The Sterkarm Handshake

by Susan Price

  When she brought him the heavy jakke and the dagger in its sheath, he hadn’t quite finished the lump of porridge. He put it down on the bedsheet while he sat up and spread the open jakke over his chest, since he couldn’t get it on over the drips in his arms. He placed the dagger on the sheet, where he could reach it easily with his left hand. Then he began eating again.

  “Tha’rt in no danger here, lover.”

  Per knew better. He ate the plums, thinking of his mother, and spat the stones out into his palm. Not knowing what to do with them, he put them back into his pouch. At home, he would have thrown them on the floor for the mays to sweep up, but here, having already thrown the tray on the floor, he didn’t want to offend again.

  “Dost feel better now?” Andrea asked.

  He nodded, and lay down, the jakke over him. He felt his eyes closing. The excitements of the day, the effort to stand, had exhausted him again.

  Watching him struggle against drowsiness, Andrea said, “I’ll try and get some food from Man’s-Home for thee,” she said.

  He said nothing, and she leaned over to see his face, to see if perhaps he’d gone to sleep.

  “Came I through Elf-Gate?” he asked. She nodded. “Where be Elf-Gate?”

  “If I told thee, thou’d no understand.”

  “But which way be it?”

  “When thou’rt well, thou’ll be sent back through it. Art sleepy? Sleep, then. It’ll be good for thee, to sleep.”

  “But where be it, Elf-Gate?”

  She thought he would relax, and go to sleep quicker, if she gave him some sort of answer. “At a place called Dilsmead Hall, Per. Now sleep.”

  “Dilsssmid Oll. Dilsssmid Oll.” He settled himself on the pillow and placed his dagger carefully in his hand. It took her by surprise when his face twisted. “I want to be home.” He turned his face into his hand and wept.

  “Oh Per, Per! Oh!” She crawled onto the bed, close to tears herself. The drip lines were in her way, but she carefully, gently lifted them and moved them aside until she could get under them and lie next to him, easing her arm under his head. “I’m sad for it, lover, I’m sad, but we had to bring thee, we had to, thee’d have died else.” She kissed his face. “I promise, I promise, all shall be right.” She kissed him again. “I’m here, I shan’t go away. My own prick, thou knows I love thee, I wouldn’t let owt hurt thee.”

  But so must the Elf-Queen have assured Tam Lin. And how could she prevent anything hurting him? Was she a man? Could she fight with sword or axe?

  But her soft warmth, so close, and her kisses and assurances calmed him. And he was very tired. The Elves had let him live so far; why would they not let him live until he woke?

  Dilsssmid Oll. That was what he had to remember.

  He drifted into sleep, his head against Andrea’s shoulder.

  9

  21st Side: A Hospital Visit

  The next morning Andrea breakfasted on a croissant and coffee and watched Per. He sat up in bed, the jakke discarded for the moment, and carefully rationed out the food he had left in his pouch. The tray of cereal and croissant meant for him was on the table beside Andrea’s chair. Per had refused to allow it near him.

  The apple, most of the plums and the greater part of the cheese Per put back into the pouch; then he closed it. On the bedcover he arranged the last of the porridge, a small piece of the cheese, a plum and the leather bottle.

  Andrea opened her mouth to speak, and then made herself be quiet. She didn’t want to begin another long, exhausting argument.

  That morning, flattering herself that she could sweet-talk Per into anything, she’d set herself to coax him into agreeing to eat the hospital breakfast. “Nigh,” he’d said, which always sounded more emphatic than “no.”

  So she’d pleaded and begged, looking close into his face and holding his hand, growing more shameless as his face showed that it did distress him to refuse her. She pelted him with endearments, swore on her life and love and honor that it was safe to eat, kissed him, made promises.

  “Entraya! Yi seet nigh!” I said no!

  It was not only disappointing but hurtful, to find that she couldn’t persuade him after all. She lost her temper and called him stupid, telling him that he was only delaying his own recovery and return home. What was he scared of? Was he a coward? She had shouted this, thinking that of all things she could say it was most likely to hurt him, and make him want to prove it untrue.

  Per had grinned. He knew that he wasn’t a coward and, anyway, didn’t much value a woman’s opinion on what did and didn’t make a coward. Her anger was much easier to bear than her pleading. “Honning min, nigh.” Honey mine, no.

  Andrea had knelt beside the bed and reverted to pleading. “Per, it be only because I love thee. I can no stand by and see thee make thysen sick.” She reached for his hands. “When thou wast hurt, I was so scared, and now I be scared again and—”

  “Nigh! Yi seet nigh!” He turned on her so fast, his eyes making that silver flash, that she thought he was going to hit her. “Quiet, woman! Or I’ll close thy mouth!”

  She’d withdrawn to a chair in the far corner of the room, picked up a magazine and pretended to read, though she’d been too angry and upset to follow a word. If he wanted quiet, he could have it. She’d never speak another word to him until he apologized.

  “Entraya. I be sad for what I said.”

  She’d lifted her chin and kept her eyes on the magazine, affecting not to have heard him.

  “Be no angry, Entraya.”

  It was an appeal not to be left alone in this strange, strange land. She’d thrown down the magazine, gone over to the bed, and hugged him.

  Now, while Per nibbled at his bit of cheese, Andrea looked at her watch and put her tray aside. The office would be open. She went to the phone on the wall and dialed for an outside line.

  “Vah air day?” Per asked. What’s that?

  “It be a—a far-speak. No, sshh, Per! I be trying to talk.” She was dialing the number for FUP as she spoke. “Quiet, Per, please!” The switchboard answered. She asked for Windsor’s office, and was put through to his secretary. Windsor, of course, was in a meeting. She asked if she could leave a message for him, and started to explain why she thought it would be best to send Per home as soon as possible—tomorrow, or even today.

  “Vorfar tala thu til ayn vegg?” Per asked. Why do you talk to a wall?

  The secretary promised that she would pass the message on to Windsor the moment she saw him. “Ssh, Per! I’ll explain in an eye-blink.” She dialed again, this time for Dilsmead Hall and, when she got through, asked for Bryce.

  “Hello, Andrea!” Bryce said, when he came on. “I’ve been meaning to come over and see you, but you know the way you get bogged down. How’s the lad?”

  “Well enough to be awkward.” She explained why Per wouldn’t eat. It was a relief to be able to explain it to someone. “I wondered—is there any way you could get hold of some food from 16th side? If he could see it was—”

  “Not before this afternoon. Would that be okay?”

  “Yes! Thank you! Anything will do,” Andrea said. “Bread. Porridge. Whatever.”

  “I’ll do my best. Dunno when I’ll be able to get it over to you, though. Look, leave it with me and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Vah air day?” Per said. He was standing right by her, wearing nothing at all except the dressing on his leg, peering at the telephone. He’d brought the drip stand with him, using it as a sort of crutch.

  “Per, I don’t think you should be standing—”

  “Vem tola thu meth?” Who are you talking with?

  “Is that the lad?” Bryce asked. “Put him on.”

  Andrea held out the phone to Per. He pulled his head back from it but then, his eyes widening, allowed her to hold it to his ear. She heard Bryce’s voice, sounding
tinny, shout, “God dag, Per!”

  Per’s eyes flew wider still and he stepped sharply back. He said, “Be that spirit?” He looked toward where the heart monitor had stood.

  “He thinks you’re a spirit,” Andrea said into the phone. Bryce laughed and said that he’d do his best to get the food sent over.

  Andrea put the phone back in its cradle. Per had retreated to the bed, where he was sitting, unable to take his eyes off the phone.

  She went to sit beside him, her hand naturally slipping around his. His hands always felt hot to her—and big, thin, and very strong. “It was no a ghost. It was a man.”

  “A man?” There was surprise in his voice.

  “I mean an Elf. It be a far-speak. It be for talking to people who’re a long way off. The Elf we spoke to was about a mile away, maybe a bit farther, in a place called Dilsmead Hall.”

  “Where Elf-Gate be,” he said.

  Andrea was startled. She’d forgotten telling him that, and hadn’t expected him to remember it. She looked into his face, unthinkingly raising a hand to touch his cheek, and thought: I underestimate him. Because he was a few years younger than her, she thought of him as sweet and naive and rather silly—but was he, in fact, any of those things?

  She was wondering whether to kiss him, or to wait for him to kiss her, when he got up from the bed and went over to the window, dragging the drip stand with him. “Per! I no think you should walk around so much …”

  He approached the big window with caution, still not sure that it wasn’t a hole in the wall. As he came close to it, he saw that there was something filling the hole, something that caught the light like … ice? He put his hand out and touched a cold, hard surface. His fingers told him it was glass. Startled, he looked up at the top of the window, and to each side, seeing the glass shine here and there. Such an expanse of glass! Flat, thin, utterly clear.

  “Per, come away from window. Per, thou’rt not fit to be seen.”

  He allowed her to pull the lower end of the curtain across between him and the window. Stepping closer, he looked beyond the glass. He saw green: a stretch of neat lawn, with some widely spaced and spindly trees, surrounded by beds of bright flowers. It ended at a wall built of red bricks that were strikingly large and neat, all the same size and almost the same color. To Per, who had never known anything but the hills, and the one small city of Carloel, the sight was almost as alien as the sheet of glass he looked through.

  It was all glamor, illusion, he decided. The grass was so even, so smooth, the flowers so large and garish, the trees so much the same and neatly spaced, that it was obvious they weren’t real, and the Elves had created them all by Elf-Work—just as they made those neat bricks.

  Immediately below the window he could see a gray path, seemingly made of stone—a road such as the old giants used to make. Leaning close to the glass, he followed the gray road with his eyes and saw that it led into a wide area of grayness, very dispiriting to look at, even though it was full of Elf-Carts of every bright, shining color.

  Andrea was saying, again, that he should lie down and rest. He said, “Which way be Dilsssmid Oll?”

  “I no ken,” she said. “At least sit down.” He looked at her in exasperation. “I no ken, Per. I think it might be over that way …” She waved vaguely toward the wall, and where she thought the city center might be. “But I might be wrong.” He gave her another ill-tempered look. It was all right for him. He’d had a lifetime’s training in finding his way over almost trackless hills. She just got on a bus and never gave a thought to which way she was going.

  Per was looking out the window again. “Can Elf-Work only be heard in Dilsssmid Oll?”

  It took her a moment to understand what he was asking. “No. If thou had far-speaks, thou couldst talk to Gobby when he was in his bastle house, and thou wast in thy tower. Tha could speak to folk in Carloel and—London. And Ireland.”

  Per turned to her, his mouth open. “Ireland?” He had never seen London, and had no idea of where it was except that it was somewhere to the south. Ireland, he knew, was even farther, because you crossed the sea to reach it.

  “Per, come and sit, and rest thy leg.”

  He was so struck by the thought of Elf-Worked voices shouting across the sea that he let her tow him to the bed. His leg did hurt, despite the fact that the wound could hardly be seen. He said, “It’d be better than a beacon.”

  She’d gone over to the other side of the room, and had reached up to a glass-fronted box hung high on the wall. Looking over her shoulder, she said, “What?”

  “Far-speak. Better than a beacon. Tha’d talk into it and say …” He gave some thought to what you would say. “Sterkarm!”

  Andrea blinked at the vision of a ride of lancers in iron helmets and jakkes being summoned by mobile telephone. Then she couldn’t help but be impressed by the speed with which he’d grasped how useful a telephone would be. “Better than that. You could tell whoever you were calling exactly what was wrong, and how many men you needed and where you wanted them to go, by which way.”

  She heard him gasp and looked back at him again to see him sitting on the bed, in the full light from the windows, his mouth open and his face delighted. The sunlight caught his fair hair, polished his skin and, she thought, made him look just beautiful. It was a shame to have to say, “FUP will never let you have far-speaks, Per.”

  He turned and gave her a long stare. His eyes caught the light and turned silver. There was a lot of thought behind that stare.

  “I’ll put far-see on,” she said, and reached up to switch on the television. Distraction was called for, she thought, for both of them.

  Per looked up at the glass-fronted box, and watched it fill with colors. He didn’t understand why Andrea seemed to think so much of it. True, if you studied the ever-changing shapes and splotches of color carefully enough, a picture would suddenly form in them—but as soon as it was glimpsed, it would whirl away as the shapes melted and the colors changed. The thing was noisy too, blaring and yelling with sounds that made him jump.

  Andrea was flipping through the channels, looking for something that might interest him. She happened on a news station, and the screen filled with angry, yelling people struggling against soldiers armed with shields and batons. There was no fancy camera work, and Per sat up straighter, exclaiming. He pointed as a mounted man leaned down from his horse and laid his baton hard across a man’s shoulder.

  “Wherefore be it called a far-see? Be it like far-speak? Does it see this happening?”

  “This is happening a long way away, Per.”

  “What, London?”

  “Farther than London. Over sea.”

  “Farther than …” He fell silent as the picture changed. He didn’t know how or why the picture kept changing. The box hadn’t moved, so it wasn’t looking in another direction. Maybe there was a spirit in it, and the spirit was turning its head and looking at something else …

  Big carts moved through a crowd of people, making them scatter. Some men on the carts held long—Per didn’t know what they were, but they flashed fire and made a clattering noise, and the people in the crowd ran away when they did. He guessed that the things were weapons. They seemed to be a little like pistols, though they could be fired faster and more often than any pistol he knew. But Elf-wrought things were always better.

  The spirit looked at something else. This time it was seeing corpses, and seeming to turn its head slowly as it looked at more and more of them. Per knew they were corpses, because he recognized the peculiar broomstick stiffness of the dead. No one living lies as rigidly as that, even if senseless.

  “Be they Elves?” he asked.

  Andrea nodded, feeling ashamed. “It be a war.”

  The spirit was looking at dead women and dead bairns, toppling backward from a heap. “Elven fight hard wars,” Per said. Women and bairns were always
in danger if captured … but to deliberately seek out women and bairns in such numbers as this, and to kill them all and pile them up … “Tha means a feud,” he said. A bitter blood feud, one that had dragged on so long that the families were half ruined and desperate to finish it … But you would have to be desperate. He had good reason to hate the Grannams, but he wouldn’t have the stomach to stand and butcher even Grannam women and bairns in such numbers, not even if he was drunk on festival ale.

  “No, a war,” Andrea said, changing the channel. “I no ken even which one.” She’d lost touch with who was killing who these days while she’d been in the 16th, and the commentary hadn’t given many clues. “Oh look, Per! A tiger!” A wildlife channel. That was more like it.

  Per, looking up at the screen, saw only that it was a dazzle of black, gold and green, while new noise blared from it. But then the spirit stood back, and what it saw made sense—of a sort. Per sat up straight again and his mouth fell open. A big animal, more vividly striped than a ginger tabby, strode through greenery. Leaped into a river. “What be it?”

  She sat beside him on the bed. “A big cat. It be cried a ‘tiger.’”

  “How big be it?”

  “Oh … big. As long as one of thine horses. And about half as high. Look at those teeth!” The spirit had moved close, and they saw the tiger open its mouth. It was the skin that Per admired, though. To go home with a skin like that!

  “Be there any nearby?”

  “There be none left anywhere, not anymore.” He looked at her blankly. “They be all dead.” Raising one hand, he pointed toward the television. “Well, that tiger was alive once, but it be dead now, like all others.”

  He seemed puzzled. “Every one? Every last one?”

  “It be what we call ‘extinct.’ It means that, aye, every last one is dead. There be no more tigers.”

  The screen showed a tigress rolling on her back, playing with her cubs. “How can far-see show us a tiger if there be no tiger for it to see?”