by Colin Harvey
"Use the rifle!" Karl screamed, his voice buzz-sawing through his head.
"Too close!"
Bera whacked the dog again and yelled, "Piss off, ugly, or I'll rip your head off!"
She yowled an "Aaaaaagh!" that went on and on into the dog's face. Karl hurled the other two rocks but missed. Running over to the other saddlebags, Karl hefted the axe, feeling the weight, getting the balance right, and swung it left-handed into the dog's side from slightly behind it. The dull thud of the axe's impact was almost obliterated by the dog's dying squeal.
Blood dripping from a bite to her forearm, Bera swung the rifle again, connecting solidly with the dog's head, and it collapsed.
Another dog lay about ten metres away, while between them the rest of the pack – about a dozen dogs – stood in a five metre wide semi-circle, watching the humans carefully.
Karl advanced on the dog at one end. It bared its teeth and backed away a pace. Karl kept walking, axe raised to chest height, ready to use it as a quarterstaff. Instead, the dog backed away another pace, and Karl drew the axe back ready to hack at his opponent – but instead, the animal backed further away, still snarling, but keeping distance between them.
Karl turned toward the next dog, which stood looking, first at Bera and the saddlebags, then at Karl, undecided whether to flee or attack. Karl advanced on it, and it backed off.
"Look away!" Bera shouted.
Too late Karl flinched as something landed between the dogs and him. It fizzed and sputtered, then the flare burst into flame with a flash and a bang. When the afterimages had faded, two of the dogs that had fled into the distance were limping, blood trailing from fresh wounds.
Karl breathed out heavily, his head still aching, but the adrenaline had temporarily obliterated the after-effects of – what? He realised that he had no idea of what had just happened.
Bera stood watching him, her left hand holding the gun's long barrel, her right hand the stock, finger looped through the trigger. "It fires fragmenting rounds." Her voice was steady, but for the faintest quaver at sentence end. "If one hits you, it explodes. Makes a mess, but it stops most things. That was how I dropped the rock-eater so easily."
Karl realised that she was warning him off. "Bera," he said. "I don't know what happened before the dogs attacked. I–"
"What happened, Karl," Bera said, "was that you keeled over, called me Jocasta again, then tried to–"
"That wasn't me!" Karl shouted. Or was it, he wondered? Is that what happens when I lose my inhibitions?
"You said something about Ti-ray-see-us. You called me Jocasta again, said that you would fetch this Tiresias. I banged your head on the ground until you blacked out."
Karl shook his head. "I don't know what to say."
"I thought that I was escaping from all the men who thought I was an easy lay, but you're as bad as any of them. How can we go on? What if you're possessed again and I fall into a fissure or the dogs come back? Or snolfurs attack?" Bera swatted at something shining on her cheek.
"I… you're right," Karl said. "We should head for the nearest farmstead. We'll give ourselves up. I'll admit that I kidnapped you."
Bera shook her head. "They'd hang you for sure." She let out a long, gusty sigh, and stared at the ground.
Finally Bera said dully, "We should pitch camp here. We'll light a fire using the dogs' carcasses and a firestarter. We haven't got many, but we might as well."
In silence, Karl gathered moss under her terse directions, wondering what Ragnar was doing, whether the Gothi had come after them. Of course he has, Karl thought. You've made him look a fool, and he won't forgive that.
The horses had scattered when the dogs attacked; Bera rounded them up, then helped Karl, still silent. It took him over an hour, but finally they had enough moss and stubby shrubs to cover the dead animals. "Where did the dogs come from?"
At first Bera didn't answer.
You've no right to expect her to, Karl thought.
She said, flat-voiced, "Probably strays from Steinar's farm that bred to make a pack of their own. Until they die of local toxins, they're a pest. That's why Pappi – Ragnar – usually killed the excess pups."
She lit the fire using one of their precious flares. "Hold this over me," she handed him a large fur, "and look away. I'm going to change into dry clothes."
When she was done, they huddled around the fire in silence. In any other circumstances, Karl would have luxuriated in the glorious warmth after so many bitterly cold nights.
Karl's eyes drooped; he sensed a presence.
We are Loki, said the voice in his head.
What do you want? Karl thought back.
To call a truce.
TWELVE
"Bera," Karl said. "How do you know when Loki takes control of me?"
They sat around the remnants of the fire. Bera had put her damp clothes as close to the fire as she dared, but even so the smell of singed clothes wafted on the air. They had warmed rocks in the fire, then – when they were so hot they were barely manageable, had scraped the rocks out and heated their dinner on them.
The vast rock-eater flock had finally passed just before dark fell fast and hard over the moor. Karl had thought the ochre and purple plain desolate before, but devoid even of rock-eaters it left him wondering whether he could ever adapt to this frozen hell-world.
He wondered whether Bera was going to answer. She'd barely spoken all evening but to respond to direct questions, and there had been times when she'd even ignored them.
This time Bera pursed her lips. "Sometimes he calls me Jocasta: it's obvious then. But most of the time, it's hard to tell – not like the old possession dramas, when the baddie has a different voice."
"You've seen possession dramas?" Karl couldn't help being surprised. When personality downloads into cyberspace had first started, a sub-genre of dramas featuring characters "swapping" their bodies with others due to accident or sabotage had flared into popularity before fading equally quickly. The possessors always wildly over-acted, putting on gravelly or squeaky voices. Karl only knew of them because of Lisane's interest in ancient art-forms.
"We're not savages," Bera said.
"I didn't think you were." Karl wanted to shout at her to stop being so defensive, but held back. Loki's behaviour had lost him any right to criticise. "So how can you tell when I'm Loki?"
"Dunno. I suppose… your voice changes slightly. Why?"
"Because he's shown himself," Karl said. "I want you to hear what he has to say." He forced himself to relax and allow the other to take control.
"We are Loki," he said, voice flattening as soon as Karl relinquished control of his epiglottis, as if the download still wasn't fully used to the subtleties of inflection and timbre. "Be not afraid Bera-Jocasta. We are legion, but wish only to cherish you."
"Why do you call me Jocasta?" Bera said.
"We are Oedipus, amongst others. You are Jocasta, mother/lover. What else could you be, when you have given us life?"
Karl thought, Give me speech, and re-took control. "It's me, Karl. Loki thinks that you're the re-incarnation of Jocasta, the mother of Oedipus, a mythical hero who fell in love with and married Queen Jocasta, never knowing that she was the mother he'd been separated from at birth."
"Ri-i-ght…"
"We were suckled at your breast, so you are our mother, Bera-Jocasta," Loki said. "We would copulate with you. You are beautiful."
Bera lifted the rifle so that it pointed at Karl. "There'll be no copulation. Got that, Mister Loki?"
Karl said, after a long pause: "He hasn't quite worked out all the social nuances, Bera. He knows so much about astrophysics and planetology, but nothing about ordinary life. He's not even a he but a they, though it's easier to call him Loki. He likes Ragnar's name for him. But he's agreed that there will be no misbehaving. I've agreed that when we reach the Winter Song, we'll find some way of repairing the damage to him, and filling in the gaps."
"Who – what is he? They?"
"Ship tried to do an emergency download." Karl sounded sheepish. "There was no time for it even to tell me, let alone download completely. So Loki is mostly memories and programmes. But without Ship's overarching personality to hold him together… plus, the human mind wasn't designed to hold two or more distinct personalities. It explains my blackouts and other odd behaviour."
"So… you'll fix it – them, whatever – when we reach the Winter Song. What about until then?"
Two seconds passed, three, four; "We will yield control to the Karl, Jocasta-Bera. We wish you no harm. You are a good mother, and beautiful."
"Hmmph," Bera said, looking down. "You said 'we'. Does that include Karl?"
Another pause. "This is Karl, Bera. Loki is a whole load of fragmented bits, so he uses 'we' rather than 'I', but he doesn't speak for me. Loki has agreed to stop trying to control me." Karl visibly hesitated. "You're a lovely girl, Bera, but I have a family and won't take advantage. I don't know what happened at Skorradalur, but you seem vulnerable, so I would be taking advantage of you."
Bera nodded.
"We will not take control of the Karl as long as he protects you, and keeps to our agreement," Loki said.
Moments later, Karl slumped and let out a long, long exhalation. "Cosmos, that was exhausting… but I think he means it."
"Get some sleep," Bera said. "I'll take first watch."
They resumed the next morning after breakfasting on cold rock-eater flash-roasted in the fire the night before for Karl, and mutton for Bera. When they finished the meat, Bera passed a handful of black berries and a knobbly little apple-shaped fruit. "You'll need this to stave off scurvy."
He shook his head. "As long as I have basic fuel, the nanophytes will synthesise what I need."
Bera shrugged and ate the fruit.
They set off beneath a bleak sky, heavily overcast with snow-laden clouds, which luckily held on to their wintry cargo.
The fourth or fifth time Karl stifled a yawn, Bera sighed. "Assuming Ragnar comes after us – and I'm sure he will," she added, "He'll have a bigger party, so each of them will spend less time than us on watch. They'll be fresher, less likely to make mistakes. We'll switch over at mid-day. That way the horses take it in turns carrying our heavier weight, and won't get exhausted quite so quickly. You can nap in the saddle."
It was, Karl decided, a reflection of how much he'd grown used in a few days to horse riding that he took the suggestion seriously.
The horses trotted at a brisk pace across the stony moorland. Snow finally began to fall about mid-morning. It mottled the ground, but for a cluster of hot springs from which steam rose lazily, twisting and weaving through the snowflakes. Karl pointed at another flock of rock-eaters slowly moving northward. "You said these migrations occur every year?"
"Every autumn," Bera said. "They spend the summer in the higher latitudes, but the winters are too harsh, even for them, so they head past us toward the equator." She added, "The trouble is that they bring the snolfurs, trolls, snawks, even the dauskalas with them; everyone feeds on the rock-eaters."
Something was niggling away at Karl, although he couldn't quite work out what it was. So he pushed it to the back of his mind to where it would eventually click. "I see human settlements as little oases in a big wilderness."
"That's about right," Bera said. "It's too cold for us much beyond the tropics, but we have that narrow girdle of land around the world. In it we've been able to push back the local life-forms and carve a sort of life out of the land which we farm, but until the Formers return we can't finish the job properly."
Karl wondered whether he ought to tell her bluntly that there was no likelihood of the Terraformers returning, but decided against it.
The snow fell even harder, and the horses slowed as the visibility deteriorated.
Bera said, "I don't like this. Snowfall is when snolfurs and other predators hunt. We should move further away from the herd."
"Which one?" Karl said, squinting into the infra-red at the signatures of another herd passing them on the other side. "They're on both sides of us."
"No one ever said this journey was going to be easy," Bera said, and flashed him the nearest thing to a smile since Loki had tried to kiss her the day before.
Karl smiled back but said nothing, simply enjoying the moment.
Then he stiffened. "What was that?" he said. "There was a grunt, off there to the right." The visibility was down to only a few metres, and Karl strained to see, easing his vision into the infra-red.
"You're sure that it wasn't a coughing sort of sound?" Bera said. "That's the sound of a snolfur marking out its territory."
"Nope," Karl said. "More like a grunt."
"Shit," Bera said.
All Karl could see were the heat-signatures of rockeaters rooting in the snow for lichens.
Then – from the opposite direction to where the cough had come from – something flew from the snow toward Bera.
"To your left!" Karl yelled.
Before he'd even finished the last word Bera fired off two rounds which were followed by a roar and a blast so foetid that Karl could smell it from several metres away. "Hold your breath!" Bera yelled and ducked her head, then rode as if pursued by the hounds of hell.
As Karl caught a glimpse of something long and sinuous but with four stubby legs, he too ducked his head, then Grainur responded with a surge forward that almost dumped him from the saddle. Ahead, Bera and the spare horse were pulling away, so Karl ignored the shape to his left and concentrated on staying on his horse.
Only when they had ridden a kilometre or so did Bera slow up.
"What the hell was that?" Karl said, between panting for breath.
"Dragon," Bera gasped.
"Huh?"
She smiled, took a few more breaths as the horses continued what was still a brisk trot. "That was the adult version of what we saw earlier. That's why the stinky breath – you try carrying a gut-full of gas all your life."
"Why the bloody hell didn't you kill the young one, then?"
"Because though they breed in large numbers, many of the young are eaten by adults," Bera said. "Why do the adults work for them?"
Karl jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "That's why!"
Bera grinned. "Calm down! We made it, didn't we? My, you are a sensitive one."
He guessed that her teasing was her belated pay-back for Loki's behaviour the day before, so he took a deep breath; he wouldn't give her the pleasure of losing his self-control again. "So that's a dragon? Why gengineer something out of myth?"
"Oh, we didn't," Bera said. "They're more like warmblooded snakes than dragons, but the name fits better than anything else."
"It would have eaten us? Or was it just cranky 'cause we were crossing its territory?"
"Both," Bera said. "But it'd eat us, or the horses. They'll eat anything – snawks, rock-eaters, even an occasional sheep, though I think they only usually do it once. Once they've had a belly-full of indigestion, they usually leave us or our animals alone." She grinned. "But I didn't fancy being that dragon's harsh lesson. Giving him indigestion's poor consolation." She added, "Anyway, we got away, so it doesn't matter, does it?" * * *
The line of horses filed through a narrow ravine in the falling snow, before emerging into the open. Thorir and a couple of the Thralls slowed. "Keep going!" Ragnar shouted. "We need to–"
He never finished the sentence, for at that moment one of the spare horses screamed, and a shape ducked back into the murk.
"Snolfur!" Arnbjorn shouted. He fired twice at where it had been, and was rewarded with a yowl. "That sounded like a cub," Bjarney called. "In which case, where's Mama Snolfur?"
Screams and shrieks and shouts erupted around them as the adult snolfur leaped from the snow and knocked Bjarney from his horse, which screamed in stereo with another riderless animal. That one fell under the teeth and claws of second and third snolfur cubs, working together on the far side of the procession from the first attack
.
Ragnar rode his horse directly at the cub which was nearest – out of the corner of his eye he saw Arnbjorn and Thorir's horses charge the mother.
The third cub was still learning, or it would have had the sense to follow its mother and retreat after attacking the horse; instead it lingered, and leaning down, Ragnar swept Widowmaker across in a flat arc, decapitating the cub with a single swipe. He gagged at the stench of its blood and faeces as its bowels relaxed in death.