Neutron Solstice

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?"

"Don't call me that, Bochco. The name is Ryan Cawdor now."

"Where was I?"

"The dogs. After the stickies mined the landwag and butchered Morgan."

The old man giggled suddenly. "Them dogs was... Yeah, I was there with the dogs. The baron sort of figured that there was something didn't set right 'bout it. There was boot tracks in the hillside 'bove where the mine had been triggered."

"Boot marks?"

Pecker started to sing to himself in a warbling, fragile voice. One or two of the Cajuns looked around, but nobody took much notice.

Well, I traveled four and forty miles

Mebbe was only three

But boots upon a stickie,

I never more did see.

"It was Harvey. I knew it then. Couldn't prove it, but I knew it."

"Then he poisoned your father's mind. The baron believed you'd a hand in Morgan's passing. Harvey kept whispering in his ear, like tainted honey. The baron near lost his mind with grief. Then, when time was right, Harvey sprung his trap on you."

Though he fought against it, Ryan's right hand rose jerkily in the air of its own volition, brushing his chin, seeking the patch that hid the ruined left eye. A part of his mind was vaguely aware that the Cajun girl was singing another slow ballad; the only other sound in the room was the shuffling of feet as the dancers caroused about her.

It was a song of lost love and the pain that remains.

I miss him in the weeping of the rains,

And I miss him at the turnings of the tide.

Pecker was leaning against the table that served as a bar, reaching for a mug of beer, fumbling it so that it toppled over, the frothing liquid spilling on the scuffed planks.

"So Harvey and half a dozen of his sec men came for you. Kid of fourteen."

"Fifteen, Bochco. The day after my fifteenth birthday. Ten at night. Corridor outside my room."

The fortress at Front Royal was one of the largest buildings anywhere in the East. It had been the mansion of a horse breeder, back before the long chill of '01. Ryan's father had built on it, repairing the work of his father and grandfather. Adding refinements. Fences and a moat. Blasters at every angle. You didn't get to be a baron by making everyone love you.

They had plenty of gasoline. Electric generators. A fleet of wags. A hundred sec men.

Harvey had tried to drug his younger brother, but a loyal servant named Kenny Morse had warned the lad not to eat or drink that evening. So when Harvey came with four of the sec men, they found Ryan awake and ready.

With his blaster cocked and ready in his right hand. A Colt .45 pistol that he'd stripped and oiled and cleaned himself. Because of his father's suspicion of him, Ryan hadn't been allowed a blaster, and he'd been restricted to certain parts of the fortress. But that hadn't stopped Morse from stealing the gun for him and instructing him in its use.

The blaster held seven rounds.

The first two rounds killed the first two sec men. Ryan had waited, just inside the doorway of his darkened room. Morse's, last favor had been to remove a couple of the light bulbs, so that the attackers would be perfect silhouettes for the lad. As soon as he heard them coming, Ryan jumped out, firing.

Two shots to the upper chest and throat. Certain kills, sending the men in their maroon uniforms and polished knee-boots crashing back into the others.

The third guard took two bullets. One through the right arm as he dodged sideways, the next penetrating his skull as he tried to duck away to safety.

Harvey fired back at him with tracer bullets that hissed and flared in the darkness, bursting off the wall at Ryan's shoulder.

The last of the sec men had thrown himself flat on the floor, behind the jerking body of one of his fellows, firing short bursts from some sort of machine-pistol, but Ryan kept moving, dodging in and out of his room. His first shot at the man missed by inches, howling into the blackness at the top of a narrow flight of stairs.

The second bullet from the Colt drilled through the guard's open mouth: shattered his teeth, slicing his tongue to ribbons of bleeding flesh, angling upward through the palate to bury itself into the man's brain.

"You fired six, brother," yelled Harvey. "One to go."

"I reloaded," Ryan lied. Morse had only been able to steal a single magazine.

At that moment, the fifteen-year-old boy knew his life was measured only in short minutes. His room offered no escape: the window opened on a sheer drop of fifty feet to the stone flags of a courtyard. If he could make it past his brother to the stairs, then he might have a slight chance.

With Ryan Cawdor, even at just fifteen, to think was to act.

He dived headfirst through the doorway, rolling over and coming up, his finger on the trigger, squeezing off his last shot, not even waiting to see that he'd missed the crouching figure of his brother. He drew the horn-hafted dagger from his belt and sprinted through the dim light, hurdling the dying guards.

"Bastard!" screamed Harvey trying to shoot him, cursing as the pistol jammed.

"Butcher!" cried Ryan as he closed in on his older brother.

Harvey was taller and stronger than the boy, but he lacked the ruthless determination. As they grappled, he managed to draw his own knife, and Ryan felt a cold fire across his ribs from the steel. But he also drew blood, cutting Harvey Cawdor on the upper arm, making him cry out in pain and shock.

Within seconds he could have killed him. And the rest of his life would have been utterly different. But there had been a sec man on a regular patrol in the corridor a floor beneath, and he'd come running at the sound of gunfire, arriving in time to drag Ryan away from his screaming brother.

The boy was quick enough, wriggling like a gaffed eel, to stab the guard to the heart, feeling the life flow from the man as his grip relaxed. But the interruption had given Harvey the moment he needed.

Ryan lived all his days with that memory. At times he felt he still had both eyes, so vivid was the image of the knife in his brother's hand, moving toward his face.

Striking.

He saw it. Actually saw the tip of the blade as it grated into his left eye socket. There was liquid trickling down his face that mingled aqueous humor of the eye with a little blood. Surprisingly little blood.

Shocked beyond belief, not realizing the devastating damage the knife had done, Ryan had staggered back, dropping his own dagger, his hands grabbing at his injured eye. Harvey had slashed out once more, aiming for the right eye, missing it by the width of a finger. The steel opened up a great jagged tear from the edge of the eye to the puckered corner of his mouth. This time blood cascaded over his chin and neck, soaking into his shirt.

In agony and desperation, Ryan punched out at the leering Harvey, feeling the man's nose break like a rotten apple. Then he turned and ran for the stairs, scarcely able to see, moaning from the pain. He never truly knew how he escaped from the fortress at Front Royal that hideous night. Perhaps a servant aided him. There was a door open. Driven snow from the Virginia winter chill on his face. Darkness, stumbling among the tall pines. A hand on his arm.

Had there been a helping hand on his arm?

Away, as far as possible. Running, running. Hiding and fighting. The years ground past until he had met the Trader and begun a new phase of his life, hoping that he had shut all of the past behind him forever.

He knew now that he had not.

Bochco babbled on.

"After, there was a fearful inquisition. Poor Kenny Morse was put to death by Harvey Cawdor. So were others of the servants judged to have helped you."

"I did not know that," said Ryan quietly.

"The cobblestones of the great yard ran with blood. Harvey was in a fearsome temper."

"My father?" asked Ryan hesitantly.

"He was told by your brother that not only were you responsible for Morgan's death, but that you'd bribed the sec men to murder him. The baron named you wolf's-head with a lot of jack on your head."

"I heard that."

"Guess you didn't hear 'bout the new Lady Cawdor."

"What?"

Again the crazed giggle from the old-timer called Pecker. "Yeah. Your father wed the whore, but it was Harvey that did the pleasuring. Only eighteen she was. Plump as a corn-fed chick. Hair like straw. I figured the old man was getting bats loose in the belfry by then, what with all that happened."

"My father died, I heard, Bochco. Was that the hand of my brother?"

"No, no, no, no. That was his wife. Lady Rachel Cawdor. The word about Front Royal was that she bound him with cords of silk. Game of love, she called it. Then she smothered him with a pillow. He was frail by then. It was at Harvey's word."

Ryan licked his dry lips. There was a small room, locked at the end of a corridor in the west wing of his memory. Despite everything he'd done, someone had come along and, forced the bolts.

And in a perverse, cathartic way, he was relieved that it was over and the door flung open and the secrets dispersed.

"Go on, Bochco," he whispered.

"He was dead and under the earth, feeding the worms and maggots, all in a day and a night. There was a babe born an' all."

"Boy or girl?"

"Boy, Lord Cawdor... I'm sorry, sorry, so sorry. Mr. Cawdor. Christened Jabez Pendragon Cawdor."

"My father's or?.."

The look on the old man's face was the answer. Harvey had sired the child, on his father's wife. His mistress.

"Hard to say which was most wicked, her or him. Mebbe they's twin shoots of the same dark flowering weed."

"And now?" asked Krysty. "Does Ryan's brother rule Front Royal? With the woman and his child? Is Harvey the baron?"

"Yes, yes, yes," babbled the old man, his eyes rolling madly. "The crow shits where the eagle should roost. Will you return, Mr. Cawdor, my lord, and claim what should be yours?"

"Harvey has it. Let him keep it. And let him have the fucking pleasure in it that he deserves," spat Ryan, turning away from Bochco, blinking as he found Doc Tanner and Lori at his elbow. "I didn't know you were..." he began.

"I beg pardon for dropping at the eaves, Ryan," said Doc. "The dancing was far too tiring. Lori and I are going to bed." Seeing Ryan's raised eyebrow, he added, "Yes. We are going to bed together. I may find dancing a little much now, at my age. But that does not mean I am totally impotent."

"Sorry, Doc," muttered Ryan.

"Apology accepted. Krysty." He gave a half bow.

"Good night, Doc. Good night, Lori. Sleep well."

"Thanks. And you," replied the blond girl.

"Doc," called Ryan, suddenly aware that the dance seemed to be breaking up around them with couples drifting away.

"Yes?"

"Did you hear any of that? About my brother and... and this," he said, fingering the patch over the barren left eye.

Doc smiled, looking startlingly, touchingly youthful. "Of course. But I had known it all along. Good night, my friend."

"Good night, Doc," Ryan said.