Land and Overland - Omnibus (38 page)

“Perhaps—but I fear that he will have already given orders for me to be executed,” Toller said. “I can’t fight a regiment.”

“I see.” Gesalla raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him, and in the dimness her face was impossibly beautiful. “Do you love me, Toller?”

He felt he had reached the end of a lifelong journey. “Yes.”

“I’m glad.” She sat up straighter and began to remove her clothing. “Because I want a child from you.”

He caught her wrist, smiling numbly in his disbelief. “What do you think you’re doing? Chakkell is on the burner just on the other side of this partition.”

“He can’t see us.”

“But this isn’t the way to…”

“I don’t care about any of that,” Gesalla said, pressing her breast against the hand that was holding her wrist. “I have chosen you to father my child, and there may be very little time for us.”

“It won’t work, you know.” Toller relaxed back on the quilts. “It’s physically impossible for me to make love in these conditions.”

“That’s what you think,” Gesalla said as she moved astride of him and brought her mouth down on his, moulding his cheeks with both her hands to coax him into an ardent response.

Overland’s equatorial continent, seen from a height of two miles, looked essentially prehistoric.

Toller had been staring down at the outward-seeping landscape for some time before realising why that particular adjective kept coming to mind. It was not the total absence of cities and roads—first proof that the continent was uninhabited—but the uniform coloration of the grasslands.

Throughout his life every aerial view he had seen had been modified in some way by the six-harvest system which was universal on Land. The edible grasses and all other cultivated vegetation had been arranged in parallel strips in which the colours ranged from brown through several shades of green to harvest yellow, but here the plains were simply …
green
.

The sunlit expanses of the single colour shimmered in his eyes.

Our farmers will have to start the seed-sorting all over again
, he thought.
And the mountains and seas and rivers all have to be given names. It really is a new beginning on a new world. And I don’t think I’m going to be part of it
…

Reminded of his personal problems, he turned his attention to the artificial elements of the scene. The two other ships of the royal flight were slightly below him. Pouche’s was the more distant, most of its passengers visible at the rail as they journeyed ahead in their imaginations to the unknown world.

Ilven Zavotle was the only person to be seen on Leddravohr’s ship, sitting tiredly at the controls. Leddravohr himself must have been lying down in a passenger compartment, as he had done—except during the traumatic episode two days before—throughout the voyage. Toller had noted the prince’s behaviour earlier and wondered if he could be phobic about the boundless emptiness surrounding the migration fleet. If that were the case, it would have been better for Toller if their inevitable duel could have been fought aboard one of the gondolas.

In the two miles of airspace below him he could see twelve other balloons forming an irregular line which increasingly flared off to the west, evidence of a moderate breeze in the lowest levels of the atmosphere. The general area into which they were drifting was sprinkled with the elongated shapes of collapsed balloons, which would later be used to build a temporary township of tents. As he had expected, Toller’s binoculars showed that most of the grounded ships had military markings. Even in the turmoil of the escape from Ro-Atabri, Leddravohr had had the foresight to provide himself with a power base which would be effective from the instant he set foot on Overland.

Analysing the situation, Toller could see no prospect at all of his living for more than a matter of minutes if he put his ship down close to Leddravohr’s. Even if he were to defeat Leddravohr in single combat, he would—as the man charged with the death of the King—be taken by the army. His single and desperately slim chance of survival, for a term to be measured in days at most, lay in hanging back during the touchdown and going aloft again as soon as Leddravohr’s ship was committed to a landing. There were forested hills perhaps twenty miles west of the landing site, and if he could reach them with his balloon he might be able to avoid capture until the forces of the infant nations were properly organised in the cause of his destruction.

The weakest point of the plan was that it hinged on factors outside his own control, all of them concerned with the mind and character of Leddravohr’s pilot.

He had no doubt at all that Zavotle would make the correct deductions when he saw Toller’s ship being tardy during the landing, but would he be sympathetic with Toller’s aims? And even if he were inclined to be loyal to a fellow skyman, would he take the personal risk of doing what Toller expected of him? He would have to be quick to pull the rip panel and collapse his balloon—just as it was becoming apparent to Leddravohr that his enemy was slipping out of his grasp—and there was no predicting how the prince might react in his anger. He had struck other men down for lesser offences.

Toller stared across the field of brightness at the solitary figure of Zavotle, knowing that his gaze was being returned, then he put his back against the gondola wall and eyed Chakkell, who was operating the burner at the one-and-twenty rhythm of the descent.

“Prince, there is a breeze at ground level and I fear the ship may be dragged,” he said, making his opening move. “You and the princess and your children should be ready to go over the side even before we touch the ground. It might sound dangerous, but there’s a good ledge all around the gondola for standing on, and our ground speed will be little more than a walking pace. Jumping off before touchdown is preferable to being in the gondola if it overturns.”

“I’m touched by your solicitude,” Chakkell said, giving Toller a tilt-headed look of surmise.

Wondering if he had blundered so early, Toller approached the pilot’s station. “We’ll be landing very soon, Prince. You must be prepared.”

Chakkell nodded, vacated the seat and, unexpectedly, said, “I still remember the first time I saw you, in the company of Glo. I never thought it would come to this.”

“Lord Glo had vision,” Toller replied. “He should be here.”

“I suppose so.” Chakkell gave him another searching look and went into the compartment where Daseene and the children were making ready for the landing.

Toller sat down and took control of the burner, noting as he did so that the pointer on the altitude gauge had fully returned to the bottom mark. As Overland was smaller than Land he would have expected its surface gravity to be less, but Lain had said otherwise.
Overland has a higher density, and therefore everything there will weigh about the same as on Land
. Toller shook his head, half smiling in belated tribute to his brother. How had Lain
known
what to expect? Mathematics was one aspect of his brother’s life which would forever remain a closed book to him, as looked like being the case with…

He glanced at Gesalla, who for an hour had been motionless at the outer wall of their compartment, her attention fully absorbed by the expanding vistas of the new world below. Her bundle of possessions was already slung on her shoulder, giving the impression that she was impatient to set foot on Overland and go about the business of carving out whatever future she had visualised for herself and the child which, possibly, he had seeded into her. The emotions aroused in him by the sight of her slim, straight and uncompromising form were the most complex he had ever known.

On the night she had come to him he had been quite certain he would be unable to fulfil the male role because of his tiredness, his guilt and the unnerving presence of Chakkell, who had been operating the burner only a few feet away. But Gesalla had known better. She had worked on him with fervour, skill and imagination, plying him with her mouth and gracile body until nothing else existed for him but the need to pulse his semen into her. She had remained on top of him until the climactic moment was near, then had insensibly engineered a change of position and had held it, with upthrust pelvis and legs locked around him, for minutes afterwards. Only later, when they had been talking, had he realised that she had been maximising the chances of conception.

And now, as well as loving her, he hated her for some of the things she had said to him during the remainder of that night while the meteors flickered in the dimness all around. There had been no direct statements, but there was revealed to him a Gesalla who, while displaying chilly anger over a fine point of etiquette, was at the same time prepared to defy any convention for the sake of a future child. In the milieu of the old Kolcorron it had seemed to her that the qualities offered by Lain Maraquine would be the most advantageous for her offspring, and so she had married him. She had loved Lain, but the thing which chafed Toller’s sensibilities was that she had loved Lain for a reason.

And now that she was being projected into the vastly different frontier environment of Overland, it had been her considered judgment that attributes available through Toller Maraquine’s seed were to be preferred, and so she had coupled with him.

In his confusion and pain, Toller was unable to identify the principal source of his resentment. Was it self-disgust at having been so easily seduced by his brother’s widow? Was it lacerated pride over having his finest feelings made part of an exercise in eugenics? Or was he furious with Gesalla for not fitting in with his preconceptions, for not being what he wanted her to be? How was it possible for a woman to be a prude and a wanton at the same time, to be generous and selfish, hard and soft, accessible and remote, his and not his?

The questions were endless, Toller realised, and to dwell on them at this stage would be futile and dangerous. The only preoccupations he could afford were with staying alive.

He fitted the extension tube to the burner lever and moved to the side of the gondola to give himself maximum visibility for the descent. As the horizon began to rise level with him he gradually increased his burn ratio, allowing Zavotle’s ship to move farther ahead. It was important to achieve the greatest vertical separation that was possible without arousing the suspicions of Leddravohr and Chakkell. He watched as the dozen ships still airborne ahead of the royal flight touched down one by one, the precise moment of each contact being signalled by the shocked contortion of the balloon, followed by the appearance of a triangular rent in the crown and the wilting collapse of the entire envelope.

The entire area was dotted with ships which had landed previously, and already some sort of order was beginning to be imposed on the scene. Supplies were being brought together and piled, and teams of men were running to each new ship as it touched down.

The sense of awe Toller had expected to accompany such a sight was missing, displaced by the urgency of his situation. He trained his binoculars on Zavotle’s ship as it neared the ground and risked firing a long blast of miglign into his own balloon. On that instant, as though his ears had been attuned to the telltale sound, Leddravohr materialised at the gondola rail. His shadowed eyes were intent on Toller’s ship, and even at that distance they could be seen flaring with coronas of white as he realised what was happening.

He turned to say something to his pilot, but Zavotle—without waiting for ground contact—pulled his rip line. The balloon above him went into the heaving convulsions of its death throes. The gondola skidded into the grass and was lost from view as the dark brown shroud of the envelope fluttered down around it. Groups of soldiers—among them one officer mounted on a bluehorn—ran to the ship and that of Pouche, which was making a more leisurely touchdown a furlong farther away.

Toller lowered his binoculars and faced Chakkell. “Prince, for reasons which must be obvious to you, I am not going to land my ship at this time. I have no desire to take you or any other disinterested parties—” he paused to glance at Gesalla—”into an alien wilderness with me, therefore I’m going to go within grass level of the surface. At that point it will be very easy for you and your family to part company with the ship, but you must act quickly and with resolution. Is that understood?”

“No!” Chakkell left the passenger compartment and took a step towards Toller. “You will land the ship in full accordance with normal procedure. That is my command, Maraquine. I have no intention of subjecting myself or my family to any unnecessary hazards.”

“
Hazards!
” Toller drew his lips into a smile. “Prince, we are talking about a drop of a few inches. Compare that to the thousand-mile tumble they almost embarked upon two days ago.”

“Your meaning isn’t lost on me.” Chakkell hesitated and glanced at his wife. “But still I must insist on a landing.”

“And I insist otherwise,” Toller said, hardening his voice. The ship was still about thirty feet above the ground and with each passing moment the breeze bore it farther away from the spot where Leddravohr had come down, but the period of grace had to come to an end soon. Even as Toller was trying to guess how much time he had in hand he saw Leddravohr emerge from under the collapsed balloon. Simultaneously, Gesalla climbed over the gondola wall and positioned herself on the outer ledge, ready to jump free. Her eyes met Toller’s only briefly, and there was no communication. He allowed the descent to continue until he could discern individual blades of grass.

“Prince, you must decide quickly,” he said. “If you don’t leave the ship soon, we all go aloft together.”

“Not necessarily.” Chakkell leaned closer to the pilot’s station and snatched the red line which was connected to the balloon’s rip panel. “I think this restores my authority,” he said, and jabbed a pointing finger as he saw Toller instinctively tighten his grip on the extension lever. “If you try to ascend I’ll vent the balloon.”

“That would be dangerous at this height.”

“Not if I only do it partially,” Chakkell replied, displaying knowledge he had acquired while controlling production of the migration fleet. “I can bring the ship down quite gently.”