Ryan ignored the compliment, getting to the heart of the matter. “How long has Boldt been around?”
“Forty years? Fifty years?” Gehrig shrugged. “Hard to say. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t there. Since there were dryads in the forest, Boldt’s been there guiding them.”
“How many other nasty surprises does he have?” Ryan asked. “Other than the tanglers.”
“The tree-huggers are a strange lot. As you could see, they dress all in green, worship pagan gods who demand blood sacrifices upon occasion, and have strange powers.”
“Powers?”
“Scrying and the like,” the raider captain said. “Premonitions. Fortune-telling. Like that. Once in a while some of my boys will come staggering out of that forest somewhat worse for wear. It seems Boldt is fighting against a little insurrection within his borders. He controls the weapons and only the ones who support his rule get them.”
Ryan thought about the boy who’d intercepted them in the mountain range, on the run from the Celtic forces. “Any idea why they’re not so happy with him?”
“Rumors,” Gehrig said. “Whispers about something the dryads call the Time of the Great Uprooting. Some shit like that. Never impressed me. But the insurrection gave me the idea to branch out some. Figured if I could meet up with some of those rebel tree-huggers, I could start up an arms deal with them. They could give me tangler poison, and I could give them guns.”
“They go for that?”
“No. Bastards have got their standards. I set out some of my team as bait and managed to capture a couple of them. Laid out the deal. Even let them see the guns I was going to be trading in. Told them they could take them with them, sort of on loan until I got my first delivery. Then they’d be like a signing bonus.” Gehrig let out a disgusted breath. “They were so bastard narrow-minded they turned me down.”
“Why?”
“Said the tangler plants were sacred to them.”
“But they didn’t have any problem going up against Boldt?”
“He’s not sacred. He’s just in control, according to the way they see things. What they want is to start a country of their own.”
“Boldt won’t let them.”
“No. They’re under a death sentence. Any of them who get found out.”
Ryan wondered if that was how Tarragon fit in.
“So we play our little games at night,” Gehrig went on. “I take a raiding party into the dryad lands, Boldt’s raid teams try to run us to ground when they catch us and the rebels try to mug us for our weapons, without getting caught by Boldt’s raiders at the same time. Course, the shoe’s on the other foot, too, because they don’t mind offing Boldt’s people and framing us for it if they get the chance.”
Ryan drank his beer, thinking. “Nobody knows where Boldt came from?”
“There are those who think those green bastards were always there, that the nukestorm just shook them out of whatever hiding place they’d set up for themselves. They got powers, Ryan, like I said. I’ve even heard stories of them flying through the trees, changing their shapes to those of animals, shrinking down to the size of ants.”
“But never seen it?”
“Fuck, no! Those people, they’ve got some mutie powers, but it isn’t anything more than that. I’d stake my left nut on that.”
“Ever been into the dryad ville?” Ryan asked.
Gehrig acted as if he didn’t want to answer the question at first. “Don’t like the idea of anybody going out to throw his life away.”
“The better informed I get,” Ryan argued, “the less likely I’d be to throw my life away. And if I find out enough that going in doesn’t seem a likely prospect, I won’t go.”
Gehrig stared at him hard, running his little finger across his gums again. “You’d do that?”
“If I knew she was dead, or was going to be and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.”
“You’re a hard man.”
“Just mebbe bright enough to see the difference between the possible and the impossible.”
“I’m telling you now that going in after the woman is impossible.”