air of its own volition, brushing his chin, seeking the patch that hid the ruined left eye. A part of his mind was vaguely aware that the Cajun girl was singing another slow ballad; the only other sound in the room was the shuffling of feet as the dancers caroused about her.
It was a song of lost love and the pain that remains.
I miss him in the weeping of the rains,
And I miss him at the turnings of the tide.
Pecker was leaning against the table that served as a bar, reaching for a mug of beer, fumbling it so that it toppled over, the frothing liquid spilling on the scuffed planks.
“So Harvey and half a dozen of his sec men came for you. Kid of fourteen.”
“Fifteen, Bochco. The day after my fifteenth birthday. Ten at night. Corridor outside my room.”
THE FORTRESS AT FRONT ROYAL was one of the largest buildings anywhere in the East. It had been the mansion of a horse breeder, back before the long chill of ’01. Ryan’s father had built on it, repairing the work of his father and grandfather. Adding refinements. Fences and a moat. Blasters at every angle. You didn’t get to be a baron by making everyone love you.
They had plenty of gasoline. Electric generators. A fleet of wags. A hundred sec men.
Harvey had tried to drug his younger brother, but a loyal servant named Kenny Morse had warned the lad not to eat or drink that evening. So when Harvey came with four of the sec men, they found Ryan awake and ready.
With his blaster cocked and ready in his right hand. A Colt .45 pistol that he’d stripped and oiled and cleaned himself. Because of his father’s suspicion of him, Ryan hadn’t been allowed a blaster, and he’d been restricted to certain parts of the fortress. But that hadn’t stopped Morse from stealing the gun for him and instructing him in its use.
The blaster held seven, rounds.
The first two rounds killed the first two sec men. Ryan had waited, just inside the doorway of his darkened room. Morse’s, last favor had been to remove a couple of the light bulbs, so that the attackers would be perfect silhouettes for the lad. As soon as he heard them coming, Ryan jumped out, firing.
Two shots to the upper chest and throat. Certain kills, sending the men in their maroon uniforms and polished knee-boots crashing back into the others.