"I read once about a country out there," he continued, almost wistfully. "Hundreds of years ago. It was a large slice of land split up into little territories, all ruled over by individual princes and barons or dukes or whatever. All feuding with one another, greedy for land. Everyone else's land. And if they weren't fighting one another, they were figuring out how to stab one another in the back in the smartest way possible so some other guy would get the blame. And at the same time as all this is going on, they're busy inventing and creating and painting pictures and writing books and fashioning crazy models or castles out of pure gold with all the towers and turrets and drawbridges and even arrow slits in the walls, all in proportion, and when you lifted the roof of the tallest tower, inside was a little glass jar for putting the salt in. Now thatwas civilization. Sure, I guess the peasants were treated like shit on the rich man's boots, but even so it was a busy time, everything going on, an upward surge. They had ambition. There was always something beyond the next horizon, and the next, and the next."

She said, "Italy."

He laughed. "You did read books!"

"My mother. She made sure I knew as much as there was to know, as much as she could cram into me. She said it was important."

"She was a wise woman."

Krysty nodded slowly, her head bowed. "Yes," she said.

Ryan did not pursue that. It was not the time. He kept his eyes on the scarlet glory of her hair, watched as she brought her head back up again so that they were once more face-to-face. The imp had gone from her eyes; now they held only grief, a sense of profound loss.

Ryan said, "Well, anyhow, the East Coast has nothing I want. It's an armed camp of greedy madmen. The muties are the peasants and no one is creating paintings that will last for half a millennium and the only gold that's coming in is from that fat rat Jordan Teague, and sure as nukeshit no one's making salt containers out of it."

"If it's an armed camp," Krysty said, "who armed it?" She stared at him clear-eyed.

Ryan held her gaze for maybe six seconds, then looked away, shrugged.

"Yeah. Okay. Point. Maybe we all realize now that our trade routes have been built on orders we should maybe never have delivered."

"Maybe?"

"Okay. We should never have delivered." He stopped, stretched, sat back down again. His hands plucked at the crimson scarf tied around his throat and he loosened it. The ends hung heavily down to his waist. "One doesn't always think ahead. You don't plan for the future, figure out the pros and cons of what you're doing. The present is all, lady. The here and now. It's the only thing you have to wrestle with. And that in fact is the history of the human race. Always too frantic worrying about what was happening in the here and how. We forgot that the future is created in the present, that whatever is done in the here and now has an influence on the years to come." His voice drifted low as he stared at his boots. "Too late, lady. Too late..."

Krysty said accusingly, "You could make a start by not delivering all this heavy shit to Mocsin." She didn't know anything about the load they were carrying, but she knew all about Jordan Teague and his miniempire out near the Darks.

Ryan grinned sourly.

"Funny thing," he said, "Teague ain't gonna be — and you can take that as a nondouble negative that's a great big positive — he ain't gonna be too fireblasted pleased about this load."

"That's funny?"

"Well, you see, it just so happens that most of Teague's consignment went up when Truck Four blew. Boom!" He spread his arms high. "All those grenades, all that high explosive, all those old armor-piercing shells. Sent most of his delivery to glory in a great big blaze-out. Lucky for us, though, because that's what creamed most of the stickies and other mad muties that had us in a terrible, terrible fix. And that means that Teague's gonna be getting short supplies. Pity."

"And did it?"

"Did it what?"

"All go up."

Ryan chuckled.

"As it happens, no, of course it didn't. But Teague's not to know that. It's the perfect scam. You may not believe this, but we do have a code. Of sorts. I mean, listen — we don't spend sleepless nights gnawing away at the problem, it's too late for that, way too late. The Old Man did it to survive."

Krysty wrinkled her nose. What Ryan had said sounded to her like special pleading. "You still didn't answer the question," she said. "Would you liketo escape?"

Ryan shook his head helplessly.

"To what? There is no escape from the Deathlands."

"Uncle Tyas thought there was."

"You mean, get a boat, take a trip, sail across the ocean? You don't know what's out there or under the waves, just waiting for you. You don't know what's waiting for you on the other side, either. Could be worse than here, though that's hard to imagine."

"No, he didn't mean that."

Ryan pointed up at the dull metal ceiling of the swaying war wag.

"You mean up there? How? Why? All there is up there is free-floating garbage. We know the old guys had, I dunno..." he groped for words, "...kind of settlements out in space, huge constructions with their own air supplies. That kind of thing. But how the hell d'you get to them? All the places where they had vehicles, aircraft, what have you, were blitzed in the Nuke. We've stumbled across launching grounds with wrecked machinery, incredible rusting hulks lying around, chunks of dead metal. But there's no way you can get this shit off the ground, believe me. No way at all."

"No, that's not what I mean, either. Uncle Tyas knew. He'd found something out. But he wouldn't tell me. He and old Peter..."

"Who?"

"Peter Maritza, his buddy. His close buddy. They did just about everything together. They were always poking into old books... and papers..." Her voice drifted off.

"And?" he prompted her.

"I remember when it happened," she said. "But I was only a kid at the time — maybe fourteen or fifteen, that kind of age."

EVEN AS SHE SPOKE Krysty could see the scene in the candlelit, tightly caulked log cabin that stood at the edge of their hamlet, hidden deep in the rolling hills and forests of the Sanctuary.

She saw again the hawk-faced man, with the deep-set, piercing eyes, then only in his early fifties, striding around the main room muttering to himself as she sat beside the fire quietly watching him with solemn, uncomprehending eyes.

She was still a little afraid of him. His tone was harsh, his manner abrupt. She had not as yet been allowed to plumb the depths of kindliness and generosity that were essential parts of his character. You had to know Tyas McCann a long time before you could get past his guard, the steely barrier of his ingrained reserve and suspicion. And to young Krysty Wroth, then, he was still an unknown quantity, for she had only lived with him since Sonja had died and that was less than eighteen months before. Sometimes she still cried at nights, the image of her mother wasted by the sickness for which there was no cure, from which there was no escape, etched into her mind. And she was lonely — soul-achingly lonely. Her mother had been everything to her, and her mother's brother could never take her place.

Now of course she knew better. Now she knew that it was not a question of Uncle Tyas taking Sonja's place in her love and affection. Uncle Tyas supplied what Sonja had not supplied, and would not have supplied even if she had lived. They were two different branches of the same tree. Her mother had taught her to keep the Secrets; her uncle, how to use them. Her mother taught her knowledge of the Earth Mother; her uncle had expanded and extended this knowledge dramatically, to include just about all he knew about the real world outside, and all he had learned about the catastrophe that had overtaken it: what had happened, how it had happened and why it had happened — though there were more theories than hard facts on that.