‘Here’s my say in the matter,’ declared Sam Oakenhurst, to open the bidding. ‘Your luck and mine, Paul Minct. Even shares. Try it once? Double our luck or double our damnation, eh?’
Sam Oakenhurst knew Mr Minct viewed treachery as a legitimate instrument of policy and that nothing he offered would guarantee Mr Minct’s consistency. But he was hoping to appeal to Paul Minct’s gambler’s soul, to whet his appetite for melodrama and catch him, if possible, in a twist or two before the main game began. At present it was the only strategy he could pursue without much chance of detection.
‘You’ll stake your life on this, Mr Oakenhurst?’
‘If you’ll give us some idea of the odds and the winnings, sir.’
‘Good odds, limitless reward. My word on it. And your word, Mr Oakenhurst. How do you value it?’
‘I value my word above my life, sir. In these troubled times a jugador has nothing but honour. I will need to know a little more before I stake my honour. So I’ll fold for the moment. Save to say this, sir - you play an honest game and so will I.’
‘And you, Mrs von Bek?’ Paul Minct made an old-fashioned bow. ‘Do you also offer an honest game?’
‘I have played no other up to now, Mr Minct. I’ll throw in all I have, if the prize suits me. We can triple our luck, if you like. We all have some idea of the size of the stakes, I think. But not the size of the bonanza. Whatever it shall be, I’ll put in my full third and take out my full third - or any fraction decided by any future numbers.’
‘You can’t say fairer than that, ma’am. Very well, Mr Oakenhurst. We have another pard.’
Sam Oakenhurst could not fathom her style, but he recognized that she was a peerless mukhamir. It was as if she had trained in the very heart of Africa. She was his superior in everything but low cunning, that instinctive talent for self-preservation which had proven so useful to him and which had resulted in his becoming kin to the machinoix, rather than their prey. He had never underestimated this useful flaw in his character. But now it could only serve his honour and help him keep his word to the Rose. He had no other choice.
She had played Paul Minct well so far. Mr Minct’s weakness was that he had less respect for a woman than he had for a man. Yet the enmascaro was in no doubt about her worth to their enterprise, so long as, in his view, Mr Oakenhurst kept her under control.
‘I have always preferred the company of women,’ said Paul Minct. ‘It will be a pleasure to work with you, my dear.’
‘I like the feel of the game,’ she said. As yet she had given Sam Oakenhurst no clue as to the nature of her quarrel with Mr Minct or why the masked man did not recognize her (or did not choose to recognize her. He was the master of any five-dimensional bluff on the screen and a few more of his own invention.)
‘We shall form a family as strong as our faith in our own strengths,’ said Paul Minct. For once his eyes looked away from them, as if ashamed. ‘We are peers. We need no others. The three of us will take our sacrifice to the Fault and reap the measureless harvests!’
‘You anticipated my sentiments, Mr Minct,’ said the Rose, almost sweet, and Sam Oakenhurst thought he caught a swiftly controlled flicker of emotion in Paul Minct’s bleak eyes.
12. UN HOMME DE PITIE
THE RULES AT last agreed, Paul Minct promised to tell them more after they reached the Frees and were off the raft. Then the three of them settled down to an easy companionship, playing a hand or two of old flat and a simulated folded paper version of Henri’s Special Turbulence which could only be modified with difficulty and which they eventually abandoned by mutual consent.
One evening, as Captain Ornate pumped his melancholy squeezebox in a corner and a couple of whiteys capered to the old familiar zee tunes, the conversation turned to the subject of animals and whether it was possible to have significant communication with them.
Mrs von Bek spoke of the famous Englishman, Squire Begg, a cousin of hers, and his affinity with crows. He believed they possessed a primitive wisdom enabling them to talk in some way with humans, but first one had to learn and obey their language and customs, which were simple enough, though immutable. It was by these customs that, down the long millennia, crows survived. Assured of your courtesy, the crow would give full attention to your thoughts and desires. ‘Crows,’ she said, ‘came from all over the world to his London mansion in Sporting Club Square, and he was frequently sketched in the company of Egyptian, Amazonian or Antipodean crows, mostly hooded, who would mysteriously leave, returning without warning to their native grounds.’
‘I was once an initiate of my tribe’s Crow Cult. ‘ Rodrigo Heat’s words were thick as Mississippi mud. ‘My totem was the crow. I was sworn to protect the crow and all his kind, even with my life, even above my family. In return the crow offered us his wisdom. But his advice was not always suited to modem times.’
‘I heard of a young buckaree from up in Arizone who had his eyes pecked out by a crow. He went crazy in the sun, they said, and jumped off that old London Bridge up there, straight down until he hit the granite, thinking he was a crow,’ said Sister Honesty Marvell. ‘Nobody ever found out why.’
Sam Oakenhurst suggested a game of Mad John Parker, but Honesty Marvell favoured Doc Granite, so in the end they made it a tambourine game and shouted like kiddikins over it. That night the Rose told Sam Oakenhurst that they might have to kill Paul Minct.
At your service, he signalled, but bile came up in his throat.
(We are not fragments of the whole, she would tell him, but versions of the whole. Mr Oakenhurst had told her of the last time he had stood in a ploughed field, full of bright pools of winter rain, on a fine, pale blue evening, with the great orange sun bleeding down into the horizon, and watched a big dog fox, brush high as he picked his way amongst the furrows, circling the meadow where he was hidden by the lattice of the hedge, sniffing the wind for the geese who had begun to cluck with anxious enquiry. All of it disappeared, Mr Oakenhurst said, in the Hattiesburg Roar. ‘I had thought that, at least, must endure. Now, even our memories are becoming suspect.’)
He had no qualms about killing the man, if he proved actively dangerous to them, but he was not at all sure he could play this. He had given his word to something for which he might not possess the necessary bottom. By now he was as nervous of losing her approval as he was terrified by Paul Minct’s displeasure. The irony of this amused and sustained him.
‘Ma romance,’ she sang, ‘nouvelle romance. Ma romancier, muy necromancier. Joli boys all dansez. Joli boys all dansez. But they shall not have muy coleur.’
13. EL BUENO, EL FEO Y EL MALO
THE THREE LEFT The Whole Hog on a mudbank near Poker Flats but not before Sister Honesty Marvell had butchered Roy Ornate in a quarrel over the nature of things. Paul Minct had finished her with a glass spike whereupon the swamp people, some devolved survivalists, had tried to crawl aboard, to be repulsed and mostly blown apart by the violent anti-gravity reaction of the colour to metal. They were extinguished by the power of their ornaments. Carly O’Dowd was dead, too, from a poison she had picked up somewhere, and there was reasonable fear of a whitey uprising until Rodrigo Heat put himself in charge.