"Who is he?"
"Looks like a mutie." The man was old, and as Ryan's eye adjusted to the night, he could make him out more clearly. Barely medium height, with silver-white hair tied in two long braids, each with a scrap of red ribbon knotting it at the end. He wore a robe of some kind of animal hide, and it was decorated with a staggeringly complex design in multihued threads and silks. His face was dark, the eyes hidden in the deep sockets.
In the hair was a single feather, white as fresh snow.
Even as they watched him, the old man moved back a couple of paces and then vanished among the pines behind him. It was done with great grace. Suddenly the space where he had been was empty.
"Goin' after him?" asked Krysty.
"No. Could be a trap. Maybe he's the one who put them signs up, warnin' us to stay away."
They moved fast, back to the safety of the war wag. Ryan's hand never left the butt of the automatic. Nobody said anything about their absence, although Ryan caught Hunaker giving a sly wink to Samantha.
In the morning the Trader had gone.
The only person who had seen him leave was Abe, who had been on guard on the river side of the war wag. Everyone gathered around the lanky man as he reported to J.B. and Ryan Cawdor, just after dawn.
"No warnin', but he was behind me. I turns and he pats me on the shoulder, like he did when you'd done somethin' real good. Know what I mean? I says to him, like, how's he doin' and he says he's never better."
"What was he wearing?" asked J.B.
"Usual. Carryin' that old Armalite of his. Steppin' good, not stooped like he's been. No cough. Looks past me to the trees and the snow up beyond. Real cold. I seen his breath plumin' out. Says he's goin' for a walk, and not to take on if he's gone some time. That was about three, maybe four hours back." Abe shook his head, the long flowing hair moving from side to side. "He sure looked pretty to me, up and walkin' tall."
"He say anythin' at all, apart from that?"
"No, Ryan. But he did say there was a letter for you. Said he'd got a scribbler to write it weeks back when we was on the road to Mocsin."
Ryan spun on his heel to go and look for the letter. But Abe coughed. "Yeah?"
"There's one other thing, Ryan. But it's kind of stupid."
"Go on."
Abe glanced away. "No, Mebbe in a while. I got to think on it some. Go read your note." It didn't take long.
It was on the steel table in the corner of the Trader's cabin. The edges of the handmade paper were crinkled. The letter was stained with machine oil and what looked like ketchup smeared over the bottom half. Because of his own illiteracy, the Trader had been forced to get a writer to produce the note for him. Which may have led to its brevity and lack of emotion. Or it may just have been the way the Trader was.
"Hi Ryan," it began.
If you're reading this then it means I'm dead. This rad cancer's been eating my guts for months and I know there's no stopping it. So this is me saying goodbye and the best of luck. If it goes the way I hope, I'll just walk away one night so don't you blasted come after me. Please. That's the Trader asking and not ordering, Ryan, old friend. We've been some places and done some good and bad things. Now it's done. That's all. I thank you for watching my back for so many years. You and J.B. watch for each other.
There was no signature.
So he'd done it. Ended his life in the same quietly efficient way he'd run it. Minutes later, as Ryan walked through the war wag, there were several of the women, and some of the men, red eyed. Samantha was weeping on the shoulder of Hennings. Rintoul was clicking his fingers in a nervous, abstracted way, and Finnegan's usual good nature had vanished.
"Break this up," called Ryan, making them jump and turn hostile faces his way. "Trader went as he wanted. Save your sorrow."
Outside in the freshness of morning the rising sun was tipping the hills to the west, turning the snow to blood. Abe was sitting on the ground, nursing his own M-16 rifle, gazing out across the river toward the forest. Ryan hunkered alongside him.
"Tell me, Abe."
"What?"
"You was goin' to tell me. Somethin' that Trader said or did. At the last?"
"No. Wasn't like that, I told you allhe said. Then he just walked off, over there." He pointed with the muzzle of the gun.
"Then what?"
"I thought I saw somethin' there. Just by that ridge of light rock, over toward where that pond lies."
Ryan followed the man's stubby finger, seeing that he was pointing in the general direction of where he and Krysty had made love the previous evening.
"This was before Trader went or after?"
"Like after. I seen him walkin' away, and there was a good moon up, so he showed clear. I watched, and then I saw this thing up there, like it was waitin' for the Trader. First I figured he..."
"A man?"
"I'm tellin' ya, Ryan. I figured he might be one of the muties that done the feathers and skulls and stuff, so I get a bead on him, ready to ice him. Then I see the Trader lift a hand to him, and this old man lifts a hand back. They meet up and go under the trees and that's all I see. No danger, so I don't raise a warnin' for everyone. Then, the Trader... he don't come back."
"Tell me about this man. This old man, you said. What was he like?"
"He had silver hair in braids, one on each side. And a long coat with some fancy patterns on it."
"Anything else?"
"Yeah. Isaw it through the scope in the moonlight, in his hair, the old man had a long white feather."
Nobody ever saw the old man with the white feather in his hair. Nor was the Trader ever seen again.
Chapter Fifteen
The roads high in the darks were as bad as anything any of them had ever seen. Bucketing ribbons of twisted concrete vanished into rivers and never came out again. Whole slabs of the hillsides had melted during earth tremors a century ago. They were looking for the remains of a township shown on their tattered maps as Babb, but the devastation was so total that they had little hope of finding it. Lakes had filled in where there should have been dry land, and tiny feeder streams had become howling torrents of angry melt water.
The greater the elevation, the slower their progress. The farther they went, the worse the weather became. The night skies clouded over and the fearsome chem clouds of nuclear detritus billowed about them, with incandescent bursts of flame searing the tops of the peaks. The great northerly winds came screeching in from the desert wastes that had once been the fruitful prairies of Canada. It took them four grindingly oppressive days to get close to the treeline, finding that great fires had raged through the pine forests, stripping the land, leaving the soil to be eroded to bare rock and ice. The dials in the war wag showed a daytime high of minus ten Celsius, with the night temperatures dropping fast to minus thirty. Add in the windchill factor and you had a land where a man would be dead within minutes if he didn't have adequate thermal protection.
Ryan was dozing in his bunk when a particularly vicious jolt woke him. As he stood he was aware that they had stopped moving and the engine now ticked over in neutral. He was on his way to the control room before Ches started calling him over the intercom.
J.B. was there before him.
"End of the line," he said.
Ryan looked out the front screen, seeing only gray ice and swirling snow. The road, if there was one there at all, was invisible.
"Not even the war wag can get us farther," said Ches, leaning back in the padded seat. "The trail's gotten way too narrow. Looks like one track in and the same one out. So there's no point goin' back and tryin' some other way."