The Rise of Ransom City (27 page)

The next night we skulked in the yard with the weeds and the cats but he went nowhere but to bed. After that we forgot our wager for a while. You may recall that after I climbed Old Grady’s tower with the kite and the baling-wire I was charged by the New Management and sentenced to a period of penal servitude. My experiment with the kite and the lightning in the thunderstorm on top the abandoned tower on Grady’s Hill was in the view of the new authorities not the admirable curiosity of a young man of genius, but rather an instance of criminal trespass, aggravated by vandalism. I was therefore plenty busy and forbidden to leave town anyhow. My father went off without warning and came back once and then again and nobody thought to follow him. It was not until maybe a month later that my father announced at breakfast that he was leaving the next day to look for work in New Foley and would be gone for a long time, if all went well, and so it was time for me to be a man.

I am sorry to say that I was still only a boy. My servitude had expired the day before and I was free again and in the mood for adventure. Therefore I rounded up Jess and Joe and reminded them of our wager and the next day we followed the old man when he left.

The road from Conlan to Foley had not yet been widened for motor-cars. It wound through the woods. It was therefore possible to follow a man unobserved, if one stuck to the trees and if that man was occupied with his own thoughts.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and hot, and the woods belonged to insects. They liked the taste of me and Joe but not Jess. Women have their ways, she explained.

My father walked west down the road for an hour or two. A wagon passed and he refused a ride and did not make conversation. After that he sat on a fallen tree for another hour or more, at a place where the road turned north toward Foley. He had his pack at his feet and his great bald head in his hands. Then he stood very quick like he had seen us, but he had not. He swung his pack over his shoulder and set off west into the woods.

I had lost my wager.

The woods south of Conlan are nothing like the swamp I fetched up in after the
Damaris
sank, except in the way that all lonely places are the same. Conlan’s woods were dry. Trees stuck up out of the ground tall and thin and regular like the bed of nails I once saw a circus-act lie down on out on the Rim. There was thorny brush everywhere. The ground was stony and uneven and rose up into a hundred tiny hills and shallow gulches, none of which had any names but all of which served to turn you around, so that it was notorious among the people of Conlan and Foley and Haman that to enter those woods was to get lost, sure as anything. We did not get far into the woods before Jess’s nerve failed and she wanted to go back.

No—that is not the right way to say it. Truth is that Jess was always brave. But she had better sense than me. Joe did not understand that, and mocked her for cowardice. Hard words were exchanged in whispers. I was for pressing on too, because I could never stand to be thought a coward. In my time I have done a lot of stupid things for reasons of pride. In the end Jess turned back and Joe and me went on. I have mentioned her deft hand with a stone— well, as soon as our backs were turned she buzzed a stone to clip Joe’s ear. He cursed. I thought my father would hear but I guess he did not.

Another difference between the swamps and the woods south of Conlan was silence. The swamps were full of strange and wet and unearthly noises, and the woods were silent. My father made no noise, and nor did Jess. Joe grunted and cursed, but he had the good sense to do so quietly. Even the insects were for the most part quiet. Sometimes one of them would make a whining sound that was as shocking in the silence as a gunshot.

Nobody much lived in the woods outside of town and there was little in them of use to commerce or industry. My father stopped at no little huts, enjoyed the company of no women. Nor did he practice any black magic.

We got hungry. It began to get dark. My father produced a lantern from his pack. That made him a good deal easier to follow from a safe distance. Of course we would never find our way back without him.

Joe offered his speculation again that my father was conspiring with Agents of the Gun, and I said that he should hope that was not true, because the Agents would have no second thoughts about slitting the throats of spies.

We were still pretending not to be afraid. As the older of the two of us Joe was naturally determined to show that he was the braver of the two of us, and because I was who I am I was determined to show that it was me. Truth is we were both afraid. In no particular order we feared the dark, hunger, getting lost, wolves, snakes, silence, and Agents of the Gun who might be skulking and scheming in the wilderness and sharpening their throat-slitting knives. Soon enough we added Officers of the Line to that list of bogeymen. On our walk west we twice passed old camp-sites. You could tell they had been occupied by Linesmen because of the kind of junk they leave behind. We did not know what business the Linesmen could have had in those parts but we did not like it. If they found us wandering in the woods there would be questioning.

We lost sight of my father’s lantern. After a little argument we agreed to keep walking west, keeping the setting sun at our backs. That might take us in the direction of New Haman by morning.

Joe remarked that it was like we were out on the edge of the world, traveling in unmade lands, and you could not be sure which way you were going or if the sun would come up tomorrow. I told him I was not scared. I was.

Above all else we were afraid of the Folk.

I did not know how many of the Folk lived in the woods south of Conlan. Nobody did. There was nothing very profitable in that wilderness and it was of no particular strategic importance to anyone and so great expanses of it were still unmapped. There was no question though that a sizable settlement of free Folk resided there, most likely in the triangle of land between Conlan and New Haman and the peak we called Old Man Hump. Sometimes a wagon on the road to Foley or Haman crossed paths with a half-dozen Folk going about their business, what ever that was. Once when I was sick a group of the Folk came to the outskirts of town, or so I heard, and the townspeople watched them watch us watching them for an hour or two before they turned back. It was said that Grady’s Mine had been hollowed out of caves that had belonged to them. There had been violence back before I was born. Old-timers spoke darkly of witchcraft and curses and strange storms and devils of dust and stone and signs scratched on trees that could drive a man mad— all the usual sort of stories you hear everywhere. Grady brought in a Mother Superior of the Silver City faith to say blessings for his men, and a Master of the World Serpent faith to spit sickness upon his enemies, and in the end religion with the aid of dynamite proved more than a match for magic. Eventually a kind of
entente
was achieved, which is to say that Grady got his mine and the Folk got the woods and for the most part we each left each other alone. But if Joe and me blundered into one of their places there was no telling what they might do to us.

My father was well out of sight and hearing now and so to show each other that we were not afraid Joe and me were talking as loud as we pleased. He told me some blood-curdling stories he had heard about the Folk of the woods and the cruelties they visited on unfortunate travelers. I doubt that there was a word that he said that was not pure invention. I would like to say that I expressed my doubt of his stories but I did not. Truth is that I made up some of my own. Well, I have always been a good talker. I do not remember what ever I said but I remember that Joe’s face went pale and he fell silent.

In the silence I began to speculate on the meaning of the Line camp-sites. Could they be looking for my father? Surely not— the camp-sites were old. If they wanted to question him, they would have arrested him in town. Perhaps they had decided that now that Conlan was under their management it was time to drive the Folk away from town, and further into the west. Maybe the camp-sites belonged to scouts, hunters, slave-takers.

It was full dark. To stop and wait out the night would be to admit that we were lost and so we crept along, feeling our way with our hands on thorny tree-trunks and rough rock. The first sign that we had walked into the territory of the Folk was when beneath my fingers I felt carved rock. It was a kind of twisted spiral, like a finger-tip, as I recall. Anyhow you could say it was frightening but now my curiosity was woken too. I had seen fragments of Folk carving before, sold back in town, but I had never seen their homes and I had never set eyes on the Folk themselves. Joe was for turning back. I was for pressing on. I got my way.

Soon enough we heard voices.

We were high up, I think. We had been climbing the slopes of Old Man Hump for some time. There were few trees but there were many tall rocks all around us. There was what I shall call moonlight for want of a better word, though it was somewhat redder than ordinary.

My father stood beneath one of those tall rocks. His back was to us and he was deep in conversation with one of the Folk, who sat cross-legged on top of the rock.

It was a woman. Long black hair fell into her lap. Otherwise she was naked, save for paintings and ornaments.

My father was speaking in his old-country language, that I had never taken the time to learn. He gestured vigorously with his hands, which he always used to do when speaking that language, and never did when speaking mine. I do not know what he was saying. Sometimes the Folk woman responded in her own language, and I do not know what that meant either.

The scene reminded me of an illustration from one of the Encyclopedias— the old-world knight serenading his love at her balcony.

“It is a woman,” Joe said. “Jess had that right, all right—, but it’s a woman of— that’s filthy, Ransom. That’s wicked. How could he. That’s—”

I told him to shut up.

My father sounded angry. He sounded like he was begging, and he hated to beg. I heard him say one or two names that I recognized— people from back in East Conlan. Officials of the New Management.

The woman stood, and walked away. My father cursed and climbed up after her. I followed and then Joe followed me.