The Many-Coloured Land sope-1

by Julian May

  The second route would have them sailing southeast across the widest part of the lake to the shore of the Jura piedmont some sixty kilometers away, then continuing south into the mountain range itself. There seemed an excellent chance that the land in that direction was completely uninhabited, since beyond the Jura lay the Alps. On the other hand, the lakeside forts were likely to have boats of their own that could be used for pursuit. The escapees might outsail the Tanu minions; but the breeze was fitful and the nearly cloudless sky suggested that the air might go dead calm as it had the day before. If the boats were becalmed at nightfall, they might attract the attention of the Firvulag.

  Basil had confidently elected for the Jura route, while Claude’s conservatism inclined him to hold out for the Vosges. But the climber was most persuasive to the majority, so in the end it was decided that all of the time-travelers except the remnant of Group Green and Yosh, the surviving ronin, would go south. The prisoners had hastily unloaded their baggage from the chalikos and followed a gully down to a tiny beach below the cliff. There boats could be launched. A few of the small craft were already spreading their sails when Richard completed ballasting the two Green boats and scrambled back up the embankment in search of the others.

  He discovered Claude, Amerie, and Yosh standing over Felice’s unconscious body. The Japanese warrior said, “I’ve found Claude’s woodworking tools and the knives and hatchets and saws from our Survival and Smallholder Units.” He held out a hideously stained packet to Richard. “And here are also a soldier’s bow and arrows that the Gypsies overlooked.”

  “We’re grateful, Yosh,” said the old man. “The bow could be very important. We have very little food except for the survival rations, and the kits have only snares and fishing gear. The people going south with Basil will have time to make new weapons if they reach the Jura shore. But our Group will be in much more danger of land pursuit. We’ll have to keep moving and do our hunting on the run.”

  “But you should go with us, Yosh,” Amerie said. “Won’t you change your mind?”

  “I have my own Survival Unit and Tat’s lance. I’ll take the rest of the tools that I scavenged down to the people on the shore. But I won’t go with them, and I won’t go with you.” He gestured to the sky, where dark specks wore already circling in the morning gold. “I have a duty here. The Reverend Sister has given my poor friend the Blessing of Departure. But Tat must not be left to the scavengers. When I’ve finished, I plan to head due north on foot to the River Marne. It joins the Pliocene Seine and the Seine flows into the Atlantic, I don’t think the Tanu will bother to track one man.”

  “Well, don’t hang around here too long,” Richard said dubiously.

  The ronin knelt swiftly beside Felice’s limp form and kissed her brow. His grim eyes swept those of the others. “You must take good care of this mad child. We owe her our freedom, and if God wills she may yet accomplish her purpose. The potential rests in her.”

  “We know,” said the nun. “Go blessed, Yoshimitsu-san.”

  The warrior got to his feet, bowed, and left them.

  “Time for us to go, too,” said Claude. He and Amerie picked up the pathetically light body of the girl while Richard gathered her helmet and pack, together with tools and weapons.

  “I can sail single-handed,” the pirate said when they reached the waiting boats. “Put Felice in with me and you two follow.”

  They shoved off, the last to set sail, and relaxed only when they were far out from land. The lake waters were cold and of an opaque blue, fed by rivers running out of the Jura and the Vosges forest to the northeast. Amerie stared at the receding shore, where carrion birds were gradually descending.

  “Claude… I’ve been thinking. Why didn’t Epone die sooner from those dreadful wounds? She was literally torn to pieces before Richard and Yosh and Dougal ever got near her. She should have bled to death or died from hypovolemic shock. But she didn’t.”

  “The people at the fort told you that the Tanu were nearly invulnerable. What did you think they meant?”

  “I don’t know, perhaps I assumed that the exotics were able to use their coercive power to fend off attackers. But I never dreamed a Tanu could survive such physical punishment. It’s hard not to think of them as approximately human, given that breeding scheme Epone spoke to us about.”

  “Even human beings without metafunctions have been mighty tenacious of life. I’ve seen things in the colonies that were damn near miraculous. And when you consider the enhancement of mental powers that the Tanu achieve with the torc…”

  “I wonder if they have regenerative facilities here in Exile?”

  “I should think so, in the cities. And God knows what other kinds of technology they have. So far, we’ve only seen the torcs, the mind assayer, and that frisking device they used on us when we first came through the time-portal.”

  “Ah, yes. And that brings us to the lethal dagger.”

  The old man stripped off his bush jacket and pillowed his back against one of the boat seats. “I don’t doubt that our anthropologist friend Bryan could tell us all about the legendary faerie antipathy toward iron. He’d probably explain it in terms of the ancient tensions between Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures… Be that as it may, European folklore is almost universal in believing that iron is repugnant or even deadly to the Old People.”

  The nun burst out, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Claude! Epone was an exotic, not some bloody elf!”

  “Then you tell me why bear-dog bites and dismemberment and stab wounds from a bronze sword didn’t finish her off, while a single thrust from a steel knife blade did.”

  Amerie considered. “It may be that the iron interferes in some way with the function of the torc. The blood of the Tanu is red, just like ours, and probably just as iron-rich. Their bodies and minds and the torc might operate in a delicate harmony that could be upset by the introduction of a gross mass of iron. Iron might even wonk them up if it just came near the body’s intimate aura. Remember Stein and his battle-axe? None of the castle people was able to prevent him from doing terrible damage, which didn’t strike me as strange at the time. But with what we know now, it seems significant.

  “They frisked us thoroughly enough,” Claude said. “I can understand why the guardians weren’t able to pry Stein loose from his axe. But how did Felice’s knife slip through?”

  “I can’t imagine, unless they were careless and didn’t sweep her leg. Or perhaps the gold of the scabbard confused the detector. It suggests possibilities for counter-tactics.”

  Claude studied her through half-closed lids. There was an intensity about her that was new and startling. “Now you’re beginning to sound like Felice! That child has no qualms about taking on the whole Tanu race. Never mind that they control the friggerty planet!”

  Amerie flashed him an odd smile. “But it’s our planet. And six million years from now, we’ll be here. And they won’t.”

  She snugged the tiller under her arm and kept the boat racing eastward, its sail taut before the freshening breeze.

  They came up behind a marshy island, hauled down sails and unstepped and deflated masts and centreboards. Armloads of reeds and young willows were cut to disguise the boats. They substituted rear mounted decamole sculling oars for the sailing rudders. A person crouched low in the stern could impart a barely perceptible forward motion by wagging the oar back and forth.

  Richard protested, “It’ll take us two hours to travel the half klom to the shore at this rate.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Claude warned him. “Sound travels over water.” He brought his boat close to Richard’s. “Somewhere on that shore is the trail, maybe even the fort where we were scheduled to stop for sleep this morning. We’ve got to be careful about showing ourselves until we’re sure the coast is clear. “Richard laughed nervously. “The coast is clear! So that’s where the cliche came from! Probably pirates…”

  “Shut up, son,” said the old man, weariness making his low voice hars
h. “Just follow me from here on in and pretend you’re a collection of flotsam.”

  Claude sculled so slowly that there was no wake; they seemed to drift from islet to islet, gradually approaching a low-lying shore where reeds and sedges grew more than five meters tall and long-shanked water birds with plumage of pink and blue and dazzling white stalked the shallows, jabbing at frogs and fish with their beaks.

  The sun rose higher. It became excruciatingly hot and humid. Some kind of biting midge zeroed in on them, trapped as they were beneath the concealing greenery, and raised itching welts before they could find repellant in their awkwardly stowed packs. After a tedious interval of paddling, they scraped bottom on a jungle mudflat where many of the bamboos had trunks as thick as a man’s thigh. Broadleaf evergreen trees perfumed the air with sickly sweet flowers. There was a game trail in the mud, heavily trampled by large flat feet. It looked as though it would lead them to higher ground.

  “This is it,” Claude said. “We deflate the dinghies and hike from here.”

  Richard extracted himself from the mass of stalks and branches in his boat and surveyed the site with disgust. “Jesus, Claude. Did you have to land us in a fuckin’ swamp? Talk about the green hells! This place is probably crawling with snakes. And will you look at those footprints? Some mighty ugly mothers been cruising through here!”

  “Oh, stuff it, Richard,” Amerie said. “Help me get Felice ashore and I’ll try to revive her while you guys…”

  “Get down, everybody!” the old man whispered urgently.

  They crouched low in the boats and stared in the direction from which they had come. Out beyond the marshy little islands, where the lake was deep and the breeze blew unimpeded, were a pair of seven-meter catboats that bore no resemblance to any of the craft launched by the escapees. They were slowly tacking northward.

  “Well, now we know where the fort must be,” Claude remarked. “South of here and most likely not very far away. They’ve probably got oculars on board so well have to stay down until they get around that point.”

  They waited. Sweat trickled down various body surfaces and made them itch. The frustrated midges whined and went on sorties against their unprotected eyeballs and nostrils. Claude’s belly rumbled, reminding him that he had not eaten in nearly twelve hours. Richard discovered a sticky gash hidden in the hair above his left ear, and so did the local variety of blow-fly. Amerie made a desultory attempt to pray; but her memory bank refused to pay out any withdrawals except the grace before meals and “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.”

  Felice moaned.

  “Cover her mouth, Richard,” Claude said. “Keep her quiet for just a few minutes longer.”

  Somewhere, ducks were quacking. Somewhere else, an animal was snuffling and slurping and breaking the giant bamboos like twigs as it sought its lunch. And elsewhere still, the silver sound of a horn sang on the limit of audibility, to be followed seconds later by a louder response farther north.

  The old paleontologist sighed. “They’re out of sight. Let’s deflate these boats and move on.”

  The power-inflators, used in reverse, swiftly sucked both air and water out of the decamole membranes, reducing the boats to spheres the size of Ping-Pong balls. While Amerie revived Felice with a dose of stimulant, Claude rummaged in his pack for survival-ration biscuits and fortified candy, which he shared with the others.

  Felice was listless and disoriented but seemed well enough to walk. Claude tried to get her to remove her leather cuirass, greaves, and gauntlets, which had to be acutely uncomfortable in the muggy atmosphere of the marsh; but she refused, only agreeing to keep her helmet stowed in the pack when Claude pointed out that its plumage might betray them to searchers. As a final ritual they daubed each other with camouflaging mud, then set off with Claude in the lead, Richard following, and Amerie and Felice bringing up the rear. The ring-hockey player had appropriated the bow and arrows.

  They went quietly along the trail, which was wide enough for them to travel in comfort, a circumstance that pleased Richard and the women but rather alarmed the more wilderness-wise Claude. For nearly two kilometers they slogged through stands of bamboo, alder, willow, and semitropical evergreens, some trees laden with fruits of russet and purple, which Claude warned them against sampling. To their surprise, the only wildlife encountered was birds and giant leeches. The ground became higher and drier and they passed into dense forest, loud with bird and animal voices. The trees were draped in vines and the undergrowth formed a mass of impenetrable thorn bushes on both side of the trail.

  At length the gloomy greenness gave way to sunlight as the trees thinned. Claude held up his hand as a signal for them to stop. “Not a peep out of you,” he breathed. “I was half expecting to meet something like this.”

  They gazed through a thin screen of young trees into an open meadow with scattered clumps of bushes. Cropping the shrubbery was a herd of six adult and three juvenile rhinos. The full-grown specimens were about four meters in length and might have weighed two or three tons. They had two horns, piggy little eyes, and quaintly tufted ears that waggled as flies buzzed around them.

  “Dicerorhinus schliennacheri, I’d say,” Claude whispered. “This is their trail we’ve been using.”

  Felice stepped forward, nocking a razor-sharp arrow. “It’s a good thing the wind is with us. Let me feel around their minds for a while and see if I can move them.”

  Richard said, “Meanwhile, we can hope they don’t get thirsty.”

  Leaving Felice to experiment with her coercive power, the others withdrew back along the trail into a sunny glen at one side, where they sat down to rest. Richard planted a straight stick about as long as his arm upright in a patch of soil, marking the position of the shadow’s tip with a small stone.

  “Making a sundial?” Amerie inquired.

  The pirate grimaced. “If we stay here long enough, we can get a fix. The tip of the shadow moves as the sun seems to travel across the sky. You wait, mark the new position of the shadow tip with another stone. Connect the two stones with a line and you got an east-west bearing. If we want to reach those highlands by the shortest route, I think we’ve got to bear more to the left than we’ve been going on this trail. It was nearly an hour before Felice returned to tell them that it was safe to cross the meadow. They chose a new route according to Richard’s aboriginal navigation; but without a convenient animal track to follow, they were forced to go cross-country through the tangled, thorn-choked forest under-storey. It was impossible to travel quietly and the wildlife was making a racket like feeding time at the zoo; so they threw caution to the winds and broke out the vitredur hatchets and Claude’s big carpenter’s axe and hacked a trail. After two exhausting hours of this, they came upon a sizable creek and were able to follow it upstream into a slightly more open section of forest.

  “We’re on the bench above the lake now,” Claude said. “The trail to the fort must be near. Be very quiet and keep your ears open.”

  They crept onward, skulking in the shadows of giant conifers, cycads, and ferns. Anticlimactically, they blundered right into the trail when they had to alter course to avoid a spider-web the size of a banquet tablecloth. The bush-constricted track was deserted.

  Felice bent over a pile of chaliko dung. “Cold. They must have passed here two hours ago. See the prints heading north?”

  “They’ll be coming back,” Claude said. “And if they have amphicyons, they’ll be able to track us. Let’s blot out our own prints and get out of here. Once we get higher, there should be fewer trees and easier going. We’ll have to follow another stream somewhere to kill our scent.”

  The trees did become more widely separated as they continued upslope, but the going was hardly easy. They followed a dry watercourse for most of an hour before the gentle grade above the bench steepened to a bluff studded with house-sized chunks of rock. The wind died and the heat of mid-afternoon smote them as they climbed.

  At times when they rested, they could see out ov
er the great lake. There were sails far to the south, apparently motionless on the water. It was impossible to tell whether they belonged to the gray-torc marines or to the escapees. They wondered out loud about the fate of Basil and his contingent, about Yosh, and about the Gypsies and their quixotic foray against the guard post; but the trail talk dwindled as they were forced to save their breath for more difficult climbing. Hope that they would be able to cross the first high ridge began to fade after one of Richard’s plass-and-fabric running shoes was slashed by a rock and he had to put on the more awkward seaboots of his original costume. Then Amerie’s saddle sore legs betrayed her on a treacherous slope and she lost her footing, dislodging several large stones that tumbled down upon Claude and bruised his arm and shoulder.

  “Well never make it to the top today,” Richard groused. “My left heel is one big blister and Amerie is ready to collapse.” Felice said, “It’s only a couple of hundred more meters. If you can’t climb, I’ll carry you up! I want to get a view of the terrain we’re heading into tomorrow. With luck, we might be able to see the bonfires from the fort or even trail beacons below us once it gets dark.”

  Claude declared he could manage on his own. Felice gave one hand to Richard and the other to the nun and hauled them up after her by main strength. It was slow going, but they were finally able to reach the top shortly after the sun descended behind the hills on the other side of the lake.

  When they had regained their wind, Claude said, “Why don’t we hole up on the eastern side of these big boulders? There’s a nice dry shelter in there and I don’t think anyone below could spot a fire if we lit one after nightfall. I could gather some wood.”

  “Good idea,” said Felice. “I’ll scout around a bit.” She went off among the crags and gnarled savin junipers while the others tended their wounds, inflated decamole cots and weighted the legs with earth, because there was no water to waste, and regretfully laid out a meal of biscuits, nutrient wafers, and cheesy-tasting algiprote. By the time Claude had assembled a pile of dry branches, Felice was back, her bow resting jauntily over her shoulder, swinging three fat marmot-like animals by their hind legs.