Land and Overland Omnibus

CHAPTER 21



The rear wall of the cave was partially hidden by a mound of large pebbles and rock fragments which over the centuries had washed down through a natural chimney. Toller enjoyed gazing at the mound because he knew the Overlanders lived inside it.

He had not actually seen them, and therefore did not know if they resembled miniature men or animals, but he was keenly aware of their presence—because they used lanterns.

The light from the lanterns shone out through chinks in the rock at intervals which were not attuned to the outside world’s rhythm of night and day. Toller liked to think of Overlanders going about their own business in there, secure in their tumble-down fortress, with no concern for anything which might be happening in the universe at large.

It was the nature of his delirium that even in periods when he felt himself to be perfectly lucid one tiny lantern would sometimes continue to gleam from the heart of the pile. At those times he took no pleasure from the experience. Afraid for his sanity, he would stare at the point of light, willing it to vanish because it had no place in the rational world. Sometimes it would obey quickly, but there were occasions when it took hours to dim out of existence, and then he would cling to Gesalla, making her the lifeline which joined him to all that was familiar and normal…

“Well, I don’t think you’re strong enough to travel,” Gesalla said firmly, “so there is no point in carrying on with this discussion.”

“But I’m almost fully recovered,” Toller protested, waving his arms to prove the point.

“Your tongue is the only part of you which has recovered, and even that is getting too much exercise. Just be quiet for a while and allow me to get on with my work.” She turned her back on him and used a twig to stir the pot in which his dressings were being boiled.

After seven days the wounds on his face and left hand needed virtually no attention, but the twin punctures in his side were still discharging. Gesalla cleaned them and changed the dressings every few hours, a regimen which necessitated re-using the meagre stock of pads and bandages she had been able to make.

Toller had little doubt that he would have died but for her ministrations, but his gratitude was tinged with concern for her safety. He guessed that the initial confusion in the fleet’s landing zone must have rivalled that of the departure, but it seemed little short of a miracle to him that he and Gesalla had since remained unmolested for so long. With each passing day, as the fever abated, his sense of urgency increased.

We are leaving here in the morning, my love, he thought. Whether you agree or not.

He leaned back on the bed of folded quilts, trying to curb his impatience, and allowed his gaze to roam the panoramic view which the cave mouth afforded. Grassy slopes, dotted here and there with unfamiliar trees, folded gently down for about a mile to the west, to the edge of a large lake whose water was a pure indigo seeded with sun-jewels. The northern and southern shores were banked forests, receding and narrowing bands of a colour which—as on Land—was a composite of a million speckles ranging from lime green to deep red, representing trees at different stages of their leaf cycles. The lake stretched all the way to a western horizon composed of the ethereal blue triangles of distant mountains, above which a pure sky soared up to encompass the disk of the Old World.

It was a scene which Toller found unutterably beautiful, and in the first days in the cave he had been unable to distinguish it with any certainty from other products of his delirium. His memory of those days was patchy. It had taken him some time to understand that he had not succeeded in firing a cannon, and that Gesalla had made an independent decision to go back for him. She had tried to make little of the matter, claiming that had Leddravohr been victorious he would soon have advertised the fact by coming in search of her. Toller had known otherwise.

Lying in the hushed peace of early morning, watching Gesalla go about the chores she had set for herself, he felt a surge of admiration for her courage and resourcefulness. He would never understand how she had managed to get him into the saddle of Leddravohr’s bluehorn, load up with supplies from the gondola, and lead the beast on foot for many miles before finding the cave. It would have been a considerable feat for a man, but for a slightly-built woman facing an unknown planet and all its possible dangers on her own the achievement had been truly exceptional.

Gesalla is a truly exceptional woman, Toller thought. So how long will it be before she realises I have no intention of taking her off into the wilderness?

The sheer impracticability of his original plan had weighed heavily on Toller after his rationality had begun to return. Without a baby to consider it might have been possible for two adults to eke out some kind of fugitive existence in the forests of Overland—but if Gesalla was not already pregnant she would see to it that she became pregnant.

It had taken him some time to appreciate that the core of the problem also contained its solution. With Leddravohr dead Prince Pouche would have become King, and Toller knew him to be a dry, dispassionate man who would abide by Kolcorron’s traditional leniency with pregnant women—especially as Leddravohr was the only one who could have testified about Gesalla’s use of the cannon against him.

The task ahead, Toller had decided—while doing his best to ignore the gleam of the single, persistent Overlander’s lantern in the mound of rubble—was to keep Gesalla alive until she was demonstrably with child. A hundred days seemed a reasonable target, but the very act of setting a term had somehow increased and aggravated his unease about the fleeting passage of time. How was he to strike the proper balance between leaving early and only being able to travel slowly, and leaving late—when the swiftness of a deer might prove insufficient?

“What are you brooding about?” Gesalla said, removing the boiling pot from the heat.

“About you—and about preparing to leave here in the morning.”

“I told you, you aren’t ready.” She knelt beside him to inspect his dressings and the touch of her hands sent a pleasurable shock racing down to his groin.

“I think another part of me is starting to recover,” he said.

“That’s something else you aren’t ready for.” She smiled as she dabbed his forehead with a damp cloth. “You can have some stew instead.”

“A fine substitute,” he grumbled, making an unsuccessful attempt to touch her breasts as she slid away from him. The sudden movement of his arm, slight though it was, produced a sharp pain in his side and made him wonder how he would fare trying to get astride the bluehorn in the morning.

He pushed the worry to the back of his thoughts and watched Gesalla as she prepared a simple breakfast. She had found a flattish, slightly concave stone to use as a hob. By mingling on it tiny pinches of pikon and halvell brought from the ship, she was able to create a smoke-free heat which would not betray their whereabouts to pursuers. When she had finished warming the stew—a thick mixture of grain, pulses and shreds of saltbeef—she passed a dish of it to him and allowed him to feed himself.

Toller had been amused to note—echo of the old Gesalla he thought he had known—that among the “essentials” she had salvaged from the gondola were dishes and table utensils. There was a poignancy about eating in such conditions, with commonplace domestic items framed in the pervasive strangeness of a virgin world; with the romance which could have suffused the moment abnegated by uncertainties and danger.

Toller was not really hungry, but he ate steadily with a determination to win back his strength as quickly as possible. Apart from occasional snuffles from the tethered bluehorn the only sounds reaching the cave from elsewhere were the rolling reports of brakka pollination discharges. The frequency of the explosions indicated that brakka were plentiful throughout the region, and were a reminder of the question which had first been posed by Gesalla—if the other plant forms of Overland were unknown on Land, why did the two worlds have the brakka in common?

Gesalla had collected handfuls of grass, leaves, flowers and berries for joint scrutiny, and—with the possible exception of the grass, upon which only a botanist could have passed judgment—all had shared the common factor of strangeness. Toller had reiterated his idea that the brakka was a universal form, one which would be found on any planet, but although he was unused to pondering such matters he recognised that the notion had an unsatisfactory philosophical feel to it, one which made him wish he could turn to Lain for guidance.

“There’s another ptertha,” Gesalla exclaimed. “Look! I can see seven or eight of them going towards the water.”

Toller looked in the direction she was indicating and had to change the focus of his eyes several times before he picked out the bubble-glints of the colourless, near-invisible spheres. They were slowly drifting down the hillside on the air flow generated by the night-time cooling of the surface.

“You’re better at spotting those things than I am,” he said ruefully. “That one yesterday was almost in my lap before I saw it.”

The ptertha which had drifted in on them soon after littlenight on the previous day had come to within ten paces of Toller’s bed, and in spite of what he had learned from Lain the nearness of it had inspired much of the dread he would have experienced on Land. Had he been mobile he would probably have been unable to prevent himself from hurling his sword through it. The globe had hovered nearby for a few seconds before sailing away down the hillside in a series of slow ruminative bounds.

“Your face was a picture!” Gesalla paused in her eating to parody an expression of fear.

“I’ve just thought of something,” Toller said. “Have we any writing materials?”

“No. Why?”

“You and I are the only two people on the whole of Overland who know what Lain wrote about the ptertha. I wish I had thought of telling Chakkell. All those hours together on the ship—and I didn’t even mention it!”

“You weren’t to know there would be brakka trees and ptertha here. You thought you were leaving all that behind.”

Toller was gripped by a new and greater urgency which had nothing to do with his personal aspirations. “Listen, Gesalla, this is the most important thing either of us will ever have the chance to do. You have got to make sure that Pouche and Chakkell hear and understand Lain’s ideas.

“If we leave the brakka trees alone, to live out their time and die naturally, the ptertha here will never become our enemies. Even a modest amount of culling—the way they did it in Chamteth—is probably too much because the ptertha there had turned pink and that’s a sign that…” He stopped speaking as he saw that Gesalla was staring at him, her expression of odd blend of concern and accusation.

“Is there anything the matter?”

“You said I had to make sure that Pouche and…” Gesalla set her dish down and came to kneel beside him. “What’s going to happen to us, Toller?”

He forced himself to laugh then exaggerated the effects of the pain it caused, playing for time in which to cover up his blunder. “We’re going to found our own dynasty, that’s what is going to happen to us. Do you think I would let any harm come to you?”

“I know you wouldn’t—and that’s why you frightened me.”

“Gesalla, all I meant was that we must leave a message here … or somewhere else where it will be found and taken to the King. I’m not able to move around much, so I have to turn the responsibility over to you. I’ll show you how to make charcoal, and then we’ll find something to…”

Gesalla was slowly shaking her head and her eyes were magnified by the first tears he had ever seen there. “It’s all unreal, isn’t it? It’s all just a dream.”

“Flying to Overland was just a dream—once—but now we’re here, and in spite of everything we’re still alive.” He drew her down to lie beside him, her head cushioned on his shoulder. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, Gesalla. All I can promise is that … how did you put it? … that we are not going to surrender life to the butchers. That has to be enough for us. Now, why don’t you rest and let me watch over you, just for a change?”

“All right, Toller.” Gesalla made herself comfortable, fitting her body to his whilst being careful of his injuries, and in an amazingly short time she was asleep. Her transition from anxious wakefulness to the tranquillity of sleep was announced by the faintest of snores, and Toller smiled as he stored the event in his memory for use in future bantering. The only home they were likely to know on Overland would be built of such insubstantial timbers.

He tried to stay awake, to watch over her, but the vapours of an insidious weariness were coiling in his head—and the last Overlander’s lantern was again glowing in the rock pile.

The only way to escape from it was to close his eyes…

The soldier standing over him was holding a sword.

Toller tried to moves to take some defensive action in spite of his weakness and the encumbrance of Gesalla’s body draped across his own, then he saw that the sword in the soldier’s hand was Leddravohr’s, and even in his befuddled state he was able to assess the situation correctly.

It was too late to do anything, anything at all—because his little domain had already been surrounded, conquered and overrun.

Further evidence came from the shifting of the light as other soldiers moved around beyond the immediate area of the cave mouth. There were the sounds of men beginning to talk as they realised that silence was no longer required, and from somewhere nearby came the snorting and slithering of a bluehorn as it made its way down the bill. Toller squeezed Gesalla’s shoulder to bring her awake, and although she remained immobile he felt her spasm of alarm.

The soldier with the sword moved away and his place was taken by a slit-eyed major, whose head was in near-silhouette against the sky as he looked down at Toller. “Can you stand up?”

“No—he’s too ill,” Gesalla said, rising to a kneeling position.

“I can stand.” Toller caught her arm. “Help me, Gesalla—I prefer to be on my feet at this time.” With her assistance he achieved a standing position and faced the major. He was dully surprised to find that, when he should have been oppressed by failure and prospects of death, he was discomfited by the trivial fact that he was naked.

“Well, major,” he said, “what is it you want of me?”

The major’s face was professionally impassive. “The King will speak to you now.”

He moved aside and Toller saw the paunchy figure of Chakkell approaching. His dress was subdued and plain, suitable for cross-country riding, but suspended from his neck was a huge blue jewel which Toller had seen only once before, when it had been worn by Prad. Chakkell had retrieved Leddravohr’s sword from the first soldier and was carrying it with the blade leaning on his right shoulder, a neutral position which could quickly become one of attack. His swarthy well-padded face and brown scalp were gleaming in the equatorial heat.

He came within two paces of Toller and surveyed him from head to toe. “Well, Maraquine, I promised I would remember you.”

“Majesty, I daresay I have given you and your loved ones good cause to remember me.” Toller was aware of Gesalla drawing closer to him, and for her sake he went on to rid his words of any possible ambiguity. “A fall of a thousand miles would have…”

“Don’t start rhyming at me again,” Chakkell cut in. “And lie down, man, before you fall down!”

He nodded to Gesalla, ordering her to ease Toller down on to the quilts, and signalled for the major and the rest of his escort to withdraw. When they had retreated out of earshot he squatted in the dirt and, unexpectedly, lobbed the black sword over Toller and into the dimness of the cave.

“We are going to have a brief conversation,” he said, “and not a word of it is to be repeated. Is that clear?”

Toller nodded uncertainly, wondering if he dared introduce hope to the confusion of his thoughts and emotions.

“There is a certain amount of ill-feeling towards you among the nobility and among the military who completed the crossing,” Chakkell said comfortably. “After all, not many men have committed regicide twice in the space of three days. It can be dealt with, however. There is a great air of practicality in our new statelet—and the settlers appreciate that loyalty to one living king is more beneficial to the health than a similar regard for two dead kings. Are you wondering about Pouche?”

“Does he live?”

“He lives, but he was quick to see that the subtleties of his kind of statesmanship would be inappropriate to the situation we have here. He is more than happy to relinquish his claims to the throne—if a chair made from old gondola parts can be dignified with that name.”

It came to Toller that he was seeing Chakkell as he had never seen him before—cheerful, loquacious, at ease with his environment. Was it simply that he preferred supremacy for himself and his offspring in a seedling society to preordained secondary role in the long-established and static Kolcorron? Or was it that he possessed an adventurous spirit which had been liberated by the unique circumstances of the great migration? Looking closely at Chakkell, encouraged by his instincts, Toller experienced a sudden upwelling of relief and the purest kind of joy.

Gesalla and I are going to have children, he thought. And it doesn’t matter that she and I will have to die some day, because our children will have children, and the future stretches out before us … on and on … on and on, except that…

One reality dissolved around Toller and he found himself standing on a rocky outcrop to the west of Ro-Atabri. He was gazing through his telescope at the sprawled body of his brother, reading that last communication which had nothing to do with revenge or personal regrets, but which—as befitted Lain’s compassionate intellect—addressed itself to the welfare of millions as yet unborn.

“Prince … Majesty…” Toller raised himself on one elbow the better to confront Chakkell with the truth which had been placed in his keeping, but the incautious torsion of his body lanced him with an agony which stilled his voice and dropped him back into his bedding.

“Leddravohr came very near to killing you, didn’t he?” Chakkell’s voice had lost all of its lightness.

“That doesn’t matter,” Toller said, smoothing Gesalla’s hair as she bent over the renewed fire of the wounds in his side. “You knew my brother and what he was?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Forget all about me—my brother lives in my body, and he is speaking to you through my mouth…” Toller went on, battling through riptides of nausea and weakness to paint a word-picture of the tortured triangular relationship involving humankind, the brakka tree and the ptertha. He described the symbiotic partnership between brakka and ptertha, using inspiration and informed imagination where real knowledge failed.

As in all cases of true symbiosis, both parties derived benefit from the association. The ptertha bred in high levels of the atmosphere, nourished—in all probability—by minute traces of pikon and halvell, or miglign gas, or brakka pollen, or by some derivation from the four. In return, the ptertha sought out all organisms who threatened the welfare of the brakka. Employing the blind forces of random mutation, they varied their internal composition until they chanced on an effective toxin, at which point—the path having been signposted—they concentrated and refined and aimed it to create a weapon capable of scourging the scourge, of removing from existence all traces of that which did not deserve to exist.

The way ahead for mankind on Overland lay in treating the brakka with the respect it deserved. Only dead trees should be used for their yield of super-hard materials and power crystals, and if the supply seemed insufficient it was incumbent on the immigrants to develop substitutes or to modify their way of life accordingly.

If they failed to do so, the history of humanity on Land would, inevitably, be repeated on Overland…

“I admit to being impressed,” Chakkell said when Toller had finally finished speaking. “There is no real proof that what you say is true, but it is worthy of serious consideration. Luckily for our generation, which has seen its full share of hardships, there is no need to make any hasty decisions. We have enough to worry about in the meantime.”

“You must not think that way,” Toller urged. “You are the ruler … and you have the unique opportunity … the unique responsibility…” He sighed and stopped speaking, yielding to a tiredness which seemed to dim the very heavens.

“Save your strength for another time,” Chakkell said gently. “I should let you rest now, but before I leave I’d like to know one more thing. Between you and Leddravohr—was it a fair contest?”

“It was almost fair … until he destroyed my sword with brakka slime.”

“But you overcame him just the same.”

“It was required of me.” Toller was experiencing the mysticism which can come with illness and utter weariness. “I was born to overcome Leddravohr.”

“Perhaps he knew that.”

Toller forced his gaze to steady on Chakkell’s face. “I don’t know what you…”

“I wonder if Leddravohr had any heart for all of this, for our brave new beginning,” Chakkell said. “I wonder if he pursued you—alone—because he divined that you were his Bright Road?”

“That idea,” Toller whispered, “has little appeal for me.”

“You need to rest.” Chakkell stood up and addressed himself to Gesalla. “Look after this man for my sake as well as your own—I have work for him. I think it would be better not to move him for some days yet, but you seem quite comfortable here. Do you need any supplies?”

“We could use more fresh water, Majesty,” Gesalla said. “Apart from that our wants are already satisfied.”

“Yes.” Chakkell studied her face for a moment. “I’m going to take your bluehorn because we have only seven all told, and the breeding must begin as soon as possible, but I will post guards nearby. Call them when you deem you are ready to leave here. Does that suit you?”

“Yes, Majesty—we are indebted.”

“I trust your patient will remember that when his health is recovered.” Chakkell turned and strode away towards the waiting soldiers, moving with the energetic assurance peculiar to those who feel themselves to be responding to the calls of destiny.

Later, when silence had again returned to the hillside, Toller awoke to see that Gesalla was passing the time by sorting and arranging her collection of leaves and flowers. She had spread them on the ground before her, and her lips were moving silently as she thoughtfully placed each specimen in an order of her own devising. Beyond her the vivid purity of Overland sparkled and advanced on the eye.

Toller cautiously raised himself in the bed. He glanced at the mound of rocky fragments in the rear of the cave, then turned his head away quickly, unwilling to risk seeing the tiny lantern gleaming at him. Only when it had ceased to shine altogether would he know for certain that the fever had entirely left his system, and until then he had no wish to be reminded of how close he had come to death and to losing all that Gesalla meant to him.

She looked up from her emergent patterns. “Did you see something back there?”

“There’s nothing,” he said, mustering a smile. “Nothing at all.”

“But I’ve noticed you staring at those rocks before. What is your secret?” Intrigued, and playing a game for his benefit, Gesalla came to him and knelt to share his line of sight. The movement brought her face very close to his, and he saw her eyes widen in surprise.

“Toller!” Her voice was that of a child, hushed with wonder. “There’s something shining in there!”

She rose to her feet with all the speed of which her weightless body was capable, stepped over him and ran into the cave.

Prey to a strange fear, Toller tried to call out a warning, but his throat was dry and the power of speech seemed to have deserted him. And Gesalla was already throwing the outermost stones aside. He watched numbly as she put her hands into the mound, lifted something heavy and bore it out to the brighter light at the entrance to the cave.

She knelt beside him, cradling the find on her thighs. It was a large flake of dark grey rock—but it was unlike any rock Toller had ever seen before. Running across and through it, integral to and yet differing from the stone, was a broad band of material which was white, but more than white, reflecting the sun like the waters of a distant lake at dawn.

“It’s beautiful,” Gesalla breathed, “but what is it?”

“I don’t…” Grimacing with pain, Toller reached for his clothing, found a pocket and brought out the strange memento given to him by his father. He placed it against the gleaming stratum in the stone, confirming what he already knew—that they were identical in composition.

Gesalla took the nugget from him and ran a fingertip across its polished surface. “Where did you get this?”

“My father … my real father … gave it to me in Chamteth just before he died. He told me he found it long ago. Before I was born. In the Redant province.”

“I feel strange.” Gesalla shivered as she looked up at the misty, enigmatic, watchful disk of the Old World. “Was ours not the first migration, Toller? Has it all happened before?”

“I think so—perhaps many times—but the important thing for us is to ensure that it never…” His weariness forced Toller to leave the sentence unfinished.

He laid the back of his hand on the lustrous strip within the rock, captivated by its coolness and its strangeness—and by silent intimations that, somehow, he could make the future differ from the past.