Future Indefinite (15 page)

“Much better than this,” Euphemia agreed hopefully.

Alice struggled to adjust to the concept of holidaying on another world. Her mind slithered helplessly, like a puppy on an icy pond.

“Very beneficial for the convalescent,” Miss Pimm remarked. “Of course, if you do decide to go on and see Edward, the journey may be strenuous. The Vales are a more primitive land than England, so it would be foolish to deny that there may be risks, but no more than you would incur on a safari in Kenya or yachting on the Broads, for that matter. At this time of year you would have to travel on dragon-back. A chance to meet your only living relative?”

“But I refuse to—”

“I do not believe the Service’s invitation has any strings attached to it. You can make it quite clear that you do not commit yourself to supporting any particular viewpoint in the dispute. Is that not correct, Mrs. Mackay?”

Euphemia started to shake her head and then nodded uncertainly.

“Jolly good!” Miss Pimm said as if the matter was settled. “And if you do agree to go and see your cousin, you can explain your motives to him. I am sure he will accept them and be very glad to see you again.”

The dining room rocked in waves of unreality and disbelief. To hear Edward talk of crossing over to other worlds had been bad enough. For Alice to consider actually doing so herself was a unicorn of another color.

She glanced suspiciously at Euphemia, who seemed to be having trouble keeping up with the conversation. “What guarantee do I have that I shall be allowed to return?”

Miss Pimm pursed her lips. “I can give you mine. The Service personnel are all eager for Home leave, now that the war is over. For that they require our cooperation. If you do not return in a month or so—or whatever time you stipulate beforehand—then I can arrange for serious consequences. Take hostages, in effect. We can set up a code message for you to send me if you wish to remain longer.”

Gibber! Alice thought of the cottage: dark, damp, dingy, and drear. No one would care whether she finished the painting now or months from now—or never. No job. No friends who would notice her absence unless it was prolonged. Why could she not jump at this incredible offer?

Miss Pimm frowned. “I honestly do not believe that the Service will make trouble for you. They are basically decent people, perhaps a little out of their depth at the moment.”

Euphemia said, “Ha!” and emptied her wineglass.

Alice drained her coffee cup. Outside was rain, loneliness, mud, and skeletal, leafless trees. To see a warm, tropical land again! How long since she had enjoyed a real holiday? She could not recall one, not ever. A week now and again visiting great-aunts at Bournemouth. Stolen weekends with D’Arcy before the war. The fire hissed and smoked.

“The milkman,” she muttered. “The butcher…”

“Your bills are all paid up? We can go past the cottage on our way. You will leave a note on the door, requesting no deliveries until further notice.”

“An invitation to burglars?”

“I can make the cottage secure against intruders. Now, is it settled?”

Alice looked doubtfully at Euphemia. “As long as I am not committing myself. I trust Edward. I won’t betray him.”

Ombay fala, inkuthin…

They had not long left the cottage for the second time, passing through Norwich again and heading southwest toward Cambridge, when Alice’s sense of collapsing reality made her wonder if her mind had come unhinged completely. Or was the wine wearing off? She huddled in the back of the car with Euphemia McKay, while Miss Pimm drove like a maniac through the night. Rain streamed on the windscreen, mocking the wipers’ efforts to clear it; the fancy electric headlights showed nothing ahead but silvery torrents.

Indu maka, sasa du.

Teeth chattering, slapping her hands on her knees to beat time, Euphemia was attempting to teach Alice the words of the key, the age-old chant that would open the portal at St. Gall’s and lead them through to another world. Alice could recall a similar drive, a year and a half ago, when it had been Miss Pimm instructing Edward and Julian in the same gibberish. Words from before the dawn of history, a complex, troubling rhythm. But that had been a sun-baked summer afternoon and the driver had been the solid, sane Mr. Stringer. He did not overtake on blind hills in pitch darkness or cut corners on the wrong side of the road.

“Hosagil!”
Euphemia cried triumphantly. “That’s the first verse. You want to try it now?”

No, Alice did not want to try it. Alice wanted to go home to her lonely hermitage and jump into bed and pull the blankets over her head. She wanted this insanity to stop. Now! Instantly. The wine had scrambled her brains or she would never have agreed to this madness. Vacation on another world? They had no luggage, either of them. They weren’t going anywhere. They couldn’t be. It was all just a gigantic hoax; it must be. Now the wine was wearing off, she could see that.

“Let me try it one line at a time first, please.”

“Right-oh!” Euphemia chirped.
“Ombay fala, inkuthin.”

“Ombay fala, inkuthin.”

In Cambridge they were going to pick up Bill and Betsy Pepper, the couple who had come Home from Nextdoor on leave and then succumbed to the flu that still lurked around England. Euphemia had explained at great length how the poor Peppers’ failure to return on time had made them very unpopular back at Olympus.

Bugger the poor Peppers! Why, oh why, had Alice ever consented to this?

“Aiba aiba nopa du, Aiba reeba mona kin.

Hosagil!”

“Now the second verse—”

“Just a minute. Shouldn’t I learn this beat you’re doing, too?”

“Oh, you’ll pick that up. Miss Pimm will drum for us. Won’t you, Miss Pimm?”

The car tilted into a corner and slewed sideways before accelerating again into the rushing, silver-streaked darkness. Alice’s half-formed scream failed as she realized she was still alive.

“Do you
have
to go so fast?”

“Yes, I do!” Miss Pimm said loudly. “We have a long way to go. We must complete our mission, and I must be gone, before the locals wake up and notice odd things going on.”

Odd
things? Neolithic shamanism in this day and age? In a
church
?

“The vicar will be celebrating matins,” Miss Pimm added, as if that excused everything.

“St. Gall’s is still in use,” Euphemia said cheerfully. “The center of the node is right in front of the altar, but there are some standing stones in the churchyard. It’s been a holy place for thousands of—”

“I know. I’ve been there.”

“Oh, yes. You said.”

Alice had witnessed Edward and Julian go into that church. To the best of her knowledge, they had never come out. It was in the Cotswolds, somewhere. That was right across England: Cambridge, then probably through Northampton, and Oxford. Wiltshire? It was going to take hours.

“Let me get this straight. We dance and chant, and then the magic comes and we find ourselves on Nextdoor? Just like that?”

“Just like that. One second you’re in St. Gall’s, and the next you’re on the node at Olympus. On a lawn with a hedge round it.”

In Colney Hatch with a straitjacket on, more likely.

“There will be four of us,” Euphemia continued blithely. “It’s much easier with a group. Coming over I was all alone and it was frightfully hard. It took me at least twenty minutes before I could catch the mood. I was absolutely fagged out, all that dancing…. Now the second verse—”

“Just a minute! If Miss Pimm’s doing the drumming, what’s to stop her passing over with the rest of us?”

“It’s happened,” Miss Pimm bellowed from the front. “The wrong person going through, I mean.” She swerved to avoid a suicidal lone cyclist fighting his way against the wind and rain with no light on his bicycle. “But I shall stay well back from the center of the node, and I shan’t be singing or dancing.”

Pagan orgies in a respectable rural Anglican church?

“Besides,” Euphemia added, and the tremor of amusement in her voice should have been a warning of what was coming, “Miss Pimm will have her clothes on.”

“What? You mean we have to…in this weather?”

“Oh, yes. So let’s learn our chant, shall we, so that everything goes off smoothly and quickly and we don’t have to hang around too long.”

“No clothes at all?”

“Not a stitch. But it will be almost dark. Don’t worry about Bill. He’s done this lots of times and seen everything there is to see. First verse again….”

The night went on forever, to the limits of unreality and fatigue and then beyond, into total madness. As morning neared, Alice found herself cavorting around with three other lunatics before the altar of a respectable little country church, an ancient, down-at-the-heels conventional place of worship like a thousand others scattered over the face of England. The first rays of dawn showed the tints of stained glass in the eastern windows, the glimmer of a sputtering acetylene lantern cast wild shadows over oak and flagstone and memorial tablets.

And this was only the dress rehearsal! She mumbled the gibberish as well as she could, she copied the others’ movements as the four of them leaped and gestured and gyrated, dancing around in a circle between the pulpit and the front row of pews. Miss Pimm sat farther back, thumping intricate rhythms on a drum. No one else seemed to recognize the insanity of what they were doing. None of them even seemed to see that it was rank sacrilege.

Alice never thought of herself as religious. What her true parents had believed, she could not remember. Uncle Cam and Aunt Rona had been upright, moral people, but not members of any formal sect. They had taught her that deeds mattered more than words, that love and duty counted more than ritual or any specific creed. Like Edward, she had been repelled by the overt fire-and-brimstone dogmas preached at them by their Uncle Roland. She had entered a church only once in many years, and that had been only because Terry had wanted a Christian marriage. She had mourned him without clerical assistance.

Nevertheless, St. Gall’s was a church, a place of worship sanctified by the devotions of humble, honest people over many centuries. To profane it with this mumbo jumbo was not merely disrespectful, it was horribly wrong. The sense of wrongness grew steadily stronger until she felt she could endure it no more. She was just about to stop dancing and say so, when Miss Pimm ended her tattoo.

“That will do. We’ll try it now.”

Alice said, “But…” and then her courage failed her. She stifled her protest and followed the others back to the vestry, picking her way along the dark nave by the light of the lamp Euphemia was carrying. She waited at the door with the other women while Bill Pepper went inside. She averted her eyes when he emerged without his clothes. She kept telling herself that she had had enough, that she was not going to play this stupid game any longer, and yet she entered with Euphemia and Betsy—who still had a racking cough and certainly ought not to be exposing herself to the icy cold in this unheated church on a rainy February night. Cursing herself for a dupe, a gullible maniac, Alice undressed with them and hurried back to the altar when they did, shivering at the touch of dank air on her skin and the cold stones underfoot. If it been wrong before, how much worse it must be now!

“Ready?” Miss Pimm boomed, and began the beat without waiting for a reply.

“Ombay fala, inkuthin…”

Jump, twist, wave arms.

“Indu maka, sasa du…”

Mr. Pepper was a tall, hollow-chested man, but he had an astonishingly loud bass voice. Supposing some early riser happened to be passing the church and saw the light of the lantern flickering through the stained-glass windows or heard the drumming and all this gibberish? Next thing anyone knew, the police would be at the door. The gutter press would shriek about satanic orgies. Bare limbs and torsos writhed like pale ghosts in the darkness. It was wrong! It was sacrilege. It was obscene.

With no warning, the gloom split, as if the fabric of reality had ripped. A brilliant jagged rent opened overhead, too bright to look upon. It spread instantly, down beside the pulpit, across the floor, dividing the world in two halves. The ground vanished below Alice’s feet and she fell through into hot daylight, rolled on grass. A wrench of anguish twisted through her. She screamed and heard others screaming also. Brightness blinded her. Pain, despair…Then someone enveloped her in a blanket and hugged her tight, lying beside her, clasping her.

“It will be all right,
Entyika
,” said a gruff female voice in her ear. “I will hold you and it will pass in a minute.”

Dosh had not visited Rinoovale since his childhood. Braced against the wind on a vantage where Lampass road emerged in Rinooslope, he stared down at the flats with disgust, seeing it as even bleaker than he remembered—a small, drab basin wedged in the teeth of gigantic peaks. Cowering under those terrible white fangs, the land was more gray than green, smallholdings and pastures struggling to survive between the mounds of slag that would eventually engulf them all, tiny isolated hovels spread like pepper grains, plumes of dust drifting from the active mines. He thought he could recall trees, but there were no trees now. The only touches of color were specks of lurid reds or purples on the slimy, poisonous ponds in abandoned workings. At the hazy limit of vision, he thought he could make out a village. That must be the only real settlement in the vale, the self-proclaimed city of Rinoo, where the Niolian military governor ruled.

Of more immediate interest, sunlight was flashing off a troop of bronze-mailed soldiers about half a mile ahead at the base of the long descent. They were lined up across the trail, so the Liberator’s entrance was going to be disputed. This would be interesting. Would D’ward loose the Warband on them or talk his way through or turn back? Having no weapons other than his fingernails, Dosh did not intend to get involved, but it would be interesting to watch.

He turned away, blinking back tears and wishing he had more clothes than one threadbare rag. Twice in his life he had gone adventuring with D’ward Liberator, and twice he had ended up poor as beggars’ lice. Some people never learn.

To his left, the Warband had come to a halt on the top of a little knoll and formed up around the leader. That seemed to be the warriors’ main task—to keep the crowds away from D’ward when he wanted some peace. The rest of the time, he was buried in eager pilgrims, mobbed by them. Dosh had not spoken with him since he had joined the Free. He had just hung back and watched, trying to understand this madness. He sat on the edge of the crowd when D’ward preached, which he did two or three times a day. He was a wonderful speaker, of course. In the old days, Dosh had watched him inspire an army often enough, and he was even better now.

He spoke Joalian like a native, but if anyone addressed a question to him in Niolian, he would reply in that tongue. He was very slick at answering trick questions. He told stories. He uttered homilies, enjoining faith, humility, honesty, chastity, and other absurdities. He disapproved of fun things like lechery, avarice, and gluttony. He quoted the Filoby prophecies that he would bring death to Zath, so that there would be no more reapers collecting souls by night. Much of what he said was pure blasphemy, denying the gods, the Pentatheon and all their lesser avatars. He insisted that they were merely mortals with magical powers, sorcerers. That should have provoked his listeners to riot and stone him to death, but so far they hadn’t. A surprising number of them seemed to believe him and believe in him.

Dosh couldn’t. He knew something of the gods; he did not like all of them and he hated the Youth especially, but he knew enough to fear them. He would love to believe D’ward’s claptrap heresy, but he could not. It would be even more wonderful to be able to swallow the Liberator’s idealistic moral drivel, but he knew too much of the world, and it just wasn’t like that. The world was made up of wolves and sheep, and wolves could not eat grass, no matter who preached to them. He wasn’t about to tell D’ward that, though.

And he certainly would not say so to Prat’han or the other henchmen. Dosh’s only contact with the Sonalby Warband had been when he dropped in at their campfires to eat. They fed him willingly, kidded him a little, and in general were friendly enough. They had concealed him from the troopers. They even seemed prepared to trust him, but he was not at all sure he trusted them. Their fanatical faith in the Liberator proved that they were all crazy, and a prudent man did not consort with armed lunatics.

From habit, Dosh had kept himself to himself. He had been a loner all his life, a man of unnumbered lovers and no friends. Now Prat’han Potter was heading his way, striding purposefully over the grass, tall and dangerous with his spear and shield. Evidently he had been sent to summon Dosh. Dosh waited for trouble to arrive in its own good time.

Behind them, the ass end of the procession was still trickling down the trail from the pass—the runts, the women with babies, the old men on canes, the cripples and invalids. The Free had increased in Nosokvale; there must be half a thousand people following the Liberator now. Most of them had no food and no money. Many of them were wearing no more than Dosh was. They were going to pour into barren little Rinoovale like a plague of locusts if the soldiers let them. If the soldiers turned them back, they would starve or freeze in the hills. Winter was coming.

“Greetings, Brother Dosh!” Prat’han boomed. It was still surprising to see a Nagian warrior without face paint.

“Greetings to you, Troopleader.”

“I am no troopleader. The Liberator is our leader. I am but one of the Free, like you.” The big man grounded his shield and surveyed the vale. “You been here before?”

“Long ago.”

“What place is that?” The spear pointed.

“Rinoo.”

“That’s the city?” Prat’han snorted. “That? Who owns the temple there?”

“There isn’t one that I know of. Just a few shrines. There’s a temple a few miles east of Rinoo, though, to Gunuu. He’s god of courage, an avatar of the Youth.”

“No gods!” Prat’han snapped menacingly. “Enchanters. Imposters, all of them!”

“If you say so.”

“D’ward says so! That’s good enough for me, and for you now.”

One of Dosh’s personal rules was not to argue with armed young men more than three feet tall, and Prat’han was twice that. “Sure. The main, er, enchanter’s foundation in Rinoovale is the convent of Irepit.”

Prat’han sneered. “And what does she claim to be?”

“Goddess of repentance. You’ve heard of the Daughters of Irepit?”

“No. And I do not wish to. The Liberator wants you.”

Obviously Dosh had no choice. They began to walk back up the knoll.

“What’s the matter with this land?” his companion demanded. “It looks like a well-used feedlot.”

“It is overblessed with mineral wealth. Dig anywhere and you turn up nuggets of gold and other metals, even jewels.”

“A waste of good grazing.”

“Niolians don’t think so. They strip it down to the water table, so nothing ever grows again. Why don’t you ask D’ward these questions? He’s been here more recently than I have.”

The warrior glanced down at Dosh suspiciously. “How do you know?”

“Well, I assume he has.”

Prat’han thought about that and frowned. “Don’t
assume
about the Liberator.” End of conversation.

To anyone with less muscle and more brain than an ox, it was obvious that D’ward knew exactly where he was going, in precise detail. He chose the damnedest places to make camp, but he set off every morning straight to the next. Some days he would walk his ragged congregation to exhaustion and others he would hardly go any distance at all. If Dosh were a gambling man—and he must assume that now he wasn’t, at least not at the moment—he would bet everything he owned—which was currently nothing, of course—that D’ward had walked out his entire route from Joalvale to Tharg in advance, using the
Filoby Testament
as a guidebook.

When Dosh had first met him, he had known almost none of the prophecies. He must know them all by now. He must know the one that said,
In Nosokslope they shall come to D’ward in their hundreds, even the Betrayer
. Dosh himself had joined the Free in Nosokslope.

He reached the outskirts of the crowd behind Prat’han and began to pick his way through. Whenever D’ward stopped moving, a halo of followers would gather on the grass around him, sitting patiently, their numbers steadily growing as the stragglers arrived and settled at the edges. The Warband stood guard in the center, clustered around D’ward, who was sitting on a rock, talking as always. His gray robe flapped and billowed in the wind, he had his cowl up, and yet he seemed oddly hunched, as if he felt the chill more than the men around him, who were all nearly naked.

Seeing Dosh slipping in between the shields, he jumped up with a smile. He grabbed Dosh’s shoulder in a Nagian greeting.

“Welcome! How are you feeling?”

“Cold and hungry and poor.”

D’ward grinned, as if truly pleased to see him. “But not hunted? You’ve been lying low! But we’re not in Joaldom anymore. If you want to slide over the horizon, now’s your chance.”

Dosh glanced at the frowning faces of the Warband all around him. Even the smallest of them was at least a hand taller than he was. “With no clothes and no money? You think I’m crazy?”

“I think you’re just fine. Tielan? Give him the bag.”

As if he had been expecting the order, Tielan Trader stepped forward, pulling a strap over his head. He handed Dosh a leather satchel—small, well worn, and so unexpectedly heavy that Dosh almost dropped it. He looked up at the Liberator in bewilderment.

“From now on,” D’ward said, “you hold our purse.”

“What do you mean? This is money?”

D’ward nodded, seeming amused. “That’s the war chest of the Free. It’s everything we’ve got. You can look after it for us.”

“How do you know I won’t vanish with it?”

“I don’t, but I’m willing to gamble.” His blue eyes sparkled brighter than the sky. “Most of it was yours originally, you know. We pass the hat after the sermons, and just about every coin you gave away came back eventually.”

Why did he have to say so? Oh, temptation!

“And what do I do with it?” The warrior animals were scowling at him because he was talking back to their precious Liberator.

D’ward shrugged. “Keep it safe.”

“Set a thief to catch a thief?”

“Of course. Everyone has his own talents, Dosh. You can count, which some people can’t. You still got those great legs you had once?”

Dosh had done no real running since those far-off days when he had been D’ward’s messenger; his feet were soft and already blistered, but he wasn’t going to say so in front of the louts. “Sure.”

D’ward smiled as if he saw through that lie. “Then when we get down to Rinooflat, I want you to run on ahead to Rinoo. Tonight we’ll camp at the burial ground at Thothby—”

“Burial ground? Why camp in a burial ground?”

The answer was a flicker of authority from those sky-blue eyes. Dosh’s spine chilled all the way down. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“All right.” The Liberator scanned the vagabond army sitting patiently around the knoll. “How many are there now, do you suppose?”

“Five or six hundred. At least.”

“Well, it’s your job to feed them tonight. Buy livestock, buy grain, buy firewood—arrange for it all to be delivered to Thothby. There’s no village left, but they’ll know where it was. All right?”

Dosh nodded. He could run to Rinoo, certainly. Then perhaps just keep on running? He would decide when he got there. “You still have to get us down to Rinooflat safely.”

“Ah!” D’ward said, and pushed back his cowl so he could scratch his head. “I was just explaining when you got here. There isn’t going to be any trouble. I had a safe-conduct for Joalvale and Nosokvale. I’ve got another for Rinoovale. Once we get to Niolvale, things may get sticky.” He glanced around at the listening warriors. “That’s when you sharpen your spears.”

“’bout time!” said Gopaenum and the others laughed nervily. Did they know verse 663, the one about young men’s bones?

“Safe-conduct from whom?” Dosh demanded.

D’ward hesitated and then replied to the group, not just to Dosh. “The authorities. Not all the enchanters are totally bad. Remember that always—nobody is totally bad! Nobody is totally good, either, of course. Some of the enchanters are on our side. A few of them are helping us.” He looked around the Warband to locate Prat’han, who was the senior, even if he would not admit it. “Remember, no bloodshed!” His eyes glinted mischievously. “But perhaps we can start to stir up a little trouble now.”

Prat’han chuckled throatily. “What sort of trouble, Liberator?”

D’ward scratched his bushy black locks again. “Only the Thargians keep slaves, right? Do any of you know who those miners are down there?”

Silence. These Sonalby rustics knew of nothing outside Nagvale.

“Convicts,” Dosh said.

D’ward turned a sky-blue smile on him. “And what does it take to become a convict in Niolland?”

“Forgetting to bow when the queen’s name is mentioned? Life sentence in the mines! Having a pretty wife that some official fancies? Ten years for that, I expect.”

“Probably. With time off for good behavior on her part? Understand, lads? Rinooland is nothing but a Niolian penal colony. Now, if a multitude of pilgrims like this just happened to swarm right through one or two of those pits on their way by, then I don’t think the jailers would be able to do very much about it, do you? And there might not be any miners left when we’d gone by, right?”

The oafs all guffawed and thumped their spears against their shields.

D’ward grinned at them. “But, please, no bloodshed! Stun them if you must. No more than that. Recruit them if you can. They’ll be in deep trouble with their superiors after we’ve gone, so they may be open to reason…. I think we’ve had a long enough break. Let’s move on. I’d better stay in front this time.”

At that he strode forward and the Warband opened to let him through. The massed pilgrims began scrambling to their feet, some of them running forward to accost the Liberator and ask him questions. D’ward waved them away, the warriors blocked them, and soon most of them had been left behind. Very conscious of the weight of the money bag on his shoulder, Dosh found himself hurrying along at D’ward’s side, while the armed band escorted them both. That might not be a good place to be when they reached the checkpoint at the bottom of the hill, but it would do for now.

He asked the question. “What do you really want of me?”

The Liberator looked down at him for a moment in silence, his stare strangely frightening.