Dogfighters: Under the Hill

by Alex Beecroft

  Another zinging touch with the spear, and Flynn was beginning to get a little brassed off with his guard. But Sumala caught his wrist as he spun to take the creature down, shook her head. She pulled on the straps of his life jacket, bending his face down to hers. “Don’t. You need to be conscious when they put you on the slab. It won’t work, otherwise.” And he thought that since he had decided he was trusting her, he might as well carry on doing it.

  Subsiding, he watched the dragon swarm down the side of the hill like a gecko on a wall, headfirst, disappearing into the front gate, scattering passersby as it went. He and Sumala were escorted across the top of the mound to where a toppled monolith lay covered with worms of carving. Oonagh spoke to it, and its shadow became a stairway, leading down by private ways into the blue underground light of the city.

  The escort of soldiers closed in about the queen and drove Flynn and Sumala before them through empty passages. No one to mark their queen’s passing, to bow or fawn, or offer violence. The idea of her sneaking through her secret tunnels, far away from the gaze of her subjects, did not count in her favour with Flynn. But perhaps she too knew of the resistance, and was afraid.

  His musings ended when he found himself once again in the prison of the sleepers. When he was prodded to lie down on one of the stone tables, his misery and resignation evaporated. This eternal sleep looked too much like death. Sod just lying there and taking it! He panicked, put his head down and charged at the guards, got in a couple of solid hits, a fierce delight in being able to do something fizzing in his veins.

  He tasted bitterness, like lemon drops in the back of his throat, as Ghastly dinged him a glancing blow with his cattle prod of a weapon. Grabbing the spear, he wrested it from Ghastly’s hands, caught the elf beneath the ribs with the butt of it. And was just swinging it round to bring the head to bear when Sumala stepped to his side, avoided his flailing arms with ease and pressed a spot at the centre of his biceps. The scalding pain was followed immediately by numbness. His hand opened by itself, and with a rapid twist and wriggle he could barely see for its speed, Ghastly pulled his spear back and gave Flynn one more shot of tooth-jangling pain.

  “Oh, bad show!” Flynn cried, looking at Sumala with disappointment and no small betrayal as five of them seized his arms and legs and forced him to lie down flat on the table. There was a feeling of pressure, struggle. He saw the arch of the ceiling above, laced with grey stars.

  …and then he slowly became aware of his den around him, the slip and slither of rounded golden pebbles beneath him, smooth as water-tumbled cobbles. He tasted oil and meat, and the blood-copper tang of the lines of malachite in the distant walls. Closer to him, the stink of eagles, guano and gore and their incessantly cheeping chicks. Lazily, he extended his snout and butted the bars that separated their nests from his. “Keep the noise down!”

  He stretched out a claw and examined it in the dim of the cavern. Yes, still his claw, adamant tipped and sharp. When he flickered out his tongue he could taste only birds and gold, all the usual presences of his off-time world. But had he really said “Keep the noise down” like a father of toddlers to a rabble of urchins in the street?

  He sniffed again, tasted the floor to see if he could scent the faint savour of footsteps, and someone—he was sure it wasn’t him—giggled. A flick of ears detected no unknown breathing in the vicinity. The eagle chicks were waiting for their hourly ration of bull carcasses and had not matured enough to speak. He’d never known an eagle to giggle, in any case.

  Wait, he thought, picking up his claws and touching his face with them, poking himself in the nostril and then the eye. Where are my hands?

  The giggle came again, and with all his senses on alert, he was aware, this time, that it came from within the depths of his own mind. “Silly. They’re on the slab with the rest of you, in the room of sleepers.”

  He uncurled his bulk and scrabbled out of the bowl of his den—the bowl lined with gold. Dragging himself to the door, he squeezed beneath the lintel into the main tack house. Servants bowed and averted their gazes, covering their eyes as they would have done for the queen.

  Curse her.

  There was no one here who would have giggled. No one here who even knew of the room of sleepers. But the fleeting moment of malice towards Oonagh echoed strangely in the caverns of his mind, as if it reflected from more than one mirror.

  He closed his eyes, concentrated. “Sumala, is that you?”

  “Of course it is. It’s both of us.”

  Setting his chin in the entrance of the city, so that the stream of business must climb over his nose, Kanath amused himself by people-watching, smelling a thousand different varieties of fear and resolve. “This happened when you looked at me,” he hazarded. “Before you mounted. You looked in my eye. This happened then.”

  “I’m sorry!” A female voice came with memories of splendour, of green woodlands hot with the smell of hibiscus, tall slopes leading up to snow, of prayer flags and trumpets, chariots and elephants and drums. Its apology was unconvincing—it felt it had every right to act as it had done, and beneath the righteous certainty, it also felt very pleased with its own cleverness.

  “What have you done?” Kanath asked, though he could smell them, now he knew, smell them on his back and his harness, and trace that smell down the spiral winds of the city to the still place just below the heart, where time was siphoned away from the ne’er-do-wells and criminals of the city to go towards Oonagh’s projects. “How is time passing for you at all?”

  “You have a splinter of my soul in you,” replied the female voice smugly. “And the soul is eternal and beyond time. All things happen to it at once. It creates the illusion of past and present to make sense of the tangle, but it is outside the threads. The people of your world seem very capable of manipulating time, dragon, it is sad that they know nothing about what they meddle with.”

  At the conversation, feeling the difference between the bright, innocent naivety of Sumala’s presence and the age-worn weariness of the dragon, Flynn managed to locate enough of his own mind to differentiate himself from the others. “You did the same to me,” he thought, and his mental voice sounded worried to himself, anxious and tired. Their mutual fatigue gave him a strange cross-species sympathy for the dragon. “Does that hurt? How many times can you do it before there’s nothing left?”

  “Silly.” Sumala’s smile coloured her mind electric blue. “The soul is like time—it can be divided infinitely, and each part will be whole. All my people can do this, easy as breathing. If I had not done it to you, you would be still suspended in the moment when you lay down. You’d know nothing else until you woke, perhaps a thousand years into the future, and experienced one bright flash of death before becoming part of the dust on the sleepers’ floor.

  “This is the way I helped you to come and rescue me, teaching you how to work the controls when you should have known nothing. You weren’t aware of me, but I was there. One cannot, though, sneak into a dragon’s mind unobserved. I think you helped us, Kanath. I think you want to help us more.”

  He roused again, straightened his aching legs and crawled along the pleasant scratch of the main road, out into the night. Above, the night sky looked exactly like the vault of the sleepers’ chamber, grey stars and two grey moons hanging over a grey land. The air tasted of burrowing things, worms come up to peek at the surface, night-hunting birds and the gold-green-blue outpouring of hot scents from beneath the hill.

  “Want to help you?” Kanath paced up the ramp to the top of the hill, and this time Flynn got to feel the takeoff from inside—the burst of energy and effort, the painful haul, the drop from the edge of the mound and the air beneath his wings like water beneath the arms of a swimmer. There was no more exhilaration than there would be for a man setting out for a walk, and Flynn felt, on the whole, that being inside a Lanc was a better deal. “Why should I desire to help you?”

  Good question. “Well,” said Sumala, an edge of uncertainty
in her mental tone, “because you do not like being a beast of burden. Because you are proud and free and no pet.”

  “I am no pet.”

  “Because,” Flynn hazarded, “you don’t seem to be fighting this. I can’t say I was keen on walking around with someone else’s soul inside me, but you seem to have taken to it like a natural.”

  “You wish me to resist you? I could snap my mind like my teeth, chew you both and swallow you.”

  In their shared belly, Flynn felt fire roil—literal fire, the tongues of it tickling pleasantly. Kanath rumbled and a wash of brimstone-tasting smoke lapped up his throat. Flynn tried to make him blow smoke rings, but his grasp on the body had become slippery. He’d raised the claw with no difficulty, before, but now Kanath knew what was happening, he had restored his ownership with so little fuss Flynn had not noticed it happening. He breathed out a jet of flame, in what Flynn could feel was laughter.

  “Not at all. But if you felt like helping us…?”

  All this time the dragon’s steady wing beats had been driving it upwards, straight towards the larger of the two moons. The stars had become very bright as they burst through thin films of icing cloud, looked down on the haze of atmosphere, and the palace and grounds. It was possible to see the edges now, to see they had come from a worldlet whose roots dangled into nothingness.

  Kanath took one last breath of depleted air and closed his nostrils. Another wing beat and a surge forward, and he breached the outer layer of air, sailed out into space. His scales clamped tight, forming a natural pressure suit, and the fires inside warmed him against the utter cold. The weightlessness was as soothing as a bath for a moment, before he had caught the lip of the closest moon’s gravity well and was using it to fling himself past, and out through the x-rays and the violet scent of the solar wind.

  This closest moon was shaped into a rough pyramid and covered on all sides with fields. A continent of vineyards, an archipelago of orchards, and three-sided fields the size of countries, burgeoning with other crops. Obligingly, Kanath focussed—he had long sight that would put a hawk to shame—and Flynn saw the figures toiling in the fields, wondered what it was about them that looked familiar.

  “They are human slaves.”

  “Oh.”

  Coming out from beneath the bulk of the harvest moonlet, they swam up towards the second moon, which proved on closer examination to be a huge, blasted world. They dived into its arid air, and though everything Kanath saw was monochrome, this place smelled grey. As up became down, Flynn saw the dejected shapes of a city below. Laid out like the palace, around a road that was a single spiral, it looked at first like a dropped shell buried in black sand.

  Kanath swept down and landed on the cracked pavement of the central avenue in a district where stone amphitheatres gave way to lumpy cairns. They gleamed fitfully as the scouring breeze removed a layer of dust only to replace it with another, and Flynn saw they were made up of swords, arrowheads, spears, pile upon pile, surfaces constantly abraded by the wind, rubbed blunt but shining.

  “What on earth?”

  No reply from Kanath, only a reverent sadness, such as a man might feel when he walked among graves.

  “I think they are sacrifices,” Sumala said, her mental voice hushed. “I think this city is a temple. You see down there? Hostelries for the pilgrims, baths where they can clean themselves. A place to give up their weapons. It is a temple of peace, I think, but the god has left it.”

  “Or she is dead,” Kanath acknowledged. He had come out from among the abandoned piles of blades and now he left the road, turning right into a mausoleum of crumbling sculptures. A crushing weariness built up in Flynn with every inchoate shape.

  Incense, gold, blue, like a smell of firecrackers, and Kanath’s head swung round, sniffing. Once he had stopped moving, the wind coated him in dust, made him indistinguishable from the ruins—a statue of a dragon. But, inside, all three of them had leapt a little for joy.

  The centre of the city was three massive buildings arranged around a parade square. Each building trailed a curved tail of small shrines, so that—observed from the air—the effect was of a three-legged wheel. All were decrepit and empty except for the small shrine closest to them. There, a candle-lantern’s wax-warm light flickered. When Kanath peered, they could see, through the windows, an undamaged statue of a woman in a carriage of living wood, driving on her team of spotted panthers. There were flowers at her feet and a black bundle of something that slowly unfolded itself from its crouch and became a young priest with his eyes closed and his fingers smudged with pollen.

  Kanath looked away, and Flynn was glad of it. It seemed intrusive to stare at the poor creature, left alone in his pieties in the middle of ruin.

  “My father said Oonagh’s people were once like ours,” Sumala offered gently. “Glad to make music and dance before the gods. But they lost their gods and we did not. It is a terrible thing, my father said, to be suddenly without the purpose for which you were made.”

  Scent came like a shout streaming past them from the central square, the taste of bronze and elf-flesh with its almost chlorophyll-like tang. Kanath swarmed forwards until he could put his snout around the final statue and look. There was a rumbling and a shudder beneath his feet, and from the broken doorway of the farthest temple elvish figures began to emerge. A batch of nine came sauntering into the dusty air, drew themselves up into a ragged line, and as they were doing so another nine emerged, and then another.

  Barracks underground, Flynn thought, and some kind of lift to the surface. They’re coming out for a bit of square bashing? They bloody need to, they’re an absolute shambles.

  He counted eighty-one groups of nine soldiers, and then a group of three, all of them in chain mail except the last. “Why are you showing me this?”

  Kanath’s fire leapt, filling him with warmth. “Show you things? I am merely out for my evening’s exercise.”

  “Where’s the army to be sent?”

  The blaze grew so hot it scorched him. “How am I to know? Shall we look?”

  The scratching of his claws blown away by the ever-present shrill of the sandstorm, his nostrils and eyes slitted, the dragon writhed like a great lizard out from the shelter of the garden of statues into something what must once have been parkland, if the dust-filled flowerbeds and dead trees were any indication. He reached the terrace of shrines and, digging his claws into the stone, swarmed slowly up to lie along the flat roof like a carving.

  The last three elves of the host were now lying down on couches set around an ornamental pond in the centre of the parade square. With a flash that turned the swirling dust clouds into bright white veils, the waters lit up, mirror smooth, mirror bright. When Kanath looked through, they could see farmland beneath clear skies dotted with cloud. A tractor in the distance and, closer to them, a man in overall trousers and a checked shirt, bending down to rub behind the ears of his mongrel dog.

  Flynn’s body rested in timeless suspension back at the palace. Without it—without moist palms, the plunge of his stomach, the halt and race of his heart—he could muster only an intellectual horror. But that was bad enough. “I was told Oonagh meant to attack Sumala’s people. Not mine!”

  “She will have to go through your world to get to mine,” Sumala said, a note of strained patience in her tone, as if she had expected him to have grasped this earlier. “And she will not wish to move her armies through hostile territory. It is only good tactics for her to capture your world first, in order to get to mine. I thought that should be clear even to you.”

  There was no body to provide the panic and the sickness, but no sickness and panic to distract him from the ramifications. This was why he was here in Elfland, then. Not for Oonagh’s prophecy, and not due to some cosmic mistake. No, he’d obviously been placed here to stop this, providentially given the chance to save his world. It was the war, writ large over the universe. What point defeating Hitler if the world was only to go down beneath an even more inhu
man regime?

  “Take us back, Kanath. Now!”

  “Uninvited guests should be more polite,” remarked the dragon casually. The three-way whole of them which had begun to feel almost comfortable wavered as a dark-shining mass bulged beneath it and burst. Flynn’s grasp on himself exploded into flying droplets. He grabbed for them and they ran through his mental fingers. He was three people at once, and none at all. He was desolate and resentful at his father’s inaction, satisfied over his triumph as he would have been over the sweet taste of a mouthful of gold.

  Something in Flynn, impatient and certain, thought, No. I don’t have time to lose myself like this, and began to plot the coordinates of himself on his own mental map. Here was his ego, here his memories of RAF training, here a cloistered and lonely childhood, and here his mental skipper, revealed as three parts wishful thinking and one part need.

  The skipper had his insubstantial foot on a thing that looked like a horizontal silver tree. Lightning moved up it and down again, bathing it in an eerie blue light. “Give this a kick,” he said. “Tell your young woman to do the same.”

  “She’s not my…” he began, guiltily, and then stopped as his priorities rearranged themselves. “I need your help. Not yours—you’re just a figment of my imagination. I need the real man. He’ll know what to do. I’ve got to let him know.”

  Sumala’s dance-toughened foot kicked the silver thing so hard that pain went through Flynn’s head like a needle. But the pain subsided faster for him than it did for the dragon. When she did it again, he used that moment of grace from Kanath’s will to reconnect all his severed parts into one personality. He could feel the graze on his jaw as Kanath whipped his head from side to side, trying to shake out the agony.

  The landscape of his mind bulged and distorted, and Flynn felt the pressure of the beast’s will come against him like a flying cloud of ash. He resisted being pulled apart again, resisted the sting and scour and increasing agony. Wished for a body so he might double over, sob ’til his nose streamed blood and the pressure drove blood out of his tear ducts and his burst ears. But he had no body to either suffer or fail, no prospect of relief by lapsing into unconsciousness. Instead, he pictured himself pushing his way forward through the blast of will, kneeling on the tree—it looked now like a stream with many tributaries, all of them flickering with electrical impulses, and he understood suddenly that it was a nerve ganglion in the dragon’s brain, one that, activated, caused him agony.