The Talisman

put it in with his hens, the farmer would have nothing but double-yolkers for the next twelve-month.
    Jack, however, had neither eyes for the rooster nor ears for the salesman’s pitch. He joined a crowd of children who were staring at the one-eyed man’s star attraction. This was a parrot in a large wicker cage. It was almost as tall as the youngest children in the group, and it was as smoothly, darkly green as a Heineken beer-bottle. Its eyes were a brilliant gold . . . its four eyes. Like the pony he had seen in the pavillion stables, the parrot had two heads. It gripped its perch with its big yellow feet and looked placidly in two directions at once, its two tufted crowns almost touching.
    The parrot was talking to itself, to the amusement of the children – but even in his amazement Jack noted that, while they were paying close attention to the parrot, they seemed neither stunned nor even very wondering. They weren’t like kids seeing their first movie, sitting stupefied in their seats and all eyes; they were more like kids getting their regular Saturday-morning cartoon-fix. This was a wonder, yes, but not a wholly new one. And to whom do wonders pall more rapidly than the very young?
    ‘ Bawwwrk! How high is up?’ East-Head enquired.
    ‘As low as low,’ West-Head responded, and the children giggled.
    ‘ Graaak! What’s the great truth of noblemen?’ East-Head now asked.
    ‘That a king will be a king all his life, but once a knight’s enough for any man!’ West-Head replied pertly. Jack smiled and several of the older children laughed, but the younger ones only looked puzzled.
    ‘And what’s in Mrs Spratt’s cupboard?’ East-Head now posed.
    ‘A sight no man shall see!’ West-Head rejoined, and although Jack was mystified, the children went into gales of laughter.
    The parrot solemnly shifted its talons on its perch and made droppings into the straw below it.
    ‘And what frightened Alan Destry to death in the night?’
    ‘He saw his wife – growwwwk! – getting out of the bath!’
    The farmer was now walking away and the one-eyed salesman still had charge of the rooster. He rounded furiously on the children. ‘Get out of here! Get out of here before I kick your asses square!’
    The children scattered. Jack went with them, sparing a last bemused look over his shoulder at the wonderful parrot.
    4
    At another stall he gave up two knuckles of wood for an apple and a dipper of milk – the sweetest, richest milk he had ever tasted. Jack thought that if they had milk like that back at home, Nestlé’s and Hershey’s would go bankrupt in a week.
    He was just finishing the milk when he saw the Henry family moving slowly in his direction. He handed the dipper back to the woman in the stall, who poured the lees thriftily back into a large wooden cask beside her. Jack hurried on, wiping a milk moustache from his upper lip and hoping uneasily that no one who had drunk from the dipper before him had had leprosy or herpes or anything like that. But he somehow didn’t think such awful things even existed over here.
    He walked up the market-town’s main thoroughfare, past the mimers, past two fat women selling pots and pans ( Territories Tupperware , Jack thought, and grinned), past that wonderful two-headed parrot (its one-eyed owner was now drinking quite openly from a clay bottle, reeling wildly from one end of his booth to the other, holding the dazed-looking rooster by the neck and yelling truculently at passersby – Jack saw the man’s scrawny right arm was caked with yellowish-white guano, and grimaced), past an open area where farmers were gathered. He paused there for a moment, curious. Many of the farmers were smoking clay pipes, and Jack saw several clay bottles, much the same as the one the bird-salesman had been brandishing, go from hand to hand. In a long, grassy field, men were hitching stones behind large shaggy horses with lowered heads and mild, stupid eyes.
    Jack passed the rug-stall. The vendor saw him and raised a hand. Jack raised one in turn and thought of calling Use it, my man, but don’t abuse it! He decided he better not. He was suddenly aware that he felt blue. That feeling of strangeness, of being an outsider, had fallen over him again.
    He reached the crossroads. The way going north and south was little more than a country lane. The Western Road was much wider.
    Old Travelling Jack , he thought, and tried to smile. He straightened his shoulders and heard Speedy’s