Winter Song

by Colin Harvey

"South," you said.

  Coeo nodded assent, cautiously.

  Bera looked sceptical.

  "He's adapted," Karl said. "He knows how to survive."

  "He's hurt and on foot. He'll slow us up."

  "Then we'll redistribute the weight, and ride more slowly. The horses could probably do with a rest."

  "A rest? Hah, I don't think so!"

  "Come on, Bera. The Asians were small as a people compared to us, and the Pantropists weren't going to gengineer for size – you said that small is better for coldweather survival. I'd guess he's barely one-metre fifty tall, and if he weighs sixty kilos, my name's Ragnar."

  Bera sighed. "OK. But I may yet change my mind."

  Karl had you explain their plan as they dismounted. Coeo shuffled on his good foot. "Where go? Find more Coeo-people?" He sounded worried.

  You shook your head, and tried to explain exploring a frozen lake in the desert, with half the words beyond your host's vocal range. "We move quickly," you said. "Bera-people chasing us. Want to kill us."

  "Coeo knows them," he said. "They chase Coeo last spring. Too near their pets."

  "He thinks the sheep are your pets," you said. "That's understandable; he's probably never seen people eating the sheep." You said to Coeo: "They want us – only us. You come with us, you in…" Even Loki had to hunt the Kazakh word they needed: "Danger."

  "Coeo know danger. Danger Coeo's brother."

  They finished repacking most of the supplies onto Taitur, and Karl and Coeo mounted Grainur, whose ears lay flat at the troll's presence, but who didn't baulk.

  They spent a tense, taut afternoon riding through increasingly arid scrubland, between tall, cactus-like plants that rose like miniature watchmen every hundred metres or so, each plant garlanded with hydra-headed flowers on snake-like necks that followed their movement.

  The wind picked up, flaying them with icy whips.

  Although the afternoon passed uneventfully enough, Bera never took her eyes off the troll, and was clearly ill at ease. Coeo was equally watchful of her, although the troll seemed to have decided that Karl was more trustworthy. Karl in turn watched them both, to act as a referee should their mistrust erupt into open conflict.

  The afternoon was silent, mostly, although every noise, the smallest of stone-slides ahead of them, once the crack of a cactus's arm falling off, was met by a startled jump from Bera.

  Her frustration was made worse by Coeo stopping them periodically, dismounting to dig up a tuber, a root, once even a small burrowing animal from the ground. He proffered each to the humans.

  "We're losing too much time," Bera grumbled the third time he did it.

  "It's probably payment for our company, or the rockeater meat," Karl said, grinning at the insects buzzing around Coeo; Isheimuri insects ignored humans, which were as deadly to them as most Isheimuri plants were to the settlers, but in this case Coeo's adaptation had a down-side. Still, the troll seemed unconcerned. "Be gracious," Karl added.

  Bera declined each offering, but Karl took a little. Almost everything he tried had the same bitter metallic taste, apart from one plant that tasted similar to the minty smell on Coeo's breath. He managed to eat most offerings, both as thanks and so the nanophytes had more fuel, but the cacti were so foul that even Karl spat out their flesh after a single bite. Coeo chomped happily on them between foraging for fresh offerings.

  "You far from home," Coeo said, when the humans paused to swig water. "You are–"

  You said to Coeo, "Last word means?"

  "Not allowed in land," Coeo said. "Thrown out."

  You asked Bera. She said, "Outlaws."

  "Yes, outlaws," you told Coeo, explaining the word. Coeo nodded emphatically, and you added, "We seek a holy place, where something fell from the sky."

  Coeo grew rigid. The troll jabbered, his voice often sliding into the ultrasonic. Much of it was unintelligible, but words like "bad" and "holy" occurred often enough for Karl to understand. "He thinks we mean sacrilege," Karl explained. He shook with suppressed excitement, and leaning across, squeezed Bera's hand. "But there is something there!"

  Bera smiled, but it was a forlorn effort.

  As they rode Loki tried to explain to Coeo in very basic Kazakh that they meant no harm. Quite the opposite – that Karl's life depended on finding the shrine, and that when they found it, Karl intended to ask for the help of the spirits that Coeo implied infested the place.

  "This is why you… outlaws?" The Isheimuri word sounded odd coming from the wide, fanged mouth. "Because you respect people-spirits?"

  It took Karl a moment to realise that by people, Coeo meant the trolls. We need to stop thinking of them as trolls, Karl told Loki.

  As long as we call them people to Coeo, it's a good shorthand, Loki said. And if you start calling them "the people" to Bera, she's going to ask aren't her people "people" too?

  OK, Karl muttered, accepting defeat, and said to Coeo, "Yes."

  "Who you talk to?" Coeo said.

  "My companion," Loki said, pointing to his head and the space around it.

  "Your…?"

  Loki repeated the word.

  "Ah," Coeo said, repeating the word but at a higher, almost ultrasonic pitch.

  "Can't say word," Loki said, pointing to Karl's larynx.

  "Your companion is…?" Coeo said.

  "Has no body," Loki said. Karl hoped that the language drift wasn't so great that it had corrupted too much of the language.

  "Ah," Coeo said.

  Over the next five minutes it became clear that Karl's invisible bodiless companion was a far more potent persuader than their protestations of goodwill, convincing Coeo that Karl was a sort of holy man accompanied by spirits.

  "I show you way," Coeo finally said.

  Bera was horrified when Karl told her. "You mean we've a companion who may turn man-eater if he gets hungry enough?"

  "Did you consider him a person two hours ago?" Karl said.

  "What makes you think I consider him one now?" At Karl's stare, she made a conciliatory gesture. "That stunt with the sword?"

  "Stunt? Stunt?"

  "He could've been trained as a pet…" At Karl's glare,

  Bera added. "I'm not saying that he was, but he could have learned the action."

  "So why should he think of you as people?" Karl continued, "Doesn't the Oracle have anything about them?"

  Bera shrugged. "Only what we've discussed. They're humanoid, but no more than gorillas and chimpanzees on Old Earth, and creatures on other planets."

  "Hmmm," Karl said, thinking of the snow-men on Brindle's polar regions. "Given how far they've regressed, and how long both sub-species have been not interacting in any positive way, there are two explanations, both of which have some nasty implications."

  "Why do I get the impression that I'm not going to like this?" Bera said.

  "Either the Formers knew about the Winter Song before they came here, in which case they should surely have guessed at the trolls' origins–"

  "Which are?"

  "That they're genetically modified descendants of the ship's crew, or the gene bank, or both," Karl said.

  "I can't believe that they would have been able to keep that a secret, if they'd found out about it."

  Karl was glad that she wasn't outraged at the suggestion that she was descended from the perpetrators of genocide. Then he saw the muscle working in her jaw, and wanted to hug her for her self-control. "The other possibility is that there has been communication between humans and Coeo's people."

  Bera sighed, and looked troubled.

  Karl said, "What is it? You've thought of something."

  Bera took a deep breath. "There are tales, no more than myths, but…"

  "Go on," Karl said.

  "Men who spent too long in the upper pastures, so they end up half-crazy with loneliness, hearing voices in the mists. Or who claim that the rock-eaters talk to them. Solitude affects some people, driving them to try the native plants. Most will simply kill
you, but a few induce hallucinations before they make you go blind, or mad, or both."

  "Some of the myths mention trolls?" Karl said.

  Bera nodded. "And the Winter Song is a local myth, not something imported from Norse legend."

  Karl paused, while the download checked. "Loki says you're right. There's nothing in Norse myth like the Winter Song."

  "The Winter Song was poetic enough that people just took it as a version of our own… fall from grace, I suppose you could call it."

  "A metaphor," Karl said.

  "Exactly," Bera said, looking troubled.

  Coeo had been quiet all this time, as if realising from their voices that whatever they were discussing was serious, and needed to be resolved, but now he leaned forward in the saddle and pointed toward the south.

  They followed his finger. The sky was stained brown on the horizon as if the land was rising up to meet the sky. Minute by minute the hazy wall spread upward and further and further across the skyline.

  "Dust storm," Coeo said.

  "What do we do?" Bera said, looking around for shelter – but for all the broken ground, none of the rocks was large enough to even shelter her, and she was the smallest of them. "What's he doing?"

  Coeo had dismounted from the horse and was peering at the ground. Karl felt the thrum of vibration from the troll's sonar.

  Then Coeo remounted behind Karl.

  "I lead. You follow," Coeo said, kicking his heels into Grainur's flanks. She set off at a gallop toward the wall of dust, which had already spread across the sky, followed by Bera on Taitur.

  She shouted, "There's another of those little clouds of dust we saw earlier! But you're headed straight toward the dust storm – is he mad?"

  Karl thought, Maybe he knows something we don't, and we should trust him. But he didn't answer, instead concentrating on staying on the horse, which was flying under the repeated digs of Coeo's heels and looked at the wall of darkness coming steadily closer.

  Karl wondered how long they had. He got his answer a few minutes later.

  Flecks of grit stung his face. Coeo pantomimed slowing the horse down and Karl pulled Grainur back, slowing her to a trot.

  Coeo jumped from the horse and studied the ground, as if looking for something. The dust cloud had dissipated, it seemed, and the troll headed slightly to the left of where Karl had seen it, ahead of where it had last been headed.

  More grit stung his face. The storm was worsening, the light fading by the minute. Karl nudged his vision toward infra-red, and looked for Coeo.

  There! And beside him, a warm boulder, maybe a metre and a half high. It was built like a small truck covered with closely-linked scales and glanced at Karl with doleful eyes before turning back into the strengthening wind, the sand bouncing off its shaggy face. Karl realised from the vibrations that Coeo was crooning to it.

  "He's sheltering in the lee of an adult glamurbak!" Bera shouted, when they got close to it. "I never thought I'd ever see one of these in real life!"

  Waved in by Coeo, they sheltered behind the glamurbak, which was slowly settling itself onto the ground. A resonant snore split the air.

  "Coeo sing them to sleep," the troll said, breaking off from his inaudible lullaby, and there was no mistaking the pride in his voice. Karl wondered whether the ability had been bred into the trolls.

  It would make sense, Loki said.

  Coeo pointed at the glamurbak's tail. "Good to drink," he said. "Only drink with new moon."

  "That's every five weeks," Bera interpreted when you translated for her. She seemed to share none of Karl's queasiness at the thought. "Doesn't it harm it?"

  Loki translated the question.

  Coeo said, "With adults it grows back, but smaller. So there is limit to how much can be cut off. We wait, cut off tail when storm passes, not make him move now."

  They hunkered down, Bera trying to settle the horses, which she turned so that they were hind-end into the storm. Bera crawled back on hands and knees, spitting sand, her eyes streaming. The wind, now a howling gale, lashed them mercilessly, digging into their noses, eyes, even their mouths.

  Karl opened his arms and Bera snuggled into him. He stroked her hair, making soothing noises.

  PART THREE

  SIXTEEN

  "Don't move," Coeo said.

  Karl froze. "Coeo says keep absolutely still," he hissed, unsure if talking counted as moving.

  Bera obeyed. In the last ten days Coeo had slowly, almost imperceptibly, earned their trust.

  Nine days earlier, twilight supplanted afternoon. The storm gradually blew itself out until the wind dropped enough for Karl and Bera to crawl out from the shelter of the glamurbak's armoured body, Karl dragging a piece of plastic from their stores that he'd worked on throughout the storm-stolen day.

  Bera said, "What's he doing?"

  Coeo scraped at the ground until a host of mouselike creatures spilled onto the surface, scurrying back and forth faster than an unenhanced eye could follow. Karl snatched one and passed her a naked, blind, writhing creature.

  "Sandurlund," Bera said. "There'll be a nest nearby."

  As swift as one of them, Coeo's hand swooped and came up with one of the little mouse-like creatures. With a flick he tossed it into his mouth. Coeo caught another and offered it to Bera, who shook her head. "I like my food to have stopped moving." Karl also declined, and shrugging, Coeo ate it.

  "These must be the workers," Bera said, watching them spilling out onto the sand. She answered Karl's raised eyebrow with, "I've seen them on the Oracle."

  "I wasn't thinking about that." Karl failed to stifle a grin.

  "What then?" Bera said. "What?"

  "I was just thinking…" Karl said.

  "Uh-oh," Bera interrupted, "that sounds dangerous."

  "That you're as much an info-junkie as me. But I haven't had the Oracle to answer all my questions." He dodged the sandurlund that Bera threw at him.

  Behind them, the glamurbak staggered to its feet. Snuffling, it scuttled across the ground, with Coeo following. "We mustn't get separated!" Bera grabbed the horses' reins and dragged them with her. Karl goggled at the caravan of glamurbak, troll, Bera and horses; then followed them. As abruptly as it had started, the glamurbak stopped.

  Bera dodged a cascade of sand from its scrabbling forelegs. "I think it's digging for tubers. The sandurlund nest among them."

  Coeo emitted an excited squeak and juggled a tiny, wriggling shape, before tossing it into his mouth.

  "Are we staying here tonight?" Karl asked Coeo.

  "Maybe, maybe not."

  Karl rolled his eyes but laid out his piece of plastic, burying the edges beneath sand and tiny stones. "It'll act as a still, trapping the moisture in the air."

  Bera snorted. "If there is any."

  "There's always moisture, even in a desert," Karl said.

  They laid out their sleeping-furs in the near-darkness

  and ate their dinner of cold meat, trying to ignore the glamurbak's grunting and the tiny squeaks from the sandurlund nest. Normally Karl would have had dozens of questions, but his brain was fogged from exhaustion.

  Still, sleep would not come.

  Just as he was finally drifting off, Bera said, "Are you asleep?"

  "Yes," Karl said.

  "With anyone else, I'd think they were joking. Is that Loki?"

  Karl sighed. "No, it isn't. I was joking. Sort of."

  "You mean you were asleep. Sorry."

  "Only half-asleep," Karl murmured. "Don't worry. You can't sleep either?"

  "Nah. The grunting may have stopped, but that damned thing is such a noisy eater."

  The furs separating them lifted, and she backed into him, wrapping his arm around her. Neither of them had washed for days. The nanophytes normally sterilised his sweat glands and otherwise kept him clean, but he sensed that they were so swamped with the various jobs that he and Loki kept assigning them that he probably stank as much as she did.

  Actually, sh
e didn't stink. He found the slightly rank, musky perfume of her body oddly attractive. Without thinking he licked the stale sweat off the side of her neck, enjoying its saltiness.

  "No funny stuff," she murmured. But even as she spoke, she wriggled her backside further into his crotch, and he had to will the nanophytes to divert the blood away from that area. "Just like brother and sister," she murmured sleepily, but covered his hand with her own smaller one and pressed it to her breast.