There was a quiet knock on the door of her room.
“Yeah? Come in.”
“Greetings and salutations, my dear child,” Doc said, walking to embrace her. “Mayhap this is to be the day when we shall receive some news of our lost companion.”
“Be good to hear,” she agreed. “Looks like it’s going to be a fine day.”
Doc stared out of the window, watching as a large three-master was warped away from the bustling quay, its crew scurrying around the deck to raise the sails and bring her out into the main current. The rising sun caught the gilt around the figurehead of a well-endowed blond woman in a blue helmet, gripping a yellow trident. The captain stood foursquare on the quarterdeck, shouting instructions through a brass trumpet.
“Wonder where she’s going and what she’s carrying?” Krysty said.
“Perhaps outward-bound across the barfor Nineveh or for distant Ophir. Sandalwood, or a cargo of cheap tin trays. Who can say?”
Krysty eased the window open a few inches, and they could hear the flapping of the canvas and the shrill cries of the men as they scampered up the ratlines and out along the yards. From the decks there was the thin whistling of a bosun’s pipe and the hoarse yell of officers on the bridge by the wheel and up on the beaked fo’c’sle.
“One day I’d like to sail away from Deathlands,” Krysty said. “I know so little about what’s happened in the rest of the world over the last hundred years.”
Doc sniffed and wiped his nose with his swallow’s-eye kerchief. “I suspect that I might have caught myself a small cold,” he muttered. “Rest of the world, child? When I was an unwilling guest of the whitecoats, I learned something of the rest of the planet. Simply put, it suffered more or less equally all around the Earth. Europe and Asia and Russia and even far-off Terra Australis Incognito nuclear destruction followed by the long winters. Followed by anarchy and mutations and a gradual return to a society similar to that of the Middle Ages.” He shook his head sadly. “I fear that the entire world has become Deathlands, my dear. The grass is most certainly no greener on the far side of the hill. Regrettably not.”
“Everywhere the same, Doc?”
He nodded. “Yes. I believe so.”
“Still like to sail away one day. Ryan and me talked about it quite a few” she stopped as her voice choked, and a single tear glistened on her cheek.
Doc put his arm around her. “Be of good cheer, my dear, and play the braveheart. Hope dies only after the last breath has been breathed the final chapter writtenthe end credits rolledand the fat lady has sung. I have never met a man of the ilk of Ryan Cawdor and probably never will again. He is a titan among giants. If any man can survive, then it is Ryan. Let your hope still spring, Krysty Wroth.”
“Thanks, Doc.” She looked down again at the river and the growing activity on the dockside. “Love watching it all going on,” she said.
“Have you noticed that magnificent building over yonder?” Doc pointed with his swordstick a little way downstream, virtually on the spit of land that jutted out between the White and the Sippi. “A baron of some wealth must have built it. That round tower the view must be truly marvelous.”
“Guess you can see the whole ville from there.” Krysty shaded her eyes with her hand. “Caught a glint of the rising sun off glass. Think there’s someone there with a telescope or binoculars. Great place to spy from.”
Doc nodded, looking the other way upstream on the White. “There is a sturdy soul taking some early exercise in that small rowing boat. I wonder how far he has traveled this morning. The fellow looks a little fatigued.”
Krysty looked casually down.
She looked away, not much interested in the dawn oarsman, who was splashing his way wearily toward the docks almost immediately below the rooming house.
Then she looked back at him.
“Doc”
The old man had noticed flecks of mud on his worn knee boots and had knelt to wipe them clean. “What is it, my dear?”