been as soon as the new crop of females came ripe for harvest.
Again there was no response from the royal harem. Time hadn’t been so kind to Willie Elijah, Ryan thought. The baron’s hair, his pride and joy, which had once been corn-silk blond like his granddaughters’, was now stiff and white and unmanageable. He tied it in a loose bun at the back of Ms head. He had on a quilted, plum velvet smoking jacket, which leaked stuffing from holes in the shoulders and elbows. He wore no shirt under the smoking jacket; the coarse white bristle of his chest hair spilled over his food-stained lapels. Loosely draped around his neck was a blue silk scarf with black tassels on the ends. His trousers were baggy, wine-colored corduroy, and his shoes were a pair of predark sandals known as Birkenstocks. Because he wore no socks, Ryan could see his great, horny, yellow toenails. Even from across the room, the baron smelled like an unhosed bear pit
Ryan remembered him as being a taller, more imposing figure. Certainly the flesh of his face didn’t used to hang down below the line of his jaw. And his cheeks had never been scruffy with white stubble like that. Even his eyes looked ancient. They were bloodshot, / and the whites had a yellowish tinge to them. From too. much of his own brew, Ryan thought. But he knew it Jr would be a mistake to underestimate Elijah, even in his. present condition. Though the man had been scourged
by time, he was still dangerous, cruelly perverse and unpredictable. And they had placed their fates in his
hands.
“So, Cawdor,” Elijah said, “did you come back to try and make amends after all these years? Mebbe beg me for forgiveness?”
The audience of toadies murmured its unanimous approval. They liked a good and proper show of begging, especially when it was doomed to be fruitless.
“We came to warn you,” Ryan told him. “There’s five thousand stickles on your toll road. They’re coming north to level this place. They already wiped out your little way stop twenty miles south. Burned it to
the ground.” The baron laughed, and the crowd of sycophants
joined in with gusto.
“That’s a good one, Cawdor,” Elijah said. He picked up a potato and threw it at Ryan’s head, but missed when his intended target easily ducked the warm missile, which brought more laughter from the audience.
“Baron,” Lester spoke up over the tumult, “I think One-eye was sure he could sneak past Willie ville without anybody recognizing him.”
Ryan didn’t look at his friends, but he could feel their eyes on him. Everything depended on what he said next, and how he said it “Baron, that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he argued. “I wasn’t trying to sneak by your ville-fireblast it, I wasn’t even wearing a disguise! With a face like mine, I’d have to wear a hood and mask to keep from being noticed. I came here for one purpose, and that was to warn you, and I
did it knowing there was still a price on my head. Ask yourself why would I risk my life to sell you some nuke-shit, made-up story about stickies when I could’ve easily taken a ten-mile detour and avoided Willie ville altogether? You know I’m no stupe. What possibly could be in this for me, except mebbe an early death?”
The baron sipped from his tankard as he considered the question.
Ryan didn’t wait for a response, but forged ahead while he still had the chance. “We talked to the only survivors from the burned ville of yours,” he said. “They told us a mutie was leading the stickies up the toll road. We outflanked them on the highway and got close enough to see the bastard for ourselves. The survivors said you know him. Said that you used to keep him in your zoo. His name’s Kaa.”
Elijah shook his head. “I don’t ever give my mutie pets formal names, Cawdor. They aren’t worth the trouble. You should remember that from the old days.” As jf losing interest in the conversation, the baron started picking through the mound of meat in front of him.