“I am asking one or all of you to do that. My origin and queer life aside, I am an old man. I would not survive out there now that she has passed beyond the Pastel City.”
Numbed by what he had witnessed, Cromis nodded his head. He gazed at the empty windows, obsessed by the face of the dead Lendalfoot child.
“We will go,” he said. “I had expected nothing like this. Tomb will learn faster than Grif or I; you had better teach him.
“How much grace have we?”
“A week, perhaps. The South resists, but she will have no trouble. You must be ready to leave before the week is out.”
During the Birdmaker’s monologue, Methvet Nian had wept openly. Now, she rose to her feet and said:
“This horror. We have always regarded the Afternoon Cultures as a high point in the history of mankind. Theirs was a state to be striven for, despite the mistakes that marred it.
“How could they have constructed such things? Why, when they had the stars beneath their hands?”
The Birdmaker shrugged. The geometries of his robe shifted and stretched like restless alien animals.
“Are you bidding me remember, madam? I fear I cannot.”
“They were stupid,” said Birkin Grif, his fat, honest face puzzled and hurt. It was his way to feel things personally. “They were fools.”
“They were insane towards the end,” said Cellur. “That I know.”
Lord tegeus-Cromis wandered the Birdmaker’s tower alone, filled his time by staring out of upper windows at the rain and the estuary, making sad and shabby verses out of the continual wild crying of the fish eagles and the creaking of the dead white pines. His hand never left the hilt of the nameless sword, but it brought him no comfort.
Tomb the Dwarf was exclusively occupied by machinery—he and Cellur rarely left the workshop on the fifth floor. They took their meals there, if at all. Birkin Grif became sullen and silent, and experienced a resurgence of pain from his damaged leg. Methvet Nian stayed in the room set aside for her, mourning her people and attempting to forgive the monstrousness to which she was heiress.
Inaction bored the soldier; moroseness overcame the poet; a wholly misplaced sense of responsibility possessed the Queen: in their separate ways they tried to meet and overcome the feeling of impotence instilled in them by what they had learned from the Lord of the Birds, and by the enigma he represented.
To a certain extent, each one succeeded: but Cellur ended all that when he called them to the topmost room of the tower on the afternoon of the fifth day since their coming.
They arrived separately, Cromis last.
“I wanted you to see this,” Cellur was saying as he entered the room.
The old man was tired; the skin was stretched tight across the bones of his face like oiled paper over a lamp; his eyes were hooded. Abruptly, he seemed less human, and Cromis came to accept the fact that, at some time in the remote past, he might have crossed immense voids to reach the earth.
How much sympathy could he feel for purely human problems, if that were so? He might involve himself, but he would never understand. Cromis thought of the monitor lizard he had seen in the waste, and its fascination with the fire.
“We are all here then,” murmured the Birdmaker.
Birkin Grif scowled and grunted.
“Where is Tomb? I don’t see him.”
“The dwarf must work. In five days, he has absorbed the governing principles of an entire technology. He is amazing. But I would prefer him to continue working. He knows of this already.”
“Show us your moving pictures,” said Grif.
Ancient hands moved in a column of light. Cellur bent his head, and the windows flickered behind him.
“A vulture flew over Viriconium this morning,” he said. “Watch.”
A street scene in the Artists’ Quarter: Thing Alley, or Soft Lane perhaps. The tottering houses closed tight against a noiseless wind. A length of cloth looping down the gutter; a cat with an eye like a crooked pin flattens itself on the paving, slips out its tongue and devours a morsel of rancid butter. Otherwise, nothing moves.
Coming on with an unsteady rolling gait from the West End of the quarter:three Northmen. Their leather leggings are stiff and encrusted with sweat and blood and good red wine. They lean heavily against one another, passing a flask. Their mouths open and shut regularly, like the mouths of fish in a bowl. They are oblivious.
They have missed a movement in a doorway, which will kill them.
As crooked and silent as the cat, a great black shadow slips into the road behindthem. The immense energy blade swings up and down. The silly, bemused faces collapse. Hands raised helplessly before eyes. Their screams are full of teeth. And the triangle of yellow eyes regards their corpses with clinical detachment. . . .
“It has begun, you see,” said the Birdmaker. “This is happening all over the city. The automata fight guerilla engagements with Canna Moidart’s people. They do not fully understand what is happening as yet. But she is losing control.”
Birkin Grif got to his feet, stared at the false windows with loathing, and limped out.
“I would give an arm never to have come here, Birdmaster,” he said as he left the room. “Never to have seen that. Your windows make it impossible for me to hate the enemy I have known all my life; they present me with another that turns my legs to water.”
Cellur shrugged.
“How soon can we move?” Cromis asked.
“In a day, perhaps two. The dwarf is nearly ready. I am calling in all my birds. Whatever your Lord Grif thinks, I am not some voyeur of violence. I no longer need to watch the Moidart’s fall. The birds will be more useful if I redeploy them over the route you must shortly take.
“Make sure you are watching when they return, Lord Cromis. It will be a sight not often seen.”
Cromis and Methvet Nian left the room together. Outside, she stopped and looked up into his eyes. She had aged. The girl had fallen before the woman, and hated it. Her face was set, the lips tight. She was beautiful.
“My lord,” she said, “I do not wish to live with such responsibilities for the rest of my life. Indirectly, all this is my fault. I have hardly been a strong queen.
“I will abdicate when this is over.”
He had not expected such a positive reaction.
“Madam,” he said, “your father had similar thoughts on most days of his life. He knew that course was not open to him. You know it, too.”
She put her head on his chest and wept.
For twenty-four hours, the sky about the tower was black with birds. They came hurling down the wind from the north:
Bearded vultures and kites from the lower slopes of the Monar Mountains;
Eagle owls like ghosts from the forests;
A squadron of grim long-crested hawk eagles from the farmlands of the Low Leedale;
A flight of lizard buzzards from the reaches of the Great Brown Waste;
A hundred merlins, two hundred fish hawks—a thousand wicked predatory beaks on a long blizzard of wings.
Cromis stood with the Young Queen by a window and watched them come out of night and morning: circling the tower in precise formation; belling their wings to land with a crack of trapped air; studding the rocks and dark beaches of the tiny island. They filled the pines, and he saw now why every tree was dead—Cellur had had need of his birds some long time before, and their talons had stripped every inch of bark, their steel bodies had shaken every branch.
“They are beautiful,” whispered the Queen.
But it was the birds, despite their beauty, that destroyed their maker.
. . . For in the stripped lands south of Soubridge, where the villagers had burned their barns before the enemy arrived, a hungry Northman fired his crossbow into a flock of speeding owls. A certain curiosity impelled him: he had never seen such a thing before. More by luck than judgement, he brought one down.
And when he found he could not eat it, he screwed his face up in puzzlem
ent, and took it to his captain. . . .
Dawn came dim and grimy over the basalt cliffs of the estuary. It touched the window from which Cromis had watched all night, softening his bleak features; it stroked the feathers of the birds in the pines; it silvered the beaks of the last returning flight: seventy cumbersome cinereous vultures, beating slowly over the water on their nine-foot wings.
And it touched and limned the immense shape which drifted silently after them as they flew—the long black hull that bore the mark of the wolf’s head and three towers.
Cromis was alone; the Queen had retired some hours earlier. He watched the ship for a moment as it trawled back and forth over the estuary. Its shell was scarred and pitted. After two or three minutes it vanished over the cliffs to the west, and he thought it had gone away. But it returned, hovered, spun hesitantly, hunting like a compass needle.
Thoughtfully, he made his way to the workshop on the fifth floor. He drew his sword and rapped with its pommel on the door.
“Cellur!” he called. “We are discovered!”
He looked at the nameless blade, then put it away.
“Possibly, we can hold them off. The tower has its defences. It would depend on the type of weapon they have.”
They had gathered in the upper room, Methvet Nian shivering with cold, Birkin Grif complaining at the earliness of the hour. Dry-mouthed and insensitive from lack of sleep, Cromis found the whole situation unreal.
“One such boat could carry fifty men,” he said.
It hung now, like a haunting, over the causeway that joined the tower to the mainland. It began to descend, slowed, alighted on the crumbling stone, its bow aimed at the island.
“Footmen need not concern us,” said Cellur. “The door will hold them: and there are the birds.”
Beneath the weight of the boat, the causeway shifted, groaned, settled. Chunks of stone broke away and slid into the estuary. In places, a foot of water licked the dark hull. Behind it, the hills took on a menacing gun-metal tint in the growing light. Cellur’s fish eagles began their tireless circling.
Five false windows showed the same view: the water, the silent launch.
A hatch opened in its side, like a wound.
From it poured the geteit chemosit, their blades at high port.
Birkin Grif hissed through his clenched teeth. He rubbed his injured leg. “Let us see your home defend itself, Birdmaker. Let us see it!”
“Only two humans are with them,” said the Queen. “Officers: or slaves?”
They came three abreast along the causeway; half a hundred or more energy blades, a hundred and fifty yellow, fathomless eyes.
The birds met them.
Cellur’s hands moved across his instruments, and the dawn faltered as he lifted his immense flock from the island and hurled it at the beach. Like a cloud of smoke, it stooped on the chemosit, wailing and screaming with one voice. The invader vanished.
Blades flickered through the cloud, slicing metal like butter. Talons like handfuls of nails sought triplet eyes. Hundreds of birds fell. But when the flock drew back, twenty of the automata lay in shreds half in and half out of the water, and the rest had retreated to their ship.
“Ha,” said Grif in the pause that followed. “Old man, you are not toothless, and they are not invulnerable.”
“No,” said the Birdmaster, “but I am frightened. Look down there. It seems to me that Canna Moidart dug more than golems from the desert—”
He turned to Cromis.
“You must go! Leave now. Beneath the tower are cellars. I have horses there. Tunnels lead through the basalt to a place half a mile south of here. The dwarf is as ready as he ever will be. Obey his instructions when you reach the site of the artificial brain.
“Go. Fetch him now, and go! His armour I have serviced. It is with the horses. Leave quickly!”
As he spoke, his eyes dilated with fear.
Despite repeated attacks by the birds, the chemosit had gained a little space on the causeway beside their ship. In this area, four of them were assembling heavy equipment. They worked ponderously, without haste.
“That is a portable energy cannon,” whispered Birkin Grif. “I had not thought that such things existed in the empire.”
“Many things exist under it, Lord Grif,” Cellur told him. “Now go!”
The tower shuddered.
Violet bolides issued from the mouth of the cannon. Rocks and trees vaporised. Five hundred birds flashed into a golden, ragged sphere of fire, involuntary phoenixes with no rebirth. Cellur turned to his instruments.
The tower began to hum. Above their heads, at the very summit, something crackled and spat. Ozone tainted the air.
Lightning leapt across the island, outlined the hull of the airboat with a wan flame.
“I have cannon of my own,” said the Birdmaker, and there was a smile on his ancient face. “Many of those birds were so complicated they had learned to talk. That is as good a definition of life as I have ever heard.”
The water about the causeway had begun to boil.
Cromis took the Queen’s arm.
“This is no place for us. The old weapons are awake here. Let them fight it out.”
The rock beneath the tower trembled ominously.
“Should we not bring the old man with us? They will kill him in the end—”
“I do not think he would come,” said Cromis, and he was right.
Tomb the Dwarf was dull-eyed and bemused.
“I have wasted fifty years of my life,” he said. “We must go, I suppose.”
One hundred steps led to the caverns beneath.
It was a queer journey. The horses were skittish from lack of exercise, the tunnels ill-lit. Moisture filmed the walls, and fungus made murals from the dreams of a madman. Huge, silent machines stood in alcoves melted from the living rock.
The vibrations of the battle above died away.
“We are beneath the estuary. It is the underside of the world, where the dead men lose their bones.”
They were forced to ride through a column of cold fire. They discovered these things:
The white skeletons of a horse and its rider; a sword too big for any of them to lift; an immense web; the mummified body of a beautiful princess.
Sounds that were not echoes followed them down the twisted corridors.
“I could believe we are out of Time,” said tegeus-Cromis.
Finally, they came up out of the earth and stood on the lip of the western cliffs, gazing down. The tower of Cellur was invisible, wrapped in a pall of coloured smoke, through which the lightnings flashed and coruscated. The causeway had sagged; in places its stones were melted. Steam hung over the estuary.
A cold mist drew round them as they turned their horses south and west, making for Lendalfoot, and then the Forest of Sloths. As they left Cellur to his vain battle, one fish eagle was hanging high above the smoke: circling.
Tomb the Dwarf never spoke to anyone of his sojourn on the fifth floor, or of what he had learned there. It is certain that he absorbed more than the knowledge required by his task, and that the Birdmaker found him an apt and willing pupil. Nor could he be persuaded to say anything of Cellur, the man who had forgotten his age and his origin. But in his later life, he often murmured half to himself:
“We waste our lives in half truths and nonsense. We waste them.”
10
Canna Moidart’s long thrust into the South reached Mingulay and guttered. The town fell, but in the bleak streets behind the sea front, the chemosit sensed there was nowhere further to go: they slaughtered the civilians, and then, quite without purpose or emotion, turned on their masters, who died in a smell of blood and fish . . .
While, in the back alleys of Soubridge and the Pastel City, death wore precise, mechanical limbs . . . A greater war had begun . . . Or perhaps it had never finished, and the automata were completing a task they had started over a thousand years before . . . The Northmen desperately needed enemies. . . .
“A forbidding prospect.”
tegeus-Cromis and Tomb the Dwarf stood at the summit of a rainswept ridge in the south of that narrow neck of land which separates the Monadliath Mountains from the sea.
The country around them was alkaline and barren, an elevated limestone region seamed and lined with deep gullies by the almost constant rain: in areas, rock strata that had resisted the erosion of millennia made tall, smooth, distorted columns which stood out above the surrounding land.
“An old road runs through it, according to the Birdmaster. What we seek is at the end of it—perhaps. You are sure you will recognise it?”
Above the grotesque spires and limb shapes of the terrain, grey clouds were flung out across a drab sky, and the wind was bitter. Tomb tapped enormous steel fingers impatiently against the left leg of his exoskeleton.
“How many times must you be told? Cellur taught me.”
They had been five days travelling. On the first night, the successful skirting of Lendalfoot and its uneasy garrison of Northmen, the fording of the major estuary of the Girvan Bay at low tide: but the next afternoon, crofters living in the southwestern shadow of Monadliath had warned them of chemosit advance parties operating in the area, and their movements had been cautious thereafter.
Now, the vanguard of the South Forest barred their path.
The land sloped away from them for five miles, growing steadily less tortured as the limestone faded out. Low scrub and gorse made their appearance, gave way to groves of birch: then the black line of the trees— dark, solid, stretching like a wooden wall from the thousand-foot line of the mountains to the chalk pits by the sea.
“Well,” said Cromis, “we have no choice.”
He left the dwarf staring ahead and made his way down the greasy northern slope of the ridge to where Birkin Grif and Methvet Nian huddled with the horses under a meagre overhang, rain plastering their cloaks to their bodies and their hair to their heads.
“The way is clear to the forest. Hard to tell if anything moves out there. We gain nothing by waiting here. Grif, you and I had better begin thinking of our way through the trees.”
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