The steward seemed to understand what he was saying so Paul went on to ask about the old ships that he had seen. The old man paused and Lynella took the opportunity to tell Paul about the other castles and the festivals. She was still describing the Eastern castle when her mother entered the room, ‘You are spending too much time in here Lynella, you must leave the men to their discussions’
Lynella ignored her and said to Paul, ‘Since you have to hurry back in the morning, there will be no time to look round the castle. Would you like to see a bit of it now?’
‘Out of the question,’ her mother cut in.
‘You can't stop me,’ Lynella replied
‘Technically not, but the steward of the kingdom can. You may be able to call yourself an adult now, but he can still stop you.’ She glared at the steward.
Paul felt uneasy as the steward looked from one to the other, before addressing the older lady. ‘In this matter, I must consider both the benefit of the Princess and that of the family.’ His soothing tone was met by a menacing scowl. ‘It may be somewhat unconventional for this visitor to be escorted around the castle by the Princess.’ He paused to think of suitable words. ‘But it would certainly bring considerable benefit to the family if she was to associate with a gentleman who can fly ships.’
‘You're saying we should let her just wander about with him?’ the lady's voice carried a biting scorn which showed the signs of many years of use.
The steward was unconcerned. ‘Yes, in effect, I am. You prevented her from meeting men from the other families and you even tried to send her to the monastery. I am not going to stop her. She is, as you said, an adult now.’
Lynella grinned triumphantly as her mother left the room. She turned to Paul and, when asked again, he agreed to go. But they were not alone. The girl from the dining room followed them like a ghost. Lynella called her and introduced her as Maria. She smiled with a melting warmth but said nothing, withdrawing but never leaving.
The other rooms of the castle were cold and poorly lit but still magnificent. In each they found footmen and maids hurriedly lighting lamps. Finally, they found themselves on their own in a small anteroom with doors at both ends and a long window. The lanterns in the courtyard outside cast flickering shadows on the opposite wall. He suggested that they sit on a seat by the window and to his surprise, she accepted. ‘I'm sorry you've got to go back so soon. When can you come again?’
‘I'll try and sort out the rota and come back in about four days.’
‘I have a little gift for you to take with you.’ Maria emerged from the shadows and passed her a soft leather purse. She carefully untied it produced four intricately decorated semi-circles made of a bright metal that looked like silver. She passed one of them to him and he held it up to the light to admire the workmanship. It felt heavy, hard and utterly cold. The patterns of the design on it resembled those he had seen on the marker stones. She smiled at him. ‘They're bracelets, it is a tradition that people here wear them’
‘But how?’ There was no sign of any way of joining them. The ends we plain and flat.
‘Let me show you. Hold out your wrist’
He held it out. First, she produced a thin flexible strip of wood from the purse and wrapped it round his wrist. Then she took two of the semi-circles, placing them around it. Taking two more small strips of wood to hold against them, she held the two halves together with the ends pushed against each other. She then paused and concentrated on the ring. He felt a pulsing warmth from it. In a moment, she let go and he saw that the bracelet was now a continuous silver band with no sign of ever having been in two halves.
‘How did you do that?’ He asked
She touched her finger to his lips.
He might look a bit of a fool if someone found him in the fitters' shop cutting them off, but apart from that, they seemed harmless. He let her put another one on his other wrist in the vain hope that he might work out how she was doing it. When they were both on, he noticed scorch marks on the wood.
A few moments later, he glanced at his watch. It had stopped. The display was completely dark.
‘Please don't tell the others about them,’ she said.
‘Why not? You haven't stolen them for me, have you?’
‘No. Just please keep them hidden for a bit.’
She stood up and they walked slowly back to join her family.
The next morning, the sounds of the castle woke him early and he immediately felt the strange metal bands round his wrists. In the early light, he was able to look at them more closely. From the colour and weight, he guessed that they might be solid silver. There was absolutely no sign of how they were joined together. When he stood up and walked about they seemed to tremble slightly as if they noticed what he was doing, but when he stopped moving they were cold and lifeless. He pulled the sleeves of his shirt over them and went down to breakfast.
The steward was already at the table. ‘Good morning, I hope you slept well.’
‘Very well thank you,’ Paul replied sleepily.
The steward went on, ‘I am glad to hear that you will be returning. I shall tell the other members of the High Council that you and your crew don't plan to remain permanently at the source, and I hope that a compromise may be reached.’
Paul mused that if they never went into the source area then they would not notice the lack of five hundred thousand tonnes of titanium, zinc and other metals, and the environmental catastrophe that would be created by strip mining and smelting them. The idea of staying on this planet was, however, growing on him and the thought of the deception made him feel very uncomfortable.
Soon they went out to their horses. He looked up to the side of the courtyard and saw the window where they had been sitting the night before and wondered what the secrets were that were being kept from him.
The soldiers rode with them as far as the edge of the source. Paul then went on alone and on foot to find his Jeep. He felt a sense of betrayal as he set out in defiance of their compact but Lynella seemed to understand his position and to know that he would return.
It was still early in the day and Lynella liked to sit alone by the one remaining ship in the crucibles, so she asked the soldiers to move away up the hill and wait for her. On this occasion, she decided to climb over the low wall and sit right on the vast iron ring. The superstructure had been gone for generations, so this was as close as she could get to imagining what they had been like to fly on. As the sun grew hotter, she daydreamed about the stories of the ancients. Then suddenly the pain was back in her head. The alien ship must be overhead. In a surge of anger, she held her jewel to her forehead. She let her mind enter the iron below her and fought back. Now the searing torture that was engulfing her. The iron could absorb her anger and reduce the pain. She drove harder. Suddenly, she felt it move beneath her. It was rising up, trying to fly as it had for the ancient mages. She tried to hold on to the rusting surface, losing her concentration. It fell back with a crash that echoed across the valley.
On the Atlanta, a technician cursed. The routine orbital adjustment manoeuvre had not worked as planned. An unusual magnetic pulse from the anomaly below had interfered with the pulse from their own drive, and meant that they would have to do it all again next time around or the Captain would start complaining that they were at the wrong altitude.
7
While Paul had been gone, chaos had spread across his site. An air of desperation had spread like wildfire. A bearing in one of the big scraper units had failed and, rather than run it back down hill and empty it, the foreman had decided to try and push it up with two bulldozers and unload it on the spoil heap. Now it lay on its side, having skidded off the road. The cab was pointing almost straight up into the air. The oil had run out of the engine in front of it, splashed on the enormous tyre and spread out on the grass below. The articulated joint had been bent right back on itself as the weight of the load had driven it down into the earth. The steering ram on the side he could see had been
forced in on itself and the hose had burst spraying the area with hydraulic oil. All of the structure around the joint was bent and buckled. The unit had been abandoned; the crew had simply tried to work the others harder to make up for lost time. The machines had worked faster, and with less care. Many of the setting out posts had been lost and a second unit was now stuck on the far side of the field, having moved out too far onto the bad ground.
‘I don't care how long it takes to unload it. Dig it out by hand if you have to. I have arranged for a rough terrain crane to come down from the ship tomorrow to get it out.’ He looked at the foreman, wondering what would happen if he just refused.
‘You're seriously going to try to get the fitters to mend that, are you? It's a write off!’ The man was obviously too stupid to understand that, for the next two years, this plant was all they had. If he had been brighter, he would probably not have been on the planet in the first place.
‘It's going back to the ship. They can fix it up there. You get the bloody thing back to the compound and let me worry about the rest.’ And worry he would. If he could not deliver this plant to the mines in working order when the landing site was completed, he was in deep trouble.
They drove across to the other machine. The setting out engineers were working at replacing the posts that showed the outline of the site. Three concentric circles. The inner one was half a mile across and showed the extent of the great hole that they were digging for the hub. The other two were quite close together and two miles across. They marked out the trench that would take the torus.
The other excavator was easier. It had moved off the area where they had removed the boggy topsoil, but it was not on a haul road, so it could be unloaded where it was. It all seemed quite simple to him, but the foreman was obviously not up to it.
8
Across the flat, windy grassland he saw Lynella in the distance, walking alone towards the edge of the source.
By the time he reached he she was waiting for him by one of the marker stones. ‘I've come back, just like I said I would, but I can't stay for too long. It was chaos back there.’
‘I would like you to meet some important men in this kingdom,’ she replied, sounding tense and turning to walk towards the crucibles, leaving him to follow a few paces behind.
He suddenly saw a group of people moving quickly towards him from one side. He guessed that they had stayed out of sight behind some bushes. They were behind him almost immediately, cutting off his retreat. He turned to face them and stopped in surprise. There were six of them. The steward was there but he was the odd one out. The other five were wearing brown hooded cloaks and had crucifixes hanging from chains around their necks.
The steward presented the leader of the party followed by the others, ‘I am so glad you could come. Let me introduce the Abbot of the Monastery of St Christopher and these fellow members of his order.’
The Abbot was clearly different; his crucifix was more ornate and there was a total stillness around him; his robes were not moving in the wind and even the grass near his feet was perfectly still. The man stared at Paul with an intensity which might have terrified him but, on this occasion, it gave him a great inner strength.
‘I am more pleased than you can imagine to meet you. My faith is very important to me and there are few on my ship who will share it with me. I hope that we can spend some time in prayer together.’ The Abbot’s well-rehearsed stare faltered; even his aura now appeared uncertain. One of the other monks, an old and gentle looking man with a pleasant smile and a walking stick to rest on, replied, ‘It would please the Abbot greatly if you could come to the monastery with us. It is only a few days ride from here. You would find peace there for your prayers.’
‘Quite so’ the Abbot added.
‘Unfortunately, I cannot go that far today. As I was saying to Lynella, I have urgent duties to attend to. In a few months, though, my workload will drop off a lot and I would love to go.’ They did not look as if they had come all this way for this type of response.
‘Perhaps, you could all come to the castle?’ Lynella suggested.
‘No,’ replied the Abbot and this time, his stare, directed at her, worked perfectly and she moved nervously across to stand next to the steward.
‘You shall come to the monastery and repent your sins. The needs of your immortal soul are greater than the needs of your duties at the source.’ The monks moved towards him. Two of them were large and looked exceptionally fit. Horses were brought and Lynella and the Steward stood helplessly as he was ordered to mount one of them.
Paul had only arranged to be away for two days this time. He had to return; the consequences of dereliction of duty on this mission were loss of pay and imprisonment. Starting to sweat he reached into his backpack and pulled out his gun. He knew from his last visit that nobody would know what it was, and the Abbot just looked with amused interest as he loaded it.
‘What is that?’ He asked
‘Watch,’ said Paul and he fired it at a small rock. The bang made the horses start and the rock flew backwards.
‘This is a gun. It can kill you,’ he said pointing it at all of them.
‘Now, let me go back to my ship.’ They all moved back, except for the Abbot who just sat on his horse, a look of confidence on his face.
‘I mean it, I cannot let you take me prisoner.’ But the Abbot simply moved his horse to block Paul's path and prevent him from escaping. In complete panic, Paul fired at the Abbot's leg. He hoped that the wound would not be too severe, but he had to get away. The leg jerked back but showed no sign of injury and, in front of it, suspended in the air, Paul saw a small black object. The Abbot smiled and leant down to pick it up. The smile immediately left his face as he touched it. The bullet was almost red hot.
After a considerable argument, the Abbot had persuaded Lynella and the Steward to return home and, for the first hour Paul and the monks rode in silence. At last, he summoned the courage to try to find out what was going on. He moved up to ride beside the Abbot.
‘What is it you want from me?’ He asked.
‘Your ship brings evil to us. We must exorcise the devil from your soul. Then you will work with us.’
‘I accept that the Devil is at work in our world. Events in my life have given me a clear picture of his influence, but what can I do about it? Taking me away from my work will simply get me into trouble and prevent me from doing anything to help you.’
The Abbot paused, seeming unable to think of a reply.
They moved east following the marker stones at the edge of the source. Paul had seen the terrain from the ship, but it was still difficult to work out where they were. To the left there was the edge of the forest which grew in the source. There was no sign of the familiar trees from earth. The giant ferns were a far paler green than any tree he knew, and they formed a solid line, concealing all that lay beyond them. To the right, the steep hillside behind the crucibles had given way to rolling hills of coarse grassland. Gradually, the open country gave way to forest and it covered the land ahead. They were soon moving through a clearing where the ferns had been cut back to keep the road clear leaving a solid wall of dense growth to either side obscuring any view of the landscape.
After some time, he saw a horse and cart approaching them in the distance. Having seen the way in which the Abbot had forced the steward to leave him, Paul had no hopes of escape and simply watched with curiosity as they passed by.
In the middle of the day the party stopped to rest. Paul almost fell to the ground and only stood up with considerable difficulty.
‘What's wrong with you? You've only been riding a horse! If you want anything to drink, come here.’ The Abbot looked at him with disdain. Paul decided that he was in no mood to argue so he staggered towards him. He was given an earthenware mug with water in it. He sat down on a fallen tree trunk and was joined by the older monk who had spoken to him earlier.
‘I am Brother Andrew. You must accept that the road to salvation
is often long and hard. But this road seems to be much harder for you than it is for us. Are you not used to travelling on horses?’
‘No, I'm not. You see, the world that I come from is completely different. Please go and persuade the Abbot that I can't do anything for him. Taking me away like this won't do anybody any good and will get me into a lot of trouble.’
The old monk smiled at him in an understanding way. ‘I'm sure that it will all work out all right in the end. Perhaps he will go and talk to your superiors and explain to them about the needs of your soul. They must understand.... You say that you don't use horses. We know that you can fly ships. You mean to say that you go everywhere in them and don't need the horses?’
‘No, we have things like cars and planes that you don't have here.’
‘What are they? Do they work in the same way as the ships?’
‘If you want to find out how our machines work, I shall be happy to tell you some other time, but right now, I want to go back to my ship. If you really want me along for some sort of religious ceremony, let's get on with it.’
‘Saving your soul is not as simple as you think. I have been assigned to you as your mentor and it will take many hours of discussion and meditation. You must trust me to guide the discussion.’
Ringships Page 5