The girl cawed laughter.
“Get out, slut, or you’ll finish the day in the underkitchens.”
It was the Captain. He had come out of the tent with another man. This second fellow was old and fat, but he shared one characteristic with Farren—he looked like a real soldier rather than one from Gilbert and Sullivan. He was trying to fasten the front of his uniform over his bulging gut while holding a curly, French horn–like instrument at the same time.
The girl with the dirty baby scurried away with never another look at Jack. The Captain took the fat man’s horn so he could finish buttoning, and passed another word with him. The fat man nodded, finished with his shirt, took his horn back, and then strode off, blowing it. It was not like the sound Jack had heard on his first flip into the Territories; that had been many horns, and their sound had been somehow showy: the sound of heralds. This was like a factory whistle, announcing work to be done.
The Captain returned to Jack.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Where?”
“Outpost Road,” Captain Farren said, and then he cast a wondering, half-fearful eye down on Jack Sawyer. “What my father’s father called Western Road. It goes west through smaller and smaller villages until it reaches the Outposts. Beyond the Outposts it goes into nowhere . . . or hell. If you’re going west, you’ll need God with you, boy. But I’ve heard it said He Himself never ventures beyond the Outposts. Come on.”
Questions crowded Jack’s mind—a million of them—but the Captain set a killer pace and he didn’t have the spare breath to ask them. They breasted the rise south of the great pavillion and passed the spot where he had first flipped back out of the Territories. The rustic fun-fair was now close—Jack could hear a barker cajoling patrons to try their luck on Wonder the Devil-Donkey; to stay on two minutes was to win a prize, the barker cried. His voice came on the sea-breeze with perfect clarity, as did the mouthwatering smell of hot food—roast corn as well as meat this time. Jack’s stomach rumbled. Now safely away from Osmond the Great and Terrible, he was ravenous.
Before they quite reached the fair, they turned right on a road much wider than the one which led toward the great pavillion.
Then he was hurrying after Captain Farren again.
6
Osmond had been right; they could have followed their noses, if necessary. They were still a mile outside the village with that odd name when the first sour tang of spilled ale came to them on the breeze.
Eastward-bearing traffic on the road was heavy. Most of it was wagons drawn by lathered teams of horses (none with two heads, however). The wagons were, Jack supposed, the Diamond Reos and Peterbilts of this world. Some were piled high with bags and bales and sacks, some with raw meat, some with clacking cages of chickens. On the outskirts of All-Hands’ Village, an open wagon filled with women swept by them at an alarming pace. The women were laughing and shrieking. One got to her feet, raised her skirt all the way to her hairy crotch, and did a tipsy bump and grind. She would have tumbled over the side of the wagon and into the ditch—probably breaking her neck—if one of her colleagues hadn’t grabbed her by the back of the skirt and pulled her rudely back down.
Jack blushed again: he saw the girl’s white breast, its nipple in the dirty baby’s working mouth.
“God!” Farren muttered, walking faster than ever. “They were all drunk! Drunk on spilled Kingsland! Whores and driver both! He’s apt to wreck them on the road or drive them right off the sea-cliffs—no great loss. Diseased sluts!”
“At least,” Jack panted, “the road must be fairly clear, if all this traffic can get through. Mustn’t it?”
They were in All-Hands’ Village now. The wide Western Road had been oiled here to lay the dust. Wagons came and went, groups of people crossed the street, and everyone seemed to be talking too loudly. Jack saw two men arguing outside what might have been a restaurant. Abruptly, one of them threw a punch. A moment later, both men were rolling on the ground.
“All of the big wagons that passed us came from here,” Captain Farren said. “Some of the smaller ones may be getting through, but Morgan’s diligence isn’t small, boy.”
“Morgan—”
“Never mind Morgan now.”
The smell of the ale grew steadily sharper as they passed through the center of the village and out the other side. Jack’s legs ached as he struggled to keep up with the Captain. He guessed they had now come perhaps three miles.
Once they were on the western side of the village, the wagon-traffic decreased, but the pedestrian traffic headed east increased dramatically. Most of the pedestrians were weaving, staggering, laughing. They all reeked of ale. In some cases, their clothes were dripping, as if they had lain full-length in it and drunk of it like dogs. Jack supposed they had. He saw a laughing man leading a laughing boy of perhaps eight by the hand. The man bore a nightmarish resemblance to the hateful desk clerk at the Alhambra, and Jack understood with perfect clarity that this man was that man’s Twinner. Both he and the boy he led by the hand were drunk, and as Jack turned to look after them, the little boy began to vomit. His father—or so Jack supposed him to be—jerked him hard by the arm as the boy attempted to flounder his way into the brushy ditch, where he could be sick in relative privacy. The kid reeled back to his father like a cur-dog on a short leash, spraying puke on an elderly man who had collapsed by the side of the road and was snoring there.
Captain Farren’s face grew blacker and blacker. “God pound them all,” he said.
Even those furthest into their cups gave the scarred Captain a wide and prudent berth. While in the guard-post outside the pavillion, he had belted a short, businesslike leather scabbard around his waist. Jack assumed (not unreasonably) that it contained a short, businesslike sword. When any of the sots came too close, the Captain touched the sword and the sot detoured quickly away.
