The Sterkarm Handshake

by Susan Price

Bryce took his mobile phone from his pocket and showed it to him. “I’m calling him.” But before he did, he turned and looked up at the overhead monitors. “Damn!” The monitors were connected to security cameras on the other end of the Tube, 16th side. One of the screens still showed a distant corner of the chain-link fence around the compound, and the other a beautiful view of the sky. “Haven’t they fixed them yet?”

  The supervisor came to stand beside him. “They sent someone to look at them.”

  The motor that swiveled one of the cameras had failed, and before maintenance had got around to fixing it, a bad storm 16th side had damaged the other. “It’d be quicker to fix ’em meself,” Bryce said. “But no, can’t do that. That’s maintenance’s job. God, I thought it was hard getting things done in the army.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s not urgent,” the supervisor said, and Bryce sighed but turned away. He hadn’t time to explain—he had to get after the geologists and call Windsor. But that was the problem: No one thought these two little security cameras were important, and they thought he was making a fuss about nothing. So maintenance played a game of Keep the New Security Boss in His Place. What did those two little cameras matter, when there was a big steel fence round the compound and all those security guards on patrol? (Security guards with guns they didn’t know how to use anyway, was Bryce’s thought.) It worried Bryce that people consistently underestimated the Sterkarms.

  Windsor leaned on one side of the medical room door, while Bryce leaned on the other. The geologists, wrapped in silver-foil blankets, sat on the couch, or chairs, on the room’s other side.

  “We’re taking our lives in our hands, going back there!”

  Was there a gene that compelled hairy people to become geologists, Windsor wondered, or was there something about the practice of geology that enforced hairiness?

  “We thought it was all sorted out! You gave us assurances!”

  The eyes of the man speaking could hardly be seen for hair, but his rabbity teeth flashed through his beard and threw spit about as he ranted. The man beside him squinted all the time because his spectacles had been stolen.

  “They shoved us about—really roughly. I really thought they were going to kill us.”

  Even the young woman was hairy, though in a much prettier way. Her mustache was quite faint, and rather fetching, and her long, straight hair was as tangled and untidy as that of the male of her species. Windsor wondered what she looked like under her foil blanket. It made a distraction from her monotonous repetition of the same few words: “Everything, they took everything! Everything! I thought they were going to kill us.”

  “We want to know what you’re going to do about it!” Rabbit sprayed spit. “We won’t be going back—nobody will be going back—until we have guarantees. Guarantees! That the situation is under control.”

  Windsor leaned against the wall behind him, making himself comfortable and folding his arms. He didn’t like being yelled at by employees, and for God’s sake, what did they expect him to do about it? “I shall talk to them again, naturally. There must have been a misunderstand—”

  “That isn’t good enough!”

  “No, not good enough!”

  “You’re expecting us to go back there, to put ourselves at risk, and saying you’ll talk to them again just isn’t good enough! We thought you had talked to them!” The others chorused and nodded agreement, hair flying, beards bobbing.

  “We need guards,” Malc said. “It’s mad, sending the teams out alone.”

  Dave was nodding. “Armed guards. Just a couple of men with guns, that’s all it would need.”

  Bryce said, “Not a good idea.”

  That annoyed them, Windsor saw with amusement, and turned their hostility onto Bryce rather than him. “What you really mean,” Malc said, “is it’s an expensive idea.”

  “It wouldn’t cost much,” Bryce said. “And cost isn’t my first concern. What worries me is that it wouldn’t stop the Sterkarms from attacking the teams—you’d just be adding guns to the loot. It’d make you a bigger prize. And if a Sterkarm got hurt or killed …” He looked across at Windsor. “Well, then you’d have a blood feud on your hands. They’re big on blood feuds.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Windsor said. Cost was one of his first concerns.

  “If they’d been at feud with us when you met them,” Bryce added, “they wouldn’t just have robbed you—they’d have killed you all.”

  “Oh, so they can rob us with impunity!” Malc shouted. “But we mustn’t do anything to annoy them, even though they broke an agreement!”

  “What do you want us to do?” Bryce asked. “Kill them for stealing your lunch?”

  “I don’t think armed guards are a good idea,” Caroline said, pushing hair off her face. “I mean, they only have spears. It wouldn’t be very fair.”

  Windsor smiled again. You had to laugh at these liberal types. It was a pity the Sterkarms didn’t have such high-minded standards of fairness. It would make life a bit easier if the Sterkarms had any idea of fairness at all.

  “I think I know who the men were who robbed you,” Bryce said. “Going on your description, I’d say it was the May and his cousins.”

  Windsor looked across at him and raised his brows. “Who?”

  “One of the horsemen was ‘pretty,’ you said. I think that was probably Per Toorkildsson Sterkarm, known as ‘the May’—it means ‘the Girl.’ The other two with horses would be two of his cousins, the Gobbyssons. There are three of them, but I only know the name of the eldest—he’s called Little Toorkild, to tell him from his uncle. He might have been the one with the beard.”

  “You’ve lost me completely,” Windsor said.

  “Well, put it this way,” Bryce said. “You made an agreement with Old Toorkild Sterkarm that, if you kept him supplied with aspirin, he wouldn’t rob our survey teams.” He nodded toward the Geological Survey Team, wrapped in foil. “His son and nephews have just robbed one of our survey teams.”

  “Are they still raiding as well?” Windsor asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “In other words,” Malc broke in, “they haven’t taken a blind bit of notice of anything you’ve said, and all the assurances you gave us about our safety after the last robberies were worthless. You let us go through there—”

  “We didn’t know that,” Windsor said. “When we gave you those assurances, we were acting in good faith. We’d kept our end of the bargain, and we had no reason to think that the Sterkarms wouldn’t keep theirs. We shook hands on it.”

  Bryce gave his slow smile and said, “It was a Sterkarm handshake.” The geologists and Windsor all looked at him blankly. “You know,” he said. “The Sterkarm badge.”

  Everyone there knew the Sterkarms’ badge. Few of the Sterkarms could write, and the badge was their signature. It showed, in red on a black ground, an upraised arm, bent at the elbow and holding in its clenched fist a dagger.

  “Well,” Bryce said, “there’s a story to it. Ever noticed that the arm’s a left arm? Look at the hand holding the dagger and you’ll see it’s a left hand. And most of the Sterkarms are left-handed, right? They even build the stairs in the towers to go around the other way from other people—y’know, the stairs in most towers are built to go around clockwise, so they can be defended by a right-handed swordsman, but that’s no use to the Sterkarms. So their stairs go around the other way, counterclockwise, to give a left-handed swordsman the advantage. That’s how you can tell a Sterkarm tower.”

  Windsor, still leaning against the wall, said, “Wouldn’t a better guide be the fact that you’d be knee-deep in Sterkarms?” He was glad to see Bryce’s face redden a little as his lumpen calm cracked.

  “Anyway,” Bryce said, determined to have his say, now he’d started, “when men meet, they shake hands. With their right hands. That is, they give each other their w
eapon hand to hold, to show they don’t mean any harm. But the Sterkarms are left-handed. So a Sterkarm can give you his right hand to hold and still draw his dagger with his left. So if somebody makes a bargain with a Sterkarm handshake, it means that they never had any intention of keeping their word. I think when Old Toorkild took those aspirins and shook hands on the deal, it was a Sterkarm handshake.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bryce!” Windsor said. “Both entertaining and informative!”

  “Just doing my job,” Bryce said.

  Malc stood, his foil blanket rattling as he drew it round him. “We’re not going back, none of us, not until you take this situation seriously—”

  “I take it seriously!” Windsor said. “Do you think I enjoy equipping survey teams and then seeing them ripped off by a lot of hairy bog trotters? I’ve got money of my own invested in this project, I might remind you, and I personally resent—” He broke off as a pager beeped in his pocket. Taking it out, he read the message that ran across its little screen. “The ambulance I called has arrived to take you all to the hospital to be checked over, at FUP’s expense. We treat you so badly.” He opened the door of the medical room and looked out into the corridor. There were some men in dark uniforms, looking around as if they didn’t know where to go. “Are you the ambulance crew? In here.” He stepped aside to let them go into the med room. To Bryce he said, “Come with me.”

  As Windsor and Bryce walked quickly through the corridors of Dilsmead Hall toward Windsor’s office, Windsor said, “Couldn’t you have dealt with that yourself?”

  “I could have,” Bryce said. “But they were making a fuss about seeing you. And I thought you’d want to know. Be kept informed.”

  “I could have been kept informed without being dragged down here to listen to a lot of whingeing from beards—and since you’re such an expert on the Sterkarms, can you explain to me why they aren’t in awe and trembling of our magical powers? I thought they were supposed to think we’re Elves?”

  “They do think we’re Elves—”

  “They seem less than terror stricken to me.”

  “James, probably the only reason that girl wasn’t raped and those men killed is that the Sterkarms thought they were Elves.” They reached the elevators and, naturally, had to wait for one. Bryce would have preferred to climb the stairs. He folded his arms. “I wouldn’t rely too much on them being scared of us. They might be, but—it’s like hoping a ferret won’t bite you because it’s scared, when truth is, the more scared a ferret is, the more likely it is to bite you.”

  “Ferrets?” Windsor said. “Did I ask you about ferrets?”

  “I’d say the Sterkarms have a certain respect for us because we’re Elves—they’re not sure what we might be able to do if they make us really mad, so they’re a bit wary. Probably more important, they’re not sure what goodies they might be able to get out of us, if they string us along a bit. They really like the aspirin.”

  “Yeah!” Windsor was diverted. “Five pence a truck-load for generic aspirin, and the Sterkarms think we’re giving them some sort of miraculous magical potion. You have to laugh.”

  Bryce nodded. As head of security, he had to oversee the distribution of aspirin. Whole packs were never given to the Sterkarms. The twenty-first-century packs were opened, and the paper strips containing four tablets were handed out. This ensured that the Sterkarms ran out of them quickly, and valued them even more highly.

  It also ensured that a black market sprang up in the tablets, as his own security men traded with the Sterkarms for women and mementos such as lance heads and helmets. It was impossible to restrict such trading altogether, but Bryce tried to suppress it as much as possible. The sheer orneriness and treachery of the Sterkarms themselves was a great help to him. Stories had already reached him of Sterkarms wheedling aspirin out of his security guards and, once they had the tablets in their hands, immediately abandoning whatever deal had been agreed. They knew they could still get aspirin through the official FUP channels. They knew, too, that no matter how many times the security guards were cheated, they would still try again. The Sterkarms were not only treacherous—they were smart.

  “If they go on the way they’re going,” Windsor said, “they can kiss their whole supply of aspirin good-bye; I promise them that.”

  The elevator came and they stepped inside. “You haven’t been through there as often as I have,” Bryce said. “You have to see it before you can believe how poor the poorest Sterkarms are. They build their houses in a morning. They’re brushwood lean-tos. They have nothing. No furniture, no more clothing than they stand up in. When you send a survey team through, with pack ponies, warm clothes, metal tools—I mean, Christ, one of our packed lunches is a feast to them. It’s a bit like waving a big juicy steak in front of a hungry dog and expecting it not to make a grab for it. After all, I doubt if the poorest of the poor beggars get to see many of your aspirin.”

  “My heart bleeds,” Windsor said. “You’re just through telling me that it was Old Sterkarm’s son and nephews who robbed the team. They’re not poor.”

  They’d reached Windsor’s outer office. “Hello, Sexy,” Windsor said to his secretary, who was fifty years old, fat and gray, and made no attempt to look anything except clean and neat. She looked up. “I don’t want to be disturbed until further notice, okay?”

  Bryce, following Windsor into his private office, said, “Not poor by their standards, no. Poor by ours. But you’re right—my best guess would be that the May and the Gobbyssons were having a bit of fun—and helping out some of their poor relations. They like to keep family ties strong.”

  Windsor went behind his desk and sat in his big black chair, leaving Bryce to choose one of the low soft chairs in front of the desk. Windsor had a coffee corner where people could loll in comfortable chairs and talk things over on equal terms, but he wasn’t in the mood to use it. “I’ll put a stop to their fun. Why do they all have such stupid names? Gobbysson! And they all seem to have half a dozen names each. I can’t keep track of them.”

  “They’re all named Sterkarm,” Bryce said. “And then they’re all named after each other. Toorkild’s named after his father, and he names his son after his brother; and his brother names his eldest son after Toorkild, and Toorkild’s a common name anyway. So you’ve got dozens of Toorkild Sterkarms, and they all have to have nicknames to tell ’em apart.”

  “Bloody stupid people,” Windsor said. “How many of our lot are over there right now?”

  “No teams,” Bryce said. “We’ve only been sending one team at a time through since the last time the Sterkarms got outrageous. But there’s young Andrea, of course.”

  “Andrea?”

  “Andrea Mitchell. But she’s safe.”

  Windsor squinted as he thought. “Isn’t she that big fat girl we’ve got living with them? And you say she’s safe?”

  Bryce, who rather liked Andrea, was slightly offended on her behalf. “James, remember, the Sterkarms haven’t actually hurt anyone with their fun and games. They’ve ripped us off, they’ve shaken people up—and I agree it’d be good to put a stop to it—but they haven’t hurt anyone. They could have done that if they’d wanted to. And Andrea is their guest. They won’t hurt a guest. Anyway, they like her. She’s very good at her job. Most of what I’ve learned about ’em comes through her. Do you read her reports?”

  “I have a hell of a lot to do.”

  “She walks down from the tower to hand them in at the Tube regularly. Handwritten. I get a secretary to run up a few copies, and send one back for Andrea. She’s planning to write a book, y’know. Bright girl.”

  “Fascinating!” Windsor said.

  “What I’m saying is, Andrea isn’t at risk, and we’ve pulled everybody else out for the moment.”

  “God,” said Windsor. “Everything at a standstill again.” No teams going through, no mapping, no surveying being done.
A billion pounds, and then some, of technology standing idle because some pig-thick sixteenth-century yobs made an agreement and wouldn’t stick to it.

  Bryce said, “We’d be better off going back further. I mean way back, to when there weren’t any people. No problems then, and the coal and oil and gold would still be there, wouldn’t it?”

  “To the best of my belief,” Windsor said, “at the time when there weren’t any people, Britain was under the sea.

  “Oh. Well. Build platforms. Anyway, we could still go back to a time before the Sterkarms. If we could just get rid of them, we’d have fewer problems.”

  “Feel free to go and tell the physicists their jobs, anytime,” Windsor said. “I bet they’ll be thrilled to have your input. They’ve already pushed the temporal span to the limit, while keeping dimensional penetration as slim as possible—and that’s what’s giving us the spatial shortfall.”

  Bryce shook his head. “Now you’ve lost me.”

  Windsor didn’t bother to hide his contemptuous expression. “A few more years of research might iron out all the bugs, but what’s going to pay for the research? The company’s put the GNP of about fifty countries into it already, to bring it this far. It’s come down from above that they want to see some money back. If we can demonstrate that the thing can actually come up with a few barrels of oil, a few ingots of gold, we might be able to generate some more investment.”

  “So we’re stuck with the Sterkarms,” Bryce said.

  “Until we can make the accountants’ eyes shine. Maybe then we can push the Tube through to a time or dimension where the Sterkarms don’t exist. Please God.”

  Bryce pulled a wry face, nodding. He looked over at a big framed photograph that hung on the office wall. It showed, against a stormy, indigo sky, the Sterkarms’ tower, standing high on its hill. “We can try embarrassing Old Toorkild. Tell him we know it was his son and nephews who robbed us—but he’s embarrassment-proof, I think. There’s only one real way to stop them.”

  “And that is?” Windsor said.