Chapter 11 #2
The young man's smile faltered for exactly half a second.
"Excuse me?"
"You're twenty-five years old and you're standing out in front of the wall instead of on it," Liam said. "Which means you're not the man who decides things. You're the man they send out to find out whether it's worth the man who decides things coming down."
Somebody on the barricade laughed.
The young man's face went ugly.
And James Wilford stepped forward.
He did it slowly, and he did it with both hands visible, and he held the Bible up where they could all see it.
"Son," he said. "My name is James Wilford. I was the pastor at Two Rivers. I'd like to speak with your commander, and I'll wait right here in the open while you fetch him, and I won't move a step."
The square went quiet.
"Two Rivers," someone on the barricade said.
"That's the church farm. Up the creek."
"That's the one Ballard hit."
"Ballard hit Two Rivers?"
And the young man with the red scarf turned around and screamed at his own wall to shut up.
Then he turned back.
And he looked at the old man standing in the middle of the street holding a Bible, and something moved across his face, and Liam saw it, and Liam's stomach dropped through the floor.
It was contempt.
It was pure, bright, joyful contempt, and it was the face of a man who has just realized he is standing in front of the one thing in the world he is not afraid of.
"A preacher," he said.
"Yes."
"You walked into Pike ground with a Bible."
"I did."
"To talk."
"Yes."
The young man started to laugh.
"You know how many preachers came down here in the first year?"
he said. "You know how many? Dozens. Standing on the corners. Telling us it was a judgment. Telling us to repent."
His hand was moving now, drifting down toward his hip, and he did not seem to know he was doing it.
"My mother believed one of them. My mother sat in a basement and prayed for four months instead of going out for food and she died in that basement, preacher, she died with her hands folded—"
"Son," James said gently. "I'm sorry."
"FUCK YOU, PREACHER."
The pistol came out.
It came out fast, a black Beretta, and Liam was forty feet away with a bolt gun slung on his back and there was no time, there was no time at all, and he saw the muzzle come up and level and he saw the old man standing there with his Bible and not moving.
Three shots.
They came so close together they were almost one sound, three flat hard cracks in the concrete canyon, and Liam was already screaming and already moving and he was much too late.
Nell Rook got there first.
She hit James Wilford in the small of the back with her shoulder at a dead run and drove him sideways off his feet, and she was still turning when the rounds arrived, and they took her in the chest, all three, high and close, and she went down on the pavement on her back with her arms flung out.
Isaiah shot the young man twice.
Liam never saw where he got the pistol. He learned later that it had been Rennick's, that Isaiah had taken it out of the bilge of the longboat and had never once mentioned it, and had carried it for two days without telling anybody.
The young man with the red scarf went down in the street and did not get up.
And the barricade did not fire.
Thirty men with rifles stood on a wall and watched a preacher get shot and a woman take the bullets and a fat man kill their own, and not one of them fired, and Liam would think about that for the rest of his life.
"NELL!"
He was on his knees beside her. Isaiah was there. James Wilford was crawling across the pavement on his hands and knees with blood on his shirt that was not his.
She was looking up at the sky.
"Well," she said.
"Don't talk."
"That's a stupid thing to say to a person." Her voice was a wet whisper. "That's the stupidest thing anybody ever says."
Liam got his hands over the holes.
There were three of them, high on the left, and they were all wrong, and the blood was coming out around his fingers in a way that he had seen before, at Ashford, at the marina, and he knew, he knew, and he kept his hands there anyway.
"Isaiah, get the coat, get his coat, press—"
"I'm pressing—"
"Press harder!"
"Liam." Nell's hand found his wrist. It was already cold. "Stop it."
"Nell—"
"Stop it, boy."
He stopped.
He knelt on a cracked street in a dead city with his hands full of her blood and he stopped.
"Preacher," Nell said.
James Wilford took her other hand.
"I'm here," he said.
"You're an idiot," Nell said.
"Yes."
"You walked into a wall of guns with a book."
"I did."
"Why."
James Wilford's face was streaming.
"Because I have been trying to die since Tuesday," he said, "and I did not have the courage to say so out loud."
Nell Rook looked up at him for a long moment.
And then she laughed.
It came out of her in a bubble of blood and it was the same cracked exhausted laugh Liam had heard in the blockhouse, the one that had made a room full of ruined people look up in astonishment.
"Then it's a good thing I was standing behind you," she said.
"Nell."
"Get my boy out of this city." Her grip tightened on Liam's wrist and it was the last strength she had. "Twenty-two people under that bluff. Twenty-two, and Cully. You promised me a way out of the trees."
"Nell, I promised you—"
"You promised me a reason," she said. "And you gave me one. Six days. That's all I got, but it was six days of being worth something and it is more than I've had in eight months, and I am not going to lie here and pretend I'd take it back."
Her eyes moved to the towers.
"Open the door," she said.
And Nell Rook died in the street.
They buried her that afternoon.
The Pike men let them.
That was the part Liam could never explain afterward, and he stopped trying.
Thirty armed men had watched their own lieutenant shoot an unarmed old woman, and something in them had broken, and when Liam stood up with his hands red and looked at that barricade with murder in his face, an older man had climbed down off it and taken his hat off.
They gave them ground.
A little green square at the edge of the market, where trees had come up through the paving stones, and two of the Pike men brought shovels and dug alongside Isaiah and did not speak.
And when it was done, twenty-two people from Willow Landing stood around a hole in the ground in the middle of a dead city, because Cully had brought them up from the boats and nothing on earth would have kept them away.
And James Wilford opened his Bible.
His hands were shaking so badly he could not hold the page.
He closed it.
"I had something," he said. "I have had something ready for thirty-one years. There is a passage and I have read it over six hundred graves and I cannot read it today, and I want you all to know that it is not because I have lost my faith."
He looked down at the raw earth.
"It's because it isn't good enough," he said.
Nobody moved.
"I was going to die on that street," James said. "I want that said out loud, in the daylight, in front of all of you, because she knew it and she did not say a word to me about it, and she pushed me down anyway."
His voice cracked.
"I buried forty-one people last week and I told myself I was doing it out of love," he said.
"I was not. I was doing it out of penance. I said no to twenty men with guns and forty-one people paid for it, and I have been trying to put myself in the ground ever since, and this morning I found a wall of rifles and I walked into it with a book in my hands and I called it courage."
He wiped his face.
"And a woman I had known for eleven hours looked at me," he said, "and saw exactly what I was doing, and she did not shame me for it. She did not lecture me. She simply stepped in front of it."
He looked up at the twenty-two.
"You knew her," he said. "You knew her for years and I knew her for a day, so I will not stand here and tell you who she was. But I will tell you what she did, because I am the only man alive who was looking at her face when she did it."
He held up his hand.
"She was not afraid," he said. "I want you to have that. Whatever else you carry out of this, take that. There was no fear in her at all. She saw the thing, and she saw the cost, and she paid it, in about one second, without hesitating, for a man she had every reason to despise."
He was weeping openly now and he did not stop.
"'Greater love hath no man than this,'" he said, "and I have preached that verse a hundred times, and today is the first time in my life I have ever understood it, and I learned it from a woman who did not believe a word I said."
He closed the Bible.
"She's not haunted anymore," he said.
And he sat down on the wet ground and put his head in his hands.
They filled in the grave at sundown.
Cully did the last of it. He would not let anybody else, and nobody tried, and when he was finished he stood there for a long time with the shovel in his hands and his jaw set, and he did not cry, and Liam thought that was the most terrible thing of all.
The Pike men waited.
They waited at the edge of the square, forty of them now, and they had brought a man down from somewhere, an older man, gray-bearded, missing two fingers on his left hand, and he had stood at the back through all of it with his hat off.
And when it was done, he came forward.
"My name's Doyle," he said. "I run the market ground. That boy who shot her was my sister's son and I have never once been able to control him and now I don't have to."
Liam said nothing.
"I owe you," Doyle said.
"Yes."
"So say it."
Liam looked past him, at the market, at the bluff, at the ruined stairway going down the hillside toward the water.
"I want the door," he said.
Doyle's face did not change.
"I thought you might," he said. "Well. That's a problem."
"Why."
"Because you're eleven hours too late, son."
Liam went cold all over.
"What?"
"Somebody already opened it," Doyle said.