had come to the Reservations and dressed up like Pocahontas, who had been passed from buck to buck, who had been the stuff of jokes at the councils of the Sons of Geronimo. They were all looking for something from the red man, something Hawk knew he didn't have. There was a crocodile egg inside Jesse, growing as their dead baby had grown, but the shell was still just a white girl. A one-eyed white girl.
Of course, most white girls could not break a wrestler's back or crush stone to dust with their naked hands. But strength of the body was not enough for Jesse, she would need all the strength of her spirit if she were who she seemed to be.
She was getting stronger inside. Sometimes, Hawk was frightened by her strength. He knew something of her past, knew she had been swept away by a stream of blood. One night, without being asked, she had told him about her father, about what he had done to her, and about how he had died. Hawk had heard many bad stories, but this scared him as no other had done. It was not so much the horrors she recounted that got through to him as the manner of her telling, as if these things had happened to someone else, a character in a film or a teevee soap. She claimed to have no scars any more, but Hawk thought Jesse was all scar tissue.
When she slept, her thumb crept babylike to her mouth, and he thought he could see her as she might have been had she not been born in a bad place, at a bad time to a bad father. Just another white girl. No better and no worse than the rest.
He left her, and wandered through the sand-carpeted corridors of the monastery. He heard the echoes of the prayers of the long-dead monks. They had come here to convert his forefathers to their faith, but had perished. Their faith was still here, though. Their meditations had created a channel to the spirit world that was still open. They had come to teach the Indians a lesson his people had already known for a thousand years. But he could not hate the Jesuits. They brought Bibles and statues of the Blessed Virgin with them from the Old World, not Springfield rifles and smallpox.
He looked up at an eroded statue of Jesus on the cross, its face ground away like the figurehead of a ship that had been through too many typhoons. He bowed his head to the carpenter; a powerful
His child by Jesse would have been a son. He would have named it himself, in the old way, as he had been named, by taking the first thing the child looked upon. Here, that meant he could not have much of a name: Stone-Wall-Standing perhaps, or Sand-That-Stretches-to-the-Sky. Back on the Reservation, he had known Navaho children called Three-Cars-Bumper-to-Bumper, Broken-Telephone-Booth and Maniak-Corpse-Rotting. His father, Two-Dogs-Dying, had not been fortunate in his naming, and had determined his son should not suffer. Hawk's mother told him that Two-Dogs was the only one of the tribe who had seen the hawk for whom he was named, but that the others had gone along with him.
The pregnancy had been a part of Jesse's education that he had not understood until its messy, bloody conclusion. He resented the spirits who would give him a son and then take the child away before its birth, just to teach a one-eyed white girl a lesson. His father had never explained, had never understood, that Hawk's part in the story was merely as an attendant upon the creation of the crocodile girl. Her feelings mattered, his were as feathers in the wind. He might as well be a Wooden Indian standing outside a drugstore for all his feelings counted.
He believed that the spirits really didn't give a damn about any of them. They were just being made to jump through hoops as part of some vast pre-ordained pattern.
Walking across the courtyard. Hawk looked up at the sky. It was late afternoon, and the moon was already up. The moon was sacred for Jesse.
'Tell me what you want, moon spirit?'
The man in the moon grinned his lopsided, reptile-jawed grin down at him and did not answer.
'Sonofabitch,' he spat.
Perhaps he should leave this place, leave Jesse to work out her own fate. He should look after his father. The old man drank too much, and was provocative of trouble. If he didn't kill himself soon, he would find someone else to do it for him. There wasn't much for him on the Reservation, but there was more there than sand and stone.
The one-eyed white girl could reach her Seventh Level on her own. She didn't really need him. She had many battles to fight, and he would only be in the way. He wondered if she was worried about him, if she ever even gave him any thought. Her face was in his mind constantly, the memory of her tugging at his heart like a fishhook. He was a Navaho brave, the last of the renegades, but Jesse made him weak.
He looked at the sand, and trembled. There were things out there in the world that would be coming here soon.
His battles were beginning.
VI
'That issue is not under discussion,' the T-H-R man said. 'There can be no negotiations on the question of liberty.'
'Aw shucks, Francis. Not even if I promise not to do it again?'
Dr Proctor's eyes twinkled. He was like a naughty little boy who knows he cannot be sent up to his room.
So this was the Tasmanian Devil. Wrapped up like Houdini before an escape, he didn't look like much more than a good-humoured man in early middle-age. How many had he killed? It didn't matter. He was unquestionably America's leading murderer. That was what made him of interest to Nguyen Seth, and, therefore, to Roger Duroc.
'You've never stopped doing it, Ottokar. We know that. We don't know how you've done it, but since you came to Sunnydales there have been a lot of deaths. Death by violence or accident or suicide among the inmates has risen by 28%, and among the guards…'
'89%. I read the sanitarium newspaper, you know.'
'It may not be your hands, Ottokar. But it's your mind. We know that.'
Dr Proctor laughed a little. 'Prove it. Francis.'
'We will.'
'And then what are you going to do? Lock me up, and throw away the key? You already did that. There's not much you can punish me with, is there Francis?'
'We can unlock your cell, chain you up like you are now, and let some of your victims' relatives visit you with blowtorches…'
Dr Proctor didn't betray anything more than mild amusement. 'And is that an official promise, Francis? Because if it is, then my lawyers will be most perturbed.'
'Frank,' cut in Russell. 'Couldn't we bring this meeting to order. The President has authorized me to…'
'Ah yes, Oliver. How is Oliver, Julian?'
'He's well.'
'And the kids? Recovered from the birthday party?'
Duroc knew that the President's children played pass-the-parcel with a severed arm at a White House social event just before Dr Proctor's arrest. It had been the Devil's idea of a joke.
'The nightmares are slowly going away.'
'That's good news.'
Dr Proctor signalled with his head for the sergeant to take his baby-cup away.
'I don't suppose anyone has a cigarette?'
Nobody did.
'So few people smoke any more. Dreadful habit, but it passes the time. I have a lot of time, you know.'
'Ottokar,' said Wicking. 'We are sanctioned to offer you books, videotapes, magazines, and a limited, monitored access to telephonic and written communication with the world outside.'
'I have those things.'
'We can increase them, sweeten the deal…'
