Asgard's Heart (23 page)

"We can hope," said Susarma Lear, who had
just climbed down from the turret, having concluded that there was nothing else
out there to shoot. "But I've told you before, Rousseau—hope just isn't
enough."

As mottos went it had its good points, but in a
morale- boosting contest it could only be a hot contender for the booby prize.

"Well, if it's all down to us," I said,
"we'd better look after that bloody suitcase, because everything I've seen
of humanoid intercourse with machinery tells me that we're a hell of a lot
better at smashing things than we are at fixing them."

"We may find scope for the exercise of both
talents before we're through," said Myrlin, with the air of one who does
not fear contradiction.

"We will do what we can," said Urania
simply. "We can do no more."

16

The mist had faded into a light, silvery haze, and
visibility on all sides of the ship had improved dramatically. A dead calm had
fallen upon the sea. Where our oars disturbed the surface there was turbulence,
and the ripples spread out slowly from each point of contact, but the viscous
water damped them down and swallowed them. The wake which we left behind us was
similarly impotent to disturb the waters for long; it too was calmed and
soothed so that it stretched behind us for little more than a boat length, like
gently- trailing tresses of weed.

I watched dark-haired Athene as she stared
over the rail at the still and silent sea, clearly perturbed by what was
happening, because it was so unexpected. I think she would have preferred a
more recognisable menace, which could be opposed in straightforward fashion.

"What is happening?" asked Myrlin—not
of her, though it was she who was surely best placed to answer—but of me.

"They appear to have made a temporary
withdrawal," I said. "I suspect they're taking time out to think
things over. A council of war, maybe. When they have another go at us, they'll
have a better idea of what to do. I have a suspicion that they may have done
this sort of thing before, and know one or two tricks that our side hasn't even
thought of."

She turned to look at me while I spoke, and
the bleak look in her eye suggested that she had reached similar conclusions.

"It is too soon to despair," she said,
sharply. "While they withdraw, we make progress. Our weapons are still
potent, and whatever monsters they may produce can only become solid enough to
do us harm by rendering themselves vulnerable to our power of retaliation. You
are more difficult to destroy now than ever you were as creatures of flesh and
bone—remember that!"

While she instructed us to be brave, our
surroundings began again to change. The mist began to thicken again, and draw
about us, so that we could not see such great expanses of mirror-bright water
to either side. The mist changed colour, too, so that it was no longer
silvery-white but a roseate pink. At first I thought of this as if it were an
infusion of something the colour of blood, which paled only because of its
dilution in the mist, but there was too much yellow in the pink for that, and
it was a colour I had only ever seen in the fragile petals of sweet-smelling
flowers.

I had the strangest impression that this
must be the most perfect of the colours which mist might have: a colour for
sugar-sweet clouds in a child's vision of paradise. I looked upwards, to the
top of the mast, where the stirring of the wind had not completely ceased, and
I saw wreaths of the mist thickening like radiant tongues of pink flame. The
sea, beneath this glowing coloured vapour, could not help but lose its
greyness, but the light that it reflected was by no means so pale. It was a red
deeper by far, but still not like the colour of blood, tending more to the
orange part of the spectrum. It put me in mind of films I had seen—the films by
which I had learned the landscapes and appearances of the homeworld which I had
never visited—where the camera's eye had looked boldly into the face of the
setting sun. It had stuck in my memory that the sun in such circumstances
seemed hugely bloated by virtue of its proximity to the horizon, its image
rippled by the hazy movement of the heated air.

I could easily imagine that the ocean upon
which we floated was the surface of a dying sun, an infinite lake of quiet fire.
Despite the redness, though, there was no heat at all. I no longer felt the
need to draw my cloak tightly about me, but neither did I feel a need to
discard it. There was still a hint of chill creeping in my bones.

"Look!" said Myrlin, pointing
dead ahead. We could see very little beyond the figurehead which was carved to
represent Medusa, whose serpentine tresses were themselves half-obscured by
numinous tongues of rosy vapour, but we could see that the fog in direct line
with the vessel's course was beginning to thicken and to move in a much more
agitated fashion. Its colour was darkening too, though not consistently, and
as I struggled to make sense of what was happening I formed the notion that
some kind of great arch was forming in the mist, through which the ship must
sail, and that this arch was made of a blazing redness.

The sea was disturbed now, but not in the
chaotic fashion of a surface stirred by eddying winds. It was as though there
were some kind of force flowing from the points where the fiery arch met the
water, which was causing great ripples and surges. As the ship began to meet
these ripples, the bow began to dip and rise.

There was a sound, then, like the moan of
some desolate creature slowly dying—a faint, hollow, hopeless sound which
echoed eerily across the face of the water.

I concentrated on the arms of the arch into
which we were sailing, which were thickening all the time from the gathering
cloud, and now seemed like huge rotating pillars, far thinner at the bottom
than the top—great vortices which slipped sinuously from side to side as
ripples of expansion passed up from the water, loosening their hold on
verticality.

"They're sucking up the water!" I
shouted as I realised what was happening. "Like a brace of
tornadoes!"

The movement of the ship was increasing in
its violence with every second that passed, and I moved in from the side,
gripping the rail close to the position of the wheel, with which Myrlin was now
trying to grapple.

They had sent no monster to fly at us or
rise from the depths, but were raising against us the very elements of this
world which we had made—they were attacking us with a storm, trying to upset
the very fabric which we had imposed upon software space.

"Be calm!" commanded the
gilt-clad goddess. "Hold hard, and we will ride it out. We are
unsinkable!"

It was a promise which I longed to believe,
but the sea boiled up beneath us as if it were a cauldron brought hurriedly to
the boil, and there came into our faces a howling tempestuous wind like the
voice of a wrathful god, while the mist fell all about us cloyingly, as though
precipitated from solution in the air. There seemed little doubt that our ridiculous
vessel would be smashed into matchwood, and our own bodies torn apart by the
fury of the storm.

I could not stand before the forces that
were beating and wrenching at me from all sides, and fell to my knees. But my
hands gripped the rail all the tighter, and I ducked my head, trying to make
myself tiny and huddle into the angle made by the deck and the balustrade.

Once I could not see what was happening it
did not feel so very awful, and the storm's power seemed much diminished. But
still the ship was tossed about in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions,
and still there was the sense of vaporous fingers clutching at me, first to
tear and then to choke, and I knew that my sword was as impotent as my mere
hands to turn them back. I stretched out my legs, trying to hook my feet into
small gaps in the wooden face where they might help to anchor me. The bow and
the quiver which I had not yet tried to use were pinned beneath me, their
awkward shapes digging into my flesh as I tried to force myself down on to the
deck.

I could still see Myrlin clinging to the
wheel, refusing to let his giant frame be cast down by the angry wind. I could
not see the goddess, but as the moaning of the wind paused for a fleeting
moment I heard her, screaming at the storm with all the wrath which she could
rouse to meet it. She was not screaming wordlessly—nor, I quickly realised, was
she screaming impotently. Although the wind's imperious howl tried hard to
reassert itself when the brief pause was done, it could only enter into
competition with her, and it seemed almost as if her voice now drew strength
from the maelstrom of sound which whirled about us, as if the turbulence which
was shaking the very foundations of the world added to her power instead of
undermining it.

I raised my head, gaining confidence that I
did not need to shrivel myself up in search of a hidey-hole, wondering if I
might not fight too, if only I had words to do it with. I opened my mouth, and
found it full of rushing, strangling air, which drove from my mind any thought
of trying to form a coherent sentence—but I would not be silenced, and I
shouted against the wind with all my might.

There was a brief moment when it seemed
that the shout might empty my lungs and leave me helpless in the grip of the
wind, helping it in its determination to choke me, but such sound as I produced
seemed only to need a spark to set it alight before it grew of its own accord,
plundering the force of the storm which tried to staunch it. There was a
moment's struggle, a second's balance, and then I found the power to sustain
the shout, to amplify it, and turn it into a cry of triumph, and I realised
that Myrlin was shouting too, and that his stentorian voice was somehow adding
its support to mine as we laid down a carpet of sound on which the goddess'
words could dance . . . and the louder we shouted, the clearer her words
became, and though they were in some primitive, forgotten language which I did
not know, they had meaning enough to terrify the wind which had come to pluck
us apart.

There surged through me a sense of
triumphant authority as I realised what power I had on which to draw. Magic
was there to be worked, and although I had no knowledge of its working, the
necessity which was the mother of improvisation could bring it forth. I could
defend myself, not only with the curious weightless sword but with the sheer
force of wishful thinking.

For the first time in my life I felt truly
free, a commander of circumstance.

The boat plunged through the tiny eye of
the storm, through the arch of rosy fire, and came out the other side, bursting
from the thick and ruddy cloud into the thinner, sparkling mist once more.

Water rained down upon us as we passed beneath
the vortices which sucked the water up, but they could not close upon the sides
of our craft, and could not break our oars—and the water was only water, which
could not hurt us in the least.

Our howls of wrath extended themselves into
a long ululating cry of pure elation, and when I had come to my feet I saw that
we were all three looking back at the dying thing behind us, whose fury seemed
now only to be consuming itself, as the red that was not like blood faded to a
pastel shade of rose, and finally evaporated in the silver mist.