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face blank. Inside I was wishing I
had balls enough to yell at him that he didn’t have to go on
being the iron man for me. He didn’t have to prove anything
to me but that he could stop sucking wine by the gallon and could
stop feeling sorry for himself. He wanted to show me how much guts
he had, let him show me he had the kind it took to go find his kids
and make up with them. He didn’t have to prove anything to
that old man over there in the trees, did he?
    I wished he would go ahead and announce the decision I knew he
was going to make. I was getting uncomfortable, knowing I was being
watched. “Come on. Which way?”
    He responded by spurring his mount down the south road. What the
hell was this? I even started to turn east before I realized what
he’d done.
    I caught up. “Why south?”
    Kind of hitting it sideways, he told me, “Croaker was
always an understanding kind of guy. And forgiving.”
    The son of a bitch was crazy.
    Or maybe he’d suddenly gone sane and didn’t need to
whimper over Darling anymore.
     
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XII
    The three-legged beast carried the head to the heart of the
Great Forest, to the altar at the center of a ring of standing
stones that had been in place for several thousand years. It could
barely squeeze through the picket of ancient oaks surrounding that
greatest of the holy places of the pitifully diminished forest
savages.
    The monster deposited the head and hobbled back into the dappled
woods.
    One by one the beast hunted down the shamans of the woodland
tribes and compelled them to go to the head. In their terror those
petty old witch doctors threw themselves upon their faces before it
and worshiped it as a god. They swore oaths of fealty for fear of
the jaws of the beast. Then they began tending to the head’s
needs.
    Not once, to any, did it occur to take advantage of its
powerlessness to destroy it. The fear of it was impressed too
deeply into their kind. They could not imagine resistance.
    And, always, there was that slavering monster to overawe
them.
    They went away from the holy place to collect willow withes,
mystical herbs, rope grasses, leather both raw and tanned, blessed
feathers, and stones known to possess magical properties. They
gathered small animals appropriate for sacrifices, and even brought
in a thief who was to be killed anyway. The man screamed and begged
to be dispatched in the usual way, fearing the perpetual bondage
and torment of a soul dedicated to a god.
    Most of the stuff collected was junk. Most of the shamans’
magic was mummery, but it proceeded from a deeper truth, from a
fountain of genuine power. Power that was real enough to serve the
head’s immediate purpose.
    In that oldest and most sacred of their holy places the shamans
wove and built themselves a wicker man of willow and rope grasses
and rawhide. They burned their herbs and slaughtered their
sacrifices, christening and anointing the wicker man with blood.
Their chanting invocations possessed the ring of stone for
days.
    Much of the chant was nonsense, but forgotten or only partly
understood words of power lingered in its rhythms. Words enough to
do.
    When those old men finished the rite, they set the head on the
wicker man’s neck. Its eyes blinked three times.
    One wooden hand snatched a staff from a shaman. The old man
fell. Tottering, the amalgam moved to a patch of bare earth. With
the foot of the staff it scratched out crude block letters.
    Slowly the thing gave the old men their orders. They hurried
off. In a week they were ready to make improvements on their
handiwork.
    The rites this time were more bloody and bizarre. They included
the sacrifice of two men snatched from the ruined town beside the
Barrowland. Those two were a long time dying.
    When the rites were finished the wicker man and its corrupt
burden possessed more freedom of movement, though no one would
mistake the construct for a human body. The head could now speak in
a soft, gravelly whisper.
    It ordered,