Over the Darkened Landscape (7 page)

Checking the wristband on the outside of his suit, he found that his compass didn’t work; it seemed that the high foreheads and astrologers were right and that the Moon did not have a population of tiny lode-mites to tell the hand which way to point. Jack knew that whatever was behind the fog was most likely his destination, but he would need a method to find his way back to the beanstalk when it was time to descend.

He rummaged through his supply pack for a moment, first pulling out a loaf of bread. That idea was swiftly ruled out by a memory of something that had happened to two of his mother’s cousins when they were children, many years before; he wasn’t sure if there were birds and rodents on the Moon, but he didn’t want to chance it. He finally settled on a bag of brightly-colored clarifying beads, carried with him as trade goods in case there were primitive natives in charge of the gardens. He dropped the first bead to make sure that it would work, watched as a mirror image of himself and his surroundings rose up out of the dust, then from the corner of his eye watched it slowly slink back into the bead as he turned away.

There was only one thing left to do before he started on his way. Reaching back into the
Aquila
, he pulled from it a small glass tubule, stoppered with a cork. Inside sat a compost of moldy leaves and bits of rancid fat, collected with great care by one of the high foreheads from an abiogenesis facility in a town near the launch site.

Jack carefully slid the tubule into a special slot in his dephlogisticator and sealed it in. Removing the cork took some delicate handiwork after all this, but with the help of some tweezers sewn into the inside of the leather cover, he managed to do so. A turn of a dial increased the flow of air into the tubule, and another dial released a special mixture of alchemical components apparently guaranteed to speed the process of spontaneous generation.

With the chronometer embedded beside the useless compass in Jack’s suit wrist, he counted out the minutes required. When time was up, he slid back the cover and pulled the tubule out of its pocket.

Sure enough, maggots swarmed through the mulch, wriggling madly as they ate their way through the disgusting mixture. Jack knelt down and poured the contents out onto the Lunar dust, watching carefully for adverse reactions from any of the pasty white grubs.

Nothing untoward happened. Indeed, some of the maggots were already covering themselves with a hard white shell, sure sign that they were preparing to give up their spot in the ladder of life to small flies.

Jack turned a third dial, listened as the hiss of incoming air slowly died away. When he could hear nothing but his own breathing, he inhaled deeply and detached his helmet from its locking mechanism. The air was cool, but temperate. A slow breath out, and then he breathed in, cautiously.

Everything was fine. The air tasted and smelled a touch rancid, but certainly no worse than his own body odors.

There was a spare microphone and earpiece in one of his pockets, so he put them on and plugged them in to the slot in the suit just under his left ear. Background noise and chatter still seemed to dominate the
choralis
, but he thought he could hear the Mission Specialist speaking, something about clouds, he thought. If so, a response was certainly in order.

“I am leaving now for the clouds. The air here is fine to breathe, and I expect to have answers shortly.”

A squeal of more Firmamental interference followed this pronouncement, high-pitched whine and harp music somewhat ludicrously combined, and then a distant voice, yet again, speaking vaguely familiar nonsense: “
Ange! N’y va pas! Tu ne pourrais pas survivre là-bas! Je t’en prie, reviens tout de suite à la Strate Omniprésente
.”

Turning the receiver volume down to a less-irritating background hiss, Jack unhooked his dephlogisticator and set it inside the
Aquila
, then strapped his pack over his suit and lifted the camera bag to his shoulder. He peeled off his gloves so that he would be able to handle the clarifying beads with greater dexterity, and then set off in search of what lay behind the clouds.

The Lunar desert he and his vessel had occupied soon gave way to a plain, fields of golden grasses waving in the soft, cool breeze. The grasses were taller than Jack, but fortunately they parted often enough for him to keep an eye on the bank of white clouds that served as cover for his mysterious destination. Jack stopped and took a picture here, making sure he got it from an angle that included the Earth in the sky.

The plain was soon followed by the gardens whose existence the astrologers had predicted. He stood on the crest of a small hill and looked down on row after row after row of vegetation, all recognizable as fruits and vegetables he would know, but all enormous, salads to feed an army; no, a
nation
. Perhaps they grew such for the same reason he felt less weight. Or perhaps whoever grew and ate them . . . And then the clouds parted for the briefest of instances, and Jack had a glimpse of the secret that stood at the edge of the lake. It was a castle, a giant stone edifice larger than any mighty wizard or high forehead on Earth could ever hope to possess. Jack saw brief details of high, steep stairs leading to a massive, dark keep, of crenellations, turrets, and uncovered parapets, all watched over by a motley collection of weathered, disturbed and angry-looking gargoyles. But then like a curtain being drawn back into place, Jack was no longer looking at the solid, ominous gray of old stone, but rather the unformed wispy slate of fog and cloud.

Dropping another bead, Jack continued on his way, the castle his confirmed destination.

At first he thought perhaps it was a trick of perspective, but as Jack neared the castle and the clouds slowly gave way, he could see what looked to be an old woman standing on one of the many steps and sweeping away great nimbuses of dust. The problem was not the woman, nor was it her fairly mundane task; rather, it was the fact that she seemed so much taller than she possibly could be.

As Jack had neared the castle he thought he had managed to get a grip on perspective by judging the height of the stairs and size of the castle’s large central door by comparing them with plants from the garden, which led all the way to almost the foot of the high stone walls. The stairs appeared to be tall and broad, enough so that he might have to pull himself up like a child new to walking, and if this was accurate, then the door was tall enough for him to walk in with a man on his shoulders, and a man on
that
man’s shoulders.

Even with this evidence, though, it was hard to credit the size of the old woman. Crookedly stooped over the broom, she still seemed to be nearly twice Jack’s height.

He would need to be careful, and so decided to stop and eat and think about his advance.

Sitting on the ground behind a bush, Jack opened his bag and pulled out his lunch. Bread, cheese, small flask of wine, and some fruit. He ate fairly quickly, but still enjoyed every bite and swallow. When he was done, he set the empty flask on the ground beside him, wrapped the leftover cheese and placed it back in the bag, then stood up, plan in place and ready to go. The direct approach seemed most sensible right now.

The old woman was still on the steps, a little closer to ground level by the time he approached the bottom stair. She noticed him when he was about fifty paces off, and stopped her sweeping to watch his advance. She was, he noticed, perhaps even taller than his first estimate.

Stopping at the bottom stair, Jack tilted his head way back and smiled up at her. “Good morning, Ma’am.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him, nodded her head. “’Morning.” The look on her face told him nothing, aside from that she was likely not enthused about his presence.

“My name is Jack, Ma’am, Jack Armstrong. I have traveled some distance to come and see what lay behind these clouds.” He gestured overhead. From here, nothing above could be seen through the billowing mist.

The old woman leaned forward and spit through a gap in her front teeth, warm saliva splattering onto the steps near Jack like stale dirty water from a wash bucket. “Came far, eh?”

Jack nodded.

“Better come in for some tea, then, I reckon.” She turned and started up the steps, leaving the broom lying where she’d been standing. Jack followed after her, scrambling up the stairs on all fours. But then she stopped suddenly, and he almost bounced off her heel. The old woman turned and glared down at him, shook a long, crooked finger and said, “But mind you stay no longer than a cuppa. My man is out hunting for the day, and you don’t want to be here when he gets back.”

“Why is that, Ma’am?” asked Jack, panting a bit as he raced to keep up with her renewed ascension.

The old woman had reached the landing, and swung open the huge wooden door, its hinges creaking and scraping in protest. She waved him in and then shut the door with a teeth-jarring slam behind them, answering, “Because my man is an ogre who eats boys and men for breakfast, usually broiled and on buttered toast.” She leaned down until she was almost looking Jack in the eye, and hissed, “And he has a
ferocious
appetite!”

There was a squeal of feedback from Jack’s earpiece just then, and a babble of voices all shouting at once. “
Sad je prekasno! Andjeo, ti moraš naci nacin da pobjegneš, ili ceš patiti tamo za cjelu vjecnost
.”

He turned the volume right off, blinking at the shock of the onslaught of noise as well as the thought of having entered the castle of an ogre; a carnivorous ogre, at that. He nodded, because the old woman seemed to be expecting some response, and when she grunted with some apparent satisfaction and continued walking, he hurried after her.

His chronometer told him he had just under five hours to go until he had to be back on
Aquila
and ready for descent. The walk was not a terribly long one, but he preferred to be sure he had an extra-large window. Even without the incentive of being cannibalized, he knew he couldn’t stay long.

Their passage eventually brought them to a large, warm, homey kitchen. The table was tall, enough so that he had to stand on his toes to look over the edge. The old woman pulled a chair from a corner and tapped it with a gnarled finger. “Sit here,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

He pulled himself up onto the enormous wooden chair and watched as she muttered some words over the great wood stove. A blue flame jumped to life, and she placed a kettle full of water on top of it. Reaching into a cupboard to the right of the stove, she pulled out one cup and was about to get a second, hopefully smaller one, when they both heard the door slam, if possible even louder now than it had sounded when Jack had stood right next to it.

The floor began to shake, the chair Jack sitting in shimmying in horrible syncopation to the thumping that was increasing in volume with every second. On the table, Jack watched with horrified fascination as a vast porcelain sugar bowl jumped and fidgeted across the surface, spoon inside clinking against the edge and little white granules of sugar jumping from the bowl in a manner that reminded Jack of rats leaping from a sinking ship.

“It’s my man!” hissed the old woman. “Quick! You must hide, or you’re meat on the table for certain!” Jack jumped from the chair and watched her with increasing panic as she cast about for a suitable hiding place. After a few seconds of turning this way and that, she finally opened the door to the oven and gestured at it. “Inside here, you.”

Jack mutely shook his head, the motion making him feel for all the world like an intransigent child. The burner on the stove was still lit, and all this talk of being eaten didn’t endear him to hiding in there. He quickly looked around the kitchen before pointing to the breadbox, a blue and yellow thing that looked large enough for him to be fairly comfortable. “In there,” he said.

She nodded and lifted him up to the countertop, and he scrambled into the box and sat on his rear, knees drawn up close to his chin and backpack resting against the rear of the breadbox. Beside him lay a few slices of heavy rye bread, flat and dark and pungent. Hopefully the ogre would have no desire for a sandwich.

The lid to the box did not close completely, and by leaning forward just a bit and turning his head one way or the other, Jack could see most of the kitchen. He watched the old woman as she poured the now-hot water into a teapot and then turn to greet her husband the ogre.

He came marching down stairs that came from the back way, feet stamping so hard that everything in the kitchen not bolted down was hopping or shaking. His entrance was even louder, a great flurry of grunts and bellows and snorts, followed by his flinging a huge canvas bag, an axe and a spear into a corner of the room. The bag, Jack noticed, had a dark, blackish-red stain slowly growing along one side and the bottom.

Tearing his eyes away from that grisly sight, Jack turned his attention back to the ogre. He was taller than his wife by a good meter or more, and wore a floppy cap that appeared to have been stitched from the skin of dead humans. The ogre’s clothes seemed relatively benign otherwise, but his features were certainly anything but. His face was fierce and scowling, pockmarked with scabs and boils and furrowed with wrinkles and lines so that his whole visage appeared to be a series of monstrous red and yellow hills and brown and black chasms, interrupted only by a snarling mouth full of sharp, yellow teeth surrounded by thin cracked pink lips, a flat pug nose with wide dark nostrils, and rheumy eyes that looked like they might shine like red-hot coals in a dark room.

“You’re back early, dear,” said the old woman. “Good luck hunting today?” She took a sip of her tea.

The ogre nodded, leering, perhaps at some misshapen memory of death and dismemberment, thought Jack. “Aye,” he said. “Caught three heifers while they was watering down . . .” He paused, sniffed at the air. “Wife, I smell something. Something here in this kitchen!” He broke into a broad, fierce grin, then bellowed out a poem in a voice so loud Jack thought his ears would bleed.

“Fee-fi-fo-faut!

I smell the blood of a Lunanaut!