what had been a mere shadow staggering across the storm-lashed space between the Holding Hall and the outbuilding.
In a moment, a disorganized clatter manifested itself, a dust-stirring freshet of damp cold. Arran's brother Donol stood shivering in the doorway, thin hair slicked down upon his scalp and water sluicing from his clothing.
"Arran, my boy!" he gasped, slamming the door against the storm and wiping his streaming face. He grinned, and excitement—a passing rare thing with him—filled his voice. "We'll sit this hurricane out a few more minutes, until it abates. You're wanted at the house. We've just received word. Father's ship's within the system! He's come back a few days early so he might help prepare for Robret and Lia's wedding!"
Arran's face lit up in a manner even Donol could be certain of.
"It's true, little brother! And by all accounts he's fetched back clowns, musicians, sages, mages, half the fools, professional and otherwise, of the Hanoverian 'Droom!"
Part Two: The Outlaws
Yeafuday 142, 3009 A.D.
SECUNDUS 12, 1567 0LDSKYAN
IRSSE 30, 509 Hanoverian
The lot did it fall upon Henry Mafttyn,
The youngest of all the three.
That he a star-pillaging rover should be,
Should be.
Should be. For to maintain his two brothers and he.
Chapter VI: The Golden Wherry
Hovering silent at her rest, a measure and a half above the ground, the estate's draywherry never failed to remind Arran of somebody's hasty, crosshatched sketch of a twenty-five-measure-long sweetmelon seed.
In construction and appearance she was a utilitarian, undecorated, and nonreflective gray where not open or transparent, the heavy wire mesh she had been fashioned from tarnished by the harsh sun and the crueller Skyan cold. In form she was as flat as a woodland tick, smooth-contoured, plump, round at her blunt stem, tapering to a flattened, slender point toward her bow.
Her design, if so formal a word were justified, had been laid down by unknown geniuses in dim antiquity, intended more for hauling cargo—farm and forest produce here upon Skye —than for transporting passengers. She herself had been fabricated—"woven" might have been a word of better choice—upon this estate for as much speed as the twin cones of her electrostatic impellers (wrought of somewhat finer mesh and powered by a modest §-fieid annihilator, the only features interrupting the clean flow of her lines) were capable of pushing her to. This for the most practical purposes, as she had never been meant as the object of anyone's exhilaration. She contained not a single moving part. Arran thought her an uncommonly beautiful sight for the un-glamorous, old-fashioned means of transportation that she was. His opinion in this regard may have had to do with the fact she had been the first article of the Holdings' large machinery he had ever been entrusted by his father or Old Henry to operate, albeit under the most stringent supervision.
However humble the purpose she was meant to serve, she
was being scrubbed clean of hay, manure, any bucolic remnant she had recently accumulated, in preparation for a brief, happy voyage to equatorial Alysabethport. This was an unpeopled cluster of w/^/c-automated buildings a few hundred klommes south of the Holdings, renamed not long ago in honor of the planet's newest mistress, now returning with her husband from their honeymoon. The task of readying the draywherry had not been made easier by the previous day's storm which had littered her from bow to stem—and, since she had lain unpowered all of yesternight, through and through—with the same bits of windblown, rain-driven dirt and vegetation which Arran had first noticed clinging to the workshop windows. Anyone, he thought, who believed rain to be a cleansing phenomenon had lived all his life indoors, with the curtains drawn.
"That'll do! Dry her off, boys!" Old Henry shut the nozzle off and dropped the soapy, long-handled brush with which he had been directing, rather than contributing to, the cleaning effort. Two younger Skyans, half-shadowed beneath her openwork fuselage, were finishing with rags along each section of the broad, curved, finger-width roddery which comprised most of the draywherry's underside. This extra heavy mesh-work took the entire vehicle's weight upon those rare occasions when she rested her length upon the ground. At present, they dripped with rinse water and fugitive suds. Meanwhile, a fourth individual unwound the workshop's hot-air blower from its reel.
Abaft, at the location of her annihilator, the vehicle was screened more solidly than elsewhere, the better to protect passengers from errant radiation (for the most part, imaginary) and disguise the workings cultured visitors might find unsightly. So close was this narrower mesh, skip-woven to produce dense, decorative whorls and swirls, that she came close to being opaque. Arran remembered (the memory was dim, for he had been ill) that Old Henry had run off klommes of the finer wire to replace more utilitarian sheathing when the draywherry had served to take her master and mistress off to Alysabethport in the first place. Anticipating their return, she had been left as she had been. Never again would she be the same gray, mundane work machine.
52 HENRYMARTYN
Now he purposed a grander embellishment. As the last drop of rinse water rolled off her glistening wirework onto the muddy ground, Old Henry brought forth a vial, unscrewed the cap, and tipped its contents onto the dray-wherry's woven surface. A sizzling noise and peculiar odor issued forth as a blush of color began to spread. In moments, from the complex framing at her bow to the conical metallic cages of her electrostatic impellers, the entire vessel gleamed as if she had been sculpted of purest gold.
The old man turned and winked at the boy. "Polymerizer spreighformed up last night after y'left. Wish I'd thought of it at weddin'." He lifted a hand to caress the fabulous coating, which had cured in an instant. "'Tis but single mollycule deep, but that pretty? Practical, too. *Spect yer father'll want it left for summer. She always did get a mite hot, sittin' in sun."
As he spoke, a giggling servant girl, assisted at the elbow by one of the male fuselage-polishers, clambered up the short hatch-ladder into the belly of the hovering machine, her arms laden with fresh-cut flowers. Others behind her were supervised by Mistress Lia. When they were through, the draywherry would be filled, stem to stem, with a more colorful (and more aromatic) cargo than had ever burdened her before.
"All aboard!" RobiQi fils shouted, striding across sun-dried flags hosed clean before the draywherry had been attended to. He was fastening a jacket quilted from a shimmering kef-flar brocade, the latest vogue to sweep the capital, which appeared in some lights a deep, heartbreaking blue, in others a dark, mysterious red. He disparaged it as his "peacock jacket" and never wore it without being persuaded by someone else. More and more, that someone else was Mistress Lia. His brother Donol followed in his wake, less exuberant of attire. As seemed consistent with his personality (or perhaps because he had no one to persuade him), he preferred to set sartorial tones more somber, affecting styles a trifle better tested by time and hues which remained, in any light, faithful to whatever they had looked like to begin with. As was fitting for the occasion, Arran, too,
had donned his second-best, which he had been at pains to protect from the muddy fun of preparing the draywherry. The best he had, trews and tunic of the same fabric as Robret*s jacket, he saved for that event to which all this fuss was but preliminary. After all, he had two wedding ceremonies to dress for, one of them retroactive.
Ducking beneath the machine, Robret ascended the short ladder, kissed Mistress Lia upon her freckled forehead in open mock of genteel custom which forbade him more than that, and handed her down laughing. Donol and Arran trooped aboard after him. Only the brothers were along for this excursion, as was proper. Mistress Lia had explained to the boy, to greet their father and his bride. For the moment, these, and as yet none else, comprised the family Islay. Arran winked at her who would soon become his sister. She returned the wink in smiles and blushes, a picture so pretty even a child of twelve could well appreciate her. That this particular child was more precociou
s than anybody guessed as yet, and, at that magic moment, set his standards for the years to come, no one would ever know, not even he who set them.
In any case, Robret had added in his characteristic practical way, they would need space aboard to accommodate the returning party, consisting, as it would, of Robret Senior, the Lady Alysabeth, their baggage and servants, the baggage, servants, bodyguard, and person of Tarbert Morven, the Lady Alysabeth's father, and similar impedimenta of whomever else they had seen fit to bring back from the capital for the younger Robret's wedding. Most likely, the draywherry would be called upon to make several such voyages.
Thus for once was Arran without Old Henry's amusing company and sage advice. As chiefmost among the family retainers, he and Mistress Lia (by Hanoverian custom it would be presumptuous and unseemly for the bride-to-be to greet those soon to be her in-laws, as if she had already married into the family; in addition, until she was thus married, she was still in technicality a servant) would stay behind to manage things for the few hours the brothers would be absent. The youngest of the Islay scions must do
54 HENRY MARTYN
without Waenzi, as well, a speeding draywherry being no place, in either of the elder brothers' opinion, for the curious and unpredictable triskel.
As those who must remain removed themselves from proximity to the idling machine, Donol pulled a lever which allowed the hatch-ladder to regain the form it best remembered, returning to its nest in the draywherry's underside. He found a seat, one of several installed in recent days in what had been cargo space, sat, and let the seat-restrainers close about his waist. Seated further forward, with a nod from Robret close beside him, Arran wiped nervous fingers upon a trouser leg, reached past the tiller bar, and passed his hand over a sensitive area of the steering pedestal. Aft, the draywherry's annihilator stirred from a partial somnolence which was never sleep in its entirety.
Lights upon the pedestal changed color. The glowing §-field built up along the woven surface of the vehicle, allowing light through the broad mesh quite unhindered—Arran could see Old Henry shooing the younger servants out of the way—but stifling sound from the outside, giving those inside a sudden shut-in feeling. With a gentle sigh passing through her fabric, the draywherry rose upon her pressor-fields another half measure above the wash-water dampness of her temporary berth, swung her narrow-pointed prow in a southerly direction, and began moving forward.
Inboard, seated behind a pressure-tiller and other simple controls which he knew in harshest truth to be redundant, Arran nonetheless felt a thrill radiate through his body, echoing stresses singing along the vehicle's length. Perhaps this was not the noblest of vessels, nothing to rival the great ships of the interstellar Deep. But she was here (as those great ships were not), operated upon the same principles, and, at least for the moment, responded to his command, however superfluous and well-supervised it might be.
Feeling the tiller vibrate of its own accord (it did not swing from side to side, but answered, without moving, to pressure put upon it by controlling hands) he watched the draywherry lift her sleek nose, surge forward, and gather speed with such ponderous deliberation that her acceleration was
all but unnoticeable, even without the all-enveloping, inertia-less §-field. Noticeable or not, her headway was sufficient that, in a few score heartbeats, the broad and close-cropped meadow before the Holdings had given way to heavy forest, and the forest, in its turn—upon either side of the greenway unrolling before them—had soon melted into a solid, indistinguishable blur.
Quite unlike a proper road was the greenway to Alysa-bethport. It seemed to open before him like cloven waters, but this was an illusion. Much like the draywherry herself, it had been constructed by a simple method; only a flying craft (unknown upon Skye) might have traveled over a road less well prepared. An open, grassy bed had been cut, by men and by machinery, upon a direct line southward across field and forest, only the grosser tree stumps and upthrust boulders cleared away. Now the former lay in bleaching clawlike tangles at the edges, amongst piles of the latter. Die-straight and indifferent to the way the land lay, the greenway, fifty measures wide, might have been no more than a forester's firebreak—indeed, it served the purpose well—except whenever it intersected a line of hills where ridges had been furrowed by deep land-cuts, only to disappear again when the hills did.
Having been created by so laborious a method, the pathway required a minimum of further concern. The shockblast which accompanied passage of the draywherry at full speed, less than three measures above the ground, was sufficient to discourage any new vegetation from overgrowing it, all save the sparsest weedery from which the road derived its naming.
Soon the draywherry was boring through the countryside at the greatest speed of which she was capable, just below that of sound, almost twelve hundred klommes per metric hour. Softened by the streamlined protective §-field, the wind of her passage shrieked about her and was gone.
Extending invisible fingers, the draywherry's §-field groped ahead for klommes along the terrain flowing toward her, matching her thunderous progress to the gentle contours of the land so that she always stayed the same distance from the ground. As she felt her way, she kept watch for the un-
56 HENRY MARTYN
expected: landslide, rockfall, upthrust tentacles of a wind-kiUed tree, some pedestrian beast or human crossing the greenway. If given sufficient warning, the draywherry could leap such obstructions, perhaps to the startled discomfort of those riding inside—and the certain consternation of pedestrians—preserving all in greater safety than might otherwise have been imagined.
Had too high or abrupt an obstacle presented itself, the field would give alarm, transfer its lifting energies against the motion induced by the conical impellers, shut the impellers off, and slow the draywherry to a halt, spilling kinetic energy into the meshwork as waste heat, or, failing that, into the fabric of unoccupied portions of the vehicle itself. These might flash into incandescence, or vanish altogether in the white heat of vaporization. The vehicle might sacrifice her very existence, yet the passengers survive to build and ride in others. It was not a perfect system, but it was a simple one and in most cases worked—or so Arran had been told. He had never experienced an emergency himself—it being an axiom that nothing interesting ever happens in the presence of a bored twelve-year-old—and wished in secret, at least just once, that he could.
Time passed with a swiftness which another axiom, not limited to twelve-year-olds, about life's few good moments, describes but does not explain. In due course, their passage brought them to a geographical feature a trifle more spectacular than a mere string of hills. These were real mountains, bordering the equator of the planet in this region, rising to a height at which an unprotected man would need to carry oxygen. The draywherry would climb them, but at an angle less steep than that of the slopes which rose before Arran*s eyes. For the first time the greenway departed from its plumbline, swung in a long, gradual curve toward an easier approach, as it deepened into a roadcut first carved, from orbit at no small expense, by the mighty weapons of the great ship which had brought the Islays' predecessors to this planet.
As the draywherry plunged into the shadow of the roadcut, lifted her prow, and began to climb, a sudden noise shook her and her passengers. The blue-white of Skye's thin
overcast, visible through the notch ahead, turned black as the sides of the cut erupted outward. Under an onslaught of forces she was not designed to withstand, she swayed, fish-tailed, ground her starboard bow against the riven hillside, throwing sparks, turning end-for-end before resuming something like a straight and level course. The mesh of which she had been fashioned groaned in one part, screamed in another, as acceleration stresses and the §-field fought to see which would control her destiny.
Reaching out both hands to steady his younger brother, Robret was torn from the deceptive safety of his chair and tossed aside as if he weighed nothing. Donol screamed, wide-mouthed and open-lunged. Somehow A
rran clung to the tiller post, battered upon face and shoulders by his involuntary motion against the handle of the steering mechanism, as the inbuilt ulsic attempted—in desperation, it seemed to the boy—to stabilize the draywherry.
The vehicle struck the hillside again, raising a cock's tail of spark-punctuated dust behind her, shot onto the tableland beyond, spun end for end a final time, and stabilized. She did not stop. She had been designed never to stop in circumstances such as this.
To stop was death.
Chapter VII: The Landing Pentagram
Woodsrunners!
The word first ran through Arran's mind as he disentangled himself from the inconvenient solicitude of his chair. The draywherry was stable now, moving at perhaps half her normal speed. This suited the boy. He ached in every comer of his body and could only manage half his normal speed, himself.
Woodsrunners. Such an outrage was impossible! All of
58 HENRY MARTYN
that now-legendary sound and fiiry had come to a final ending some thirty or forty years ago. His warrior father, akeady weary from the interstellar war which won him land and title, had subdued the rebels. A glad agreement had been consummated in his marriage to Glynnaughfem Briartonson, daughter of the Skyan leader, lanmichael Briartonson. More than just a marriage of two loving individuals— although they had been that as well, to credit the romantic tales which everyone, including Old Henry Martyn, told of them—it had brought unprecedented peace and happiness to Skye.
Nevertheless, from hoary and suspicious habit, woods-runner attacks were the reason why, even today, no conveyance such as this could be induced to stop once damaged, even by her occupants, unless she first arrived where she was going or had been altogether ruined. Too many Hanoverians had been murdered in ambuscade, too many captives tortured or held hostage.
Coordinated Arm 01: Henry Martyn Page 6