Jazzbeaux hadn't met her, but she could imagine the type. A bitter old biddy, eating herself alive with bile, pretending to be crippled to tie her son to the old place, sucking all the life out of him. She knew all about demanding parents.
She'd learned about that back when she was Jessamyn Amanda and nine-year-olds had been worth a gallon of potable water on the streets of the NoGo. Ma Katz could hardly be more of a monster than Daddy Dear, Bruno Bonney. He had told her she would have to be an outlaw because of her heritage. The old man had claimed kinship with Anne Bonney, the pirate queen of the Spanish Main, and William Bonney, Billy the Kid. One thing she had to say about Dad, at least he had prepped her for the world she was going to have to live in.
Other girls graduated from the PZ high schools and got Senior Proms, but she had known she was a grown-up woman the day she ripped Bruno's rotten throat out for him. She'd breezed through the courts, faking numbskull stupidity, and come out clean. Everyone knew what she had done, but no one was really that conce with it. A few looies spread around the Juvie Op Agency, and she walked free. She had been with the 'pomps since then.
Yesterday, she had thought she might have a healthy career in front of her. She didn't believe she'd marry Petya Tcherkassoff and move to a dacha on the steppes any more, but she thought she might see twenty-five. Now, things were different. She would live as long as she had to to see Elder Seth dead, and then she would think again…
'It was a rough night. Don't worry about it.'
'You want your room key?'
'Chalet Number One.'
Herman fussed with his bird, needlessly wiping his palms on his apron, and took the key down.
Jazzbeaux took the key. 'Is the shower working?'
'Sh-sh-shower?' Herman was spooked. That put her on her guard.
'Yeah. I'm a mess. I want to clean up.'
'Sh-sh-sure, the shower's fine. I checked the systems myself only a week back.'
'Terrif.'
'It's a special service. Costs extra. Water's expensive. We have to get it piped in from town special. We have to pay one-third of our turnover to Judge Colpeper for the privilege, so you'll have to dig deep into your purse.'
She pulled her jacket off her shoulders. Some skin came away with it, and her back stung. Her cutaway T-shirt was even more cutaway than it had been when she bought it. Herman's eyes popped. She couldn't work out whether he was ogling her breasts or appalled by the extent of her injuries. He tried to say something, but she walked away, towards Chalet Number One.
'I put in cuh-cuh-clean towels, mizz,' Herman whined.
She ignored him, and unlocked her door. Inside, the room was a mess. She had partied with Andrew Jean, Cheeks and So Long Suin the night before last, and Herman hadn't even tried to clear up. One of Andrew Jean's beehive combs lay on the dressing table in a spread of pills and lipsticks. The pornovideo set was smashed, a high- heeled ruby pump lodged in the cracked screen. Cheeks hated Billy Priapus flickies. The ice sculpture had melted, leaving a tray of warm water on the floor. That brought back interesting, if cool, memories. There were bulletholes in the ceiling—which might have been there before the 'pomps checked in — and the queensize bed was a tangle of ugly tie-died sheets and surplus clothing.
She remembered the night, the nights. Andrew Jean on top, Cheeks squealing. So Long rocking her to a cataclysmax. She would miss her gangbuddies. The days of fun and frolic were gone for good. Freak, she was nearly seventeen. She should be all grown up. She'd never sign up for marriage and mortgage, that was for sure. But there was an adult place marked out for her.
The bathroom was better. Jazzbeaux took the rubber ducks and Wally Whales out of the tub and threw them away, then turned on the shower, letting the water run. Getting naked was a long and painful process, and involved finding out just how much punishment her body had taken. She had to cut her stockings off with nail scissors, and the fishnet pattern was stamped in red on her swollen knee. She wasn't bleeding any more, but there were huge scabs on her face, chest and back. She stretched, and little stabs of pain shot through her.
Jazzbeaux stepped under the shower, and sponged her wounds. The warm water washed over her face and body. She shook her hair, scraping the slime out of it. The remains of her whiteface make-up came off with the clotted badges of blood. The warmth made her sleepy, and she slipped down in the bathtub, lying under the shower jet, taking the water full in the face. Between her feet, water swirled down the plughole, taking red and black threads of blood and dirt with it.
She thought of sleep, but was too tired to make a move for the bed. Wearily, she sponged her torso and stomach, cleaning her wounds. They stung, but it was a healthy, healing pain. Doc Threadneedle had fixed her body up so she healed quick, and the stinging meant that the microorganisms he had fed into her flesh were doing their good work.
Her head lolled to one side, and her eye fluttered shut. Something moved, and she looked again. There was a shadow on the shower curtain, a human-shape holding something in an upraised arm.
The plastic dimpled, and a silvery point poked through. It was a long knife. The curtain tore, and the figure stabbed…
IV
Hawk-That-Settles, son of Two-Dogs-Dying, was waiting. But he knew his wait was nearly over.
His people, the Navaho, had been waiting for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Brutally suppressed by bluecoats led by Rope Thrower, known to whites as Kit Carson, in 1863, they had been out of the major Indian Wars because the Reservation lands given to them were so arid and dreary that even the white man didn't want to kick them off to somewhere else. No gold, no oil, no food, no water: just Navaho, persisting as they always had done, getting drunk and stubbornly refusing to die out. Now, the whole of the West and the Mid-West was like the Navaho Reservation. Before Rope Thrower subdued the Great Chief Manuelito—among whose lieutenants was Hawk's many-times-great grandfather Armijo—the Navaho had been herders of horses and cattle, cultivators of com, pumpkins, wheat and melons and famous for their groves of peach trees. The Navaho had respected Rope Thrower as a warrior, but could never forgive the destruction of their prized orchards. Removed from their fertile lands in what became New Mexico, the Navaho were transported to the Bosque Redondo and into the mountains.
Now, in Monument Valley, on the border between Arizona and Utah, Hawk pulled his stetson lower, to keep the glare of the sun from his face, and strode out of the drugstore to join the depressed knot of Indians at the roadside. The motorwagons were passing them by, a battered parade. Two-Dogs was slumped in his usual chair, with four legs of unequal length, sucking like a baby on the brown-paper-wrapped bottle he always carried. Haw! nodded to his father, the man who had tutored him as Dreamwalker, and was not acknowledged. He knew all the others by name, by the names of their families for generations past. It was his place to remember the ancestors. He was the medicine man, now that Two-Dogs was the whisky Navaho.
Bowed, weary, and with deeply-lined faces, the Indians all looked ancient, even the children. If possible, life was harder even for these ragged redskins than it had been for their forefathers after the war with Rope Thrower, when their livelihood had been deliberately burned away fromr them. Only Jennifer White Dove replied to his greeting with a tight smile. They were of an age. Hawk and Jennifer and had been close as teenagers, before Hawk joined up with the Sons of Geronimo and left the Reservation, intent on changing the world. By the time he had been through that and was ready to return, Jennifer had been married and divorced and was almost a stranger again.
The motorwagons were full of smiling, unreadable pilgrims in black, presumably joyous at being so close tc their destination, Salt Lake City. The convoys had been coming through all week. Hawk still had the shakes although they were coming under control. He had been doing road duty when the first wagons rolled past, with a US Cavalry Escort, and he had looked upon the face of the Josephite leader and known that these were the last days of the world. Nguyen Seth was his name. Hawk had read about him in the newsfax, but rarely watched teevee, and so had never seen his face before. That is, not in the flesh.
From his childhood, he had known the face, had seen it in paintings and had drawn it himself. It was the
