Land and Overland - Omnibus (59 page)

The manoeuvre had been completed without mishap, and now it was time to do things which had never been done before.

Toller was strapped into the pilot's seat, with Tipp Gotlon near to him on the other side of the engine unit. The false deck on which they were sitting was a circular wooden platform, only four good paces across, and beyond its unguarded rim was a yawning emptiness, a drop of more than two thousand miles to the planetary surface. At varying distances the five other sky-ships were suspended in the void against the complex blue-and-silver background of the heavens. Their two-man crews, because they were in the cylindrical shadows of the decks, were only visible where silhouetted against glowing spirals or the splayed radiance of comets. The huge balloons, brilliantly illuminated on their undersides, had the apparent solidity of planets, pear-shaped worlds with meridians marked by load tapes and lines of stitching.

Toller was concerned less with the unearthly ambience than with the demands of his own microcosm. The deck space was occupied by a clutter of equipment and stores, from the pipe runs of the lateral jets to the lockers used for the storage of power crystals, food, water, skysuits and fallbags. Waist-high partitions of woven cane enclosed the primitive toilet and galley. From the latter protruded the lower part of Gnapperl's body, which had been lashed in place to forestall its unnerving tendency to rise up and meander in weightless conditions.

"Well, young Gotlon, this is where we part company," Toller said. "How do you feel about that?"

"Ready when you are, sir." Gotlon gave his centrally divided smile. "As you know, sir, it is my ambition to become a pilot, and I would be honoured if you would allow me to pull the rip line."

"Honoured? Tell me, Gotlon—are you enjoying this?"

"Of course, sir." Gotlon paused while an unusually large meteor burned across the sky below the ship, followed by a sonorous clap of thunder. "Well, perhaps it would be wrong to say I'm enjoying it, but I have no wish to do anything else."

A fair answer.
Toller thought, resolving to keep an eye on the youngster's future progress. "All right, pull the line when you're ready."

Without hesitation Gotlon leaned forward, grasped the red line which ran down to the crew stations from the balloon's interior, and tugged hard on it. The line went slack in his hand. There was no perceptible change in the ship's equilibrium or dynamics, but high in the flimsy cathedral dome of the balloon something irrevocable had happened. A large panel had been torn out of the crown, surrendering the ship to the forces of Overland's gravity. From that moment onwards the ship and its crew could do nothing but fall, and yet Toller felt a strange timidity over the next inevitable step.

"I see no point in sitting around here," he said, taking no chances on having his feelings observed. His feet were already tucked inside his fallbag, which was a fleece-lined sack large enough to enclose his entire body. He unfastened his restraints, straightened up, and in the act of doing so noticed his sword, which was still tied by its scabbard belt to a nearby stanchion. For an instant he considered letting it remain. It was an inconvenient and incongruous article to be taken into the confines of the bag, but leaving it behind would have been like abandoning an old friend. He strapped the weapon to his side and looked up in time to see Gotlon—still smiling!—launch himself backwards from the edge of the deck.

Gotlon tumbled away into the sterile blue, sunlight glancing unevenly from the underside of his cocooned form until he came to rest some thirty yards from the ship. He made no attempt to modify his final attitude, and could have been thought lifeless but for the transient feathering of his breath.

Toller looked towards the sister ships and saw that other men, following Gotlon's example, were venturing into the thin air. It had been decided in advance that there would be no synchronisation—individuals would jump when they were ready—and suddenly he had a fear of being last, and being seen to be last, which outweighed his reluctance to perform the supremely unnatural act. Toller drew the fallbag up to his chest, pushed hard with his feet and sailed face downwards over the rim of the deck.

Overland slid into view beneath him, and they were face to face like lovers, and she was calling to him from thousands of miles below. Little was visible in the gibbosity where night still reigned, but in the sunlit crescent the equatorial continent could be seen to span the world, pale green powdered with ochres beneath traceries of white cloud, and the great oceans curved away to the mysterious watery poles.

Toller surveyed the entire hemisphere for a short time, chastened and subdued, then drew up his knees to make himself smaller and closed the neck of the fallbag over his head.

I did not expect to sleep.

Who would have thought that a man could sleep during the dizzy plunge from the central blue to the surface of the world?

But it's warm and dark in here, and the hours pass slowly. And
as my speed gradually increases and the atmosphere grows thicker, I can feel the bag beginning to rock and sway, and there is a hypnotic quality to the soughing of the air as it rushes by. It is easy to sleep. Almost too easy, in fact. The thought has crossed my mind that some of us may not awaken in time to get out of the bags and deploy our parachutes, but surely that is a ridiculous notion. Only a man with a deep inner urge to end his life could fail to be ready when the time comes.

Sometimes I open the bag and look out to see how my companions are faring, but it is becoming impossible to find them, whether above or below me. We are falling at slightly different rates, and as the hours go by we are being strung out in a long vertical line. It is noteworthy that we are all falling faster than the ships—something which had not been predicted. The false decks, being symmetrically attached to the balloons, are trying to maintain a horizontal attitude even though the balloons have collapsed and are being dragged along in their wakes, thus creating greater air resistance.

As we left the ships behind I noticed the decks oscillating in the air stream, and the last time I picked them out they were like six slow-winking stars.
I
must relate all this to Zavotle and see if he wants to redesign the attachments so that the decks can fall edge-on. The ships would descend faster that way. The impact with the ground would be worse, but the engine cores are indestructible.

Sometimes I think about the men we left up there in the weightless zone, and have found genuine cause to envy them. They at least have something to do! An abundance of tasks to perform … the sealing of the fortresses with mastic … the hourly smoke readings to warn of drifting … the setting up of the pressurisation bellows … the preparation of the first meals … the checking of engines and armaments … the establishment of watch rotas…

The fallbag rocks gently, and the air whispers persuasively all around.

It is too easy to fall asleep in here…

"Gold! You have the gall to offer me gold!" Ragg Artoonl, infuriated, slapped the leather bag away with a calloused hand. It fell to the ground and partially opened, allowing a few squares of stamped yellow metal to spill into the wet grass.

"You're just as barmy as everybody says!" Lue Klo dropped to his knees and carefully retrieved his money. "Do you want to sell your section, or do you not?"

"I want to sell it all right—but I want
real
money. Good old-fashioned glass, that's what I want." Artoonl rubbed the thumb of one hand against the palm of the other, mimicking the counting of traditional Kolcorronian woven glass currency notes. "Glass!"

"It all bears the King's likeness," Klo protested.

"I want to
spend
the stuff—not hang it on a wall." Artoonl glowered around the small group of farmers. "Who has real money?"

"I have." Narbane Ellder sidled to the fore, fumbling in his pouch. "I've got two thousand royals here."

"I'll take it! The section is yours, and may you have better luck with it than I did." Artoonl was extending his hand for the money when Bartan Drumme stepped in between the two men and pushed them apart with a force he would have been unable to exert when he first turned to farming.

"What's the matter with you, Ragg Artoonl?" he said. "You can't sell off your land for a fraction of what it's worth."

"He can do as he pleases," the thwarted Ellder cut in, brandishing his wad of coloured squares.

"And I'm surprised at
you"
Bartan said to him, tapping him on the chest with an accusing finger. "Taking advantage of your neighbour when his mind is disturbed. What would Jop say about that? What would he say about this meeting?" Bartan glanced a challenge around the group of men who had come together in a tree-fringed hollow which offered some protection from the weather. A heavy belt of rain was drifting across the area, and the farmers in their sack-like hoods looked sullen and oddly furtive with their hunched shoulders and dripping features.

"There's nothing wrong with my mind." Artoonl stared resentfully at Bartan for a moment, then his face darkened even further as a new thought occurred to him. "This is all
your
fault, anyway. It was
you
who brought us to this place of misery."

"I'm sorry about what happened to your sister," Bartan said. "It was a terrible thing, but you have got to think straight about it and realise it's no reason to give up all you have worked for."

"Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?" Artoonl's flushed face expressed the kind of mistrust and hostility Bartan had encountered on first entering the commune. "What do you know about the land anyway, Mister Bead-stringer, Mister Brooch-mender?"

"I know Lue wouldn't be offering to buy your section unless he thought it worth his while. He's taking advantage of you."

"Watch your tongue," Ellder said, stepping closer to Bartan with his stubbled jaw thrust forward. "I grow more than a little weary of you, Mister—" he sought a fresh insult, eyes narrowing under the mental strain, and finally was obliged to copy Artoonl—"Bead-stringer."

Bartan looked around the group of cowled figures, assessing the general mood, and was both shocked and saddened to realise there was a genuine possibility of violence towards him if he remained. It was another indication, contrary to all his own arguments, that the farmers had indeed degenerated since occupying the Haunt. In the year that had passed since his marriage to Sondeweere he had seen their old spirit of camaraderie eroded and replaced by a mean competitiveness, with the largest and most successful families begrudging help to their neighbours. Jop Trinchil's mandate had been totally withdrawn from him, and—coincidentally—the loss of his authority had been accompanied by a spiritual and physical diminution. Shrunken and ill-looking, no longer able to exert a cohesive force on his flock, he was rarely seen outside the boundaries of his own family's section. Bartan had never expected to miss the old Trinchil, with his crassness and bullying ways, but the commune seemed to have lost direction without him.

"I am no longer a bead-stringer," Bartan said stiffly to the rainswept assembly. "More's the pity—because with my finest needle and thread I might have fashioned a slim necklace from all your brains. A
very
slim necklace."

His words drew an angry response from perhaps twenty throats. The sound was formless and blurred, like a conflict of sea waves in a narrow inlet, and yet by a trick of selective perception Bartan was able, or thought he was able, to isolate a single sentence:
The fool would be better employed making a chastity belt.

"Who said that?" he shouted, almost reaching for the sword he had never worn.

The shadowed archways of several hoods turned towards each other and back to Bartan. "Who said what?" a man asked in tones of gleeful reasonableness.

"Does young Glave Trinchil still lend a hand with your chores?" another said. "If his strength ever fails I'll be willing to take his place—I've been known to plough an excellent furrow in my day."

Bartan came close to running forward and throwing himself at the last speaker, but commonsense and prudence held him in check. The peasants had won again, as they always did, because a dozen cudgels would always overcome one verbal smallsword. The same coarse clichés were ever cherished by them as something entirely original and precious, and thus their ignorance became their armour.

"I hope you will not be too distraught if I withdraw, gentlemen." He paused, hoping the sexual innuendo might have eased some tensions, but it had gone unnoticed. "I have business at the markets."

"I'll travel with you, if that's all right," Orice Shome said, falling in at Bartan's side as he walked away from the group. Shome was an itinerant labourer, one of the few who had recently been hired by members of the commune. He was a slightly wild-eyed young man, with most of one ear missing, but Bartan had heard no bad reports of him and was prepared to accept his company.

"Join me if you wish," Bartan said, "but doesn't Alrahen expect you to be at work?"

Shome held up a small kitbag. "I'm on the road again. Don't want to stay around here."

"I see." Bartan pulled his oilcloth hood closer around his shoulders and climbed up to the driving seat of his wagon. The warm rain was still coming down hard, but above the western horizon was a band of pale yellow which was growing wider by the minute, and he knew the weather would soon improve. Shome sat on the bench beside him, Bartan twitched the reins and his bluehorn moved off, its rain-slicked haunches rising and descending in a steady rhythm. Inexplicably, Bartan found himself dwelling on the taunts about his wife, and to redirect his thoughts he decided to strike up a conversation with his passenger.

"You weren't with Alrahen for long," he said. "Was he not a good employer?"

"I've had worse. It's the place I don't like. I'm leaving because there's something not right about the place."

"Not another scare-monger!" Bartan gave Shome a critical glance. "You don't look like a man who'd be given over to wild imaginings."