Agri said I don't want anything from you, slayer, except to still be here when you move on.
I won't beg for my life, but that doesn't mean I don't want it for yet while longer.
The slayer closed his eyes. His mind swiveled. Tell me what you are, he said thickly. Just a man. One who means you no harm. And I am still willing to listen if you are willing to talk.
To this, the slayer made no reply. I guess you won't feel right about it unless I invite you, Agri said, and so I do. Will you tell me about Mono?
The slayer was surprised to find that this time the words were there. He began to speak in sleek bursts that slowly spread into an even, slightly toneless description.
He found himself oddly excited. He talked deep into the night. Agri did not interrupt at all. Neither did the bird.
He had bought the mule in Princetown, and when he reached Mono, it was still fresh. The sun had set an hour earlier, but the slayer had continued traveling, guided by the town glow in the sky, then by the uncannily clear notes of a honky-tonk piano playing Hey Jude.
The road widened as it took on branches. Here and there were overhead spark lights, all of them long dead.
The forests were long gone now, replaced by the monotonous flat prairie country: endless, desolate fields gone to Thaddeus and low shrubs; eerie, deserted estates guarded by pouting, shadowed mansions where demons undeniably walked; leering, empty shanties where the people had either moved on or had been moved along; an occasional dwellers hovel, given away by a single flickering degree of light in the dark, or by sullen, inbred clanfams laboring silently in the fields by day.
Corn was the main crop, but there were beans and also some pokeberries.
An occasional series way cows gazed at lumpishly from between scraped alder poles.
Coaches had passed him four times, twice going and twice coming, nearly empty as they came up on him from behind and bypassed him and his donkey, fuller as they headed back toward the forests of the south.
Now and then a farmer passed with his feet up on the splashboard of his bucks, careful not to look at the man with the guns.
It was an ugly country. It had rained twice since he had left Princetown, grudgingly both times.
Even Thaddeus looked yellow and demoralized. Pass-on-by country. He had seen no sign of the ebony man. Perhaps, he had taken a coach.
The road made a bend, and beyond it, the slayer booted the donkey to a stop and looked down at Mono.
It was on the floor of a circular, bowl-shaped hollow, a shoddy jewel in a cheap setting.
There were several lights, most of them massed around the area of the music.
There looked to be four streets, three running at right angles to the coach road, which is scorpion's avenue in the town.
Perhaps there would be a cafe. He doubted it, but perhaps. He clucked at the donkey. More houses sporadically lined the road now, most of them still abandoned.
He passed a tiny graveyard with moldy, leaning wooden slabs overgrown and choked by the rank devil lose. Perhaps five hundred feet further on he passed a chewed sign which said: MONO.
The paint was flaked nearly to the point of illegibility. There was another sign on, but the slayer was not able to read that one at all.
A fools chorus of half-stone sounds was rising in the final protracted lyric of Hey Jude Naa-naa-naa naa-na-na-na . . .hey, Jude . . ." as he entered the town proper.
It was a dead sound, land ike the wind in the valley of a rotted tree. Only the prosaic thump and pound of the honky-tondo piano saved him from greatly marveling if the ebony man might not have raised ghosts to inhabit an abandoned town. He smiled a little at the thought.
There were people on the streets, but not many.
Three maidens wearing black slacks and identical high-collared blouses passed by on the opposite boardwalk, not looking at him with pointed curiousness.
Their faces seemed to swim above their all-but-invisible bodies like pallid circles with eyes.
A quiet aged man with a straw hat perched firmly on top of his head watched him from the steps of a boarded-up mercantile store.
A scrawny tailor with a late customer paused to watch him go by; he held up the lamp in his window for a clear look.
The slayer nodded. Neither the tailor nor his customer nodded back. He could feel their eyes resting heavily upon the low-slung holsters that lay against his hips.
A young boy, perhaps thirteen, and a girl who might have been his Jilly or his Sissa-child crossed the street a block up, pausing imperceptibly.
Their footfalls raised little hanging clouds of dust. Here in town most of the street side lamps worked, but we're not electric; their isinglass sides were cloudy with congealed oil.
Some had crashed out. There was a livery with a just hanging-on look to it, perhaps depending on the coach line for its survival.
Three boys squatted silently around a marble ring drawn in the dust to one side of the barn's gaping maw, smoking cornshuck cigarettes.
They made long shades in the yard. One had a scorpion's tail poked into the band of his hat. Another had a bloated left eye bulging sightlessly from its socket.
The slayer led his donkey past them and looked into the dim depths of the barn. One lamp glowed sunkenly. A shadow jumped and flickered as a gangling old man in bib overalls forked lose timothy hay into the hayloft with big, grunting swipes of his fork.
Hey! the slayer called.
The fork wavered and the hostler looked around with yellow-tinged eyes. Hey yourself!
I got a mule here.
Good for you.
he slayer flicked a heavy, unevenly milled gold piece into the semidark.
It rang on the old, chaff-drifted boards and glittered.