tiny gold-cross earrings, the ones Jack had given her for
Christmas two years ago. Then the face changed. The chin became rounder, the nose straighter and more patrician. The hair went a shade lighter and became somehow coarser. Now it
was Laura DeLoessian he saw in that coffin—and the coffin
itself was no longer a smoothly anonymous funeral parlor
special, but something that looked as if it had been hacked with rude fury from an old log—a Viking’s coffin, if there had ever been such a thing; it was easier to imagine this coffin being torched alight on a bier of oiled logs than it was to imagine it being lowered into the unprotesting earth. It was Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, but in this imagining which had become as clear as a vision, the Queen was wearing his mother’s wedding dress from Drag Strip Rumble and the gold-cross earrings Uncle Tommy had helped him pick
out in Sharp’s of Beverly Hills. Suddenly his tears came in a hot and burning flood—not sham tears but real ones, not just for his mother but for both of these lost women, dying universes apart, bound by some unseen cord which might rot but would never break—at least, not until they were both dead.
Through the tears he saw a giant of a man in billowing
whites rush across the room toward them. He wore a red ban-
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danna instead of a puffy chef ’s hat on his head, but Jack
thought its purpose was the same—to identify the wearer as
the boss of the kitchen. He was also brandishing a wicked-
looking three-tined wooden fork.
“Ged-OUT!” the chef screeched at them, and the voice emerging from that huge barrel chest was absurdly flutelike—
it was the voice of a willowy gay giving a shoe-clerk a piece of his mind. But there was nothing absurd about the fork; it looked deadly.
The women scattered before his charge like birds. The
bottom-most pie dropped out of the pie-woman’s rack and she uttered a high, despairing cry as it broke apart on the boards.
Strawberry juice splattered and ran, the red as fresh and
bright as arterial blood.
“GED-DOUT MY KIDCHEN, YOU SLUGS! DIS IS NO
SHORDCUD! DIS IS NO RAZE-TRAG! DIS IS MY KID-
CHEN AND IF YOU CAD’T REMEMBER DAT, I’LL BY
GOD THE CARBENDER CARVE YOUR AZZES FOR YOU!”
He jabbed the fork at them, simultaneously half-turning
his head and squinching his eyes mostly shut, as if in spite of his tough talk the thought of hot flowing blood was just too gauche to be borne. The Captain removed the hand that had been on the scruff of Jack’s neck and reached out—almost casually, it seemed to Jack. A moment later the chef was on the floor, all six and a half feet of him. The meat-fork was lying in a puddle of strawberry sauce and chunks of white unbaked
pastry. The chef rolled back and forth, clutching his broken right wrist and screaming in that high, flutelike voice. The news he screamed out to the room in general was certainly
woeful enough: he was dead, the Captain had surely murdered him (pronounced mur-dirt in the chef ’s odd, almost Teutonic accent); he was at the very least crippled, the cruel and heart-less Captain of the Outer Guards having destroyed his good
right hand and thus his livelihood, and so ensuring a miserable beggar’s life for him in the years to come; the Captain had inflicted terrible pain on him, a pain beyond belief, such as was not to be borne—
“Shut up!” the Captain roared, and the chef did. Immediately. He lay on the floor like a great baby, his right hand curled on his chest, his red bandanna drunkenly askew so that one ear (a small black pearl was set in the center of the lobe)
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showed, his fat cheeks quivering. The kitchen women gasped
and twittered as the Captain bent over the dreaded chief ogre of the steaming cave where they spent their days and nights.
Jack, still weeping, caught a glimpse of a black boy ( brown boy, his mind amended) standing at one end of the largest brazier. The boy’s mouth was open, his face as comically sur-
prised as a face in a minstrel show, but he kept turning the crank in his hands, and the haunch suspended over the glowing coals kept revolving.
“Now listen and I’ll give you some advice you won’t find
in The Book of Good Farming,” the Captain said. He bent over the chef until their noses almost touched (his paralyzing grip on Jack’s arm—which was now going mercifully
numb—never loosened the smallest bit). “Don’t you ever . . .
don’t you ever . . . come at a man with a knife . . . or a fork . . . or a spear . . . or with so much as a God-pounding splinter in your hand unless you intend to kill him with it.
One expects temperament from chefs, but temperament does
not extend to assaults upon the person of the Captain of the Outer Guards. Do you understand me?”
The chef moaned out a teary, defiant something-or-other.
Jack couldn’t make it all out—the man’s accent seemed to be growing steadily thicker—but it had something to do with the Captain’s mother and the dump-dogs beyond the pavillion.
“That may well be,” the Captain said. “I never knew the
lady. But it certainly doesn’t answer my question.” He prodded the chef with one dusty, scuffed boot. It was a gentle
enough prod, but the chef screeched as if the Captain had
drawn his foot back and kicked him as hard as he could. The women twittered again.
“Do we or do we not have an understanding on the subject
of chefs and weapons and Captains? Because if we don’t, a
little more instruction might be in order.”
“We do!” the chef gasped. “We do! We do! We—”
“Good. Because I’ve had to give far too much instruction
already today.” He shook Jack by the scruff of the neck.
“Haven’t I, boy?” He shook him again, and Jack uttered a
wail that was completely unfeigned. “Well . . . I suppose
that’s all he can say. The boy’s a simpleton. Like his mother.”
The Captain threw his dark, gleaming glance around the
kitchen.
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“Good day, ladies. Queen’s blessings upon you.”
“And you, good sir,” the eldest among them managed, and
dropped an awkward, ungraceful curtsey. The others followed suit.
The Captain dragged Jack across the kitchen. Jack’s hip
bumped the edge of the washing trough with excruciating
force and he cried out again. Hot water flew. Smoking
droplets hit the boards and ran, hissing, between them. Those women had their hands in that, Jack thought. How do they stand it? Then the Captain, who was almost carrying him by now, shoved Jack through another burlap curtain and into the hallway beyond.
“Phew!” the Captain said in a low voice. “I don’t like this, not any of it, it all smells bad.”
Left, right, then right again. Jack began to sense that they were approaching the outer walls of the pavillion, and he had time to wonder how the place could seem so much bigger on
the inside than it looked from the outside. Then the Captain was pushing him through a flap and they were in daylight
again—mid-afternoon daylight so bright after the shifting
dimness of the pavillion that Jack had to wince his eyes shut against a burst of pain.
The Captain never hesitated. Mud squelched and
smooched underfoot. There was the smell of hay and horses
and shit. Jack opened his eyes again and saw they were crossing what might have been a paddock or a corral or maybe just a barnyard. He saw an open canvas-sided hallway and heard
chickens clucking somewhere beyond it. A scrawny man,
naked except for a dirty kilt and thong sandals, was tossing hay into an open stall, using a pitchfork with wooden tines to do the job. Inside the stall, a horse not much bigger than a Shetland pony looked moodily out at them. They had already
passed the stall when Jack’s mind was finally able to accept what his eyes had seen: the horse had two heads.
“Hey!” he said. “Can I look back in that stall? That—”
“No time.”
“But that horse had—”
“No time, I said.” He raised his voice and shouted: “And if I ever catch you laying about again when there’s work to be done, you’ll get twice this!”
“You won’t!” Jack screamed (in truth he felt as if this
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scene were getting a bit old). “I swear you won’t! I told you I’d be good!”