Winter Song

by Colin Harvey

  They must be very friendly to their brothers and sisters, he thought with a wry inner smile, but said nothing. Incest almost certainly was a problem in every small isolated community on Isheimur.

  It was at quiet times like this he missed Karla, Lisane and Jarl most. His doubts that he'd ever see them again floated up like the bodies of dead leviathans from the depths.

  He might have to spend the rest of his life on this cold, drab world, the last effects of the Rejuve wearing off so that he had maybe fifty years instead of three or four hundred, trying to fit in among people who never had the time to lift their eyes from grubbing out an existence.

  He must have sighed, for Bera slurred, "Wassamatter?" and stroked his hand.

  He said, "Thinking about what happens if this doesn't work. If the Winter Song's disabled or isn't there…"

  "What you do?" Bera mumbled.

  "Don't know," Karl said.

  She turned slightly, looping one hand around to stroke his face, laying her own cheek against his. "Is OK. We'll get you home. Somehow." Her voice broke, and he felt tears on her cheek.

  "Hey, don't cry." He wiped her face and licked his fingers, savouring the salt. "What's all this about?"

  "You'll either be gone or stuck here and miserable," Bera said. "Don't know what's worse."

  "You could always come with me," Karl said.

  "Your life isn't for me," Bera said. "Look at you, then at me. I'd be the ugly primitive freak in your world."

  "You're not ugly," Karl said.

  "Plain, then," Bera said.

  "Are you fishing for compliments?" Karl said, grinning in the darkness. "How about, your hair is dark as a raven's wing, your eyes limpid pools, your skin like softest satin?"

  Bera sniffed, and wiped her nose. "Freya, but you're good. No wonder the other women wet themselves when you arrived."

  "Did they?" Karl said. "I didn't pay much attention to those fools. I noticed you, though." She's a young girl; you shouldn't play with her affections.

  "Flirt," Bera said, giggling. A moment later she sighed. "I really like you, Karl."

  "I should hope so," Karl said. "I'd worry about someone who trekked across the planet with someone they didn't like. And for what it's worth, the feeling's mutual."

  "No," Bera said. "I mean I really, really like you."

  "Oh," Karl said. "Oh." He wondered what he should say next, and decided on honesty. "I have to remind myself about six times a day that I'm married, you know. I do try–"

  Bera shushed him with a finger to his lips. "That doesn't matter, you stupid man," she said. "You're married there, not here. If that was the problem, you could have had me the first night. But much as I want to be with you, I can't." She took a deep, ragged breath. Karl felt her heart pattering beneath his hand. "Even talking about it… I can't put a sentence together, my mouth goes dry, I choke. Ever since the baby…"

  It was Karl's turn to hush her. "Then we'll carry on as we have been," he said, "rather than change things and hurt both of us. Now go to sleep."

  To Karl the night seemed endless, but every time he listened, Bera's breath was regular and rhythmic. About midnight the night suddenly lit with a silent green flash. There was a moment of white light, colder than sunlight but twice as bright, then it was gone. Coeo squalled, but Bera slept on.

  For about twenty minutes the sky was lit by intermittent green flashes, and more rarely the white ones, as the weapons found their target. Karl watched the battle rage across the heavens, and could have wept with frustration, but he kept still, and Bera slept on, blissfully unaware.

  The battle ceased at some point, and later the wind dropped. Coeo and the glamurbak ceased their bickering, and Gamasol rose in the eastern sky.

  Now the same sun was setting behind loaf-shaped foothills, and on the nearest of them, outlined against the beauty of the red-purple-streaked sky stood a line of twenty or thirty humanoids – Karl had finally stopped thinking of them as trolls.

  "Wait," Coeo said.

  Karl put his hand on Bera's arm, wishing that he could shield her.

  Coeo dismounted from behind Karl to a cacophony of sonar pings and shrieks from the waiting humanoids, and strode toward their line with hands outstretched and open. "To show they're empty," Karl muttered.

  For the longest two or three minutes of Karl's life, Coeo argued with the other humanoids, too quickly for the lingua-weave to keep up, their voices dissolving into a buzzing blur at times.

  Coeo motioned them to dismount and approach. The other humanoids milled round their horses, some making appreciative noises, others less so, some verging on scornful. Their Kazakh ancestors were horsemen. They may still have an atavistic love of horses.

  In response to an interrogatory burst Karl said, "Speak slowly and clearly."

  From the humanoid's air of authority, Karl assumed that the questioner was their leader. "Why you here?" it repeated.

  "We seek Godsfall –" Karl gave the site the name Coeo referred to it by "– to pay respect."

  "You are not fake-fur?" Karl guessed that the humanoid referred to the settlers' habit of wearing fur.

  "I am a…" Loki struggled for the word, "castaway. Lost, learning the ways of this world." At his mention of "world" the humanoid stiffened, but didn't speak. "I am alone, but for my companion."

  "Your mate?"

  Karl hesitated. What do I say? "Yes."

  "She has left her people to be with you?"

  "Yes," Karl said. "The others fear us, hate us. Would kill us."

  There was a sound like a hissing kettle that Karl realised was laughter. "That sounds like the fake-furs," the chief said. "Come."

  "What about the horses?" Bera said. "We need to feed them."

  "Wait, please," Karl called.

  The horses were in pitiable condition – they had been losing weight throughout the journey. While they ate, Bera brushed them down with her hands, crooning. The humanoids watched intently. Karl emptied one of their precious water bottles into the material they used each night as a still, and the horses nudged each other to get at it. It was gone in seconds. "Shall I give them more?" Karl said.

  "No," Bera said. "It's more important that we get there than they do; if the worst happens, we may yet have to kill them and drink their blood." Karl stared, and Bera turned on him a gaze suddenly ice-cold. "Did you think this was a stroll in one of your parks?"

  Karl didn't answer. He had badly underestimated how hard it would be. If he couldn't fly to where he wanted to go on Avalon, he sent a remote. Walking and riding were sports to be played for an hour or two, not this bone-grinding marathon that left him permanently on the brink of exhaustion and aching so deeply that he couldn't remember what it was like not to ache.

  To take his mind off his aches, as the horses finished their meagre feed he asked Loki, "Could the Formers really not have known that the humanoids were sentient?"

  Possible, Loki said. The settlers now have no satellites to fly-by, just the remnants of ground-based stations, and for all its aridity, Isheimur is a world often wreathed in storms, whether snow, or dust. The humanoids are probably the origin of wraiths and shapeshifter legends.

  "That's now, what about then?" Karl growled, ignoring the startled look from the nearest humanoid, and Coeo's explanation of "spirit friend".

  The Formers would have had the capability, if not the inclination. They'd have focussed on what needed doing to adapt the world. Indigenous wildlife was something to be ignored or eliminated, not studied. Don't forget, they were men and women on a mission.

  "So they may have known, but suppressed it?"

  Or they never noticed. We may never know. Is the difference relevant?

  Coeo's touch reminded Karl that the horses had finished. He and Bera led them through a maze of twisting ravines into the foothills.

  "Caring for the horses was good." Coeo walked beside Karl. "Won you much goodwill. Our people had such beasts, but we lost them when we fell from heaven."

  "Th
at's why you take them from the farms? Not to eat?" Karl said.

  Coeo let out his hissing laugh. "Never! We love them."

  Karl decided not to point out that in stealing the horses Coeo's people were condemning them to a slow death; the humanoids wouldn't be the first to kill that which they loved.

  They entered a natural amphitheatre that was sheltered from the ever-present wind. Groups of smaller humanoids rested beneath animal-hide sheets strung between boulders. Women and children, Loki said. A few rock-eaters nuzzled at the ground for plant-life.

  "They aren't migrating?" Karl said.

  Coeo said, "They live here. Guard the way to Godsfall."

  At a signal, one humanoid separated from the others and launched into a foot-stamping dance. Others marked out a square by drawing in the thin sand covering the rocks.

  "You wrestle," Coeo said. "If you win, we travel onward."

  "If I lose?" Karl said.

  "We die."

  Karl took a deep breath. "Agreed," he announced in Kazakh.

  The humanoids answered with more whistles and shrieks. Bera looked horrified at the sudden commotion.

  "Two falls wins," Coeo said, pointing to Karl's shoulder blades. "You must hold your enemy to the ground to the count of five. If either of you leave the square you stop – but if you try to escape that way, is a fall to him. No holding fur."

  Damn, thought Karl. There goes one advantage. He accepted the glamurbak tail passed to him for refreshment, and chewed it. The sponge-like tail was almost all water, but to him it tasted of congealed fat.

  His opponent stepped into the square and Karl paused.

  The humanoid wrestler was a giant, almost as wide as he was tall and nearly Karl's height. Karl mirrored his opponent, settling into a crouch, wondering how he was supposed to get hold of the sumo-humanoid without clutching fur.

  He tried not to think of failure. It wasn't just his life at stake, but the others' as well.

  He reached for the giant, who faster than thought had Karl in a grip and wrestled him to the ground, to shouts and yells from the crowd.

  On three, Karl managed to wriggle free and using all his strength, tip his opponent over. But he couldn't keep hold without clutching fur.

  "Stop!" shouted the chief, who was refereeing.

  "You crossed the line, is why," Coeo called.

  Karl sneezed, his nostrils and mouth full of the strange scent of the humanoids; like Coeo his opponent smelled of musk and mint and something else cheeselike, but in his case it was almost overpowering.

  Karl turned, and was suddenly flat on his back. "Five!" The referee counted before Karl could blink, it seemed. One fall down.

  The next time Karl grabbed an ankle, but his opponent somehow flipped him again and the count was on four and we're going to die–

  He put everything into flinging his opponent off.

  Karl's opponent landed just inside the square, stunned or winded it seemed, not moving. Karl flung himself on him.

  "Five!" shouted Coeo. "You're one fall each!"

  Karl lurched to his feet, the yelling and stamping from around them almost enough to break his eardrums.

  At the restart Karl's opponent still seemed stunned. Karl managed to grip wrist and ankle and tip him over, and transferred all his strength into pinning the struggling, writhing humanoid down.

  "Five!" Coeo screamed. "You are the victor!"

  "You'll live." Ragnar patted Thorir on the shoulder.

  "Frostbite," Thorir said. "What an idiotic thing to happen. I thought I'd checked the water-bottle was sealed properly." He kicked a stone into space and cursed. "Bloody thing leaked in the night, all over the furs."

  They were a full two kilometres below the Death Zone, and Ragnar knew that the cumulative effects of hypoxia and the false comfort of being "safe" often lulled travellers, making them sloppy.

  "If we take the two smallest fingers off, you should be OK," Orn said.

  "Lucky it's not your sword hand," Ragnar pointed out.

  "It could be worse." Arnbjorn lifted his booted foot. Trenchfoot from permanently cold, damp footwear had cost Ragnar's son his little toe. Unable to walk without losing his balance until they could fit a prosthetic back at Skorradalur, he had to ride one of the few horses that hadn't fallen, or been slaughtered for food to replace their dwindling supplies.

  "Do it," Thorir said through teeth already gritted.

  Needles always made Ragnar a little queasy, which had amused his wife when she was alive; "A man happy to chop off a man's leg, but who can't bear a little needle," she'd laughed when he'd admitted it to her.

  So he studied the harsh beauty of the mountains while Orn injected precious penicillin into Thorir's hand to halt the spread of the infection. Seconds later, he winced at the choked-off scream that followed the thud of Orn's axe.

  The others packed away their furs, and Orn his medical equipment. They wolfed down breakfast and resumed their grim march. Ragnar's men spoke little, preferring to save their breath, which had to be hauled into their lungs in thimblefuls ready for the icy trudge.

  Ragnar found it hard to stay angry with Karl; even at this lower altitude, it still cost too much energy. Lift one foot; put it down; lift the other; put it down in turn; repeat the process. So the hours passed through the morning. The world narrowed, to a snow-covered path through the jagged-toothed rocks puncturing the aquamarine sky.

  Even a metre either side of the path was beyond his mental horizon at the moment.

  So though the attack that followed should have been as predictable as the sunrise, it took them completely by surprise.

  Morning in the deep desert: the silence was broken by a pig-like squeal.

  Bera sat upright, blinking at the light. "Dauskalas," she mumbled, her breath steaming in the freezing air. Shielding her eyes, she squinted up at black bat-like shapes cartwheeling in the sky. Belatedly she realised both that she'd allowed the furs to fall away, and that Karl was studying her bare breasts where they goosepimpled.

  He stifled a yawn. "Nah, it came from ground level." He added, "Aren't you cold?"

  She stared at him. He looked up and met her gaze and she felt heat, down below. To ease the tension, she grabbed her top and pulled it over her head. "Not now." She almost added, "You're not interested anyway, so why worry?"

  They had slept against one another for warmth these last few nights, and while she wasn't sure that she could yet bear to have him actually inside her, she had wanted him to want her. His limpness against her backside had been like a slap to the face.

  Coeo squatted, offering them the now near-daily piece of glamurbak tail, raggedly cut into three. Bera took the furry stump, picking out pieces of the scales that covered the animal. It was better than dipping into their meagre supplies.

  She glanced at Karl and burst out laughing.

  "What?" He wiped his chin, stared at his hand. "Oh, it's only blood from the tail. And you can talk."

  Bera groped among the meagre Kazakh vocabulary that she'd picked up from Karl. "Thanks," she said to Coeo.

  The humanoid mumbled acknowledgement around his mouthful of tail.

  Three days had passed since Karl had bowed in response to the humanoid chants of "Ul-lah! Ul-lah!" taking the acclaim of the victor. "It's a corruption of something from an old Kazakh religion," he told Bera afterward. They had stayed the night with the humanoids, eating and drinking barely enough of the celebratory feast not to give offence.

  Still, Bera had suffered stomach cramps in the morning.

  Karl checked the still and fished a drowned sandurlund out of the water. "It'll do for the horses." He added, "I'll load them when they've fed." He dug out the plastic sheet, and carried it gingerly over to them.

  They wasted no time making tracks. When they had left Skorradalur they had travelled over a hundred kilometres a day. Now they covered barely half that. They were slowing day by day, as their horses grew steadily thinner and weaker, despite their eating Skorri's rations. So there
was little time to waste. Bera knew Ragnar was somewhere. He wouldn't let them get away.

  Throughout the morning Karl asked several times what was bothering her. He sensed that something was wrong. He was sensitive – she had to grant him that.

  She had all but managed to overcome her reluctance to be touched. She'd been on the verge of guiding his hand down across her stomach the night before, but she couldn't make herself beg, and his obvious lack of desire had been humiliating.