‘If they hadn’t, the Yobbies would have given us to Grym before nightfall.’
‘I guess there’s something in what you say.’ Mike did not really have his heart in what he was saying. He felt sick to the stomach at what he had just witnessed.
The Patchies rode on long past nightfall, and Mike despaired of ever being able to walk again. His hands and feet had gone numb some hours since.
He drowsed off.
He woke as he hit the ground. A Patchie had tossed him onto the ground as one might a parcel. Mike looked around. Katrin was lying nearby. The situation was hopeless. They were both trussed tight, and in the hands of what in Mike’s short experience were the cruellest barbarians in this whole cruel barbarian future.
If they were lucky they would be sold as slaves to gentler masters. If they were unlucky, they would be kept for the Patchies’ own use. Mike found himself remembering Teresa’s warning that he would return to his own time. He wished it would happen very soon. In fact, he wished it would happen right now. As soon as the wish was there in his conscious mind, he felt sick with himself. He was wanting to run out on Katrin. ‘But it won’t be your fault,’ said the voice in his mind. ‘Yes it will,’ he told the voice, ‘because I wished it.’
The Patchies set a guard, and two fell on the ground and slept. The third, bow in hand, moved about the camp, and then found a shadowed place in which to keep watch.
Mike lay, watching the shadow where their guard sat. He tried his bonds. There were as tight as they had been all day. He found himself reflecting that, if this had been a story, he would have discovered a sharp stone or a piece of broken glass with which to cut the thongs about his wrist. This was not a story and there was no sharp stone or piece of glass.
He looked over at Katrin. He saw to his astonishment that she was asleep! How could she sleep at a time like this? Then he remembered what she had said to him once. ‘Eat when you can, sleep when you can. You don’t know when the next chance is coming.’ It was one of her sayings, like ‘don’t get skylined’ or ‘a path is what you get ambushed on’. It was part of her people’s code of survival. And here she was sleeping because she could do nothing else. Mike knew she was conserving energy for the time when she could use it. He tried to follow her example. After a while, he slept.
He woke to the worst smell he had ever experienced. He opened his eyes, and would have screamed if there had not been a dreadful furry thing pressing his mouth shut.
He was looking into the face of a Wanderer: at the lumpy outline, the non-existent nose with the two nostrils set flat in the face itself, at the two glaring eyes, one set higher than the other. ‘Kind man. No sound.’ The Wanderer was whispering, and the smell which had wakened him flooded over his face again.
Kind man? No sound? Then he knew where he had seen the face before. It was one of the Wanderers with whom they had shared their food. His eyes slid sideways to the place where the guard had been. The other Wanderer squatted there. Of the Patchie there was no sign.
Now the Wanderer took his hand from Mike’s mouth and with his strong yellow fangs he bit through the thongs binding Mike’s wrists. Then he slouched silently over to Katrin and woke and released her in the same manner. Mike fumbled with the thongs tying his ankles, but could make no headway. His hands were so numb from being tied for hours, he could not untie the knots in the thongs.
One of the Wanderers, seeing Mike’s predicament, brought him Katrin’s shortsword from the packs. Mike cut through his own ankle thongs and then went and helped Katrin with hers.
As all this went on, he was still looking around for the Patchies. They were simply not there. Their horses were there, their bows and quivers were there. But the Patchies were not.
‘Where are the Patchies?’ he whispered to Katrin.
‘You don’t want to know that,’ she whispered back, and pushed him toward the ponies.
‘Thank you, kind man, kind woman. We remember,’ the Wanderer said, as they mounted, picked up the leading rein of their packhorse and rode north into the night. ‘We remember.’
At first light before dawn, they dismounted and walked the horses for a while.
‘The Wanderers . . . they let us go because we shared our food with them?’
‘I suppose so.’ Katrin seemed angry at the thought. ‘Yes!’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘I don’t like owing Lifedebt to a Wanderer.’
They walked in silence for some time.
Then she spoke again. ‘Yet we have Kinship with them.’
‘What happened to the Patchies?’
She looked at him, and when she spoke it was with some reluctance. ‘The Wanderers believe that what you eat, your child becomes. When their women are carrying their young inside them, they feed only on what is well-formed. So that their young will be well-formed. While carrying young they will eat only the perfect. A perfect sheep … a perfect cow . . .’
‘A perfect human being?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s their belief.’
‘The Patchies? Perfect?’
‘More perfect than themselves.’
Mike thought he should feel disgust. Instead, he felt only pity. ‘They really believe that.’
‘It’s their only hope. Would you take it from them?’
He was silent.
‘It may be true, what they believe,’ she said, as the sun rose on their right hand.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t true. There are true things and false things, and what they believe in isn’t true.’ He was surprised to hear himself say so. He had always been taught to respect other people’s beliefs as if they were true. Somehow he had changed, and truth now seemed more important than politeness.
CHAPTER 22
RETURNINGS
That afternoon, they passed through the Field Of Bones.
Mike was recognizing landmarks again from their outward journey. He saw the concrete wall with the Safari Park sign engraved upon it, and now they were moving again through the parklike forest which lay inland from Clan Murray house.
And then, in the evening, as they rode, saddlesore and half-asleep, they came out of the trees and there was the dark house before them.
It was hard for Mike to believe that he had once feared this house which now beckoned him like home.
There was a pony grazing before the house, and Katrin recognized it with a glad cry. ‘The pony!’ she said. ‘Fergus got back!’
They kicked their exhausted ponies into a trot, and then they were at the house itself, and Simon stood swaying at the doorway to greet them.
Katrin slid from her pony and ran to his embrace. ‘Father!’ And then, ‘Uncle Fergus?’
‘Fading . . . fading.’ From the weakness of Simon’s voice, he himself was fading.
They found Fergus lying on his bedding. He had fallen into what, without the Wise Ones’ medicine, would have been his final sleep.
There was something pathetic about the giant warrior laid low like this but there was no time to be sentimental about it. Mike unpacked the precious medicine provided by Teresa, and began measuring it out in a metal test-tube.
‘You know this magic?’ Simon asked.
‘Seen it done on TV,’ Mike answered. Then, more seriously, ‘the healer on the Island showed me.’
He gave Fergus his dosage, and then turned to Simon. ‘You next.’
But Simon gestured at people lying on the bed shelves in the dark comers of the Hall. ‘Them next. They’re in Last Sleep. Then me . . . and then the people of the farms.’
For the next twenty-four hours, Mike and Katrin moved from farm to farm, dispensing the medicine to the sick. Whatever it was that was in the medicine, it worked. There were the hard cases where they had come too late, there were incidents of selfishness and generosity, of greed and self-sacrifice. But at last it was done.
They returned to Clan Murray House and slept for a day and a night.
In the early hours of the morning, Mike dream
ed that he was flying off the cliffs in his own time. He was outside his own body and he could see himself. The Mike whom he watched was dressed in jeans and sheepskin jacket and was in the air above the rocks.
But he had no glider.
He screamed and fell toward the rocks.
And Mike woke, roused by his own cry of terror.
He was lying on his sleeping bench, drenched with sweat, and breathing hard. He got up, and moved outside into the cool night.
Simon stood there. Watching the night. He looked at Mike in question.
‘I had a bad dream. I dreamt I was falling.’
‘So it was before. With your . . . the other one.’
‘You actually met one of the others?’
‘When I was young. In the time of the Covenant War. When the whirling came in the air, he went. The gods took him.’
‘The Sisters told me. . . it’s a Discontinuity in time. As natural as the wind or weather.’
Simon looked at him solemnly, but without understanding. ‘The gods took him. You will feel a tugging. You will know the time. He did.’
Mike stared at him.
Simon hesitated, as if weighing up whether he should tell Mike something. Then he spoke again. ‘Mike, the one who came before … he was yourself.’
‘Me? You mean he was like me?’
‘He was you. I was young. It was twenty years ago. But I remember.’
The blood ran cold under Mike’s skin, lifting the hair on the back of his neck and arms. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Nor I. The gods cast us like bones. They always deal with us in ways we cannot understand.’
Mike could not take it in. He had been here before? It was not possible. But the whole thing was not possible. He looked at the night.
‘You will know the time,’ Simon repeated.
And he did. It was the time. Mike knew it. He stood on the cliffs above the salty plain which in this time ran from their base to the sea. He had discarded everything from this century, and stood in the clothes he had had on when he arrived.
He was strapped into the hang-glider, and Katrin stood beside him.
He knew he must launch himself, and soon, but he could not bear to.
Katrin moved close. ‘Mike … I would like to venture into your time with you.’
He shook his head. He tried to imagine Katrin in his own time, and he knew that even if it were possible to take her with him he would not. She would die there, like a wild thing in a cage. He said gently, ‘It can’t be, Katrin.’ And then again, ‘It can’t be.’ Then he kissed her cheek, and looked toward the sky.
He could not see it yet, but he could feel it forming, feel the tug of that strangeness in the sky.
‘I can feel it drawing me,’ he said. ‘It’s drawing . . .’
And then, without thinking, he was running into the wind, and it took him, and lifted him.
He was airborne.
Almost too late. There it was, the whirling in the air, the transparent whirling, the hole in time.
Below him, Katrin was watching, and there were tears in the young woman warrior’s eyes. From the house, a giant was running toward the group on the clifftop.
‘The boy,’ he roared. ‘I want to farewell the boy!’
‘There is no boy.’ Simon pointed to the sky. ‘The man is there.’
Mike felt the tug, the drawing in of himself and the glider. The whirling in the sky engulfed them.
To those watching on the clifftop, it seemed as if he was there one moment and then was gone.
Katrin stared upward, but the sky remained empty.
The cliffs dropped to the sea, boiling against the sharp rocks. Three hang-gliders soared like hawks above the water.
And then there was a fourth, emerging from a shimmer in the air, emerging, it seemed, from a transparent whirlpool in the sky.
They floated to the clifftop, one by one. They landed.
One of Mike’s mates turned to him. ‘Missed you there for a moment. Thought you’d gone in.’
‘Going mad, are you?’ said Mike.
‘Just normal,’ his mate said, putting on his mad voice.
‘It’s the tight harness does it to him, you know,’ said another mate.
Mike was staring at the sky, as his mates laughed and chiyakked each other. No time had passed. He had been there, beyond the hole in Time, for more than a week, and no time had passed here.
He looked for the whirling in the sky. The sky was clear.
The voices were in his mind. ‘Energy isn’t lost. You came here . . . you’ll go back.’ ‘Kinship . . . it’s there in your own time if you can find it.’ And, strangest of all, ‘The one who came before … he was yourself.’
There were promises there, promises he did not yet understand. Promises that he could find in his own time the things he had grown to value in the future.
Promises that he might one day find his way back there.
He looked across to the city where he had always lived, and remembered a moment when he and Katrin had sat just below the crest of a hillock, and he had dug up a red and gold tile, the proof that he had travelled to the future. And he then remembered his vision of the mushroom cloud rising above his home. Perhaps it need not happen. Perhaps that whole barbarian future need not happen. Perhaps there was something he could do, some way he could prevent it all happening.
But then his eyes were drawn again to the sky, seeking the whirlpool, seeking kinship and meaning beyond Time.
Knowing that he would always seek them now.
Always.
The Sickness has come to Clan Murray. They call on the gods for assistance, which arrives in the form of Mike and his hang-glider. He is the man who can fly.
With Katrin of the Clan Murray he sets out on a quest for help through a savage land.
Australia in the post-nuclear Dark Age…
QUEST BEYOND TIME
AN
AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION FOUNDATION PRODUCTION
Starring: Daniel Cordeaux, Rebecca Rigg and Roger Ward
Screenplay by Tony Morphett
Produced by Richard Mason and Julia Overton
Directed by Stephen Wallace
Cover: Rebecca Rigg as Katrin and Daniel Cordeaux as Mike in the telemovie Quest Beyond Time.
A McPHEE GRIBBLE/PENGUIN BOOK
Children: Older Fiction
Quest Beyond Time Page 11