by Colin Harvey
He joked with her, he flirted with her, he slept with her – to keep warm.
But he didn't want her. That much was clear. All her fantasies of him – slippery skin against skin, lips seeking lips, of straddling him, taking him in her mouth, being taken by him – left only ashes in her mouth. She wasn't sure when she'd fallen in love with him, but fool that she was, she had. And he didn't want her. She was crossing Isheimur with a man to whom she might as well be made of wood.
So when he asked her several times what the matter was, she told him about the horses. She wasn't lying, not exactly. Their fate did bother her.
When it came, it was entirely unexpected.
It was near noon, the twin suns high in the sky, almost warm despite the lateness of the year, their altitude and the high latitude. Karl – shirt off – was deep in murmured conversation with Coeo. Bera dozed in the saddle.
He and Coeo pitched forward.
Grainur's screams split the stillness as her riders fell from the saddle. The ground had collapsed beneath her, revealing sandurlund diggings.
Bera leapt from Taitur, knowing what she would find before she landed. The grey's forelegs were broken, and Bera felt as if her heart would burst with grief. "I'm sorry, old girl," she whispered, her vision dissolving. Her faithful Grainur deserved better reward than to spend her last moments in agony.
Bera thrust out her chin, defying Karl to offer sympathy. She grabbed her rifle, brushing tears away. Karl looked away, but she wouldn't. She lined up the barrel. "I'll see you in Valhalla, lovely."
The shot echoed across the featureless plain.
As it faded away, she took out her knife. "More food for us," she said, her laugh shaky. "The gods know we need it."
Karl took a knife and helped her butcher the carcass. "We can re-pack the bags so that everything fits into one."
Bera nodded, licking chapped lips. They never seemed to have quite enough moisture now, no matter how many glamurbak Coeo caught, and Bera wasn't sure whether her constant headaches weren't linked to trace elements in its tail. "We need to drain her blood into the empty bottles," Bera said, "and drink whatever we can."
"Good idea," Karl said. When he'd packed everything into the remaining saddlebag, he took the last flare and placed it in the carcass. "We should give her a proper funeral."
"What?" Bera frowned. "No, no time. We still have to skirt those hills –" she indicated a purple stain on the horizon "– and we should keep going for as long as possible."
"You ride Teitur," Karl said. "Coeo and I can walk. His foot's better now, almost completely healed. So let's wait an hour or two. We'll keep going into the evening."
"No," Bera said. "We go now."
Karl didn't answer immediately. He sighed. "Look," he said, "even in the time we've been travelling, I've grown fond of the horses, and it seems wrong to just butcher her and leave her where she is. I thought that it would be a mark of respect to have a little…" He tailed off at Bera's look. "Yeah, it's a lame idea," he said. "Let's go."
The foothills grew so slowly that Karl couldn't be sure at what point they changed from shadow to substance.
Coeo had started to limp again after a glamurbak mother nursing her offspring had objected violently to his presence and side-swiped him.
"According to the Oracle they don't breed often," Bera had said with a certain satisfaction as she swabbed where the scales had scraped him raw. "So Mama Glamurbak will nurture Baby G for many years. It tends to make them a little over-protective."
"There speaks a mother," Karl said. "Exactly how much time did you spend quizzing the Oracle?"
"Far, far too much, according to the others," Bera said, without looking up.
Karl sighed. "Until that wound heals, no more glamurbak hunting. Even if it makes us dependent on our water-bottles, and what we get from the still."
They stopped, and Bera laid out the maps. "If we went over, rather than around, the hills," Bera said, outlining with her finger, "we could cut maybe half of the week to ten days it'll take to get to the lake. But even then, I don't think that we'd make it."
Karl was tempted to argue, but one look at their physical condition stopped him.
Instead Coeo beckoned them. "Come!" he called in Kazakh, then astonishingly repeated it in passable Isheimuri.
Bera stared at Karl. "You've been teaching him, as well as him teaching you?"
"Yep," Karl said.
Coeo stood before a narrow crack in the rock wall. He suddenly disappeared.
"Do we follow?" Bera said.
"He hasn't led us wrong so far," Karl said.
"Maybe he's been waiting for his moment."
"You really think so?"
Bera shook her head. "No."
They followed Coeo.
The air was markedly warmer in the tunnel. Karl smelled sulphur. The walls were damp.
Teitur, who had shrunk to little more than skin and bone, licked the wall gratefully, his tongue rasping along the rocky surface.
"It's getting darker," Bera said. "We have a torch in here some – ah, here it is!" A cone of light cut into the darkness and Bera gasped. "Are these troll drawings?"
Karl had Loki ask the question.
"No," Coeo said in Isheimuri, then switched to Kazakh: "The Others." He made what was clearly a genuflection.
"Others?" Karl asked.
Karl had learned to read Coeo's body language. The humanoid looked uncomfortable. "Others. Not like Coeo, or you. Or her." He indicated Bera. "They can look like any of us."
"Where are these others?" Karl remembered Bera's stories of mysterious shapeshifters.
Coeo shook his head. "Gone." He turned away, indicating that the conversation was over.
Loki said, It implies that the shapeshifters were here before even the trolls, in which case if the shapeshifters are intelligent and not extinct, then the Pantropists committed an involuntary offence by landing here.
Maybe, Karl sub-vocalised, neither group should be here. If the stories are true.
He said to Bera, who was staring at him with raised eyebrows and a "What was that about?" look: "Coeo hinted that he thinks that they're painted by shapeshifters. Oh, and he considers us as being like him. Isn't that progress?"
Bera's "Hmm" was non-committal. She followed Coeo down the corridor, hanging onto a hank of his fur, the humanoid's sonar pinging off the walls.
The subterranean path must have run for several kilometres; after a while it brightened, and when they reached it they saw a crack no wider than Karl's hand in the tunnel's ceiling. Karl guessed it ran all the way to the surface, but it was too narrow to test.
After that there were similar cracks every few hundred metres, through which light could shine, not enough for Bera to switch off the torch, but it did alleviate the stygian gloom outside the torch-beam.
About a kilometre later they reached a cavern bright with daylight. "Water!" Bera gasped, but then flinched when she touched it. "Damn! That's hot!" She cautiously filled some of the now-empty bottles.
When they had filled them all they resumed, across a narrow ridge that ran right across the cavern, dividing the pools up as if it were artificial. Karl had seen too many natural formations that looked man-made to make assumptions, but he kept thinking of the Others, as Coeo had called them.
Every so often one of the bubbling pools would spit. Coeo was protected by his thick fur, but Karl and Bera both hissed whenever the water found a gap in their clothes.
They were near the far side of the cavern when Bera stumbled and nearly fell.
Coeo moved faster than Karl would have believed possible and caught her, but they wobbled on the ridge, and toppled forward.
Coeo put his hand down on the ridge, and Karl heard him hiss, "Hot," and snatch it away.
"You OK?" Karl called from behind.
"Watch your footing," Bera called as they stepped onto the cavern floor.
When they were all clear, Bera dressed Coeo's scalded hand.
"What's the Kazakh for 'I'm very grateful'?" Bera said, then repeated Loki's translation.
"He says," Karl translated back, "that it's nothing."
The spear that was hurled at Ragnar missed him by half a metre, but vital seconds were lost while his befuddled brain registered what it was. But instinct took over and when the trolls charged, he had just enough wit to draw Widowmaker.
The trolls must have outnumbered Ragnar's men ten, even twenty to one, but fortunately there wasn't room for the enemy to spread out. Arnbjorn had his rifle, while the others chose to use bows so the trolls fell in huge numbers before they reached the humans, who kept advancing along the path as they fired their weapons.
Ragnar preferred to hear the thud of tempered steel biting into troll-flesh over girly weapons like bows and rifles, and even though the trolls carried spears as long as his arm, he knew that he was a match for any one of them. He had cut three down before the creatures retreated in headlong flight.
Only then did the significance of the trolls using tools hit him, and for a moment his world tilted. "They're using weapons," he said, in wonderment.
When the last troll had fled, Ragnar turned to the others and saw that they had lost Bjarney. Ragnar had known the man who became his second tenant-farmer since before Hilda had been born. It was like losing a brother. Ragnar chanted three verses in Bjarney's honour, but his heart wasn't in it, and for the first time, he wondered on the wisdom of chasing the utlander.
But the chase had a momentum of its own, and later all such thoughts were forgotten.
They rounded a bend in the path and looked out across Isheimur. There across the plain, gleamed white, a vast frozen lake.
They still had one pair of glasses from their supplies with which Ragnar surveyed the lake. He couldn't be sure even with magnification, but he thought he saw the shrine jutting from the ice.
SEVENTEEN
Karl and the others entered the tunnel on the far side of the springs. This tunnel wasn't lit by the fissures leading to the surface, so they journeyed into darkness. Coeo led, his sonar thudding off the walls and floor, which was regular enough for them to move briskly without fear of stumbling. Bera held on to a hank of his fur, and Karl held on to her backpack with one hand, leading Teitur with the other.
Karl had never feared enclosed spaces, but without the fissures to ventilate the tunnel it felt hot and clammy, so that sweat trickled down his back, his chest, even his face. Sulphur wafted from somewhere, mingling with the other – unclassifiable – mineral smells.
The darkness stifled conversation; Karl found questions dying unasked in his throat, as did any more than a few bars of a tune. The others seemed to feel the same, and they moved in silence save for the clop of Teitur's hooves on the stone floor, and the rich, dull thuds of Coeo's sonar pings. Instead Karl settled for counting his footsteps, and every time he reached a thousand, saying, "Still here."
"Me too," Bera replied, and even Coeo grunted something in mangled Kazakh.
It was only when he noticed a faint glow that Karl realised that they had been following an upward incline in the tunnel, so shallow that he hadn't realised they were ascending. "Daylight," he said. "Up ahead."
"Good." Bera turned her torch on. "Let's hurry up. I really don't like this place."
"No," Karl said. "Coeo leads. Not much point in having sonar and not using it – if there are cracks in the floor, it won't do us any good if you've already fallen down one, will it?"
She eventually said, "I suppose so." She still walked level with Coeo's shoulder.
The light grew gradually stronger until they emerged into a narrow ravine, blinking in Gama and Deltasol's watery sunshine. Karl's eyes ran with the unaccustomed brightness, and when he had wiped them, he saw Bera doing the same. Only Coeo seemed unaffected.
"I hoped that we were shortening the distance, but I never guessed that we'd cut right through them!" Bera laughed gleefully. "Rather than have to climb them, we've shortened the journey another way!" She flung her arms around Karl and did a little dance in his arms, even patting Coeo's arm. The humanoid started, then relaxed, and clumsily patted her arm back.
They faced a broken, boulder-strewn landscape full of rocks and pebbles rather than the gravel and silt-like soil on the far side of the hills. There was also more vegetation, Karl noticed, although it was still straggly shrub and scrub. He pointed at a blue cactus-like plant with pink flowers. "That implies there's water."
They spent a cold afternoon journeying past geysirs and pools of boiling mud which bubbled and spat gobbets of orange for several metres. Bera rode Teitur while Karl and Coeo walked alongside the little horse.
"Are there sandurlund sites below ground?" Karl asked Coeo. He had no idea what the Kazakh for the little animal was, but with the lingua-weave it was best not to think of such things, but leave them to the lingua-obsessed who dissected back-translations, comparing their odder variations with glee.
"Some," the humanoid said. "Sometimes they dig too close to hot springs, or they're unlucky, and the water changes course underground. Then you may find boiled sandurlund thrown up out of the geysirs. That's why there are so many dauskalas around." He pointed to where a dozen bat-like shapes circled in the thermals, their screeches echoing off the surrounding hills.
"Is he talking about those bloody dauskalas?" Bera said, watching the sky.
"She's nervous of them," Karl explained to Coeo. He struggled to follow some of their subsequent conversation – even with the nanophytes' modifications, his hearing still couldn't catch the highest notes of Coeo's language.
"Coeo says you've nothing to worry about," Karl translated. "The dauskalas can't carry off a human."
"That was a long conversation for so little," Bera said. "Either that or he uses very long words." She smiled, but there was an edge to her voice. "Or was he playing the Oracle?"
"Why not?" Karl said. "You're always complaining that I ask you too many questions."
"I don't complain," Bera said, "I merely observe."
Karl squinted up at her. "Observe this!" He blew her a big, fat raspberry.
"Hmmph," she said.
Karl was tempted to observe that a trinary was an inherently unstable relationship, that he and the women had married Jarl for precisely that reason – that and that his lean, smooth-skinned husband was good-looking enough to overcome Karl's strongly hetero leanings.
But he had the feeling that such a comment might provoke an eruption. He frowned. Is that why she's so moody? Surely she's not jealous of Coeo? He decided that he should be more attentive.
Karl craned his neck. "Apparently the dauskalas have an internal mechanism for heating the blood by exchanging heat from the blood going to the wings, with that returning to the body; so the wings are cold but the body's warm, even on one of their more epic flights."
"Fascinating," Bera said.
"Isn't it?" Karl ignored her sarcasm. "Is that where your phrase 'as cold as a dauskala's touch' comes from?"
"Probably."
Karl squinted at her. "OK, I get the message. Dull, dull, dull. Let's move on." He quickened his pace.
But their extra speed didn't last long. When they had first left Skorradalur they had travelled more than fifty kilometres a day without much effort. The last three days they had covered barely half that.
Teitur limped a little at first, then more badly as the hours progressed to Gamasol-set, until Karl and Coeo had slowed to a stroll. Bera dismounted and led him, and still he lagged behind them.
The group walked in silence. Karl sensed that the time was coming when they would have to kill the faithful little horse. A quick, painless death's still more merciful than marooning him in the desert to die slowly of thirst or from predators, he thought sadly. Bera will know when it's time.
When the shadows were long, the sky clear of dauskalas and the cold too biting to allow Karl to keep his shirt off any longer, he saw Bera weeping quietly as she walked, and knew.
"Bera." He put hi
s arm around her shoulder. "Do you want me to do it?" He wasn't sure that he could, but for her sake he would try.
She wiped her eyes impatiently. "No, I'll do it. Normally we don't hesitate to cull, if there's any sign of temperament or weakness that could be carried on. But this is different. He's served me ever since I was a child and he should live another decade at least. We know that we're going to outlive them, that they grow old before our eyes, but to see him reduced to this…"
Karl nodded, noting the horse's ribs sticking out, bony souvenirs of their odyssey, the tired swaying of his head from side to side. He thought of Ship, for the first time in too long. They give their lives for us, he thought, and we take it for granted.