A Sterkarm Kiss

by Susan Price

  A strong wind blew past his ears as, out of breath, he reached the gatehouse. He was surprised to see that the gate was open. There was a guard closely watching his approach, but even so, he’d have thought the Sterkarms would be on red alert, given the circumstances. Before he could approach the gate, he heard voices and footsteps from beside the tower. He looked in that direction and saw Andrea Mitchell come hurrying around the curve of the tower’s fifteen-foot wall.

  She was half running, her hair flying, and she swiped her hands at her eyes as she came. Gareth got the impression that she wasn’t happy. “Hi!” he said, and raised his hand in greeting.

  She stopped short and stared at him.

  “James Windsor about?” he asked.

  She came on toward him. Drawing near, she said, “You liked Joan Grannam, didn’t you?”

  An odd question, he thought. What had it got to do with anything?

  “I know you did, I know you liked her,” Andrea said. “Well, she’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Gareth said, blankly. How could she be dead? There was a higher mortality rate 16th side, yes, but even so, Joan Grannam was only fifteen or sixteen, and in good health the last time he’d seen her, which was only—he couldn’t remember the exact time. A couple of days. Three days. Something like that.

  “They nearly cut her fucking head off!” Andrea said.

  “What? Are you all right?”

  Andrea raised her clenched fists on either side of her head. “I’m all right! Joan Grannam’s dead!” Her hair flew out about her head.

  She’s mad, Gareth thought, and was relieved to see Windsor coming up behind her with several other 21st siders. He half waved at Windsor, and would have gone to meet him, except he felt vaguely guilty about leaving Andrea when she was so obviously upset about something.

  “Gareth!” Windsor said as he came closer. “I’m certainly glad to see you!”

  “I’ve got some—” Gareth began, but Windsor cut him short.

  “I’m out of here, leaving straightaway. You’re in charge.”

  Gareth tried to take this in. Windsor, he realized, wasn’t looking quite well. He was pale, and there was a jumpiness about all his movements, a slight shake in his voice.

  “I’m coming with you,” Andrea said.

  Windsor looked at her and calmed a little. “You? No, Andrea. We can’t spare you.”

  “I resign,” she said.

  “Fine. As soon as I receive your formal, typed letter of resignation on my desk, 21st side, your month’s notice will begin.”

  As Gareth, bemused, looked on, Andrea gave Windsor a long look of pure hatred. “You can’t stop me from leaving.”

  “Who’s stopping you?” Windsor said. “But Patterson here needs the vehicles. Can’t spare one to be your taxi. Of course, you can walk—if you want to walk from here to the Tube with the Grannams on the warpath.”

  Andrea looked at Patterson, who stood stolidly beside Windsor. She looked at the other men beside him, and at Gareth, but though scared and angry, she wasn’t yet quite desperate enough to ask them for help—especially when she strongly doubted that they would help her.

  “Andrea,” Windsor said, in a reasonable, soothing tone, “I need you here. Gareth will be off into the hills with Patterson and the Sterkarms.”

  Gareth was startled to hear this.

  “So I need you here, at the tower,” Windsor went on, to Andrea. “And you’re not in any danger. You’re an Elf. Nobody here is going to cut your throat.” His voice wavered again.

  “I don’t think they’re going to—to kill me!” Andrea said.

  “Then what is the matter?” Windsor asked. “Why do you want to leave suddenly? Oh—” He smiled. “Is Per Sterkarm not so cuddly as you thought he was? What a pity. Personally, I wasn’t under any misapprehension there.” His hand briefly rubbed his stomach.

  Voices and footfalls made them look around. The rest of the funeral party was returning from the graveyard. Per Sterkarm, ahead of the rest, raised his arm and called to someone among them—it might have been any of them.

  Andrea, knowing it was her, was seized with a sort of panic. She couldn’t face Per, couldn’t speak to him. Being near him would be like being smeared with blood. Abruptly turning away, she hurried up the rough steps to the tower’s gatehouse. If she went inside, she could go to her bower, pull up her ladder, hide.

  “Who’s my driver?” Windsor asked. “Gareth, make my excuses—lay it on with a trowel.”

  And Windsor, too, ran away, with his driver, down the steep path that led to the valley below, where the Elf-Carts were parked.

  Gareth, exasperated and afraid, was left to greet the Sterkarms. “Mistress Sterkarm—I am sad for your husband’s death—er—Master Windsor has been called away. On important, urgent business. He wished to stay longer”—Gareth was half aware of Per Sterkarm leaving the funeral party and running up the steps toward the gatehouse—“but truly he could not. He is needed—in Elf-Land—could not stay.”

  “We be sad for it, Master Elf,” Isobel Sterkarm said. Her face was stiff and rather grim, but she was composed. “Shall you be staying with us?”

  “Er—I shall.”

  “Then I will make you a place to sleep,” Isobel said, and went on toward the tower. Most people followed her, though some were peeling off and going to their business in the fields. Gareth fell in with Patterson and the other 21st men.

  “What’s this about me going with you into the hills?”

  They grinned at him.

  Per caught up with Andrea as she reached the narrow alleyway that led to her bower. “Wait! I’ve been calling thee! I—”

  “Get away from me!” Andrea said, almost in a panic. She tried to go on.

  He darted in front of her, blocking her way. “How stands it with thee? What be wrong?”

  “What be—?” Andrea’s voice croaked into silence. She could only look at him. There he was, tall, strongly made, good-looking. His sleeve stained with fresh blood, his face flushed and lively, his spirits high. That, she thought, is a killer.

  “I be ganning soon,” Per said. “I wanted to see thee afore I gan.”

  “I thought you understood!” she said to him. “I thought you did. I thought you got it. But no— You have no even tried, you have no even thought about it!”

  He was baffled. And she was calling him “you” when he’d thought they were “thou” to each other.

  “Joan,” she said. “You murdered Joan.”

  He frowned, annoyed. He didn’t like being called a murderer. It had been revenge, not murder. “Grannams killed my daddy.”

  “Joan did no!” she yelled at him. “Joan never hurt anyone! Joan was—was—just a little lass.”

  “Ach! She was a Grannam!”

  “And that’s reason enough, be it?”

  Per looked angrier. He didn’t like being shouted at by a woman, not even an Elf-Woman. Still less did he like being shouted at by a woman he’d lain with, and from whom he’d expected kisses and cuddles and kind words.

  “And now what will you do? Kill more Grannams—whether or no they had anything to do with killing your father. And they’ll kill some of you. And you’ll kill some more of them. And they’ll kill some more of you—and on and on it’ll go!”

  “Tha’rt an Elf,” Per said. “Tha dinna—”

  “Why be it that when you kill Grannams, that be right and fair—but when they kill you, that be wicked and wrong? How do you tell difference between a good murder and a bad murder?”

  Per scowled, looking angrier than she’d ever seen him, in this world or the other. His blue eyes flashed silver, as if a light had lit up behind them. He seized her by both shoulders and shook her. Though she always thought of him as slender, he was tall, and he was very strong. His fingers gripped her arms painfully and, big hefty girl as she
was, he shook her until her head bobbed and her teeth clattered. She was dreadfully scared: Her heart pounded, her face flushed, and her breath seemed to be lost somewhere in the shaking. It flashed through her mind that he was going to kill her, as he’d killed Joan—what was to stop him? He could do anything he liked. The Sterkarms would always back him. And so would FUP, because he was worth more to them than she was. They would tell her parents, “Dreadfully sorry—your daughter was killed in an industrial accident. Here’s some money.” She tried to say, “Be so—kind—” but couldn’t form the words for the shaking.

  “You ken nowt!” Per said. “Nowt!” He shoved her aside, and she stumbled into the stone wall of a storehouse. “Elven may forgive and forget and live in peace—but this be no Elf-Land! If we dinna kill Grannams, they will kill us!” He strode away from her and then turned. “And I shall kill them!” With a couple more strides he had turned the corner of the alley and was out of her sight.

  Andrea huddled against the wall, shaking, for some minutes before she felt able to climb the ladder to her bower. She felt wobbly as she did it and didn’t think she had the strength to pull the ladder up after her, but she did and then felt safer.

  She lay on the bed, huddling in the smell of old hay, and cried, from shock and humiliation, because she’d thought she could influence Per, and she couldn’t—and perhaps from grief—for Joan, for Per, for everyone who was going to be killed and hurt … She didn’t know for sure why she cried.

  As the sobbing eased and her brain began to work again, she asked herself what she’d expected. Had she really thought that one short pillow talk would reverse the whole conditioning of Per’s life? Behind Per lay centuries of blood feud. He thought murder a lesser crime than leaving his father unavenged.

  But he’d killed Joan. She hadn’t liked Joan—the girl had been prickly, touchy, and hard to love … But she’d been a girl. A fifteen-year-old girl.

  Andrea realized that she wouldn’t have been so appalled if Per had cut the throat of a Grannam man in front of her. Shocked, yes. Scared. But—she wouldn’t have felt such a personal affront. She wouldn’t have been so scared when Per had lost his temper and shaken her. At the bottom of her grief was the fear that if Per could kill Joan so pitilessly, then he might also harm her.

  And that knowledge grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and shoved her face into the fact that she’d managed to forget again, the fact that she always managed to duck, no matter how often it was brought to her notice. Per was a killer.

  He always had been, she thought. When he’d seemed so sweet, when she’d known him before, in another dimension—he’d been a killer then. Raised to it, trained to it. But she’d always managed to overlook it. She’d overlooked it so successfully that she’d kissed him, cuddled him, lain with him. She felt like the mistress of some concentration-camp commander, cooing over him when he came in from a hard day’s torturing and murdering—wiping the blood and stink off him, kissing him.

  She felt sick. She felt filthy. She didn’t know what to do.

  “Do you ken,” Gareth asked, “places called Lang Stane and Urwin’s Gap?”

  The expressions on their faces told him that they knew them very well.

  “That be where Grannams lie in wait for you,” he said.

  “They lie in wait for us?” Per looked at Sweet Milk. “They be no coming to attack?”

  “Not as I understood it,” Gareth said. “I could no ask them directly. I gathered that they expected you to be attacking them—”

  “And they’ve set ambushes,” Per said, again to Sweet Milk, “where they think we’ll come through hills! That be why we’ve seen no sign of them, for all our watching!”

  Sweet Milk nodded slowly.

  “Show us where they are,” Patterson said, nodding to Gareth to translate, “and we’ll take ’em out.”

  Sweet Milk said, “The Elf-Carts,” and made a dismissive, wiping gesture. He shook his head.

  Gareth opened his mouth to translate, but there was no need. Patterson grinned and said, “Tell him we can still use our legs. We were never planning on using the Elf-Carts.”

  Gareth translated that. Sweet Milk gave the Elves a sidelong glance of amusement, though his face never shifted into even a glimmer of a smile.

  “Can you ride?” Per asked, and mimed riding a horse. Several of the 21st siders laughed, shaking their heads.

  “Yes,” Patterson said.

  “Be ready then,” Per said and, swinging around on his heel, drew in a long breath and expelled it in a yell of “Sterkarm!” His carrying bellow rang through the tower and jerked up the head of every man and woman who heard it—and they passed the alert to everyone who hadn’t. They dropped what they were doing and came toward the shout, to be met by Per, shouting, “Horses! We ride.”

  Gareth turned to Patterson to translate and found that he and his men had gone. They knew what they had to do too.

  It was little more than an hour later that Andrea heard the ride leaving. She refused to leave her refuge to see them go but went to her bower’s one window, opened the shutter, and leaned out. At the end of the narrow alley in which her bower was built, she could see the horsemen passing, above the heads of those who crowded the alleys to watch them. The little, stocky, barrel-chested horses—almost all of them black—with their shaggy coats and long, uncut manes and tails, clopped by, shaking their heads and rattling their harnesses. The eight-foot lances towering above the riders’ heads, but not gleaming, as in storybooks. The Sterkarms didn’t want any gleaming, flashing lance heads to announce their coming to any lookouts. The lances had been rubbed with a mixture of grease and soot, both to preserve them from rain and to darken them so they wouldn’t catch the light. Their helmets had been treated in the same way, and the many small metal plates of their jakkes were hidden between two layers of worn leather.

  She couldn’t catch any sight of the 21st men, though presumably they were going with the Sterkarms. Leaning out the window and listening, she heard the horses, yells of “Sterkarm!” and the shouted good wishes of women and children, but she didn’t hear any of the MPVs’ engines start.

  That meant there would be MPVs at the foot of the hill, and she could drive herself … But that idea soon faded. Each would have a personal key, which could be used only by a specific driver. Even those cars driven by several different people would have a code to be punched in before they could be started. She didn’t know the code, and she didn’t have a personalized key. Neither did she have the skills needed to start a car without its keys.

  For a while she sat on the bed and thought seriously about walking to the Tube. It would be a long, hard trudge across very difficult country, but she’d be doing it to escape, to spite Windsor. She didn’t know the way, but there would be a track left by the cars … She didn’t have the courage, though. Even supposing the track was clear and she didn’t get hopelessly lost, there was no telling what raiding parties were out there. Grannams, and allies of the Grannams, looking for revenge. Sterkarms from outlying districts who had never seen her before. She could perhaps rely on them leaving her alone because she was an Elf, but—there was no law, out there on the 16th-side moors. Angry men need not worry about any retribution. She kept seeing the blood pouring from Joan Grannam’s throat—but it was her own throat—and hearing Joan’s dying gasps and choking in her own voice. She wasn’t going to chance it.

  She passed the time by thinking over what a bloody fool she’d been, to leave Mick and come back to this godforsaken time and place. What did you expect? she asked herself again and again, in amazement. If the Per you knew before was good-natured and sweet—or capable, at least, of being good-natured and sweet at times—then it was because his father, his uncle, and his cousin hadn’t been murdered. She thumped her head on the pillow and told herself: It’s no use grieving over the Per you knew and mourning his loss—he isn’t lost. This Per and that P
er are one and the same. The Per you knew was just as callous and murderous as this one. He’d just never had reason to show it so close to home.

  Hours later and dusk was thickening to dark; her hunger became so sharp that she couldn’t bear it. She got up, opened the door, awkwardly dragged her ladder to it, and dropped one end into the alley below. Climbing down, she set off to find herself something to eat. The kitchen would give her some flatbread and cheese, if nothing else.

  The kitchen was an outbuilding across the yard from the tower’s door. It was built all of wood, so that when it burned down—as kitchens were prone to do—it could be rebuilt quickly and cheaply. A thatch of heather roofed it and hung well over the walls, to carry the rain away from them. The entrance was always muddy where water had been thrown out, and was strewn with peelings and other rubbish. The tower’s pigs, chickens, cats, and dogs were usually hanging about the door, since they knew as well as the tower’s human occupants where the food was to be found. And there was one of the tower’s human occupants, an old lady, sitting on an upturned tub under the eaves, eating from a bowl.

  Andrea hopped over the mud, stuck her head into the hot, smoky interior, and asked the nearest woman whether she could have something to eat. “Just something quick. Whatever’s to hand.”

  Her question started a bustle, with women fetching other women and shouting to others, but eventually she was given a broad, flat wooden plate on which was a bowl of groats, a lump of cheese, some shards of flatbread, and some slices of smoked tongue and mutton. She was about to leave with this substantial meal when she heard someone say, “Funniest-looking wounds ever I saw!”

  It was the old woman. She took another spoonful from her bowl and swallowed. “I said to ’em, ‘Toorkild shot by a ball! Never as I live! I’ve seen some wounds in my time,’ I said, ‘but that was never made by a ball! Never in this world!’”

  Andrea hesitated. Old people talk to themselves, in the 21st as well as the 16th. If she asked the old woman what she meant, she probably wouldn’t get any sense out of her but would have to listen to a long, wandering monologue. She took a step away, to return to her bower, but then turned back. “What dost mean?”