Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

The nearest horizon was a ragged line of bone-white buildings three miles away across the bay, but the shepherd at the end of the pier was squinting south, where the bay broadened out and one could see, this being a clear day, the distant dot that was Long Beach Island. At the seaward end of the pier Rivas hung back, seeming to find something disquieting about traveling on the water, but a shepherd stepped up impatiently behind him and gave him a hard shove between the shoulders. Rivas wound up making a flailing jump down onto one of the benches, but once he was in the boat he sat down quietly.

Sister Sue stared at him, then turned to the shepherd, shrugged, and resumed getting the rest of her group aboard.

In the midafternoon the boat tacked in to a Jaybird dock at Cerritos, which, being a good two miles below the southern edge of the Desolate, presented an almost tropical front to the bay, with tall trees trailing flowers and vivid greenery over the water. The harsh cries of monkeys and parrots rang for hundreds of yards through the trees up and down the coast, and the warty top halves of a few amphibian heads poked up out of the water to see what the commotion was, but there was no hitch as the shepherd helped everyone up out of the boat and onto the dock. As he pushed away and let the wind fill his main and jib sails for the skate back northwest to the Gage Street pier, Sister Sue's band plodded up the foliage-roofed highroad that split the narrow band of coastline jungle and led the group finally to the crest of a hill from which they could look down on the Cerritos Stadium. Other groups of Jaybirds were arriving from north and south and inland, and there was a considerable crowd at the gates. Sister Sue led her group down.

Over the stadium's entrance gates some agile devotee had painted, with more fervor than skill, a mural of the Messiah Norton Jaybush welcoming all of humanity with outstretched, misproportioned arms; and the painted crowd on which he was looking down became, below the long lintel over the gates, the real, animate crowd of smiling Jaybirds jostling up to get inside. They were all silent, and the only sounds were panting, and the scuff of shod or callused feet, and the occasional uncomplaining grunt of a member of the faithful being momentarily compressed against a wall.

Once inside the huge weathered bowl of the stadium, Rivas absently noticed eight rickety wooden towers set up at even intervals around the periphery of the wide field, and on the little railed platform at the top of each tower stood a brown-robed, bearded man holding a crook-topped staff. Once free of the press at the gates, the various Jaybird groups became distinct and separate again, and each group set out walking toward the base of one or another of the towers.

There were no visible differences among the hooded, tower-top shepherds, and in this orderly dispersal it was, for once, the most deteriorated and imbecilic member of each group that determined on a specific tower and led his or her band across the weedy field toward it. The tower toward which Rivas's group plodded was on the far side of the enclosed field, and most of the other bands were already standing at ease in the shadow of other towers by the time his band came to a halt.

As if at a signal, all the tower-top shepherds abruptly opened their mouths and began producing a low, steady note, and a moment later every deteriorated Jaybird in the stadium joined in with a shrill « eee » sound; though a ground-rumbling roar now instead of a buzz, it was the same insistent two-tone note that had aided Rivas's acquiescence to his new masters earlier that day . . . but now it only deepened his frown. He glanced at Sister Sue and saw that she was watching him, and he looked away quickly.

As suddenly as it had started the sound stopped, and in the moment that the last harsh echoes were rebounding away among the high tiers, Rivas took an involuntary step forward, as if the sound had been something physical he'd been pushing against.

The shepherds slung their staves through their belts and climbed nimbly down from the towers, and Rivas watched the one his group and a couple of others were clustered around. When the man got to the ground he straightened up, hiked his staff free and then strode up to Sister Sue and spoke to her quietly.

She indicated Rivas with a nod of her head and then whispered to the bearded shepherd for nearly half a minute. The expression on the man's tanned, craggy face didn't change, but he slowly lifted his head to stare at Rivas, and when Sister Sue had finished he walked over to the new member.

«Welcome to your real family, Brother Boaz,» he said in a deep voice.

Rivas glanced around uneasily, then nodded. «Uh, thank you.»

«How old are you?»

» . . . Eighteen? I think eighteen.»

The shepherd raised an eyebrow and looked more closely at Rivas's face and hair. «Hmm. Take off your knapsack, please, and let me have it.»

Rivas looked over at Sister Sue, who smiled and nodded. With evident reluctance he reached up, slipped the canvas straps off his shoulders, shrugged the knapsack off and held it out toward the shepherd.

The man took it, stepped back and began undoing the buckles. Around the arena the other shepherds were also busy taking stock of new recruits, and, except for the low mutter of those conversations, the wind in the ragged high tiers was the only sound.

«Or thirty-one,» said Rivas.

The shepherd looked up. «What?»

«Maybe I'm thirty-one years old.»

The man had got the flap open, but paused to squint at him. «Maybe thirty-one, eh? Have you ever . . .been with us before?»

«No, sir. I ran away from home yesterday. My father's a tenant farmer for Barrows. The Currency brandy estates.»

«Let me get this straight,» said the shepherd curiously as he pulled a large cloth-wrapped bundle out of the knapsack. «You leave home at thirty-one and call it running away?»

Rivas was breathing deeply now, clearly trying to resist panic. «No, eighteen,» he said tensely. «That's right, eighteen. For sure.»

The shepherd opened his mouth to ask another question but shut it again when he saw what was wrapped up in the cloth—Rivas's second-best pelican.

The gaze he now turned on Rivas was full of suspicion. «What the hell is this?»

After a pause Rivas said, almost in a whisper, «Somebody's pelican.»

«Somebody's? It's not yours? . . . Damn it, answer me!»

«No, sir.» Rivas rubbed his hand across his mouth. «I have one, but not as nice as that.»

«Well, Brother Boaz, music is one of the things we have to sacrifice.» He opened his hand and the instrument fell to the ground with a discordant bwang, and then he lifted a heavy boot and stamped the thing flat.

The shepherd started to turn away, then froze, and an instant later he had whirled back to face Rivas again. «Say, what's your name?»

For a moment Rivas's apprehensive frown left his face and, proud of knowing the answer, he said, «Brother Boaz.»

«No, damn it, I mean before, what was your—»

A strident trumpet note suddenly split the air, and a voice from the far side of the arena shouted through a megaphone, «Make yourselves ready for the Lord!»

The shepherd craned his neck and saw that an old man in a white robe had entered the stadium. «The jaybush is here,» he said. «You walk out into the center of the field. We'll talk some more after the sacrament.» He gave Rivas a push and then turned to the other groups around his tower. «All new members follow this brother!» he called. «I'll greet you all personally afterward.»

Rivas plodded out across the uneven ground, which was stippled now with fresh green weed shoots after the rain, and though he walked as slowly as any of the hundred or so new members who were approaching from all sides of the arena in a steadily shrinking circle, his mind was racing.