Land and Overland Omnibus

CHAPTER 7



"Gold! You have the gall to offer me gold!" Ragg Artoonl, infuriated, slapped the leather bag away with a calloused hand. It fell to the ground and partially opened, allowing a few squares of stamped yellow metal to spill into the wet grass.

"You're just as barmy as everybody says!" Lue Klo dropped to his knees and carefully retrieved his money. "Do you want to sell your section, or do you not?"

"I want to sell it all right—but I want real money. Good old-fashioned glass, that's what I want." Artoonl rubbed the thumb of one hand against the palm of the other, mimicking the counting of traditional Kolcorronian woven glass currency notes. "Glass!"

"It all bears the King's likeness," Klo protested.

"I want to spend the stuff—not hang it on a wall." Artoonl glowered around the small group of farmers. "Who has real money?"

"I have." Narbane Ellder sidled to the fore, fumbling in his pouch. "I've got two thousand royals here."

"I'll take it! The section is yours, and may you have better luck with it than I did." Artoonl was extending his hand for the money when Bartan Drumme stepped in between the two men and pushed them apart with a force he would have been unable to exert when he first turned to farming.

"What's the matter with you, Ragg Artoonl?" he said. "You can't sell off your land for a fraction of what it's worth."

"He can do as he pleases," the thwarted Ellder cut in, brandishing his wad of coloured squares.

"And I'm surprised at you" Bartan said to him, tapping him on the chest with an accusing finger. "Taking advantage of your neighbour when his mind is disturbed. What would Jop say about that? What would he say about this meeting?" Bartan glanced a challenge around the group of men who had come together in a tree-fringed hollow which offered some protection from the weather. A heavy belt of rain was drifting across the area, and the farmers in their sack-like hoods looked sullen and oddly furtive with their hunched shoulders and dripping features.

"There's nothing wrong with my mind." Artoonl stared resentfully at Bartan for a moment, then his face darkened even further as a new thought occurred to him. "This is all your fault, anyway. It was you who brought us to this place of misery."

"I'm sorry about what happened to your sister," Bartan said. "It was a terrible thing, but you have got to think straight about it and realise it's no reason to give up all you have worked for."

"Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?" Artoonl's flushed face expressed the kind of mistrust and hostility Bartan had encountered on first entering the commune. "What do you know about the land anyway, Mister Bead-stringer, Mister Brooch-mender?"

"I know Lue wouldn't be offering to buy your section unless he thought it worth his while. He's taking advantage of you."

"Watch your tongue," Ellder said, stepping closer to Bartan with his stubbled jaw thrust forward. "I grow more than a little weary of you, Mister—" he sought a fresh insult, eyes narrowing under the mental strain, and finally was obliged to copy Artoonl—"Bead-stringer."

Bartan looked around the group of cowled figures, assessing the general mood, and was both shocked and saddened to realise there was a genuine possibility of violence towards him if he remained. It was another indication, contrary to all his own arguments, that the farmers had indeed degenerated since occupying the Haunt. In the year that had passed since his marriage to Sondeweere he had seen their old spirit of camaraderie eroded and replaced by a mean competitiveness, with the largest and most successful families begrudging help to their neighbours. Jop Trinchil's mandate had been totally withdrawn from him, and—coincidentally—the loss of his authority had been accompanied by a spiritual and physical diminution. Shrunken and ill-looking, no longer able to exert a cohesive force on his flock, he was rarely seen outside the boundaries of his own family's section. Bartan had never expected to miss the old Trinchil, with his crassness and bullying ways, but the commune seemed to have lost direction without him.

"I am no longer a bead-stringer," Bartan said stiffly to the rainswept assembly. "More's the pity—because with my finest needle and thread I might have fashioned a slim necklace from all your brains. A very slim necklace."

His words drew an angry response from perhaps twenty throats. The sound was formless and blurred, like a conflict of sea waves in a narrow inlet, and yet by a trick of selective perception Bartan was able, or thought he was able, to isolate a single sentence: The fool would be better employed making a chastity belt.

"Who said that?" he shouted, almost reaching for the sword he had never worn.

The shadowed archways of several hoods turned towards each other and back to Bartan. "Who said what?" a man asked in tones of gleeful reasonableness.

"Does young Glave Trinchil still lend a hand with your chores?" another said. "If his strength ever fails I'll be willing to take his place—I've been known to plough an excellent furrow in my day."

Bartan came close to running forward and throwing himself at the last speaker, but commonsense and prudence held him in check. The peasants had won again, as they always did, because a dozen cudgels would always overcome one verbal smallsword. The same coarse clichés were ever cherished by them as something entirely original and precious, and thus their ignorance became their armour.

"I hope you will not be too distraught if I withdraw, gentlemen." He paused, hoping the sexual innuendo might have eased some tensions, but it had gone unnoticed. "I have business at the markets."

"I'll travel with you, if that's all right," Orice Shome said, falling in at Bartan's side as he walked away from the group. Shome was an itinerant labourer, one of the few who had recently been hired by members of the commune. He was a slightly wild-eyed young man, with most of one ear missing, but Bartan had heard no bad reports of him and was prepared to accept his company.

"Join me if you wish," Bartan said, "but doesn't Alrahen expect you to be at work?"

Shome held up a small kitbag. "I'm on the road again. Don't want to stay around here."

"I see." Bartan pulled his oilcloth hood closer around his shoulders and climbed up to the driving seat of his wagon. The warm rain was still coming down hard, but above the western horizon was a band of pale yellow which was growing wider by the minute, and he knew the weather would soon improve. Shome sat on the bench beside him, Bartan twitched the reins and his bluehorn moved off, its rain-slicked haunches rising and descending in a steady rhythm. Inexplicably, Bartan found himself dwelling on the taunts about his wife, and to redirect his thoughts he decided to strike up a conversation with his passenger.

"You weren't with Alrahen for long," he said. "Was he not a good employer?"

"I've had worse. It's the place I don't like. I'm leaving because there's something not right about the place."

"Not another scare-monger!" Bartan gave Shome a critical glance. "You don't look like a man who'd be given over to wild imaginings."

"Imaginings can be a lot worse than anything that comes at you from outside. That's probably why Artoonl's sister killed herself. And I heard that boy of hers didn't just disappear—I heard she slew him and buried the body."

Bartan became angry. "You seem to have heard a lot—for somebody with only one ear."

"There»'s no need to get touchy," Shome said, fingering the remnant of his ear.

"I'm sorry," Bartan said. "It's just that all this talk of… Tell me, where are you bound for next?"

"I'm not sure. Had enough of breaking my back to make other men rich, and that's the truth," Shome replied, staring straight ahead. "Might try to make it as far as Prad. Work is plentiful there—clean, soft work, I mean—because of the war. Trouble is, Prad's so far away. You'd need an…" Shome looked at Bartan with fresh interest. "Aren't you the one who has his own airship?"

"It's laid up," Bartan said, seizing on the mention of the war. "What news have you? Do the invaders still persist?"

"They persist, all right—but always they are repelled."

In Bartan's experience itinerant workers did not identify themselves with national objectives, but there was an unmistakable note of pride in Shome's voice.

"It's a strange war, all the same," Bartan said. "No armies, no battlefields…"

"Don't know about there being no battlefield. I heard the skymen sit astride jet tubes as if they were mounted on bluehorns, and they fly out miles from their fortresses. And there aren't any balloons—no balloons anywhere—nothing to keep you from falling to earth." Shome gave a noisy shudder. "Glad I'm not up there—a man could get himself killed up there."

Bartan nodded. "That's why kings no longer lead their armies into battle."

"Lord Toller doesn't hold with that. You've heard of Lord Toller Maraquine, haven't you?"

Bartan associated the name with the far-off events of the Migration, and was mildly surprised to hear that such an historic figure was still active. "We're not completely cut off from civilisation, you know."

"They say Lord Toller has spent more time up there, fighting the pestilent Landers, than any other man alive." Speaking with patriotic fervour, Shome launched into a series of anecdotes—some of which had to be fanciful—about the heroic exploits of Lord Toller Maraquine in the interplanetary war. At times his voice thickened and shook with emotion, suggesting that he was acting out the tales in his imagination with himself as the central figure, and Bartan's attention began to stray back to the jibes aimed at him by his former friends.

He knew better than to give any credence to the uninspired ritual insults, and yet he could wish that the name of Glave Trinchil had not been used. Glave was one of the few who still came to the farm and helped when there was heavy work to be done, but—the thought slid into Bartan's consciousness like the tip of a poniard—he usually visited when Sondeweere was alone. Bartan thrust the notion away, but into his mind there crept the image of an event he had all but forgotten—Sondeweere and Glave by the side of the Trinchil wagon when they had believed themselves to be unobserved, the moment of intimacy which had taken neither by surprise.

Why am I suddenly doubting my wife? Bartan thought. What is doing this thing to me? I know that I cannot have been wrong about Sondeweere. And, while conceding that other men have been blinded by love, I know that I am too clever, too world-wise to be duped in that particular manner by a farm girl. Let the bumpkins jeer to their hearts' content—I will never let them influence me in any way.

The rain was easing off and the well-defined edge of the cloud shield was now directly overhead, creating a feeling that the wagon was emerging into sunlight from the shade of a vast building. A short distance ahead the track on which they were travelling intersected a wider track, where Bartan would have to turn west for New Minnett. Water-filled ruts reflected the clear sky like polished metal rails.

Feeling oddly guilty, Bartan turned to Shome and said, "My apologies for this, but I have decided against attending the markets today. It's a long way for you to go on foot, but…"

"Think nothing of it," Shome said with a fatalistic shrug. "I have already walked halfway around this planet, and I dare say I can manage the rest."

He shouldered his bag, jumped down from the wagon at the intersection and set off towards New Minnett at a good pace, pausing only to wave goodbye. Bartan returned the farewell and directed the bluehorn east towards his own section.

His feeling of guilt increased as he admitted to himself that he was laying a trap for Sondeweere. She would not be expecting him until close to nightfall, and the trip to town had been arranged days in advance, giving her ample time in which to make all her arrangements with Glave. Self-reproach mingled with self-disgust and a curious kind of excitement as he bent his mind to a new kind of problem. If he did espy Glave's bluehorn from afar, tethered by the farmhouse, could he be underhanded enough to halt the noisy wagon and move in silently on foot? And if he were to find the couple in bed—what then? A year's unrelenting toil had clothed Bartan's frame in hard muscle, but he was still a lightweight compared to Glave and had little experience of fighting.

This is terrible, he thought in a crossplay of emotion. All I want out of life is to find my wife alone, working contentedly in our home. Why take the risk of losing what happiness I have? Why not turn back, catch up on Shome, and go on to the markets as planned? I could sit down with the old crowd and get merry on brown ale and forget all this…

The landscape ahead of Bartan was becoming obscured by refractive peach-and-silver mists as the fallen rain was lured back into the aerial element by the sun, and in the centre of his field of view there had appeared a wavering dark mote which seemed to change shape every few seconds. As he watched, the mote assumed a definite form, resolving itself into a rider approaching at considerable speed.

Bartan knew, long before proper identification was possible, that the rider was Glave Trinchil, and again there was a clash of emotions—simultaneous relief and disappointment over the fact that a confrontation was ruled out. This far from the farm Glave could claim that he was coming from any one of a number of places, and in all fairness there could be no justification for openly disbelieving him. With that analysis of the situation in mind, Bartan expected Glave to pass him with a casual greeting, and he was taken aback when the younger man began waving to him while still some way off, obviously preparing to stop and talk. Bartan's heart quickened with alarm as he saw that Glave was in a state of agitation. Could there have been an accident at the farm?

"Bartan! Bartan!" Glave reined his bluehorn to a halt beside the wagon. "I'm glad to see you—Sondy said you had gone to town."

"She said that, did she?" Bartan replied coldly, unable to shape a more appropriate response. "So you've been paying her another of your conveniently timed visits."

The imputation seemed to pass Glave by. His broad, artless face looked troubled, but Bartan could detect no hint of shiftiness or defiance which might have sprung from guilt.

"Go to her without delay," Glave said. "She has need of you."

Bartan swore at himself for having continued nursing his petty suspicions when it was becoming obvious that something serious had happened to Sondeweere. "What's wrong with her?"

"I truly do not know, Bartan. I called at the farm just to be neighbourly, just to see if there was any heavy work to be done…" Even though overwrought, Glave had to direct a satisfied glance at his well-muscled arms. "Sondy told me there was a tree to be uprooted. You know the one—where you want to plant the wirebeans and—"

"Yes, yes! What happened to my wife?"

"Well, I fetched a spade and an axe and set about the roots. It was hot work, in spite of the rain, and I was pleased when I saw Sondy coming down from the house with a pitcher of smallbeer. At least, I think it was smallbeer—I never got to drink any. She wasn't more than a dozen paces away from me when she gave a sort of a gasp and let the pitcher fall and sat down in the grass. She was holding her ankle. I was fearful she had done herself a mischief, so I went to her. She looked up at me, Bartan, and she gave a terrible scream, but the worst thing about it was … was…" Glave's voice faded and he stared at Bartan in perplexity, as though wondering who he might be.

"Glave!"

"It was a terrible scream. Bartan, but the worst thing about it was that her mouth was shut. I was looking straight into Sondy's face, and I could hear her screaming, but her mouth was tight shut. It fair made my blood run cold."

Bartan shifted his grip on the reins preparatory to moving off. "What you're saying doesn't make sense. All right, Sondeweere was moaning! Is that all there was to it? Had she turned her ankle? What did she say?"

Glave shook his head, slowly and pensively. "She does not say anything."

"She doesn't say anything! What way is that to…?" Bartan began to feel a new kind of alarm. "She can still speak, can't she?"

"I don't know, Bartan," Glave said simply. "You should go to her. I stayed as long as I could, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could think of…"

His remaining words were lost in the clatter of hooves and equipage as Bartan sent the wagon forward. He goaded the bluehorn up to the best speed that could be achieved on the uneven track, enduring the discomfort of sliding and bouncing on the unpadded seat. The bright mist had now blanked out the horizon and reduced his range of vision so much that he seemed to be travelling at the centre of a bell-shaped dome in whose sides faint pastel colours swirled all the way up to the sun. A short time later the vapours began to boil off, the sky became a milky blue and Bartan saw his own farm in the distance, gleaming, created anew out of rain and mist. By the time he reached it the sky was returning to its normal intense shade of blue and the daytime stars were reappearing.

He brought the wagon to a standstill, jumped down and ran into the house. There was no reply when he called Sondeweere's name, and a rapid search in which he threw himself from room to room established that she had to be out of doors. The first place he could think of looking was by the tree which Glave had mentioned, though it would be odd if she had lingered there so long—unless she had been overtaken by serious illness. Why had the oafish Glave not escorted her back to the house instead of fleeing as if he had seen an apparition?

Bartan left the building, sprinted past the sty which housed his modest stock of pigs, and went to the top of the grassy knoll which blocked the view to the east. He saw Sondeweere at once. She was sitting in the grass near the tree where Glave claimed to have been working, and she was still wearing her pale green oilskin cape. He shouted out to her, but she made no response of any kind. She remained completely motionless as he walked down the gentle slope, and his fears for her increased with every step he took. What manner of illness or disability would induce a person to sit for so long, head bowed, apparently oblivious to everything? Could she be fevered, or semi-conscious, or … dead?

When he was about six paces away from his wife he halted, overcome by a strange timidity, and whispered, "Sondeweere, dear one, are you well?"

She raised her head and a pang of relief went through him as he saw that she was smiling. She gazed at him for a few seconds—smile unchanging, no welcome in her eyes—then lowered her head again, obviously studying something on the ground in front of her.

"Don't play games with me, Sondy." Bartan stooped and went closer, and was reaching out to touch Sondeweere's hair when his eyes abruptly focused on what she was watching. Only a hands-breadth away from her crossed ankles were two small multi-legged creatures, seemingly locked in combat. Their articulated, crescent-shaped bodies were longer than a finger and dark brown on top, pale grey on the underside. They were unlike any other crawling thing he had ever seen in that each sprouted a single thick feeler from just below the head. He was already recoiling in disgust when his eyes began to sort out and comprehend the profuse tangle of legs, eye-stalks and antennae. The creatures had bound themselves together by their central feelers and were engaged in copulation, not combat … and… There was only one head to be seen. The female had eaten off her partner's head, and was gorging herself on the pale ichors oozing from his thorax, and all the while—quite undaunted, rhythm unaltered—his body went on with its ecstatic thrusting and jabbing into her greedy abdomen.

Bartan's reaction was immediate and totally instinctive. He straightened up and smashed his boot down on the writhing obscenity he had witnessed. Sondeweere was on her feet in the same instant, screaming in a way that hurt his brain. Bartan gazed at her, afraid… How can she make a sound like that without opening her mouth? … then caught her as she toppled towards him in a faint.

"Sondeweere! Sondy!" He inexpertly massaged her throat and cheek, trying to restore consciousness, but her head lolled in the crook of his arm and her eyes glimmered white beneath the lids. He gathered up her limp body and began walking back to the house, his mind overloaded with worries and fears.

A short distance along the faint path he saw a movement on the ground, a brown glistening, and knew at once that it was another of the ugly crawlers. The sight added to his forebodings—he had never seen any of the creatures before, nor had he heard them described, but now they were beginning to abound. He altered his stride slightly so that his boot came down squarely on the crawler, crunching it into the soil.

Sondeweere stirred in his arms and, as though emanating from the far end of a mile-long corridor, there came a whispering version of her unnatural scream.

Twice more on the way to the house he encountered one of the nameless creatures, labouring towards him in a seething of many-jointed legs, and each time he pulped it underfoot and each time Sondeweere was affected as before. To Bartan it was unthinkable that there could be any kind of affinity or link between his wife and the crawlers, and yet—in spite of being unconscious—she had definitely flinched as each one of them was dying. And there was the question of the screams. How did she make the sounds without opening her mouth, and why were they so disturbing?

A pressing sense of gloom and a coldness on his spine told Bartan that the sunlit normalcy all around him was a sham, that he was straying into realms beyond his understanding. On reaching the house he carried Sondeweere inside and carefully put her down on her bed. Her brow was cool and her coloration normal, giving the impression that she was merely asleep, but she failed to respond to being shaken or to his urgent repetitions of her name. He eased her out of the oilskin and was removing her sandals when he noticed a speck of dried blood on her right ankle. It came away quite readily on a damp cloth and the skin underneath was unblemished, dispelling the idea that she might have been bitten or stung by one of the creeping horrors. But something had happened to Sondeweere, and try as he might he could not rid himself of the notion that the creatures were in some way involved. Could they exude a venom so powerful that merely coming into contact with it was enough to render a person unconscious?

Standing by the bed, staring down at his wife's inert form, Bartan felt his fortitude begin to crumble. Artoonl was right in what he said to me, he thought. I kept quiet about the warnings, and I led everybody to this place—and what has been the upshot? Two suicides, one disappearance which is probably a murder, still births, madness and near-madness, strange sightings and bad dreams, friends turning against friends, malice where once there was goodwill—and now this! Sondeweere has been struck down, and the earth spews out horrors!

With a considerable effort he wrenched his thinking out of the downward spiral and fought to regain his normal optimism. He, Bartan Drumme, knew that ghosts and demons did not exist—and, if there was no such thing as an evil spirit, how could there be an evil place? It was true that there had been a spate of misfortunes since the farmers' arrival in the Basket of Eggs, but runs of bad luck were always cancelled out sooner or later by runs of good. Artoonl was wrong in quitting after investing so much time and effort. What the farmers had to do was stand their ground and wait for things to improve. And Bartan's duty was clear—he had to stay by his wife and do everything in his power to restore her to her old self.

As he settled into his bedside vigil his thoughts were again drawn to the crawling creatures whose appearance had heralded Sondeweere's mysterious affliction. Many curious life forms, some of them highly unprepossessing, had been found on Overland, and it was likely that something so repellent would have been noticed elsewhere. On reflection he had been too quick at destroying the horrors. If he found another crawler he would overcome his revulsion so that he could trap and preserve it for inspection by someone with greater knowledge of such matters.

Bartan raised Sondeweere's limp hand to his lips and was holding it there, willing his own vitality to flow into her body, when he was alerted by a faint scratching sound from another part of the house. He tilted his head and listened intently. The sound was barely audible, but he placed its source at the entrance to the house. He stood up, puzzled, and took the few paces needed to take him out of the bedroom and through the kitchen to the front door. The line of brilliance seeping under the door was uninterrupted, and yet the delicate scratching continued. He opened the door and something which had been clinging to the lintel, something which twisted and squirmed, brushed his face as it fell to the floor.

Bartan gave an involuntary gasp, mouth contorted with shock and loathing, as he leapt back.

The crawler landed upside down with a thud, pale grey underside flashing, then righted itself and began moving into the house with every semblance of purpose. It single thick feeler was extended ahead of it, undulating, questing. Bartan's hoped-for objectivity failed to materialise. He stamped his foot down on the creature, and heard and felt its body burst and flatten—and between his temples there was the sound of Sondeweere's anguish.

He slammed the door shut and pressed his back to it, appalled, remembering times when he had seen human beings—a farmer's wife, little children at play—extend an arm and wave it in a strange, boneless motion which mimed that of a crawler's central feeler.