He said: “She has woken something from the Old Science. I am sorry for that man, and I see each of us in him—” He slid the shards of the nameless sword one by one into his scabbard. “We are all dead men, Grif.” He stood up, his muscles aching from the long night. “I’ll make ready my horse. We had best to move on.”
Perched on an overhanging bough with pale turquoise bark, the metal lammergeyer eyed him silently.
“Sure you won’t have some pig?” offered Theomeris Glyn.
They reached the northerly bounds of the marsh without further loss of men. By afternoon on the fourth day the gaudy foliage had thinned sufficiently to reveal a sky overcast but of more acceptable colour. Their speed increased as the going firmed steadily. The bog broke up into irregular patches separated by wide, flat causeways, tending to the colour of rust as they moved north. A cold wind billowed their cloaks, plucked at Cromis’s torn mail, and fine rain dulled the hides of the horses.
Stretching east and west in a great lazy curve, the terminal barrens of the Great Brown Waste barred their way: chains of dun-coloured dunes interconnecting to form a low scarp, the face of which was cut and seamed by massive gully erosion.
“We are lucky to come here in winter,” said Birkin Grif, twisting in his saddle as he led the company in single file up the gently sloping cleft worn by a black and gelid stream. Walls of damp russet loess reared lifelessly on either side. “Although the winds are stronger, they carry more moisture to lay the soil. The waste is not a true desert.”
Cromis nodded dully. In the Low Leedale it had been autumn yet, but that was hard to believe here. He fixed his eyes on the narrow strip of sky beyond the lips of the ravine, wishing for Balmacara, where the year died more happily.
“There is slightly less danger of earth-falls, you understand, and clouds of dust. In summer, one might choke to death, even here on the edge.”
From the uncomfortable sky, Cromis shifted his gaze to the file of men behind him. They were lost in a mist of rain, dim shapes huddled and silent on tired mounts.
At the top of the gully, the entire company halted, and by common, unspoken consent, fanned out along the crest of a dune: each man held solitary and introspective by the bleak panorama before him.
The Waste rolled north—umber and ochre, dead, endless. Intersecting streams with high, vertical banks scored deep, meaningless ideographs in the earth. In the distance, distorted into deceptive, organic forms, metal girders poked accusing fingers at the empty air, as if there the Rust Desert might fix the source of its millennial pain. Grif’s smugglers muttered, and found that a narrowed eye might discern certain slow but definite movements among the baffling curves of the landscape.
But tegeus-Cromis turned his horse to face away from the spoiled land, and stared back at the mauve haze that marked the marshes. He was much preoccupied by giants.
5
“We should not strive too hard to imitate the Afternoon Cultures,” said Grif. “They killed this place with industry and left it for the big monitors. In part, if not in whole, they fell because they exhausted the land. We mine the metal they once used, for instance, because there is no ore left in the earth.
“And in using it all up, they dictated that our achievements should be of a different quality to theirs—”
“There will be no more Name Stars,” murmured Cromis, looking up from the fragments of his sword. Dusk had drawn a brown veil across the wastes, amplifying the peculiar vagueness of the dune landscape. It was cold. As yet, they had seen no lizards: merely the slow, indistinct movements among the dunes that indicated their presence.
“Or any more of this,” said Grif, bleakly.
They had made camp amid the ruins of a single vast, roofless building of vanished purpose and complicated ground plan. Although nine tenths of it had sunk long ago beneath the bitter earth, the remains that reared around them rose fifty or sixty feet into the twilight. A feeble wind mumbled in off the waste and mourned over their indistinct summits. Among the dunes meandered a vile, sour watercourse, choked with stones worn and scoured by Time.
Two or three fires burned in the lee of a broken load wall. Grif’s men tended them silently. Infected by the bleakness of the waste, they had picketed the horses close, and the perimeter guards kept well within sight of the main body.
“There will be no more of anything soon,” said Theomeris Glyn. “The Moidart, the Afternoon Cultures—both are Time by another name. You are sentimentalists, lacking a proper sense of perspective. When you get to my age—”
“We will grow bored and boring, and make fools of ourselves with dirty girls in Duirinish. It will be a fine time, that.”
“You may not make it that far, Birkin Grif,” said the old man darkly.
Since Cromis’s fight in the Metal-Salt Marsh, Cellur’s mechanical vulture had spent most of its time in the air, wheeling in great slow circles over the waste. It would report nothing it had seen from that vantage. Now it perched just beyond the circle of firelight and said:
“Post-industrial shock effected by the so-called ‘Afternoon Cultures’ was limited in these latitudes. There is evidence, however, that to the west there exists an entire continent despoiled to the degree of the Great Brown Waste.
“In a global sense, the old man may be right: we are running out of Time.”
Its precise reedy voice lent a further chill to the night. In the silence that followed, the wind aged, the dying sun ran down like clockwork in an orrery. Birkin Grif laughed uncomfortably; a few thin echoes came from his men.
“Bird, you will end up as rust, with nothing to your credit but unproven hypotheses. If we are at the end of Time, what have you to show for it? Are you, perhaps, jealous that you cannot experience the misery of flesh, which is this: to know intimately the doom you merely parrot, and yet die in hope?”
The bird waddled forward, firelight spraying off its folded wings. “That is not given to me,” it said. “It will not be given to you, if you fail the real task implicit in this war: fear the geteit chemosit; travel at once to the tower of Cellur, which you will find—”
Filled with a horrible depression, Cromis dropped the shards of his sword and left the fire. From his saddlebag he took his curious Eastern instrument. He bit his lip and wandered past the picket line and the perimeter guards. With death in his head, he sat on a stone. Before him, huge loops of sand-polished girder dipped in and out of the dunes like metal worms. They are frozen, he thought: caught on a strange journey across an alien planet at the forgotten end of the universe.
Shivering, he composed this:
Rust in our eyes . . . metallic perspectives trammel us in the rare earth north . . . we are nothing but eroded men . . . wind clothing our eyes with white ice . . . we are the swarf-eaters . . . hardened by our addiction, tasting acids . . . Little to dream here, our fantasies are iron and icy echoes of bone. . . . rust in our eyes, we who had once soft faces.
“Rust in our eyes—” he began again, preparing to repeat the chant in the Girvanian Mode, but a great shout from the camp drove it out of his skull. He jumped to his feet.
He saw the metal bird explode into the air, shedding light like a gun-powder rocket, its wings booming. Men were running about the encampment, casting febrile shadows on the ancient walls. He made pitiful grabbing motions at his empty scabbard, hurrying toward the uproar. Over a confusion of voices he heard Grif bellow suddenly:
“Leave it alone! Oh, you stupid pigs, leave it alone!”
Obsessed by his fantasies of an alien world, Cromis was for a moment unable to identify the dark, massive shape fidgeting and grunting in the gloom of the dead building. Drawn out of the inhospitable dunes by the warmth or the light and surrounded by men with swords, it seemed to be mesmerised and bemused by the fire—a lean, heavy body slung low between queerly articulated legs, a twenty-foot denizen of his own imagination.
He was almost disappointed to recognise it as one of the black reptiles of the waste, huge but harmless, endowed
by the folklore of Viriconium with the ability to eat metal.
“Big lizard,” muttered one of Grif’s brigands, with sullen awe. “Big lizard.”
Cromis found himself fascinated by the flat, squat head with its wicked undershot lower jaw and rudimentary third eye. He could discern none of the spines and baroque crests traditional in illustrations of the beast, simply a rough hide with a matte, nonreflective quality.
“Pull back,” ordered Grif, quietly.
The men obeyed, keeping their weapons up. Left to itself, the reptile closed determinedly on the fire: finally, the flames leapt, perfectly reflected, in each of its eyes. There it stood for some minutes, quite still.
It blinked. Cromis suspected that whatever sluggish metabolic desires the fire had aroused were unfulfilled. Laboriously, it backed away. It shuffled back into the night, moving its head slowly from side to side.
As his men turned to follow, Grif said sharply, “I told you no. Just leave it be. It has harmed nothing.” He sat down.
“We don’t belong here anymore,” he said.
“What do you suppose it saw in there?” Cromis asked him.
Two days out into the barrens. It seemed longer.
“The landscape is so static,” said Grif, “that Time is drawn out, and runs at a strange, slow speed.”
“Scruffy metaphysics. You are simply dying of boredom. I think I am already dead.” Old Theomeris slapped his pony’s rump. “This is my punishment for an indiscreet life. I wish I had enjoyed it more.”
Since noon that day they had been travelling through a range of low, conical slag hills, compelled by a surface of loose slate to lower their speed to a walk. The three-hundred-foot heaps of grey stone cast back bell-like echoes from the unsteady hooves of the horses. Land-slips were frequent; limited, but unnerving.
Cromis took no part in the constant amiable bickering: it was as unproductive as the sterile shale. Further, he was concerned by the odd behaviour of the lammergeyer.
Ten or fifteen minutes before, the bird had ceased flying its customary pattern of wide circles, and now hung in the air some eight hundred feet up, a silver cruciform slipping and banking occasionally to compensate for a thermal current rising from the slag tips. As far as he could tell, it was hovering above a point about a mile ahead of their present position and directly on their route.
“The bird has seen something,” he said to Grif, when he was sure. “It is watching something. Call a halt and lend me a sword—no, not that great lump of iron; the horse will collapse beneath it—and I’ll go and find out what it is.”
It was a queer, lonely excursion. For half an hour he worked along the precarious spiral paths, accompanied only by echoes. Desolation closed oppressively round him.
Once, the terrible, bitter silence of the slag hills was broken by a distant rhythmic tapping—a light, quick, mysterious ring of metal on metal—but a brief fall of rock drowned it out. It returned later as he was urging his horse down the last slope of the range, the Great Brown Waste spread once more before him, Cellur’s metal vulture hanging like an omen five hundred feet above his head.
At the bottom of the slope, two horses were tethered.
A pile of dusty harness lay near them, and a few yards away stood a small red four-wheeled caravan of a type usually only seen south of Viriconium— traditionally used by the tinkers of Mingulay for carrying their large families and meagre equipment. Redolent of the temperate South, it brought to his mind images of affectionate gypsy slatterns and their raucous children. Its big, thick-spoked wheels were picked out in bright yellow; rococco designs in electric blue rioted over its side panels; its curved roof was painted purple. Cromis was unable to locate the source of the tapping sound (which presently stopped), but a thin, blue-grey spire of smoke was rising from behind the caravan.
He realised that it was impossible to conceal his presence from whoever was camped down there—his horse’s nervous, crabbing progress down the decline was dislodging continuous slides of rock, which bounded away like live things—so he made no effort, coming down as fast as possible, gripping his borrowed sword tightly.
On the last five yards of the slope, momentum overcame him: the horse’s rear hooves slid from beneath it; it pecked; and he rolled out of the saddle over its shoulder. He landed dazed and awkward in the gritty, sterile sand of the waste, and dropped his sword. Fine, stinging particles of dust got into his eyes. He stumbled to his feet, eyes blind and streaming, unpleasantly aware of his bad tactical position.
“Why don’t you just stand there quietly,” said a voice he thought he knew, “and make no attempt to regain that rather clumsy sword? Eh?” And then: “You caused enough fuss and furore for ten men coming down that hill.”
Cromis opened his eyes.
Standing before him, a power-axe held in his knotty, scarred hands, was a thin figure no more than four feet high, with long white hair and amused, pale grey eyes. His face was massively ugly—it had an unformed look, a childlike, disproportionate cast to its planes—and the teeth revealed by his horrible grin were brown and broken. He was dressed in the heavy leather leggings and jerkin of a metal-prospector, and standing on end the haft of his axe would have topped him by a foot.
“You,” said Cromis, “could have done no better. You are as insubordinate as ever. You are a pirate. Put up that axe, or my familiar spirit”—here, he pointed to the vulture spiralling above them—“will probably tear the eyes from your unfortunate face. I have a great deal of trouble in restraining it from such acts.”
“You will, however, concede that I’ve captured you? I’ll chop the bloody bird up for dog’s meat if you don’t—”
And with that, Tomb the Dwarf, as nasty a midget as ever hacked the hands off a priest, did a little complicated shuffle of triumph round his victim, cackling and sniggering like a parrot.
“If I had known it was you,” said Cromis, “I’d have brought an army of occupation, to keep you quiet.”
Night.
A pall, a shroud of darkness lay over the slag heaps, to cover decently their naked attitudes of geographical death. Out on the waste, the harsh white glare of Tomb’s portable furnace dominated the orange flickering of a circlet of cooking fires.
Underlit by a savage glow like a dawn in Hell, the little Rivermouth man’s unbelievable face became demoniac, bloodcurdling. His hammer fell in measured, deadly strokes onto the soft, hot steel, and, as he worked, he droned and hummed a variant of that queer “Dead Freight” dirge:
Burn them up and drive them deep;
Oh, drive them down!
It was Cromis’s nameless sword, now whole, that flared in the furnace and sparked on the anvil, and drew closer to its gloomy destiny with every accentuated syllable of the chant.
After the meeting by the caravan, Cromis had called down the vulture and sent it to fetch Grif from his position in the hills. On his arrival, he had bellowed like an ox: it was a wild reunion between him and the dwarf, the one bellowing with laughter and the other capering and crowing. Now Grif was eating raw meat and shouting at his brigands, while Tomb and Cromis worked the forge.
“You interrupted me,” shouted the dwarf over the roar and wail of the bellows. “I was repairing that.”
And he jerked his thumb at a tangle of curved, connected silver-steel rods—resembling nothing so much as the skeleton of some dead metal giant—which lay by the furnace. Small versions of the motors that powered the airboats were situated at the joints of its limbs, and a curious arrangement of flexible metal straps and stirrups was attached halfway down each of its thighbones and upper arms. It looked like the ugly, purposeful work of long-dead men, an inert but dangerous colossus.
“What is it?” asked Cromis.
“You’ll see when we get a fight. I dug it up about a month ago. They had some beautiful ideas, those Old Scientists.” The light of Tomb’s sole enthusiasm—or was it simply splashback from the furnace?—burned in his eyes, and Cromis had to be content with that.
Later, the four Methven sat round a fire with a jug of distilled wine. The reforged sword was cooling, the furnace powered-down, the brigands noisily asleep or dozing in their smelly blankets.
“No,” said Tomb, “we aren’t too far behind them.” He displayed his repugnant teeth. “I’d have been up with Waterbeck and his well-disciplined babes by now, but I wanted to get that power-armour in good order.”
“It won’t be the same as the old days,” complained old Glyn. He had passed rapidly into the sodden, querulous phase of drunkenness. “Now there was a time.”
Tomb chuckled. “Why did I saddle myself this way? A greybeard with a bad memory, a braggart, and a poet who can’t even look after his own sword. I think I might join the other side.” He leered down at his hands. “Time I killed somebody, really. I feel like killing something.”
“You’re a nasty little beast, aren’t you?” said Birkin Grif. “Have some more wine.”
Cromis, content to have found Tomb if not Norvin Trinor, smiled and said nothing. More roads than this lead to Ruined Glenluce, he thought.
But in the end they had no need to go as far as Glenluce, and Tomb’s prediction proved true: two days later, they came upon Lord Waterbeck’s expeditionary force, camped several miles southeast of that unfortunate city, in a spot where the waste had heaved itself into a series of low ridges and dead valleys filled with the phantoms of the Departed Cultures.
Time is erosion: an icy wind blew constant abrasive streams of dust over the bare rock of the ridge; it had been blowing for a thousand years.
His black cloak flapping about him, tegeus-Cromis gazed down on the ancient valley; at his side, Grif stamped his feet and blew into his cupped hands. Beneath them spread the tents and bothies of Waterbeck’s army— multicoloured, embroidered with sigils and armorial bearings, but hardly gay. Canvas whipped and cracked, the wind moaned in the guylines, and armour clattered as the message runners hurried to and fro between piles of gear that lay in apparent confusion around the encampment.
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