Land and Overland Omnibus

CHAPTER 5



General Risdel Dalacott awoke at first light and, following the routine which had rarely varied in his sixty-eight years of life, left his bed immediately.

He walked around the room several times, his step growing firmer as the stiffness and pain gradually departed from his right leg. It was almost thirty years since the aftday, during the first Sorka campaign, when a heavy Merrillian throwing spear had smashed his thigh bone just above the knee. The injury had troubled him at intervals ever since, and the periods when he was free of discomfort were becoming shorter and quite infrequent.

As soon as he was satisfied with the leg’s performance he went into the adjoining toilet chamber and threw the lever of enamelled brakka which was set in one wall. The water which sprayed down on him from the perforated ceiling was hot—a reminder that he was not in his own spartan quarters in Trompha. Putting aside irrational feelings of guilt, he took maximum enjoyment from the warmth as it penetrated and soothed his muscles.

After drying himself he paused at a wall-mounted mirror, which was made of two layers of clear glass with highly different refractive indices, and took stock of his image. Although age had had its inevitable effect on the once-powerful body, the austere discipline of his way of life had prevented fatty degeneration. His long, thoughtful face had become deeply lined, but the greyness which had entered his cropped hair scarcely showed against its fair coloration, and his overall appearance was one of durable health and fitness.

Still serviceable, he thought. But I’ll do only one more year. The army has taken too much from me already.

While he was donning his informal blues he turned his thoughts to the day ahead. It was the twelfth birthday of his grandson, Hallie, and—as part of the ritual which proved he was ready to enter military academy—the boy was due to go alone against ptertha. The occasion was an important one, and Dalacott vividly remembered the pride he had felt on watching his own son, Oderan, pass the same test. Oderan’s subsequent army career had been cut short by his death at the age of thirty-three—the result of an airship crash in Yalrofac—and it was Dalacott’s painful duty to stand in for him during the day’s celebrations. He finished dressing, left the bedroom and went downstairs to the dining room where, in spite of the earliness of the hour, he found Conna Dalacott seated at the round table. She was a tall, open-faced woman whose form was developing the solidity of early middle age.

“Good foreday, Conna,” he said, noting that she was alone. “Is young Hallie still asleep?”

“On his twelfth?” She nodded towards the walled garden, part of which was visible through the floor-to-ceiling window. “He’s out there somewhere, practising. He wouldn’t even look at his breakfast.”

“It’s a big day for him. For us all.”

“Yes.” Something in the timbre of Conna’s voice told Dalacott that she was under a strain. “A wonderful day.”

“I know it’s distressing for you,” he said gently, “but Oderan would have wanted us to make the most of it, for Hallie’s sake.”

Conna gave him a calm smile. “Do you still take nothing but porridge for breakfast? Can’t I tempt you with some whitefish? Sausage? A forcemeat cake?”

“I’ve lived too long on line soldier’s rations,” he protested, tacitly agreeing to restrict himself to small-talk. Conna had maintained the villa and conducted her life ably enough without his assistance in the ten years since Oderan’s death, and it would be presumptuous of him to offer her any advice at this juncture.

“Very well,” she said, beginning to serve him from one of the covered dishes on the table, “but there’ll be no soldier’s rations for you at the littlenight feast.”

“Agreed!” While Dalacott was eating the lightly salted porridge he exchanged pleasantries with his daughter-in-law, but the seething of his memories continued unabated and—as had been happening more often of late—thoughts of the son he had lost evoked others of the son he had never claimed. Looking back over his life he had, once again, to ponder the ways in which the major turning points were frequently unrecognisable as such, in which the inconsequential could lead to the momentous.

Had he not been caught off his guard during the course of a minor skirmish in Yalrofac all those years ago he would not have received the serious wound in his leg. The injury had led to a long convalescence in the quietness of Redant province; and it was there, while walking by the Bes-Undar river, he had chanced to find the strangest natural object he had ever seen, the one he still carried everywhere he went. The object had been in his possession for about a year when, on a rare visit to the capital, he had impulsively taken it to the science quarter on Greenmount to find out if its strange properties could be explained.

In the event, he had learned nothing about the object and a great deal about himself.

As a dedicated career soldier he had taken on a solewife almost as a duty to the state, to provide him with an heir and to minister to his needs between campaigns. His relationship with Toriane had been pleasant, even and warm; and he had regarded it as fulfilling—until the day he had ridden into the precinct of a square house on Greenmount and had seen Aytha Maraquine. His meeting with the slender young matron had been a blending of green and purple, producing a violent explosion of passion and ecstasy and, ultimately, an intensity of pain he had not believed possible…

“The carriage is back, Grandad,” Hallie cried, tapping at the long window. “We’re ready to go to the hill.”

“I’m coming.” Dalacott waved to the fair-haired boy who was dancing with excitement on the patio. Hallie was tall and sturdy, well able to handle the full-size ptertha sticks which were clattering on his belt.

“You haven’t finished your porridge,” Conna said as he stood up, her matter-of-fact tone not quite concealing the underlying emotion.

“You know, there is absolutely no need for you to worry,” he said. “A ptertha drifting over open ground in clear daylight poses no threat to anybody. Dealing with it is child’s play, and in any case I’ll be staying close to Hallie at all times.”

“Thank you.” Conna remained seated, staring down at her untouched food, until Dalacott had left the room.

He went out to the garden which—as was standard in rural areas—had high walls surmounted by ptertha screens which could be closed together overhead at night and in foggy conditions. Hallie came running to him, recreating the image of his father at the same age, and took his hand. They walked out to the carriage, in which waited three men, local friends of the family, who were required as witnesses to the boy’s coming-of-age. Dalacott, who had renewed their acquaintanceship on the previous evening, exchanged greetings with them as he and Hallie took their places on the padded benches inside the big coach. The driver cracked his whip over his team of four bluehorns and the vehicle moved off.

“Oho! Have we a seasoned campaigner here?” said Gehate, a retired merchant, leaning forward to tap a Y-shaped ptertha stick he had noticed among the normal Kolcorronian cruciforms in Hallie’s armoury.

“It’s Ballinnian,” Hallie said proudly, stroking the polished and highly decorated wood of the weapon, which Dalacott had given him a year earlier. “It flies farther than the others. Effective at thirty yards. The Gethans use them as well. The Gethans and the Cissorians.”

Dalacott returned the indulgent smiles the boy’s show of knowledge elicited from the other men. Throwing sticks of one form or another had been in use since ancient times by almost every nation on Land as a defence against ptertha, and had been chosen for their effectiveness. The enigmatic globes burst as easily as soap bubbles once they got to within their killing radius of a man, but before that they showed a surprising degree of resilience. A bullet, an arrow or even a spear could pass through a ptertha without causing it any harm—the globe would only quiver momentarily as it repaired the punctures in its transparent skin. It took a rotating, flailing missile to disrupt a ptertha’s structure and disperse its toxic dust into the air.

The bolas made a good ptertha killer, but it was hard to master and had the disadvantage of being too heavy to be carried in quantity, whereas a multi-bladed throwing stick was flat, comparatively light and easily portable. It was a source of wonder to Dalacott that even the most primitive tribesmen had learned that giving each blade one rounded edge and one sharp edge produced a weapon which sustained itself in the air like a bird, flying much farther than an ordinary projectile. No doubt it was that seemingly magical property which induced people like the Ballinnians to lavish such care on the carving and embellishment of their ptertha sticks. By contrast, the pragmatic Kolcorronians favoured a plain expendable weapon of the four-bladed pattern which was suitable for mass production because it was made of two straight sections glued together at the centre.

The carriage gradually left the grain fields and orchards of Klinterden behind and began climbing the foothills of Mount Pharote. Eventually it reached a place where the road petered out on a grassy table, beyond which the ground ascended steeply into mists which had not yet been boiled off by the sun.

“Here we are,” Gehate said jovially to Hallie as the vehicle creaked to a halt. “I can’t wait to see what sport that fancy stick of yours will produce. Thirty yards, you say?”

Thessaro, a florid-faced banker, frowned and shook his head. “Don’t egg the boy into showing off. It isn’t good to throw too soon.”

“I think you’ll find he knows what to do,” Dalacott said as he got out of the carriage with Hallie and looked around. The sky was a dome of pearly brilliance shading off into pale blue overhead. No stars could be seen and even the great disk of Overland, only part of which was visible, appeared pale and insubstantial. Dalacott had travelled to the south of Kail province to visit his son’s family, and in these latitudes Overland was noticeably displaced to the north. The climate was more temperate than that of equatorial Kolcorron, a factor which—combined with a much shorter littlenight—made the region one of the best food producers in the empire.

“Plenty of ptertha,” Gehate said, pointing upwards to where purple motes could be seen drifting high in the air currents rolling down from the mountain.

“There’s always plenty of ptertha these days,” commented Ondobirtre, the third witness. “I’ll swear they are on the increase—no matter what anybody says to the contrary. I heard that several of them even penetrated the centre of Ro-Baccanta a few days ago.”

Gehate shook his head impatiently. “They don’t go into cities.”

“I’m only telling what I heard.”

“You’re too credulous, my friend. You listen to too many tall stories.”

“This is no time for bickering,” Thessaro put in. “This is an important occasion.” He opened the linen sack he was carrying and began counting out six ptertha sticks each to Dalacott and the other men.

“You won’t need those, Grandad,” Hallie said, looking offended. “I’m not going to miss.”

“I know that, Hallie, but it’s the custom. Besides, some of the rest of us might be in need of a little practice.” Dalacott put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and walked with him to the mouth of an alley created by two high nets. They were strung on parallel lines of poles which crossed the table and went up the slope beyond to disappear into the mist ceiling. The system was a traditional one which served to guide ptertha down from the mountain in small numbers. It would have been easy for the globes to escape by floating upwards, but a few always followed such an alley to its lower end as though they were sentient creatures motivated by curiosity. Quirks of behaviour like that were the main reason for the belief, held by many, that the globes possessed some degree of intelligence, although Dalacott had always remained unconvinced in view of their complete lack of internal structure.

“You can leave me now, Grandad,” Hallie said. “I’m ready.”

“Very well, young man.” Dalacott moved back a dozen paces to stand line abreast with the other men. It was the first time he had ever thought of his grandson as being anything more than a boy, but Hallie was entering his trial with courage and dignity, and would never again be quite the same person as the child who had played in the garden only that morning. It came to Dalacott that at breakfast he had given Conna the wrong assurances—she had known only too well that her child was never coming back to her. The insight was something Dalacott would have to note in his diary at nightfall. Soldiers’ wives were required to undergo their own trials, and the adversary was time itself.

“I knew we wouldn’t have to wait very long,” Ondobirtre whispered.

Dalacott transferred his attention from his grandson to the wall of mist at the far end of the netted enclosure. In spite of his confidence in Hallie, he felt a spasm of alarm as he saw that two ptertha had appeared simultaneously. The livid globes, each a full two yards in diameter, came drifting low and weaving, becoming harder to see clearly as they moved down the slope to where the background was grass. Hallie, who had a four-bladed stick in his hand, altered his stance slightly and made ready to throw.

Not yet, Dalacott commanded in his thoughts, knowing that the presence of a second ptertha would increase the temptation to try destroying one at maximum range. The dust released by a bursting ptertha lost its toxicity almost as soon as it was exposed to air, so the minimum safe range for a kill could be as little as six paces, depending oft wind conditions. At that distance it was virtually impossible to miss, which meant that the ptertha was no match at all for a man with a cool head, but Dalacott had seen novices suddenly lose their judgment and coordination. For some there was a strange mesmeric and unmanning quality about the trembling spheres, especially when on nearing their prey they ceased their random drifting and closed in with silent, deadly purpose.

The two floating towards Hallie were now less than thirty paces away from him, sailing just above the grass, blindly questing from one net to the other. Hallie brought his right arm back, making tentative wrist movements, but refrained from throwing. Watching the solitary, straight-backed figure holding his ground as the ptertha drew ever closer, Dalacott experienced a mixture of pride, love and pure fear. He held one of his own sticks at the ready and prepared to dart forward. Hallie moved closer to the net on his left, still withholding his first strike.

“Do you see what the little devil is up to?” Gehate breathed. “I do believe he’s…”

At that moment the aimless meanderings of the ptertha brought them together, one behind the other, and Hallie made his throw. The blades of the cruciform weapon blurred as it flew straight and true, and an instant later the purple globes no longer existed.

Hallie became a boy again, just long enough to make one exultant leap into the air, then he resumed his watchful stance as a third ptertha emerged from the mist. He unclipped another stick from his belt, and Dalacott saw that it was the Y-shaped Ballinnian weapon.

Gehate nudged Dalacott. “The first throw was for you, but I think this one is going to be for my benefit—to teach me to keep my mouth shut.”

Hallie allowed the globe to get no closer than thirty paces before he made his second throw. The weapon flitted along the alley like a brilliantly coloured bird, almost without sinking, and was just beginning to lose stability when it sliced into the ptertha and annihilated it. Hallie was grinning as he turned to the watching men and gave them an elaborate bow. He had claimed the necessary three kills and was now officially entering the adult phase of his life.

“The boy had some luck that time, but he deserved it,” Gehate said ungrudgingly. “Oderan should have been here.”

“Yes.” Dalacott, racked by bitter-sweet emotions, contented himself with the monosyllabic response, and was relieved when the others moved away—Gehate and Thessaro to embrace Hallie, Ondobirtre to fetch the ritual flask of brandy from the carriage. The group of six, including the hired driver, came together again when Ondobirtre distributed tiny hemispherical glasses whose rims had been fashioned unevenly to represent vanquished ptertha. Dalacott kept an eye on his grandson while he had his first sip of ardent spirits, and was amused when the boy, who had just overcome a mortal enemy, pulled a grotesque face.

“I trust,” Ondobirtre said as he refilled the adults’ glasses, “that all present have noticed the unusual feature of this morning’s outing?”

Gehate snorted. “Yes—I’m glad you didn’t attack the brandy before the rest of us got near it.”

“That’s not it,” Ondobirtre said gravely, refusing to be goaded. “Everybody thinks I’m an idiot, but in all the years we’ve been watching this kind of thing has anybody seen a day when three globes showed up before the bluehorns had stopped farting after the climb? I’m telling you, my shortsighted friends, that the ptertha are on the increase. In fact, unless I’m getting winedreams, we have a couple more visitors.”

The company turned to look at the space between the nets and saw that two more ptertha had drifted down from the obscurity of the cloud ceiling and were nuzzling their way along the corded barriers.

“They’re mine,” Gehate called as he ran forward. He halted, steadied himself and threw two sticks in quick succession, destroying both the globes with ease. Their dust briefly smudged the air.

“There you are!” Gehate cried. “You don’t need to be built like a soldier to be able to defend yourself. I can still teach you a thing or two, young Hallie.”

Hallie handed his glass back to Ondobirtre and ran to join Gehate, eager to compete with him. After the second brandy Dalacott and Thessaro also went forward and they made a sporting contest of the destruction of every globe which appeared, only giving up when the mist rose clear of the top end of the alley and the ptertha retreated with it to higher altitudes. Dalacott was impressed by the fact that almost forty had come down the alley in the space of an hour, considerably more than he normally would have expected. While the others were retrieving their sticks in preparation for leaving, he commented on the matter to Ondobirtre.

“It’s what I’ve been saying all along,” said Ondobirtre, who had been steadily drinking brandy all the while and was growing pale and morose. “But everybody thinks I’m an idiot.”

By the time the carriage had completed the journey back to Klinterden the sun was nearing the eastern rim of Overland, and the littlenight celebration in honour of Hallie was about to begin.

The vehicles and animals belonging to the guests were gathered in the villa’s forecourt, and a number of children were at play in the walled garden. Hallie, first to jump down from the carriage, sprinted into the house to find his mother. Dalacott followed him at a more sedate pace, the pain in his leg having returned during the long spell in the carriage. He had little enthusiasm for large parties and was not looking forward to the remainder of the day, but it would have been discourteous of him not to stay the night. It was arranged that a military airship would pick him up on the following day for the flight back to the Fifth Army’s headquarters in Trompha.

Conna greeted him with a warm embrace as he entered the villa. “Thank you for taking care of Hallie,” she said. “Was he as superb as he claims?”

“Absolutely! He made a splendid showing.” Dalacott was pleased to see that Conna was now looking cheerful and self-possessed. “He made Gehate sit up and take notice, I can tell you.”

“I’m glad. Now, remember what you promised me at breakfast. I want to see you eating—not just picking at your food.”

“The fresh air and exercise have made me ravenous,” Dalacott lied. He left Conna as she was welcoming the three witnesses and went into the central part of the house, which was thronged with men and women who were conversing animatedly in small groups. Grateful that nobody appeared to have noticed his arrival, he quietly took a glass of fruit juice from the table set out for the children and went to stand by a window. From the vantage point he could see quite a long way to the west, over vistas of agricultural land which at the limits of vision shaded off into a low range of blue-green hills. The strip fields clearly showed progressions of six colours, from the pale green of the freshly planted to the deep yellow of mature crops ready for harvesting.

As he was watching, the hills and most distant fields blinked with prismatic colour and abruptly dimmed. The penumbral band of Overland’s shadow was racing across the landscape at orbital speed, closely followed by the blackness of the umbra itself. It took only a fraction of a minute for the rushing wall of darkness to reach and envelop the house—then littlenight had begun. It was a phenomenon Dalacott had never tired of watching. As his eyes adjusted to the new conditions the sky seemed to blossom with stars, hazy spirals and comets, and he found himself wondering if there could be—as some claimed—other inhabited worlds circling far-off suns. In the old days the army had absorbed too much of his mental energy for him to think deeply on such matters, but of late he had found a spare comfort in the notion that there might be an infinity of worlds, and that on one of them there might be another Kolcorron identical to the one he knew in every respect save one. Was it possible that there was another Land on which his lost loved ones were still alive?

The evocative smell of freshly-lit oil lanterns and candles took his thoughts back to the few treasured nights he had spent with Aytha Maraquine. During the heady hours of passion Dalacott had known with total certainty that they would overcome all difficulties, surmount all the obstacles that lay in the way of their eventual marriage. Aytha, who had solewife status, would have had to endure the twin disgraces of divorcing a sickly husband and of marrying across the greatest of all social divisions, the one which separated the military from all other classes. He had been faced with similar impediments, with an added problem in that by divorcing Toriane—daughter of a military governor—he would have been placing his own career in jeopardy.

None of that had mattered to Dalacott in his fevered monomania. Then had come the Padalian campaign, which should have been brief but which in the event had entailed his being separated from Aytha for almost a year. Next had come the news that she had died in giving birth to a male child. Dalacott’s first tortured impulse had been to claim the boy as his own, and in that way keep faith with Aytha, but the cool voices of logic and self-interest had intervened. What was the point in posthumously smirching Aytha’s good name and at the same time prejudicing his career and bringing unhappiness to his family? It would not even benefit the boy, Toller, who would be best left to grow up in the comfortable circumstances of his maternal kith and kin.

In the end Dalacott had committed himself to the course of rationality, not even trying to see his son, and the years had slipped by and his abilities had brought him the deserved rank of general. Now, at this late stage of his life, the entire episode had many of the qualities of a dream and might have lost its power to engender pain—except that other questions and doubts had begun to trouble his hours of solitude. All his protestations notwithstanding, had he really intended to marry Aytha? Had he not, in some buried level of his consciousness, been relieved when her death had made it unnecessary for him to make a decision one way or the other? In short, was he—General Risdel Dalacott—the man he had always believed himself to be? Or was he a…?

“There you are!” Conna said, approaching him with a glass of wheat wine which she placed firmly in his free hand while depriving him of the fruit juice. “You’ll simply have to mingle with the guests, you know. Otherwise it will look as though you consider yourself too famous and important to acknowledge my friends.”

“I’m sorry.” He gave her a wry smile. “The older I get the more I look into the past.”

“Were you thinking about Oderan?”

“I was thinking about many things.” Dalacott sipped his wine and went with his daughter-in-law to make smalltalk with a succession of men and women. He noticed that very few of them had army backgrounds, possibly an indication of Conna’s true feelings about the organisation which had taken her husband and was now turning its attention to her only child. The strain of manufacturing conversation with virtual strangers was considerable, and it was almost with relief that he heard the summons to go to the table. It was his duty now to make a short formal speech about his grandson’s coming-of-age; then he would be free to fade into the background to the best of his ability. He walked around the table to the single high-backed chair which had been decked with blue spearflowers in Hallie’s honour and realised he had not seen the boy for some time.

“Where’s our hero?” a man called out. “Bring on the hero!”

“He must have gone to his room,” Conna said. “I’ll fetch him.”

She smiled apologetically and slipped away from the company. There was delay of perhaps a minute before she reappeared in the doorway, and when she did so her face was strangely passive, frozen. She pointed at Dalacott and turned away again without speaking. He went after her, telling himself that the icy sensation in his stomach meant nothing, and walked along the corridor to Hallie’s bedroom. The boy was lying on his back on his narrow couch. His face was flushed and gleaming with sweat, and his limbs were making small uncoordinated movements.

It can’t be, Dalacott thought, appalled, as he went to the couch. He looked down at Hallie, saw the terror in his eyes, and knew at once that the twitching of his arms and legs represented strenuous attempts to move normally. Paralysis and fever! I won’t allow this, Dalacott shouted inwardly as he dropped to his knees. It isn’t permitted!

He placed his hand on Hallie’s slim body, just below the ribcage, immediately found the telltale swelling of the spleen, and a moan of pure grief escaped his lips.

“You promised to look after him,” Conna said in a lifeless voice. “He’s only a baby!”

Dalacott stood up and gripped her shoulders. “Is there a doctor here?”

“What’s the use?”

“I know what this looks like, Conna, but at no time was Hallie within twenty paces of a globe and there was no wind to speak of.” Listening to his own voice, a stranger’s voice, Dalacott tried to be persuaded by the stated facts. “Besides, it takes two days for pterthacosis to develop. It simply can’t happen like this. Now, is there a doctor?”

“Visigann,” she whispered, brimming eyes scanning his face in search of hope. “I’ll get him.” She turned and ran from the bedroom.

“You’re going to be all right, Hallie,” Dalacott said as he knelt again by the couch. He used the edge of a coverlet to dab perspiration from the boy’s face and was dismayed to find that he could actually feel heat radiating from the beaded skin. Hallie gazed up at him mutely, and his lips quivered as he tried to smile. Dalacott noticed that the Ballinnian ptertha stick was lying on the couch. He picked it up and pressed it into Hallie’s hand, closing the boy’s nerveless fingers around the polished wood, then kissed him on the forehead. He prolonged the kiss, as though trying to siphon the consuming pyrexia into his own body, and only slowly became aware of two odd facts—that Conna was taking too long to return with the doctor, and that a woman was screaming in another part of the house.

“I’ll come back to you in just a moment, soldier,” he said. He stood up, tranced, made his way back to the dining room and saw that the guests were gathered around a man who was lying on the floor.

The man was Gehate:—and from his fevered complexion and the feeble pawing of his hands it was evident that he was in an advanced stage of pterthacosis.

While he was waiting for the airship to be untethered, Dalacott slipped his hand into a pocket and located the curious nameless object he had found decades earlier on the banks of the Bes-Undar. His thumb worked in a circular pattern over the nugget’s reflective surface, polished smooth by many years of similar frictions, as he tried to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened in the past nine days. The bare statistics conveyed little of the anguish which was withering his spirit.

Hallie had died before the end of the littlenight of his coming of age. Gehate and Ondobirtre had succumbed to the terrifying new form of pterthacosis by the end of that day, and on the following morning he had found Hallie’s mother dead of the same cause in her room. That had been his first indication that the disease was contagious, and the implications had still been reverberating in his head when news had come of the fate of those who had been present at the celebration.

Of some forty men, women and children who had been in the villa, no fewer than thirty-two—including all the children—had been swept away during the same night. And still the tide of death had not expended its fell energies. The population of the hamlet of Klinterden and surrounding district had been reduced from approximately three-hundred to a mere sixty within three days. At that point the invisible killer had appeared to lose its virulence, and the burials had begun.

The airship’s gondola lurched and swayed a little as it was freed from its constraints. Dalacott moved closer to a port hole and, for what he knew would be the last time, looked down on the familiar pattern of red-roofed dwellings, orchards and striated fields of grain. Its placid appearance masked the profound changes which had taken place, just as his own unaltered physical aspect disguised the fact that in nine days he had grown old.

The feeling—the drear apathy, the failure of optimism—was new to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying it because, for the first time ever, he could see cause to envy the dead.