The Talisman

shade lighter and became somehow coarser. Now it was Laura DeLoessian he saw in that coffin – and the coffin itself was no longer a smoothly anonymous funeral parlor special, but something that looked as if it had been hacked with rude fury from an old log – a Viking’s coffin, if there had ever been such a thing; it was easier to imagine this coffin being torched alight on a bier of oiled logs than it was to imagine it being lowered into the unprotesting earth. It was Laura DeLoessian, Queen of the Territories, but in this imagining which had become as clear as a vision, the Queen was wearing his mother’s wedding dress from Drag Strip Rumble and the gold-cross earrings Uncle Tommy had helped him pick out in Sharp’s of Beverly Hills. Suddenly his tears came in a hot and burning flood – not sham tears but real ones, not just for his mother but for both of these lost women, dying universes apart, bound by some unseen cord which might rot but would never break – at least, not until they were both dead.
    Through the tears he saw a giant of a man in billowing whites rush across the room toward them. He wore a red bandanna instead of a puffy chef’s hat on his head, but Jack thought its purpose was the same – to identify the wearer as the boss of the kitchen. He was also brandishing a wicked-looking three-tined wooden fork.
    ‘ Ged-OUT! ’ the chef screeched at them, and the voice emerging from that huge barrel chest was absurdly flutelike – it was the voice of a willowy gay giving a shoe-clerk a piece of his mind. But there was nothing absurd about the fork; it looked deadly.
    The women scattered before his charge like birds. The bottom-most pie dropped out of the pie-woman’s rack and she uttered a high, despairing cry as it broke apart on the boards. Strawberry juice splattered and ran, the red as fresh and bright as arterial blood.
    ‘GED-DOUT MY KIDCHEN, YOU SLUGS! DIS IS NO SHORD-CUD! DIS IS NO RAZE-TRAG! DIS IS MY KIDCHEN AND IF YOU CAD’T REMEMBER DAT, I’LL BY GOD THE CARBENDER CARVE YOUR AZZES FOR YOU!’
    He jabbed the fork at them, simultaneously half-turning his head and squinching his eyes mostly shut, as if in spite of his tough talk the thought of hot flowing blood was just too gauche to be borne. The Captain removed the hand that had been on the scruff of Jack’s neck and reached out – almost casually, it seemed to Jack. A moment later the chef was on the floor, all six and a half feet of him. The meat-fork was lying in a puddle of strawberry sauce and chunks of white unbaked pastry. The chef rolled back and forth, clutching his broken right wrist and screaming in that high, flutelike voice. The news he screamed out to the room in general was certainly woeful enough: he was dead, the Captain had surely murdered him (pronounced mur-dirt in the chef’s odd, almost Teutonic accent); he was at the very least crippled, the cruel and heartless Captain of the Outer Guards having destroyed his good right hand and thus his livelihood, and so ensuring a miserable beggar’s life for him in the years to come; the Captain had inflicted terrible pain on him, a pain beyond belief, such as was not to be borne –
    ‘ Shut up! ’ the Captain roared, and the chef did. Immediately. He lay on the floor like a great baby, his right hand curled on his chest, his red bandanna drunkenly askew so that one ear (a small black pearl was set in the center of the lobe) showed, his fat cheeks quivering. The kitchen women gasped and twittered as the Captain bent over the dreaded chief ogre of the steaming cave where they spent their days and nights. Jack, still weeping, caught a glimpse of a black boy ( brown boy, his mind amended) standing at one end of the largest brazier. The boy’s mouth was open, his face as comically surprised as a face in a minstrel show, but he kept turning the crank in his hands, and the haunch suspended over the glowing coals kept revolving.
    ‘Now listen and I’ll give you some advice you won’t find in The Book of Good Farming ,’ the Captain said. He bent over the chef until their noses almost touched (his paralyzing grip on Jack’s arm – which was now going mercifully numb – never loosened the smallest bit). ‘Don’t you ever . . . don’t you ever . . . come at a man with a knife . . . or a fork . . . or a spear . . . or with so much as a God-pounding splinter in your hand unless you intend to kill him with it. One expects temperament from chefs, but temperament