Starship Home (25 page)

A trapdoor lay open in the floor of the old Dalrymple Ponds library building. From the square dark hole emerged a burning wooden resinous-smelling torch, followed by the huge arm which held it, and this was followed in turn by Ulf’s face, scowling in disappointment. The Don stood waiting for his war leader’s report. ‘Like a rats’ nest down there, m’ lord. A maze of tunnels. We haven’t found them yet.’

The Don considered the situation, then made his decision. ‘Pull the men out. I’m not going to lose good fighting men in ambush to burrowing vermin.’

Ulf’s scowl of disappointment deepened. ‘Retreat?’

‘They’ll be far away by now. Pull the men out, we can deal with the Looters another day.’

The Don walked away from the trapdoor toward the doorway as Ulf climbed back into the hole bellowing, ‘Pull out! Count off and pull out! Make sure no one’s left in there!’

When the Don came back into the street, he found Zachary standing over the statue, which was now prostrate again, cutting it up with his Slarnstaff. The Don also noticed with a mild pang that the three other Slarnstaffs, which had been lying on the verandah of the ruined general store when he had last seen them, were now firmly in the grasp of Zoe, Harold and Meg. He also noted that Zoe and Meg had not relinquished the Looter gold with which they had been adorned to make them suitable sacrifices to Dark One, and wondered what Father John and his bishop would have to say about that.

Across the street, two Troll warriors, detailed to the task by Ulf in an access of military neatness, were arranging in rows the bodies of the Looters killed in the Troll attack. The Don permitted himself a grim smile at this evidence of Ulf’s compulsive tidiness. As Zachary made the last cut to reduce Colonel Light to manageable pieces, the Don approached him. ‘I released you from my immediate service to provide protection for the Lady Henderson,’ he said coldly. ‘Explain to me why you placed her in deadly peril?’

‘Well,’ said Zachary, ‘it seemed…’

‘Don’t say “like a good idea at the time”,’ the Don said.

‘Now look, Don,’ Meg interrupted. ‘I’m my own person, I do what I like, I go where I like…’

‘Of course you are my dear and of course you do, but for the moment I’m speaking to your male protector.’

Suddenly all but a very small part of Meg’s gratitude to the Don for saving her from a gruesome death evaporated, and she looked at the sky in speechless rage.
The nerve of this man!
The Don was apparently willing to let the point pass now that he had reprimanded Zachary, being fully aware that Zachary’s lapse had helped in his wooing of Meg: by saving her life he might have opened up the channels he had feared closed as a result of his kidnapping her and trying to force her into marriage. He knew that if he were to win this courageous and lovely woman’s hand he must pay at least some lip service to the barbarous customs of the primitive society from which she sprang. So he simply said to Zachary: ‘Anyway, all’s well, you’ve had your revenge on the Looters by cutting up their god, so perhaps we can move out of here.’

‘Well actually,’ Harold said, ‘we need to take the statue back with us.’

This proposal seemed to puzzle the Don.

‘Guinevere needs the metal in it to heal herself,’ Zoe explained.

‘I mean, if you don’t want her blowing up in your back yard,’ Zachary added.

The Don looked at Zachary coldly as if mentally measuring him for a gallows. Zachary hated that look. He was willing to admit that the Don did a very good cold look, but it reminded him of the way the lioness had looked at them, and it had the effect on Zachary of making his stomach rumble and his bowels feel watery. He wished the Don would save the look for other people. ‘I thought,’ said the Don with silky politeness, ‘that we were never going to say that again? That we were never going to threaten me with bombs again?’

‘We weren’t and we aren’t,’ Zachary said rapidly.

Meg suddenly sat down. ‘The bottom line is this. After all I’ve gone through, I’m not budging without it. The statue comes with us or I stay here.’

‘She means “please”,’ Zachary said.

‘I don’t mean “please” at all. I mean that the bottom line is I’m sitting here until someone helps us get this statue back to Guinevere.’

‘Say no more,’ beamed the Don, and called Ulf over and explained that the Lady Meg had a simple request which the Don was very pleased for Ulf to be able to fulfill, and leaving Ulf and his warriors to fulfill the simple request, the Don, Rocky and two Troll men-at-arms rode back to the starship, doubling the starship crew on their horses, the Don making very sure that it was Meg whom he doubled.

When they reached the starship, the Don and Rocky accompanied the crew inside, and found Maze on the deck of the bridge, playing Wyzenball with the Wyzen and Zoe’s basketball. Maze stood up as they entered. ‘You really been to Oldtown after Our Mother told you it Looters’ Moontime?’ Her eyes were wide with admiration.

‘Just something we had to do,’ said Harold airily.

‘You pretty brave honcho Topclass, you know that?’ Maze said, and Harold straightened up and tried to look brave but modest, whereupon Maze ignored him utterly and started gingerly examining the Looter gold hanging around Zoe and Meg’s necks and wrists. ‘You got Looter gold on.’

Harold was now telling Guinevere about the bronze which would soon be delivered by Ulf and the Trolls, but Guinevere seemed to be more interested in the jewellery Zoe and Meg had acquired. ‘How much weight of gold would be in yon baubles?’ she was asking.

‘Of course!’ said Harold, consulting his list of the substances which Guinevere required.

‘Enough for rich dowries for both of these ladies,’ the Don answered, but dowries were not what was on Guinevere’s mind.

‘You need … what, Guinevere? About a pound weight of gold?’ Harold asked.

‘Now just hang on,’ Meg said, ‘I’ve never had gold jewellery like this. I nearly got killed earning this stuff.’ The others just stood looking at her. Finally, Meg got the message. ‘I nearly get killed and eaten and Guinevere gets the jewellery, am I right?’

‘You’re right,’ Zoe said.

‘This is what you’re all saying?’

‘It’s what we’re all saying,’ said Zachary.

‘I have to give this beautiful barbaric tribal gold jewellery to a 600-year-old nun to eat?’

‘That’s it,’ said Harold.

‘It’s not fair! She gets everything!’ Meg was in full reaction to the events of the morning. ‘My sister Cynthia was like this, she got everything. I always got her hand-me-down polo ponies, it’s just not fair!’ And she sat down hard on a couch and glared at the wall.

‘When we’re wed,’ said the Don, ‘I’ll win you all the gold you want.’

‘On the other hand,’ Meg said, out of purest spite, ‘I don’t really like gold, it’s so incredibly vulgar and ten minutes ago,’ and she began stripping the chains and beads and bangles from her neck and wrists. ‘Old-fashioned, much more Guinevere’s style,’ she concluded, directing a pussycat smile at the main screen.

Guinevere did not dignify that remark with a reply, but simply told them where they could feed the gold to her. By means of flashing lights in her corridors, she guided them to a part of the starship they had never been in before. It was room where pipes ran in all directions, and where strange liquid noises surrounded them. Zoe, Harold, Meg and Zachary were accompanied by Maze, Rocky and the Don, all of whom wanted to see what was going to happen to the Looter gold.

They did not have long to wait. Guinevere had them step back from an area in the centre of the room, and then she slid back part of the deck to reveal a pit from which arose a harsh-smelling chemical vapor.

‘What is this place, Guinevere?’ asked Zoe, choking on the fumes.

‘My guts, my bowels,’ Guinevere said.

‘This is like your sort of … stomach?’ asked Meg.

‘I said. My guts.’

‘Well we don’t really say that any more, Guinevere we say stom…’ and her words trailed off as she gagged on the fumes. Guinevere’s breath, she thought, smelled worse than the Eldest’s, but Meg did not put her observation into words. Instead she said: ‘What’s this vapor?’

‘‘tis but an alchemical mist. Harmless, but ‘twould reek upon thy nostrils.’

‘Ladies don’t say “nostrils” any more Guinevere, they say “snout”,’ Zachary told her, straight-faced.

‘On thy snout then, Meg.’

‘He’s trying to be funny. Now where do you want the jewellery? I want to get out of here before he does any more of his comedy routine.’

‘In yonder pit,’ Guinevere told her, and Meg moved to the edge of the pit and started feeding the Looter gold into it. As each piece fell into the pit, there was a silence, and then a splash as it hit the surface of some liquid far below, and this was followed by a hissing noise as the gold began to dissolve.

‘Your gastric juices can dissolve gold?’ Harold asked in awed tones.

‘Aye,’ replied Guinevere.

‘Your stomach juices are
aqua regia
?’ Harold went on, taking time out to explain to the others that gold could only be dissolved in aqua regia, a mixture of concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids (in the proportion of 1:4, he added helpfully).

Meg told him she knew that, and Zoe said that she knew it too, but this was more on principle than the precise truth. She had probably been told it, but she spent most chemistry lessons drawing pictures of tennis players. Zachary was puzzled. ‘If aqua regia dissolves gold, how come they sell it to drink?’ he asked, and there was confusion for a while until they worked out that he was thinking of acqua minerale, Italian mineral water, which, Harold pointed out, was different. ‘Just as well it’s different,’ Zachary said, ‘or people with gold fillings in their teeth’d be in very bad trouble.’

Meanwhile Zoe was tossing her Looter gold chains and bangles into the pit, which hissed and bubbled as the acid dissolved the gold. When the last of the gold had been thrown into Guinevere’s gut, the starship let out a ladylike belch. This produced silence, and then Zachary asked if it had been her, in case people thought it was him.

‘I wish to show appreciation,’ Guinevere said.

‘Well we really don’t show appreciation that way any more, Guinevere, we…’ Meg began, and then heard herself and laughed, and left it at that.

By this time, Ulf and the Trolls were on their way back to the starship, using their horses to drag the pieces of Colonel Light’s statue, and the Looters were warily coming out of their tunnel system to see whether the Trolls had gone.

The first, and in the Eldest’s mind most expendable, Looter scouts had come back to report that not only had the Trolls gone, but that Dark One had gone too. This brought the Eldest and the rest of the Looters out in a rush. When they saw that the image of their god had gone, and they remembered that their gold was also gone, they knelt in the street and poured dust over their heads with their left hands, and wept and wailed and cut themselves with stones. The Eldest left these formal expressions of grief to his followers, while he grabbed Marlowe by the jerkin and shook him and crowed: ‘You talk to foreign foods! You ask foreign foods why they want Dark One! You tell me why!’

Marlowe still hoped to use the Looters to help him remove the thieves from the starship. He wanted to learn what they knew, but once he had learned that, the best tool for getting rid of them was the Looter pack. So he knew he must keep the Looters interested. He pitched his voice so that he could be heard by all the Looters over their wailing. ‘They tell me why they want Dark One!’ he proclaimed in a loud, carrying voice, ‘they tell me they want Dark One … for food!’

The Looters sat back on their heels and made sounds of astonishment and awe.

‘The foreign foods,’ Marlowe went on, ‘live in an iron castle in the forest. They want to feed Dark One to their iron castle!’

Again, the Looters made sounds of amazement. The Eldest did not like what was happening. Marlowe was usurping his place as the revealer of truth to his people. He quickly clutched his forehead with one hand, thrust out the other hand, and spun in a circle making cries and groans in the way he did when he had a more-than-routine message from Dark One. The Looters watched and waited, and when he had their full attention, the Eldest spoke: ‘Dark One speaks in my brain. Dark One says … what eats Dark one …
is
Dark One! Iron castle eat Dark One … iron castle
is
Dark One!’

At the moment he was saying this, the iron castle was indeed eating the bronze which had once been Colonel Light’s image before it became the image of Dark One. Ulf and the Trolls were carrying the pieces of the statue up into the starship’s feeding room, and dropping them into the vaporous pit. As each lump went in, there was silence, then a giant splash and vast hissings and bubblings as Guinevere’s gastric juices dissolved the bronze and began distributing the resulting chemical salts through her system to help rebuild her tissues.

That night in the old library building of Oldtown, the Eldest and Marlowe sat with a circle of Looters, most of them still marked by the dust of their grief rite earlier in the day. It was a teaching session, for the Eldest wanted to heal any doubts or problems of faith that the events of the day might have brought. ‘Dark One speaks in my brain,’ he said with quiet authority, ‘Dark One says. Dark One comes in many shapes.’ He gestured at the patches of night sky which could be seen through the gaps in the roof. ‘As night. As death.’ He lifted his sacrificial knife. ‘As blade.’

Standing now, he assumed the posture of the statue of Colonel Light. ‘Dark One can come in shape of man, looking forward to time when Dark One change again. Today is change. Dark One has used foreign foods to take him to iron castle. They think they steal Dark One. Dark One laughs at them, ha ha!’ His listeners were smiling now, chuckling at the joke Dark One had played on the stupid foreign foods. ‘Used foreign foods to take him to iron castle to be eaten!’ He paused. ‘But we know that Dark One is not eaten but eats. Whatever eats Dark One is eaten by him. Used foreign foods to take him to iron castle, be eaten, therefore eat. Take new shape. Night, death, blade, man … castle! Dark One eaten, Dark One lives. As iron castle!’

‘All eat all,’ muttered some of the Looters.

‘All eat,’ answered the Eldest.

‘All eaten!’ shouted all the Looters.

‘All live!’ answered the Eldest in a cracking yell.

The full Looters’ Moon shone down on the starship, illuminating the shapes of Rocky and some Troll men-at-arms who sat their horses in the clearing some distance from the hatch. They were waiting for their Don who stood on the ramp of the ship, quietly conversing with Meg. On the bridge of the starship, Zachary was gently playing his guitar, while Zoe and the Wyzen played with the basketball, and Harold hunched over the main console consulting with Guinevere about her menu.

‘So that’s it for copper and gold,’ Harold was saying, ‘and you must’ve got about 9% tin there as well.’

‘I feel the better for it Hal,’ Guinevere replied, and indeed she already seemed to have more life in her voice.

‘And some zinc.’

‘Meg’s taking her time seeing the Don off the premises isn’t she?’ Zachary said.

‘I shall need more zinc later, Hal.’

‘I mean, she was just seeing him to the door, right?’ Zachary added.

‘I’m hoping to get you more iron in the form of old roofing. That’ll have some zinc with it,’ Harold said, consulting his science encyclopaedia.

‘What crave I now is salt. My system lusts for salt,’ Guinevere said.

‘What I’m saying is,’ Zachary said, ‘that we need another kidnap now like we need a collective hole in the head.’

‘Salt,’ said Harold, consulting the menu. ‘Two hundred pounds? That’s a lot of salt!’

‘Cranky Meg fares right well, Zachary, thou needest not behave like some father pacing of the floor. Both sodium and chlorine, Harold, I need both.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Zachary. ‘What’s “right well” mean in mediaeval then?’

‘Maybe we can trade with the village,’ Harold said.

‘You’re not getting jealous are you Zach?’ asked Zoe with an impish grin.

‘Jealous? You kidding? I just don’t want to have to rescue her again. That woman abducts pretty easily.’

But Meg was in no danger of being abducted. Her big danger at this time was that she might elope with the Don willingly. He had seized the chance of reading her his poem, and was just reaching the end of it.

‘Add to it three last parts of life to try

This new word “wife”; bind with a lover’s kiss,

And then, test this my word and find it true.’

In Meg’s defence it must be pointed out that she had had a very big day: she was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. Furthermore, the full moon was shining, a handsome knight in shining armor had saved her from being sacrificed to a pagan god and then eaten by cannibals, and now it turned out that he had written her some poetry. The situation was simply unfair. She went cross-eyed and fell into his arms, and as the poem fluttered to the ground, he held her tightly and planted a kiss on her.

On the bridge, Harold was interrupted in his work on the menu when Guinevere suddenly said, very sharply, ‘Thou slut, Meg! Comest thou inside at once, else come the dawn he’ll not respect thee!’

Guinevere suddenly had everyone’s total attention. Zachary stopped strumming his guitar, Zoe stopped playing Wyzenball with the Wyzen, and even Harold looked up from Guinevere’s menu.

There was a pause, and then Meg stalked onto the bridge, scarlet with embarrassment and fury. ‘I hate being spied on!’ was her opening line. ‘A simple goodnight kiss…’

‘I know men like that full well,’ Guinevere chided her. ‘He’ll want a pure bride and if thou hast sweet dalliance withal…’

‘A simple goodnight kiss, dammit! He saved me from cannibals!’

‘If thou wist be his bride, then mend these wanton ways of thine.’

Meg sat down hard on one of the couches. ‘I thought the whole point of this exercise was to get you healed and off the planet. Am I right? Well that doesn’t make for setting up very permanent relationships here on Earth, does it?’

‘I’d not stand in thy way, should’st thou wish to stay behind’ said Guinevere sweetly.

‘I’ll bet your tin ass you wouldn’t!’

Harold had gone back to looking at Guinevere’s menu. He looked up from it to Meg. She saw the look and knew in her heart that he was about to say something which would force her to disembowel him. ‘Whatever you’re going to say, don’t say it. Not a word out of you, Harold.’

‘I was going to ask…’ began Harold, who, when he wished to speak, no threat could silence, ‘was going to ask if they…’

‘Just be very careful.’

‘… had much salt in the Forester village.’

‘Salt?’ Meg was puzzled for a moment, then realized the salt was for Guinevere. ‘You sure it’s not vinegar she wants?’

Outside, as the hoof beats of the Troll party receded into the night, Marlowe and the Eldest moved silently toward the starship. They reached a point where they could see her moonlit form while still remaining in the dark protection of the trees. The Eldest was entranced. ‘Dark One,’ he murmured as if to a lover, ‘my lovely Dark One … eaten … born again.’