had not as yet been allowed to plumb the depths of kindliness and generosity
that were essential parts of his character. You had to know Tyas McCann a long
time before you could get past his guard, the steely barrier of his ingrained
reserve and suspicion. And to young Krysty Wroth, then, he was still an unknown
quantity, for she had only lived with him since Sonja had died and that was less
than eighteen months before. Sometimes she still cried at nights, the image of
her mother wasted by the sickness for which there was no cure, from which there
was no escape, etched into her mind. And she was lonely—soul-achingly lonely.
Her mother had been everything to her, and her mother’s brother could never take
her place.
Now of course she knew better. Now she knew that it was not a question of Uncle
Tyas taking Sonja’s place in her love and affection. Uncle Tyas supplied what
Sonja had not supplied, and would not have supplied even if she had lived. They
were two different branches of the same tree. Her mother had taught her to keep
the Secrets; her uncle, how to use them. Her mother taught her knowledge of the
Earth Mother; her uncle had expanded and extended this knowledge dramatically,
to include just about all he knew about the real world outside, and all he had
learned about the catastrophe that had overtaken it: what had happened, how it
had happened and why it had happened—though there were more theories than hard
facts on that.
And he had taught her how to survive in a world that had been insane for a
century. Her mother would never have taught her how to use a firearm. Uncle Tyas
had taught her just that.
She could see him now, outside the large, airy, seven-roomed cabin, holding a
squat and ugly-looking metallic shape in both hands—she realized now that it
must have been the Detonics Pocket 9; it was the smallest handgun Uncle Tyas had
in a wide-ranging collection gathered over the years—and saying, “This is a bad
thing, little one, but you have to know about it and you have to be able to use
it one day, because there are worse things waiting out beyond the Forest, and
you have to sometimes use bad things to deal with worse things, worse
situations.” Krysty was fourteen when she’d heard this.
Almost as soon as she had come to stay with him he had begun his instruction,
not only in the use of all kinds of weaponry, but in unarmed combat, as well.
There had been two of them, she and young Carl Lanning, at fifteen the eldest
son of Herb Lanning, Harmony’s ironsmith. Herb was a big, potbellied, gruff man
who had taken over the forge and ironsmith’s shop built by his father forty or
so years back. He did odd jobs for Uncle Tyas, made strange-looking metal
artifacts that Uncle Tyas created on his drawing board from books in his vast
library, objects that sometimes worked as Uncle Tyas said they would, and
sometimes didn’t. And when they didn’t, Uncle Tyas would rant and cuss and call
Herb the biggest blockhead in the entire Deathlands, say that he couldn’t
construct a simple metal object when it was handed to him on a set of detailed
and meticulously finished drawings. And Big Herb would grin good-naturedly and
point out that everything he’d done was from the drawings, and if the thing
didn’t work it was because the guy who drew it up hadn’t got it right in the
first place. They used to argue for hours, Uncle Tyas raging, Big Herb smiling
complacently, filling a rocking chair with his bulk, both hands clasped across
his gut. It had to be said that more often than not Big Herb was right. More
often than not, there had been a slight error in transcription from book example
to drawing board, because Uncle Tyas worked fast, too fast, often in a white
heat of creation, his eager brain far ahead of his fingers, nimble though the
latter were. The trouble was, Uncle Tyas invariably wanted things done about
half an hour before he thought of them.