The Sterkarm Handshake

by Susan Price

  Windsor braked the car on the platform just outside the Tube. Bryce looked through the windshield at the rutted mud of the compound below, surrounded by its high chain-link fence and, beyond that, the moorland hills of the Sterkarms’ country. Five hundred years had just been sidestepped. They were also about twenty miles farther north than the spot they’d left in the 21st—Bryce wasn’t exactly sure why. There’d been talk of wishing to avoid the small sixteenth-century city of Carloel, where everyone’s business was too readily known to everyone else, but also technical talk of a “temporal-spatial dislocation.”

  What was truly hard to grasp was that the hills before him, though solid and in every way real, were not in the same world as the one he’d just left.

  A security guard stepped out of the office alongside the platform and stooped to look at them. Recognizing his immediate boss, Bryce, and Bryce’s superior, Mr. Windsor, he smiled and waved them on down the ramp.

  Windsor drove down the ramp and across the small compound to the gate. A guard opened it for them, dividing the big FUP logo, and then joining it again as he closed and locked the gate behind them.

  Windsor stopped the car, a great shiny, metallic scarlet box on the green hillside. “How long are we going to have to sit here?”

  Bryce smiled. “The Sterkarms don’t have watches.”

  “They have the ones they stole from our geologists,” Windsor said.

  “Yeah, well … I told young Andrea nine thirty—”

  “Which it is now, and there’s not a sign of them.”

  “We’ll just have to be patient,” Bryce said.

  Windsor tutted and got out of the car, slamming the door. The metallic sound echoed back from the hills. As Bryce got out of the car into the wind, he had a feeling of immense space opening around him. He joined Windsor in leaning against the car’s hood. “What a view,” Windsor said.

  Before he admired the view, Bryce took his pistol from its shoulder holster and checked it over. It was his own and, unlike those carried by the security guards, it was loaded. He didn’t think there was any chance he would need it—if he had seriously thought that he might, neither he nor Windsor would be here—but if anything did go wrong, he was prepared. He noticed Windsor smirking at him and waited for some crack about playing soldiers. Windsor was one of those who thought that, because they weren’t like him, the Sterkarms were nothing more than overgrown, rather dim and naughty children.

  But it was a wonderful view. The FUP compound was built about halfway up a hillside above Bedesdale, a long, wide valley cut deeply through the moors. Long hill spurs, now from this side, now that, sloped down from the hills toward the river of Bedes Water. Between the spurs were narrower side valleys, making the shape of Bedesdale a long, intricate zigzag. It was impossible to see very far up or down the valley, because the long hill spurs blocked the view.

  But from where they stood, just outside the gates of the FUP compound, it was possible to catch a glimpse of Toorkild’s tower. Look across the width of the valley to the hills on the other side—and look high up, high on the shoulder of the nearest hill spur. There, just poking above the ridge, was the top of the tower. It was built on the slope of another hill, farther away than the one that blocked most of it from view, but it stood tall enough to give the Sterkarms’ watchman a clear view up and down the valley. The Sterkarms had a better view of the FUP compound than FUP had of them. As the bird flew, the distance between them probably wasn’t much more than a mile, but by the time you’d climbed down the hillside and over the rough valley floor and forded the river, and climbed up the opposite hill, you’d have been walking for a good hour and a half. And then you had to walk back. Andrea said she’d never been fitter.

  It was rough country, but fresh and beautiful. Above them, the sky was thick with clouds moving so fast before the wind that patches of clear blue were torn open, letting through the sun. The sunlight shone in patches on the hillside around them, and on the slopes across the valley, gleaming on red bracken, lighting green and tawny grass—and then vanished as the break in the clouds closed, leaving the hillsides shadowed, grayed. But somewhere else other patches of sunlight were dancing briefly before closing.

  Scores of little streams fell down from the hills in silver streaks, to join the silver of Bedes Water as it ran down the valley. Here and there were stands of trees, pretty birches mostly. Some of them, those highest on the hills, where the wind blew coldest, were turning yellow.

  Bryce was never sure if he imagined it, but the details of everything, even outcrops of rock and bushes on the opposite hillside, seemed pin sharp, as if there were a lens in front of his eyes, magnifying things and intensifying colors. There seemed to be more tints to the colors here than there were at home in the 21st. More greens, subtle but distinct: rich greens, luminous pale greens, golden greens, tawny greens. In the stone, the bracken, the trees, there were tawnies, russets, grays, ochers, purples—and all the colors seemed to softly vibrate somehow, to shimmer.

  It was the air. It was so clean, so clear. His eyes were no longer looking through a filter of smog and dust. Behind them, the bright-yellow paint of the office was as bright and fresh as when new, and the concrete of the Tube was pure white.

  Windsor let out a long sigh. “People are going to pay big money for this. Just listen to that silence!”

  The silence was, indeed, more a presence than an absence. It made you realize that what passed for silence in the twenty-first century was more often a din of disregarded sound: of traffic, and people talking nearby, of radios and televisions, of piped music, of machinery running. The silence of the 16th’s hills seemed to travel to them from miles away, to coddle their ears in fold upon fold of silence. When there was a sound—when a sudden gust of wind flapped their coats, or a sheep bleated miles away—it was startling. Then they realized how much the silence had calmed them, without their being aware of it, how it had slowed their hearts and made them draw their breath more deeply.

  “Yes,” Windsor said, sighing again. “How can you beat this for a get-away-from-the-rat-race vacation? We’ll be able to ask any price.”

  “Not if the Sterkarms are going to keep up their little games.”

  “Oh, I can deal with the Sterkarms,” Windsor said. “God, they can’t even write their names. And it’s early days. By the time we get vacations here under way, the Sterkarms will be walking to heel and fetching sticks, don’t worry.”

  They’re ill to tame, the border men … Bryce, who’d seen more of the Sterkarms than Windsor, tried to picture this. He said, “It’s a shame we’ll spoil it all.”

  “We’re not going to spoil anything,” Windsor said. “We’ll improve it. Improve it and preserve it, not spoil it.”

  “But coal mining,” Bryce said. “And drilling for oil. And tourists are going to want electricity—it all adds up to pollution, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re still in the past!” Windsor said. “Catch up! Cold fusion! Clean, cheap power!”

  “But isn’t there a—”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Windsor said. “One hundred percent. And the pollution at home was built up over two hundred years. Way back then, they didn’t care how much mess they made—but we’ve learned a lot. We know about filters and safeguards—and we’ve got a big incentive to keep this place clean! Money! All this …” He waved a hand at the landscape spread before and below them. “It’s all money in the bank. Are those sheep or goats?”

  A little troop of animals had appeared from a fold of the hillside below them and went trotting past, following a narrow track down into the valley. They had long, shaggy coats of wiry hair rather than fleece, black with the odd rusty brown streak. All of them had at least two horns—several had four, in a sort of star burst.

  “They’re sheep,” Bryce said. “They do keep goats, though—for their milk.”

  “Free-range, organically bred me
at on the hoof,” Windsor said. “Unpolluted by insecticides, antibiotics or radioactive fallout. That’s why they’re so tiny and skinny, of course, but the health-food mob won’t mind that. The health-food nutters are just going to eat this place up. See that river down there?”

  “Water,” Bryce murmured. The Sterkarms called it “a water,” not a river, and he liked the phrase.

  “Fresh trout, fresh salmon, freshwater mussels—and oysters! All plentiful, unpolluted and cheap. Freshwater pearls! Vast shoals of fish in the sea, not just oil!” He spread his arms wide. “Their fishing grounds haven’t been vacuumed clean of fish by factory ships until there’s nothing left but sardines—there’re still whales out there! Do you know how much ambergris is worth an ounce? No heavy-metal pollution in these seas. No mad cow disease in the food chain. Fruit, grain, vegetables, all organically grown.”

  “There’ll be a big demand,” Bryce said, and watched Windsor nod. He was wondering himself how long it would be before FUP quietly introduced growth hormones and insecticides and artificial fertilizers into the 16th, to maximize production. How long before they imported big fat modern sheep to replace the hardy but small and skinny Sterkarm sheep. The Sterkarms themselves would probably welcome every innovation once they saw that they would gain from it, so how could you say it was wrong? There was no way he could stop it from happening anyway.

  “Whiskey!” Windsor said. “Can you imagine the ad campaign for a whiskey made here? All you’d have to do is list all the pollutants in every make of whiskey made 21st side, just because it’s made in the 21st, never mind how special their ‘pure, natural spring water’ is. And forget ‘twelve years old’ and ‘twenty-five years old’—ours’d be five hundred years old! You wouldn’t be able to keep the shelves stocked. I tell you, this place is a gold mine. But here comes the grit in our Vaseline.”

  Bryce had already spotted the approaching party of horses and people. They were on the near side of Bedes Water, having crossed the ford out of sight, and were just rounding the corner of the nearest hill spur.

  “We’ll go and meet them,” Windsor said, and got back into the Range Rover. Bryce climbed in beside him. The Range Rover was going to be a shock to the Sterkarms, but it wouldn’t do any harm to impress them with the power of the Elves. Slowly, in four-wheel drive and first gear, they lurched down the rough slope.

  Andrea was plodding along on foot, having walked all the way from the tower, as she always did. The Sterkarms had offered her a horse many times, but she didn’t like horses much, and liked the idea of falling off them even less. Toorkild, from good manners, had dismounted and walked beside her, leading his horse, though walking was normally beneath him. His men either dismounted too or curbed their horses into walking behind and beside them, though occasionally one of the party would canter off to stretch his horse’s legs before returning to them.

  The Range Rover had been glaringly visible from the moment they’d rounded the hill spur and started climbing toward it: the brightest color in the landscape, a scarlet dot against the green hillside, flashing light from its windshield and mirrors. The men around Andrea exclaimed and pointed. “It’s an Elf-Cart,” she’d said. “You’ve seen them before.” But the Range Rover was very different from the drab trucks that had been brought through the Tube when the office and compound fence had been set up.

  Then it started down the hill toward them, which the trucks had never done. The noise of its engine reverberated across the valley. The horses shied and bucked. The men themselves, as they struggled with the animals, sent white-eyed glances at the thing jolting down the hill. The nearer it came, the stranger it looked. Even Andrea thought so, after spending so long in the 16th. The chrome and glass and metallic finish sending out blinding flashes of light; the great, four square, machine-tooled frame; its coughing, snarling, growling; its strange smell. It was utterly alien.

  “Take the horses back,” she said. “I’ll go and ask Elf-Windsor­ to stop.”

  The men were glad of the excuse to fall back from the thing, but after Andrea had gone on a pace or two, she found Toorkild at her side, though he’d left his horse behind in someone else’s care. She could feel his apprehension about the big, noisy steel box, but he would never allow himself to appear afraid in front of his men, even less in front of a woman, even an Elf-Woman. And he had to greet Elf-Windsor personally because anything else would be, in his own eyes, insufferably rude.

  When they neared the car, Windsor halted it and got out. He remembered Andrea, now he saw her. A big lumpy girl. Her round face was all red from the cold, and her hair was pulled back and pinned in prim plaits around her head. She wore a thick, mannish jacket and a long skirt, with solid boots appearing at the hem. Her choice of dress was obviously practical, and possibly in deference to local custom, but Windsor suspected it was what she would wear to a garden party or on the beach. Big lumpy girls were always prudish, because nobody wanted them to be anything else.

  Standing beside Andrea was Old Toorkild Sterkarm, who was the kind of man it took to make Andrea look dainty. He had a big head of thick, shaggy long hair hanging to his shoulders and becoming an equally shaggy beard. He was tall too, every bit as tall as Windsor himself, and wore an odd kind of cross between a cloak and a coat with a big cape of fur across the shoulders, making him look enormously broad. He was grinning through his beard, showing big, square, slightly yellowed teeth. Luckily for FUP, however impressive Old Sterkarm might look, he was as ignorant and dim as he was wide. He thought France was a town in England.

  Toorkild came at Windsor, arms spread, and enveloped him in a powerful, furry embrace and a strong stink of musk, old wet fur and rank, masculine sweat. Before Windsor had time to react, the harsh mass of beard was shoved into his face and a kiss planted on his cheek. He couldn’t stop himself trying to pull away but remembered in time that this was the Sterkarms’ way. They hugged and kissed everyone, regardless of age or sex. Nerving himself, Windsor grasped the big man’s shoulders and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek in return. Hey, whatever it took.

  Old Sterkarm was speaking—that is, he was making a snarling, coughing noise that was incomprehensible to Windsor, even though it was supposed to be some peculiar kind of English. Andrea translated, as Toorkild beamed at Windsor. “It’s his pleasure to welcome you again, and he thinks it’s been too long. He’s brought a horse for you to ride to the tower, and he and his wife will be unhappy if you don’t eat with them. They have gifts for you, as they’re eager for the friendship of the Elves.”

  “Tell him it’s my great pleasure to be here and that I’m looking forward to meeting his wife again.” If Windsor remembered correctly, Mrs. Sterkarm was rather a fetching little piece, if no easier on the nose than her husband. “I’ll be delighted to eat with them, but I’ll pass on the horse if he doesn’t mind. Not dressed for it.”

  Indeed, Toorkild was staring at the cloth of Windsor’s dark suit, which had a smoothness and tightness of weave that couldn’t be found in even the best cloth the Sterkarms could steal. “Ask him,” Windsor said, “if he’d like a ride in the car.”

  But Toorkild, asked if he would like to ride in the Elf-Cart, politely declined, saying that perhaps at some other time he would, but that day, he was sad for it but he had to get back to his men and the horses. He would ride ahead to the tower, so that everything would be ready for them when they arrived. In the middle of saying this, he turned to Bryce, opening his arms, hugging and kissing the security man even more enthusiastically than he had Windsor, since he knew him a little better.

  “Vordan staw day?” Bryce said, as Andrea had taught him— How stands it? or How are you?

  Toorkild laughed and thumped him on the back and said something. Bryce didn’t understand a word but smiled and nodded throughout. He gathered that Toorkild was amused by his attempt to speak like a Sterkarm, and was generally being pleasant.

  While Toorkild was talking to
Bryce, Windsor smirked at Andrea and said, “Well, hello there, Sexy.” She looked startled, which was what he wanted. “Who else will call you ‘Sexy’ if I don’t? I see they’re not starving you.”

  Andrea had been thinking that she ought to tell Windsor about the ride the Sterkarms had sent out. Now she changed her mind.

  “Join us in the car,” Windsor said. “We can have a few words before the meeting.”

  Andrea had to translate again, as Toorkild made another attempt to persuade his guests to ride the horses he’d brought for them and then apologized for having to go back to his men. As Toorkild went away down the hill, Windsor opened the door of the Range Rover.

  “Get in the back, Andrea. Sit in the middle—then maybe you won’t roll us over on these slopes.”

  Andrea climbed into the car, feeling elephantine and clumsy, and wishing she could suck the blood back out of her face and not give Windsor the satisfaction of seeing that he’d made her blush. She could feel Bryce’s embarrassment on her behalf, and that embarrassed her still further. Neither of them was really in a position to fall out with Windsor, however rude he chose to be—which, of course, was exactly why he enjoyed being rude. She couldn’t imagine anyone among the Sterkarms ever being so casually offensive. In fact, when Toorkild and Per were with people subordinate to them, they were generally more polite, not less. At least, they were if the subordinates were Sterkarms.

  Unpleasant as Windsor was, it had to be said he drove the Range Rover well, taking it down the steep, uneven slope and then over some very rough ground on the valley floor, alongside the river. They rounded the hill spur and came in sight of another part of the valley, a bowl surrounded by cloud-­shadowed hills against a gray sky.

  They crossed Bedes Water at the ford, driving very slowly through the brown water and over the loose pebbles, and then followed the riverbank again, rounding another hill spur and coming into still another part of the valley. Andrea pointed out the tower on its hill above them. Its full thirty-foot height could be seen now, surrounded by a wall half as high, and all built of the local grayish-reddish gritstone.