He crept up close to the yawning, empty window frame, which, with the softness of the mud underfoot, was infuriatingly just a little too high for him to see into. There was no choice but to stand on tiptoe and hold on to the ledge. By hoisting himself up just a few inches, he would be able to peer inside. Of course, his fingers might be visible from within, but there was no other way, short of trying to sneak in the heavy barn-width door, which might well have been barred anyway.
As quietly as he could, he reached up and grabbed hold of the rough-troweled masonry and dragged himself into the square of light cast from inside the storehouse. In the blend of moonlight and diffused gleam from within, he could see that the chinks in the slapdash brickwork had been patched with mortar and mud, and were flecked with old desiccated wasp nests and cobwebs. He tried to brace his boots against the chinks without making a scraping sound. What he saw at first surprised him as much as the sight that had greeted his eyes when the Vardogers’ music box had opened.
It was the Quists, all gathered together in a circle around a group of tallow candles arranged in a Star of David pattern atop a cross, which from his point of view was upside down. There were perhaps twenty or thirty adults, with a couple of older kids and a few mother-cradled infants. Everyone, even the babes in their mothers’ arms, were swathed in red turbans and staring with rapt attention as a man straddling the candle flames rising from the sod floor passed around what looked to Lloyd like pieces of sun-dried tree bark with funny markings etched into them. He struggled to maintain his hold on the ledge and to strain up a bit higher to get a better look.
The man who held sway in the center of the group was none other than Increase McGitney, lately arrived in Independence under cover of darkness with an armed escort, to lead his people west and south to a promised land they knew they would recognize when they came to it. The surviving Quists had congregated in this unusually derelict building at a late hour in a ritual of renewal, hoping to find the strength and focus to lead them forward, beyond the reach of their persecutors, to some green valley that lay on the other side of the wolf-roaming plains and scorching deserts. They had turned back to the sacred scriptures upon which their beliefs were founded, not the Book of Buford but the very Headstones that Kendrick Quist himself had uncovered on his way home from the fateful horse gelding in Indiana.
The sections of petrified wood were produced from a strongbox that McGitney’s guards carried, but, unlike the relics and holy texts of other less democratically minded faiths, they were not hoarded away as they had been back in the days of Buford’s prophetic leadership. Truth be known, McGitney had many personal reservations about the Book of Buford, and was privately of (the arguably heretical) opinion that the Headstones held a deeper mystery than either the great Kendrick or his relative had fathomed. In any case, ever since his inadvertent moment of courageous abandon, McGitney had grasped an often overlooked element of effective leadership: the sharing of authority whilst never shirking from responsibility. And so, at this crucial juncture in his people’s journey, he had deemed it appropriate to renew their collective sense of awe and devotion.
It was a risky move, for at first nothing could have seemed plainer or humbler than the old bits of engraved bark that came out of the box. Lloyd gripped like a cat to the ledge, eyes probing through the glassless space-not, of course, knowing what it was he was witnessing but perceiving, in the quality of attention in the shining eyes of the turbaned group, that it was something important.
Then, very gradually, the effect McGitney had counted on began to manifest itself. What before-at least, at the distance from which Lloyd was viewing them-had looked like the vehement gnawings of insects or the scratchings of some demented child in the ancient bark now began to glow. Over the course of a minute, the glow deepened and brightened as if magnetizing the moonlight. The unexplained phenomenon caused the desired stir around the circle of the Quists and set Lloyd wriggling to gain a clearer view. There was an inexplicable aura of bioluminescence about the markings now, as if they had come to life in the candlelight and indeed outshone the tapers with a weird green phosphorescence that revealed a new level of detail in the figures. To Lloyd’s amazement, he found that he recognized the radiant markings as the unmistakable likenesses of the hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors! The shock sent him tumbling to earth outside the window.
“Wait!” called Increase McGitney, becoming hypertense. “Go see what that was!” he instructed the guards, who bolted out between the candles. Trouble had followed the Quists wherever they had gone and they were prepared for more before they made their departure across the prairie. Three burly men in red turbans stormed out of the storehouse, one carrying a torch, the other two cudgels. Before Lloyd could scramble to his feet, they were upon him.
CHAPTER 2. The Blinking of an Eye
MCGITNEY’S GUARDS PLUCKED LLOYD FROM THE MOON-SOAKED mud and hauled him inside the storehouse like a sack of spuds. For all his fearsome intellect, the boy was powerless in their hands. When he recovered from his shock, he was standing, forcibly propped between two turbaned men on the perimeter of the candles that he had been observing moments earlier, with the face, or rather the dense red beard and glittering eyes, of Increase McGitney poking down at him.
“Who are ya, boy?” the Quist headman demanded.
“He’s a spy!” a woman cried out.
“I’m Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd,” the boy answered, and shook the big hands off his shoulders with an authority or an arrogance that made McGitney pause.
“Am I to know that name?” McGitney asked, hoping to raise a chuckle among his agitated congregation.
Lloyd instantly regretted proffering his name, but as he could not retract it he let the statement stand and sent his eyes out around the group.
“What brings a lad like you out so late, then?” the Quist leader tried, concerned about this disruption in their ceremony but not afraid. He doubted that any terror gang would send so young a child to scout them.
Lloyd ignored the question, in part because he did not want to have to explain about trying to sleep in a coffin. Instead, he reached out with his hand for the nearest of the thin wooden tablets.
The gray-bearded man who held it pulled back in alarm, but not quite fast enough. As the boy’s hand brushed the bark, the luminous glyphs pulsed with brightness.
“I know those markings,” Lloyd announced. “I’ve seen the likes of them before.”
“Are you… a Quist, then?” McGitney sputtered. “Because naught but the Quists has ever laid eyes on the sacred Headstones.”
Lloyd again refused to answer-he was too enthralled by the shimmering writings. He reached out his hand again toward the bark section the bearded man held close to his chest, and this time the fluorescence illuminated the whole of the man’s face, as if he were clasping a lidded lantern from which the light wanted to escape.
“My Lord!” a woman on the other side of the storehouse cried. “Look!”
One of the other tablets started pulsing more intently, too. Then another. Murmurs and moans spread throughout the storehouse. McGitney sensed some impending crisis of authority in the presence of this boy and the uncanny effect he seemed to have on the Headstones. But he was curious, too.
“Take out the others,” he directed his assistants.
The remaining Headstones were produced from the strongbox and all were now beaming brilliantly, casting their runic mysteries upon the faces and the walls like magic-lantern pictures. The Quists let out a collective gasp and then turned their frightened, composite scrutiny on the boy.