Land and Overland - Omnibus (11 page)

For the second time that morning he found himself unexpectedly in the presence of Gesalla, who was crossing the entrance hall towards the west salon. She turned to him, dazzled by the light from the archway, and smiled. The smile lasted only a moment, as long as it took for her to identify him against the glare, but its effect on Toller was odd. He seemed to see Gesalla for the first time, as a goddess figure with sun-bright eyes, and in the instant he felt an inexplicable and poignant sense of waste, not of material possessions but of all the potential of life itself. The sensation faded as quickly as it had come, but it left him feeling sad and strangely chastened.

“Oh, it’s you,” Gesalla said in a cold voice. “I thought you were Lain.”

Toller smiled, wondering if he could begin a new and more constructive relationship with Gesalla. “A trick of the light.”

“Why are you back so early?”

“Ah … the meeting didn’t go as planned. There was some trouble. Lain will tell you all about it—he’s on his way home now.”

Gesalla tilted her head and moved until she had the advantage of the light. “Why can’t you tell me? Was it something to do with you?”

“With
me
?”

“Yes. I advised Lain not to let you go anywhere near the palace.”

“Well, perhaps he’s getting as sick as I am of you and your endless torrents of advice.” Toller tried to stop speaking, but the word fever was upon him. “Perhaps he has begun to regret marrying a withered twig instead of a real woman.”

“Thank you—I’ll pass your comments on to Lain in full.” Gesalla’s lips quirked, showing that—far from being wounded—she was pleased at having invoked the kind of intemperate response which could result in Toller being banished from the Square House. “Do I take it that your concept of a real woman is embodied in the whore who is waiting in your bed at this moment?”

“You can take…” Toller scowled, trying to conceal the fact that he had completely forgotten about his companion of the night. “You should guard your tongue! Felise is no whore.”

Gesalla’s eyes sparkled. “Her name is Fera.”

“Felise or Fera—she isn’t a whore.”

“I won’t bandy definitions with you,” Gesalla said, her tones now light, cool and infuriating. “The cook told me you left instructions for your … guest to be provided with all the food she wished. And if the amounts she has already consumed this foreday are any yardstick, you should think yourself fortunate that you don’t have to support her in marriage.”

“But I do!” Toller saw his chance to deliver the verbal thrust and took it on the reflex, with heady disregard for the consequences. “I’ve been trying to tell you that I gave Fera gradewife status before I left here this morning. I’m sure you will soon learn to enjoy her company about the house, and then we can all be friends together. Now, if you will excuse me…”

He smiled, savouring the shock and incredulity on Gesalla’s face, then turned and sauntered towards the main stair, taking care to hide his own numb bemusement over what a few angry seconds could do to the course of his life. The last thing he wanted was the responsibility of a wife, even of the fourth grade, and he could only hope that Fera would refuse the offer he had committed himself to making.

General Risdel Dalacott awoke at first light and, following the routine which had rarely varied in his sixty-eight years of life, left his bed immediately.

He walked around the room several times, his step growing firmer as the stiffness and pain gradually departed from his right leg. It was almost thirty years since the aftday, during the first Sorka campaign, when a heavy Merrillian throwing spear had smashed his thigh bone just above the knee. The injury had troubled him at intervals ever since, and the periods when he was free of discomfort were becoming shorter and quite infrequent.

As soon as he was satisfied with the leg’s performance he went into the adjoining toilet chamber and threw the lever of enamelled brakka which was set in one wall. The water which sprayed down on him from the perforated ceiling was hot—a reminder that he was not in his own spartan quarters in Trompha. Putting aside irrational feelings of guilt, he took maximum enjoyment from the warmth as it penetrated and soothed his muscles.

After drying himself he paused at a wall-mounted mirror, which was made of two layers of clear glass with highly different refractive indices, and took stock of his image. Although age had had its inevitable effect on the once-powerful body, the austere discipline of his way of life had prevented fatty degeneration. His long, thoughtful face had become deeply lined, but the greyness which had entered his cropped hair scarcely showed against its fair coloration, and his overall appearance was one of durable health and fitness.

Still serviceable
, he thought.
But I’ll do only one more year. The army has taken too much from me already
.

While he was donning his informal blues he turned his thoughts to the day ahead. It was the twelfth birthday of his grandson, Hallie, and—as part of the ritual which proved he was ready to enter military academy—the boy was due to go alone against ptertha. The occasion was an important one, and Dalacott vividly remembered the pride he had felt on watching his own son, Oderan, pass the same test. Oderan’s subsequent army career had been cut short by his death at the age of thirty-three—the result of an airship crash in Yalrofac—and it was Dalacott’s painful duty to stand in for him during the day’s celebrations. He finished dressing, left the bedroom and went downstairs to the dining room where, in spite of the earliness of the hour, he found Conna Dalacott seated at the round table. She was a tall, open-faced woman whose form was developing the solidity of early middle age.

“Good foreday, Conna,” he said, noting that she was alone. “Is young Hallie still asleep?”

“On his twelfth?” She nodded towards the walled garden, part of which was visible through the floor-to-ceiling window. “He’s out there somewhere, practising. He wouldn’t even look at his breakfast.”

“It’s a big day for him. For us all.”

“Yes.” Something in the timbre of Conna’s voice told Dalacott that she was under a strain. “A wonderful day.”

“I know it’s distressing for you,” he said gently, “but Oderan would have wanted us to make the most of it, for Hallie’s sake.”

Conna gave him a calm smile. “Do you still take nothing but porridge for breakfast? Can’t I tempt you with some whitefish? Sausage? A forcemeat cake?”

“I’ve lived too long on line soldier’s rations,” he protested, tacitly agreeing to restrict himself to small-talk. Conna had maintained the villa and conducted her life ably enough without his assistance in the ten years since Oderan’s death, and it would be presumptuous of him to offer her any advice at this juncture.

“Very well,” she said, beginning to serve him from one of the covered dishes on the table, “but there’ll be no soldier’s rations for you at the littlenight feast.”

“Agreed!” While Dalacott was eating the lightly salted porridge he exchanged pleasantries with his daughter-in-law, but the seething of his memories continued unabated and—as had been happening more often of late—thoughts of the son he had lost evoked others of the son he had never claimed. Looking back over his life he had, once again, to ponder the ways in which the major turning points were frequently unrecognisable as such, in which the inconsequential could lead to the momentous.

Had he not been caught off his guard during the course of a minor skirmish in Yalrofac all those years ago he would not have received the serious wound in his leg. The injury had led to a long convalescence in the quietness of Redant province; and it was there, while walking by the Bes-Undar river, he had chanced to find the strangest natural object he had ever seen, the one he still carried everywhere he went. The object had been in his possession for about a year when, on a rare visit to the capital, he had impulsively taken it to the science quarter on Greenmount to find out if its strange properties could be explained.

In the event, he had learned nothing about the object and a great deal about himself.

As a dedicated career soldier he had taken on a solewife almost as a duty to the state, to provide him with an heir and to minister to his needs between campaigns. His relationship with Toriane had been pleasant, even and warm; and he had regarded it as fulfilling—until the day he had ridden into the precinct of a square house on Greenmount and had seen Aytha Maraquine. His meeting with the slender young matron had been a blending of green and purple, producing a violent explosion of passion and ecstasy and, ultimately, an intensity of pain he had not believed possible…

“The carriage is back, Grandad,” Hallie cried, tapping at the long window. “We’re ready to go to the hill.”

“I’m coming.” Dalacott waved to the fair-haired boy who was dancing with excitement on the patio. Hallie was tall and sturdy, well able to handle the full-size ptertha sticks which were clattering on his belt.

“You haven’t finished your porridge,” Conna said as he stood up, her matter-of-fact tone not quite concealing the underlying emotion.

“You know, there is absolutely no need for you to worry,” he said. “A ptertha drifting over open ground in clear daylight poses no threat to anybody. Dealing with it is child’s play, and in any case I’ll be staying close to Hallie at all times.”

“Thank you.” Conna remained seated, staring down at her untouched food, until Dalacott had left the room.

He went out to the garden which—as was standard in rural areas—had high walls surmounted by ptertha screens which could be closed together overhead at night and in foggy conditions. Hallie came running to him, recreating the image of his father at the same age, and took his hand. They walked out to the carriage, in which waited three men, local friends of the family, who were required as witnesses to the boy’s coming-of-age. Dalacott, who had renewed their acquaintanceship on the previous evening, exchanged greetings with them as he and Hallie took their places on the padded benches inside the big coach. The driver cracked his whip over his team of four bluehorns and the vehicle moved off.

“Oho! Have we a seasoned campaigner here?” said Gehate, a retired merchant, leaning forward to tap a Y-shaped ptertha stick he had noticed among the normal Kolcorronian cruciforms in Hallie’s armoury.

“It’s Ballinnian,” Hallie said proudly, stroking the polished and highly decorated wood of the weapon, which Dalacott had given him a year earlier. “It flies farther than the others. Effective at thirty yards. The Gethans use them as well. The Gethans and the Cissorians.”

Dalacott returned the indulgent smiles the boy’s show of knowledge elicited from the other men. Throwing sticks of one form or another had been in use since ancient times by almost every nation on Land as a defence against ptertha, and had been chosen for their effectiveness. The enigmatic globes burst as easily as soap bubbles once they got to within their killing radius of a man, but before that they showed a surprising degree of resilience. A bullet, an arrow or even a spear could pass through a ptertha without causing it any harm—the globe would only quiver momentarily as it repaired the punctures in its transparent skin. It took a rotating, flailing missile to disrupt a ptertha’s structure and disperse its toxic dust into the air.

The bolas made a good ptertha killer, but it was hard to master and had the disadvantage of being too heavy to be carried in quantity, whereas a multi-bladed throwing stick was flat, comparatively light and easily portable. It was a source of wonder to Dalacott that even the most primitive tribesmen had learned that giving each blade one rounded edge and one sharp edge produced a weapon which sustained itself in the air like a bird, flying much farther than an ordinary projectile. No doubt it was that seemingly magical property which induced people like the Ballinnians to lavish such care on the carving and embellishment of their ptertha sticks. By contrast, the pragmatic Kolcorronians favoured a plain expendable weapon of the four-bladed pattern which was suitable for mass production because it was made of two straight sections glued together at the centre.

The carriage gradually left the grain fields and orchards of Klinterden behind and began climbing the foothills of Mount Pharote. Eventually it reached a place where the road petered out on a grassy table, beyond which the ground ascended steeply into mists which had not yet been boiled off by the sun.

“Here we are,” Gehate said jovially to Hallie as the vehicle creaked to a halt. “I can’t wait to see what sport that fancy stick of yours will produce. Thirty yards, you say?”

Thessaro, a florid-faced banker, frowned and shook his head. “Don’t egg the boy into showing off. It isn’t good to throw too soon.”

“I think you’ll find he knows what to do,” Dalacott said as he got out of the carriage with Hallie and looked around. The sky was a dome of pearly brilliance shading off into pale blue overhead. No stars could be seen and even the great disk of Overland, only part of which was visible, appeared pale and insubstantial. Dalacott had travelled to the south of Kail province to visit his son’s family, and in these latitudes Overland was noticeably displaced to the north. The climate was more temperate than that of equatorial Kolcorron, a factor which—combined with a much shorter littlenight—made the region one of the best food producers in the empire.

“Plenty of ptertha,” Gehate said, pointing upwards to where purple motes could be seen drifting high in the air currents rolling down from the mountain.

“There’s always plenty of ptertha these days,” commented Ondobirtre, the third witness. “I’ll swear they are on the increase—no matter what anybody says to the contrary. I heard that several of them even penetrated the centre of Ro-Baccanta a few days ago.”

Gehate shook his head impatiently. “They don’t go into cities.”

“I’m only telling what I heard.”

“You’re too credulous, my friend. You listen to too many tall stories.”

“This is no time for bickering,” Thessaro put in. “This is an important occasion.” He opened the linen sack he was carrying and began counting out six ptertha sticks each to Dalacott and the other men.