Tough barons held their villes.
Weak barons lost everything.
If this gang of brushwood heroes wanted to chance their arms, Ryan wouldn’t bother to take sides though his emotions lay with the poor, not with the powerful.
“Jak wants to know what’s happened to the man called Straub.” Krysty whispered, passing on the message from the albino teenager. “One we heard about when we arrived and everyone seemed so interested in me and Jak.”
“Ask Schickel.”
“Right. I will.” Krysty raised her voice above the hubbub of conversation. “I heard the name of someone called Straub in this camp. Where is he?”
It was as though she’d uttered some dreadful blasphemy in an old predark cathedral.
Everyone around the tables stopped eating, spoons and forks frozen halfway to gaping mouths. All eyes turned to look at the redhead.
A young woman next to Schickel answered Krysty. “Straub comes and goes when he wants, outie. He’s not one of us. Not with us, so to speak.”
“But not against us, Madge,” Schickel said. “Straub’s not against us, is he?”
“Oh, no. No, he’s triple-not against us. Then again, Schickel, you can’t sort of say he’s with us.”
“Well, you know how it is. Straub comes and goes when he wants.”
“I said that.”
Schickel nodded. “Know you did, Madge, know you did. I was agreeing with you.”
He turned to Krysty. “Straub’s his own man. Trades in a special way. I reckon that you and the white-headed boy, Jak, will interest him a lot.”
“Why? Why me and Jak in particular?”
“He can tell you that for himself. Likes to speak his own words, does Straub.”
“Look forward to hear him,” Krysty said tersely, tearing at a sinewy hunk of roasted deer. “Hope he isn’t going to keep us waiting too long.”
“The waiting is over, lady. I’m Straub and I’m here.”
Chapter Sixteen
The voice was soft and gentle, with a strange caressing quality to it.
It reminded Krysty of her mother trying to persuade her to do something she wasn’t keen to do.
It reminded Ryan of a high-class gaudy slut he’d once known near Aurora in the Carolinas. She’d been the mistress of an elderly baron and wanted some tender young meat to carve, and picked on the dark-haired, brown-eyed youth with the scarred face and the missing eye. She’d had a voice that could’ve charmed birds down out of the tallest trees in the forest.
Dean remembered his mother Sharona’s voice during the rare times that they weren’t running and hiding. There’d been a small vacation cottage from predark, amazingly well preserved, in the Black Hills. The local Lakota had been friendly to the woman and her little boy. And at night, by the side of the crackling fire, Rona would tell her child tales of heroes and villains, while he gnawed on a crust smeared with wild honey.
Straub’s voice didn’t remind Abe of anything in particular, though he found himself turning around with a sudden and unanticipated smile on his face.
Trader remembered a golden girl in a cornfield on a golden Kansas afternoon when he was young and Mildred also found herself smiling at the friendly voice. Her father had a younger brother, Josh Wyeth, who’d been a Baptist minister in Alabama. He used to sit the skinny little girl with the ribboned plaitswho he called Millieon his knee and tell her stories of the Bible.
Jak heard the voice of Straub and, for some wholly unaccountable reason, thought of Mama Jeanne, the wise voodoo woman in the bayous, and her tale of the gator that changed himself into a smooth-talking man to try to charm little children down to the muddy deeps, among the gnarled roots of the ancient mangroves. There he would change back to a reptile again and devour them.
J.B. listened to the smooth, gentle voice, and he had a vision of an old breed gunsmith he’d once met, close to Norleans, a tiny, halt figure in a cane-backed wheelchair, his spine twisted sideways from a birthing accident. His eyes were as bright as chips of Sierra ice, and his delicate hands could turn a rusted, moldering relic into a fine piece of crafted weaponry. He had talked while he worked, and young John Dix had sat at his bench, sometimes handing him a chisel or an auger. But most of the time he would just sit and listen.