The Talisman

Yes, in the lobby. In the lobby where everything smelled like the motor of a Waring Blender that had been running continuously on Hi Speed for about nine hours. In the lobby where everything had been blackened and twisted and fused.

Except for this humble tin key.

Which, in the other world, was a queer kind of lightning-rod—and which Sloat now hung around his neck on a fine silver chain.

“Coming for you, Jacky,” said Sloat in a voice that was almost tender. “Time to bring this entire ridiculous business to a crashing halt.”

17

Wolf and the Herd

1

Wolf talked of many things, getting up occasionally to shoo his cattle out of the road and once to move them to a stream about half a mile to the west. When Jack asked him where he lived, Wolf only waved his arm vaguely northward. He lived, he said, with his family. When Jack asked for clarification a few minutes later, Wolf looked surprised and said he had no mate and no children—that he would not come into what he called the “big rut-moon” for another year or two. That he looked forward to the “big rut-moon” was quite obvious from the innocently lewd grin that overspread his face.

“But you said you lived with your family.”

“Oh, family! Them! Wolf!” Wolf laughed. “Sure. Them! We all live together. Have to keep the cattle, you know. Her cattle.”

“The Queen’s?”

“Yes. May she never, never die.” And Wolf made an absurdly touching salute, bending briefly forward with his right hand touching his forehead.

Further questioning straightened the matter out somewhat in Jack’s mind . . . at least, he thought it did. Wolf was a bachelor (although that word barely fit, somehow). The family of which he spoke was a hugely extended one—literally, the Wolf family. They were a nomadic but fiercely loyal race that moved back and forth in the great empty areas east of the Outposts but west of “The Settlements,” by which Wolf seemed to mean the towns and villages of the east.

Wolfs (never Wolves—when Jack once used the proper plural, Wolf had laughed until tears spurted from the corners of his eyes) were solid, dependable workers, for the most part. Their strength was legendary, their courage unquestioned. Some of them had gone east into The Settlements, where they served the Queen as guards, soldiers, even as personal bodyguards. Their lives, Wolf explained to Jack, had only two great touchstones: the Lady and the family. Most of the Wolfs, he said, served the Lady as he did—watching the herds.

The cow-sheep were the Territories’ primary source of meat, cloth, tallow, and lamp-oil (Wolf did not tell Jack this, but Jack inferred it from what he said). All the cattle belonged to the Queen, and the Wolf family had been watching over them since time out of mind. It was their job. In this Jack found an oddly persuasive correlative to the relationship that had existed between the buffalo and the Indians of the American Plains . . . at least until the white man had come into those territories and upset the balance.

“Behold, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the Wolf with the creep,” Jack murmured, and smiled. He was lying on his back with his hands laced behind his head. The most marvellous feeling of peace and ease had stolen over him.

“What, Jack?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Wolf, do you really change into an animal when the moon gets full?”

“ ’Course I do!” Wolf said. He looked astounded, as if Jack had asked him something like Wolf, do you really pull up your pants after you finish taking a crap? “Strangers don’t, do they? Phil told me that.”

“The, ah, herd,” Jack said. “When you change, do they—”

“Oh, we don’t go near the herd when we change,” Wolf said seriously. “Good Jason, no! We’d eat them, don’t you know that? And a Wolf who eats of his herd must be put to death. The Book of Good Farming says so. Wolf! Wolf! We have places to go when the moon is full. So does the herd. They’re stupid, but they know they have to go away at the time of the big moon. Wolf! They better know, God pound them!”

“But you do eat meat, don’t you?” Jack asked.

“Full of questions, just like your father,” Wolf said. “Wolf! I don’t mind. Yeah, we eat meat. Of course we do. We’re Wolfs, aren’t we?”

“But if you don’t eat from the herds, what do you eat?”

“We eat well,” Wolf said, and would say no more on that subject.

Like everything else in the Territories, Wolf was a mystery—a mystery that was both gorgeous and frightening. The fact that he had known both Jack’s father and Morgan Sloat—had, at least, met their Twinners on more than one occasion—contributed to Wolf’s particular aura of mystery, but did not define it completely. Everything Wolf told him led Jack to a dozen more questions, most of which Wolf couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.

The matter of Philip Sawtelle’s and Orris’s visits was a case in point. They had first appeared when Wolf was in the “little moon” and living with his mother and two “litter-sisters.” They were apparently just passing through, as Jack himself was now doing, only they had been heading east instead of west (“Tell you the truth, you’re just about the only human I’ve ever seen this far west who was still going west,” Wolf said).

They had been jolly enough company, both of them. It was only later that there had been trouble . . . trouble with Orris. That had been after the partner of Jack’s father had “made himself a place in this world,” Wolf told Jack again and again—only now he seemed to mean Sloat, in the physical guise of Orris. Wolf said that Morgan had stolen one of his litter-sisters (“My mother bit her hands and toes for a month after she knew for certain that he took her,” Wolf told Jack matter-of-factly) and had taken other Wolfs from time to time. Wolf dropped his voice and, with an expression of fear and superstitious awe on his face, told Jack that the “limping man” had taken some of these Wolfs into the other world, the Place of the Strangers, and had taught them to eat of the herd.