The Way to Babylon (Different Kingdoms) (14 page)

I don’t believe it. Swords and bloody sorcery.

‘Should I call you Prince Bicker?’ he asked, struggling into his boots.

The dark man smiled. ‘Here in Minginish we are not so formal. Bicker will do. The word “Prince” is only used in your book. It does not correspond to my rank in my own country.’

‘My apologies,’ Riven rasped. ‘I’ll try to get it right next time.’ He fumbled in his rucksack for provisions. He needed coffee before he could even think about functioning. Bicker watched him with keen interest, spooning gobbets of his unspeakable breakfast into his mouth.

‘What the hell is that?’ Riven asked him when he had his coffee bubbling nicely.

‘Bacon and beans in a bag,’ Bicker answered. ‘It is another of the things from your world which I will assuredly not miss.’

Riven sipped his coffee. ‘How well do you know my world?’

‘I have spent a long enough time there. At first it was terrifying, for I was not sure if I would find my way home. It was I who found the first door, by accident. And it was a long, weary time before I found the one that would take us back—the one we have just passed through ourselves.’

Riven frowned. ‘What the hell is going on? What is the point of this? How did it happen?’ He knew there was something like hysteria edging into his voice, but he was too bewildered to care. These things do not happen in real life. Another world.
His
world, for Christ’s sake.

Bicker finished the last of his food, and stood up. ‘We had best be moving on. We can talk as we travel.’

They packed their gear. Bicker stowed the primus away and slid his sword into the baldric, which made Riven stare. He would have laughed, had he not been afraid of how it would sound. In a few minutes, the blackened fire circle was all that remained of their camp, and Bicker covered even that with stones and plucked grass. Then they set off northwards.

D
ESPITE HIMSELF,
R
IVEN
found that he was responding to the beauty of the land they were traversing. As the morning wore on, it became warmer, and he sweated under the rucksack with his legs complaining ceaselessly, but even so there was peace of a sort to be had here. He could enjoy the simple emptiness of the land, unscarred by man, untenanted. There were no roads, no telegraph wires, no jet trails in the sky; no litter. And almost no sound. Except for the wind and a few birds, the country was silent, quieter even than the bothy had been, for there the sea had been a constant companion. He could have enjoyed this were it not madness to be even seeing it, walking on it. He tackled Bicker again.

‘You promised to tell me how this came about—why you came to Skye. Why you have brought me here.’

The dark man sighed. ‘Indeed, I did.’ He walked on for a few seconds, his face closed. ‘It is a long and tangled tale I have to be telling you, so you must bear with me. Storytelling is not my strength. Ratagan is the man for that.’ He glanced at Riven quickly. ‘But you would know that already.’

Ratagan, the bluff red-bearded giant. The drinker—the storyteller. Riven knew him already. Oh, yes.

‘Well, I will begin at the start.

‘It was last year, in the height of summer. I was wandering in the north of the land, beyond Talisker—’ He waved away Riven’s attempt to interrupt. ‘It was a fine day, a day of haze and buttercups, and the barley ripening. It came upon me that I thought I would climb the Red Mountain and look out on the land, for I was a scout then, in the pay of a lord named Quirinus, though I had little to do. It had been a quiet spring, a summer of plenty. The weather was so fair that the passage of the mountains was but little trouble, though in the winter that is another tale. I was a long way up on the western face, and the sun was hot. I found a ledge that was out of the wind and difficult to approach. And there I sat. And before an hour had passed, I had fallen asleep.’ He stopped talking for a long moment, his sharp face unreadable.

‘It was a scream woke me up; someone falling. Then I heard another shout, someone in pain. But I could see no one, though it seemed close by. I looked about me, and what was it I did not see? I saw a small valley below, no place in Minginish; and houses such as I had not seen before sitting there. And before me, wrapped round the rock, was a bright rope and when I drew it up the end was severed.

‘
Michael
, the woman’s voice had screamed as it fell. That I remembered afterwards. At the time I thought the sun had turned my head, but I could not forget that.

‘I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I was on the Red Mountain in my own land again. But there was a great stillness in the air. The wind had died and the land was hushed. Not a bird or a bee stirred, and the people in the valley below had stopped their work in the fields and were looking at the sky, for there was a light in it like the shine of blood, and the sun was dimmed. I scrambled down from my high perch with the silence deafening me, and made the best time I could through the mountain passes—but before that first day had gone into night, a cloud that was black as pitch had covered the sky and the wind had taken up again, waxing into a storm the like of which no one had ever seen. Some called it the end of the world. The barley was flattened in the fields, and the lightning struck cattle and people dead where they stood. And then the rain came lashing down like ice, roaring the rivers into flooding the land.’ Bicker’s eyes were far away, narrowed with memory. His hand touched the sword hilt at his side.

‘And that was the beginning of it, the start of the Bad Time when the summer died and the snows stalked the land before autumn had even rightly begun; and the beasts came ravening out of the mountains. And the Giants that no man had seen for a score of years—they came down from the snows to spread terror through the Rorims. And the wolves bayed at the very gates of Talisker itself. Minginish began to die.

‘I went south, to my home—to Ralarth Rorim, and found the Dales under siege and swamped with snow. A bitter winter had come upon the land and none could find any reason for it.’ He paused again. ‘Except me. I thought I knew. I told my father—the Warbutt—and took the northern road again, and Murtach joined me. We fought our way through the hills and followed the Great River north, and then had a lean time forcing the passage of the mountains. And we went through the door. We found ourselves on the mountain you name Sgurr Dearg, in the Isle of Mists, and we breathed for the first time the tainted air of your world...’

He trailed off, looking suddenly weary.

‘A thin time of it we had, at first. Strange to say, we spoke the same tongue as the folk of the Isle—the same you write in your books. We sounded different, but we could make ourselves understood. Murtach was better than I at aping the accents of the people there.

‘We lived like beggars or thieves, stealing enough to live on, finding ourselves more fitting clothes. Murtach’s little pets were a problem. Much of the time they had to remain hidden.’

‘Pets?’ Riven asked.

‘Wolves, Michael Riven. Murtach has a pair of wolves for his constant companions—Fife and Drum.’

‘Wait a minute—’

But Bicker shook his head. ‘Let me finish this in one go, or it will never be told.

‘At any rate, we frequented a string of drinking houses on the Isle, and after a long, weary time, we found out what had occurred that summer’s day on the slopes of the Red Mountain. A woman had died, and a man had been crippled. We learned your name. The trail was easier to follow, then. Murtach did that: with Minginish gold, he pawned his way south. I remained in the north searching for another door to take us home whilst he was looking for you.’

‘He found me.’ A vision of wolves crouched under the willows in the night. He had not been imagining them.

‘Yes. When he was sure you would be returning to the Isle, he returned himself. It is a long tale, that of his journey: part on foot, part in the machines your people use to move in. And Fife and Drum complicating matters all the way.’ Bicker chuckled. ‘Fine scrapes they got in and out of, I can tell you. But they did it. They came back with the news that you would be returning within weeks or days.

‘And Murtach brought two other things north with him, Michael Riven. He brought your books, which we could read as easily as we could speak your tongue. And when we read them, we were dumbfounded. We knew then that your accident, your loss, was somehow tied up with the happenings in our own land. Somehow you are connected with Minginish. Somehow—and this is much worse—you may even be directing what is happening here. That is something which must be thought about.’

Riven started angrily, but yet again Bicker halted him.

‘There is more. I found the door that would take us into Minginish down by the sea not far from Sgurr Dearg in your world.’

‘How?’ Riven asked curtly. He was sure the answer was important. Bicker did not look at him.

‘I stumbled upon a dark-haired girl wandering in the mountains of the Isle. I followed her, and watched her disappear through the door. It may be she is here now, in Minginish.’

‘You bastard!’ Riven spat, his gaze swimming with anger. ‘You knew about her all the time. You knew who she must be.’

‘I am sorry,’ Bicker said stiffly. ‘I had little choice.’

‘She’s my wife! She’s supposed to be dead.’

‘I know. I know how this must be paining you. You must try to accept it. It will make it easier. There may be many lives hanging on your deeds, my friend—perhaps the fate of a whole world.’

‘Spare me the sermon, Bicker.’

So Jenny was here, also. Wandering these hills, perhaps, alone with the beasts.

Grief and bitterness rose in his throat like vomit. But why had she run away from him? And how could she have gone through the door
before
the night she had been in the bothy?

He spat into the fresh grass as he walked. It was mad—crazy and insane. He was treading a nonexistent world with a character from one of his own books. And his dead wife was somehow alive again.

Jesus Christ!

He had to stop. His legs were quivering like reeds.

‘I can’t—can’t take it. Bicker, this is too much. It is wrong.’

‘It is,’ the dark man agreed. ‘But it is nonetheless real.’

‘It’s not right. She died. My God, is nothing sacred? She was my
wife
.’

‘And this is my country.’

Riven blinked furiously. ‘Where’s the snow and ice, then? Where are the Giants and the wolves? It looks pretty much fine here to me—or am I missing something?’

For the first time Bicker seemed at a loss. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘That I cannot explain. When I last was here the whole land was in the grip of a savage winter. But you like this place, do you not, Michael Riven? You have enjoyed walking through it?’

‘Yes. So?’

‘Then perhaps that is something to do with it. Perhaps.’

‘Bloody hell! What am I then—some sort of weatherman?’

‘Maybe you are,’ Bicker said mildly, and continued walking. After a moment Riven followed, swearing silently.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked at last.

‘To Ralarth Rorim—where else? And it is still a good two days from here. So walk on, Michael Riven, and pray this weather holds. We want a way yet under our belts before dark.’

So Riven kept walking, because there was nothing else for him to do.

T
HERE WAS A
soft rain that night, like a whisper at a funeral. It lay like a silver mist in their hair as the light went and they sat beside another fire. Bicker had lit this one with flint and steel, and it took a long time to catch in the moist air. They ate some of Riven’s tinned food and buried their litter, then sat cloak-wrapped staring into the fire in silence. The rain continued. A soft night, Riven thought, and the mourning rose in him to clench his throat as he wondered whether this land was mourning with him.

‘Bicker,’ he said, the quiet patter of the rain in his words. ‘Tell me a story.’

His companion looked up, his face a maze of shadows and beard, but the eyes reflected the firelight. ‘You are the storyteller,’ he said. Riven shook his head helplessly, and buried his stare in the embers. There was a fantail of sparks as Bicker threw another faggot on the fire, then he leaned back into the heavy folds of his cloak.

‘I can’t tell you many tales; we have few here in Minginish. I know an old story that concerns the Myrcans, though.’

‘The Myrcans?’ Riven remembered. ‘They’re soldiers, fighting men.’

Bicker made a face. ‘No other word can be used about them. They are soldiers, and they are nothing else.’ He frowned, and sucked his teeth.

‘I was a soldier once.’

‘You said. But Myrcans, they are born soldiers and die so. I will tell you the tale, so that you may know, for you will meet them soon.’ He built up the fire, edging a larger log into its bright heart. Then he began.

‘There were Giants in the north of the land once, tall as hills.

‘Some were good, some were not, for that is the way of things. But, being Giants, when they were good they were very good, and when they were bad—’ He shrugged. ‘At any rate, there was one of them who lived in the mountains beyond Dun Drinan, and he was bad, bad right through. He enslaved the people of the valley and made them pay tribute. He took their cattle and their women for his amusement, he razed the walls that they had built, he slew their menfolk for sport. And the long and short of it was that the people beyond Dun Drinan were not happy. But who argues with Giants?