Quest Beyond Time

by Morphett, Tony

  Mike had been looking at them. On one, was a figure of the Buddha, with what he took to be a prayer wheel beside it. Another was a cross, about three metres high, with the figure of a crowned king nailed to it. The third was a standing stone.

  He was distracted by the sudden whistle and thrum of an arrow flying from a bow. He turned fast, ready to drop to the ground, when he saw a bird tumbling from the sky, pierced by an arrow. Katrin was already running toward where it would fall.

  She retrieved it, and came back, pulling the arrow from it. The bird’s eyes were already glazing over in death. Then Katrin knelt by her pack, and brought a small bag of grain from it. She went to the standing stone. Mike watched, as she slit the bird open and let some of its blood fall to the ground. Then she scattered the grain upon the blood. Her eyes went to the top of the stone and her lips were moving, and Mike looked away.

  He found that Brother John and Woodcat were also at their devotions. John knelt before the Hanged God, his eyes on the image of the crucified king. Woodcat was spinning the prayerwheel, and then his eyes went to the distance, his breathing slowed, and he entered a state of quietness.

  Again, Mike looked away. He had been made aware of his difference from his three friends. In the presence of the practice of their three very different faiths, he felt a lack within his own life, as if they had a dimension to theirs which his did not have.

  Then they were taking leave of Brother John. At the last moment, the deep-set dark brown eyes locked on his and John said, ‘Think on it, Mike. He died in your place.’

  Mike’s eyes went again to the image of the Hanged God. When he looked back, John was already walking toward the south, following his king’s orders.

  ‘He’ll die there,’ Katrin said quietly. ‘No one ever comes back from Vickharn.’

  The brown brother in his brown robe was hurrying south. He began to sing. Mike could hear the lilt of his singing but could not catch the words.

  They turned east, and rode toward the sea.

  After a while, they could hear the breakers. Soon, the flat sea horizon stretched from edge to edge of their view.

  And he saw the Island. It was not large. He could not remember it from his own time, but he felt that it might have been a promontory which in the past five hundred years had been cut off from the mainland. It was cliff-bound and separated from the land by a raging channel of sea.

  Mike could understand now why the waterfearing Murrays thought it inaccessible. He knew that skilful and determined sailors could get there by boat. He also knew that a landsman would die trying.

  They left the road now and walked their horses up the slope toward the clifftops.

  They were within reach of their goal. In a short time it would all be up to Mike’s skill with his hang-glider.

  They were almost to the clifftop when Katrin turned in the saddle and drew her breath in sharply.

  ‘Patchies!’ she said.

  They looked back.

  Three horsemen were following them. They were a wild-looking crew, long-haired and unwashed, and dressed in thonged-together animal skins. They reminded Mike of pictures he had seen of the Mongol horse nomads who, under the generalship of Genghis Khan, had come close to conquering Europe.

  The horsemen moved like a group of half-wild dogs, sniffing, interested, but not yet in pursuit.

  ‘You going to tell me what Patchies are?’

  ‘They live on horseback. They wander in tribes. Dangerous.’ Katrin was swaying slightly in the saddle as she spoke.

  ‘They eat people?’

  She shook her head. ‘Mare’s milk. They tap veins in their horses and drink their blood. Raw meat they soften under their saddles.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to go to dinner at their place.’

  They rode to the clifftop, terribly aware of the horse nomads’ eyes on their backs.

  ‘They going to attack?’

  Woodcat shrugged. ‘Sometimes they attack, sometimes not. Who knows what a Patchie might do?’

  Katrin looked at Mike, and spoke slowly and seriously, intent that he should understand that she meant what she said. ‘If they attack, and we can’t beat them off, don’t be taken prisoner.’

  ‘How do I not get taken prisoner?’

  ‘You die.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Die?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Isn’t that kind of an extreme solution?’

  ‘I’ve met people who were captured alive by the Patchies and escaped later. They said dying would have been better.’

  ‘Yeah, well, there could be two opinions about that, you know.’ Mike wished Katrin would not always take things so seriously.

  They were at the clifftop now. Woodcat dismounted, and Mike and Katrin did the same.

  The Patchies reined in at the bottom of the hill, and watched them.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ said Mike. ‘Stop here and fight them?’

  Woodcat shook his head. ‘No. We put your kite together, and you two fly to the Island.’

  ‘And leave you by yourself? No way!’ Mike heard the words coming out of his mouth and wished he had not said them, while knowing that what he had said was right. They could not leave the little man to face the Patchies alone.

  Katrin nodded her approval of what Mike had said.

  Woodcat looked at the Patchies, and then at his friends. ‘Put together the kite.’

  The Patchies edged closer. Mike saw that their faces were tattooed in abstract patterns. He decided that the tattoos on their faces did absolutely nothing for their personal appearance.

  Woodcat drew his sword. ‘Put the kite together and go, or I’ll cut you both down where you stand!’

  There they went again, Mike thought, always taking extreme positions on things.

  But Katrin was looking at Woodcat, and asking him a question. She used a voice which suggested that she had learned the question. ‘Have you chosen the day of your death, brother?’

  Woodcat’s answer had the same ritual flavour. Katrin’s question had, it seemed, a special answer which fitted it. ‘Today is a good day to die,’ the little man said.

  Katrin turned to Mike. ‘We go to the Island.’

  Mike could not believe it. Katrin, willing to run out on a friend who had helped them?

  ‘If we don’t, we’ll have dishonoured him and he’ll have to kill us.’

  ‘But. . .’

  ‘Don’t argue about things you don’t understand! Do it!’

  Mike looked at Woodcat.

  Woodcat said, ‘Mike, hundreds of Murrays, women and men and children, died in the Covenant War. They died so that they’d not have a king, but also to keep us . . . the First Returners . . . free. We pay our debts.’

  Mike hesitated, then turned to the packhorse, got the kite off it and started putting it together.

  As he worked, the Patchies circled and watched, intrigued at this strange activity. Part of Mike wished they would charge before he finished. He could not get out of his mind the memory of Isolde telling them to keep Woodcat out of adventures. Well, Woodcat was in an adventure up to his neck now, and a dirty and dangerous one it looked like becoming.

  CHAPTER 17

  AIRBORNE AGAIN

  When the kite was ready, Mike strapped Katrin into her side of it, and tied himself into his with the ropes he had borrowed from Woodcat the night they did the modifications.

  He looked at Woodcat, and felt worse than he had ever felt in his life.

  ‘Go on,’ said the little man.

  ‘Do you want my bow?’ Katrin asked.

  Woodcat smiled. ‘I couldn’t hit a barn with one of those newfangled things.’ He tapped his sword hilt. ‘I have this. And the cliff, should I fail.’

  Mike could not stand it any more. Woodcat’s smile made it worse.

  The wind was lifting the wing above their heads.

  ‘Come on!’ he said, and they started moving into the wind, down the slope toward the cliff’s edge. For the first time
in his life he felt no fear at this moment. His feeling of remorse at leaving Woodcat overwhelmed everything else.

  The Patchies saw them moving for the cliff’s edge. The realization came to them that two of their prey were escaping.

  As they reached the cliff’s edge and the wind was bearing the glider up, Mike heard a yelping noise, and the sound of approaching hoofbeats. From the corner of his eye Mike caught a glimpse of Woodcat spitting on his hands, drawing his sword and taking a firm two-footed grip on the earth.

  Then he was too busy to look back.

  They were airborne. The wind from the sea was a blustering, buffeting one, and normally Mike might have been unwilling to glide in it.

  But they were off, and over the water, gaining height, turning.

  He was trying to keep them safe, trying to reach the Island, and at the same time trying to see what had become of Woodcat.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he yelled to Katrin over the roar of the wind in the nylon wing.

  ‘I can’t see!’ she yelled in return, straining her head back to get some view of the cliffs.

  And all the while they were gliding toward the cliffs of the Island. The cliffs were of different heights, some higher than those of the mainland, some lower.

  Mike was trying to reach a line of lower cliffs. Beyond them was a grassed area, and beyond that again an old stone building.

  He could see figures in brown. Two stood in what seemed to be a vegetable garden, hoes in their hands, looking up at the glider. A third was running from the garden toward the stone building.

  But Mike did not have time to concentrate on the figures. His time and strength were both fully involved in keeping them airborne. Katrin was going limp. Her hands were still on the strut, but her body was hanging in the straps. She was battling to stay conscious.

  Mike remembered the way the giant warrior Fergus had suddenly collapsed at the edge of the field of bones, and he knew they were in trouble.

  ‘Mike . . . Sickness . . . can’t see . . . properly,’ Katrin gasped out.

  ‘Hang on!’ Mike yelled. ‘We’re nearly there!’

  The brown-clad figure who had been running for the house was not in sight now. Then a door opened, and two people came out. One had a brass rod, and put it to one eye and directed the other end at them. The rod must be a telescope. Then the telescope was lowered and the figure turned to the other one, and shouted something.

  Katrin was hanging in the straps, her hands slipping from the bar.

  Mike was desperate. He needed her conscious to give whatever effort she could to maintaining their line of flight.

  ‘You going to give up?’ he found himself shouting, ‘you going to quit? They’re right! The Murrays are cowards! The “quitting Murrays” they call them and they’re right!’

  There was a spark of anger in Katrin’s eyes. It brought her closer to consciousness. She reached for her shortsword to avenge the insult.

  ‘Go on! Die if you want! Easier to die, isn’t it! Cowards can always die! It’s what they’re good at!’

  ‘I’ll kill you if you call me that again!’

  ‘Sure! Sure you will! Got the guts to live, have you? Got the guts to hang on?’

  Her mouth set, and she hung on, furious with him.

  ‘Right! Like that! I didn’t come five hundred years to lose you!’

  She was with him again, her anger having dragged her back from the deadly sleep which would have killed them both.

  As the Island rushed toward them, he saw brown-clad figures running from the house. Two were carrying a stretcher, and the third had the telescope he had seen earlier.

  Suddenly, in the shelter of the Island they lost the wind, and the glider dropped below the level of the clifftops. They were heading straight into them.

  ‘Help me!’ Mike yelled, and who or what he prayed to he could not have said. Just, ‘Help me!’ he shouted, and the wind was there, lifting them, and they were no longer sailing over seas smashing on rocks at the cliff base but over green grass and solid earth.

  The ground rushed up at them. Mike’s feet took the impact as he tried to slow them.

  And then the wing was falling down over them and they themselves were falling. They were down, safe.

  He untied the ropes on himself and unsnapped Katrin’s harness. He lifted the wing off them and found himself facing four women.

  They were all brown-clad like Brother John had been. They were smiling.

  ‘She’s got the Sickness!’ he gasped. ‘Help her. For God’s sake!’

  The eldest one, the one holding the brass telescope, smiled at him, strong white teeth showing in her brown face. ‘For God’s sake? Yes. That’s what it’s all about.’

  CHAPTER 18

  THE WISE ONES

  The walls of the room were of rough plaster, painted white. It was very quiet. The room had a wooden bed, a chair and a plain wooden cross on the wall. There was no figure on the cross.

  Katrin sat up in the bed, half conscious, and the older woman who had introduced herself to Mike as Mother Teresa slowly eased her back onto the pillow. Almost immediately, Katrin slept again.

  ‘I’m supposed to take medicine back to the others,’ Mike was saying. ‘Can I leave Katrin here and come back for her later?’

  Mother Teresa looked at him. Her face was very serious. ‘We have to talk,’ she said.

  Teresa’s office was as spare and bare as the room in which Katrin now lay sleeping. The walls of the office were the same rough, white-painted plaster. There were two chairs, a table, a small bookcase with leatherbound books in it, and another unadorned cross on the wall.

  Teresa went to the chair by the desk and indicated to Mike that he should use the other. They sat, and she looked at him in silence for a moment.

  Then she spoke. ‘Do you understand how you got to this century?’

  The question was so abrupt as to make Mike wary. He had become used to the way the Clans thought, and the Mother’s question showed that her knowledge was different from theirs. He felt she knew too much about him, and he was already well-schooled in the dangers of this time.

  ‘What?’

  She seemed to hear the wariness in him, and she smiled. ‘You’re not from this century. You’re from Before.’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Do the Clanspeople no longer use the word? I can scarcely believe that.’ She paused to give him time to answer but he stayed silent. She shrugged as if to say that she was willing to play the game his way.’ “Before” is what we call the time before the Fire War.’

  Again, she paused. Again, he did not speak.

  She sighed, stood, and walked to the window and looked out. Then turned to him. ‘I’ve examined that kite of yours. Its wing is made of some sort of artificial fabric. Probably what you used to call ‘nylon’ but since I’ve never seen any, I can’t tell. We cannot make an artificial fibre in this century. The art’s been lost. We cannot weave as finely as that. If you could supply that cloth to the court ladies of Vickharn, you could buy yourself a Dukedom!’

  Still, he waited.

  She went on. ‘The frame is made of a metal called aluminium. We can’t make aluminium in this century, because we can’t generate the enormous amounts of electricity required.’

  She paused. ‘And if I had never seen your kite, I could tell you were not from this century just by looking at your shoes.’

  He looked down at his joggers.

  ‘They’re made of artificial cloth and plastic. We cannot make plastic in this century. Your glider doesn’t come from this century, your shoes don’t come from this century. And neither, Mike, do you.’

  Mike looked up at her and grinned. ‘Over the past week, I’ve learned to be pretty careful.’

  She smiled her understanding. ‘Life on the mainland can be brutal. And for those who aren’t careful, it’s often very short, as well.’

  ‘I come from 1985,’ he said. ‘We do hang-gliding as a sport. I was hang-gliding off the
cliffs, the air went funny . . . suddenly I was here. Now.’

  ‘You came through what we call a Discontinuity.’

  Mike did not know what she was talking about. His face showed it.

  ‘The war that ended your era . . . that ended your civilization . . . unleashed forces which have affected the fabric of space and time in some places. Things from your time slip through to ours. Sometimes people do.’

  ‘Other people have done this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I meet them?’

  ‘I know of four cases. Two were killed here.’

  ‘Can I meet the other two?’

  She shook her head. ‘One was twenty years ago. A young man your own age. On another occasion, a young woman. The story about both is that they disappeared. Went back to wherever they came from.’

  There was silence for a moment.

  Mike broke it. ‘The Murrays say I came for a reason. They needed someone who could fly, so that one of them could get here to the Island. They sacrificed to their gods, and I turned up. Flying. And, as it happens, I’ve ended up getting one of them to the Island.’

  ‘Does this make you believe that their sacrifice worked? That their gods are true?’

  Mike paused, then shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think I can believe that.’

  She smiled. She had the lines round her eyes of someone who smiled a lot. ‘No. I don’t think I can believe that either. But if you said to me that the God who controls all things permitted this to happen, then I’d agree. Can you believe that?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  She moved back to her chair, and sat. ‘If you survive, you’ll almost certainly go back. To your own time.’

  ‘Go back?’ He was shocked, and was shocked to find that he was shocked. A week ago, he would have welcomed the thought. Now, he found, he did not want to leave.

  ‘Don’t you want to go home?’

  ‘Yes, I… no. No, I don’t.’

  ‘You must have relatives? Friends?’

  Now it was Mike who stood, and walked to the window and looked out at the garden. He could see two of the sisters hoeing the vegetable garden. ‘They must already think I’m dead.’ He paused. ‘I feel useful here. I’m doing real things. I’m a grown-up here, doing grown-up’s work.’