by Steve White
"If they lack souls . . ." Dee looked up from a reverie and met Riahn's eyes. "Can your people do this?"
"I cannot say, for we have never had the opportunity to try."
"Why not? You could try at the same place where the English first appeared."
"Ah, but we don't know where that is."
Ambrose Viccars spoke up. "When we arrived here, we were dizzy with shock. It didn't help that it was night here at the time. Many of us thought we had died. Others thought we had entered a world of madness. A couple really did go mad, and never recovered. None of us were in any condition to think straight. So we simply set out, trying to find Manteo and his people, who, we thought, must somehow still be nearby. We blundered on and on before encountering the Eilonwë. After that, of course, we had even more to get used to! And when we found out that the Gray Monks, as we knew the Grella, ruled this world . . . Well, what with one thing and another, we lost sight of where the spot was. And we've never had the leisure to try and find it."
"I can find it," Winslow stated positively.
They all stared at him, with a great variety of expressions on their faces. In some cases, one expression followed another across the same face.
"You mean," Viccars finally managed, "that we can go home?"
"No."
That voice stopped them all in the midst of their chaotic thoughts, for the Queen had listened in intent silence for a long time. "No," she repeated. "I doubt not your words, Sir Riahn, nor do I doubt that you can do what you say, Captain Winslow. But there is no home for us to return to. I promised Mistress Dare the tale of why I am here. It is a heavy tale. The Armada that was rumored when you left England, Master Viccars, finally sailed. The Gray Monks—the Grella, I should say—gave it a victory it should never have won. England is fallen. London is ashes. I fled to the New World because Dr. Dee believed that the secret of the Gray Monks' powers was to be found there. Well, he was right. But I see no way for us to use that secret against them. Does anyone?" She stood up and looked around at each face in turn, finally turning to Walsingham. "Well, my Moor?"
Walsingham shook his head slowly, then bowed it. Winslow had never thought to see him looking so utterly defeated. "We could go back to Croatoan, Your Majesty, and stay with Manteo's people. But it would only be to await the arrival of the Spaniards and their Grella masters, for they are coming in search of the way back to this world, from whence they can bring more of their fellow to complete the subjugation of our world to their soulless reign."
No one else spoke, for the air of the chamber was too choked with wordless despair to hold sound.
Nine
Something that was not really a butterfly flew past Winslow's field of vision as he lay on the hillside at the edge of the woods and gazed across the valley of the ancient Eilonwë city toward Elf Hill.
He still thought of it as that, and since he had started using the term all the humans had come to adopt it. But this was the first time he had looked on it since their initial emergence into this world. For a while after that emergence, the Grella had been thick as fleas on a dog in the area where one of their patrols had been wiped out. Later, there had been no time as they had adapted to the fugitive existence the Eilonwë and their human allies led among the tunnels and the ruins. There had been too much to learn.
One of the things they had learned was that the Eilonwë were divided into a multitude of sheuaths. (Nations? Tribes? Clans? Something else?) They were united in their hatred of the Grella, but in nothing else. Riahn led the sheuath in whose territory the portal to Croatoan lay, though by what right he led them was not clear—it was not hereditary monarchy, certainly. His sheuath had always advocated active resistance to the Grella—a tendency that had become more pronounced since the English had joined it—but it acted alone. Certain others felt the path to survival lay in passive concealment, avoiding the notice of the alien masters as much as possible, and even those favoring active resistance had their own ideas as to how to go about it. Such was the way of the Eilonwë, and Winslow couldn't help thinking it was a way that might have smoothed the Grella pathway to conquest.
They had also learned that what had seemed to them the magic of the Eilonwë—flameless torches, devices for sending voices winging across great distances to carry messages instantly, and all the rest—did not really involve the black arts. It was simply what the Eilonwë had managed to retain of the mechanic arts their ancestors had possessed before the coming of the Grella, and could now produce in their small hidden workshops.
Riahn had put it to them in the form of a rhetorical question: "Is an arquebus or a compass magical?"
"Of course not!" Dee had huffed.
"Ah, but your own forefathers would once have thought it so."
Dee had looked blank, as had everyone else. Technological change was an idea that had only just begun to enter into their world. It was still so new that it had not yet had time to become a part of their mental universe. Tools had always changed so slowly that one didn't think of them as changing at all. It seemed perfectly natural for artists to depict Alexander the Great wearing modern armor and using artillery. In the end, though, Dee had been the first to accept the concept, and Winslow had come to accept it too. But he had not yet taken the next logical step, for he could still not apply the same reasoning to the arts of the Grella. That, surely, must belong to the realm of the supernatural!
The tools of the Eilonwë, however, could at least be thought of as tools, and he now held one of them in his hands. The two cylinders, each about six inches long, were connected by a framework which allowed the distance between them to be adjusted to fit the spacing of human eyes. On his first try at looking through them, he had seen only a blur. Then, as instructed, he had turned a tiny wheel between the cylinders. All at once the world had come into focus—far closer to him than it ought to have been, bringing a startled oath to his lips. He'd been assured that it was only an application of the kind of magnifying glass lenses used in ordinary spectacles. Dee had coined the term "bi-oculars" in lieu of the device's unpronounceable Eilonwë name.
Now Winslow raised it to his eyes and gazed across at the slope where he had first set eyes on this world. There was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen. But there wouldn't be, would there? he reflected. There had seemed nothing out of the ordinary on Croatoan Island either.
"So it's there?" he heard from behind and to his right. It was the first thing he heard, as Virginia Dare slithered soundlessly up beside him in the tall grass just beyond the treeline.
"Yes. I can tell the general location from glimpses I had as we moved away from it. If I could actually get over there to that ridge, I could start looking for . . . well, the shape one ridgeline looks like when viewed at a certain angle, with another behind it. A pity that ridge is so open, with nothing in the way of concealment."
"But what good would it do us?" she asked in a voice that held the hurt of having had the fulfillment of a childhood hope held up before her, only to be instantly snatched away. "If all we can do is go from one Grella-ruled world to another—"
"They don't rule ours yet!" said Winslow, more harshly than he'd intended. "England may have fallen, but it won't be conquered as long as Englishmen are Englishmen, and know the rightful Queen escaped and may still live. I'm not yet ready to believe that there's nothing we can do. And if there is something . . . well, we may yet have reason to be glad to have our ability to pass through this portal opened by the Grella."
"I wonder about that, Mistress Dare." A rustling sound came from behind them as Shakespeare joined them. Winslow couldn't for the life of him remember how the young actor had prevailed upon them to let him come along on this outing. He wasn't moving through the undergrowth with Virginia Dare's noiselessness—Winslow feared he himself probably wasn't either—but he was making a surprisingly creditable effort. "Do the Grella really have to tear their way through the veil between the worlds before we humans can step through? Or is the portal open to us anyway
?"
"What?" She looked puzzled that the question had even been asked. Actually, she had never quite known what to make of Shakespeare. Winslow could sympathize. "So Riahn has always told us. And what difference does it make? The Grella have forced this world's portals open. So why do you ask?"
"Oh . . . I was just wondering. I remember what Riahn said about the Near Void where we humans linger for a short time before passing into the Deep Void. I can't help wondering . . ." Shakespeare's eyes took on the faraway look Winslow had come to know. "Suppose that there are other portals in our world, and that people can unknowingly walk through them, finding themselves wandering in our world's Near Void, stranded there . . . doomed for a certain time to walk the night." He gave his quick filing-away nod. "Might it not go far toward explaining the stories one hears of ghosts?"
Winslow and Virginia Dare both stared at him for a moment.
"But," she finally broke the silence, "according to Riahn, people in the Near Void cannot be seen, as ghosts sometimes can."
"That does pose a problem," Shakespeare admitted.
"I can see why you have aspirations to be a playwright, Will," Winslow observed dryly. "You have an active imagination."
"So I've sometimes been told," Shakespeare acknowledged with a sigh. "Not least by my wife."
"But," Winslow continued, turning to Virginia Dare, "this raises a couple of questions about which I myself have wondered, Mistress Dare."
" 'Virginia.' Unless," she added with what he thought to perceive as a twinkle, "you'd prefer 'Alanthru.' "
" 'Virginia,' by all means. I'm English, not Eilonwë. And the name suits you." He paused a moment, watching for a reaction—of which there was none, save for a brief eye contact—before getting down to business. "You said, 'the Grella have forced this world's portals open.' When I think of it, it must be 'portals,' for they must have entered this world from somewhere."
"You're right. Thousands of years ago, they appeared at a place to the west of here, only about thirty miles as we English measure distance." She wore the look of someone considering questions that had never occurred to her before. "I don't know if there's any reason why the two portals should be so close together. Riahn has never said anything about it. I'm sure he doesn't know. Maybe it's just an accident. Or maybe something about these weak points in creation causes them to come into existence in the same area."
"If so," Winslow reflected, "then it must narrow the area the Grella have to search, after they enter a world, for the way into the next one. I can't understand why, in almost two thousand years, the ones here have never found the way to Crotoan, which their fellows once found."
"Riahn says they have to be practically on top of one of these points in space before they can perceive it with their mechanical devices. The ones who discovered the way into our world probably didn't want to share the secret with the others until they had forced the portal open and gone through. Perhaps this way they establish ownership of a world by right of discovery."
"A common enough way of doing things," Winslow nodded, recalling the Spaniards' practices in the Indies. He also noted, without comment, her reference to this world as our world. "The ones still here must have missed the ship, but they probably assumed it had come to grief somehow."
"As, indeed, it had," Shakespeare interjected.
"But I don't understand. How can the Grella run an empire across many worlds, when time moves differently in each?" Winslow struggled to express his meaning. "How would it be if a soldier was sent from England to the garrisons in Ireland, stayed a year, and came back to find that in England twenty years had passed in his absence? His parents would be dead, his friends old, his children grown, his wife married to somebody else, and God knows what would have become of his property! Everything he had known would be gone. And what if it were two hundred years? His entire world would be gone!"
"The Grella don't think like us. Remember what Riahn said about them? He has explained it to us many times. They no longer have children; indeed they've given up the very ability to do so, and are all the same sex—or lack of sex. All of them are walking shells, reanimated over and over by their arts. They work together for mutual advantage, but they have no real attachments, no traditions, no families, no friends, no God. Maybe they did in the past, but if so they no longer even remember what it was like. All they have in common is their contempt for the rest of creation. Each of them is alone in the universe."
Both men stared at her, trying unsuccessfully to imagine such a hollow, meaningless existence.
"Likewise," she continued, "their mechanical arts reached finality ages ago, and no longer change. They are no more able to create than they are able to love."
"Perhaps the first ability cannot exist without the second," Shakespeare mused.
Winslow shook himself free of the chill that had touched his soul. "Well, be that as it may, there's something else—something Will's question started me wondering about."
"What? But I explained that the only two portals we know exist in this world had already been opened by the Grella."
"Yes. And we know that humans can pass through them. But once we do, and find ourselves in the Near Void, can we stay there?"
"But our parents, and now you, were only there a few moments before passing on into the Deep Void, to re-emerge—"
"Yes, yes. But they and we were caught by surprise, overwhelmed by strangeness. We could only . . . let the current carry us. But how would it be if we walked through that place purposely, knowing what we were in for, and tried to linger in the Near Void? Could we do it? Could we will ourselves not to pass on?"
"I have no way of knowing," Virginia Dare answered simply.
"Of course you don't." Winslow gazed hungrily across at the opposite hillside. "I have to try it." He turned to the other two, and thought to see in their faces the same curiosity he felt, tempered by alarm or at least prudence. "Are you with me?"
"But you said it yourself," Virginia Dare reminded him. "There's no concealment, except among the ruins. Once we emerged onto the slope, we'd be exposed to the view of any Grella flyer that happened along."
"Perhaps if we waited until nightfall . . ." Shakespeare suggested.
"I don't think I'd be able to find the exact location in the dark. Besides, how often do they fly over this area, now that the excitement over our little encounter with them has died down?"
"More often than you might think," Virginia Dare cautioned. "Remember, this is only thirty miles from the portal that admitted them to this world. They have a great fortress there, as you would expect. The area around it hums with activity."
"But that's thirty miles away." Winslow got up onto one knee before anyone could argue further. "Come on!"
Virginia Dare's eyes flashed with what Winslow interpreted as resentment at having her usual leadership role usurped. But Shakespeare, accustomed to regarding Winslow as his captain, followed. Rather than be left behind, she followed too. They slipped quietly along the edge of the woods, running in a half-crouch just under the covering foliage, then quickly descended into the valley of the ancient city.
At least, Winslow told himself, they were dressed inconspicuously. He and Shakespeare had donned the Eilonwë-style but human-proportioned garments of the ex-colonists, in colors designed to blend with those of nature. They had not brought any ranged weapons, because captured Grella weapons were too valuable to risk and guns were useless against the silvery suits which magically (as Winslow stubbornly continued to think of it) stiffened to steellike hardness where they were struck by any object moving above a certain speed. But blades—even blades wielded by Virginia Dare—were slower than that speed, and she had brought the beautifully designed curved sword that seemed an extension of herself. Winslow had stuck to his backsword; it might lack elegance, but he knew he could use it effectively. Shakespeare's usual boarding pike would have been too awkward to carry on this expedition, so he had brought a dagger which, he stubbornly insisted, an actor
had to learn to convincingly use. Winslow only hoped the Grella would be convinced.
They scrambled down the slope and entered the haunted precincts of the dead city, flitting through the long-overgrown ruins like ghosts among the ghosts. The thought of ghosts reminded Winslow of his reason for insisting on coming here, and going on to the exposed slope beyond: a less than half-formed idea, a bare glimpse of a possibility that might be used.
It was a mistake to dwell on it, for it caused his attention to wander just before they emerged into the ancient courtyard, barely discernible as an unnaturally regular clearing in the forest, and came face to face with a Grella patrol.
Fixated on the threat of the Grella flyers, they had forgotten that the aliens might be stepping out of character and patrolling the region of the recent unpleasantness on foot. So Winslow was caught flat-footed when he saw the small aliens in the silvery one-piece garments, carrying the tubular weapons he remembered. The one closest to him—very close indeed—began to raise that weapon before he could react.