Cloud Castles (34 page)

Last of all – I thought – we glided among the north Italian hills, to pick up small groups of men and women in rough, torn clothes and battered hats, long knives in their belts and Stenguns and captured Schmeissers cradled in their arms, partisans fighting on when their armies had broken. I could imagine the same people coming off a mountainside
in Greece or France, or out of the icy Russian marshland. They had the fierce haunted look of those who had seen too much, too many ‘security measures’ and ‘due reprisals’ in helpless villages, and had found themselves driven to do the same in turn, or worse.

And yet, like the doomed Hungarians, like the French cavalrymen, like all the rest whose lives might suddenly flare up and vanish like insects in a lamp-flame, they were ready to come back. Straight back from the nightmare of the Brocken to the man-made nightmares we had snatched them from, to tasks however hopeless and causes however lost – because in doing so they might make things that shade better, or at least less bad. Their chances were not good; that was why they’d been chosen, from causes already doomed, or firmly enough won to make their intervention only secondary – but still they were ready, because they might make that crucial difference, might perhaps save a hundred lives later, and from among those hundred one who might save a million. None of these people was under compulsion, none of them under orders; they were people who had been shown a truth, a pattern in which their life and if necessary their death had been given some greater meaning. Most of them had lived long lives already, far longer than the ordinary; but instead of clinging greedily to the rest they felt they were making some return in venturing it to help others. Neither the Graal nor its followers threw lives away; but they might, if they chose, invest them.

I wondered at that, wondered if ever I could come to think that way. I’d seen the near-immortality the Spiral made possible, and it made me uneasy. Age brought change; and those changes, however good, meant one was no longer entirely human. They extended you, concentrated you, heightened your abilities, brought out what was dominant in your inner self. That might be good, as it had been for Jyp and Mall; but more often it might be ugly. It could lead to near-divinity, or to things unimaginably hellish. Something of that sort had happened to Katjka, and though she’d pulled back, somehow, from the brink, it had remained there always a few steps in front of her, until at last it had claimed her again. Living forever at that sort of cost wasn’t something I wanted. Better to be content with an ordinary life, and live it reasonably; it could be pretty good. Mine was, by most people’s standards, so why the hell was I hankering after more? Why had I yearned for the Spiral all these
years, yet only dabbled in it, flirted with it, never really taken the plunge? Was it because I really wanted something else – like, for example, the strength and belief and purpose these people had?

‘… fifteen, sixteen!’ counted Alison. ‘That’s it, we’ve enough! Set course northward, Jyp, we won’t need to stop at Stalingrad now.’

‘And Lord, am I thankful!’ exclaimed Jyp, who’d sailed in the North Sea convoys. ‘Freeze our asses off up there, if the Jerries didn’t shoot them off first—’

Alison shook her head. ‘We’d have been looking for the German side. Obersturmbannführer Ewald Holzinger, for one, and many others.’

‘Ober—’ Jyp choked. ‘That’s an SS rank! What kind of goddamn game’re you folks playing?’

‘A very rough one,’ answered a leathery middle-aged partisan woman. ‘I had hoped Ewald would be assigned to our part of Italy, we could have prevented so much bloodshed together. But Stalingrad is worse.’

‘You see,’ said Alison gently, ‘you need, sometimes, to have good men serving an evil cause, to reform it, or at worst restrain it. Even the SS was not beyond redemption, once.’

Jyp and I exchanged fairly eloquent glances.

I followed the partisans as they climbed up into the main gallery that ran along the body of the airship, openwork metal platforms that throbbed with the energy of the engines as we pulled away northward, back into the shadows once more. There they all were, knight and squire, commoner and peasant crushed in together in a fuggy atmosphere of blood and sweat and horse dung, perched on every conceivable seat, joking quietly about the variety of smells each one had brought along, and which era had the biggest lice. (Byzantium won, by virtue of its bureaucrats.) They made a tremendous impression on me, a force of savage and dedicated fighters the SAS or Marines or samurai might have envied, yet radiating none of the aggression of a warrior caste. There was even a curious gentleness about them as they talked, swapped news of friends, soothed the restless horses in their wire-mesh stalls, snatched a hasty meal from the rations we handed out, or whatever sleep they could manage in those conditions. Some of them looked to me for more news about what had happened to the
Spear; I suggested a briefing, thinking of Alison. They nodded sagely, and I called back down the ladder. ‘Alison, a word? And can somebody unpack that big chart? Thanks.’

Rather to my surprise, Alison didn’t come up; instead, she locked the control surfaces, took over the helm from Jyp and bent over the speaking tube. ‘Attention, all! In two minutes, a briefing on what’s happened to the Spear, and what we’re going to do about it!’ She grinned at me, and added, ‘From the horse’s mouth, right?’

I looked at all those hard, expectant faces, and I swallowed hard, wishing I was somewhere else, far, far away. These were the Knights of the Sangraal, its most dedicated followers, fanatical even; and I’d been playing fast and loose with the object of all that devotion. I was going to have to be pretty fast on my feet, verbally – or maybe literally.

But on the other hand, I’d been doing presentations all my life, and this wasn’t too different, bar the bull. And there was Mall, sitting near me and watching me right through with those disconcerting green eyes. The Knights sat silent mostly, bar the odd question; I got some strange looks with my part in the theft, nothing more. But when I told them about the captain, and the helicopter, a low growling mutter ran through them, a horrible sound. Most of them knew Dragovic, it seemed; and if he’d heard it, I think he might have run to the ends of the earth, or simply cut his own throat on the spot. So the hounds of heaven might give tongue, and I was glad it wasn’t after me. At last it broke up, with nothing more than a few more questions, some nodding and fingering of chins, and Hastein still trying to cadge a cigarette.

‘They accept you as their captain,’ Mall breathed in my ear. ‘Never a doubt on’t. That’s well.’

‘I can’t get over it!’ Not sheeplike, not deferential even, just accepting me with a confidence I didn’t feel I even remotely deserved. ‘I mean – people like these!’

‘They’re fierce, aye, and fell. But then …’ her eyes sparkled in the gloom, ‘so am I! And I follow you, Master Stephen. So is the Pilot, and so are you also, after your fashion, fierce and fast and proud as a goshawk when wrath o’ertakes your quietness. Can you but enchain your doubts and see
but a little deeper into yourself, you’ll have few masters. Save one, I think.’ She bared her large teeth, and dug an elbow into my side with her usual robust rib-cracking energy. By the time I had breath to speak she was down the ladder again.

Somehow, despite the desperation of it all, I suddenly felt good. If this pack of fighters could accept their fate, stand or fall, could I do any less? If they accepted me as leader I owed them the best I could do. I had Mall by my side, and Jyp – and Alison too, of course. I owed them even more. I might be adequate or I might not; but whatever there was in me, they were going to get it.

Clouds rolled by us, cloud battlements, cloud towers, cloud castles, vast insubstantial fortresses of nebulous history and misty ideals. They loomed like all the challenges I’d ever faced, all the heights I’d ever hoped to storm, as grey and forbidding as my imagination could make them. All the demands of life, exams, college courses, graduation with a good degree, getting the right job, landing the right contracts, handling the new promotion, launching my brainchild C-Tran – mist, all mist. A clammy veil that blotted out things that really mattered, that shaped itself into seductive phantoms I could chase and catch, only to have them melt away in my fingers and leave me no satisfaction, no real achievement, no solid ground beneath. And then one day, drawn by urges I hadn’t understood, I’d wandered out onto the Spiral. Here, among this shifting morass of space and time and history and legend, I’d begun to face real challenges, real adventures with life as the prize and the forfeit both. Real, amid unreality; real friendships, real relationships. Other people I knew had stepped briefly over the bounds as I had – my colleague Dave, my ex-girlfriend Jacquie – only to step back, hurriedly. See and step back, to wrap the cold fixed Core around them like a security blanket. Dave had long forgotten; I hoped Jacquie hadn’t, not entirely, if only for the odd fond memory of me. I couldn’t do that, I knew it now. Like Alison, I’d been torn, this way and that, afraid of rejecting what my reason insisted must be the hard, the firm, the only true reality. Now, about to walk straight into what stood to be the most hellish thing I’d ever encountered – and by now that covered quite a pack – the mere vapours had been stripped away. This was real, for me at least; this moment now was life, existence. My past life, that had seemed so involving, so important, that was the fog. The
cloud castles around us, they were real.

Jyp spun the wheel, took us down a little. The clouds thinned to flying streamers, and we headed west now, straight into the dying sun’s last angry glance before an endless night. I stood beside him, swaying on my feet as small gusts swung and shook us. ‘This is it?’

‘Surely is. Near as I can get it. Any nearer, we might be too early and scare ’em off.’

‘Okay. Stay in among the lower clouds,’ I warned him, ‘the driven stuff. Hide, as long and as completely as you can. Circle if you have to. It’s our best hope.’

He grinned; his teeth were on edge. ‘Nope. It isn’t, you are. Don’t go losing a holt of that.’

I hung onto the brass handrail instead, and watched grimly. Not alone; I heard the little buzz and whisper that ran through the ship, audible even over the soft engine drone. The dull horizon swallowed up the sun and sucked the colour from the sky, changing the world to lead. The cockpit lights were out, and we were sunk in shadow. This was glacial country, ground out by the great ice sheets, a broad, broken land seamed with river valleys. Against a swathe of pallid clouds the worn teeth of the ancient Harzgebirge stood out dark grey, and above them, twice their height, a vast mountainside shouldered upward. Out of its shroud of forest a central peak protruded, bare and stark, its nooks and crannies gleaming with greyish snow. The sharp little winds that buffeted us herded the clouds in a swirl around it, and it tore at them and shredded them and sent them reeling away in tatters, over the face of the rising moon.

I’d seen the Brocken, in the Core – the real Brocken, I might once have called it. Even there it was a presence, brooding, dominant, looming over the little town in the valley with its quaint station. Only the lure of the Harz mountain railway, with its beautifully preserved steam locomotives, had happened to take me up there, a footloose, footsore student wandering around Europe on a pre-college rail pass. It had impressed me, yes. The dense green forest of its lower slopes, still visibly divided by criss-crossed scars like an old
Junker’s
sabre cuts where the late unlamented East German border fortifications had been taken up, and their defoliated no man’s land where the greenery was only just returning; high crags, with big birds wheeling around them; the bare and
bony flanks of the peak, capped by the concrete blockhouse and spiny antennae set up to improve the border guards’ view and ruin everyone else’s. I’d paused a moment, whistled, made a mental note to pick up some postcards (I never did) then shambled off down into town with nothing more on my mind than the youth hostel, the girls I might meet there, the local
Bierstube.
That was all; no mysterious chills, no portents, nothing. Nothing to suggest it might somehow become the thing that had risen at me out of the pentacle, that swelled in bulk and menace ahead of me. I’d have laughed myself sick; but I never felt less like laughing now.

The moon was full, and its pallid light shone down upon a nightmarish transfiguration. The enshrouding
Urwald
was tangled and choked, a mass of struggling, distorted trees like one long frozen death-struggle spread out across the whole mountain flank. Swirling bands of mist shrouded the twisted branches, clinging to them wraithlike, while billows of darker smoke rose up and rolled between them. The tree shadows were alive with lights – pale lights, unhealthy phosphoric glows of green and yellow, sudden flaring actinic blues that hurt the eyes but illuminated nothing, pulsing specks of scarlet the shade of rubies and of fresh blood, sparking among the smoke. Fierce white glares shot out their rays into the blackness, lit up only the infinite tangle, and were swallowed up into the dark once more. There was noise, too, audible even from this far away, an indistinct, incessant row punctuated by impossibly deep, slow sounds that seemed to originate from within the mountain itself, carried to us on the wailing wind; and every so often fragments of sound would break through, a sudden keening in many voices, a brutal rattle and thud like drumming on metal. Always, in front of the lights, shapes flickered, brief blinks of movement rising and falling almost in patterns, like a great sweeping net of ribbons that arched from depths to heights and back again. The big brass telescope mounted over the binnacle showed me they were insubstantial, as if the mountain was surrounded by a constant flock of flying creatures, great moths or monstrous bats, maybe. And above it all lifted that bare jagged peak, escalating crags of granite whose peculiar shapes cast monstrous moon shadows across the mist.

One thing above all else it
radiated: terror. Even I could feel it, as strong at this range as when it contorted space and time to drag us down into its ant-lion’s pit, and all the time growing stronger, a cavernous cold feeling that seemed to suck the marrow from my bones. It was partly the sheer size of the thing; it was a mountain, a whole huge peak filled with the influence of whatever dreadful force it was that dwelt there. But there was more to it than that; something inside me shrank away – and something, bolder but nastier, licked its chops and was curious. And that was what I feared most. I reached out, unthinking, and felt a hand slip into mine and clutch it tight. Alison stood beside me. ‘The lion’s den,’ I whispered. ‘This is too much like walking straight into it. Wish we could land some way off—’