The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (32 page)

Dumbly, Elizabeth nodded.

The nurse swiftly wrapped the baby in a soft towel and hurried out of the birthing room. Elizabeth had all she could do to keep up as the woman raced down flight after flight of stone stairs, all empty and echoing and lit only by the tiny ruby and amber lamps. They finally came to a cellar. A dank corridor led to the outer wall of the town and a great, locked water-gate, beside which was an indoor anchorage full of deserted small boats. The gate had a wicket with a bronze bolt, which the exotic woman shot open.

"Guard your mind," she warned, and stepped outside onto the fog-obscured dock.

There were lights out there, and they converged with alarming speed, making no sound whatsoever. Then came a single deep-green glow that became a sphere some four meters across, rolling on the surface of the water and burning the mist to shreds as it approached the dock.

With great caution, Elizabeth pried apart the fabric of the illusion and looked inside. There was a boat, a punt rather, with a dwarfish fellow poling and a round-cheeked little woman sitting in the bows with a covered basket in her lap.

So you see us, do you?

Elizabeth staggered as a barrage of lightning seemed to explode behind her eyes Her tongue swelled as if to strangle her. The flesh of her hands blistered, blackened, burst, and cooked in a living flame.

That'll show the upstart!

"I warned you," said the Tanu woman. Elizabeth felt the tall one's arms about her, holding her up. She saw only the glowing ball receding into the mist. Her mouth was normal, her hands unhurt.

"The Firvulag are operant metapsychics of a sort. All most of them can do is farsense and spin illusions, but those can be strong enough to drive an unready mind mad. We handle them well enough, at Grand Combat time and at most other times, too But you must not let them take you unaware."

The baby was gone. After a few seconds the green glow vanished as well, and daylight broke fitfully through rags of vapor. Far up on the battlements, a woman's voice was singing alien words to a familiar melody.

"Well go back now," the nurse said "My Lord and Lady will be very grateful to you. You must receive proper thanks, then refreshment and rest. There is a small family ceremony, naming the child and giving her the first tiny golden torc. They will wish you to hold the baby It is a great honor."

"Imagine me as fairy godmother," Elizabeth murmured. "What a world! Are you going to name her after me as well?"

"She already has a name It is traditional among us to give anew the name of one who has recently passed on to Tana's peace. The baby will be called Epone, and the Goddess grant that she be more fortunate than the last who bore that name."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Amerie came down to the lakeshore where the freed prisoners were ballasting their hasI'lly inflated boats.

"I've had to sedate Felice. She was ready to tear the poor noddy apart."

"Not surprising," Claude growled. "Once I'd thought the matter through, I was tempted along those lines myself."

Richard was treading siphon bulbs with both feet, flooding the interstices of his and Claude's beached dinghies while the old man loaded equipment into the two small decamole craft Richard had changed back into his pirate costume, curtly telling the nun to keep his spacer's coverall "for the duration." Now he glowered at her. "Maybe Dougal did us all a favor without knowing it. How do we know what Felice would turn into once she got hold of a golden torc? "

"There's that," Claude had to admit. "But if she'd got it, we wouldn't have to worry about any immediate danger from the soldiers. As it is, some kind of armed force is going to be breathing down our necks any minute now. We couldn't have been far from the next fort when the fight started."

Amerie said, "You two come up and help me with Felice when you finish here. Yosh has been going through the baggage packs, retrieving some of our stuff."

"Any weapons?" Richard asked.

"They seem to have left ours back at the castle. But most of the tools are there. No maps or compasses, I'm afraid."

Claude and Richard shared a glance. The paleontologist said, "Then it's seat-of-the-pants navigation and devil take the hindmost. You go on up, Amerie. We'll be along in a few minutes."

In the aftermath of the fight, when all of the prisoners had been released, they had held a hasty conference and decided that the best chance of escape lay in taking to the water, one or two people to a decamole dinghy from the Survival Units. Only the five Gypsies had ignored Claude's warning about the dangers of riding the torc-susceptible chalikos. They had gone back to attack the suspension bridge guard post after donning the gory armor of the slain escort and taking most of the soldiers' weaponry.

The remaining escapees had reestablished the bonding forged back at the auberge, the original Groups coming together once more to plan their collective getaway. Claude, the only person with a working knowledge of the Pliocene landscape, had suggested two possible escape routes. The one that would take them most quickly to rugged country entailed a short voyage northeast, across the narorw upper portion of the Lac de Bresse to canyons leading into the heavily forested Vosges highlands. This had the disadvantage of crossing the main trail to Finiah on the opposite shore of the lake; but if they managed to elude mounted patrols, they could reach high country before nightfall and hole up among the rocks.

The second route would have them sailing southeast across the widest part of the lake to the shore of the Jura piedmont some sixty kilometers away, then continuing south into the mountain range itself. There seemed an excellent chance that the land in that direction was completely uninhabited, since beyond the Jura lay the Alps. On the other hand, the lakeside forts were likely to have boats of their own that could be used for pursuit. The escapees might outsail the Tanu minions; but the breeze was fitful and the nearly cloudless sky suggested that the air might go dead calm as it had the day before. If the boats were becalmed at nightfall, they might attract the attention of the Firvulag.

Basil had confidently elected for the Jura route, while Claude's conservatism inclined him to hold out for the Vosges. But the climber was most persuasive to the majority, so in the end it was decided that all of the time-travelers except the remnant of Group Green and Yosh, the surviving ronin, would go south. The prisoners had hasI'lly unloaded their baggage from the chalikos and followed a gully down to a tiny beach below the cliff. There boats could be launched. A few of the small craft were already spreading their sails when Richard completed ballasting the two Green boats and scrambled back up the embankment in search of the others.

He discovered Claude, Amerie, and Yosh standing over Felice's unconscious body. The Japanese warrior said, "I've found Claude's woodworking tools and the knives and hatchets and saws from our Survival and Smallholder Units." He held out a hideously stained packet to Richard. "And here are also a soldier's bow and arrows that the Gypsies overlooked."

"We're grateful, Yosh," said the old man. "The bow could be very important. We have very little food except for the survival rations, and the kits have only snares and fishing gear. The people going south with Basil will have time to make new weapons if they reach the Jura shore. But our Group will be in much more danger of land pursuit. We'll have to keep moving and do our hunting on the run."

"But you should go with us, Yosh," Amerie said. "Won't you change your mind?"

"I have my own Survival Unit and Tat's lance. I'll take the rest of the tools that I scavenged down to the people on the shore. But I won't go with them, and I won't go with you." He gestured to the sky, where dark specks wore already circling in the morning gold. "I have a duty here. The Reverend Sister has given my poor friend the Blessing of Departure. But Tat must not be left to the scavengers. When I've finished, I plan to head due north on foot to the River Marne. It joins the Pliocene Seine and the Seine flows into the Atlantic, I don't think the Tanu will bother to track one man."

"Well, don't hang around here too long," Richard said dubiously.

The ronin knelt swiftly beside Felice's limp form and kissed her brow. His grim eyes swept those of the others. "You must take good care of this mad child. We owe her our freedom, and if God wills she may yet accomplish her purpose. The potential rests in her."

"We know," said the nun. "Go blessed, Yoshimitsu-san."

The warrior got to his feet, bowed, and left them.

"Time for us to go, too," said Claude. He and Amerie picked up the pathetically light body of the girl while Richard gathered her helmet and pack, together with tools and weapons.

"I can sail single-handed," the pirate said when they reached the waiting boats. "Put Felice in with me and you two follow."

They shoved off, the last to set sail, and relaxed only when they were far out from land. The lake waters were cold and of an opaque blue, fed by rivers running out of the Jura and the Vosges forest to the northeast. Amerie stared at the receding shore, where carrion birds were gradually descending.

"Claude... I've been thinking. Why didn't Epone die sooner from those dreadful wounds? She was literally torn to pieces before Richard and Yosh and Dougal ever got near her. She should have bled to death or died from hypovolemic shock. But she didn't"

"The people at the fort told you that the Tanu were nearly invulnerable. What did you think they meant?"

"I don't know, perhaps I assumed that the exotics were able to use their coercive power to fend off attackers. But I never dreamed a Tanu could survive such physical punishment. It's hard not to think of them as approximately human, given that breeding scheme Epone spoke to us about"

"Even human beings without metafunctions have been mighty tenacious of life. I've seen things in the colonies that were damn near miraculous. And when you consider the enhancement of mental powers that the Tanu achieve with the torc . . ."

"I wonder if they have regenerative facilities here in Exile?"

"I should think so, in the cities. And God knows what other kinds of technology they have. So far, we've only seen the torcs, the mind assayer, and that frisking device they used on us when we first came through the time-portal."

"Ah, yes. And that brings us to the lethal dagger."

The old man stripped off his bush jacket and pillowed his back against one of the boat seats. "I don't doubt that our anthropologist friend Bryan could tell us all about the legendary faerie antipathy toward iron. He'd probably explain it in terms of the ancient tensions between Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures... Be that as it may, European folklore is almost universal in believing that iron is repugnant or even deadly to the Old People."

The nun burst out, "Oh, for heaven's sake, Claude! Epone was an exotic, not some bloody elf!"

"Then you tell me why bear-dog bites and dismemberment and stab wounds from a bronze sword didn't finish her off, while a single thrust from a steel knife blade did."

Amerie considered. "It may be that the iron interferes in some way with the function of the torc. The blood of the Tanu is red, just like ours, and probably just as iron-rich. Their bodies and minds and the torc might operate in a delicate harmony that could be upset by the introduction of a gross mass of iron. Iron might even wonk them up if it just came near the body's intimate aura. Remember Stein and his battle-axe? None of the castle people was able to prevent him from doing terrible damage, which didn't strike me as strange at the time. But with what we know now, it seems significant.

'They frisked us thoroughly enough," Claude said. "I can understand why the guardians weren't able to pry Stein loose from his axe. But how did Felice's knife slip through?"

"I can't imagine, unless they were careless and didn't sweep her leg. Or perhaps the gold of the scabbard confused the detector. It suggests possibilities for counter-tactics."

Claude studied her through half-closed lids. There was an intensity about her that was new and startling. "Now you're beginning to sound like Felice! That child has no qualms about taking on the whole Tanu race. Never mind that they control the friggerty planet!"

Amerie flashed him an odd smile. "But it's our planet. And six million years from now, we'll be here. And they won't."

She snugged the I'lller under her arm and kept the boat racing eastward, its sail taut before the freshening breeze.

They came up behind a marshy island, hauled down sails and unstepped and deflated masts and centreboards. Armloads of reeds and young willows were cut to disguise the boats. They substituted rear mounted decamole sculling oars for the sailing rudders. A person crouched low in the stern could impart a barely perceptible forward motion by wagging the oar back and forth.

Richard protested, "It'll take us two hours to travel the half klom to the shore at this rate."

"Keep your voice down," Claude warned him. "Sound travels over water." He brought his boat close to Richard's. "Somewhere on that shore is the trail, maybe even the fort where we were scheduled to stop for sleep this morning. We've got to be careful about showing ourselves unI'll we're sure the coast is clear. "Richard laughed nervously. "The coast is clear! So that's where the cliche came from! Probably pirates... "

"Shut up, son," said the old man, weariness making his low voice harsh. "Just follow me from here on in and pretend you're a collection of flotsam."

Claude sculled so slowly that there was no wake; they seemed to drift from islet to islet, gradually approaching a low-lying shore where reeds and sedges grew more than five meters tall and long-shanked water birds with plumage of pink and blue and dazzling white stalked the shallows, jabbing at frogs and fish with their beaks.

The sun rose higher. It became excruciatingly hot and humid. Some kind of biting midge zeroed in on them, trapped as they were beneath the concealing greenery, and raised itching welts before they could find repellant in their awkwardly stowed packs. After a tedious interval of paddling, they scraped bottom on a jungle mudflat where many of the bamboos had trunks as thick as a man's thigh. Broadleaf evergreen trees perfumed the air with sickly sweet flowers. There was a game trail in the mud, heavily trampled by large flat feet. It looked as though it would lead them to higher ground.