Almost as soon as they were ashore they came upon a scattering of the swamp people’s weapons, flung this far into the reed beds by the colour. Sam Oakenhurst had never held an original Olivetté PP6 before and he treasured the instrument in his hands, to the Rose’s open amusement.
‘Take up one of these weapons for yourself, ma’am.’ Paul Minct became proprietorial, motioning with his wicked fingers. ‘It will almost certainly prove useful to you.’ He bent and his arms, encased in hide, again emerged from their velvet wrappings to examine the scattered hardware. ‘I have made this journey before. Many times, this journey. Yes. This time we will go on.’ He straightened, turning the glittering weapon in her direction and, gasping at sudden pain, examined his pricked wrist. He watched the wand that had wounded him disappearing back into her cloak at the same moment as she apologized.
‘She is sometimes hasty in my defence.’
‘Swift Thom,’ he said.
The wind was ugly in their ears. A grey whine from the north.
‘You would not prefer to pack this OK9?’ continued Paul Minct. ‘Some kind of back up?’ He dangled the thing by its flared snout, as if tempting a whitey gal to a piece of pie. But she had stirred a memory in him and he turned away, looking out to where the saplings shivered. To Sam Oakenhurst she flashed a fresh play, then she gathered her gravitas so that when, also controlled, Mr Minct turned back, she seemed proudly insouciant of any slight.
Again Sam Oakenhurst recognized a game beyond his usual experience.
‘She is all I shall need,’ said the Rose, almost distantly, while Paul Minct retreated, having apologized with equal formality. He took the OK9 for himself and also hid a Ryman’s 32/80 (“a beastly, primitive weapon”) in his pack.
They were walking up a well-marked old road which followed the edge of the lake. The road had run between Shreveport and Houston once. They could follow it, Paul Minct assured them, as far as San Augustine. ‘I have heard or read of a weapon called Swift Thom,’ he added as he lengthened his gait to lead them South. ‘The subject of some epic.’
‘Not the subject,’ she said. Oh, he is easily clever enough to kill me, Sam. He tricked me into a show.
He doesn’t know that he succeeded. He will not dare risk a move on you until he’s sure of me. Sam Oakenhurst fell in beside her.
I must take risks, Sam. He must not escape me. I am pledged to his destruction.
‘Hey, hola! Les bon temps rolla! Ai, ha! The good times pass! Pauvre pierrot, muy coeur, mon beau soleil,’ sang out Paul Minct up ahead. ‘What a day, pards! What a day!’
A tremor moved the ground and the reed beds rippled.
Around them suddenly boiled the cloudy landscapes, the powerful mirages, of the Free States, all in a condition of minor agitation, as if not fully in focus. Crazy tendrils erupted into a bewildering kaleidoscope, each fragment a fresh version of its surroundings and of the people inhabiting them. A thousand images of themselves, in a variety of roles and identities, poured away down fresh cracks in the fabric of their histories.
Sam Oakenhurst found this a depressing illusion.
‘They refuse to search for the centre and hold to it against all attacks and temptations. There must be sacrifices. Lines drawn. And faith. You’re familiar with The Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr Oakenhurst, you being a preacher’s son? There’s a book, eh? But if only life were so simple. We must press on, holding together, through this valley of desolation, to our just reward. We must know complete trust. And what a reward, my dears!’
Orange and yellow pillars pissed like egg yoke into the sky and splashed upon a gory firmament.
‘Here we are,’ sang Paul Minct. ‘This is it!’ He paused before the yelling pillars and threw back his head as if to drink them up; his crude cartographic visor flickered and flashed and made new reflections. ‘We are about to pass into the Free States. This is the malleable world indeed! This, or one like it, must bend to our will. Do you not think?’
The Rose was unimpressed. Not as malleable as some, she told Sam Oakenhurst. She moved with an extra grace as if until now her blood had hardly quickened. She had the alertness of an animal in its natural element. Sam Oakenhurst thought they were walking into the suburbs of Hell and he told her that while he remained at her service he was also entirely in her hands. This experience was too unfamiliar. He had thought the stories only legends.
‘Here is what all matter should aspire to,’ Paul Minct continued. ‘Here is true tolerance. Everything is free.’
‘Tolerance without mercy,’ murmured Sam Oakenhurst, willing to reveal this fear if only to disguise his other, more profound, anxieties.
‘We shall find further allies here!’ Paul Minct appeared to have forgotten his earlier pledge as he led them between the columns. ‘I will guide you.’
But it was soon left for the Rose to lead them, with miraculous confidence, through the vivid shadows, through volatile matter and corrupted time. Perspective, gravity and the seasons were all unstable and Sam Oakenhurst felt he must throw up as Paul Minct, with angry gestures of refusal, had done after they had walked the Bridge of Rubies for uncountable hours. Mr Minct, expecting to be the most experienced of them, clearly resented the Rose’s easy pathfinding. Generally he managed to hide his feelings. It was as if, with the sureness of one who knew such waters well, she steered their boat through the wildest rapids.
Agitated scratchings came from within Paul Minct’s mask and swaddlings. Occasionally the enmascaro uttered a little, shrill bubbling sound which added to Sam Oakenhurst’s own fearful nausea. For a while it seemed they passed between fields of stars, crossing by silver spans of moonbeams, but the Rose told them it was the abandoned forecourt of The Divided Arabia which at one time had been the largest shopping mall in the Western Hemisphere. What they witnessed was what it had become.
‘That stuff scares the devil out of me,’ Sam Oakenhurst admitted as they emerged from a forest of bright metallic greenery into a wide relief of desert dominated by the brazen stability of a tiny sun.
‘Now, my dears, this is more like Texas,’ said Paul Minct.
14. NO ME ENTIERRES EN LA PRADERA
THE FIRST TOWN they reached was Poker Flats, built in a wide yellow plain in what had been, Paul Minct told them, the old mustard-growing region. Her streets were full of whiteys and mixed couples and she was clearly a town given over almost entirely to license. Poker Flats announced herself as the Theater Capital of the Southwest and her main boardwalk was nothing but vivid marquees and billboards advertising simulatings, using living actors, of the great local V heroes, whose adventures Sam Oakenhurst had already skimmed at Lieutenant Twist’s. These were elaborate dramas concerning the love triangle of Pearl Peru, Bullybop and Fearless Frank Force, or the Quest for the Fishlings, featuring Professor Pop, Captain Billy Bob Begg and her Famous Chaos Engineers. Many of the protagonists were white. White barkers stood outside their booths and called to the newcomers. ‘So true you’d think it was V! Dallas Horizon.’ / ’It’s the net! Ontario Outer.’ / ‘Virtually V! Laramee Deadlock.’ / ‘Frank Force Face To Face! Ludoland.’ Their words were echoed overhead in the baroque calligraphy of the day. Power paint growled with all the brilliant vulgar bellicosity of the old circus towns. Poker Flats had been the first of the roving show cities to take permanent root. Such settlements were all over the Free States now, said Paul Minct, but the biggest were still Poker Flats and Porto Cristo.