Quest Beyond Time (3 page)

As they ran through the forest, Mike did not think about anything except escape. He wanted the Wanderers and himself to have a nice friendly distance between them. A thousand kilometres would have seemed about right.

And then they were out from under the trees, running across what seemed like grazing land, and as they did this he did not think about anything much except the lions he had seen earlier in the day. He had seen them on pasture which looked very like the area they were moving through. So Mike stopped thinking about bloodthirsty Wanderers and started thinking about bloodthirsty lions and all the stories he had read in the newspapers and seen on the television news about people being pulled out of cars in lion parks. And devoured.

So it was not until Katrin dropped to the ground just below the crest of a small hill, scanning the surrounding countryside as she did so, and Mike dropped beside her, panting too much for someone who was hoping to make the football team next season, that he started to think about the law, and what view the law might take about people who shot arrows into other people.

He looked at Katrin. ‘Do you do this every day? Or just on Saturdays?’

‘Do what?’

‘You just tried to kill someone!’

‘I tried to wound him,’ she explained carefully. ‘If I had tried to kill him, he would be dead.’

‘The police are going to be after us. At least they’re going to be after you,’ he amended. ‘I mean, I. . .’

‘The Wanderers were going to try and kill us. I was kind to them.’ She thought about it. ‘Very kind. I should have sent them to their Dark Father. I spared them. And won much honour,’ she added modestly.

‘Big deal,’ Mike said, looking glumly at the ground beside him. There was something square protruding from it. For want of something better to do with his hands he began tugging at it as they talked. ‘Katrin, is this some kind of . . . uh, hospital? Is this a place for sick people?’

She thought about his question. ‘There are sick people here.’

He nodded. He tried to look understanding.

‘Since the Sickness came,’ she added.

‘Will you cut that out! There is no Sickness! This is 1985! There is a perfectly logical explanation!’

‘For the lions? The old people say you had no free lions in Before.’

‘We have lion parks. Like this one we’re in now. Open-range zoos.’

‘The Wanderers?’

‘You’re in fancy dress. Why shouldn’t they be?’ Mike did not convince even himself. ‘You get some pretty weird people on the street these days!’ He looked at her. ‘Very weird!’ She just looked back at him. He reminded himself that sarcasm did not work with Katrin.

He tugged again at the square object and it began to come loose from the earth.

‘What would it take for you to believe us, Mike?’ The way she said it, his name sounded like ‘Mark’.

‘Oh I don’t know . . . maybe a big booming voice from the sky . . . message written in the clouds . . . something like that . . .’ He was cleaning the dirt from the square object. It was a sign of some sort, red and white.

‘We really need your help.’

‘Katrin, I can’t help you! I’m not a doctor! It’s not me that’s been screwing up your head with these crazy ideas about living in the future . . .’ His words trailed away. The sign was clean now. It showed a bottle with a curved waist made to put a hand around. The sign had flowing writing on it. One word. He was staring at something he had seen thousands of times, sitting in identical booths in identical hamburger bars with his friends.

The word on the sign rang in his mind.
Coke.

He stared at the sign, and then looked around at the landscape. There had never been anything built here. At least, he found himself thinking, nothing had been built here for hundreds of years. The sound which escaped him came from deep in his chest. It could have been a grunt of surprise, half a laugh, or, most embarrassing of all, a suppressed sob.

‘It’s an oldenthing.’ She said it as one word.
Oldenthing.
As if there were so many artefacts lying about from Before that they needed a special word for them. ‘There may be more.’

She drew her shortsword and started chipping at the earth.

It was then he saw the writing on the sword blade. He realized he had seen it before, when they had been attacked by the Wanderers, but at that time his mind had not taken it in. He had been thinking of more important things, like staying alive for the next sixty seconds.

He watched, dully, as the sword chipped at the earth. She was turning up an ashtray, and part of an ancient Coke bottle.

He watched the words on the sword blade. The letters were deeply graved into the steel, black against the blade’s brightness. He could read them.

General Motors

She became aware of his stillness and stopped digging. She looked at him and saw what he was looking at.

‘General Motors,’ she said. ‘He was from Before. Of your time, I think. Was he as great a warrior as men say?’

If he had not felt so much like weeping he would have laughed. Then he laughed anyway. ‘The General? Yeah!’ He looked out over the landscape. Out toward where the city of Sydney had been five hundred years before. In his mind’s eye he saw the flash, the slow blossoming mushroom cloud he knew so well from the movies.

Then he looked at the warrior girl beside him. He believed her now. It had not taken a voice from the sky or a message written in the clouds. Just a few things from a hamburger bar and a piece of cannibalized steel.

‘Yeah, whenever we had a war General Motors was there all right. In the thick of the fighting.’ He looked at the sign in his hand. ‘Maybe you’ve heard of our other great warrior?’

‘Who was that?’

‘Colonel Sanders.’

She leaned forward, obviously eager to hear of this other famous fighting man’s exploits.

Mike found himself laughing for fear that he might cry.

It was night, and the windows of the dark house showed the gold glow of lamplight. The distant sound of the sea reached the house, and, from inland, the occasional cry, or cough, or hoot of a wild creature in the bush.

Through all the sounds of night, wove the wail of bagpipes, haunting, desolate.

Around the comer of the dark house came the giant Fergus, the bagpipes tucked under his knotted right arm, his eyes distant, the sound of the pipes taking him back to scenes of boyhood, scenes of young manhood, scenes of battle where the bloodlust had come upon him, and it had been hack or be hacked, cleave or be cloven, and the only things louder than the cries of the dying had been the clash of steel and the shouts of the victors.

Slowly, Fergus strode to the standing stone, and played his pipes before it. He looked up into the stone’s eye. There were times, when the Gift was on him, that he saw things in the eye; sometimes things from the past, sometimes the far away, and sometimes the future. But tonight, the eye was blind to him.

In the bush, in the mid-distance, something was moving.

Some lost thing was howling out there.

Within the house, Mike sat before a fire burning in the fireplace. He was thinking that the fireplace was so big he could park a small car inside it. As he watched the flames, he listened to Simon’s voice. The ailing chieftain sat near him in his chair, and, on Mike’s other side, Katrin sat cross-legged, honing her shortsword’s edge with a fine-grained stone. From outside the house, the slow skirl of Fergus’s pipes blanketed the other sounds of night.

‘In your time,’ Simon was saying, ‘there was The War. Not wars such as we fight in the here and now, but The War which the giants fought with fire from the sky. The songs and legends say that great cities burned with the fire, and that beams of light came from the sky, scorching everything they touched.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps not all of this is true. Some seems too strange for belief.’

He paused as if to gather strength, and then went on. ‘But I have seen where the cities were,’ and he gestured toward where Mike still half-believed that Sydney stood, ‘and they were vast. I have stood on their mounds and middens, and walked three days and have still stood on their mounds and middens.’

‘Mounds? Middens? They’re covered up then?’ Mike asked. ‘How do you know there are cities underneath?’

On his right, Katrin drew breath inwards between her teeth. She looked at Simon, as if expecting some action on his part. Simon smiled, and shook his head. ‘In the time he comes from, Katrin, they did not fight for insult.’

‘Insult?’ Mike was puzzled. ‘I wasn’t being rude. Just asking how he knew . . .’

‘You questioned a chieftain’s truth,’ Katrin said.

‘I know there are cities underneath,’ Simon went on, as Mike opened his mouth to argue, ‘because of what the Little People mine out of them.’ He put out his hand to Katrin, and she laid the shortsword on his palm. Mike looked at the words on the blade, thrown into dark relief by the firelight. ‘All of our weapons, our tools, all our steel, and copper and gold . . .’ He returned Katrin her sword and for a moment held up his hand and let the folds of his cloak drop back from his wrist, displaying a dull red-gold bracelet worked into intricately twined knots. ‘All our metal and metalwork come from them. Dug out of the buried cities of the giants by the Little People, and then forged and wrought by them.’

‘Who are they? These Little People?’ Mike could not stop himself from asking, though part of his mind was still unconvinced.

‘They call themselves the First Returners. The first to go back to where the cities stood. There is something in the earth there that’s dangerous for most of us to live near for long. It’s the Bad Country. The songs tell us that many of the First Returners died. Some folk think they’re small because of what is in the earth where they live. Who knows?’

‘Radioactivity?’

His words drew a strange response. They closed their eyes, placed the tips of their right index and middle fingers to their left eyes and swiftly drew them across both eyelids. Then they paused, and opened their eyes and looked at him solemnly.

‘That is not to be spoken,’ said Katrin.

‘What?’

‘The word.’

Silence fell on them like a blanket. Mike stared into the flames, his reason repeating to him that these people were living a grotesque fantasy, while all the evidence of his senses told him that they spoke the truth. Finally he looked at Simon.

‘What happened then? After The War?’

‘The Great Darkness. Some, a few, lived through it. It was the time of the forming of the Clans. When children were born, some . . . were altered. Those could not be of the Clans. Those became the Wanderers.’

‘Mutants,’ Mike said.

Again, they closed their eyes and made the swift drawing motion across their eyelids.

‘Is that another word? Not to be spoken?’

They nodded.

Silence fell once again. Mike suddenly realized that, at some point, the piping outside had ceased without his noticing.

After a time, Simon spoke. ‘We need your help. The Sickness is among us and without help we shall all die.’

Mike looked swiftly at Katrin, sitting cross-legged, honing her sword with smooth strokes of the stone. Simon took in Mike’s reaction, and answered it.

‘Yes. Katrin, too. All will die.’

‘I told her. I’m not a doctor.’

Simon looked at him intently. ‘You do not remember? The gods did not tell you? When they brought you here? They said nothing to you of why you were sent again?’

‘Again?’

Simon did not answer, but looked beyond him, and Mike became aware that someone had entered the hall behind him. Silently, Fergus moved into the half-circle of firelight, and squatted alongside Katrin. She looked at him in question and he shrugged. ‘I saw nothing in the Eye,’ he murmured.

‘You can fly,’ said Simon. ‘Off the coast to the south is the Island. On it are wise folk, who follow the Hanged God. Could you fly to the Island on your kite?’

‘It depends how far it is . . . if there are cliffs . . . the winds. . .’

‘If the gods can bring him through Time, they can fly him to the Island,’ rumbled Fergus.

‘There are high cliffs,’ Simon paused. ‘Could you do it with one other? Could you take her with you?’ He gestured at Katrin.

‘Perhaps.’

‘The wise ones on the Island collect the old wisdom. They could look at her blood and give you the cure.’

‘But how far are the cliffs? I’d have to get there. . .’

‘Fergus and Katrin would get you there.’

Mike paused, and thought about lions, and Wanderers, and the fact that he had to get home, and to school on Monday. Somehow he managed to fit home and school and Wanderers into the same world, and come up worried. By now his mother would be frantic. She would have telephoned his father. His father would be feeling guilty, and when his father felt guilty, Mike would sooner or later be made to feel guilty, too. He had to get out of here.

‘Look, I don’t have time. I’d like to help you but. . .’ They looked at him, puzzled, and suspicious. He felt guilty under their gaze. ‘I’m really not the hero type!’

Fergus’s hand dropped to his sword hilt. ‘He’s of man’s years and not a man!’ He was on his feet in one smooth movement, his sword coming out of his scabbard. ‘I claim his Culling!’

‘Stop!’ Simon was on his feet, his own sword halfway from its scabbard. ‘He’s a guest! He’s eaten my bread!’

Fergus stood frozen, clearly unwilling to draw on his chieftain. Then slowly he slid his sword back into its scabbard.

‘I say he’s from the Dark Ones, sent to mock us.’

Simon looked at Katrin. ‘Show him to his bed. We’ll talk more in the morning.’

As Katrin led Mike to a comer of the hall, he tried to understand what had just happened. He had said something which had put him in deadly danger, and Simon had intervened to save his life. But what had he said wrong? And why had Simon helped?

As Katrin indicated the wooden shelf where he would sleep, and the sheepskin covering which would keep him warm, he asked, ‘What happened just then?’

‘You do not have the Cull and the Guestright in Before?’

‘No.’

‘Among the Clans, if a male grows to man’s years and is not a man, he is given back to the gods.’

‘Like, ah . . .?’ Mike made a throat-cutting action.

She nodded. ‘It is called the Cull. It keeps the Clans strong.’

‘And by not wanting to go to the Island. . .?’

‘You proved you were not a man.’

‘When is a male a man?’

‘At fourteen. It is then that he does the Tests.’

Mike thought about asking what the Tests were, but then decided that he really did not wish to know. ‘So Fergus was going to Cull me, but your father. .

‘You had eaten his bread. You had Guestright.’

‘Would he really have fought Fergus for me?’

‘And died. And I would have killed Fergus, for the Payback.’

Mike looked at her in silence. She was standing there telling him that her father would die to protect a guest, and that if he had, she would have murdered her uncle to avenge him. He could think of only three explanations: these people were either wonderful actors having a very bad game with him; or he really was in a barbarian future; or, and for some reason this seemed worst of all, he had stumbled into a drop-out commune which had developed its own culture. A culture based on ritual homicide.

‘Katrin, has it ever occurred to you that you people tend to take things a little too seriously?’

‘We have the Law,’ she said. ‘Do you not have the Law?’

And he found he had no answer to that. No answer at all.