On the right side there was a jewelry case of deep purple velvet plush.
Underneath the ammunition box and the jewelry case, along the bottom of the trunk, there was a white dress laid out flat. Alice May stared at the strange combination of cowgirl outfit and bridal gown, cut from the finest, whitest shot silk, with the arms and waistcoat-it had a waistcoat- sewn with lines of tiny pearls. It looked a little big for Alice May, particularly in the region of the bust. It was also indecently short, for either wedding dress or cowgirl outfit. It probably wouldn"t go much below her knees.
"A Winchester "73," said Jake behind her, pointing at the rifle. He didn"t make any attempt to reach forward and touch them. "And two Colt .45s. Peacemakers, I think. Like the one my grandfather had above the mantelpiece in the old house."
"Weird," said Jane, pushing her father, so he moved to allow her and Stella up.
"What"s in the jewelry box?" asked Stella. She spoke in a hushed tone, as if she were in a temple. Alice May looked around and saw that Jake, Stella, and Jane were all cl.u.s.tered around the top of the ladder, as if they didn"t want to come any closer.
Alice May reached into the trunk and picked up the jewelry case. As she touched the velvet, she felt a strange, electric thrill pa.s.s through her. It wasn"t unpleasant, and she felt it again as she opened the case: a frisson of excitement that raced through her whole body, from top to toe.
The case held a metal star. A sheriff"s badge, or something in the shape of one, anyway, though there was nothing engraved upon it. The star was shinier than any lawman"s badge Alice May had ever seen, a bright silver that picked up the last glow of red sunlight and intensified and purified it, till it seemed that she held an acetylene light in her hand, a blinding light that forced her to look away and flip it over.
The light faded, leaving black spots dancing in front of her eyes. Alice May saw there was a pin on the back of the star, but again there was nothing engraved where she had hoped to see a name.
Alice May put the star back in the case and closed it, letting out the breath she didn"t know she"d held. A loud exhalation from behind told her that the rest of her family had been holding their breaths as well.
Next she slid the rifle from the straps that held it in place. It felt strangely right in her hands, and without conscious thought she worked the action, checked the chamber was empty, and dry fired it. A second later she realised that she didn"t know what she"d done and, at the same time, that she could do it again, and more. She could load and fire the weapon, and strip and clean it too. It was all in her head, even though she"d only ever fired one firearm in her life before, and that was just her uncle Bill"s single-shot squirrel gun.
She put the rifle back and took down the twin revolvers. They were heavy, but again she instinctively knew their weight and heft, loaded or unloaded. She put the revolvers, still holstered, across her lap. The flower pattern on the barrels seemed to move and flow as she stared at them, and the heringbone cut on the grips swung from one angle to another. The grips were some sort of bone, Alice May realized, stained dark. Or perhaps they were ebony and had never been stained.
She drew one of the revolvers, and once again her hands moved without conscious thought. She swung the cylinder out, spun it, checked it was empty, slapped it back again, c.o.c.ked and released the hammer under control, and had it back in the holster almost before her foster family could blink.
Alice May put the revolvers back. She didn"t even look at the box with the pokerwork ammunition on it. She closed the trunk firmly. The lock clicked again, and she rapidly did up the straps. Then she turned to her family.
"Best if we don"t mention this around . . ." she started to say. Then she saw the way they were looking at her. A look that was part confusion, part awe, and part fear.
"That star . . ." said Jake.
"So bright," said Stella.
"Your hands . . . a blur . . ." said Jane.
"I don"t want it!" burst out Alice May. "I"m not . . . it"s not me! I"m Alice May Susan Hopkins Hopkins!"
She pushed past Jane and almost fell down the ladder in her haste to get away. The others followed more slowly. Alice May had already run to her room, and they all could hear her sobbing.
Jake went back to the kitchen and his preserved lemons. Stella went back to her sewing. Jane went to Alice May"s door, but turned aside at the last second and went downstairs to write a letter to a friend about how nothing ever, ever happened in Denilburg.
When Alice May came down to breakfast the next morning, after a night of no sleep, the others were bright and cheerful. When she tentatively tried to talk about what had happened, it became clear that the others had either no memory of what they had seen or were actively denying it.
Alice May did not forget. She saw the silver star shining in her dreams, and often woke with the feel of the rifle"s stock against her cheek, or the harsh weight of the holstered revolvers on her thighs.
With the dreams came a deep sense of dread. Alice May knew that the weapons and the star were some sort of birthright, and with them came the knowledge that someday they were to be used. She feared that day, and could not imagine who . . . or what . . . she was supposed to shoot. Sometimes the notion that she might have to kill a fellow human being scared her more than anything. At other times she was more terrified by a strange notion that whatever she would ultimately face would not be human.
A year pa.s.sed, and summer came again, hotter and drier than ever before. The spring planting died in the fields, and with the small seedlings went the hopes of both the farmers of Denilburg and the townsfolk who depended on the farmers making money.
At the same time, a large number of apparently solid banks went under. It came as a surprise, particularly since they"d weathered the credit famine of "30 and the bursting of the tantalum bubble two years previously. The bank crash was accompanied by a crisis of confidence in the currency, as the country shifted from gold and silver to aluminum and copper-nickel coins that had no intrinsic value.
One of the banks that failed was the Third National Faith, the bank that held most of the meagre savings of Denilburg residents. Alice May found out about it when she came home from school, to discover Stella weeping and Jake white-faced in the kitchen, mechanically chopping what might have once been a pumpkin.
For a while it looked like they"d lose the drugstore, but Janice"s husband had kept a highly illegal cache of double eagles, the ones with the Dowager Empress"s head on them. Selling them to a "licensed coin collector" brought in just enough to pay the Hopkinses" debts and keep the store a going concern.
Jane had to leave college, though. Her scholarship was adversely affected by inflation, and Jake and Stella couldn"t afford to give her anything. Everyone expected her to come home, but she didn"t. Instead she wrote to say that she had a job, a good job with a great future.
It took a few more months and a few letters before it turned out that Jane"s job was with a political organisation called the Servants of the State. She sent a tonatype of herself in the black uniform with the firebrand badges and armband. Jake and Stella didn"t put it up on the mantelpiece with the other shots from her sisters" lives.
The arrival of Jane"s tonatype coincided with Alice May- and everyone else-spending a lot more time thinking about the Servants. They"d seemed a harmless enough group for many years. Just another right-wing, bigoted, reactionary, pseudomilitary political organisation with a few seats in Congress and a couple of very minor advisory positions at the Palace.
But by the time Jane joined the party, things had changed. The Servants had found a new leader some- where, a man they called the Master. He looked ordinary enough in the newspapers, a short man with a peculiar beard, a long forelock, and staring eyes. He had some resemblance to the kinetocome-dian Harry Hopalong, who favored the same sort of overtrimmed goatee-but the Master wasn"t funny.
The Master clearly had some charisma that could not be captured by the tonatype process or reproduced in print. He toured the country constantly, and wherever he appeared, he swayed local politicians, the important businesspeople, and most of the ordinary population. Mayors left their political parties and joined the Servants. Oil and tantalum barons gave large donations. Professors wrote essays supporting the economic theories of the Master. Crowds thronged to cheer and worship at the Master"s progress.
Everywhere the Servants grew in popularity, there were murders and arson. Opponents of the Servants died. Minorities of every kind were persecuted, particularly the First People and followers of the major heresies. Even orthodox temples whose haruspices did not agree that fortune favoured the Servants were burned to the ground.
Neither hara.s.sment, beatings, murder, arson, or rape were properly investigated when they were done by, or in the name of, the Servants. Or if they were, matters never successfully came to trial, in either State or Imperial courts. Local police left the Servants to their own devices.
The Emperor, now a very old man roosting in the palace at Washington, did nothing. People wistfully spoke of his glory days leading hilltop charges and shooting bears. But that was long ago and he was senile, or close to it, and the Crown Prince was almost terminally lazy, a genial buffoon who could not be stirred into any sort of action.
Off in Denilburg, Alice May was largely insulated from what was going on elsewhere. But even in that small, sleepy town, she saw the rise of the Servants. The two shops belonging to what the Servants called Others-pretty much anyone who wasn"t white and a regular worshiper-had red firebrands painted across their windows and lost most of their customers. In other towns their owners would have been beaten or tarred and feathered, but it hadn"t yet come to that in Denilburg.
People Alice May had known all her life talked about the International Other Conspiracy and how it was to blame for the bank failures, the crop failures, and all other failures-particularly their own failures in the everyday business of life.
The fact that something really serious was happening came home to Alice May the day that her uncle Bill Carey walked past dressed not in his stationmaster"s green and blue, but the Servants" black and red. Alice May went out into the street to ask him what on earth he thought he was doing. But when she stopped in front of him, she saw a strange vacancy in his eyes. This was not the Bill Carey she had known all her life. Instinctively she knew that something had happened to him, that the adopted uncle she knew and loved had been changed, his natural humanity driven deep inside him and overlaid by something horrible and poisonous.
"Praise the Master," snapped Bill as Alice May looked at him. His hand crawled up to his shoulder and then snapped across his chest in the Servants" knife-chop salute.
He didn"t say anything else. His strange eyes stared into the distance until Alice May stepped aside. He strode off as she rushed inside to be sick. Later she learned that he had been to Jarawak City, the state capital, the day before. He had seen the Master speak, out of curiosity, as had a number of other people from Denilburg. All of them had come back as committed Servants.
Alice May tried to talk to Jake and Stella about Bill, but they wouldn"t listen. They were afraid to discuss the Servants, and they would not accept that anything had been done to Bill. As far as they were concerned, he"d simply decided to ride with the tide.
"When times are tough, people"ll believe anything that puts the blame somewhere," said Jake. "Bill Carey"s a good man, but his paycheck hasn"t kept up with inflation. I guess he"s only just been holding on for some time, and that Master gave him hope, somehow."
"Hope laced with hatred," snapped Alice May. She still felt sick to the very bottom of her stomach at seeing Bill in his Servants" uniform. It was even worse than the tonatype of Jane. More real, more immediate. It was wrong, wrong, wrong.
A knock at the door stopped the conversation. Jake and Stella exchanged frightened looks. Alice May frowned, angry that her foster parents could be made afraid by such a simple thing as a knock at the door. They would never have flinched before. She went to open it like a whirlwind, rushing down the hall so fast, she knocked the portrait of Stella"s grandsire onto the floor. Gla.s.s shattered and the frame broke in two.
There was no one outside, but a notice had been pushed half under the door. Alice May picked it up, saw the black and red and the flaming torch, and stormed back inside, slamming the door behind her. "The Master"s coming here! This afternoon!" she exclaimed, waving the paper in front of her. "On a special train. He"s going to speak from it."
She put her finger against the bottom line.
"It says, "Everyone must attend," she said grimly. "As if we don"t have a choice who we listen to."
"We"d better go," muttered Stella. Jake nodded. "What!" screamed Alice May. "He"s only a politician! Stay at home."
Jake shook his head. "No. No. I"ve heard about what happens if you don"t go. There"s the store to think about."
"And my grandsire was a Cheveril-an accom-modator," Stella said quietly. She looked down at the splintered gla.s.s and the smashed painting. "We mustn"t give them a reason to look into the family. We must be there."
"I"m not going," announced Alice May.
"You are while you live in this house," snapped Jake, in a rare display of temper. "I"ll not have all our lives and livelihood risked for some silly girl"s fancies."
"I am not going," repeated Alice May. She felt strangely calm, obviously much calmer than Jake, whose face was flushed with sudden heat, or Stella, who had gone deathly pale.
"Then you"d better get out altogether," said Jake fiercely. "Go and find your real parents."
Stella cried out as he spoke, and clutched at his arm, but she didn"t speak.
Alice May looked at the only parents she had ever known. She felt as if she was in a kinetoplay, with all of them trapped by the script. There was an inevitability in Jake"s words, but he seemed as surprised to say them as she was to hear them. She saw a terror deep in his eyes, and shame. He was already afraid of what he was becoming, afraid of the place his fears were driving him toward.
"I"ll go and pack," she said, her voice dull to her own ears. It was not the real Jake who had spoken, she knew. He was a timid man. He did not know how to be brave, and anger was his only escape from acknowledging his cowardice.
Alice May didn"t pack. She stopped by her room to pick up a pair of riding boots and then went up to the attic. She opened the trunk, breathing a sigh of relief as the straps and lock gave no resistance. She took out the box marked ammunition and set it on the floor, and placed the holstered revolvers and the belt next to the box.
Then she stripped down to her underclothes and put on the white dress. It fitted her perfectly, as she had known it would. She had grown in the year since her first sight of the dress, enough that two undone shirt b.u.t.tons could derail the trains of thought and conversation of most of the boys she knew-and some of the men.
This dress was not low cut, but it hugged her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and waist before flaring out, and it was daringly short at an inch below her knees. The waistcoat that went over it was also tailored to show off her figure. Strangely, it appeared to be lined with woven strands of hair. Blond hair that was a shade identical to her own.
The dress, even with the waistcoat, was cold to the touch, as if it had come out of an ice chest. The temperature outside had forced the mercury out the top of the old thermometer by the kitchen door, and it was stifling in the attic. Alice May wasn"t even warm.
She strapped on the revolvers next. The gun belt rested on her hips, with the holsters lower, against her thighs. She found that the silk was double-lined there, to guard against wear, and there were small ties to fix the snout of each holster to her dress.
The ammunition box opened easily. It held a dozen smaller boxes of blue tin. Alice May was somehow not surprised by the descriptions, which were handwritten on pasted labels. Six of the boxes were labeled "Colt .45 Fourway Silver Cross" and six "Winchester .44-40 Silvercutter."
She opened a tin of the .45 Fourway Silver Cross. The squat bra.s.s cartridges were topped with lead bullets, but each had four fat lines of silver across the top. Alice May knew it was real silver. The .44-40 cartridges looked similar, but the bullets were either solid silver or silver over a core of lead.
Alice May quickly loaded both revolvers and then the rifle and filled the loops on her belt with a mixture of both cartridges. Instinctively she knew which ammunition to use in each weapon, and she put the .45 Silver Cross cartridges only on the left of the eagle buckle and the .44-40 only on the right.
Even with the rifle temporarily laid on the floor, the revolvers and the laden bullet belt came to quite a load, heavy on her hips and thighs.
There was still one thing left in the trunk. Alice May picked up the jewelry case and opened it. The star was dull till she touched it, but it began to shine as she pinned it on. It was heavy, too, heavier than it should have been, and her knees buckled a little as the pin snapped in.
Alice May stood absolutely still for a moment, breathing slowly, taking the weight that was as much imagined as real. The light of her star slowly faded with each breath, till it was no more than a bright piece of metal reflecting the sun. Everything felt lighter then. Revolvers, belt, star-and her own spirits.
She closed the trunk, sat on it, and pulled on her boots. Then she picked up the rifle and climbed down the ladder.
No one was downstairs. The broken gla.s.s and picture frame were still on the floor, in total contradiction of Stella"s nature and habit. The painting itself was gone.
Alice May let herself out the back way and quickly crossed the street to her Uncle Bill"s house. The other Uncle Bill, Bill Hoogener. The milk carter. She wanted to talk to him before she did . . . whatever she was going to do.
It was unusually quiet on the street. A hot breeze blew, throwing up dust devils that whirled on the fringes of the gravelled road. No one was outside. There were no children playing. No one was out walking, driving, or riding. There was only the hot wind and Alice May"s boots crunching gravel as she walked the hundred yards diagonally down the street to the Hoogener house.
She stopped at the picket fence. There was a red firebrand splashed across the partly open door, the paint still wet and dripping. Alice May"s hands worked the lever of her rifle without conscious thought, and she pushed the door open with the toe of her boot.
The coolness of her dress was spreading across her skin, only it was colder now, a definite chill. Bill, as his surname gave away, was a descendent of Oncers, even if he wasn"t practicing himself. The Servants reserved a special hatred for the monotheistic Oncers.
Everything in the hall had been broken. All of Bill"s paintings of the town and its people, a lifetime of work, were smashed upon the floor. The wire umbrella stand had been wrenched apart, and the canes and umbrellas it had contained used as clubs to pummel the plasterboard. It was full of gaping holes, the wallpaper flapping around them like torn skin.
There was blood on the floor. Lots of blood, a great dark ocean of it close by the door, and then smaller pools leading back into the house. A b.l.o.o.d.y handprint by the kitchen door showed where someone-no, not someone, Alice May thought, but Bill, her uncle Bill-had leaned for support.
She stepped through the wreckage, colder still, colder than she had ever been. Her eyes moved slowly from side to side, the rifle barrel with its silver flowers following her gaze. Her finger was flat and straight against the trigger guard, an instant away from the trigger, a shot, a death.
Uncle Bill was in the kitchen. He was sitting with his back against the stove, his skin pale, almost translucent against the yellow enamel of the oven door. His eyes were open and impossibly clear, the white whiter than any milk he had ever carted, but his once-bright blue pupils were dulling into black, black as the undersize bow tie that hung on his chest, the elastic broken.
His mouth was open, a gaping, formless hole. It took Alice May a moment to realize that his tongue had been cut out.
From his waist down, Bill"s usually immaculate whites were black, sodden, totally saturated with blood. It still dripped from him slowly, into the patch under his legs. Someone had used that same blood to paint a clumsy firebrand symbol on the floor, and two words. But the blood had spread and joined in the letters, so it was impossible to read whatever Bill"s murderers had intended. The firebrand was enough, in any case, for the death to be claimed by the Servants.
Alice May stared at her dead uncle, thinking terrible thoughts. There were no strangers in town. She would know the murderers. She could see it so easily. The men dressed up in their black and red, drinking whiskey to make themselves brave. They would have pa.s.sed the house a dozen times before they finally knocked on Bill"s door. Perhaps they"d spoken normally for a minute to him, before they pushed him back inside. Then they"d cut and cut at him as he reeled back down his own hallway, unable to believe what was happening and unable to resist.
Bill Hoogener had died at the hands of neighbors, without having any idea of what was going on.
Alice May knew what was going on. She knew it deep inside. The Master was a messenger of evil, a corrupter of souls. The Servants were not Servants of the State, but slaves to some awful and insidious poison that changed their very natures and made them capable of committing such dreadful crimes as the murder of her uncle Bill.
She stepped toward him, toward the pool of blood. An echo answered her, another footfall, in the yard beyond the kitchen door.
Alice May stopped where she was, silent, waiting. The footsteps continued, then the screen door swung open. A man came in, not really looking where he was going. He wore a Servant"s black coat over his blue bib-and-brace overalls. There was blood splashed above his knees. There was blood on his hands. His name was Everett Kale, a.s.sistant butcher. He had once walked out with Jane Hopkins and had given a much younger Alice May a single marigold from the bunch he"d brought for Jane.
Alice May"s star flashed bright, and Everett looked up. He saw Alice May, the star, the levelled rifle. His hand flashed to the bone-handled skinning knife that rattled in the broad butcher"s scabbard at his side.
The shot was very loud in the confined s.p.a.ce, but Alice May didn"t flinch. She worked the lever, the action so fast the sound seemed to fall behind it, and then she put another round into the man who had fallen back through the door. He was already dead, but she wanted to be sure.
Noise greeted her as she stepped outside. Shouts and surprised cries. There were three men in the yard, looking at the dead butcher on the ground. They had got into Bill"s home brew, and they were all holding bottles of thick, dark beer. They dropped the bottles as Alice May came out shooting.
They were armed with slim, new automatic pistols that fit snugly into clipped holsters at the nipped-in waists of their black tunics. None of them managed to get a pistol out. They were all dead on the ground within seconds, their blood mixing with black, foaming beer, their death throes acted out upon a bed of broken gla.s.s.
Alice May looked at them from a weird and forbidding place inside her own head. She knew them but felt no remorse. Butcher, baker, ne"er-do-well, and ore washer. All men of the town.
Her hands had done the killing. Her hands and the rifle. Even now those same hands were reloading, taking bullets from her belt and slipping them with a satisfying click into the tubular magazine.
Alice May realised she had had no conscious control over her hands at all. Somewhere between opening the front door of Bill"s house and entering the kitchen, she had become an observer within her own body. But she didn"t feel terrified by this. It felt right, and she realised she was still in charge of her actions. She wasn"t a zombie or anything. She would decide where to go next, but her body-and the weapons-would help her do whatever had to be done when she got there.
She walked around the still-twitching bodies and out the back gate. Onto another empty street with the unforgiving, hot wind and the dust and the complete absence of people.
There should have been a crowd, come to see what the shooting was about. The town"s two lawmen should be riding up on their matching grays. But there was only Alice May.
She turned down the street, toward the railway station. Her bootheels crunched on the gravel. She felt she had never really heard that particular sound before, not so clear, so loud.
The wind changed direction and blew against her, stronger and hotter than ever. Dust blew up, heavy dust that carried chunks of grit. But none hit Alice May, none got in her eyes. Her white dress repelled it, the wind seeming to divide as it hit her, great currents of dust and grit flying around on either side.
A door opened to her left, and she was facing it, her finger on the trigger. A man half stepped out. Old Mr Lacker, in his best suit, a Servants of the State flag in his trembling hand. His left hand.
"Stay home!" ordered Alice May. Her voice was louder than she expected. It boomed in her ears, easily cutting through the wind.
Lacker took another step and raised his flag.
"Stay home!"