but a long tooth, a shark’s tooth perhaps, inlaid with a winding, intricate pattern of gold.
When Jack looked up at the Captain’s face, half-expecting
a blow, he saw his shock echoed there. The impatience which had seemed so characteristic had utterly vanished. Uncertainty and even fear momentarily distorted the man’s strong features. The Captain lifted his hand to Jack’s, and the boy thought he meant to take the ornate tooth: he would have
given it to him, but the man simply folded the boy’s fingers over the object on his palm. “Follow me,” he said.
They went around to the side of the great pavillion, and the Captain led Jack behind the shelter of a great sail-shaped flap of stiff pale canvas. In the glowing darkness behind the flap,
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the soldier’s face looked as though someone had drawn on it with thick pink crayon. “That sign,” he said calmly enough.
“Where did you get it?”
“From Speedy Parker. He said that I should find you and
show it to you.”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know the name. I want
you to give me the sign now. Now.” He firmly grasped Jack’s wrist. “Give it to me, and then tell me where you stole it.”
“I’m telling the truth,” Jack said. “I got it from Lester
Speedy Parker. He works at Funworld. But it wasn’t a tooth
when he gave it to me. It was a guitar-pick.”
“I don’t think you understand what’s going to happen to
you, boy.”
“You know him,” Jack pleaded. “He described you—he told me you were a Captain of the Outer Guards. Speedy told me to find you.”
The Captain shook his head and gripped Jack’s wrist more
firmly. “Describe this man. I’m going to find out if you’re lying right now, boy, so I’d make this good if I were you.”
“Speedy’s old,” Jack said. “He used to be a musician.” He
thought he saw recognition of some kind flash in the man’s
eyes. “He’s black—a black man. With white hair. Deep lines
in his face. And he’s pretty thin, but he’s a lot stronger than he looks.”
“A black man. You mean, a brown man?”
“Well, black people aren’t really black. Like white people
aren’t really white.”
“A brown man named Parker.” The Captain gently released
Jack’s wrist. “He is called Parkus here. So you are from . . .”
He nodded toward some distant invisible point on the horizon.
“That’s right,” Jack said.
“And Parkus . . . Parker . . . sent you to see our Queen.”
“He said he wanted me to see the Lady. And that you could
take me to her.”
“This will have to be fast,” the Captain said. “I think I
know how to do it, but we don’t have any time to waste.” He had shifted his mental direction with a military smoothness.
“Now listen to me. We have a lot of bastards around here, so we’re going to pretend that you are my son on t’other side of the sheets. You have disobeyed me in connection with some
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little job, and I am angry with you. I think no one will stop us if we make this performance convincing. At least I can get
you inside—but it might be a little trickier once we are in. You think you can do it? Convince people that you’re my son?”
“My mother’s an actress,” Jack said, and felt that old pride in her.
“Well, then, let’s see what you’ve learned,” the Captain
said, and surprised Jack by winking at him. “I’ll try not to cause you any pain.” Then he startled Jack again, and
clamped a very strong hand over the boy’s upper arm. “Let’s go,” he said, and marched out of the shelter of the flap, half-dragging Jack behind him.
“When I tell you to wash the flagstones behind the kitchen, wash flagstones is what you’ll do,” the Captain said loudly, not looking at him. “Understand that? You will do your job.
And if you do not do your job, you must be punished.”
“But I washed some of the flagstones . . .” Jack wailed.
“I didn’t tell you to wash some of the flagstones!” the Captain yelled, hauling Jack along behind him. The people
around them parted to let the Captain through. Some of them grinned sympathetically at Jack.
“I was going to do it all, honest, I was going to go back in a minute . . .”
The soldier pulled him toward the gate without even glanc-
ing at the guards, and yanked him through. “No, Dad!” Jack
squalled. “You’re hurting me!”
“Not as much as I’m going to hurt you,” the Captain said, and pulled him across the wide courtyard Jack had seen from the cart-track.
At the other end of the court the soldier pulled him up
wooden steps and into the great palace itself. “Now your acting had better be good,” the man whispered, and immediately set off down a long corridor, squeezing Jack’s arm hard
enough to leave bruises.
“I promise I’ll be good!” Jack shouted.
The man hauled him into another, narrower corridor. The
interior of the palace did not at all resemble the inside of a tent, Jack saw. It was a mazelike warren of passages and little rooms, and it smelled of smoke and grease.
“Promise!” the Captain bawled out.
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“I promise! I do!”
Ahead of them as they emerged from yet another corridor,
a group of elaborately clothed men either leaning against a wall or draped over couches turned their heads to look at this noisy duo. One of them, who had been amusing himself by
giving orders to a pair of women carrying stacks of sheets
folded flat across their arms, glanced suspiciously at Jack and the Captain.
“And I promise to beat the sin out of you,” the Captain said loudly.
A couple of the men laughed. They wore soft wide-
brimmed hats trimmed with fur and their boots were of vel-
vet. They had greedy, thoughtless faces. The man talking to the maids, the one who seemed to be in charge, was skeletally tall and thin. His tense, ambitious face tracked the boy and the soldier as they hurried by.
“Please don’t!” Jack wailed. “Please!”
“Each please is another strapping,” the soldier growled, and the men laughed again. The thin one permitted himself to display a smile as cold as a knife-blade before he turned back to the maids.
The Captain yanked the boy into an empty room filled
with dusty wooden furniture. Then at last he released Jack’s aching arm. “Those were his men,” he whispered. “What life will be like when—” He shook his head, and for a moment
seemed to forget his haste. “It says in The Book of Good Farming that the meek shall inherit the earth, but those fellows don’t have a teaspoonful of meekness among them. Tak-
ing’s all they’re good for. They want wealth, they want—” He glanced upward, unwilling or unable to say what else the men outside wanted. Then he looked back at the boy. “We’ll have to be quick about this, but there are still a few secrets his men haven’t learned about the palace.” He nodded sideways, indicating a faded wooden wall.
Jack followed him, and understood when the Captain
pushed two of the flat brown nailheads left exposed at the end of a dusty board. A panel in the faded wall swung inward, exposing a narrow black passageway no taller than an upended
coffin. “You’ll only get a glimpse of her, but I suppose that’s all you need. It’s all you can have, anyhow.”
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The boy followed the silent instruction to slip into the passageway. “Just go straight ahead until I tell you,” the Captain whispered. When he closed the panel behind them, Jack began to move slowly forward through perfect blackness.
The passage wound this way and that, occasionally illumi-
nated by faint light spilling in through a crack in a concealed door or through a window set above the boy’s head. Jack soon lost all sense of direction, and blindly followed the whispered directions of his companion. At one point he caught the delicious odor of roasting meat, at another the unmistakable stink of sewage.
“Stop,” the Captain finally said. “Now I’ll have to lift you up. Raise your arms.”
“Will I be able to see?”
“You’ll know in a second,” the Captain said, and put a hand just beneath each of Jack’s armpits and lifted him cleanly off the floor. “There is a panel in front of you now,” he whispered.
“Slide it to the left.”
Jack blindly reached out before him and touched smooth
wood. It slid easily aside, and enough light fell into the passage for him to see a kitten-sized spider scrambling toward the ceiling. He was looking down into a room the size of a hotel lobby, filled with women in white and furniture so ornate that it brought back to the boy all the museums he and his parents had visited. In the center of the room a woman lay sleeping or unconscious on an immense bed, only her head and
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