The Talisman

Blasted Lands . . . at night . . . d’ye ken—’
    ‘I ken, all right,’ Jack said, ‘I ken that I’ll need all the surprise I can whip up. Morgan and that man the Wolfs call He of the Lashes are going to be looking for me, and if I show up twelve hours before anybody is expecting this train, Richard and I might get away alive.’
    Anders nodded gloomily, and again looked like an oversize dog accommodating itself to unhappy knowledge.
    Jack looked at Richard again – asleep, sitting up with his mouth open. As if he knew what was in Jack’s mind, Anders too looked toward sleeping Richard. ‘Did Morgan of Orris have a son?’ Jack asked.
    ‘He did, my Lord. Morgan’s brief marriage had issue – a boy-child named Rushton.’
    ‘And what became of Rushton? As if I couldn’t guess.’
    ‘He died,’ Anders said simply. ‘Morgan of Orris was not meant to be a father.’
    Jack shuddered, remembering how his enemy had torn his way through the air and nearly killed Wolf’s entire herd.
    ‘We’re going,’ he said. ‘Will you please help me get Richard into the cab, Anders?’
    ‘My Lord . . .’ Anders hung his head, then lifted it and gave Jack a look of almost parental concern. ‘The journey will require at least two days, perhaps three, before ye reach the western shore. Have ye any food? Would ye share my evening meal?’
    Jack shook his head, impatient to begin this last leg of his journey to the Talisman, but then his stomach abruptly growled, reminding him of how long it had been since he had eaten anything but the Ring-Dings and stale Famous Amos cookies in Albert the Blob’s room. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose another half hour won’t make any difference. Thank you, Anders. Help me get Richard up on his feet, will you?’ And maybe, he thought, he wasn’t so eager to cross the Blasted Lands after all.
    The two of them jerked Richard to his feet. Like the Dormouse, he opened his eyes, smiled, and sagged back to sleep again. ‘Food,’ Jack said. ‘Real food. You up for that, chum?’
    ‘I never eat in my dreams,’ Richard answered with surreal rationality. He yawned, then wiped his eyes. He gradually had found his feet, and no longer leaned against Anders and Jack. ‘I am pretty hungry, though, to tell you the truth. I’m having a long dream, aren’t I, Jack?’ He seemed almost proud of it.
    ‘Yep,’ said Jack.
    ‘Say, is that the train we’re going to take? It looks like a cartoon.’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘Can you drive that thing, Jack? It’s my dream, I know, but—’
    ‘It’s about as hard to operate as my old electric train set,’ Jack said. ‘I can drive it, and so can you.’
    ‘I don’t want to,’ Richard said, and that cringing, whining tone came back into his voice again. ‘I don’t want to get on that train at all. I want to go back to my room.’
    ‘Come and have some food instead,’ Jack said, and found himself leading Richard out of the shed. ‘Then we’re on our way to California.’
    And so the Territories showed one of its best faces to the boys immediately before they entered the Blasted Lands. Anders gave them thick sweet slices of bread clearly made from the grain growing around The Depot, kebabs of tender sections of meat and plump juicy unfamiliar vegetables, a spicy pink juice that Jack for some reason thought of as papaya though he knew it was not. Richard chewed in a happy trance, the juice running down his chin until Jack wiped it off for him. ‘California,’ he said once. ‘I should have known.’ Assuming that he was alluding to that state’s reputation for craziness, Jack did not question him. He was more concerned about what the two of them were doing to Anders’s presumably limited stock of food, but the old man kept nipping behind the corner, where he or his father before him had installed a small wood-burning stove, and returning with yet more food. Corn muffins, calf’s-foot jelly, things that looked like chicken legs but tasted of . . . what? Frankincense and myrrh? Flowers? The taste fairly exploded over his tongue, and he thought that he too might begin to drool.
    The three of them sat around a little table in the warm and mellow room. At the end of the meal Anders almost shyly brought forth a heavy beaker half-filled with red wine. Feeling as if he were following someone else’s script, Jack drank a small glassful.
    3
    Two hours later, beginning to feel drowsy, Jack wondered if that enormous meal had been an equally enormous