The Talisman

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, Nestle’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 the 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 bottle clink lightly against the mirror. Here goes old Travelling Jack along the Territories version of Interstate 90. Feets don’t fail me now!

He set off again, and soon that great dreaming land swallowed him.

5

About four hours later, in the middle of the afternoon, Jack sat down in the tall grass by the side of the road and watched as a number of men—from this distance they looked little bigger than bugs—climbed a tall, rickety- looking tower. He had chosen this place to rest and eat his apple because it was here that the Western Road seemed to make its closest approach to that tower. It was still at least three miles away (and perhaps much more than that—the almost supernatural clarity of the air made distances extremely hard to judge), but it had been in Jack’s view for an hour or more.

Jack ate his apple, rested his tired feet, and wondered what that tower could be, standing out there all by itself in a field of rolling grass. And, of course, he wondered why those men should be climbing it. The wind had blown quite steadily ever since he had left the market-town, and the tower was downwind of Jack, but whenever it died away for a minute, Jack could hear them calling to each other . . . and laughing. There was a lot of laughing going on.

Some five miles west of the market, Jack had walked through a village—if your definition of a village stretched to cover five tiny houses and one store that had obviously been closed for a long time. Those had been the last human habitations he had seen between then and now. Just before glimpsing the tower, he had been wondering if he had already come to the Outposts without even knowing it. He remembered well enough what Captain Farren had said: Beyond the Outposts the Western Road goes into nowhere . . . or into hell. I’ve heard it said that God Himself never ventures beyond the Outposts. . . .

Jack shivered a little.

But he didn’t really believe he had come so far. Certainly there was none of the steadily deepening unease he had been feeling before he floundered into the living trees in his effort to get away from Morgan’s diligence . . . the living trees which now seemed like a hideous prologue to all the time he had spent in Oatley.

Indeed, the good emotions he had felt from the time he woke up warm and rested inside the haystack until the time Henry the farmer had invited him to jump down from his wagon had now resurfaced: that feeling that the Territories, in spite of whatever evil they might harbor, were fundamentally good, and that he could be a part of this place anytime he wanted . . . that he was really no Stranger at all.

He had come to realize that he was part of the Territories for long periods of time. A strange thought had come to him as he swung easily along the Western Road, a thought which came half in English and half in whatever the Territories language was: When I’m having a dream, the only time I really