"Let's go for a walk." I stood up and cuffed his shoulder lightly. He looked up at me with angry red eyes, but I refused to back down. "Come on."
"Where are you going?" Marella asked as Timash got to his feet. "It's dangerous out there."
"We won't be long," I said, and walked into the sunshine without looking to see that Timash had followed.
He had to shield his eyes again. "It's hot out here."
"You might as well get used to it. We're going to have to move out sometime."
"Then we oughta travel at night."
I responded with an annoyed look. After several nights on the plains in the groundcar, he knew as well as anyone why we couldn't travel at night.
"What's wrong?" I asked bluntly.
He looked at me, lowering his arm as he put his back to the sun.
"What do you mean?"
"You're growling and complaining so much I had half a mind to leave you with the breen. You could bite their heads off instead of ours."
"It's nothing."
"I've seen it before, you know. Back where I come from. I told you I was taken from the middle of a war. I was an officer, and I used to see this reaction sometimes after men went through their first battle." When he failed to rise to the bait, I took the plunge. "It was you or them. It's no sin to kill in war. That's what happens in wars. If they don't die, you do."
"But I didn't have to like it!" Once the dam burst, there was no stopping the flood. "Back when we attacked the research station, they made me stay back. I watched everything, but I was more concerned with my friends than with the Nuum. I even pulled a couple of them out of the way when they were hurt, and I thought how great it all was, with the shouting and the fighting and here I was saving lives. But I didn't hurt anybody! It was just like Uncle Balu's stories, so when I got a chance to go with you, I saw myself charging around, having adventures—but I never thought about what it would be like to kill a man. Back there, in the city—I know, like you said, it was them or us…
"But Keryl—when you and I were down there, trapped in that hallway with the Vulsteen coming at us and we started swinging and slashing away and they—I liked it! It was my greatest adventure, fighting evil and helping people and—and there you were next to me—I felt so great! People were dying at my feet, I could feel their bones breaking, but I liked it! I liked the feeling of power. But then, when we got back to the pit, and I saw all those bodies and all that blood…"
Like a phonograph record, he ran down until his voice was inaudible.
I put a hand on his hairy shoulder. "Timash, let me tell you something. When I was a boy, I read the same kind of stories you did, all about heroes and knights in shining armor." From his expression, he had no idea to what I was referring. I let it go. "And I joined the army for the same reasons you wanted to come with me: Grand adventure, fighting evil. But I'd never killed a man, never even gotten in a real fight, until I went to France, and the first time I saw the enemy marching across no-man's-land… I will never forget the feel of my rifle against my shoulder, and the kick of the recoil, and the sight of a man falling backward, dead because I shot him." I had to stop while the damned moving picture played through my mind again. "Very soon afterward I learned there are two kinds of men in war: Those who kill because they have to, they're soldiers. Those who kill because they want to, they're murderers.
"How do you feel, right now, about what you did?"
"I feel like I'm gonna be sick."
"Congratulations. You're a soldier."
Whatever my speech meant to him, he had no time to tell me before a huge shadow swooped down and someone began shooting at us.
33. I Am Shanghaied
The snap of the whip on flesh was short and ugly. Unlike the shells and the bullets, you never heard the whip coming, never knew when it was flying at you, or the man next to you, until it struck, the sound sharp when it split the air, wet and flat when it flayed your skin. It didn't hit me, but I flinched. We all did.
"Put your backs into it!" Garm shouted, as though he were the overseer on a slave galley and we were the human engines. And so he was, though we were not. This Nuum sky-barge depended no more on our muscles than Garm needed his ancient leather whip to keep order. But both had their uses.
I snapped my head, tossing my hair about to keep the sweat from my eyes. My hair was longer than it had ever grown, even as a child, certainly longer than my days in the British army. My hands, chained to the oars, were helpless to wipe my brow. My mind, numbed by the incessant push and pull of rowing through thin air, fought to rise above the fog of misery, but it failed, sinking once again into the comfort of the past…
Our shouts had been drowned out by the engines of the descending airship, and we could only scatter before it crushed us. As it was, the hurricane winds from its hoverfans kicked up such dust that we had no breath for shouting in any event. I held one hand over my mouth and eyes as best I could and staggered in the direction I hoped was shelter. I could not see or hear Timash.
Those shots had been meant only to frighten, not kill; had it been otherwise, we would have died without ever knowing we were targeted. The second the craft touched down men boiled out of the hatch, some coming for me and others, I assumed, seeking Timash. With the wind dying away, I could see them approaching; I had run into the open, not toward cover, and one look at their firearms told me that a dash for freedom now would likely end quickly and painfully. I stood carefully still.
They were a motley pair that closed in on me, sporting garish baggy shirts and pants that complemented them only in a drunkard's nightmare. To a man the landing party wore beards, an affectation I had not seen in this era. They held their pistols loosely, but with an air of confidence and familiarity. Their ship was the size of a house, roughly triangular, but plainly a larger cousin of our own late groundcar.
"Look, boys, another one! And he's a big one, too!" A barrel-shaped man in green shirt and purple trousers, sporting a bright yellow waist-sash holding a wide sword, rounded the ship and put his hands on his hips while he looked me over. His dress, manner, and the careless way his own pistol was thrust in his sash, inevitably reminiscent of a Caribbean pirate, was more evidence of the cycles of history. Behind him several more men escorted Timash, their pistols held in a less cavalier manner than my own guards'.
"What's the meaning of this?" The meaning was quite clear, but having no wish to seem meek in front of these men, I followed convention. I probably should have kept my tongue but there was no sign of Harros or Marella—and not far away camped a small army of breen. If I could make enough fuss, rescue was not out of the question.
The big man thought my question humorous but undeserving of an answer. Despite his red hair and beard, he did not fit my usual image of a Nuum, and some of his men were black-haired. A few of them, I was sure, were Thoran, but each one held guns supposedly forbidden to all but the overlords. There were six raiders altogether, bad odds even without the guns.
Their leader jabbed a thumb toward the front of their ship. "Porky, get us going. I don't want to have a lizard breathing down our necks while we on-load."
"Aye-aye, Durrn." One of the crew ducked back into their ship. Durrn followed, waving to his men to bring us aboard.
"Wait!" I said, startling my guards. "What about our friends?"
Durrn spun about, eyes narrowing.
"Keryl!" Timash shouted. "What are you doing?"
"Yes, what are you doing?" Durrn walked up to me, peering into my eyes.
"We left two friends in that building over there." I motioned with my head, feeling it unwise to use my hands around the nervous guards. Meantime I was trying to tell Timash telepathically, Trust me! with little success. Perhaps it was as well. "We can't leave them here."
"They might not agree with you."
"Whatever you've got in mind, it can't be any worse than what we've seen here."
Durrn chuckled. "You might be surprised."
I laughed right back at h
im. "So might you." That unnerved him, but when Marella appeared from the shadows and shouted "Stop!" at him, he completely went to pieces.
As I have stated before, in moments of crisis my body leaps ahead of my mind, taking the initiative when the more settled of spirit would have withheld action pending rational consideration of outcomes and consequences. Not so I. This time my body literally leaped without conscious impetus, and the consequences were severe.
As soon as I had seen we were outnumbered, I had slid my baton up my sleeve and held it there. Our captors had not gotten around to searching us, and now they paid the price.
I spun, sliding the baton in my hand as I did so and resting it with some force against the side of a guard's head. When he staggered, I grabbed his sidearm.
My fingers wrapped themselves around the grip in a practiced habit a million years old—but when I reached for the trigger there was none. I pointed the gun at the remaining guard and wished I knew how to fire it.
The gun flashed and the guard went down. Deep in the back of my mind the words telepathic trigger echoed faintly, but I was too involved to appreciate the Library's far-ranging education right then. I whirled, searching for targets.
There were none, and too many.
Timash's guards had turned at the sound of Marella's shout. One lay on the ground, one writhed in the ape's grip, but the third had trained his weapon on the girl. Timash was between us. At the last second, Harros appeared, chasing Marella. The guard shifted aim, fired, and Harros went down.
"Nice shooting, lad." Durrn had appeared in the hatchway, his gun leveled at me. "But you won't have time for another."
And then he shot me.
In the hands of an experienced marksman, a Nuum phase-pistol can render a target unconscious for a number of hours without any appreciable after-effects. I survived Durrn's attack because he wanted me to; knowing how long I would need to recharge my pistol, he took the time to adjust his own, to my everlasting benefit.
A few moments' careful listening with my eyes closed lead me to believe that I was in no immediate danger, so I allowed myself to look about and examine my surroundings. That they were strange to me was no shock; prisons were becoming a familiar sight. The room was small, seemingly hewn out of thick logs. Light was provided by a heavily-barred electric lamp in one corner of the ceiling. That Timash was napping in a corner, wearing thick chains that matched my own, was likewise not unexpected, but the absence of Harros concerned me. Several empty sets of manacles lined our jail, but they bespoke nothing of any recent occupancy.
"Are you awake?"
"Unfortunately." My friend opened one eye. "I was hoping you wouldn't wake up. I was hoping maybe you were having a dream and I got caught in it." He touched one hand lightly to his closed eye and winced. "I didn't think it was true."
"Are you all right?"
He grunted. "I'll live." Then he winced again. "Oh. Bad choice of words."
I felt cold. "Harros?"
Timash and Harros had never gotten along; I knew that, but my friend's voice showed genuine concern.
"He was shot in the head. Maybe it was an accident; I don't think they meant to kill us. They brought him on board, but he wasn't moving—and if they know anything, they're sure not telling me."
"On board?" I repeated. There were no windows in our cell, and there was no sense of movement. I'd no idea we were inside a vehicle.
"We're on a sky barge." He couldn't keep his hand away from the area around his closed eye. It was as if the pain would eventually convince himself that his plight was real, and then he could do something about it. "They're a Nuum invention. They use them to ferry themselves around—the rich ones do, anyway."
"A sky barge? Are we airborne?" I tried to feel my surroundings, placing a hand to the deck, but there were no vibrations, no sounds of engines.
"Yeah. Don't ask me how they work. We've seen them on occasion flying over our mountain. They never make a sound, just sail over like a huge balloon. Uncle Balu says sometimes they fly so low you can see the rowers."
I recalled now that Balu had told me about sky barges once, but our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of four motley jailors, two of whom exchanged our fixed manacles for others, while the remaining pair guarded us from a distance—with cutlasses. At first I believed all an elaborate dream after all, that I was trapped in a Morphean landscape out of Robert Louis Stevenson, but I was to learn that the gaudy play into which I had been involuntarily cast was all too real. Everything in this surreal world had its place and its purpose: I was to be thrust into my own niche very soon.
We were forcibly marched up several flights of what appeared to be wooden ladders before being pushed into daylight. I stopped; I could not help it. The vision before me was so incongruent as to overwhelm me as I had not been since my first days in this looking-glass world.
I stood upon the deck on a Spanish galleon the size of the Titanic. Masts like redwoods towered above me, and sails of a shimmering silver stretched for what seemed miles in the bright sun. To my immediate left, seated below the level of the deck, I saw the rowers Timash had mentioned, swaying to and fro to a beat I could barely hear, though they were but scant yards away. And beyond the rowers, beyond the limits of the ship itself…
…were the clouds. We sailed, without a doubt. We sailed the sky itself.
I stumbled forward as a heavy hand shoved me in the back.
"Enough gawking! Move along! We got a place for yah!" And I was herded to an open spot among the rowers and chained again into place…
My memories exhausted, I did not return to any conscious appreciation of my state. I rowed. My body rowed. Whither my mind had gone, I had not the wit to say.
34. I Am Robbed
When my shift was over, I was reunited with Timash and introduced to my crewmates. We were in no condition to exchange polite greetings; our labors had pushed us well past the edge of exhaustion. I had fancied myself well-conditioned, and Timash—Timash was a gorilla!—but we fell limply to the deck the moment our jailors pushed us through the door to the "crew quarters"—a euphemism at best. Technically it was not even correct, since the real crew, those skilled "air sailors" who truly operated the ship, had their own separate and far superior quarters above decks.
We were slaves. We lived communally, always chained, rotated on and off the rowing details as our masters wished. We lived to work, and we only stopped when we died. These things I was to learn over time, but the first thing I learned was the raison d'être for this flying circle of hell: It was a prison, and all of the men around us were convicted criminals. This I had discovered very quickly indeed.
I awoke with the exceedingly unpleasant sensation that I had tried to eat a woolen blanket in my sleep. I rolled over, spitting our bits of Timash's fur, and banged into a wall. I didn't have to roll far.
My first sensation had been a bad taste, and my second had been pain, but the third was the most disturbing, as it stole upon me gently but insistently. As Timash rolled away from me—thank god, or he might have crushed me—the last feeling became at once more pronounced: I was cold. All over.
My clothes had been stolen while I slept.
Levering myself painfully into a sitting position, I tried to clear the dreams from my head and ignore the eyes I could feel upon me. Behind closed lids the pressure of foreign minds beat against my shields. Those too feeble to take my physical possessions were attempting to make do with the crumbs and tidbits of my unconscious mind. But they were weak, and I had overcome the dreaded telepathic virus. I shook them off like fleas. Their panicked feet beat a tattoo on the deck. Someone laughed, but it was dry, like a splintered stick. Suddenly, opening my eyes felt like the last thing I wanted to do.
We sat in a cleared space, away from other sleepers and away from the door. Had we been dragged to an open space to sleep or simply pulled out of the doorway so others would be saved the trouble of stepping over us? It did not matter, since we had most likely been robbe
d by the same good Samaritans who gave us a place to rest. Timash had been stripped and left on the floor even as had I; I shuddered to think of strangers' hands all over my senseless body. They had left me my shorts, but filched my coveralls and boots.
A low growl from behind me said that Timash had awoken. He had exhibited a more aggressive side since leaving Tahana City than I had seen before; I did not know if it was a sign of his continuing maturity (sometimes I had to remind myself that he was still much younger than I), or the loss of the civilizing influences he had known all his life. In either event, this seemed both the most obvious, and the least desirable, time for him to test his newfound capacity for anger.
Next to opening my eyes, confronting a outraged, half-naked bull gorilla ranked as one of the worst choices in a day that had already reached calamitous proportions—and I had only just awakened.
I rotated, crablike, without getting up, hoping to avoid any more notice than was inevitable. Timash was more jumpy, his shoulders twitching with the thought of what he would do to the unfortunate soul he found wearing his clothes. I swallowed hard; my weeks in the city of the apes had not inured me to their behavior as much as I had thought. Still in the back of my mind they were the savage beasts of my own time, beating their breasts only when safely contained within iron bars. This ape had yet to begin beating his breast, but he wasn't separated from me by thick iron bars, either.
Many of the men who were awake at this moment had congregated toward the far end of the compartment, talking and arguing amongst themselves as men will in close quarters with no diversions. In the trenches of France, even with the closeness of sudden death—or perhaps because of it—men weakened by months of freezing weather and scarce food had suddenly erupted into riots over inconsequential playing cards or another man's picture from home. Sometimes only the shrieking of the incoming shells had stopped the madness. And sometimes the only way was to substitute another form of madness: Not all suicide charges could be laid to blame at the door of an incompetent rear-line command.
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