The Talisman

do.’
    Jack whispered something.
    ‘What?’ Farren asked sharply.
    ‘I said I don’t want to go,’ Jack said, only a little louder. Tears were close and he knew that once they began to fall he was going to lose it, just blow his cool entirely and ask Captain Farren to get him out of it, protect him, something –
    ‘I think it’s too late for your wants to enter into the question,’ Captain Farren said. ‘I don’t know your tale, boy, and I don’t want to. I don’t even want to know your name.’
    Jack stood looking at him, shoulders slumped, eyes burning, his lips trembling.
    ‘Get your shoulders up!’ Farren shouted at him with sudden fury. ‘Who are you going to save? Where are you going? Not ten feet, looking like that! you’re too young to be a man, but you can at least pretend , can’t you? You look like a kicked dog!’
    Stung, Jack straightened his shoulders and blinked his tears back. His eyes fell on the remains of the carter’s son and he thought: At least I’m not like that, not yet. He’s right. Being sorry for myself is a luxury I can’t afford . It was true. All the same, he could not help hating the scarred Captain a little for reaching inside him and pushing the right buttons so easily.
    ‘Better,’ Farren said dryly. ‘Not much, but a little.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Jack said sarcastically.
    ‘You can’t cry off, boy. Osmond’s behind you. Morgan will soon be behind you as well. And perhaps . . . perhaps there are problems wherever you came from, too. But take this. If Parkus sent you to me, he’d want me to give you this. So take it, and then go.’
    He was holding out a coin. Jack hesitated, then took it. It was the size of a Kennedy half-dollar, but much heavier – as heavy as gold, he guessed, although its color was dull silver. What he was looking at was the face of Laura DeLoessian in profile – he was struck again, briefly but forcibly, by her resemblance to his mother. No, not just resemblance – in spite of such physical dissimilarities as the thinner nose and rounder chin, she was his mother. Jack knew it. He turned the coin over and saw an animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. It seemed to be looking at Jack. It made him a little nervous, and he put the coin inside his jerkin, where it joined the bottle of Speedy’s magic juice.
    ‘What’s it for?’ he asked Farren.
    ‘You’ll know when the time comes,’ the Captain replied. ‘Or perhaps you won’t. Either way, I’ve done my duty by you. Tell Parkus so, when you see him.’
    Jack felt wild unreality wash over him again.
    ‘Go, son,’ Farren said. His voice was lower, but not necessarily more gentle. ‘Do your job . . . or as much of it as you can.’
    In the end, it was that feeling of unreality – the pervasive sense that he was no more than a figment of someone else’s hallucination – that got him moving. Left foot, right foot, hay foot, straw foot. He kicked aside a splinter of ale-soaked wood. Stepped over the shattered remnants of a wheel. Detoured around the end of the wagon, not impressed by the blood drying there or the buzzing flies. What was blood or buzzing flies in a dream?
    He reached the end of the muddy, wood-and barrel-littered stretch of road, and looked back . . . but Captain Farren had turned the other way, perhaps to look for his men, perhaps so he would not have to look at Jack. Either way, Jack reckoned, it came to the same thing. A back was a back. Nothing to look at.
    He reached inside his jerkin, tentatively touched the coin Farren had given him, and then gripped it firmly. It seemed to make him feel a little better. Holding it as a child might hold a quarter given him to buy a treat at the candy store, Jack went on.

7
    It might have been as little as two hours later when Jack heard the sound Captain Farren had described as ‘thunder rolling along the earth’ – or it might have been as long as four. Once the sun passed below the western rim of the forest (and it did that not long after Jack had entered it), it became difficult to judge the time.
    On a number of occasions vehicles came out of the west, presumably bound for the Queen’s pavillion. Hearing each one come (and vehicles could be heard a long way away here; the clarity with which sound carried made Jack think of what Speedy had said about one man pulling a radish out of the ground and another smelling it half a mile away) made him think of Morgan, and each time he hurried first