Winter Song (29 page)

    "That's every five weeks," Bera interpreted when you translated for her. She seemed to share none of Karl's queasiness at the thought. "Doesn't it harm it?"

    Loki translated the question.

    Coeo said, "With adults it grows back, but smaller. So there is limit to how much can be cut off. We wait, cut off tail when storm passes, not make him move now."

    They hunkered down, Bera trying to settle the horses, which she turned so that they were hind-end into the storm. Bera crawled back on hands and knees, spitting sand, her eyes streaming. The wind, now a howling gale, lashed them mercilessly, digging into their noses, eyes, even their mouths.

    Karl opened his arms and Bera snuggled into him. He stroked her hair, making soothing noises.

SIXTEEN

"Don't move," Coeo said.

    Karl froze. "Coeo says keep absolutely still," he hissed, unsure if talking counted as moving.

    Bera obeyed. In the last ten days Coeo had slowly, almost imperceptibly, earned their trust.

Nine days earlier, twilight supplanted afternoon. The storm gradually blew itself out until the wind dropped enough for Karl and Bera to crawl out from the shelter of the glamurbak's armoured body, Karl dragging a piece of plastic from their stores that he'd worked on throughout the storm-stolen day.

    Bera said, "What's he doing?"

    Coeo scraped at the ground until a host of mouselike creatures spilled onto the surface, scurrying back and forth faster than an unenhanced eye could follow. Karl snatched one and passed her a naked, blind, writhing creature.

    "Sandurlund," Bera said. "There'll be a nest nearby."

    As swift as one of them, Coeo's hand swooped and came up with one of the little mouse-like creatures. With a flick he tossed it into his mouth. Coeo caught another and offered it to Bera, who shook her head. "I like my food to have stopped moving." Karl also declined, and shrugging, Coeo ate it.

    "These must be the workers," Bera said, watching them spilling out onto the sand. She answered Karl's raised eyebrow with, "I've seen them on the Oracle."

    "I wasn't thinking about that." Karl failed to stifle a grin.

    "What then?" Bera said. "What?"

    "I was just thinking…" Karl said.

    "Uh-oh," Bera interrupted, "that sounds dangerous."

    "That you're as much an info-junkie as me. But I haven't had the Oracle to answer all my questions." He dodged the sandurlund that Bera threw at him.

    Behind them, the glamurbak staggered to its feet. Snuffling, it scuttled across the ground, with Coeo following. "We mustn't get separated!" Bera grabbed the horses' reins and dragged them with her. Karl goggled at the caravan of glamurbak, troll, Bera and horses; then followed them. As abruptly as it had started, the glamurbak stopped.

    Bera dodged a cascade of sand from its scrabbling forelegs. "I think it's digging for tubers. The sandurlund nest among them."

    Coeo emitted an excited squeak and juggled a tiny, wriggling shape, before tossing it into his mouth.

    "Are we staying here tonight?" Karl asked Coeo.

    "Maybe, maybe not."

    Karl rolled his eyes but laid out his piece of plastic, burying the edges beneath sand and tiny stones. "It'll act as a still, trapping the moisture in the air."

    Bera snorted. "If there is any."

    "There's always moisture, even in a desert," Karl said.

    They laid out their sleeping-furs in the near-darkness

and ate their dinner of cold meat, trying to ignore the glamurbak's grunting and the tiny squeaks from the sandurlund nest. Normally Karl would have had dozens of questions, but his brain was fogged from exhaustion.

    Still, sleep would not come.

    Just as he was finally drifting off, Bera said, "Are you asleep?"

    "Yes," Karl said.

    "With anyone else, I'd think they were joking. Is that Loki?"

    Karl sighed. "No, it isn't. I was joking. Sort of."

    "You mean you were asleep. Sorry."

    "Only half-asleep," Karl murmured. "Don't worry. You can't sleep either?"

    "Nah. The grunting may have stopped, but that damned thing is such a noisy eater."

    The furs separating them lifted, and she backed into him, wrapping his arm around her. Neither of them had washed for days. The nanophytes normally sterilised his sweat glands and otherwise kept him clean, but he sensed that they were so swamped with the various jobs that he and Loki kept assigning them that he probably stank as much as she did.

    Actually, she didn't stink. He found the slightly rank, musky perfume of her body oddly attractive. Without thinking he licked the stale sweat off the side of her neck, enjoying its saltiness.

    "No funny stuff," she murmured. But even as she spoke, she wriggled her backside further into his crotch, and he had to will the nanophytes to divert the blood away from that area. "Just like brother and sister," she murmured sleepily, but covered his hand with her own smaller one and pressed it to her breast.

    They must be very friendly to their brothers and sisters, he thought with a wry inner smile, but said nothing. Incest almost certainly was a problem in every small isolated community on Isheimur.

    It was at quiet times like this he missed Karla, Lisane and Jarl most. His doubts that he'd ever see them again floated up like the bodies of dead leviathans from the depths.

    He might have to spend the rest of his life on this cold, drab world, the last effects of the Rejuve wearing off so that he had maybe fifty years instead of three or four hundred, trying to fit in among people who never had the time to lift their eyes from grubbing out an existence.

    He must have sighed, for Bera slurred, "Wassamatter?" and stroked his hand.

    He said, "Thinking about what happens if this doesn't work. If the W
inter Song
's disabled or isn't there…"

    "What you do?" Bera mumbled.

    "Don't know," Karl said.

    She turned slightly, looping one hand around to stroke his face, laying her own cheek against his. "Is OK. We'll get you home. Somehow." Her voice broke, and he felt tears on her cheek.

    "Hey, don't cry." He wiped her face and licked his fingers, savouring the salt. "What's all this about?"

    "You'll either be gone or stuck here and miserable," Bera said. "Don't know what's worse."

    "You could always come with me," Karl said.

    "Your life isn't for me," Bera said. "Look at you, then at me. I'd be the ugly primitive freak in your world."

    "You're not ugly," Karl said.

    "Plain, then," Bera said.

    "Are you fishing for compliments?" Karl said, grinning in the darkness. "How about, your hair is dark as a raven's wing, your eyes limpid pools, your skin like softest satin?"

    Bera sniffed, and wiped her nose. "Freya, but you're good. No wonder the other women wet themselves when you arrived."

    "Did they?" Karl said. "I didn't pay much attention to those fools. I noticed you, though." She's a young girl; you shouldn't play with her affections.

    "Flirt," Bera said, giggling. A moment later she sighed. "I really like you, Karl."

    "I should hope so," Karl said. "I'd worry about someone who trekked across the planet with someone they didn't like. And for what it's worth, the feeling's mutual."

    "No," Bera said. "I mean I really,
really
like you."

    "Oh," Karl said. "Oh." He wondered what he should say next, and decided on honesty. "I have to remind myself about six times a day that I'm married, you know. I do try–"

    Bera shushed him with a finger to his lips. "That doesn't matter, you stupid man," she said. "You're married there, not here. If that was the problem, you could have had me the first night. But much as I want to be with you, I can't." She took a deep, ragged breath. Karl felt her heart pattering beneath his hand. "Even talking about it… I can't put a sentence together, my mouth goes dry, I choke. Ever since the baby…"

    It was Karl's turn to hush her. "Then we'll carry on as we have been," he said, "rather than change things and hurt both of us. Now go to sleep."

    To Karl the night seemed endless, but every time he listened, Bera's breath was regular and rhythmic. About midnight the night suddenly lit with a silent green flash. There was a moment of white light, colder than sunlight but twice as bright, then it was gone. Coeo squalled, but Bera slept on.

    For about twenty minutes the sky was lit by intermittent green flashes, and more rarely the white ones, as the weapons found their target. Karl watched the battle rage across the heavens, and could have wept with frustration, but he kept still, and Bera slept on, blissfully unaware.

    The battle ceased at some point, and later the wind dropped. Coeo and the glamurbak ceased their bickering, and Gamasol rose in the eastern sky.

Now the same sun was setting behind loaf-shaped foothills, and on the nearest of them, outlined against the beauty of the red-purple-streaked sky stood a line of twenty or thirty humanoids – Karl had finally stopped thinking of them as trolls.

    "Wait," Coeo said.

    Karl put his hand on Bera's arm, wishing that he could shield her.

    Coeo dismounted from behind Karl to a cacophony of sonar pings and shrieks from the waiting humanoids, and strode toward their line with hands outstretched and open. "To show they're empty," Karl muttered.

    For the longest two or three minutes of Karl's life, Coeo argued with the other humanoids, too quickly for the lingua-weave to keep up, their voices dissolving into a buzzing blur at times.

    Coeo motioned them to dismount and approach. The other humanoids milled round their horses, some making appreciative noises, others less so, some verging on scornful. Their Kazakh ancestors were horsemen. They may still have an atavistic love of horses.

    In response to an interrogatory burst Karl said, "Speak slowly and clearly."

    From the humanoid's air of authority, Karl assumed that the questioner was their leader. "Why you here?" it repeated.

    "We seek Godsfall –" Karl gave the site the name Coeo referred to it by "– to pay respect."

    "You are not fake-fur?" Karl guessed that the humanoid referred to the settlers' habit of wearing fur.

    "I am a…" Loki struggled for the word, "castaway. Lost, learning the ways of this world." At his mention of "world" the humanoid stiffened, but didn't speak. "I am alone, but for my companion."

    "Your mate?"

    Karl hesitated. What do I say? "Yes."

    "She has left her people to be with you?"

    "Yes," Karl said. "The others fear us, hate us. Would kill us."

    There was a sound like a hissing kettle that Karl realised was laughter. "That sounds like the fake-furs," the chief said. "Come."

    "What about the horses?" Bera said. "We need to feed them."

    "Wait, please," Karl called.

    The horses were in pitiable condition – they had been losing weight throughout the journey. While they ate, Bera brushed them down with her hands, crooning. The humanoids watched intently. Karl emptied one of their precious water bottles into the material they used each night as a still, and the horses nudged each other to get at it. It was gone in seconds. "Shall I give them more?" Karl said.

    "No," Bera said. "It's more important that we get there than they do; if the worst happens, we may yet have to kill them and drink their blood." Karl stared, and Bera turned on him a gaze suddenly ice-cold. "Did you think this was a stroll in one of your parks?"

    Karl didn't answer. He had badly underestimated how hard it would be. If he couldn't fly to where he wanted to go on Avalon, he sent a remote. Walking and riding were sports to be played for an hour or two, not this bone-grinding marathon that left him permanently on the brink of exhaustion and aching so deeply that he couldn't remember what it was like not to ache.

    To take his mind off his aches, as the horses finished their meagre feed he asked Loki, "Could the Formers really not have known that the humanoids were sentient?"

    
Possible
, Loki said.
The settlers now have no satellites to
fly-by, just the remnants of ground-based stations, and for all
its aridity, Isheimur is a world often wreathed in storms,
whether snow, or dust. The humanoids are probably the origin
of wraiths and shapeshifter legends.

    "That's now, what about then?" Karl growled, ignoring the startled look from the nearest humanoid, and Coeo's explanation of "spirit friend".

    
The Formers would have had the capability, if not the in
clination. They'd have focussed on what needed doing to adapt
the world. Indigenous wildlife was something to be ignored or
eliminated, not studied. Don't forget, they were men and
women on a mission.

    "So they may have known, but suppressed it?"

    
Or they never noticed. We may never know. Is the difference
relevant?

    Coeo's touch reminded Karl that the horses had finished. He and Bera led them through a maze of twisting ravines into the foothills.

    "Caring for the horses was good." Coeo walked beside Karl. "Won you much goodwill. Our people had such beasts, but we lost them when we fell from heaven."

    "That's why you take them from the farms? Not to eat?" Karl said.

    Coeo let out his hissing laugh. "Never! We love them."

    Karl decided not to point out that in stealing the horses Coeo's people were condemning them to a slow death; the humanoids wouldn't be the first to kill that which they loved.