Quest Beyond Time (5 page)

They set off the next day as the kookaburras were delivering their morning chorus, and the sun was stretching its first rays across the salty pasture which ran from the cliff’s base to the sea.

With them went a packhorse, a stocky little beast carrying on its back Mike’s rolled-up hang-glider, their blankets, and dried meat and flat rounds of bread, enough for ten days.

They had tried to persuade Mike to abandon his Twentieth Century clothes altogether, but he had clung to his jeans and jogging shoes, and still wore a Midnight Oil T-shirt under the sheepskin jacket they had found for him. He had tried to avoid their offers of weapons. How they had offered him weapons! He had learned the night before how the Murrays loved their songs and their swords. Elders of the Clan had come in from neighbouring farms, and the drink had flowed, and the songs had been sung, and they had all tried to outfit Mike with a weapon befitting his quest.

One urged a long, hand-and-a-half sword, another a shortsword like Katrin’s combined with a round shield they called a ‘target’. Another claimed that Mike had the build of a bowman, and yet another favoured a curious weapon which had a handle ending in a short length of chain to which was attached a spiked ball. A ‘morningstar’ he had called it.

Mike had refused them all, and only at the last moment had been persuaded to wear a sheathed knife on his belt. Katrin had explained to him that under the Covenant (whatever that was) only the slaves of the Hanged God went unarmed, and the penalty for impersonating such a one was death.

‘Seems as if you’ve only got one penalty up here in the future,’ Mike had said.

‘No,’ she had replied seriously, ‘there is selling in slavery, lopping of limbs and blood price in cattle.’

‘Why do I always end up sorry that I ask these things?’ Mike had said.

‘How do you punish lawbreaking in Before?’ Katrin had then asked.

‘Gaol, mostly.’

‘What is gaol?’

‘You get locked up. In a building with other lawbreakers. For one year, two years . . . ten . . . twenty.’

She had looked at him solemnly for a moment, then, ‘Are the Dark Ones worshipped in Before?’ she had asked.

He had not understood what she meant.

‘To lock a kinsman up . . . until old . . . such a thought might come from the Father of the Dark Ones himself. Better to lop limbs or kill, I think.’

He had seen, from the set of her face, that the idea of prison was an obscenity to her. ‘We think killing’s wrong,’ he had tried to explain.

‘To kill one person was wrong but to kill cities was right?’

He had paused for a long moment. Then, ‘I don’t think I can quite explain it in a few words,’ he had said.

She had smiled. Her smiles were so rare that they seemed to light her face from within. ‘Or in many words either, I think. Perhaps the gods sent The War to clean such ideas from the earth.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he had answered. ‘I don’t think so.’

But he had lain on his hard shelf for a long time that night thinking about it, until sleep had come to close his circular conversation with himself.

Now the three of them and their packhorse were moving into the same open parklike forest he had run through as a fugitive two nights before.

As the travellers disappeared into the trees, one of the Elders turned to Simon. ‘So we have a chance.’

‘One in ten,’ said another of the Elders. ‘The Old Woman at our homestead cast the bones on them. On nine casts, she saw them dead.’

‘The gods sent him,’ Simon said. ‘The gods will bring them safe home.’

‘The gods cast us like bones, Simon.’

Simon looked at the Elder, and had no answer.

About mid-morning, the travellers paused to rest. Mike was grateful for the halt, though they had earlier rested five minutes in every hour. He had timed the rest periods on his watch. Fergus and Katrin had known by instinct.

Mike was seated on a low outcrop of pale stone. He was enjoying the walk. The air smelt crisp with approaching autumn, and the going was fairly easy.

‘Do you bum off,’ he asked Fergus, ‘to keep the forest free for hunting?’

Fergus seemed surprised at the question. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘do you do so in Before?’

‘No. I was just wondering.’

Fergus’s eyes roved over the terrain. Mike had noticed that both Fergus and Katrin were always watching, always looking in every direction as they moved along. They seemed to coordinate their watching. While one looked one way, the other would be scanning the opposite direction. It had taken him some time to realize what the movements reminded him of. Then it came to him. He had seen infantrymen do it in war movies. These people were instinctively on a war footing at all times. When they stepped outside their house they were on patrol.

As he sat, resting in the warm morning, the sunlight filtering through the tall gum trees onto him, Mike became aware of the cold seeping into him from the stone on which he sat. He looked down, and found himself looking at carved letters each about thirty centimetres high.

LION they spelled.

He stood up, and dropped to his knees before the stone ledge. Grass and a small-leafed ground vine covered some of the surface of the stone. He tore at it, ripping it away so that he could see if there were any more writing.

When he had finished, he was looking at the remains of what had once been a sign, impressed into a concrete wall.

LION ND SAFAR PAR it read.

‘Lion and Safari Park,’ he whispered. He could see, in his mind’s eye, the days, the weeks, the months following the nuclear destruction of the cities. The open range zoos abandoned by fleeing employees, or simply left to themselves as the employees died. Perhaps some zoo keepers had opened the gates before they left or died, hoping to give the animals a chance of survival in the midst of universal death.

And then the African animals, breeding on the Australian plains, eating sheep and cattle, kangaroos and wallabies, breeding, adapting.

Now Mike understood why the lions had been there on the day he had flown into the future.

He put out a hand and touched the stone. He and it came from the same civilization. It was like something found on the beach, washed up from the wreckage of a great ship. For a moment, Mike was suddenly hit by a wave of loneliness and personal loss.

After a moment he became aware that Fergus and Katrin were watching him. He turned from the sign as Fergus said, ‘He can read the Letras.’ Fergus looked at Mike. ‘Are you Warlock? Are you Shaman?’

Mike looked at Katrin. Instinctively he felt she was more of a friend to him than the grim warrior was.

‘Only the Wise Ones can read the Letras,’ she said.

‘And the Warlocks and the Shamans and the Witchboys,’ interposed Fergus flatly.

‘In Before, we are all taught to read,’ Mike said, carefully laying no stress on his words, desperate to avoid misunderstanding. He had learned that, here and now, misunderstanding could be a terminal condition.

At Mike’s answer Fergus simply closed his eyes and drew the tips of his right index and middle fingers across his eyelids from left to right.

Mike knew that he had somehow just uttered another blasphemy. Suddenly he felt tired with Fergus and his gestures. He shrugged. ‘That’s how it is. Was.’ He felt confused and irritable.
Take it or leave it,
his tone suggested.

Fergus glared at him, and then the harsh features relaxed into what might have been intended as a smile. If so, it was a smile guaranteed to give its recipient nightmares. ‘Since I cannot teach you to mend your mouth, I shall have to teach you to use a sword,’ the warrior said. ‘For all people here are not as gentle and forgiving as I am.’

They were in open country when the sun was at its highest, and Fergus and Katrin insisted on eating as they walked. There could be no stopping in a place with no cover. They had told Mike that the reason for heading inland was that there was a river to cross. At the coast it broadened into a bay, and round the bay lived a fishing clan with whom the Murrays were at feud. Up-river lived the River Yobbies but for them Fergus and Katrin had nothing but contempt. They laughed about their legendary clumsiness and foolishness.

Mike was obscurely glad to know that racism was alive and well in the Twenty-fifth Century. It made him feel at home.

As they moved out of the open country again, they crossed remains of the freeway. Mike was again gripped with a feeling of loss. All of the people he knew, parents, friends, teachers, were dead in the far past and only he of his generation was alive. His sixteen years felt as if they weighed a century. Five centuries, he corrected. Five. Five hundred years. He was lost, he thought again, five hundred years from home.

When he saw the Mobil sign, he could have wept.

It was, of course, no longer standing. The sign and its concrete stanchion had fallen centuries before. It showed signs of having been covered with earth but now the action of wind and rain were uncovering it again. It reminded him of the
Coke
sign. He stood looking at it, at the familiar service station emblem.

‘There are many such things along the Giants’ Road.’

He turned and saw Katrin just behind him. Fergus was moving on with the packhorse. He saw the warrior stumble and was surprised for the giant usually moved with an uncanny grace.

‘Are they signs of your clans? Or your gods?’ she asked.

Mike was saved from tears by the question. He managed a dry smile. ‘Our gods? Yes. They marked service stations. Shrines of the things we worshipped.’

It was towards evening when they came to the Field Of Bones. Several more times during the afternoon, Fergus had swayed or stumbled and each time Mike could read the concern on Katrin’s face.

They were moving down the slope of a hill into a basin ringed on three sides by hills and open on the fourth side. As they came down the hillside, Mike saw a human skull on the ground. Its empty eye sockets were turned toward the sky and by it lay a rusted helmet, dented and cloven.

He stopped and looked around. The skull lay among other bones and broken and discarded arms and armour.

He stood, staring.

Fergus saw him like that and he too paused and leant his elbows on the packhorse’s back. He looked at Mike keenly from under his shaggy eyebrows. ‘Never seen this battlefield before, boy?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You look surprised.’

‘It’s the bones,’ Mike replied. ‘We bury our dead.’

‘And so do we. But not these.’

Katrin was looking at the grim relics with pride. ‘My father and uncle fought here twenty years ago. Did you not, Fergus?’

The grim warrior nodded with a quiet satisfaction, as of a tradesman looking at work done years before, and finding its quality still good. ‘They came down that slope,’ he said, pointing to one of the further hills, ‘out of the morning mist. The men of the clan-we-do-not-name. They came and we fought them. And we slew them here and left them to the hawks.’

Mike looked at the place, and tried to see it as it must have looked on that twenty-year-gone morning. The armoured men filing down the slope out of the mist, met by other armoured men, with the younger Simon and Fergus among them. And then the shouting, and the clash of metal, and the screams . . .

He broke out of his daydream. ‘Who were they?’ Mike asked.

‘They were the Clan who enslaved the Little People. They tried to make their chieftain tyrant over us. To give us a king.’ He spat the word. ‘And here we wrote the Covenant in their blood . . . and left them to the birds’ beaks!’ As he shouted the last words, Fergus swayed on his feet.

He turned, grasped the leading-halter of the packhorse and strode on. Mike watched him walk. He meandered, like a man who was drunk.

They were just beyond the bones and scattered armour, when Fergus fell. He had been walking past his strength for miles, and now he fell like a great tree. He lay face-down for a moment, then thrust with one arm, and forced himself onto his back. He looked up at Katrin. ‘Slay him! Slay the witchboy! Now!’

Katrin looked from Fergus to Mike and back again. Mike took a step back but knew the futility of running. She could take him with an arrow long before he reached cover.

‘He might be from the Dark Ones! Slay him!’

‘No gain without risk!’ Katrin said. The way she said it, it sounded like a proverb. ‘He’s our one chance to get to the Island.’

‘Slay him!’

It seemed to Mike that Fergus had an unhealthily one-track mind. It was like a movie. He felt he was outside it all, watching it happen. He stood, frozen to the spot.

But Katrin was defying her uncle. ‘No!’

In an act of will conquering weakness, Fergus surged from the ground, drawing his sword. The effort was too great, and he fell again, as if struck down.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Mike’s voice had returned.

‘The Sickness. It lingers in us . . . then, at the end,’ her hand made a chopping motion, ‘very quick.’ She stooped and put the sword beyond Fergus’s reach. ‘Help me unload the horse. We’ll get him on it.’

‘We’re going to take him back? Get help?’

She shook her head. ‘We are going to send him back. And go on by ourselves.’

‘That’s the worst idea I ever heard!’

‘The Sickness is in me, too. I can feel it. If I turn back, I die, and so does the Clan.’

Mike did not need to consider it. ‘Okay,’ he said, and moved to the horse and started undoing the ropes.

It took what seemed like half an hour to get Fergus on the horse. In the end, they tied him on. Then they patted the horse on the rump and sent it on its way. It went more willingly than it had come, seeming to prefer the prospect of its own stall and feedtrough to any exotic fodder it might find along the road in foreign parts.

Mike and Katrin watched the horse carry Fergus out of sight. They were alone now, with only such provisions as they could carry on their backs.

Night was closing in as they started on their way again.

They slept in a tree. Mike could see the sense in that. ‘I guess this keeps us safe from lions,’ he said.

‘But not chagwars,’ she answered.

‘Chagwars?’

She nodded. ‘Chagwars.’

He thought for a moment. ‘Big cats? Orange fur? Black markings?’

‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘chagwars.’

‘Jaguars. What do you call leopards?’

‘We call them leopards.’

Mike left it at that, and concentrated on trying to sleep in a tree. It was obviously an acquired art. Katrin had acquired it, he had not. He sat in the fork of the tree thinking about chagwars, and lions and leopards and leathermen who ran dog packs. He knew he would never get to sleep.

After a while he went to sleep and dreamed about chagwars chasing him out of trees into the mouths of giant hounds, controlled, for some reason, by a faceless Fergus on a horse.

In the morning, Katrin shook him awake, and he tried to unbend his limbs. It took him a while to be able to use his arms and legs properly, and his neck felt as if it had developed a permanent forty-five degree twist.

They started off without eating, a custom Mike disapproved of.

‘The day beasts are up and hunting,’ Katrin explained. They’ll smell where we’ve lain the night and come for us.’

Mike felt like telling her to speak for herself, but then thought better of it. Anyway he probably smelled the same as the rest of them by now.

An hour later, they breakfasted by a creek. Katrin showed him how to dip the hard bread in water to soften it. At first he was reluctant, and explained why. ‘In Before, it’s dangerous to drink creek water.’

She looked at him in surprise. ‘Why?’

‘Well. . . there’s poisons in it.’

He could see the horror in her eyes. ‘Your Clan enemies poison your creeks? That’s against the Covenant!’

‘No, the poisons come from the farms.’

She now looked at him in blank incomprehension. Then smiled in sudden understanding. ‘Your farms are in Bad Lands.’

‘We spray poisons on our crops.’

‘Are you making a joke?’ she said solemnly.

‘No.’

‘Why do you poison your food?’ She spoke as if she were humouring a maniac.

‘The poisons are to kill the insects.’

‘If you kill the insects, what do the birds eat?’

‘Well they . . . they get along.’ He paused. ‘Unless you spray against insects you lose a lot of your crops!’

‘Yes. The insects eat. Sometimes there’s famine. . .’

‘So. It’s a good thing to do.’

She made no answer to that, and instead drank from the creek with a cupped right hand, her left grasping her bow. He watched, and then he also drank. The water tasted good. There was a rich, earthy taste to it. She watched him as he drank. He became aware of her eyes on him.

‘Well, we sure as hell don’t have your health problems! We have a life expectancy second to none!’

She watched him with that waiting feral gaze, and then said, ‘Where then are your cities?’

And he had no answer.

They moved on through the morning, their inland path beginning to curve south toward a river ford Katrin knew of. The hang-glider was becoming a burden. When the sun was high, they reached the top of a hill and paused to rest. Mike wiped the sweat off his forehead.

‘I’m missing that packhorse,’ he said. He slowly got his breath back after the last effort up the hill. He had argued about the need to go to a hilltop to rest, but Katrin had insisted. She would not rest if she had no clear view of the surrounding countryside.

Now they rested just below the crest of the hill. Again, this was on Katrin’s insistence. She was always telling Mike not to get ‘skylined’, silhouetted against the sky.

‘We could really use a four-wheel drive,’ Mike said.

She looked at him in question.

‘A machine. It has four wheels and runs along the ground.’

She nodded, understanding. ‘A toy.’

‘Well . . . not exactly.’ Then he grinned, thinking of his father’s off-road vehicle. ‘Sometimes. But farmers use them as well.’

Now she really understood. ‘A cart.’

‘Yes, but they have. . . had no horses. They ran by themselves.’

‘Loco-motif.’

Mike was rocked. It was the last thing he expected her to say. ‘What do you know about locomotives?’

She pointed south. ‘In Vickharn, where people are slaves and have a king, they have a machine that moves on steel rails and makes smoke and noise.’

‘Do they indeed?’ Mike filed the information for future use. There was a higher technology here. There may be a better life here somewhere than the kill-or-be-killed Clan system.

‘Slave people,’ Katrin said contemptuously, and scanned the countryside. Then, ‘We should steal a horse,’ she said.

‘Steal? We couldn’t buy one?’

‘Buy? You mean, use money?’

He could tell from the way she used the word. She said it like an obscenity. ‘Don’t tell me,’ Mike said, ‘only slaves use money. Right?’

‘Free people barter or steal,’ she said. ‘We have nothing to barter for a horse. So we should steal one.’

‘What exactly do they do to horse thieves in these parts?’ Mike asked, suspecting that he already knew the answer to his question.

She made a throat-slicing gesture, then laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

He had been right. He had already known the answer. He felt sick and contemplated making a run for the Vickharn border. Maybe he could volunteer to become a slave in a society where they at least had steam trains. Then he contemplated lions, leopards, chagwars and Night Huntsmen and decided to stay with Katrin. He felt he stood a better chance of staying alive that way.

As it turned out, they reached the river before finding a horse to steal.

The river was a broad brown stream, spreading in its channel. They lay in cover, looking at it. He could see where the ford was. There was a sandbar across the river, just underwater. He could tell where it was by the ripples on the river’s surface.

There was, as far as he could see, only one problem. The problem was that the ford was guarded on both sides by large men in fur suits and steel helmets. The men shared with the Clan Murray a weapon fetish. They were hung with them.

Mike and Katrin lay in the grass, watching the men. ‘River Yobbies,’ she muttered.

Either end of the ford, the River Yobbies had set up a camp.

‘They’re in breach of the Covenant!’ she hissed. ‘You may not set up toll gates on a river ford!’

‘Do you want to be the one to tell them that?’

‘They can do it only because of the Sickness,’ she said. Her eyes had narrowed. When she was angry, she reminded Mike of nothing so much as his family’s Siamese cat. He would not have been surprised if Katrin had extended claws from the tips of her fingers and slashed at the Yobbies. ‘This is just cause under the Covenant for raid or war!’

‘Why don’t we try and get everyone well first, uh?’

She looked at him with sudden respect. She had never looked at him that way before. ‘Gather strength before the attack. Yes. You are right.’

‘Right!’

‘Don’t offer battle before you have the advantage.’

‘Absolutely.’

She watched the Yobbies at the ford for a moment longer then, ‘We should steal a boat,’ she said.

‘Couldn’t we just go downstream, swim the river. . .’

‘Swim?’ The one harsh word cut through what he was saying.

‘What’s wrong with swimming?’

‘Murrays don’t swim.’

‘You come on like Wonderwoman, and you don’t swim?’

‘Dark Ones live in water. They can enter your soul.’

Mike knew then what had saved him from the Night Huntsman. The Clansmen did not swim. They had a tabu against it. He filed this also for future reference. If it had saved him once, it could save him again.

‘If you can’t swim, why have you got a word for it?’

Katrin acted like someone who had lost face. ‘River Yobbies swim,’ she allowed sullenly. ‘It’s why they’re so stupid. The Dark Ones who have entered their souls have eaten their brains!’

Mike thought it through. ‘Okay. We steal a boat.’

‘We need it anyway. To make better time. I can feel the Sickness growing in me. A boat will help us.’

‘I don’t suppose I need to ask what they do to boat thieves in these parts?’

She grinned, regaining her good humour. She made the familar throat slitting gesture. ‘They’re very religious people. They hang boat thieves at weddings. It pleases their favourite god.’

He looked back at the River Yobbies. He wanted never to have a closer acquaintance with them than he was having right now. ‘Their favourite god?’

‘His name is Grym. Who hung on the LifeTree three days and paid an eye for wisdom. Who wanders the earth cloaked.’

‘And Grym likes the occasional human sacrifice, uh?’

She nodded.

Mike wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. ‘Could we get the hell out of here? Please? Just a suggestion.’

‘You’re right. We should steal a boat.’

‘That wasn’t exactly what I said.’

But she was not listening. She was slithering back away from the river, rising into a low crouch, and moving downstream along the riverbank.

Mike followed, thinking that home would be a nice place to be.