Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [75]
Will Riker liked the tale because it demonstrated a trait that Thaddius Riker had in common with William Tecumseh Sherman, and one that he hoped he had as well-the ability to look unconventionally at a difficult situation and find a unique solution. Most leaders wouldn’t have abandoned their guns and attacked a larger force with lesser weapons. But without that creative response, the story of Thaddius Riker might well have ended in that cold, slow Georgia creek near Garner’s Ridge.
Maybe that was what he needed with Felicia, he realized. The two had talked for hours the other night, after they had made their peace. Since then he had seen her a couple more times, but usually in groups. They had touched a few times, hands coming together, but there had been little forward progress in the direction that Will had decided he wanted to go. He still didn’t know if it was what Felicia wanted, but he was more convinced than ever that it might be. He just needed to find out. And since he didn’t know quite how to go about it, he needed a creative way to force the issue.
As he got ready for bed, and then later in his bed as he tried to find his way to sleep, he worked on coming up with just that.
Chapter 18
Sometimes in the evenings as the suns drifted one by one toward the horizon and the winds churned through the twisting streets, the atmosphere in The End was that of a carnival, loud and joyous and full of color. Kyle walked the streets on one of these long twilights. A couple of blocks from home he encountered a crowd spilling out of buildings, jamming the sidewalk and overflowing into the street. Kyle shouldered through the mob, alternately smelling perfume, sweat, roasting meat from a nearby spit, and alcohol on breath and in bottles. Ahead the laughter was raucous and shouts rang out, whoops of delight and encouragement. He couldn’t quite tell what they were shouting about so he kept going through the crowd, past the mostly adult men and women, human and otherwise, who composed it. When he was finally near the front he could see the source of the commotion.
In a small clearing-the crowd was just as dense, or more so, on the other side of it-two Cyrians faced one another, bare-chested, their loose cotton slacks belted at the waist. They were big and muscular, though one had an enormous roll of flesh that hung over his belt, and both were tattooed, with brilliant splashes of color, yellows and reds and peacock blues and a green that reminded Kyle of forested mountain-sides back home, snaking across chests and arms and backs. A fight, Kyle thought, but the two men were smiling, grinning like drunken fools, and Kyle realized they were drunk but not fighting. This was a different kind of competition altogether.
A streetlight, rare in The End, cast a circle of illumination over the whole scene. The taller of the two Cyrians, the one with the flat stomach, pulled back his own hair, which fell below his shoulders in thick waves. Where his ear was-no, where his ear should have been, Kyle realized-there was instead a flap of skin that looked like a shaven cat’s ear, punctured by at least a dozen gold hoops all the way around the rim. Kyle decided the fellow must have surgically altered it, since every other Cyrian ear he’d noticed had looked just like human ears. The crowd loved the ear, though, and responded with gales of laughter and shouts of joy. Kyle wondered what he’d missed so far, before he’d been able to see what all the excitement was about.
The second one, with the gigantic gut, had a bald head and Kyle could see both of his ears. They were studded and pierced but otherwise normal. This man smiled broadly, and then opened his mouth wider, and wider. When it seemed like his head