Quest Beyond Time

Tony Morphett was born in New South Wales in 1938. He was educated at Parramatta High and began his career as a copyboy with a Sydney newspaper. He worked later as a journalist and broadcaster and after ten years with the ABC he left to take up writing full-time. He has written a number of books and is a well-known screenwriter. He now lives with his family in Katoomba, New South Wales.

Quest Beyond Time

TONY MORPHETT

McPHEE GRIBBLE/PENGUIN BOOKS
with
The Australian Children’s Television Foundation

McPhee Gribble

Penguin Books Australia Ltd

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First published by McPhee Gribble Publishers 1985

Reprinted 1985, 1986, 1990

This edition published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 1990

7 9 11 12 10 8 6

Copyright © Tony Morphett, 1985

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Produced by McPhee Gribble
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Typeset in Palatino by Bookset, Melbourne
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Morphett, Tony, 1938-.
Quest beyond time.
ISBN 014 008409 6
1. Children’s stories, Australian.
I. Title. (Series: Winners
(Melbourne, Vic.))
A823’.3

eBook published by BWM Books Pty Ltd in 2014
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19 Embling St
Wanniassa, ACT 2903
Australia

Cover design: Burhan Ferozi
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For Inga and our children and grandchildren.

Quest Beyond Time is derived from a telemovie written by Tony Morphett for the Australian Children’s Television Foundation’s Winners series. Tony Morphett wishes to acknowledge the encouragement given to this project and to the cause of children’s television generally by the Foundation’s founding CEO, Dr Patricia Edgar. He would also like to thank Sandra Levy who as script editor on the telemovie gave invaluable advice. This book was originally published by McPhee Gribble Penguin Books Australia.
ISBN 014 008409 6
Copyright © Tony Morphett 2014

Mike was hang-gliding when it happened. He had launched himself from the cliff, and was riding the thermals above the ocean when his kite took him through a gap in Space-Time and he found himself looking down at an alien landscape. Coming to earth he was ambushed by a young warrior woman armed with bow, arrows and sword. He had landed 500 years in the future, a future in which civilization had collapsed and the world had reverted to a new barbarism. Now he and the young woman warrior would go on a quest together, a quest which would save her tribe from disaster.

The stone house stood on the brink of what, centuries before, had been a cliff overlooking the sea. But in the Dark Times, when the sun had removed herself from the sky, the ice had grown and the seas had shrunk, and now flat, salty pasture spread for a mile beyond the cliff’s base.

On the three sides of the house which faced inland, no tree grew. The land was clear for the distance that a strong archer could shoot an arrow. The lower storey of the house was of stone, and the narrow windows had strong shutters.

The house was made to be defended against attack.

First light was creeping from the sea, and across the salt pasture. The light hit the cliff face, and then flowed over the land. From within the house came a wailing sound, the sound of pipes: a haunting sound, rasping at the nerve ends, stirring the blood. Then came the cry of an animal, cut short, and the faint murmur of voices, chanting.

The growing light revealed, standing before the house, a stone. The stone was as thick through as an old tree, and stood the height of two people. It was as rough and unhewn as the day it was dragged from the earth hundreds of miles to the north-west, in the High Lands whence the Clan Murray came.

For the house was Clan Murray House. Three hundred years before, the savage horse-nomad Patchies had driven the Clan from their home in the north-west. They had ended their trek here, on this clifftop. They had turned and fought, women, men and children with their backs to the drop, and they had won, and stayed, and carved out a territory with their swords, and kept that territory with their cunning.

Now, from the dark house came people, a slow procession led by three very different figures.

One was a tall, gaunt man, carrying an earthenware bowl. In the bowl was a dark red liquid, almost black in this first light before dawn. From the liquid, steam arose. It was blood, still hot from the veins of the sacrificial beast.

On the left of the tall man walked a girl of scarcely fifteen years. She wore no cloak but was clothed in a short kilted dress made of a chequered cloth and caught at the waist with a finely tanned leather belt. From the belt hung a shortsword and hunting knife, and another knife was tucked into a sheath in the archer’s brace she wore on her left forearm. Her hair hung in a single dark plait behind her head. The light crept into the planes of her face and revealed thin, high-boned features and slanting eyes. The girl walked like a hunting animal. She was feral.

Alongside her was a giant of a man. It was he who was playing the pipes. The man had ‘warrior’ written all over him, from the scarred face, through the knotted muscles of his arms, to the workmanlike weapons at his waist.

Behind the three walked the elders of the Clan, and beyond them again were the people, men, women and children, from the outlying farms. For the Murrays were not simply warriors, but farmers and poets as well. There were seasons for all things, seasons for planting and reaping, seasons for hunting and war, seasons for sitting by firesides and making songs and stories. And now was the season for sacrifice.

For the Sickness was among them.

It had come last summer, in the blood and breath of a refugee from the Kingdom beyond the Great River in the south. A runaway slave he had been, with the chains still on him, running north from the Vickharn where all people were slaves. He was dying of the Sickness when the Murrays took him in.

The Sickness had abated in the winter, and now was back. One in three of the Clan Murray was dead of it, and another one in three deathly ill, so now the time had come to sacrifice to the gods.

The procession moved to the landward side of the standing stone. The cloaked figures waited, looking up at the round eye in the stone’s head. For the stone was pierced and this was what gave it power. To retain this power, the Murrays had dragged the stone with them, slowing their retreat, losing women and men to the Patchies to defend it as they had travelled south and east. The stone was the soul of the Clan, its ever-open eye their guard, their watchman, and their seer.

Now, in first light, the stone watched for the dawn.

There came a moment when the tall, gaunt leader, Simon, lifted the bowl toward the eye, as if for that instant it were a mouth which could drink. Then he poured out the blood at the base of the stone to feed the roots of its power.

From beneath his cloak, he drew out a small sack which had been hanging from his belt. He handed the sack to the girl beside him.

‘Katrin,’ he said. His voice was low. ‘The grain sacrifice.’

Katrin took the sack, and with her right hand slipped the knife from its sheath in her archer’s brace. The razor-sharp blade slashed into the sack, and wheat fell onto the blood at the base of the stone. The fruits of the harvest, the fruits of the flock, fed the stone.

Now the chanting rose. The voices lifted into the morning air as kookaburra and currawong joined the chorus, and the sun heaved over the skyline, over the water, striking across the salt pasture toward the cliff, toward the stone, and the stone’s eye.

Now Simon threw back his cloak, and his right hand grasped the hilt of the great sword at his waist, and with a rasp of steel against the iron of the scabbard’s throat, he drew the sword. He lifted it high.

The rising sun’s rays struck through the eye of the stone and lit the tip of Simon’s sword.

A sigh went up from the remnant of Clan Murray. The omen was good.

Katrin, her eyes on the sunstruck sword tip, then knew in her heart that the gods had answered their prayers.

They would be sent the man who could fly.

The fear gripped Mike as he knew it would. It was always at this moment, standing facing the slope down to the cliff’s edge, strapped into the aluminium and nylon of his hang-glider, his helmet firm on his head and no preparations left to make, nothing left to do but fly, that fear assailed him.

It had been like this since the beginning, since he had started to learn hang-gliding the year before. There was always the knot in the pit of the stomach which only the joy of soaring like a bird could undo.

As he did with every flight, on every fine Saturday, Mike now stepped through the cold, invisible wall of his own fear, and began to move downhill, into the wind blowing off the sea.

Then the air took him to her arms, and the bright red wing above him lifted, and lifted him with it, and suddenly the rank green grass beneath his feet was gone, dropping back and away, and was replaced by the slow, combing waves dashing into the rocks at the cliff’s base.

Already, three of Mike’s mates were aloft, soaring, rising on the air and riding it like garish birds of prey.

The peace returned. He never felt it through the week, never felt it at school where he always felt an outsider, always felt he had to be alert to the moods of his teachers and friends. And he never felt it at home, helping Mum through the week, never quite knowing why what he did was wrong, never quite understanding the guilt he felt when he heard her weeping in her room. And he never felt it on Sundays, going out with his stranger father, mending their relationship one day a week, one week at a time.

But here he felt peace. In the air.

He gave himself to it as he gave himself to nothing else. It was riding an invisible wave, being one with it. It was dancing, being held in the arms of an unseen giant.

A piece of paper was in the air with them. It flew and tumbled. It was being drawn toward a patch of air.

Mike blinked. There were no patches in air. But there it was, like a transparent whirlpool in the sky, drawing the piece of paper to itself.

The paper floated toward the turbulence, skimmed its edge, was caught like a bubble in a fast-draining bath, turned once, and then fell through the middle of the turning air and was gone.

Mike looked down, but there was no paper falling. It had disappeared.

Then he felt the tug.

It was an undertow in the air. It drew him, and he felt the hang-glider turning with him toward the mysterious turbulence.

He looked back toward his three friends, but they were a hundred metres away, intent on their own flight.

He was nearer the turbulence, and it was almost as if he could see beyond the whirlpool in the air. As if he could glimpse clouds in the cloudless sky, and beneath that other sky, a landscape, broadly similar to the landscape over which he was flying, but changed in detail.

Suddenly he was in it. It took him in its hand and turned him as easily as it had turned the piece of paper.

For a moment he was blind, and there was a roaring in his ears, and then he was in clear air again.

As soon as he could see he realized that he must have blacked out for several minutes and somehow stayed aloft. He was incredibly lucky to be alive. But he knew he had been out to it for some time, for the landscape beneath him had changed.

There was a cliff, to be sure, but no waves broke at its base. At the base of this cliff, a grey grassy plain stretched to the sea a mile away. There were sheep grazing on it, and a man watching them.

He rose as a column of warm air lifted him over the cliff and took him inland. He had apparently flown into some sort of national park, or a farming area which he had not realized existed so close to the city. He could see grey-green bushland stretching where he would have expected to see the chequerboard of suburban housing. There were square paddocks in which some sort of grain was growing.

And kangaroos hopped and grazed along the margin of the bush.

It was as if he had somehow flown out of a beach suburb and into a rural landscape.

There was a house on the cliff’s edge, with stables and a bam attached. The house looked old, and on the grass before it, stood some kind of a stone monument. Or perhaps a modern statue, for towards its top it seemed that a hole had been cut through it.

Mike had a sudden feeling of unease about the house. It looked strange, and somehow wrong. He wanted to get away from it. He turned in the air, hoping to find his friends.

His friends! He had forgotten them. He looked around, but the sky was empty except for him and a hawk hovering to the north of where he was.

He thought he should probably land near the house and use their telephone, but his instincts kicked against the idea. Instead, he turned steeply and glided north away from the house.

The lions changed his mind.

He could scarcely take in what he saw. There, basking in the sunshine on the further slope of the hill, were half a dozen lions, big, tawny, well-fed cats, half-asleep in the warm afternoon.

He knew then where he was. He had somehow glided into an open range zoo. He had not known there was one in the area, but this was the only possibility. Lions do not roam free in Australia.

He managed to turn again, and glided down toward the house. It looked dark in the sunshine. It was squat, tucked into itself like a beast about to spring.

He pushed the thought aside. Any sort of house was better than half a dozen lions.

He was a few hundred metres from the house, just over a fringe of tall eucalypts. The earth came up with a rush and he was running, his feet slamming into the ground, and then he was down, with the wing slowly dropping loose on its frame above him.

He was free of his harness and tending to the glider when he heard the voice.

‘Are you the One?’ the voice said.

Mike turned, and found himself facing a girl his own age. She was wearing a dress of a rough tartan material, caught at the waist with a leather belt. On the belt hung a scabbard with a sword in it and a sheath containing a hunting knife. On her left arm was an archer’s leather brace. Her left hand gripped a bow and her right hand was lifted to the quiver of arrows he could see projecting over her right shoulder.

‘Beg your pardon?’ Mike said.

‘Are you the One we sacrificed to the gods for?’ the strange girl asked him, her brows knitted, her eyes watching him with the intensity of a wild animal sizing up prey.

Mike grinned. ‘I’m sorry?’

It was clearly the wrong answer. The girl twirled an arrow out of the quiver, and in one fluid movement brought it to her bowstring. In the same movement, her left arm straightened, and the feathers of her arrow were at her right ear. Mike found himself looking at the business end of a broad-bladed hunting arrow.

‘Who are you?’

Her words sound slightly foreign to Mike’s ears, but it was no accent he had heard before. It was as if someone had taken the way he himself talked and broadened the vowels, and slowed the pace of the speech.

‘What is this?’ he said. ‘A zoo or something? There are lions out there!’

She looked at him for a long moment, then said, ‘You’d better come inside.’

Mike looked toward the dark house. It was the last place in the world he wanted to go.

The strange girl jerked her bow hand toward the house. The gesture contained within it some unmistakable implications. Mike decided that if the house were preferable to six lions, it was certainly preferable to an arrow in the chest.

Mike walked toward Clan Murray House.