Harry Cavendish (9 page)

‘Just so.’

‘I wonder if I did the right thing bringing him here?’

‘Well, what’s done is done. You right in it now, whether you want to be or not, Captain. Now ain’t no time for second thoughts.’

She could hear Frantic, the centre half, talking with Porritt, two rows back.

‘Don’t have to tell her,’ he said. ‘Just do it.’

‘But she’s the captain.’

‘We don’t stand any kind of bloody chance at all unless we find ways to circumvent her.’

‘I’ll sound her out. She might not object.’

‘Just go ahead and do it. She won’t even notice.’

Over nothing, she thought. He wanted to switch to the wing, and she would have had said, Yes, immediately. In fact, she preferred him there. They didn’t want to talk to her. That was all. She was different, older, a woman, whatever.

She gave a sigh, reclined the spacecraft seat a little further, and stared at the tiny oval by her side that gave out onto the black void. She saw a middle-aged woman, her hair sprayed and set, face powdered and rouged, crowsfeet round her eyes, mauve lipstick. A relic.

I suppose I understand how they feel, she thought. If I were their age, I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.

‘Porritt!’ she said. ‘I heard you!’

‘Oh, hell!’

‘Oh, hell what? You can talk to me, you know.’

‘Yes, Mrs. Bellingham.’

‘Move to the wing if you want. It might be an idea.’

But he didn’t want to, now she had suggested it.

Later she heard them again. They must have thought she was sleeping.

‘What gives her the right anyway?’ said Porritt.

‘She’s the selector, isn’t she?’

‘Is she? Selector and captain – very strange.’

‘Otherwise she wouldn’t even be on the team.’

‘How can she be selector and captain? Who is she exactly? I hear she lives in this huge country estate.

All by herself.’

‘It’s called Blowers. She’s a nob. Her claim to fame is having introduced polo to Crampton. She spent some time on Zargon 8 as a girl and learnt the game there. That’s why she’s in charge of everything. The game on Crampton has outgrown her, that’s all.’

‘I think the whole planet has outgrown her. She’s one of those old fogeys. Takes pleasure in shoving her enormous bulk in the way of progress. Never come to terms with Empire, I suppose.’

He said the word, ‘Empire’, in a kind of snotty sarcastic whine, making fun of the declamation as he supposed she might. It was a concept irrelevant to him, as immediate as his duct.

She accessed her childhood, stored more vividly there.

She had been seven when she had gone. The Zargons had arrived on Crampton two years before. She remembered their smooth, grey battle-cruisers sat in the sky like barrage balloons, a statement of intent.

Her parents had been uneasy, but had told her to curtsey to the Commander when he had paid them a visit.

She remembered the excitement of packing, everything not fitting in her small blue suitcase; meeting with the other children at the spaceport; the small transporter with the pilot who unnervingly left the cockpit to talk with them; her first view of the city – people, everywhere; the litter; great, grey museums impressively empty and smelling of carbolic; holo-theatres, advertising movies full of explosions; shops on seventeen levels where pretty, smiling girls sprayed her with perfume as she entered; trams that she caught according to a multi-coloured diagram; the animated advertising hoardings; a mono-rail full of angry commuters; smog one morning; a beggar playing a penny-whistle.

And when she had reluctantly returned to Crampton and been driven to Blowers, she had found her parents gone.

They set off again after lunch at a good pace taking their cue from Stanton Bosch who was keen to press on. Cormack had rather embarrassingly joined the cow on the stretcher. His legs were aching, his feet were blistered and the Boschs had become frustrated. They were going to lose the Guards if he couldn’t keep up, so they had relented and told him to climb on. He lay back as best he could, resting a little on the cow, and shut his eyes as he bumped back and forth, listening to the crunch of crampons in the snow, and the laboured breathing of the Boschs, and above everything else, the roar of the wind as it whipped and lashed about them.

Up the mountain the way was marked with poles, the path having given way to snow, but they were coming on them further and further apart, until at last they seemed to disappear altogether. Cormack could just make out Proton, in the lead far ahead, striding purposefully.

Then it began to snow, lightly at first, the small snowflakes dropping like confetti from the cold white sky, and the cow opened her eyes, wondering what it was that was tickling her skin, and when she saw it was snow, she smiled.

‘I does love the snow,’ she said.

‘Really?’

‘Reminds me of home. Zargonic pastures.’

She made a play of catching the flakes on her tongue, and giggled when she missed and they landed on her nose.

But the fall that had started so gently, soon became a downpour, and the wind began to whip the larger flakes, themselves more like hail now. Stanton Bosch declared it a blizzard and called the party to a halt.

They laid up on a large plateau, making temporary camp with tarpaulins.

‘We can still make the summit before nightfall,’ Proton said. ‘It will ease off.’

‘Bes’ to lay up here till it pass right over,’ said Stanton Bosch. ‘Take no chances on this ‘ere mountain.’

The Guards were consulted and were at one with the Bosch, so the tents were removed from the backpacks to make a more permanent camp for the night. They pitched them perilously close to the drop-off. The guy-ropes had to be pulled taut so they fizzed in the wind, but there was nothing for it but to wait, and soon the little camp was buried in two feet of snow.

The cow was in Cormack’s tent.

‘Ooo, huddle close,’ she said. ‘A cow does have no woollens to keep her warm.’

‘It’s very uncomfortable,’ said Cormack. But he lay down beside her all the same, and put his arms around her, and she moved herself close so that her body was backed tightly against his. They shivered together, with his head resting on her cheek, and all he could see was her leathered skin and the sharp bristles round the nape of her neck, and beyond them, on the wall of the tent, his shadow moving over hers, in time with her breaths.

‘All the teams are here, Sire.’

‘The Cramptonians as well?’

‘They arrived this morning.’

‘Excellent. Was Mrs. Bellingham searched?’

‘Quite thoroughly scanned. But they found nothing.’

‘Perhaps she has just come for the polo after all. Keep her in barracks all the same.’

They were in the recreation room and had another, from an old groundsman who had died unexpectedly after falling in the moat, and had just finished stewing in it.

‘So when can we have her?’

‘After the first match, Sire. They cannot win. They are hopeless. They’ll play the Tartans.’

Something disappointing with this one though – a sort of sadness running through it like a vein in rock; a paucity of experience – all the memories indistinct as though they were tinged with sepia. The hive-mind had blamed the resolution and the cheapness of the duct. The Emperor had blamed its provenance.

‘I suppose they know about the rule changes. The consequences for losing. The prerogative will be strictly enforced.’

‘It hasn’t been for years.’

‘It will be a surprise.’

At last the blizzard subsided, but it would soon be dark and there was debate between Stanton Bosch and Proton as to the wisest course of action.

‘I say push on. We can make the summit before nightfall. We don’t have much time,’ said Proton.

‘Aye, we can make the summit with luck. But it is not just the summit you seek, is it?’ said Stanton Bosch.

‘We could make camp up there and wait if necessary. Rather up there than down here.’

‘The camp here is made and we are safe for now. We can rest a while and set off in the morning.’

In the end Proton prevailed. There was little time to lose, so they would attempt the summit before nightfall.

The camp was disassembled hurriedly and the tents and equipment were packed away. After much grunting, puffing, and rearranging of loads and clothing, everyone was ready. They set off in single file with the Boschs and their burden of Cormack and the cow at the back.

The heavy snowfall had made the going more difficult. The snow was no longer compacted and hard, but soft and giving, and they were soon bogged down. Proton was leading the way, manfully making flamingo-like strides between the drifts that sucked him in like quicksand, but it was slow-going even for him, and they had barely made two hundred yards when the sun began to sink below the horizon. A gloom descended on the mountain.

Soon Cormack and the cow, borne aloft by the Boschs, lost sight of the Guards who were pushing ahead in what seemed to be one last desperate dash for the summit. The Boschs were adopting a more measured approach, moving forward steadily and slowly in tortured silence.

For four more hours, they tramped forward until at last in the darkness ahead, Cormack could make out flags, marking a way across a small jagged precipice covered with an ice floe, and up into what must surely be, he thought, the rim of the crater.

‘Aye, up there, ‘tis not far now,’ said Stanton Bosch.

They paused for a final rest, filling up on cheese and biscuits, and drinking water from the snowmelt. The cow ate the last of the kush-kush grass that Cormack had gathered for her from the lower slopes, and then Stanton Bosch led the way with a ‘Hey-ho!’ heading directly for the first of the poles.

It was difficult to see the way, but a strange moon had appeared to the south above the sea and was giving a pale blue light to the snow, so progress was still possible.

Tight in the hollows made by hardened lava floes were black pools of steaming mud that smelt sulphurous, and above, from the rim itself, surged great clouds of fluming smoke that whipped off the mountain and out over the valley below.

They came upon the summit unexpectedly. Stanton Bosch rounded one last outcrop, looking apocalyptic in his lederhosen amongst the billowing smoke, and then they were there - the side of the mountain that they had circled for close on three days at last giving way to a flatness of rocks and smoke and looming darkness.

The rim was some two hundred yards across, roughly circular, pocked with jagged little ledges with a sheer drop-off into the crater itself.

The cow expressed an interest and was shuffled to the edge for a look.

‘Oh, my good Lord!’ she said as a Bosch tipped her sideways for a better view. ‘Tis unfathomably dark down there.’

She asked to be held there for a while and seemed fascinated by something a little way down the far side where Cormack could see only blackness.

‘Hope your straps are tight enough there, cow!’ said Stanton Bosch. ‘Death for a cow or a man if you fall in there! We get our fair share of extreme sports madness on Foul Ball but there ain’t no sport called Racing-on-a-Stretcher-Down-a-Volcano. No, cow. Don’t even think about it. Now where be the Guards?’

‘Perhaps they took a wrong turn,’ suggested Cormack.

‘So they be going down instead of up?’ said the Bosch, and put like that it didn’t seem likely, so they decided to leave the cow on her stretcher by the rim and do a quick circuit in the hope that the Guards were resting on the opposite side.

They were about a third of the way round, some ten minutes after leaving the cow, when Cormack, above the roar of the wind, heard a strange, plaintive moan. The Boschs either didn’t hear it, or had chosen to ignore it, because they continued on without comment, but to Cormack it sounded dreadfully familiar, hitting some still raw nerve, and it filled him with a sense of foreboding and doom.

He walked on, trying to ignore it, but it continued - the low moaning sound, awful and unearthly, an unloosed imprecation to a terrible God; like the noise the cow had made in her spasms within the Prison Whale, he thought, and then chills ran down his spine and he had an appalling prescience and called at once for Stanton Bosch. In their panic, they ran all the way back to where the cow had been lain on her stretcher.

She was gone. Just an impression of two poles and a emaciated rump worn into the rocky ground marked her former presence, but the low moan, much louder here, indicated where she was now well enough – deep within the crater.

‘Cow, can you hear me?’ said Stanton Bosch, lying flat to the rim, his leathered legs held by another in case he slipped.

The moan came back stronger and deeper.

‘She be in there,’ he said to Cormack, pointing down the crater. ‘There ain’t no hope for she. Prime beef gone to waste. We should have eaten her earlier.’

‘She’s my friend. We need to get her out.’

‘No chance of that. The cow has had it.’

‘Hold on there cow!’ shouted Cormack down the crater. ‘I’m coming to get you out!’

‘You does be so good to me,’ the cow shouted back limply. ‘I was just having a look-see into the crater because I thought I could see some lovely straw and I didn’t realize I was so close to the edge and then the stretcher started to slide like a toboggan and…’

Cormack began to strip off, furiously removing his jumpsuit.

Stanton Bosch watched him in horror.

‘No, no, skinny man!’ he said. ‘To go after her without the proper equipment would be certain death.

Leave her to her fate. She ain’t the first cow to be barbecued.’

‘I’m going in,’ said Cormack, and got down flat on his belly and crawled across to the rim. He could see little down there except smoke, and the dark scarred rock, and a faint glow from deep below, but, at least initially, it seemed possible to be able to scramble down a little, and still keep a hold, and then perhaps find a way further towards her.

‘Holy crap!’ cried Stanton Bosch as he watched him go. ‘Holy crap! These tourists! They does horrify your soul in truth! And it is only the fourth day! Only the fourth day!’