Finn was eyeing a skinny girl who looked to be around thirteen. She sashayed up to him and whispered something into his ear.
"Can I dance, Ryan?" he asked.
"Stick to dancing, Finn. Don't leave this room, or I'll slit your fat windpipe."
"Sure thing." The fat man grinned and went wheeling away after the sprite in her torn dress.
J.B. leaned against the bar, rubbing a pattern in the spilled beer with his forefinger. A huge woman, fully six and a half feet tall and weighing around 350 pounds, came over and tapped him on the shoulder.
"Dansez, mon petit?" she asked.
"What did?.." began the Armorer, but not even waiting for an answer, she jerked him forward, pressing his face into her rolling breasts, nearly knocking his hat off and sweeping him onto the crowded dance floor.
"Want to dance, lover?" asked Krysty.
"Better offer than J.B. got," he replied.
"Want it more formal?"
"Yeah," he said with a grin. The beer was loosening him up, and the food had been as good as any he'd eaten in... in a long time and a lot of miles.
"Sure." She composed herself, brushing back an errant strand of the fiery hair from her cheek. "Miss Krysty Wroth of the sanctuary of Harmony requests the pleasure of the next dance with Mr. Ryan Cawdor of... of where?"
The answer came in a crackling high-pitched giggle, from someone behind her.
"From the ville of Front Royal in the great state of Virginia, run by Baron Cawdor."
The blood drained from Ryan's face at the sudden voice.
Once, years back, a whore in a gaudy house somewhere near Denver had kicked him in the groin in an attempt to rob him. He'd broken her arm to teach her a lesson, but the shocking pain remained a powerful memory. It had felt like the breath had been sucked clean out of his body.
The feeling now was similar.
"What'd you say?" asked Krysty, turning on her heels.
"He's the youngest runt of Baron Cawdor. Richest and most powerful man east of OlТ Miss."
The speaker looked to be around three hundred years old, but was probably somewhere between sixty and ninety, with a filthy fringe of hair around a peeling scalp. He was not much over five feet tall, with a drooping shoulder that made him look like a hunchback. He was dressed in a variety of rags, held together with mud and spittle.
His eyes were bright as stars.
Ryan gaped at the hideous apparition. There was something vaguely familiar about the old, old man, but he, couldn't set his mind to it.
"You don't know me, Ryan Cawdor, do yer?"
The noise of the music and bellowed singing was so loud that nobody apart from Krysty and Ryan had heard the dotard's chattering, or shown the least interest. Instead they concentrated on having a good time.
Finn whirled past, hugging the young girl. On the far side of the hut J.B. was still almost suffocating in the embrace of the giantess. It might have been a trick of the flickering oil lamps, but Ryan could have sworn at that moment that the Armorer's feet were a good eighteen inches clear of the planking.
But all of that blurred compared to this totally unexpected confrontation. The Trader had known a little about Ryan's background. About the lost eye. About the emotional scars.
But even the Trader had only known the small glimpses of the past that Ryan allowed him.
Now this...
For a moment of scorching rage, Ryan was tempted to reach out and snap the scrawny neck of the diminutive old man to still his babble forever. But that would bring everyone in Moudongue down on them.
Oddly, it never occurred to him that the stranger might be chattering lies, might just have a snippet of useless information that meant anything or nothing. Somehow Ryan knew that this was the revelation that he'd feared for many long years.
"I think I know you. What's your name?"
The face contorted into an expression of vulpine cunning. The old man wiped a gnarled hand over the stub-bled cheeks.
"Like to know, wouldn't yer, Squire Cawdor?"
Ryan eased aside the shirt, showing the butt of the SIG-Sauer pistol. "Name?" he hissed.
"Ryan? What does..." began Krysty, recoiling as he turned to look at her, the one eye glowing with a manic light.
"Let it lay, woman," he snarled.
"I don't rightly recall what my true name is," muttered the old man, licking his lips and speaking so softly that Ryan had to lean close to catch the words. He winced at the stale alcohol on the breath.
"What do they call you?"
"Pecker."
"Pecker?"
"Yeah."
A vacuous smile slithered across the wrinkled cheeks. The old man touched his stomach with his right hand, smoothing the torn shirt. He moved his hand lower, fondling himself, demonstrating how he'd earned his nickname.
"You know Ryan?" asked Krysty.
"Sure. Knowed him. Years, back. He knowed me then. Don't know old Pecker now, do yer?"
The man put his head to one side like a bird sizing up a juicy morsel of food. Then Ryan remembered him Ч remembered his real name.
"Bochco. Harry Bodice. You were my... the dog-handler at the ville."
"Harry Bochco." The man tried the name out for size, running it around his mouth, repeating it and finally shaking his head in bewilderment. "Sometimes past I don't recall. You say it, then it was so. But I recall you."
"Then tell it," said Ryan wearily.
Against the noisy maelstrom of the Cajun dance, unheard by anyone else, the old man told it.
Chapter Eight
"Front Royal was the biggest, strongest, richest ville in all Virginia. The nukes hit it hard, but the land's good. Fertile. Plant a bullet, and it grows a blaster. Baron Cawdor held it, in the Shens, from his father and his father 'fore him."
The music and the dancing swirled about them, but Ryan and Krysty were locked into the old man's story; the girl heard it for the first time; Ryan tasted the bitterness of old wounds, feeling the empty eye socket beginning to throb with ancient pains.
"Home like a fortress, deep in the hills. Oh, sweet Lord, those blue-muffled hills and the rolling forests. I swear it were near heaven. Ryan here, Lord Cawdor, was the youngest. Bravest. Proudest. Best with blade or blaster. Finest..."
"Get on, man," snapped Ryan.
"But only as he grew some. There were three in the litter. Morgan was oldest, and like Ryan here. Cherished him when we were little. Runt of the lot when young, Ryan was. The middle brother..."
"Harvey," whispered Ryan, barely conscious that he'd spoken.
"Aye, Harvey. Curse his fucking name. Twisted like a windblown rowan tree. I recall that when he were but ten years old, he took this kitten and a white-hot dagger and pushed...".
"Fireblast!" Ryan closed his good eye, fighting for self-control. "Keep to the center of the story, or I'll fucking... Go on!"
"You were only fourteen when Harvey struck. Your older brother, Morgan, was out with a landwag train, meeting up a trader from the Apps. Stickies mined the wag. None lived to tell."
The rowdy songs had momentarily ceased, and a young girl, her skin afflicted by disease, stood at the center of the long hut and sang a slow, sad ballad, alternating lines in French and English. Around her, the dancers had slowed, with everyone holding their partners tighter.
My yesterdays are always here,
Tomorrow is another now.
And none may say when life will end
And no man may say how.
Krysty had moved closer to Ryan, sensing the dreadful tension and memories roused in him by the old man's story.
"Theysaid it was stickies," stressed Pecker. "I was there with me dogs Ч you said it was dogs, Lord Cawdor?"