‘This is the Law and the Promise,’ Guinevere responded gently. ‘Now, little one, what dost thou here?’
‘Who’s that talking?’
There was a quivering in the air in front of Maze, and slowly, gently, there manifested a transparent three-dimensional image of Guinevere. Maze was delighted. ‘Can see through you!’ she said. ‘You pictureshow lady?’
‘Nay, little one.’ Guinevere’s manifestation was smiling. ‘Many years ago, wizards took my body from me and locked me in this castle. This shade thou seest is how I once appeared.’
Maze held out her flowers. ‘Here is guestgift. Want to say sorry to strangerboy who chased me. I was scared of his animal. Got him in trouble with Trollwarriors.’
On the bridge, Zoe looked at Harold with scorn. Looking at young men with scorn was one of Zoe’s best things. She had practised scorn in front of the bathroom mirror and the practice had paid off. ‘Are you ashamed of yourself Harold? Are you now sincerely ashamed of yourself? The people you were going to steal from now bring flowers to say they’re sorry? Doesn’t that make you feel like a slimy sub-human worm, Harold?’
Outside, Guinevere’s transparent manifestation was saying: ‘Enter little one, and talk a while.’
‘Is Animal in there?’ Maze still felt a little uncertain about the strange animal.
‘The animal’s name is Wyzen and she is my friend and will harm thee not.’
The four of them stood back from the hatchway as Maze entered, carrying her roses, guided by Guinevere’s immaterial manifestation.
Zachary was admiring Guinevere’s three-dimensional appearance. ‘Neat trick, Guinevere. Should do it more often. It suits you.’
Guinevere, who was not immune to flattery, smiled at Zachary as the Wyzen looked at Maze, and tossed her squeeze bottle aside, ready for more play. ‘Be thou still, Wyzen,’ Guinevere firmly, and allowed her manifestation to disappear as her image come up on the main screen.
Maze was delighted, and beamed, and then looked around. Seeing that Meg was the oldest woman on the bridge, gave her the flowers. ‘To you, oldest woman,’ she said.
‘Anyone laughs gets the flowers in their face, right?’ said Meg and then she smiled at Maze. ‘I’m Meg, and I’m not the oldest woman, the oldest woman is up on the screen there.’
‘Looks younger.’
‘She paints her face so she can look like that, but we’re too polite to mention it,’ Meg said. ‘Let’s see, Harold you’ve met, this is Zoe, and this person is Zachary and you don’t believe anything he says.’
‘Zachary just prettyface?’
‘You’ve got it, Maze, he’s just a pretty face. Now what can we do for you?’
Zachary looked at Guinevere on the screen. ‘Are we going to take this? I mean apart from Meg’s admission that she thinks I’m really hot, are we going to take this general bad-mouthing?’
‘Men don’t interrupt womantalk,’ said Maze sternly.
‘Oh. Right.’ Zachary said, and dropped into a couch with a broad smile on his face.
‘Now,’ said Maze to Meg. ‘Straight talk time. You say in your head that I dirty and I smell. Well you smell too, just different.’
Meg was taken aback that Maze knew what she was thinking. ‘I’m sorry, I…’
‘Woman to woman, no anger here. You say in your head now I awful brat whatever that is. I say you awful brat too, okay?’
‘Guinevere, am I right in thinking that this child is reading my mind?’
Guinevere’s voice was tinged with sadness. ‘Aye. She hath the Talent. She could be a starship.’
‘No anger, no problem, no fight, but I know what you say in your head, eldest lady.’
‘Can we drop the “eldest lady” bit? I might be getting over-sensitive but there does seem to be some kind of conspiracy about this.’
‘But to be eldest lady is best,’ said Maze, looking puzzled. ‘You want to stay child all your life? No. You want to stay young woman all your life? No. One day I will be eldest lady and be proud.’
Zoe felt the subject needed changing. ‘Okay, why don’t we all have something to eat?’ she said.
Maze smiled. She was a child of a gardening, hunting and gathering people, and rule #1 was never to refuse a chance to eat. This was also rule #2.
‘Always worked with my little sister Helena,’ said Zoe, as bottles of blue gruel and khaki biscuits started coming out of the food and drink slots in the main console.
30: MAKING DEALS
On the male side of the red line which crossed Our Mother’s floor, Marlowe sat cross-legged. ‘He was not Slarn,’ Marlowe was saying.
‘Nor the three others, by Maze’s report,’ said Our Mother.
‘But in a Slarn starship,’ said Marlowe.
‘You must stay away from it. I had ordered that no man should know. You must stay away from it, Marlowe. You know what happened last time.’
‘Mother, I must have it.’
‘What?’ The ancient voice sharpened. The power was still there when it was needed.
‘Whoever’s in that starship stole it from the Slarn. Thieves. But I have a right.’
‘You have no right!’ Power surged into the voice. She straightened in her chair of office. ‘If you go near that ship, you endanger the clan, the village, you’ll bring death to us, ruin all my plans, you must not go near it, I Forbid!’
Marlowe stood, and looked at her in silence.
‘The Forbid is on it, Marlowe. It is Forbid.’
‘Goodbye Mother,’ said Marlowe. ‘I’ll probably not see you again.’
She watched him walk out of the hut, out of her life, and there was a distant pain to the moment.
On the bridge of the starship, Maze put down her half-eaten ship’s biscuit with visible signs of disgust. She tried drinking the blue gruel, and the signs of her disgust, if anything, increased. ‘This horrible!’ she said. ‘You always eat this yukstuff?’
‘Lately,’ Zoe allowed.
‘Guinevere says it’s a scientifically balanced diet,’ Harold told Maze. ‘The thing I don’t understand is how a food designed for the Slarn should suit our metabolisms. I mean even if they’re a hydrogen carbon cycle lifeform…’
‘It’s muckstuff,’ Maze said.
‘And certainly they’re oxygen-breathing hominids. There are suits of their armor in there and it’s clear that they possess many physical features similar to ours…’
‘Tastes like dogdirt,’ Maze said.
‘We do like other food as well,’ Zachary said, beginning the conversation which he hoped would end in some kind of trading. ‘You know, like apples, carrots, lambchops, thick juicy T-bone steaks…’ he suddenly felt overcome with emotion.
‘Toasted bread,’ said Meg. ‘We’re very fond of toasted bread with butter and thick-cut vintage marmalade and Darjeerling tea.’
Zachary thought he could have come up with a better set of priorities than that. Darjeerling tea? He had never heard of a plant called a Darjeerling. ‘What’s a Darjeerling?’ he asked.
‘It’s a place, lunkhead. Where they grow tea.’
‘I knew that,” he said. ‘Can’t I make a joke?’
‘Hamburgers,’ said Zoe. ‘Chips.’
‘Apple pie,’ said Harold, distracted from thoughts of carbon-hydrogen cycles. ‘With ice cream. Chocolate cake,’ he drooled.
Maze watched them, knowing they wanted to trade. She lifted her hand for silence. ‘You want to deal?’ she asked.
‘Let me handle this,’ said Zachary and turned to her. ‘You know the Promise and the Law, kid, I heard you say it and I was very pleased you people have remembered it, because we’re from out of the sky, right? Sort of gods, you understand, so we don’t actually make deals with people. You bring us gifts, we do you favors. That’s the way it is with Skygods, right?’
‘I’m Greek Orthodox,’ said Maze. ‘Any more of that godscam talk and I walk away.’
‘Just testing you,’ said Zachary.
‘We
get three four people a year walk in from somewhere, they’ve got some gadget-thing they looted, it makes a noise, it makes movieshow pix, they say meet the Skygods, give us your gold. We call ‘em godscammers, give ‘em to the Don.’
‘Just … matter of interest? What’s this Don do with godscammers?’
‘Swaps them to the Sullivans for horses or sells ‘em up the river into Vic as slaves.’
Zachary looked at Maze with great respect. ‘I see. Do you happen to know the concept “joke”?’
‘“Joke”. Like someone falls in the duckpond.’
‘Right!’ said Zachary. ‘Joke like someone falls in the duckpond. When I said I was a Skygod I was joking. I didn’t mean it.’
‘We don’t call that “joke”. We call that “lie”.’
‘We call it that too,’ said Meg.
There was a moment’s silence. Then Maze said: ‘You strangers who need food. What you got to swap?’
Zachary pulled out his wallet. ‘Well I’ve got about 45 bucks here, some major credit cards…’
Maze stretched out her hand and Zachary put the wallet into it. Meg was stupefied at Zachary’s idiocy. ‘This is moronic, even for you, Zachary. Don’t you realize you’re dealing with a barter system?’
But Maze was examining the money very intently. They watched as she turned the bills over in her hand, looking at each side of them. ‘This here word-writing?’ she asked.
Zoe moved so she could look over Maze’s shoulder. ‘That word says “Australia” and those are the figures for “10”. Then down here at the bottom it says “this Australian note is legal tender throughout Australia and its territories”.’
Maze handed the wallet back to Zachary. ‘In the time of my grandmother, we had a teacher but she got eaten.’
‘Lion, uh?’
Maze shook her head. ‘Looters.’
‘People?’ Zoe asked. ‘People ate your teacher?’
‘Probably Year Nines,’ muttered Meg, ‘I recognize the pattern.’
‘Looters eat people, anyone knows that,’ Maze said briskly. ‘We haven’t had a teacher since.’ She paused. ‘Teach us to read words and write them and we feed you all.’
It sounded like a very good deal, but Zoe said: ‘Can you make an agreement like that? For your village?’
Maze ran her right middle finger across her forehead, from left to right, and then across her heart. ‘Promise.’ She paused. ‘I’m anointed. When Our Mother dies, I will be Our Mother.’
The others looked at Meg, who realized she was being silently elected as teacher. ‘I don’t teach infants or primary,’ she said. ‘I’m High School English/History, I…’
‘We got a deal?’ Maze asked. ‘Teach reading-writing-words for food? Or not?’
Meg picked up a khaki-colored biscuit and looked at it glumly. ‘You have a deal,’ she said.
31: HELENA
Maze led them into the village, Zoe walking on one side of her, Meg on the other, with Harold and Zachary following as befitted Maze’s view of their status as males. Villagers paused in their work to stare at the newcomers, and Meg remembered something that she had read once about the Middle Ages, that most people back then would pass their lives without ever meeting more than a hundred people. Strangers must be rare here. In looking around, she noticed the hut that Harold had mentioned, the one with skulls hanging from its doorposts.
There was movement inside the hut and as Maze led them across the village square, a tall man came out of it, wearing a pack on his back. The pack had strapped to it a large leather-bound book. Harold’s witchdoctor, Zoe thought.
Harold was looking nervously around them. ‘If we all stay calm, Zachary, they won’t attack us.’
‘Shut up, Harold,’ Zoe said over one shoulder.
‘Later on I’ll do some calculations with Guinevere so I can predict eclipses of the sun and moon and impress them.’
Zoe sighed. Nothing seemed to be able to reduce the size of Harold’s enormous ego.
Maze now paused at the steps to the biggest hut. ‘In here is Our Mother. Women go first. Inside, males don’t speak. Women can cross red line on floor, males stay this side.’ Then she led the way up the steps and across the verandah.
Harold murmured to Zachary: ‘I think we’re looking at a primitive matriarchy here, Zachary, preceding more advanced societies in which men run things.’
‘I never saw anywhere that’d reached that second stage,’ Zachary said as they entered the dim coolness of the hut.
As they went in, Marlowe was leaving the village, with his pack on his back.
Inside the hut, they blinked, waiting for their eyes to adjust after coming in out of the bright sunlight. The ancient woman sat watching them, unmoving, the old agate-colored eyes taking in the details of their dress, the way they held themselves, the color of their skins, the sheen of their hair. She was learning about them as they stood there. The adults, the ancient woman thought, were very big, had been well fed as babies and children, perhaps not the man so much, but the woman was a giant, with a giant’s teeth gleaming in the dimness. She had no teeth missing, this woman, and they were very even; her hair gleamed, and the color was too pale to be real. The ancient woman had never seen hair that particular shade of blonde. Did the stranger woman color her hair? The skin was very healthy. She had always eaten of the best this woman, like a Trollwife.
The younger woman’s hair was black, as her own had been long ago. Her memory quivered, there was something about the younger woman, but the memory would not surface. Like the older woman, the young woman was a giant. They came from somewhere where there was a lot of meat to be had, a lot of grain and fruit and milk and vegetables. These strangers made her own Forester people look small by comparison.
The man was more sinewy, like the Trollmen were sometimes, the ones who had been bought in, or escaped from the slave farms in the East. The man had had a harder life than the others. The boy, the one with the writing on his shirt, the one Marlowe had been interested in, he was well-fed too but thin, not yet having finished his growth, not yet developed his adult muscles.
But all the signs were there. These people came from a place of great riches.
They could see her now, the ancient woman, sitting in her big bishop’s throne, a feathered cloak wrapped about her shoulders, staring at them with bright brown eyes.
She was once beautiful, Zachary thought. The bones which seemed in danger of piercing the wrinkled skin of her face were the bones of a great beauty. How old was she? How old could this woman possibly be?
‘You will call me Our Mother,’ the ancient woman said. ‘The women may approach and kiss my hand. The men are unclean and must remain beyond the red line.’
The English she speaks is much more like ours, thought Meg. Brought up by people of our generation? Maze must be three generations down at least? The language changing?
Zoe moved first, walked forward, crossing the red line and dropping to one knee as she took the hand which Our Mother extended, and kissing it. Meg did the same, kissing the ancient woman’s hand, feeling the skin like dry paper under her lips.
‘So the skygods have come again, have they?’ The voice was like the creaking of the unoiled hinges of an old gate.
‘Not skygods, not us, no,’ Zachary said, wanting to make that perfectly plain.
‘The women speak, the men stay silent. Maze must have told you that.’ She sat in silence, looking at them. ‘I remember people dressed like you. From a long time ago. Who are you?’ She suddenly looked at Zoe, singling her out, her old head moving with a shocking speed. ‘Tell me your names.’
‘Zachary Owens,’ Zoe said, indicating Zachary.
‘Don’t know the name Owens. Him?’ She pointed at Harold.
‘Harold Lewin,’ said Zoe.
‘Lewin. One of the lost families. Her?’
‘Meg Henderson.’
‘Henderson. Another lost family. You?’
‘Zoe Poulos.’
The
old woman looked at her for so long that Zoe felt uncomfortable. ‘Zoe … Poulos.’ Our Mother breathed the three syllables. ‘Come closer.’ Zoe went closer. Our Mother stared at her in a silence which stretched almost beyond breaking point. Then she said: ‘Go to the shelf, Zoe Poulos. Tell me what you find.’
Zoe was not sure what she meant, and the old woman pointed to a shelf behind her. This part of the hut was deep in shadow, and Zoe had to get closer to see what was on the shelf. There were three very different objects: a Greek ikon of St George slaying the dragon; a framed photograph, faded by time; and a chewed teddybear. Zoe stared at them, and then silent tears were rolling down her cheeks.
‘Tell me.’
‘I find … an ikon of Hagios Georgiou, St George, like the one we used to have at home … and …’
‘Zoe? What’s wrong?’ Meg moved toward her, but stopped at a gesture from Our Mother.
Zoe was looking at the framed photograph. It was a group shot of a family: a father, a mother, two boys in their late teens, a girl in her mid-teens and a girl of about three. The girl in her mid-teens was Zoe. The toddler was her sister Helena.
‘A photo… a photograph of my mother and father and … brothers Peter and George, and my little sister Helena. And me.’ The others were staring at her as she picked up the worn bear, and looked at its back. There was some old, worn stitching on the back. Some of the stitching was gone, but the Greek letters ‘Elena’ could be read. ‘And my sister Helena’s teddybear,’ Zoe said.
There was silence, total silence, then the ancient woman spoke. ‘So it’s you. Come back. Has no time passed at all … in the place where the Slarn-demons took you?’
Zoe was looking at Our Mother, in fear as much as anything. Her tears were running from her face down onto the top of her Slarn longjohns. ‘You’re … you’re Helena? My little sister? You were three years old…’
‘I am Our Mother. Once, long ago, I was Helena. Helena Poulos. Now … for fifty years … Our Mother.’ Zoe broke. With a great sob which was wrenched from deep within her, she stumbled forward and fell to her knees by her ancient younger sister’s chair of office. She held Helena’s old hand, and words emerged from her sobbing. ‘Helena? Still alive? I left you … by the gate … a week ago…’
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