Nymph stared at her in disbelief. ‘You can’t have temporal fever in the Analogue World,’ she said.
‘That’s what we all thought,’ Madame Cardui said soberly. ‘But clearly we were wrong.’
Sixty-Five
‘I don’t see any mountains,’ Blue said.
‘They’ll appear in a moment,’ the Abbot told her.
‘It’s an optical illusion,’ put in the Purlisa. He smiled benignly. ‘Look,’ he added, ‘there they are now.’
Blue turned to follow his gaze. The mountains stood out stark and blue against the near horizon. ‘The serpent is there?’ she asked, ‘In a cavern in those mountains?’
The Purlisa nodded. ‘Such was my vision.’
‘And Henry is there too, held by the serpent?’ She wasn’t sure she believed any of this, but the Purlisa had been able to describe Henry on the basis of his vision and the description was completely accurate. Besides, she had no other clue to Henry’s whereabouts.
From the corner of her eye she saw the Abbot give the Purlisa what looked like a warning glance. But the Purlisa only nodded and said, ‘Yes.’
They were standing at the head of the small party of monks who had escorted them this far. A wiry pack animal of a breed Blue did not recognise carried minimal supplies, including her designated weapon. Blue said, ‘What happens now?’
The Purlisa looked at her but said nothing.
Blue said, ‘Will you help me?’
The Purlisa still said nothing. Beside him, the Abbot looked away, embarrassed.
Blue turned to stare into the mountains, ‘I go up there alone?’
‘Yes.’ The Purlisa stretched out a hand to pat the pack animal. ‘You can take the charno. He will carry your weapon.’
‘Won’t you need him?’ Blue asked. ‘For your supplies?’
‘The supplies will remain with you,’ said the Purlisa. ‘As monks, we are used to deprivation.’
‘The journey back is not long,’ the Abbot added. He still looked embarrassed.
‘How can I be sure of finding the right cave?’ Blue asked.
‘It is your destiny,’ the Purlisa told her simply. He handed her the reins of the charno.
After a long moment, Blue turned and led the beast away. The monks stood silent, watching, until she disappeared into the foothills.
Sixty-Six
The charno was an odd-looking creature, with enormous feet and long drooping ears, that squatted on two powerful hind legs like a giant hare. They were high in the foothills before Blue realised it could talk.
‘You know they’ve conned you,’ it said suddenly.
Blue blinked.
‘The Abbot and that midget,’ said the charno. ‘Conned you.’ It had a rough, scraping voice, the sort some men developed through drinking too much spirits of grain.
‘I didn’t know you could talk,’ Blue said foolishly.
‘Don’t have much to say usually,’ the charno told her.
‘What do you mean, conned me?’ Blue asked.
‘Got their own agenda. Your boyfriend’s not up there yet.’
Blue stared at the creature. The strange thing was she believed it, at least about the monks’ agenda. There’d been too many peculiar little glances between the Abbot and the Purlisa. But she wasn’t sure they were actually lying to her. Especially not the Purlisa, who was probably the sweetest man she’d ever met. After a moment she said, ‘Do you have a name?’
‘Charno,’ said the charno.
‘I meant a personal name.’
‘You can call me Charno with a capital "C",’ said the charno. ‘That’s how we do things,’ he added without specifying who he meant by we.
‘How do you know Henry’s not up there, Charno?’ Blue asked.
The charno tapped the side of his nose with a forepaw. ‘Got my sources,’ he said. He turned a toothy head to look pointedly up the mountain. Blue followed the direction of his gaze and discovered he was looking at a cave mouth. "Sides,’ he added, ‘I eavesdrop.’
‘Why do the Abbot and the Purlisa want me to go up there?’
‘Abbot doesn’t. It comes down to the mad midget.’ He reached up with one huge hind foot to scratch behind his ear.
‘You don’t think there’s a serpent up there?’
‘Something up there,’ said the charno. ‘Serpent. Dragon. Oompatherium. Dunno. Just know it hasn’t started munching on your boy, ‘cause he’s not there yet.’
‘Yet?’ echoed Blue.
‘He’s not there.’
‘You said yet.’
‘No I didn’t,’ said the charno quickly.
‘Yes, you did – twice.’
‘Didn’t mean to. He’s not there. Henry. Not there.’ He looked away furtively.
‘You’re not telling me the truth,’ Blue said.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Then why won’t you meet my eye?’
‘I’m an inferior species,’ said the charno.
Blue snorted, a sound that reminded her of the Abbot. ‘Look here, Charno,’ she said firmly, ‘we can do without this nonsense. The Abbot and the Purlisa aren’t the only ones with an agenda, are they?’
The charno stared down at the claws of his huge feet. ‘No,’ he admitted sheepishly.
‘You don’t want to go up there, do you?’
‘Would you want to go up to a cavern full of man-eating serpent? Well, you would, but I wouldn’t. I don’t have a boyfriend up there.’ It was the longest speech the charno had yet made, probably showing the measure of his upset.
But Blue pounced on his last sentence. ‘So Henry is up there?’
‘No,’ said the charno. ‘No. I told the truth about that.’
‘But he will be here?’
‘Might,’ said the charno. He stared innocently up into the sunwashed blue of the sky.
Blue reached out to take his reins. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re going up.’ For a moment she thought he might resist, like a stubborn donkey, but he climbed to his feet and plodded obediently after her.
‘Hope you won’t regret this,’ he said.
Sixty-Seven
There was a rocky apron outside the cave mouth. Blue stopped when they reached it. ‘You don’t have to come in,’ she said.
‘Humph,’ said the charno cynically.
‘What humph?’ Blue asked crossly. ‘Why humph?’
‘You’ll need the hammer.’
Blue looked at him blankly, then remembered. ‘Oh, the war hammer! Yes, I will.’ The Purlisa had insisted a hammer was the only effective weapon against the Midgard Serpent and the Abbot had produced an antique used in ancient battles. It was an odd thing to have in a monastery and another reason why she was suspicious about their whole story.
‘Can’t carry that yourself,’ the charno said.
‘Of course I can,’ Blue told him.
‘Tried, have you?’
In point of fact she hadn’t. The Abbot, or his monks, or somebody had loaded up the charno. She’d hardly done more than glimpse the hammer. It looked quite large, but she assumed if she was meant to use it against some monster, they wouldn’t give her something too heavy to carry.
It occurred to her suddenly how mad this whole thing was. If there really was a serpent in the mountain, she was about to face it like a mythic warrior, armed with an ancient weapon supplied by men she’d only met a day before. But she wasn’t a mythic warrior, wasn’t any sort of warrior at all. She was only a princess – she still thought of herself as a princess, even now they’d made her Queen – and in the myths it was the princess who was rescued, not the other way around.
She realised two things then. The first was that she didn’t entirely believe the Purlisa’s story about the serpent, however much she liked the little man. The second was that she would do anything for Henry, anything at all. She would fight a serpent for him if there really was a serpent. She would cross a desert for him. She would follow any clue, however slight, in the hope of finding him. Tha
t had to be love, hadn’t it?
‘No, I haven’t,’ she said, answering the charno’s question.
The charno reached round and flipped open the catch on his backpack. He drew out a bulky bundle, undid the linen wrappings and revealed the war hammer the Abbot had supplied. It was a substantial weapon with an ornately carved oak shaft and the sort of battering that comes with ancient battles. The charno handed it across to her.
Blue took the weapon and immediately dropped it to the ground. The thing weighed a ton! Although the charno handled it as if it were a feather, it was literally too heavy for her to lift.
‘See?’ the charno said.
There was a simmering anger in Blue that had nothing at all to do with the charno, but she took it out on him just the same. ‘What’s the point of that?’ she demanded. ‘What’s the point of giving me a weapon I can’t use? Are they trying to kill me?’
It was a rhetorical question but the charno said soberly, ‘Told you they were conning you.’
That brought her up short. For the first time it occurred to her that what Charno said might actually be true. Not in some light-hearted and amusing way, but literally, seriously, in a way that might be harmful to her. She liked the Abbot, liked the Purlisa, so her whole instinct was to trust them. But wasn’t that the very essence of the problem? You had to be likeable if you wanted to fool people. Nobody was going to trust some shifty-eyed scoundrel. Had the Purlisa and his Abbot conspired to send her to her death?
But why?
‘But why?’ Blue asked the question aloud.
‘Search me,’ said the charno, shrugging.
Frowning, Blue said, ‘But they must have known I’d discover the weapon was useless to me.’
‘Weren’t meant to find out until you were inside the cave.’
Blue looked at him. ‘When it was too late?’
The charno nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘You would have carried the hammer and handed it to me when I was facing the serpent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I’m not that loyal,’ said the charno. ‘Serpents eat charnos.’
It made complete sense, except that it didn’t make any sense at all. Why would the Abbot and the Purlisa want her dead? They’d met her only a day before. She’d stumbled on their monastery by accident. ‘You think there really is a serpent?’
‘Probably,’ the charno said.
They stood looking at each other on the rocky apron, Blue still dressed like a young man, the charno’s soulful brown eyes on a level with her own. Behind them loomed the entrance to the cavern, ominous and dark.
The trouble was she didn’t really trust the charno either.
The trouble was, for all the lies, Henry might still be in there.
Sixty-Eight
There were subtleties about his situation Henry didn’t understand.
They started with the ruined city. It was clear Lorquin’s people hadn’t built it. There was nothing about it in the tribe’s most ancient legends, with the sole exception of the legend telling how they found it. Henry heard it from Brenthis, the tribe’s main storyteller.
Long ago, Brenthis said, at a time when the world was lush and well watered, the Luchti were foodstuff for the savage race of Buth. They were held in pens or allowed to roam across great fenced estates, but each year in spring, two-thirds of their young were slaughtered and stored to feed the Buth.
One day a Luchti woman named Euphrosyne discovered a marvellous ark that allowed her to speak directly to Charaxes. Like the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament, Henry thought when Brenthis reached this part of the story. And Charaxes sounded just as bloodthirsty as Jehovah because he visited a Great Disaster on the Buth, which destroyed them entirely. This freed the Luchti, but dried the land so that it turned to desert and the Luchti became wanderers in the desert, always and ever in search of food and water. And that sounded suspiciously like the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt, Henry thought, frowning. It was spooky the way some things in the Faerie Realm reflected the history of his own world. But Brenthis was still talking and Henry dragged his attention back so he wouldn’t miss anything.
Thanks to the marvellous ark, Brenthis was saying, Charaxes journeyed with the Luchti and when they reached a desert flatland that seemed to hold no hope of life, they learned a secret practice of the mind that permitted them to alter certain aspects of reality. It was a difficult discipline that took them long months to perfect, but when they did so the entire tribe sank beneath the desert sands to discover the ruins of a mighty city, the like of which had never been seen by anyone before. And there, in the ruins of the city, they had lived ever since, though they roamed the desert wilderness on quests as Lorquin had done and to celebrate their release from slavery.
It sounded to Henry like the sort of legend that was a misunderstanding of actual events. Perhaps Lorquin’s people really had been held captive in the distant past. Perhaps their captors, the Buth, had been defeated in war or fallen afoul of some natural disaster. But who had built the city? And how was it maintained in this impossible bubble beneath the sand? How was it – even now, in ruins – supplied with light and air and copious supplies of water? Most mysterious of all, how had the Luchti found the means to reach it? Whatever mental discipline they used was far beyond Henry. When he wanted to travel to the surface, he had to be accompanied by Lorquin or some other obliging member of the tribe.
But the city wras only the start. He still could not understand how the Luchti survived. From everything he’d seen, there simply was not enough water, not enough food, not enough shelter to sustain them. Difficult enough for Lorquin and himself (and impossible without Lorquin’s special skills) but the Luchti, he discovered, was an extensive tribe. How did the desert support them? When he asked the question of Brenthis, the storyteller only shrugged and remarked, ‘Are we not as skilful as the vaettirs?’ Which was true enough in that the vaettirs and their draugr obviously survived as well, but not very helpful as an explanation.
Henry got no explanations for several other matters that concerned him either. The Luchti didn’t know why their skin was blue, beyond saying it was the ‘will of Charaxes’. (Henry’s own skin didn’t seem to be changing any more than it had when he first noticed a bluish tinge.) They didn’t know anything about the Analogue World, or Queen Blue and her Empire in the Faerie Realm. They didn’t know the name of their own country (it was just ‘The Wasteland’). They didn’t know how Henry had come to be in the desert or, far more importantly, how he might get back.
What they did know was that the tribe was overdue a celebration.
Lorquin was full of it. ‘It’s really my celebration, En Ri,’ he said. ‘Because they couldn’t hold it until I slew the draugr. But it’s not just about me. It sets the tribe’s song-lines for the next year and it gives thanks to Charaxes and everybody gets to eat a lot and dance and I might find a wife and -’
‘Wife!’ Henry exclaimed. ‘Lorquin, you’re only ten years old!’
‘I know,’ said Lorquin happily. ‘And Ino will consult the bones and Euphrosyne will speak with Charaxes and there’ll be drumming and everyone will drink much melor.’
Henry frowned. Euphrosyne? Ino was the squat man with tattoos and seemed to be some sort of witch doctor, but Euphrosyne was the woman who had found Charaxes’ mysterious ark at the very dawn of tribal history. ‘How old is Euphrosyne?’ he asked curiously.
‘Twenty years and seven months,’ said Lorquin promptly.
‘She’s not the same Euphrosyne who found the ark, is she?’
Lorquin favoured him with a strange look, if you were not my Companion, En Ri, I might think you were a little simple. Euphrosyne is the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the -’
‘I get it!’ Henry told him hurriedly. There was clearly some sort of priestly line going from the original Euphrosyne, passed from daughter to daughter in the service of Charaxes. He wondered
if they’d preserved the actual ark. It would be interesting to see.
‘- of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of the daughter…’
Henry crept away and left him to it.
Sixty-Nine
It started with a single drummer.
Henry watched as the man entered the city’s enormous central plaza. His drum was a tapered wooden tube, open at one end, covered in what might be goatskin at the other and brightly decorated with tiny painted skulls that could only have come from some small rodent.
The man walked vaguely across the cracked paving, staring up at the ruined buildings for all the world like a tourist who had stumbled on a new attraction. Then, somewhere to one side of the square, he squatted with the drum between his knees, stroked the goatskin and began to play a single tap… tap… tap with no discernable rhythm. The drum had not much resonance, either that or the under-sand environment absorbed much of its sound.
‘Do we go down yet?’ Henry asked softly. They were standing by a window in what remained of the second floor of a squat building. Blue faces were at the windows of many buildings around them.
‘No,’ Loquin said without elaboration. His eyes were very bright.
A second drummer appeared from the shadow of an alley. He moved with greater focus, walking directly to the centre of the plaza, ignoring his environment. He too squatted down and began to play, but this time there was a rhythm: both drums together sounded like a massive heartbeat, and now there was the resonance that had been lacking before. Henry fancied he heard a collective sigh from the watching tribe.
There was no change for long moments on end: thud-boom… thud-boom
… thud-boom… thud-boom… The sound was mildly hypnotic.
Two more drummers entered the square, their heads turned upwards. They moved in time with their drumbeats, but with a curious gait, taking two steps forward, one step back. They reached the original drummers and squatted down beside them. The drumbeats were now rolling across the plaza without pause.
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