The Greenstone Grail (29 page)

Not somewhere he expected to be. There was no curved architecture, no panorama of the city with its many-coloured lights and its skimmers and xaurians swooping and wheeling as if in a complex aerial ballet. Wherever he was, it was completely dark. He seemed to be lying on ground rather than floor: it felt hard and lumpy and rather gritty. His own body was quite solid; parts of the ground dug into it. He stood up, and began cautiously to move around, touching something that was unmistakably rock. A rock wall. I’m in a cave, he deduced. There had to be a way out. The air was fresh, not stale. If he could work out where the draught came from … But there wasn’t really a draught, just a nuance in the atmosphere, the hint of a change. Following it, he found himself progressing down a passage. The rocks drew close on either side – now the walls were barely a yard apart – but when he reached up he couldn’t touch the roof. He was twisted this way and that in the narrowing space, peering with dilated eyes into the unresponsive blackness. Another turn of the passage – and another – and suddenly he could see something.

Not very much, but something. A crooked slit, tapering to a point far above him, blue against the dark. The deep velvet blue of a night unstained by any artificial light. High up
between encroaching walls of rock a single star shone. He wriggled through the slot – it would have been too narrow for an adult, unless they were very slim – and out into the night. He couldn’t see very much in the star-glimmer, but he was aware of a slope dropping away from him, of a vast empty landscape stretching out to some remote horizon. The air was cold and dry; overhead, the stars soared upwards in unfamiliar constellations, some huge and bright and near, others in distant clusters like glittering trails of dust. He didn’t see any moon but presently one hove into view, round a shoulder of rock to his right, a pinkish half moon, fraying at the edges, dimming the stars in its vicinity. He thought: That’s one of the moons of Eos, I’m almost certain … But he didn’t know where on Eos he might be, and there was little point in starting to walk somewhere, when he had no idea in which direction he should go. In any case, he could see enough of the terrain to tell that it was very rugged, humped into low ridges and pitted with star-shadows; walking could be hazardous in the dark. He decided to stay close to the cave and wait for morning. It was a fortunate decision.

Afterwards, he wondered what would have happened, if he had moved. Would he have woken with the sunrise – or never woken at all? His dreams always seemed to have a purpose, even if he wasn’t sure what it was, and formerly he had felt somehow protected – at least until his materialization became more solid. But with this dream he realized he was on his own, vulnerable to dangers he didn’t understand. He was being transported into an alien world without guidance or aid, swept blindly towards some hidden precipice. In that moment, the knowledge terrified him even more than the fear that he might not get back.

The dawn came slowly, paling the sky to the east (he assumed it was east), fading the pink half moon to a feather-like
translucency. Morning twilight reached across the emptiness, showing him a desert of sand and rock, ribbed with the wave-patterns of some prehistoric ocean, veined with river-swirls long gone dry. A double line of boulders snaked up the slope towards him; the ground there was particularly uneven, rearing into knife-edged crests and swollen into bumps and mounds. When the sun’s arc finally lifted over the horizon colour spilled across the world: the sand was a pale terracotta, the rocks cream, furrowed with grey, torn or eroded here and there to reveal a core of sky-blue, or blood-orange, or raw-beef-red. For a second he was entranced with the terrible harsh beauty of it; then he was aware of pain. Sudden, blazing pain. Where the dawn touched his hand he saw it reddening, beginning to blister. He could feel his face doing the same. He bolted back to the slot and wriggled into the welcome shadow of the cave. The pain eased, but only a little, and then the relief set in, as he thought of how it would have been if the sun had found him exposed on that shelterless landscape, shoeless and pyjama-clad …

He could peer out through the slot, though the naked light stung his eyes. He saw what he thought were birds circling, very high up, perhaps vultures. As they flew lower he realized they were xaurians, but not like the ones he had seen in the city. These were riderless, maybe a little smaller, and their colours varied: many were dark grey or black, some blotched and spotted, one white. The xaurians they ride are domesticated, he thought; they’ve been specially bred. These are wild ones. Interest diverted him from the pain of his burned skin. He wondered what they found to eat, out here in the desert.

One dropped suddenly, wings and body streamlining into an arrow. Whatever it had seen, it missed, but shortly after it stooped again, rising this time with a snake in its hind claws which writhed like a whiplash, trying to bite. Nathan
remembered Eric had said there were few creatures who could resist the growing levels of pollution, but he supposed that if you could survive in the desert, you could survive almost anything. He shrank back into the cave for a while, closing his eyes to rest them. When he looked again there were xaurians approaching, in a V-formation of three. They had riders. A patrol.

The wild reptiles veered away from them hut only to a safe distance, where they spiralled slowly, watching the intruders. The patrol dipped low – ‘They’re coming in to land,’ Nathan murmured with a rush of anxiety. They had to be aiming for the cave – there was nowhere else – but the entrance should be too narrow to admit them. Close to, he saw they looked different from other patrols, black-clad, with scarlet insignia on their foreheads. It came to him that they must be some illicit group, raiders or terrorists from a subversive organization. He tried to memorize their scarlet emblem, an intricate design set in a circle, but although he knew he would recognize it if he saw it again he didn’t think he would be able to draw it. The foremost rider drifted to the ground near the top of the slope and dismounted, glancing warily around. Even though he was used to seeing the hoods Nathan found the figure peculiarly sinister, with its black-goggled stare and the shapeless mesh hiding every feature. There was something in its stance, a sort of hot-wired alertness, a slimness of the shoulders, a suggestion of poise. He thought it might be a woman. Not a woman like Halmé, with a face of magic and legend, but a lithe athletic creature, deadly as a tigress.

He thought: She’s thin enough to get through the cave entrance …

The other two hovered but didn’t land. The rider began to climb the last of the slope while the xaurian waited, untethered. Suddenly it rose on a wingbeat, beak open in a scream.
Nathan saw the ground twitch: the twin lines of boulders began to heave upwards. The earthbound rider stumbled. Of the two who were airborne, one swung off into an ascending curve, the other plunged down to rescue his companion. What happened next left Nathan almost too amazed for fear.

There was a deep rumble – not the crack of rending stone, more like a growl in the belly of the earth – and a huge section of the hillside simply broke away, hoisting itself as though forced by subterranean pressures. Sand billowed in clouds around it; the humps and boulders tilted but didn’t fall. A crevasse split open to reveal a gleam of black surrounded with smoky bronze. There was an instant of confusion, and then Nathan understood what he was seeing. The monster had been lying on the slope, its hide the colour and texture of the desert, blending with it, becoming a part of the sandscape, vast and invisible. If he had strayed a few yards further, he would have stood on it. The flattened skull was perhaps forty feet across, surmounted by a double ridge of bone; the spines continued down its neck and along the spreading mass of its body, also somewhat flattened like those of certain desert-dwelling lizards which Nathan had seen on nature programmes. Somewhere below the remote coil of its tail rasped over the ground, raising more dust-clouds. Nearer, jagged rocks uncrooked into elbow-joints; a splayed foot shifted, making the cave vibrate. The fallen rider was trying to get up, balanced unsteadily on the head. Above her another rider descended, his xaurian thrashing the air, its wings dwarfed by the monster beneath. Claws seized the woman’s arms – Nathan was now quite sure it was a woman – and lifted her up, but she wasn’t weightless, and the xaurian strained to gain height. The riderless reptile was also in flight, wheeling round them. Still higher up, against the sun, the third xaurian was being watched by its wild cousins. There
was a stab of flame from some unidentifiable weapon, and they sheered off. The woman kept her head. Dangling in midair, with a piece of the desert rearing towards her, she managed a call, hoarse but imperative – repeated it, more clearly – and her mount swerved to dip beneath her.

But the monster was not so easily baulked. Encumbered by its own weight, slow from long slumber, it was starting to awaken fully, its movements accelerating. The great head swung round; the jaws parted, displaying triple rows of haphazard teeth. A long, deep blue tongue unravelled, thick as a conveyer belt, wrapping itself round the lowest xaurian, plucking it from the air like an insect. There was a snap as the maw closed, the crunch of teeth biting through bone. A flailing wing-tip went limp and was swallowed up. The second rider tugged on the reins, exhorting his beast with word and spell, and gradually it began to pull away, struggling skywards with its burden. The behemoth gulped the last of its meal, belched foul air and turned in search of the next.

That was when the third rider returned. Nathan, watching in an agony of helplessness and horror, had almost forgotten him. He dived into the monster’s line of vision, skimming the knobbled landscape of its skull, sweeping the crevasse of one eye with an outthrust pinion. He must have punctured the surface, for a bubble of white fluid appeared, blurring its gleam, and red welled within the white. With an alarming burst of speed the head twisted, snatching at this new prey – but the smaller reptile was too quick and too agile, swerving out of range and looping round for another pass. Again it dived, aiming for the other eye … Nathan saw the rider point with what must be a kind of gun. But there was a brain somewhere in the giant skull, and the monster learned from its mistakes. The eyelid snapped shut – the flame-flash sparked harmlessly off its hide. The head jerked back, the tongue was
unleashed in a movement too swift for sight to follow. For an instant Nathan saw rider and mount struggling in a blue coil of muscle, then they were sucked into the vast gape of its maw.

It took longer over its meal this time, grinding at the morsel as if something about it was too tough or stringy to be effortlessly pulverized. When the jaws parted so the tongue could explore every cranny, Nathan saw fragments of black mesh caught between its teeth. He felt sick.

The last of the invaders were further away by now, but not far enough. The xaurian had landed so the woman could climb up behind her rescuer and then taken off again, flying more comfortably with the extra load transferred from its claws to its back. But it was gaining height too slowly, and the monster, its hunger whetted rather than sated, was alert and fast. Its whole body swivelled, the sagging belly grinding rock into dust, feet pounding the earth so that the desert trembled. A sandstorm swirled in its wake. Nathan found he was pleading or praying: ‘No! No! Please no …’ The neck extended, the enormous mouth unclosed …

And then the wild xaurians came, zooming out of the sky, homing in on the lunging head. The white one led them, and the lashing of their wings forced both eyes to close, and the blind muzzle swayed to and fro, snapping at air. Whatever hatred they might have felt for their domesticated kin, evidently it had been undermined by the sight of the two xaurians being eaten. They knew their adversary, and they could manoeuvre far quicker than their larger cousins. They swarmed around the skull, beating it with their leathern pinions, clawing at every exposed glint of eye, the inside of a nostril, the shallow indentation of an ear. The blue tongue flicked out, probing, but without vision it could not snare them. The laden xaurian gradually drew away, its flight
laboured, the rescued woman, sitting behind the saddle, holding tight to her companion. Nathan was almost sure they were going to make it.

But the desert sun was growing dim, and the dream was slipping away. He tried to hang on, desperate to be certain of their escape, to catch the last moments of the xaurian attack, but it was no good. The darkness of the cave poured into his mind, filling it from edge to edge, and when it receded it was daylight in his own world.

‘Where were you last night?’ Ned Gable asked.

‘What?’

‘I woke in the night, and you weren’t there.’

‘You should do something about your sleeping problem,’ Nathan said, ignoring the coldness that trickled down his spine. ‘You’re always waking in the night and imagining things. Anyway, if I really wasn’t there, I must have been in the loo.’

‘Okay,’ said his friend. ‘If that’s all you want to tell me. But if you’ve got a cloak of invisibility, you might share it with me.’

‘I wish,’ Nathan grinned.

‘How come your face is burnt?’

‘Oh …’ Nathan touched his cheek, which felt very tender. ‘Must’ve been yesterday. Tennis.’

‘I thought brown skin didn’t get sunburnt,’ Ned said.

‘Depends on the sun.’

Back home, Annie was surprised to receive a visit from Alex Birnbaum, who wanted to take her out to lunch. She suspected he was after information about Rowena, but in fact he talked about painting and sculpture, sounding like someone who knew his stuff, and about himself, sounding like every other man she had ever met. But it was a pleasant meal and she
enjoyed herself, returning to the shop with an inward tweak of guilt, because she didn’t feel she
should
be enjoying herself quite so often. They had pulled a dead body from the river, and an exile from another world was living at Thornyhill, and Nathan was in danger. This was no time to start having fun.