Hunting Season
Have you ever taken the ferry from Portwest to Lynlith? I hear it still runs from the severe stone jetties of Pilgrim’s Harbour, although only once a sixday since they opened the airport at Low Brandon. They don’t make the crossing in winter.
I went that way three years ago. It was the final voyage of autumn and there were only a few trappers and West Tear monks to accompany me on the ugly little boat. We sailed at ten from the granite bay. The bells of the Chapel Of Storms rang out over the wet black slate and dumb grey stones of Fish Street. The thin salt spray whipped up by a needle cold wind mixed with a fine fresh drizzle cast intermittently from low grey clouds. Grey stone; grey clouds and grey green sea, cut with white spume as the wind began to rise.
“Been in the wars?”
She startled me with the question as I twisted to face her; a small figure wrapped in a blue velvet cloak. The raw wind burning my ears in the bow had let her catch me unawares. She was a young woman - late teens or early twenties with long golden hair. I hadn’t noticed her board with the other passengers.
I frowned feeling irritable and confused. Alone at the prow as the ship broke into the channel I’d been enjoying the mournful desolation of the ocean; the harsh calls of the WhiteBacks and the Turns. Her interruption annoyed me obscurely. I hunched my shoulders and thrust my hands deeper into the pockets of my thick black northern coat as I searched for the right reply.
“The Azure Isles.”
She smiled. “Are the Knights still holding out ?”
I shrugged and turned my head away, raising my eyes to the receding shore. For all I knew the King Of the Umgumms was walking through the streets of St. Peters.
The dull throb of the engine remonstrated with the open water like a nanny with a wayward child as Portwest faded into the dreary morning chill. I was sick of the Azure Isles; sick of the whole Tropic Archipelago. Sick of its fractious petty kingdoms - its endless squabbles and pathetic little wars. I’d made a good living there but enough was enough. A mercenary can tire of his occupation like anyone else.
So here I was: Calgary’s Tears. On a boat between East Tear and West Tear to take up a long standing invitation from an old ally and to fulfil an unpleasant obligation.
“I’ve never been to the Azure Isles.” The girl chose to ignore my deliberately rude response. Her voice was wistful.
“You haven’t missed much.”
I turned to the bow again. On a good day, I knew that Lynlith would already be in sight. The Alberta Channel current runs deep and swift but it’s less than fifteen kilometres from shore to shore at the Narrows where the ferry crosses.
She pressed on. She was like one of those Free Stream News journos. Always asking questions after a battle. Questions and more questions….
“What bring you to West Tear?”
“Memories. Some good. Some bad.”
“Ah..”
The enigmatic answer seemed to satisfy her, as though with those antiseptic words I had told her a whole story. And of course she could no more know what was in my mind than you do.
“I’m here to kill things,” I said.
Lynlith stretches along the West Tear coastline for three kilometres or so connecting two bays; the Lyn jetty in the north and the more important Lith harbour in the south. We docked at Lith. Jonathan Keith was waiting on the quay side in an open topped Rolls Royce painted red, the old ‘Talking Heads’ classic ‘Slippery People’ blaring out of ostentatious white speakers in the back.
“Freddy baby! Good to see you!” he shouted above the noise of his own music. “Glad you could make it!” He came forward like a bolder in a landslide - the bulk of his chunky body enlarged by outstretched arms, his long white hair blown back in the wind. I felt him clap me on the back with insincere strength, then suddenly release me.
“Hiya chicken!”
The blonde girl had come down the gang plank behind me and now emerged to plant a demure kiss on Keith’s right cheek.
“This is Helen, my daughter,” he explained, then seeing the sideways grin which she cast in my direction continued with a chuckle, “say, have you two met?”
We stowed our luggage in the boot. I sat up front and with Helen in the back, Keith eased the car through the thinning crowd of disembarking passengers and busy dockhands. He took it easy on the narrow tarmac roads where weathered old buildings made Portwest seem nearly cosmopolitan but as soon as we began to climb towards a dark brotherhood of straggling pine trees at the western edge of town he pressed his foot hard to the floor and a cloud of pale sandstone dust erupted behind us. I could see Helen’s hair streaming in the breeze through the driving mirror.
“What’s the matter with him?” Byrne sang with querulous anxiety.
“He’s all right!” the gospel choir answered.
“How do you know?”
“The Lord won’t mind!”
I bent forward and switched the song off.
“Hey, I was listening to that!” my former commander protested mildly.
“You get plenty of time to listen to that twentieth century retro,” I answered, “but you haven’t seen me for years. We ought to talk.”
“Sure!” he shrugged and laughed. “Let’s talk! I think you’ll enjoy it here. We’re gonna bag some real big ones… One bitch in particular I got a grudge against - Old Lady Bracknell - She’s mine!”
“I haven’t come all this way to shoot grouse,” I said. “I hope these Harpies are worth it.”
“They’re worth it all right; even you won’t be disappointed. They do so love to fight back!”
“And how big’s the hunting party?” I asked.
He turned to me with something approaching a sly grin on his face. “I’ve got a surprise for you there, boy. Guess what? I’ve invited the whole gang and they’re here already. You’re the last pick up, old ‘One Shot’. Now aint that nice!”
“Yeah, sure,” I managed, “but I haven’t used that name in years. It’s Mr. Elliot to you.”
“Well you’ll always be ‘One Shot Stubbs’ to me,” he answered unperturbed. “You’re amongst friends now. You don’t need to hide your past from us.”
He chuckled in a manner I could only interpret as malicious. I turned to watch the trees give way to heather and rock as we reached the open moor. I could just about cope with Keith. The thought of the whole gang made me want to vomit.
We reached the Spine Highway after ten minutes but it was another four hours north to Keith’s manor house. Although West Tear is very sparsely populated the robot built and maintained roads are of excellent quality and the car travelled quickly. Half an hour after joining the Spine we crossed a track to the Benedictine monastery but from there we only saw three more junctions leading into the West. Keith explained that these were survey roads but also led to the remote estates of the few other locals. For the most part the land was open moor but we also passed through extensive forests of dour evergreens and by the shining levels of half a dozen lakes, as all the while we rose gradually into the northern hills.
“Helen’s studying at the Commonwealth College,” Keith said.
“Medicine,” she put in from the back of the car.
“She’s home for the winter,” he continued, speaking as if she weren’t there. In the mirror I could see an expression of mixed amusement and exasperation cross her pretty features. I was doing some quick calculations.
“Tania’s?” I queried in a low voice.
“Yeah…that’s right,” he muttered. “You know we went to Blenhim afterwards. Helen was born in 34. Well we had to leave in a bit of a hurry when she was three. There was… an incident. Tania fell from the train and she was badly injured. The doctors couldn’t save her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I meant it. Tania had always been a calming influence on Keith - the best thing that ever happened to him. She was too good to get mixed up in his runaway life.
“How’s Richard?” Helen lent forward to ask.
“Fine, fine...” Keith said more loudly so that his voice carried over the wind. “In fact I’ve persuaded him to join us on the hunt. It’ll make a man out of him!”
She sat back looking confused and a little hurt and shortly afterwards the rain came down from the north. We stopped the car and covered the roof.
“Who’s Richard?” I asked her, but it was Keith who replied.
“Richard Adams. He’s a government ecology agent at GrimRock point. It’s twenty five kilometers up the road but he’s still my nearest neighbour. It didn’t seem right to hunt without him.”
I picked up an undercurrent of that hidden nasty scheming which was Keith’s special trademark but I said nothing. If he wanted to be enigmatic for a while, let him. It would make no difference.
After we restarted, he switched the music on again and we made the rest of the journey in a warm cocoon of our own psychotic sound as the hostile weather lashed against the windscreen. By unspoken consent nothing more was said about the festering years since K-Day.
Idris had already set and we were well into the twilight of Pendragon before we reached Freestone manor. Keith’s pseudo Edwardian creation was cut into a hillside about five kilometers from the Spine Highway with views of a long stretch of the road, a sheltered expanse of Great Teeth Lake, the northern fringes of St. David’s Forest and the outliers of the Northern Massif.
West Tear ‘society’ is notorious in New Cambria for its peculiar conservatism, as much as for its isolation and reputed riches. Apart from the monks, the scientists and the trappers, the inhabitants are a rather eccentric lot. They vie with one another to demonstrate their ‘taste’ and wealth. Twentieth century English culture was ‘in’ on the West Tear and no expense was spared to recreate aspects of its arcane artefacts and customs. I knew this much already. It was now becoming clear that Keith had joined their exclusive cliques with his usual manic enthusiasm.
Cold rain was sluicing down the gutters and running off the sandstone gables as we came to the end of a long gravel drive fringed with waxy rhododendron. Keith parked in the stables and we ran across the lawn to reach the shelter of the classical portico. Yellow lights from cut glass chandeliers and candles projected into the gathering gloom where the surrounding hills were already dark and featureless against the sombre sky. I was glad to get inside.
The hall was covered by a dark red carpet and stocked with suits of armour and old oil paintings. Lia was sitting on the wide stone steps leading to the balcony, cleaning an old JX-61. She gave me a wide leathery grin.
“Hello ‘One Shot’, glad you could make it!”
“Paul Elliot,” I corrected automatically. Lia should have remembered my new name but she was an unregenerate bitch. Her eyes widened as she saw Helen behind me.
“Well, well, what have we here?”
There was a predatory intensity in her expression which alarmed the younger woman.
“Not the sort of prey you’re here to hunt,” I said.
Lia laughed. I hadn’t seen her for five years since we’d co-operated in a profitable little venture helping the Moon Islands overthrow the Sun Queen. She hadn’t changed - a long lean muscular body, olive skin, sharp features and deep set eyes. She kept herself fit and she was still in the trade - useful in a fight.
“Helen, this is Ms Carboni,” Keith said. “We go back a long way. She’s here to join the hunt.”
“Lia, this is my daughter Helen - hands off!” He clapped his old comrade on the back as he started up the stairs. At that moment a door on the ground floor opened and a wiry young man in an ill fitting white suit emerged blinking in the low light.
“Richard!” Helen cried and flung herself at him. They embraced warmly and kissed whilst I felt the briefest irrational instant of jealousy. Lia smiled at me again and gave a wry shrug but Jonathan Keith was frowning.
“P…P.. Pleased to meet you M.. M.. Mr Elliot,” the young man said as he shook my hand. There was something a little sickly about his body, as though he had suffered from some debilitating disease in childhood which had left him with a permanent weakness. His stammer was compounded by a little nervous tick on his right cheek, but his eyes were steady and penetrating. I sensed that what he lacked in physical strength he might make up for in resolve.
“Helen, you can join us all for dinner in an hour,” Keith said, pointedly ignoring the ecologist. “I’ll show ‘Mr. Elliot’ to his room.”
He spoke my new name in reluctant inverted commas, obviously still indulging his own amusement at the adopted pseudonym. I remember thinking that it might have done him some good to take one himself before today.
The wide bay window in the bedroom looked up to a grassy slope at the back of the house, and only a small slice of sky was visible above the dark rocky crags at the peak. Keith was as eager to show off his property as a toddler at Christmas - the en suite Jacuzzi which could be converted to a sensory deprivation tank, the orchids and bromeliads each enclosed in a cunningly engineered micro climate, the elegant furnishing and the sophisticated decorations. I noted with interest the succession of photographs round the walls. They all showed the owner of the house in the proximity of some more or less famous political leader, feeding from their acquaintance like a leech in a swamp. Some were shaking his hand, others engaged in conversation and a couple had their arm round his shoulder. One in particular, I considered typical of the man’s peculiar mixture of vanity, vulgarity and presumption. Jacob Herring, the notorious industrialist was pictured holding a TR-11 and menacing the camera, whilst Keith’s hand rested on the barrel, guiding his employer’s aim. Both men wore wolfish grins in celebration of their recent success. I happened to know that three years later, Keith had assisted Umgumm revolutionaries to retake the Topaz island group, killing Herring in the process. Suddenly he was at my elbow and his voice dropped from the expansive boasting, which was beginning to bore me, to an anxious whisper.
“Listen, ‘One Shot’, we may not always have seen eye to eye in the past but I trust you. I want some advice from an old friend. You know me," he continued in a wheedling tone. “I can never resist a challenge - I always like to get involved.. Well.. naturally enough I’ve made some enemies over the years. And times aren’t the same. You must have noticed that yourself. When we were young you could go where you wanted all over New Cambria and there was always a job to be done and people prepared to pay. Nowadays, the chances are the state holds all the cards. This World government seems to be getting a grip. Oh, it will take a while yet but my bet is that in less than twenty years there won’t be any work left for an honest soldier of fortune.” He laughed. “I don’t suppose that will bother you,” he said. “After all, you must be near retirement! And I retired ten years ago when I built this place.”
“So what’s your problem?” I interrupted a little sharply.
“Like I said, I’ve made some enemies and there are a lot of people who might find it more convenient if I were out of the way. That includes elements in the new World government and some of my old adversaries across the battlefield. I think there’s a plot to kill me. The administration want to do it but they’re too scared to make it obvious so they’ve come up with something indirect. Do you know what this is?”
He pressed a wooden token into my hand. It was about ten centimetres across, roughly semi-circular and carved in the dark red wood which they call ‘Blood Grain’ on the mainland east of Zan. Black lines were scored across the surface to make a pattern of peculiar runes.
“No idea,” I said.
“You ought to have,” he replied. “It belongs to your friends the Taranills. You remember K-Day?”
How could I forget.
“Of course, but that doesn’t mean I know what you’re talking about.”
He snorted.
“That was one day we didn’t see eye to eye, eh? But I suppose you might not have heard about this….” he hesitated as though searching for the right word, “…custom. Even if you were a Taranill lover!”
“So tell me.”
“It’s an assassins calling card. They’re known as Othkyne. The prospective victim is sent one half of the token; the other half is sent to the assassin, to be reunited only after the kill.”
“Charming,” I said.
“Complete idiocy!” he answered. “Something to do with their witless idea of honour, but forewarned is forearmed. I’m damned sure the Taranill assassins would be much more successful if they didn’t use the Othkyne! But I don’t think the Taranill are doing this - they’re just an excuse. I think it’s the government. I want you to help me ‘One Shot’. I want you to find out who’s behind this.”
So it was help he wanted now. A little while ago it was only advice. Keith was frightened. I‘d never seen him in this state before.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “This place is so isolated, no one could possibly get here without your knowledge. I bet you have that road watched by automatic systems and I can’t see anyone but the most fanatical killer trekking through seventy kilometers of wilderness to reach you from West or East. This trinket has probably been passed on just to scare you. Don’t let it get to you. That’s what they want.”
He seemed to relax a little. A spattering of rain dusted the back window.
“Sure, sure…” he said and was his old laughing self again. “But we’ll talk more about this later - after the hunt.”
Then he left me to prepare for dinner. I unfastened my kit bag and began to carefully lay out my clothes. I realised that Keith had developed an unhealthy degree of paranoia. It accounted for the reunion. He wanted the old gang around to give him a degree of reassurance.
I took a long shower and dressed slowly in the formal attire I always carry but seldom wear. It felt good to be out of my travel worn garments. It had been a long journey. Before going downstairs I pressed my hand to the breast of my quilted shirt. I could feel the reassuring hardness of the other half of the Othkyne, bound into the lining.
Only Paulo was missing from the table - he’d drowned in a diving accident off the Pink Shell Reefs in ‘43. The rest were all there; all the survivors of K-Day, Colin Varran, fat and balding now it seemed, Hildren T’riu, his dark navy skin scarred with eestox needles, Obidiah Chen, oriental features cadaverous and intelligent, Felix Mason hatchet faced and scowling through his thin grey moustache and of course Ms Lia Carboni, the only one who seemed to be conspicuously amused. But Keith was waxing grandiloquent again so it didn’t matter.
“Good to see you all,” I said, interrupting his anecdote as I took my seat at the long, highly polished wooden table.
“Pour ‘One Shot’ a drink!” Keith said expansively, waving his hand vaguely at Varran who had the place to the right to me. I sipped it cautiously. It was a fine Riesling from the ‘48 vintage proving that Keith was a least capable of exercising some aspects of good taste. I smiled across the table at Helen and Richard. They looked a little subdued.
Round the walls, Keith had mounted a number of old cathode ray televisions and hooked them to contemporary video players. They were showing a succession of images from the twentieth century, with the sound turned down. There were scenes from assorted wars, reruns of the moon landings, the state funeral of an English princess, an emotional vampire session and some incomprehensible game shows.
Robot servants began to serve the first course, a starter of Neapolitan prawns and avocado pears.
“I’m coming with you tomorrow,” Helen said to Richard, putting her hand on his arm. He looked uncomfortable.
“I d.. d.. don’t think that would b.. be a good idea,” he said.
“I do and you can’t stop me - no one can.” She glanced up to the head of the table as she spoke. I got the impression this was the tale end of a long argument. If Helen had inherited half her father’s stubborn determination her boyfriend was wasting his breath.
Chen was sitting on my left. I noted the expensive black silk suit with its fashionable high collar, stiff and studded with an array of bright red stones.
“Business good?” I queried.
“Most excellent, thank you,” he replied. “If you ever find yourself in need of my services you know where to come. I always offer favourable terms to my old friends.”
“Yeah sure,” I said, “But I don’t think I can afford you. I prefer it when my patrons pay the expenses.”
Chen was an arms dealer now. Apart from Keith he was probably the only one of us with real money. He had a place in Blenhim where he was reputed to broker all kinds of shady deals including a side line in organised terrorism and a number of protection rackets. I was surprised to find him here without his own bodyguard and said as much.
“House rules. The commander insisted.”
Obidiah Chen had been Jonathan Keith’s deputy before I ever met them. I wondered how he would react if he knew about the Othkyne in my shirt - how any of them would react. It was going to make my job much more challenging….
“Well , Mr. Stubbs,” Helen said as we finished the main course, “now that it seems you’re an old friend of my father’s perhaps you can tell me a little more about his past? He never tells me anything.” She smiled disarmingly so that I forgot to correct the Stubbs to Elliot. “I rather thought on the boat that you were just as secretive but I believe you all fought with him.”
She was teasing me a little - I realised she must have guessed I was joining her father’s hunting party when she first spoke to me - but I was enjoying the game this time; especially when I caught sight of Keith’s warning expression. I had no idea how much she really knew but I could see he was worried about what I might say. Let him sweat, I thought.
I sat back whilst the robots cleared the table and brought in the sweet. The Riesling had been replaced by Port and I took a slow drink before replying, thinking carefully. Some topics were obviously taboo and others might be controversial….
“Do you know much about the Gallian Trading Gangs?” I began.
She shook her head.
“Well, the Gallian Trading Gangs operate throughout the Bubble now, but they originated on Gall V, shortly after the S’arys Contract was signed. They have a complex culture; part religion, part commercial philosophy and part political ideology. Although they maintain a loose affiliation the individual Gangs are fiercely independent and competitive. They’re pretty weird - they use elements of a modified voodoo in their ceremonies and they have a strange sense of honour too.”
Keith knew the story I was going to tell now, and in the corner of my eye I caught sight of a brief scowl. I grinned and saw Lia smiling with me.
“Not long after I signed up with your father’s outfit we did a job for the Te-aikará Gang. Before the Revolution they used to control a number of plantations on Palm and Yesterday, and some of the islands in the Yesterday group.”
“They still do,” T’riu said. I nodded and continued. I had everyone’s attention now.
“It wasn’t a difficult task. They wanted us to escort a crate of relics they’d imported, from FirstLanding to Arweal. Arweal is a tiny island in the Yesterday group which the Te-aikará gang have designated as holy for one of their festivals. Apparently they believed that a rival Gang might try to intercept the shipment for some purpose that was quite incomprehensible to us.
"Your father made a pretty unusual deal with Te-aikará Stump Boss. He was a giant of a man, seven foot tall and black as the Coal Sack, with bleached bones for earrings and a face stripped red and white with the Gang’s markings. He told us up front that they wouldn’t deal in local currencies during the Purity Season. Apparently it was against their principles. He also said that when we’d delivered the relics we had to leave Arweal on the same day. So we negotiated special terms.”
“The Trading Gangs never renege on an agreement,” Chen put in. “They have a very strict code of ethics. We knew we could trust them to keep their word.” He was smiling too.
“The Stump Boss promised to pay us with sufficient Fesqua nuts to extract two litres of pure blaze oil. At the price blaze oil fetches that was quite a pretty little sum for three days work, even divided between six of us.”
“What’s blaze oil?” Helen asked.
“Have you ever drunk quazak?” Lia said. “Distilled rye flavoured with apples and blaze oil. It’s used for medicinal purposes as well - mixed with arrowroot and mallow to make trimol.”
“They tap it from the heart of nuts they call ‘le grand Fesqua’,” I said, “heavy, dark purple shiny shells the size of a man’s head. When you crack them open there’s a rich, sticky, velvet green liquid inside which can be decanted just as it is - pure blaze oil. A sack full of ‘le grand Fesque’ would have paid us if they were good ripe nuts. But the nuts are rare.
Although the estates of Yesterday are filled with the dripping foliage of Regulin trees you can search for an hour or more at harvest time before you find one. Most of the trees are clones and they seldom engage in the form of sexual reproduction which produces the giant nuts. No one has found a reliable way to force it.”
“B.. but t.. t.. t.. hat isn’t the o.. only w.. way to g.. get b.. b.. blaze oil,” Adams said.
“Indeed not!”
I laughed and Lia, Chen and Varran joined me with suppressed mirth, to the puzzlement of the others who hadn’t been there. Keith frowned into his drink.
“When we finished our job the Stump Boss met us on the quay side. We expected him to bring our payment but he just pointed to a large wooden barn at the end of a row of warehouses and beckoned for us to follow. ‘All yours’, he said when we entered, pointing at a mound of glass smooth black nuts the size of marbles, stacked ten metres high.”
Now Adams started to chuckle, beginning to guess the joke.
“They were ‘la petite Fesque’,” I continued. “The Regulin tree has two different mechanisms for sexual reproduction. No one knows why. ‘La petite Fesque’ are much the more common and they do contain an essence of blaze oil. The plantation owners extract it from the nuts in specially designed presses on Palm and Yesterday.”
“The Te-aikará hadn’t cheated us,” Varran said, taking over. “There was sufficient oil in those nuts to pay our fee. The Stump Boss had just been a little vague when we settled on the terms and Jonathan didn’t specify. We didn’t really understand their business and we’d assumed ‘le grand Fesque’.”
“Of course, there was no way we could carry the nuts away,” I said. “We had to be off the island by nightfall and we only had the small motor launch we’d come in. That cunning Stump Boss knew it as well. He was suddenly backed up by a whole band of polite but powerful warriors.
‘Ah well’, he said when the commander protested at our predicament. ‘If you can’t take them I suppose we’ll have to look after them until after the festival.’”
“He was a shrewd old beggar!” Keith protested, finally joining in. “He knew damn well what he was doing. I was determined to get my money but by the time I’d hired a barge (from the Te-aikará) and arranged for those pathetic nuts to be shipped to Yesterday where they could be pressed, we’d lost half the profits.”
Suddenly the old man laughed aloud himself, and everyone else relaxed as they joined in. I observed dryly to myself how apparent it was now that our earlier humour had been forced; strained and nervous. It was as if his guests all waited on Keith’s approval before they dare express proper amusement.
I took a long drink. He still keeps everyone on a string, I thought. But I’m not his puppet anymore.
I woke early on the following morning and went down the silent stairs and out onto the lawn whilst the cool early rays of Idris were still casting the long shadows of dawn. Pendragon was at maximum elongation and would not rise for another hour. Overnight, the rain had blown away into the West to leave a patchy sky with high cloud. A thin mist remained at ground level cut through with prismatic sparkles from a heavy dew on the grass. Sombre drips of water leaked slowly from the dark rhododendrons.
I wanted to breath the damp, pure air and clear the dregs of alcohol out of my system. As I crossed the lawn my feet made dark tracks through the dew and I came at last to a narrow ravine where a rapid stream splashed noisily below me. A crude slate stone bench overlooked a turbulent little waterfall and I sat down to think.
I hadn’t decided whether to execute Keith. We’d survived a lot of scrapes together and I owed him plenty. But I felt a profound revulsion towards him. He represented everything that was most vile in the mercenary trade.
I had to see him: to test him. We would hunt again and I would learn….
“C… C.. Can I join you, M.. M.. Mr. Elliot?”
I’d heard the faint wet spongy steps of Richard Adam’s approach for a full half minute before he reached me.
“I didn’t know I was coming apart,” I quipped, but simultaneously wondered if I was. For a couple of seconds he didn’t seem to get the joke, then suddenly erupted in broken laughter and sat beside me.
“I should think after all you’ve b.. b.. been through, this hunt w.. w.. would be a bit b.. boring,” he said. “Y.. you’re all f.. f.. fighting men. W.. w.. why have y.. you really come h.. here?”
He’s perceptive, I thought but he doesn’t know. Obviously Helen, too, was wondering just who we all were. I knew that it wouldn’t be Keith’s style to confide in her. Last night’s meal revealed that his daughter was ignorant of much of his past career. Now, however, he seemed to be opening up, most likely out of necessity. With the gang around, secrets would come out. She might be in for some shocks.
“We’re not as young as we used to be,” I said. “And anyway I believe these harpies are spirited creatures and should give us a good fight.”
“Y..y.. yes,” he said. For a moment there was silence as we both considered. When he spoke again his voice was quieter and more thoughtful.
“Y..y.. you know, Mr. Elliot. All of N.. New Cambria is o.. o.. one continual b.. battle ground. Of a sort. L.. l.. look here.”
At first I couldn’t see where he meant but then I realised his silver capped shoe was pointing at a tiny dark green plant emerging from the sparse grass in front of the bench.
“Quamilia,” he said.
“N..native to West Tear. D.. d.. did you know that t.. there w.. was once a thriving e.. ecosystem of n.. native flora and f.. fauna on New Cambria? B.. but we’ve replaced it with Earth species, everywhere. Almost all g.. g.. gone.”
His voice was wistful and trailed away for a moment’s mourning. I was vaguely aware of this but in truth I hadn’t really given it much thought.
“A.. and d.. do you know why?”
“The earth species were better adapted?” I said, hazarding a guess.
He laughed again; an easier and less forced reaction.
“W.. well perhaps in a way. B.. but think how unlikely that is! N.. native life has evolved for this p.. p.. planet over m.. millions of years. Y.. you would expect it to be far superior to alien invaders in coping w.. with l.. local conditions. So why is it f.. fighting a losing b.. battle everywhere?”
“Tell me,” I said, intrigued.
“New Cambrian life is u.. unusual. It’s based on amino acids which are m.. mirror images of t.. the ones f.. found on earth and everywhere e.. else w.. we’ve found carbon based life in the galaxy. T.. this means that it can’t integrate with life based on our isomers. The nutrients which sustain it, the w.. whole chemistry is different. The Qualima and the grass live in different chemical universes.
"N.. New Cambrian animals and plants c.. can’t feed off earth plants and animals and visa versa.”
I noticed that as we talked about ecology his stammer grew less pronounced and he became altogether more fluent. He had an air of innocent enthusiasm and for the first time I could see what Helen might find attractive in him.
“Then you’d think they’d just get along together, wouldn’t you?” I said.
“Ah, b.. but they still compete you see. The plants compete for light and space and the animals still hunt one another and fight for territory even if they can’t eat their kills.
"F.. for some reason that n.. nobody understands, o.. our chemistry seems more efficient at a base molecular level. Earth life wouldn’t stand a chance against the in built advantage of the native ecology otherwise.
"And all things being equal it still shouldn’t stand a chance, given that native life controlled the land and sea and had a massive numerical advantage in the war of the isomers. You see an earth microbe surrounded by thousands of unpalatable natives is in a far worse plight than a native microbe that happens to make the mistake of eating one rare useless alien. T.. that’s probably why, when life first evolves, both isomeric system are s.. stable o.. once they reach a critical bio mass.
"All things aren’t equal though. We upset the balance. W.. we needed life we could eat so we brought in enough m.. mirror isomers to s.. start a competing ecosystem. N.. no one t.. thought the effects on the natives would be so catastrophic. I.. in a f.. few hundred years they c.. could all be extinct.”
“Then why are you hunting the harpies?” I asked. “Seems to me you’d be fighting to preserve them, if they’re part of a vanishing system.”
“It’s not that simple. When an ecosystem g.. goes out of k.. k.. kilter there are all sorts of unpredictable effects which c.. can include an unexpected and unwanted i.. increase in the numbers of s.. some species. It’s not the h.. harpies I’m worried about Mr. Elliot. There are too m.. many of them and I’m happy to help c.. c.. cull them. It’s their prey. It’s the Sky Sailors.”
Now I understood. This much natural history I knew. In the autumn the Sky Sailors migrated south from that inhospitable region of fjords and glaciers on the Cap, known as the Fringes. The harpies traditionally preyed on them as they passed over Calgary’s Tears. They were especially aggressive at this time of year, taking anything that moved and storing excess meat in ice larders in their rocky lairs. It was their final opportunity to kill and eat before the winter during which they would hibernate. And their hunting presented us with the best opportunity for ours.
“Have you hunted harpies before?” I asked.
“N.. n.. no.” He sounded doubtful.
“Don’t let Keith manoeuvre you into taking part if you don’t want to. I know how he manipulates people.”
Adams shrugged. “He d.. doesn’t think much of m.. me. H.. he’s said so before. H.. he doesn’t approve of Helen s.. s.. seeing me.”
“It’s probably nothing personal,” I said, although it probably was. Keith believed in the cult of physical perfection and fitness and he had an almost squeamish dislike of sickness and weakness. Adams was far from his ideal. “Keith doesn’t like governments”, I continued. “He’s allergic to them. Most of his life has been spent fighting them or running away from them. He has a natural suspicion of any government employee, even an ecologist like yourself.”
“T.. tough,” Adams said.
This time it was me that laughed.
We set out for the Hunting Grounds after breakfast in a convoy of four customised Land Ramblers. Keith, Lia and Mason were up front in the first vehicle, Chen and T’riu occupied the second. I drove the third with Colin Varran as my passenger and Richard and Helen brought up the rear. Two hang gliders were fastened to the roof rack of each Rambler.
For the first half hour we travelled on a rough private road which crossed the ravine then bent back sharply, wound behind the hill and came up a long shoulder of granite to a wide ridge overlooking the Great Teeth Lake. From there it followed the contours to a brooding mass of rock called ‘The Watcher’, then on into the heart of the Massif. The track had been privately engineered by hired construction robots and lacked the smooth surfacing of the publicly financed roads of yesterday. Ultimately it came to an end and we engaged the scramble legs. The thick wheels retreated into the body of the Ramblers and eight long multiply jointed metal limbs emerged from their grey housings. I grasped the remorphed control column and eased it gently forward. Like giant spiders we crawled slowly across a field of heather and rock.
“Do you ever think about it?” Varran asked. He didn’t say what. He didn’t need to.
“No,” I lied.
“I do,” he said. “All the time.”
I glanced sideways at him. Outside, the pleasant autumn sunshine was only just warming the land but the cab had heated through and there was a light sheen of perspiration across his pink jowls. He swallowed, glancing round listlessly at the bleak moors before continuing.
“He made us do it. We didn’t have to. We could have left them alone.”
I grunted, noncommittal. Varran was our comms man - strictly electronics and sidearms, but he’d been as enthusiastic as the rest of us.
“War’s war,” I said. “It’s over.”
As I spoke, I felt one of those occasional early morning whirlpools in the stream of consciousness when, for no obvious reason, you unexpectedly recollect a fragment of last night’s dreams. Sometimes, if the mood takes me, I can hang on and use it to haul back more rubble from the unfettered wanderings of the unconscious. But this time I didn’t need to. I had dreamt about K-day.
Towards the end of the bloody year of 331 the Army of the Friends of New Cambria began to advance up the western coast of Gwynedd. They launched an amphibious assault from Daffodil Point and easily overran the inadequate island defences of Zan. Only the lands of the Taranill now stood between them and New Swansea.
We were working for the military wing of the Old Assembly, garrisoned in a village called Lowrush in the coastal hills. A brigade of regular troops armed with light attack tanks, star burst mortars and plasma pulse artillery were camped in the valley but three days after St. David’s day their commanders received word that air cover had been withdrawn; diverted to defend the eastern front. It was clear to the officers that this was only a prelude to abandoning the region. Without helicopter and ornithopter support we could not hope to hold against the AFNC. And that in turn meant that New Swansea would almost certainly fall. Things were going pretty badly for the Old Assembly.
Over the next couple of days Keith spent several hours closeted with our masters in the command post, a church hall taken over by the army. Sure enough, the order to retreat came on the morning of the 10th. The regular troops took it badly. Many of them came from New Swansea and the towns to the north and they were angry with their political leaders. They saw this move as tantamount to the surrender of their homes. And of course, events were to prove them right.
We expected to be ordered to cover the retreat. Intelligence reports suggested that advance units of the AFNC were only a couple of days away and it would help if they were harassed. I was getting a bit itchy. I didn’t like this kind of operation - doing the regular army’s dirty work. Not only was it dangerous but it was quite likely that we wouldn’t get paid. Communications in this part of Gwynedd weren’t going to be good over the coming months and even if Old Assembly forces retained control there was no guarantee that they would recognise the local deals we had made with the brigade commander. They were poor patrons anyway, always paying late and grudgingly. I suggested to Keith that this might be the time to cut and run but there was a strange gleam in his eye.
“Oh no Freddy,” he’d said. “We’ve got a job to do! How do you think we’re going to get work in the future if word gets round we break a deal when it gets tough?”
“Besides,” he’d added with a wink, “this one’s easy.”
He led the unit up to the tor on Beacon Hill where we watched as the Old Assembly soldiers fell into convoy and fled to the north.
“Now boys and girls,” he said, “here’s the plan.” He began to explain….
I wasn’t the only one to protest but I like to think I made the strongest objection; Paulo and T’riu grumbled openly and Lia spat heavily into the grass with an expression of disgust. It was her only contribution. The others took it in rigid silence.
“It’s necessary!” Keith insisted, sensing the mood. “You know about the mines on the southern approaches to the vale and the sonic snares in Evan’s Pass. So do the Taranill - they know exactly where they’re laid because they watched the army lay them. They’ll sell out to the AFNC without a second thought! More than half of ‘em are Friends’ sympathisers anyway.
"Operation K-Day; Killing Day - that’s want command wants! We’re here to tidy up after the Old Assembly army. Their troops are too soft for it. They have Taranill blood in their veins. We haven’t.
"We’re going to silence Lowrush. We’re going to kill the traitors. All of them. When they’re dead there’ll be no more talking. Those ‘friendly’ bastard invaders are going to get what’s due to ‘em. No clues. Let’s go.”
We’d come a long way together since the peninsula campaign and we were tired - physically and spiritually. We’d grown used to obeying Keith and a mercenary unit isn’t run like a democracy. But I’m not making excuses. Weak or willing, it didn’t matter, we all went along with it and the result was the same. We all tasted the putrid communion of our guilt.
And this was the stuff of my frequent nightmares. A series of images…
Mason and Keith knocking on the doors and rounding the men up; T’riu and Varran covering the backs of the houses whilst Chen broke in and butchered our former hosts; the panic and screaming when the villagers realised we had returned from Beacon Hill as their executioners; Paulo standing on the steps of the church and spraying side arm death into the town square; Lia engaged in a shoot out with the only armed citizen and the recoil against my shoulder as I picked him off; Keith yelling “No survivors! No survivors! No survivors!” like a mantra from hell.
It was all over in less than fifteen minutes. Lowrush was silent in the stinking afternoon where only our own dumb boots kicked the bloody paving stones and the mute bodies of a hundred dead waited patiently for the sun and the flies to strip the unwanted flesh from their bones. Then we went down the main street and all the side streets, systematically searching for witnesses.
“Finish the job,” Keith said steadily. “Finish the job. That’s what we have to do.”
And the earlier mania was gone so that only a dull grey persistence remained - an unthinking nerveless requirement to make a clean sweep.
In a small whitewashed cottage behind the school, where incongruously neat wall flowers denied the reality all around them, I crouched down and found the girl. She was about eight years old, hiding under the bed with her fingers in her ears and her eyes shut tight, shivering violently. A shot rang out and she flinched but didn’t open her eyes. I knew her. She was the Miller girl. An accident of nature had left an irregular red birth mark on the back of her left calf so that the other children called her ‘Fever Legs’ and ‘Strawberry’. I’d seen her running down the street with them - a lanky thing with blonde straggly hair - awkward - an outsider only grudgingly included in their games. Her parents were the line station operatives. I’d watched both of them die in the square less than ten minutes before.
I hesitated.
“You finished in there ‘One Shot’,” Mason called and at that moment she opened her eyes wide and for a long instant we stared at one another, face to face. Her mouth dropped open into an O of surprise but she stopped trembling and I could see that she had passed her limits and could be no more frightened by my reality than her imaginings. If she’d screamed I think I would have killed her but she remained perfectly silent - accepting. I rose to my feet and left.
“Yeah. All done here.”
Was I doing this child a kindness, leaving her an orphan in a town of death, or was I just a coward afraid to put her out of her misery - too fastidious to make a mess unless I could share the blame with others? I didn’t know but I thought about it often in the days that followed as we moved up the coast. When the war sputtered to its inconclusive conclusion and the gang went their separate ways, I still hadn’t found an answer though the question persisted like some tenacious advocate for all those other questions I should have asked; waiting unanswered in the darkness. And in the end I realised that it was going to break me if I let it.
So I gave up, and more than just that, I stopped considering right and wrong altogether. I concentrated on what I knew. I concentrated on survival : for twenty three years until the hollow days before I took passage to Calgary’s Tears. Until the hunting season.
“Over there!”
Varran’s shout returned me to the present. We were picking our way across a gentle slope at the top of a U-shaped valley, Keith in the lead vehicle keeping the line well above the steeper scree which fell away sharply below. Where the head of the ancient glacier was now marked by tumble down cliffs, I could just make out some grey dots circling up into the pale blue horizon.
Varran raised a mock gun made from two fat fingers.
“Bang. Bang,” he said softly as he took imaginary aim. “We’re coming to get you birdies…”
The convoy came to a halt after another ten minutes, scrambling down into a sheltered hollow below a rocky knoll and out of sight of the harpies. A small stand of scrubby vegetation of a kind which was shorn from the higher ground by the winds, made the surrounding moor land seem more desolate by contrast. After my conversation with Adams I wondered if these were native plants or colonists from Earth and was a little ashamed that I didn’t know.
We had parked the Ramblers in a rough semicircular formation following the ingrained habits of our old military life - maximum defensive cover and no vehicle blocking the escape route of the others. Adams broke the pattern by stopping too close to Chen and T’riu, earning an instinctive glare of disapproval from the normally bland arms dealer, although this was not a military expedition. Everyone gathered at the centre.
“So what’s the game?” T’riu asked with an apparent casual disinterest which fooled no one. He was chewing a wad of sterox and ripples of nervous discharge twitched over the chemically altered surface of his deep blue skin. He spat into the heather - a bright green trickle of fluid running briefly down his chin before his unnaturally long tongue came out to lick it clean. I sensed his excitement. We were all excited now.
Jonathan Keith was in high spirits. He was in command again and loving it.
“Today we’re going to mark our territory and scout the flock. Tomorrow we attack.”
He smiled.
“Of course the harpies may not know the plot. We’ve got to be careful from now on - even here. Remember they’re hunters and they see the world the way we do. On the ground, in the sky. It’s all prey to a harpy, just prey.
"We’ve all handled gliders before. Even Mr. Adams has used a glider.” He gave an ironic bow in the direction of the young ecologist at which his daughter scowled.
“I won’t bore you by reminding you how to fly. The whole point of this hunt is to take them in the air. We’ll have side arms for emergencies but I don’t want to see anyone firing - it’s unsporting.”
He grinned wickedly.
“This is hunting not warfare, so we take them in the air with spears; one to one in personal combat.”
The gang were a little uneasy when they heard this and Varren looked particularly unhappy but we said nothing, content to let Keith dictate the terms as usual. There was a short silence.
“Like I said. What’s the game?” T’riu reiterated with belligerent discontent.
Lia laughed, enjoying the truculence of her former colleague and breaking the tension. “Still the same old Hildren T’riu, eh? What’s in it for me?”
“Don’t worry,” Keith said, “there’ll be plenty of time to discuss the side bets tonight. That’s why we’re only scouting today. That and the fact that the Sky Sailors are due tomorrow. I have the latest satellite reports and the jet stream is running fast. The weather is changing and our quarry can sense it. When the harpies are engaged with the Sky Sailors, we strike at them! Any questions?”
“I s.. s.. suggest w.. w.. we stick fairly c.. c.. c.. close in the air t.. today,” Adams said.
“T.. they’ll m.. m.. mob a lone flyer if it’s n.. n.. not i.. in their flock, b.. but they’ll b.. b.. be more wary of a g.. g.. group. S.. sometimes f.. f.. flocks, fight f.. for territory, b.. but they’re more c.. c.. cautious about it. If they s.. s.. see we’re flying t.. together, they’ll w.. wait t.. to s.. size us up before they a.. a.. a.. attack.”
Keith shrugged, contemptuous. Adams’ contribution had obviously annoyed him.
“You must all do as you see fit,” he said. “But I’ve brought down these bitches before and I’ll cut my own air space. Now let’s get up there and have a look around!”
We manhandled the hang gliders to the top of the knoll, where from the sloping flat face of a mirror black rock we could launch into the valley. Helen wasn’t going to join us in the air; the second glider on Adam’s Rambler was for Felix Mason. Her father had allowed her to come so far but there was absolutely no question of her hunting, even if she had wanted to. So she sat by the rock with a pair of high powered binoculars and watched as one by one we climbed into the sky.
It felt good to feel the wind under me again. I hadn’t flown for more than five years and I realised I’d missed it.
From the tip of each triangular nylon wing the glider spanned six metres, braced by aluminium struts and fibre glass poles under tension. A lightweight engine coupled to retractable props and a thixiotropic, hydrostatic auxiliary wing gave it the capability of powered flight if required but it was really designed to ride silently on the breeze. Keith had equipped each glider with a rack of spears of varying lengths and types which were slung underneath the wings pointing forwards like air to air missiles, which I suppose of a kind, they were. Cradled in a harness below the axis I could take a weapon with either hand, and the racks could be cycled with a small pulley to bring the more distant spears into reach. A broad knife in my belt and a gun clipped to the air frame completed my armament.
I swung in a broad circle round the camp, gaining height slowly with one eye on the opposite cliffs. There was a crackle on the public channel and I recognised Mason’s voice.
“I don’t think Fatty’s gonna make it. Hey Varran! You should ‘a cut down on those cakes!”
The large blue sail of Colin Varran’s glider was diving steeply into the valley but just when it looked as if he would crash it pulled out and he found an updraft.
“Whit whooooo,” Mason wolf whistled. His own glider was above me in the air and he was already beginning to level off. When I looked down I could see that Richard Adams was banking below me. He seemed to be handling his craft well enough but conditions were good and if the weather changed tomorrow we might all find it difficult. I was quite sure that Keith would insist on the hunt if flying was at all possible.
Once we were all high enough in the air we began to cross the valley in a loose cloud. The sere brown grass and bony thistles of the slopes gave way to tussocks of reeds and bright green mosses indicating that the land below us was wet and poorly drained. It would make for a soft crash landing but the thought was still not one I cared to contemplate. Ahead of us the hostile grey flock wheeled suspiciously. I felt now that I could sense their malevolent intelligence. As we got closer I picked out a little more detail. The harpies were enormous, their wing span every bit as long as our gliders, their cruel heads angular and surmounted by a twisted black horn. The leading edge of each wing was a clinically contoured line of sharpened bone supporting a set of hollow trailing struts, over which the rubbery membrane of their skin was stretched.
The voice on the intercom was Keith’s, “They’re matriarchs. Every flock is a clan of families descended from the dominant female. The females are bigger and more aggressive than the males. If you look carefully you’ll see that the males are a darker shade and they have a kind of curved spur at the tip of each wing.”
I judged there to be around thirty of the creatures in the air and now that Keith had pointed out the difference I could see that there were only six or seven females, each one at the nucleus of a group of males.
“I’ve studied this gang for a couple of years,” he was saying.
“I got names for ‘em. The bitches anyway. See the one circling over by the trees at the foot of the scree slope? That’s Bodicea. The group just to the left are led by Lucretia and above them is Hypolita and her cronies. You can recognise her by the wide white scar on her left wing. Then we’ve got Klytemnestra and Ruth at the top of the flock. Octavia must be in the roost, but the big one in the centre is Lady Bracknell. She’s the queen.”
“I d.. don’t think we s.. s.. should g.. go any closer.”
I eased the nose of the glider fractionally into the air stream flowing down the valley, catching a little extra lift and beginning to turn away. I remember that the Othkyne pressed hard into my heart. I thought it safer now to keep it on my person at all times, never envisaging the consequences which were to flow from that simple decision. In the high autumn air the sun cut sharp shadows across the glider. Although my body was warm enough in the thickly padded one piece flying suit, my face was exposed to the vigorous currents of mountain air which kept me aloft, scouring it red and raw. Despite the distant voices on the intercom it was possible to feel quite isolated here; possible to drift and dream whilst almost automatic actions of muscle and bone compensated for the minor imbalances of flight.
The Othkyne reminded me why I was here.
When summer was first travelling south over the equator I’d left the Azure isles intending to sail to Gwynedd where I had business in Dragon City. The Knights had paid me well to harass their enemies. I had money in my pocket and was in no particular hurry so I decided to stop over in Zan for a sixday. Tiger Bay glories in its reputation; cosmopolitan, beautiful, and simultaneously demure and decedent. They say that when the AFNC took the city the Reformers wanted to burn it to the ground. General Trevellyn ignored the orders of the Friend’s Council and was subsequently court marshalled, but a statue in his honour now stands in the Waterfall Plaza overlooking the bay.
I stayed in the Tiger Lily Hotel; an expensive suite with views of the Grand Canal. In the casinos of Echo Hill, I gambled at roulette, decay, blackjack and orbital. I ate in the bistros of Red Row and drank rum, puma juice, spiced quazak and sherry in the shady balcony bars above the market boulevards and in the lantern gondolas on the Grand Canal. And I womanised. I always had one of those exquisite local girls on my arm, “escorts” discretely offered by the hotel or hired from the so called Special Service agencies. There is something about the intermingled product of Taranill, Oriental and Old Welsh genes which I find irresistible. The women of Zan are the most beautiful in the world.
I was always this way after a job. The binges never lasted long enough to ruin my fitness - health and strength were essential in my profession - but they lasted long enough to empty my pockets. That’s why I would never be as rich as Keith or Chen. That and the fact they always struck a harder bargain.
Towards the end of the sixday the money began to run out again and I wandered the poorer districts of the city, feeling the discontented urge to drain the dregs of life.
There was a cheap brothel by a pier where cargo ships docked. In a restless room over the quay side I took a rough tumble with a skilful Taranill professional. She worked on me with a strange energy whilst the reflected light from the water rippled over the ceiling above and the crude shouts of stevedores barked in the street below.
I didn’t recognise her until it was over and I saw the strawberry mark on her leg. It was the Miller girl.
She smiled at me. In the strict terms of physical time she was still young but in the stricter ones biology and experience dictate she was already old. I could see the history of a broken life in her watery eyes. I realised too that she knew exactly who I was and I had no doubt that she had known from the moment I entered the room.
“I should hate you,” she said. “I should really, but I don’t.”
I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. It was for her to speak.
“I dreamt you here,” she said. “I knew it would happen one day. Today Fate starts to close the circle which was opened on the day Lowrush died.” She stroked an arm along my chest.
“You’re going to work for me,” she said. “You’re going to finish what you started when you left me.”
She handed me half of the Othkyne from a small wooden box where it was carefully wrapped in layers of red velvet like a magician’s soul.
She kissed me lightly and the tears running down her face wet my own cheeks. And so I acquired my commission….
When I completed my lazy circuit, I expected to find all the others rising round me. Keith was above and slightly behind, Adams perhaps a little too close on my right whilst Chen and T’riu arced slowly below. I couldn’t see Lia or Varran but Mason continued to sail blindly towards the harpies and they had begun to take an interest.
“Pull back Mason! You don’t want ‘em on you now!”
Keith’s voice was loud and hard with all the old tones of command but we were no longer a fighting unit. Mason had gone too far and a small contingent of males were moving purposefully forward, sensing the weakness of an isolated intruder. They would close with him long before he could turn. It suddenly seemed remarkably reckless to go hunting these creatures in their own element where our cumbersome rigid gliders were pitted against a deadly speed and manoeuvrability honed by New Cambrian evolution.
“You’ll have to help him out, One Shot! You’re nearest!”
I reacted almost without thinking, dipping the nose to pick up speed. Realising the danger, Mason had now started to change direction and the new line took him further down the valley, opening the angle between us. He couldn’t hope to escape but I reckoned I might be able to intercept the attacking flock and sow a little confusion, allowing him to gain some height and turn to face them. By then the rest of the gang should have arrived to help us out.
The harpies had assumed hunting formation, an inverted version of the classic migratory V which allowed them to harry their prey from left and right whilst those in the rear waited to stoop on any attempt to dive for freedom. I could see one of the females joining the pattern from above. She was co-ordinating the attack ,calling to the others in a harsh croaking mirror analogy of Keith’s commands. I sensed Adams and Lia behind me but knew I would make contact first.
“It’s Hypolita’s crew,” Keith said, as if I cared.
One of the males on the far side of Mason’s flight path leaned in and flipped its left wing up so that the sharp edge struck the underside of his glider. It lurched dangerously.
“Bastard!” Mason grunted throwing his body in a desperate counterweight which only just succeeded in restoring control.
But now I was there. I picked my principle target in the few seconds before collision and let my momentum carry me close. At the last possible moment I threw the nearest spear with my right hand and with the left, aimed higher and let fly with the JX70, relying on its advanced anti-recoil mechanism to compensate for my awkward grip. This was no time for sportsmanship.
There was a gratifying squawk as the harpy in front dropped sharply and I avoided clipping his flailing wings by the narrowest of margins. I sped through the centre of the group and out the far side hearing Lia scream, “Two down! Great shooting!” and I knew that I had retained my reputation for marksmanship with the second target.
The hunters had been too intent on their chase to notice my angled approach but I’d been too intent on mine to notice the reinforcements arriving from the rest of the flock. I realised the problem as soon as I twisted the glider to the right. There were six more flying rapidly towards me under the eye of another female.
At the same instant, Adams cast another spear at the trailing male and Lia fired off a couple of shots at one of the others. Keith and Chen were moving in behind them, looking for spaces to fly through. It was rapidly turning into a full scale melee and one I knew we couldn’t win.
I engaged the power, feeling decidedly happier as the control systems monitoring my angle and speed, flexed the auxiliary wings and fired the engine.
“Don’t get excited,” I said. “We’ve got company. Bandits at 2 o’clock.”
I could fly in a tighter envelope now, but it was still an unequal contest. I completed my turn to see the harpies scattered ahead, their leather wings spread like breaking parachutes as they slowed to twist back for the fight. Any surprise we had before was gone. It was going to get messy.
Two of them were still harassing Mason and now one got underneath his right wing and tipped the glider over. I saw it tumble from the sky as he screamed a final curse. They let him fall, wheeling straight back round towards us. The harpies calculated he was carrion now and they were too intelligent to waste time squabbling over the fallen in the thick of combat. That was lucky for Felix since he crashed into a bogy expanse of rakweed and lived to tell the tale.
I had no time to worry about him now. The males had selected their targets and were closing for the kill. On my left I saw Hypolita swooping down to join her consorts in the battle.
“W.. we’ve got to s..sc.. scare them off!” Adams shouted. “It’s the only way!”
I took aim at the specimen which had earmarked me for oblivion and instead consigned him to the great roost in the sky. There was a fearful screeching all around and the air seemed to boil with the fury of flapping wings. The reinforcements had arrived.
I saw one of the creatures twist its great leathery neck to snap at Lia as she soared above me. A row of pain sharp teeth flashed in the sun. I was close enough now to smell them - a nauseating stench compounded of rotten meat and keen alkaline bile. Their huge eyes were rusty orange sinks of hatred. The world had exploded into fragments of blue sky, grey skin, black talon and white teeth. It was time to leave and I picked the quickest way out.
If you’ve ever flown one of the Hwirye gliders you’ll know that the telescoping lever sits under the main strut below the power housing. You’re only supposed to use it to fold the glider for transportation and in flight it should be locked with a ratchet pin. There’s a manoeuvre that the manufacturers don’t tell you about and I can’t say I’d recommend it myself, but in an emergency… This was an emergency.
I pulled the racket pin forward and yanked the telescoping lever. The wings folded, the engine screamed and the world went dark. I dropped like a stone.
The only problem with this technique is opening the wings again. You have to get the timing exactly right. If you panic and pull back too soon, the bracing struts will separate from the housing joints, because the extension springs haven’t finished registering with the retaining seals. On the other hand, if you leave it too long, the force of the air will rip the fabric away from the frame before you can slow down; or you might just hit the ground first anyway. Even if you get it spot on, there’s always an element of luck. Failing to come out at the correct angle of attack can still result in a nasty mess on the floor.
I held my breath as my stomach tried to leave through the roof of my mouth. I hate free fall and I’d already had to do this once before. Getting away with it twice in one lifetime was asking for a lot. On the count of four I tugged the lever again. There was a beautiful “whomp” and a violent jar of deceleration as the wings grabbed hold of the air and bent uncomfortably with the strain. I heard them groan and for an awful instant thought that they were going to collapse,. But they held and I could look down to see the ground rushing below me a scant ten meters away. It was a bit too close.
Then Klytemnestra struck. I learned afterwards that she had folded her wings and dived right behind me. Harpies are familiar with my trick. Sky Sailors don’t use it but the BlueWings and WhiteBacks they hunt in summer try to escape this way all the time. It seldom works.
All I knew was that a sharp horn had torn through my right wing and a baleful eye was granted a split second to lock with mine before the glider twisted away out of control. It didn’t twist away fast enough. As the frame flipped over, the glider’s underbelly was briefly exposed to the victorious harpy and she lashed out with a muscular wing. The sharp bone edge impacted on the hollow metal poles with dreadful force and I really only caught the back stroke as I fell away. It was enough. A bright line of red pain blossomed across my chest and almost simultaneously I heard a loud siren scream. I wasn’t quite as lucky as Mason. I hit the ground hard. The remains of the glider collapsed over me like a tent. There was a crescendo of pain and for a little while I lost the plot. I think I passed out briefly but my ears kept ringing with the high pitched unnatural siren. I wasn’t sure if it was real or if I was imagining it.
When I came to again I was being lifted into a Land Rambler by Keith and Varran. A blessed peace had descended.
“Nice work ‘One Shot’,” Keith chuckled. “You’ll be all right now and the glider isn’t too badly damaged.”
“Oh good,” I managed with an ironic little mutter.
Varran drove. On the way back to the camp he explained what had happened.
“Chen had some ‘blast flares’. Don’t know why he took ‘em up with him but it was a good job he did. When Adams said we had to frighten ‘em he realised that the harpies might be more scared of a few bangs and lights than they were of our real weapons. He let off a series of flash flares and sonic alarms, and the critters scattered back to the cliffs. Adams thinks they didn’t like it ‘cos they couldn’t hear their own hunting cries.”
By mid day we were all together in the hollow with the Ramblers, safe if not exactly sound. Paulo was our medic in the old days - a bit rough and ready but good enough for routine field work. Now though, we had a student from the Commonwealth College, and Helen had some patients to practice on. Mason was the worst off. A broken leg and torn ligaments in his left arm had put an end to his fun but he could consider himself fortunate to be alive. I’d had a little too much adrenaline pumping through my system. I’d twisted an ankle and was leaking blood through the gash in my stomach. Lia had a scratch on her arm but the others had come through unscathed.
Varran pushed the seat back and let me lie down with the heater on. I was only left alone in the Rambler for thirty seconds and in that time I struggled to open the First Aid kit under the dash. I was still a little confused or I would have realised that I had more important priorities. Then Helen arrived, straight over from tending to Mason.
“Don’t move,” she said.
She was trembling a little bit and I wondered how much practice she’d actually had in dealing with live casualties. Some unconscious fear made me wave her feebly away but she unfastened the suit to get to the wound. The Othkyne fell to the floor with a dull thump.
“What’s this?”
She picked it up, turning it over curiously in her pale hands.
“It’s a souvenir,” I said. “Something from an old war - a lucky mascot.”
I coughed.
“I’d rather you didn’t mention it to the others. I’m sort of ashamed of it, you see. I don’t like to admit to superstition.”
“Sure”
She shrugged and smiled, placing it under the seat. I breathed more easily as she bent over to examine me.
“Well I think your mascot saved you from a serious injury,” she said at last. She had cleansed the cut, applied a careful smear of skinstitch to knit the flesh together and dressed it. Now she pressed a bottle of white pills into my hand.
“Take these. One a day for a week. They’ll help to guard against the risk of a blood infection although frankly it’s only a small risk. The native life incompatibility issue. I hear Richard was explaining it to you.
"Now you ought to rest for a few hours. You’re suffering from a little bit of shock. Get some sleep and lie still so that the skinstitch can work properly. There’ll be no more flying today but father says we’re going to have a planning session over the evening meal. I’ll wake you for that if you want.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And you won’t say anything about my mascot?”
“I won’t,” she assured me with an indulgent smile.
I fell into a light doze almost as soon as she left, but at first I could not pass through an unsettled hinterland of repeated reawakenings. I dreamt of K-day and I felt the sweat of a cold intellectual fever as I pictured the Othkyne falling into the wrong hands whilst I lay helpless in my nightmares. Once, I thought I heard the loud call of a harpy cross the camp. It was a good hour or more before I attained the sanctuary of deep sleep and it was dark when I awoke.
A large fire was burning fiercely in the centre of the circle and the smells of a savoury pork stew drifted through the chilly air. I was feeling much better having washed and changed and tucked the Othkyne safely into my new clothes. The prospect of a good meal restored my spirits.
“We should have shot the bloody thing,” Varran was grumbling to Chen.
“You tried as I recall,” Chen answered, displaying one of those colourless cynical smiles which he liked to affect. “Only you weren’t good enough.”
“Shot what?” I interrupted.
“Ah, Mr. Stubbs, so you’re back with the living eh?”
“We had visitors,” Varran cut in. “Whilst you were recuperating, a couple of harpies scouted the camp and had a little tussle with one of the Ramblers. They didn’t take long to realise the metal was too tough for their teeth, though. They’re smart as well as mean and they were away before we could get ‘em.”
So I hadn’t imagined the call.
“Colin takes it all personally,” Chen said. “One of them stayed behind on that knoll watching us all afternoon. A lone black male. Darker than the rest. A sentinel. It flew away with the night.”
“The thing gave me the creeps,” Varran said. “Vermin!”
He shuddered.
Chen laughed. “You should learn to make peace with the spirits,” he said. “Especially if you plan to kill them!”
I had ceased to find their talk amusing. “Let’s eat.”
Keith was dishing out the stew from a large black cooking pot. T’riu sat on a cable reel by the fire looking as lean and wiry as a high tensile cable himself.
“Two hundred says you can’t get Klytemnestra,” the older man said. “She’ll be too quick for you.”
“Oh yeah?” T’riu replied. “Well I’ll take your two hundred and another three says you won’t get the big bitch. Lady Brackpot or whatever you call her.”
“Lady Bracknell,” Lia said. She was sprawling by the far side of the fire. “I’ll take the three.”
“No! I saw her first,” Keith almost shouted. “You lot can have your pick of the others but no one bets on anyone killing the queen but me.”
There was a short silence.
“Suit yourself,” Lia answered. “Then I’ll just let that three say you can’t.”
The morning’s events had infected the gang with an unhealthy enthusiasm, vectored through nasty grins and tight little comments. It reminded me of the old days with all their unsavoury anticipation and ecstatic dangers.
“It’s the hero of the hour!” Keith said, acknowledging my arrival and changing the subject. “What have you got to say for yourself ‘One Shot’?”
“I say the Hwirye should fit jets on those gliders for when you pull the telescoping lever. Gravity obviously isn’t strong enough.”
The others chuckled but T’riu laughed loudly.
“You’re making a habit of it Freddy,” he said. “Personally, I prefer to stay in the air.”
“Yeah? Well you might have thought differently if you’d been in the middle of that flock of crazed chickens. I didn’t see you volunteering for a pecking!”
“Ah come on,” T’riu answered with a grin. “It was easy. We’re well ahead. We’ve killed two and injured another three and they only managed to wound Mason and bring you down with a scratch.”
“So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I replied, not bothering to keep a heavy tone of sarcasm out of my voice. “There were eight of us and we disabled five of them for our two. If I fly, there’ll be seven of us tomorrow. Let’s be generous and say we manage three for one (and we’re not supposed to use the guns). I make that twenty one harpies down so I guess that only leaves another twenty odd left to pick our bones. You call that good odds?”
“You worry too much Freddy!” Keith said, speaking like an indulgent parent reassuring a nervous child. “It’ll all be different tomorrow. The Sky Sailors are coming and the harpies will be far too intent on hunting them to spare time for us. That’s the whole point remember?”
And you don’t worry enough, I thought, irritated by his patronising attitude.
“Has anyone told them that? Now they’ve seen us they might have other ideas.”
“You’ll enjoy it once you’re up there,” he persisted. “Lia’s repaired your glider and despite the abuse you’ve dished out, it’s as good as new.”
“Come on, lighten up,” T’riu added. “Have a little bet with us.”
“I don’t play sport for money,” I said. “If I fly tomorrow it’s for fun.”
“Each to his own,” Keith laughed, “now get some of this stew inside you.”
They had already assumed that I would be hunting tomorrow. The worst of it was, they were right.
Helen emerged into the circle of firelight from the Rambler where Mason was resting. She had taken him a bowl of stew and now pronounced him as well as could be expected. She went to sit beside Richard on a small outcrop of rock and whispered something into his ear. He turned and kissed her but when she broke to look at the fire I could see a fleeting anxiety cross her face.
“Pass us a bottle!” T’riu demanded. A thick brown glass cylinder arced over the fire from Chen, winking in the flames as it spun end over end. The blue skinned catcher took it easily with one hand and cracked the top off against a rock. The drinking had begun.
“We’re going to kip outside tonight and up at first light,” Varran said.
“The harpies will be in the air as soon as Idris rises, so there’s an incentive not to oversleep,” Lia added with a smile.
I looked at the tents pitched just beyond the firelight. They wouldn’t withstand an attack from above for more than a few seconds. I returned the smile and took a long drink.
The evening slipped easily and quickly by. We drank a lot and talked a lot but the thought of the morning hunt kept everyone sober. Under the hard stars of an ice cold sky we waited for the fire to die, and one by one, retired to the tents. Before I left the circle Helen came round to talk to me.
“When did you last see my father? Before you came here I mean.”
“A long time ago, when the world was young,” I answered, paraphrasing the poet. But it wasn’t, I thought. It was old even then. It was old after K-Day.
“We decided to go our separate ways for business reasons.”
She held my gaze without speaking, and I was compelled to continue.
“I didn’t want to work with him anymore.”
She nodded but said nothing, as if she understood.
And I so wanted to be understood. The feeling came over me at that moment with an intensity I had not imagined before. I felt a curious temptation to confess; or at least to believe her unspoken sympathy, as if she could offer some strange form of absolution. But I knew it for the delusion it was. I had to resist. She didn’t know and so she couldn’t understand, and it was far, far better that she did not.
“And how’s he been keeping?” I said. It wasn’t just a polite enquiry. I was hungry now for knowledge of my quarry.
“He’s restless,” she said simply. “He’s always been restless but these days I don’t know what’s biting him. I know this though. I need to escape.”
Her cheeks were thin and white in the firelight and her eyes wide and watery. There was a vehemence in her words that surprised me.
“I.. I can’t put up with him any longer,” she said. “He doesn’t know what to do with himself and he doesn’t know what to do with me. I’m just a counter to be moved about in some game and it’s a game where I don’t understand the rules. I’m not playing anymore.” She looked at me fiercely as though she expected me to defend him. “I’m going to marry Richard. I’m leaving Freestone manor to live with him. We were going to wait until I’d finished my studies but I can’t wait…”
“Does your father know?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said, “but I think he suspects.” I saw that look of anxiety cross her face again. “I hate this hunt,” she said.
Lia had taken a silver pocket whistle out of her jacket and was blowing a thin little tune which struggled against the night breeze before it was swept across the hollow and whipped out to haunt the open moor. Only Chen was left on the far side of the fire, finishing his drink with her.
“Did you know my mother?” Helen asked. Her change of direction caught me by surprise.
“Yes…. Yes I did. I knew Tania before I met Jonathan Keith. Before I met any of the others. You look a lot like her. She was vivacious but she had a core of steadfast patience underneath. She knew what she wanted and she always seemed to get her way.”
I smiled, remembering. There had been a short season before the Revolution when we had been lovers but I was too feckless for her. She wanted someone with big dreams and that was Keith. I thought I hadn’t missed her when she left.
“Tania could be as steady as a rock and then all of a sudden she’d take some crazy action that’d leave you breathless. She worked for a while as a tourist guide in Tregaron and conducted tours to FirstLanding, round the old town and across the Fish Lake. I used to meet her after the early evening trip and sometimes I’d get a ticket on the Fish Lake Ferry and sit with the commuters at the back listening to her spiel. She must have said that piece so often she was bored stupid. Once, I found that her boss was sitting beside me. He’d come to do a little quality control exercise, just checking up on his staff. Tania caught my eye with a wink and she started to deliver the most outrageous set of historical falsehoods in a deadpan monotone which went completely unchallenged by her placid tourists. I don’t know how much of it they believed but by the end even the most gullible must have suspected something. She’d just broken down in fits of giggles… She was fired on the spot by her humourless employer but she didn’t care. She couldn’t stop laughing all evening.”
I laughed myself at the memory and Helen kissed me lightly on the cheek.
“Thank you,” she said.
I stared into the night for a long time after she had retired to her tent. Lia finished a final mournful melody, put the whistle in her pocket and kicked the embers. She came over to me.
“I was watching you two,” she said. “That girl looks a lot like you in this light. Her nose, the line of her chin…Have you ever thought if perhaps?”
“No,” I interrupted gruffly. “The timing is wrong. She’s not old enough.”
Lia shrugged.
“Still...” she said.
But privately I wondered. I wondered if Jonathan Keith had told me everything. I wondered if perhaps Lia was right. Perhaps Helen was older than he’d said. Perhaps I was her father.
I shivered and the fire finally went out.
I ought to have killed Keith then, whilst he slept in the tent. Courage failed me. The conversation with Helen had left me foundering on the shoals of unsuspected complexity and I no longer saw his death so clearly. I needed more time to think. Or much less…
Autumn in Calgary’s Tears is a notoriously volatile season. Sometime in the early hours of the morning there was a change in the weather. The wind blew in from the north bringing a host of low clouds which covered the sky and we woke to a much bleaker and drearier day. It was colder too. Despite the blanket of moisture laden grey, the temperature had dropped by a good ten degrees. The satellite forecasts were right. This was air straight from the Cap and with it would come the Sky Sailors.
“Perfect,” Keith chortled as we broke camp and readied the gliders.
The harpies were already flying, hungry and waiting.
“I know who it is,” Keith said to me. “I know who’s trying to kill me.”
He had taken me aside as the others jostled for position on the launching rock and glanced round nervously at the fearsome sky. I kept my expression deadpan.
“Who?”
He looked suddenly furtive and crafty. I felt a cold chill in my stomach.
“You’ll find out,” he said. “You’ll find out.”
“The Sky Sailors!” Lia shouted, diverting everyone’s attention. Suddenly there they were: tiny specks at first, seen far away, but filling the northern sky as they rode the wind to the south.
The Sky Sailors have a strange and complex life cycle. For many years they live a simple life in slow, slug like bodies, spread over the hostile rocks and seas of Friel, feeding on lichen and moss to extract the necessary minerals for a profound transformation. Before the winter, when the Cap is plunged into permanent darkness, the mature specimens assemble on the mountains where thousands of individuals meld to form super organisms in a fashion biologists had hitherto only seen on Earth in slime moulds and allied microscopic agents. It is these super organisms which are given the name Sky Sailors and in this form they migrate to the tropics.
Along their top surface they grow a field of hollow rubbery polyps made out of a remarkably inert plastic protein, with a macromolecular structure of great interest to chemists as well as biologists. Beneath each polyp they manufacture a photo voltaic cell where they electrolyse the natural acids in their digestive system. The hydrogen which bleeds off from this process is trapped in the polyps which blow up like balloons. As the process continues, the lower edges of the colony metamorphose to form hollow tentacles which will be the birth canals for the next stage of their life cycle. They anchor themselves onto the ground until the weather is right then rise with the natural buoyancy of the hydrogen and drift south on the back of the winter winds. When the reach the equator, they spawn a rain of fish and when these finally breed in the tropical waters, they migrate northward themselves, and lay eggs that hatch as the slug like vector to crawl onto land and begin the three stage life cycle all over again.
All this I learned much later. For now it was time to join the hunt.
The harpies had scented their natural prey and were rising, flapping their laborious leathery wings to ascend higher into the cold air and spreading out over a broad front. There was going to be an aerial battle of enormous proportions. In the absence of yesterday’s kinder air it was immediately obvious that we would have to use power on the gliders, whatever ideas we may have had before. I filled my lungs with the sharp dampness of the new season as the frigid stream of winter’s breath washed over me. The comforting heartbeat of half a dozen engines swelled around me. I was glad of the leather gloves protecting my hands where they gripped the cross strut. Each time I turned into the wind it slapped my face and thrust a rusty knife down my throat.
“Up we go boys and girls! Don’t stop ‘til we’re looking down on ‘em all! Climb, damn you, climb!”
We had only completed three circuits when the first of the Sky Sailors was upon us. They were mats of large, greenish boyant drifting bubbles, welded together by biology. They dwarfed our gliders as though we were flies flitting round the ears of phlegmatic cattle garlanded for some holy Hindu ceremony. We had to scatter to avoid colliding with them. Their skin was stretched taut, shiny and translucent against the grey sky and their tentacles made them look like giant vibrant ariel jellyfish of the kind I'd seen in the seas of the Azure Isles.
The harpies had broken into small hunting flocks, each led by one of the females and each targeting one of the sailors. They began to dive into the flanks of the strange creatures, tearing at them with beaks and talons and ripping chunks of their flesh clean away. The sky sailors sensed what was happening and I saw some of them try to flee, their tentacles thrashing to produce a pathetically ponderous and inadequate attempt at directed flight. Two of the balloons exploded as a wicked grey shape sped low over one sailor. The harpy screeched in rage, burned by a fierce little fire and tumbling a couple of times before it recovered. I realised with astonishment that the ‘cattle’ were not completely helpless. That was a co-ordinated defensive reaction even if it was not one which could be repeated often without cost.
“Take your pick,” Keith said, “but Lady Bracknell’s mine.”
I saw him turn towards the great queen of the harpies, now looking no bigger than a large wasp as she harried one of the smaller Sky Sailors.
“Let’s hunt!” he screamed.
And so we hunted…..
Looking back, I am astonished that we did not sustain more casualties. We were weaving in and out of the sailors and the harpies, buffeted by the wind, loosing spears and trying to avoid collisions as we wheeled back to continue our attacks. Keith was right though. The harpies were completely absorbed in the task of hounding the sailors. To hibernate successfully throughout the winter they needed special nutriment obtained from the sailors’ flesh and their concentration was all on making that crucial kill. As a consequence they didn’t take sufficient notice of us. They weren’t really so intelligent after all.
I killed a couple of males before engaging one of the females. I didn’t know which one but she was sufficiently aware of me to make life difficult and one of her males dived at me three or four times before I managed to finish him.
The harpies were engaged in a war of attrition. The sky sailors relied on bulk and robustness to make then resilient. With mass lost from severed tentacles and torn and trailing bellies, they rose higher. The stress of the attacks had unlocked a different desperate option. The mats were undulating now to beat the air with powerful strokes and headless of the effect on their tattered bodies, all the time they forged on south, dragging the battle after them, like flotsom in their wake as they broke apart.
Without really noticing we had left the cliffs behind and were flying over the northern expanses of St. David’s forest. That was where the harpies brought down their first victim. There was a flash of light and a wave of heat. Recognising its own doom the sailor had detonated all the hydrogen in an attempt to take some of its killers with it. I saw the great body blacken a little and flutter into the trees. It was obviously not flammable or it would have burned to a crisp and deprived the harpies of their spoils. They swept down onto it and were left behind as we followed the fleet.
Lia was the first to kill one of the females.
“Got the bitch!” she shouted and I saw her glider below me, one wing bent disturbingly out of position, but still flying. The harpy fell away and crashed, broken backed, across the top of a tall conifer before sliding into the depths. Lia banked round, returning for her trophy.
“Careful,” I said. “Landing in those trees isn’t going to be easy.”
“I’ve found a spot, ‘One Shot’,” she said. I had no more time to watch. I had to turn my attention quickly back to my own situation, making a sharp dive to avoid a nasty tangle with the harpy I later learned was Bodicea.
Things got sticky for a few minutes. I missed with a couple of throws, although one nearly went on to slice through Chen’s glider.
“Watch where you’re throwing those things!” he called out from below. It occurred to me that I might dispatch Keith this way. Or he might dispatch me.
A second sailor tumbled into the trees with another flash of light. I was running low on spears and soon I would have to draw my gun. Varran streamed past at high speed on my right and hurled a spear into a male. The harpy died with an ear shattering squeal. The fat man turned and gave me a thumbs up sign, then crashed straight into a sailor and lost control. He hit the tops of the trees and got tangled in the upper branches, cursing volubly for thirty seconds until T’riu yelled at him to shut up and stop polluting the open channel. I looked round the sky quickly in the sudden silence, listening for harpy calls and afraid they might have singled me out.
There was a crow of triumph from Keith and I located his bright red glider, running an edge where the forest cloaked a steep drop of two hundred metres or more. He had succeeded in planting two spears into the body of the harpy queen and she was plummeting to the ground. We were thinning their ranks considerably.
The third and the fourth sailor went down almost together and just after that I finally had to engage in close combat with Bodicea. She took my last spear and she nearly took me. I felt her keen orange eye, the stench of digestion and the sharp clack of teeth as she twisted and slashed at me.
“Brave work!” Chen said but I thought it too close for comfort, or for any satisfaction except relief that she hadn’t killed me. I had been foolish to rely on the spear. I should have used the gun.
After that, the hunt seemed to peter out and the sky gradually cleared. I felt the aftertaste of adrenaline like a cheap cocktail mixed with too many bitters.
“The h.. harpy t.. t.. teams that have k.. killed w.. will be butchering n.. now,” Adams said. “T.. they won’t bother us. T.. they j.. j.. just want to get as m.. much m.. meat back to their larders as they c.. can.”
So four groups were out of it and we had brought down the other three matriarchs. Without their leaders the widowed males were no threat. They were already circling and calling in distress but they would not attack. Later they would petition to join other harems. Those that failed would have to wander alone, scavenging where they could. They wouldn’t hibernate and few would survive the winter.
“W.. we’ve s.. saved three sailors,” Adams said. He sounded happy.
We regrouped for the journey back. Lia and Varran (who had now managed to cut himself down) would be walking through the forest.
“Beware of Grey Bears,” Chen broadcast pleasantly. Grey Bears were another West Tear predator native to St. David’s forest. They were reputed to be dangerous if they caught you unawares, but they were really quite rare and the Trappers were busy making them less common all the time.
Keith had somehow managed to re launch his glider from the escarpment in the trees and he rose triumphantly to meet us. He had tied the severed head of Lady Bracknell to the main spar, making a gruesome figurehead, and he was bubbling with enthusiasm. I was much less enthusiastic. The lurches, jerks and twists I had endured in combat had reopened the wound in my chest. I could feel the warm dampness of blood spreading in my jacket and I felt weak. Against the hard wind it took us three quarters of an hour to return to the high moors and the valley of the harpies. I consoled myself with the thought that it would be a much longer march through the conifers.
Then we saw them. A second smaller wave of sky sailors riding the growing gale ahead of us.
“What about one of them?” Keith hollered. “A sailor would make a nice tapestry for the Manor walls.”
He laughed loudly. I recognised this mood from of old. The bloodlust filled him and it could only be satisfied by killing.
“Get yer guns out men, and let’s shoot one down!”
“No!” Adams shouted. “You c.. can’t kill the sky sailors. T.. they’re protected! A p.. protected species!”
“Who cares!” Keith yelled. “I want one!”
Adams was slightly above and ahead of us. He put his glider into a dive, shielding the nearest sailor. I had a clear view of the whole thing. It was cold blooded and deliberate. Keith drew his side arm, aimed carefully and shot the ecologist twice with no warning.
In the suddenly shocked rush of the frigid wind, the sky sailor drifted past unnoticed as we watched Richard Adams’ glider dive like a spear into the valley floor. I knew immediately that he was dead. Someone spoke against the numb silence.
“Did you have to do that?”
It was Chen. It was unprecedented for him to offer even the mildest criticism of his former commander.
“He was a government fucking agent!” Keith screamed. “It was him or me!”
The Othkyne was covered in blood. It’s only a matter of time now, I thought. You have to die.
Chen and T’riu were sent back to the camp with instructions for Chen to take Mason and Helen back to Freestone manor and T’riu to bring a Rambler onto the valley floor for us.
“Leave the other two for Lia and Varran,” Keith said. “They can ride back when they get out of the forest.”
I followed him down, landing badly a little upwind of Adams’ fallen glider. As I struggled to free myself from the harness without opening any more cuts, Keith was already untangling the ecologist’s body from the wreckage, and by the time the wings of my craft were folded, he was waiting for me on a small grassy hillock. I had considered the possibility of shooting him but the opportunity was passed. His eyes were full on me, almost as though he had guessed my intention.
Back at the house, I thought. That will be soon enough.
I was cool and clinical under the pain. It was ugly here and I felt oddly fastidious about the assassination. I wanted it to be tidy - an execution, not a hunt.
We waited in an uneasy silence. I watched the victorious Harpies returning with great chunks of their kill, entering the roost in the cliffs and then emerging to fly back for more. They were as quiet as we were; no sound but the maddening wind.
“I had to do it,” he muttered at last. “It was him or me.”
I said nothing. I let him continue with a self justifying monologue of error and paranoia. It was unlike Keith to justify anything. He had never made any excuses for K-Day.
I felt no guilt at the possibility that the Othkyne had precipitated the senseless murder of the innocent young man. I knew his protests for what they were. Keith had no proper evidence against Adams, and he needed none. He had darker motives than self preservation - motives of control and fear of declining influence. That was quite clear to me now and I was at peace with myself and my decision.
A Land Rambler came speeding down the valley side, too soon to be T’riu. It was Helen. I realised she must have seen everything; witnessed the fall from the sky and its cause. The metal legs scuttled dangerously over the rough ground, their hydraulic joints flexing fiercely as the dynamic stability systems made continuous rapid compensations for the vehicle’s uneven motion whilst maintaining the speed of a fast horse on good turf. Carry on like that for long and the chances are you’ll take a tumble and wind up with too many broken legs to crawl away. Land Rambler’s are good but they’re not that good. Keith stopped speaking and simply stared, unblinking, ahead. The legs splayed as Helen braked to a dramatic stop, squelching into the reeds below us.
Richard Adams was obviously dead. I’m not medically trained but I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies on the battlefield and I know one when I see one. Jonathan Keith’s bullets had struck him in the chest and shoulder. His torso was a bloody mass of ruptured tissue.
I saw Helen take a step towards him; saw the life drain from her face; saw her cheeks collapse in a wretched mask sucked inside a hateful breath; saw her arm snake out and swing suddenly flat across her father’s face - hard and instinctive. She crouched on the slope and took Richard’s head in her hands, then turned her face to the sky and began to scream. It was an astonishingly thin sound at first, this banshee keening, but one which impaled us with a needle sharp agony. It seemed to last for hours and I felt unable to think or move as that dreadful wail cursed and danced with the winter wind.
The murderer came out of the spell first. He had a broad spectrum anaesthetic dart gun clipped to his belt. When she tumbled unconscious from his shot it was almost a relief.
“Come on Stubbs,” he said, suddenly filled with a manic energy. “Help me with these two.”
We wrapped Adams body in a roll of plastic sheeting and taped it round the legs and neck to hide the worst of the mess, then bundled him into the back of the Rambler. I tried to wipe my hands clean of the blood on the slippery wet grass as Keith propped Helen up beside the corpse. There was nowhere else for her.
It was a long journey back to Freestone manor. Keith drove, contacting Chen and T’riu through the Rambler radio and giving them a sanitised version of events. I concentrated on maintaining consciousness, increasingly aware that my wounds were worse than I had thought. I’d lost a lot of blood and I felt weak. It seemed like the end of forever before Keith guided the Rambler back to the road and we could use the quicker and more comfortable wheels. He was talking all the time now - almost babbling. It was just a repeat of the same stupid defensive arguments, but he was desperate to convince me. I didn’t answer him but it didn’t seem to matter and at last we reached the manor.
“I’m hurt,” I said. “I need to rest.”
Chen had made it back before us. He went out to help Keith as I staggered inside.
I made it back to the bedroom and washed my cuts quickly and rather badly. I was trembling and not just from my injuries. I couldn’t hold my hand steady enough to use the skinstitch but I managed a crude bandage to staunch the flow from my left leg and decided that my chest was probably better left. Then I slumped into the bed and fell into a deep sleep.
I don’t dream about K-Day anymore. I have other scenes to surrender to in my nightmares; the fulfilment and the agonies of my last days on the West Tear.
For the next three days I hardly left the bedroom and I woke only to eat and to gaze out of the window at the sleet and rain which now lashed the landscape. Despite all the fine theories to the contrary I had developed a mild fever and my strength returned far more slowly than it had in the past when I’d suffered similar injuries. I decided that I was getting old.
When he came to visit me on the first morning, Keith told me that he was keeping Helen under sedation for a while; ‘for her own good.’ He explained that they’d buried Adams in the garden. He was worried about concealing it from the authorities.
T’riu and Varran decided to quit and returned to Gwynedd and Gwent but Lia, Chen and Mason stayed on for a while in that unpleasantly distressed house. Mason still had plenty of his own recuperating to do.
On the third morning Helen came to see me. She dressed my wound without speaking and skilfully applied a fresh line of skinstitch. I wanted her to cry but she was a small, hard and hurt thing. She must have given me an anaesthetic with the milk because I fell asleep again before she’d left the room.
When I came round several hours had passed. It was dark and I felt a little stronger. I thought it was late evening although I couldn’t see the clock. Something made me flick on the bedside light. My gear had all been tidied away and when I reached for the Othkyne under my pillow it was gone. I heard voices and realised they must have woken me.
“Stubbs will tell you! Listen to him if you won’t listen to me!”
It was Keith, blustering and vulnerable at the same time. I knew he was speaking to Helen and her silence was more eloquent than any words could be.
The door burst open and the old man and the young woman entered the bedroom. Keith saw that I was awake but he showed no surprise.
“Tell her, Freddy. Tell Helen. Tell her that I had to do it. It was him or me. Him or me!”
Helen’s expression was cool and remote. She seemed to be looking down on us both and deciding; reaching a mysterious and final verdict. Just for a second I felt the awful bile of inadequacy eating the lining of my stomach, as though I were an unrepentant sinner suddenly facing an angel on the day of judgement.
“I’ve told her about the Othkyne, Freddy,” Keith was gabbling. “I’ve told her what it means. You talk to her. Make her see sense.”
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
She took my half of the Othkyne out of a pocket in her white silk robe. Keith’s eyes bulged.
“How did you get hold of that? It’s locked in the safe!”
He was disconnected for a moment - almost shell shocked with incomprehension. I’d never seen him look so lost.
“No daddy,” she said wearily, “You don’t understand. This is a present from Mr. Stubbs.” She passed it over to him almost gently and he took it with an expression of wonder as he turned his face to me.
“You!” he began.
“And this is a present from me,” she said. She had concealed the gun inside her robe and once she drew the weapon she neither hesitated nor flinched. She fired twice. The bullets burst his chest and ripped the top off his skull.
Then she cried. One enormous sob which wracked her slender frame.
“O God, O God, O God.”
I realised it was me that was speaking and then it was too late. There was an inevitability about the next few seconds and it is these seconds that I repeat most often in my dreams, not the killing of Keith.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I tried to get out of bed but I couldn’t react quickly enough.
“No!” I shouted and still shout repeatedly. And wake up shouting even today. She had turned the barrel to her forehead and for a precious instant, lived and took her final breath. Then she pulled the trigger.
The walls were scattered with scarlet and the white robe drenched with blood.
I screamed as I had never screamed before. When Lia burst through the door a moment later she threw up. I stopped screaming when my lungs emptied, but I was shaking violently and coldly. She came to stand by me, and took my hand, and squeezed it tight. And we waited for Chen.
I didn’t say anything about the Othkyne to the others. There didn’t seem any point. We just wanted to get away now - all of us. I slept downstairs on a sofa, blanking out for the moment the horror I had left behind in the bedroom. Would that the mind’s defences were more permanent!
In the morning we all co-operated to dig the graves and we buried them at the bottom of the garden : Helen next to Richard and the old man on the opposite side of the ravine. It didn’t seem right to unite them in death. We stood in silence for a while afterwards, the metal cage supporting Mason’s broken leg, stiff and respectful, my leather coat whipping furiously round my legs.
“What a waste,” Chen said as the chill wind gnawed methodically at the marrow in our bones. His arm swept to include the house and grounds.
“The Tear Government will take this place now. They’ll use it for conferences or as a retreat for one of their Seminar Chairmen.”
He grimaced in disgust. I think he was incapable of recognising the real waste. Mason said nothing and neither did I.
“We’re through here,” Lia concluded. “Let’s go.”
And it was so…
I started the Land Rambler engine and pushed a music crystal into the sound system, bringing up a long familiar piece to tend to my mood - an obscure item by an obscure band, but Keith wasn’t the only one with a taste in twentieth century music.
As I moved back down the track towards the Spine Highway wet flakes of snow were starting to cover the land. The long winter of the West Tear was settling in.
I had thought to cleanse an old wound - to expiate the sins of killing by more killing. And in a certain rather pathetic sense I had. But I realised now the ultimate folly of my enterprise. It was a bitter poverty stricken redemption with precious little hope in it and I felt drained and empty; as bleak as the landscape.
I remember the dank cold on view from the warm cab as I switched on the wipers to clear the thickening snow. I picked up speed, trusting the wide tyres on the whitening highway.
There was a single harsh but distant cry above me. A solitary harpy; one of the males we had widowed, flew high and lonely in the wide grey sky, gliding into strange new territories of isolation and raw desperation as the snow fell. The sad sound of the woman’s song enfolded me like a melancholy commentary on all I had achieved. I didn’t understand the words of the Curve track but the title said it all - “Today is not the day.”
The orthodox harpies would soon be asleep, the sky sailors in warmer climes and the dark trees of St. David’s Forest, blanketed, patient and quiet as they waited for the distant spring. The Rambler would reach Lynlith before nightfall but I had to carry on. I’d sailed on the last ferry but there were fishing boats. I’d hitch a ride or charter a ship to the East Tear if need be.
And after that? After that I had no idea where I was going. No idea at all.
DMFW - 5/11/97A couple of links to pieces of music mentioned in the story:- Slippery People - Talking Heads Today Is Not The Day - Curve
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