Priests of Ferris (13 page)

‘Ole Ben will get us round the bogs,’ Jimmy said. ‘Bears ’ave got a nose for that sort of thing.’

And Limpy told them grub-weed rubbed on their skins would stop insects biting. The only problem was food. So they went back to the rocks and collected shellfish and a supply of weed. Then they struck out east into the swamp, crossing flats where the rising water bubbled in crab holes and washed into the roots of salty rushes. But soon they got ahead of the water and padded along on dry ground that sank and rose elastically, as though hollow worlds lay underneath. This gave way in mid-afternoon to real swamp – boggy holes, rush pools, stretches of marsh-weed swimming in peaty water. They moved in a small circular world where the boundaries faded away in mist. Limpy had found grub-weed and its juice kept insects off. Ben, leading carefully, testing the ground, twice killed snakes with a blow of his paw. At dusk he found higher ground, an island rising from the swamp, and they made camp there. Limpy made a small fire in a hollow and they baked shellfish and ate them with raw weed.

‘What about Ben?’

‘He can live orf ’is fat,’ Jimmy said. ‘He’ll be havin’ priests for dinner tomorrer night.’

They slept uncomfortably in the humid night, disturbed by shrieks of creatures in the swamp, and started in the dawn, eager to reach the forest at the foot of Sheercliff. But it took them the whole of that day to come out of the swamp. They came up on dry ground as the sun went down and saw Sheercliff ahead, climbing into the sky, with its stone face glowing yellow. Another half day’s travel in thick bush lay ahead. And there, Limpy said, they were likely to meet patrols.

‘Where’s the Temple?’

‘South. There’s Deven’s Leap. You can see the Temple on the cliff beyond.’

It gleamed as pink as candy in the evening sun, a magic colour. But the building itself was brutal, Susan thought; a marble block, a giant slab, set down on the cliff-top, over-jutting it. Here and there a tower rose, a window glittered. A wall ran from its base along to the swollen dome of Deven’s Leap. She stared at that giant outcrop. A year ago – a hundred years – she had launched herself from its brow on her glider and sailed over bush and swamp and sea, south-west to the island. Now she was creeping up on it, slithering up, like a thing from the swamp. She wished she could go boldly to the Temple, bang on the door, and demand to talk to the High Priest. The time was close when something of that sort had to be done.

That night they risked no fire but ate fruit from the bush. They huddled close together and spoke in low voices.

‘We can’t take ’em all on, that’s fer sure,’ Jimmy said. ‘What we got on our side is surprise. We gotter get close to the big wheel – this High Priest geezer – and grab ’im when we see our chance. Then we got bargainin’ power, see? Susie can say ’er piece. If that don’t work we’ll knock some ’eads together.’

‘We’ve got to save Soona,’ Limpy said.

‘Where will they keep her?’ Kenno said. ‘And how do we get into the Temple?’

‘If Nick comes with them Birdfolk they can lift us in. We’re meetin’ them in Wildwood, north of Deven’s Leap, so we better get up there toot sweet. There’s places we can climb the cliff. I know one not much more’n a day’s walk north.’

‘They can lift us in at night,’ Limpy said. ‘We can land on a tower.’

‘They can’t lift Ben.’

‘He can come in through the main gate. Once he starts chargin’ they’ll never stop ’im. Eh, old feller?’

The bear nodded. He seemed very old to Susan. She did not doubt his strength and ferocity, but even he could not overcome an army of priests. She could not get away from the feeling that he would have some other importance, and Jimmy too, and Kenno and Limpy. If it came to a fight, they had no chance.

‘The priests will shoot the Birdfolk down with their crossbows.’

‘Not at the Temple,’ Kenno said. ‘The High Priest is afraid of assassination. More than one has been murdered. Only his bodyguard carry weapons. And they are spears and swords. The priest army stays down on the plains.’

‘How big is the bodyguard?’

‘More than a hundred men.’

‘Chicken feed,’ Jimmy said.

But his boasting worried Susan. She wondered if his long sleep had damaged him in some way. He did not seem to bother with thinking any more. He seemed too ready to fight and die. She did not want to die. She wanted to destroy the religion of Ferris, and save Soona, and go back to Earth. Jimmy’s sleep had been a kind of death and it seemed he did not mind going back to it.

She lay awake long after the others were asleep. It might be that Jimmy’s plan was best – if it was a plan – but it did not seem to need her. It relied on force and threat. She had always thought there was a better way. She would stand alone in front of the High Priest. She would tell him who she was and tell him his religion was a lie. Someone had to say it. She did not believe the Temple would crumble away after that. But something would happen – the words would be out, and she saw them flying like birds, over Wildwood, all through O, carrying the truth and giving it the strength to defeat the Lie. It was her way. Fighting and killing were not. Jimmy and Kenno would do that, if it had to be done. But before they started she would face the High Priest, she would trust Soona’s dream. As for Soona, there was a simple way to save her.

Susan slept a while and woke before the others in the dawn. They were curled up in the cold. She smiled at them, Jimmy and Ben, Limpy and Kenno, and said a silent goodbye. But when she rose to her feet the old bear opened his eyes and looked at her. She raised her hand to keep him silent and crept to him and looked into his eyes. She made a series of pictures of what she meant to do. It seemed less easy now, and parts of it made her shiver, but the bear did not object. She asked him to tell Jimmy and make Jimmy carry on with his own plan. She touched his head and he seemed to smile, and closed his eyes and slept again.

Susan went out of the camp and down through the bush to the edge of the swamp. She travelled fast in case the others woke and tried to catch her. At the place where a creek emptied into the swamp she found a patch of grub-weed. She dug several tubers with a stick and broke them and rubbed juice on her skin. Then she travelled south, keeping in the bush at the edge of the swamp. The priest patrols would be further in towards Sheercliff. She ate whenever she found fruit and berries.

By midday she was opposite Deven’s Leap. It thrust out from the cliff-top like a giant cumulus cloud, brown and grey. She climbed through the bush towards the base of the cliff, shivering a little at her memories of the place: of standing on the edge strapped in her glider; and of Odo Cling falling, with a seabird shriek, and his legs working like insect legs. She did not want to go too near the place where he had struck. And how many hundreds had fallen since, thrown in the name of Susan off the Leap?

She heard the rumble of a cart and crouched low in the underbrush until it died away. Then she crept on again and came to a road surfaced with gravel. It wound along a valley to the cliff below Deven’s Leap, and she saw men working there, and priests and dogs patrolling. The ground was levelled out and strewn with marble chips. Men were raking it smooth, while others shovelled chips from laden carts. On either side, workmen were building stands and draping them with cloths decorated with the wing emblem. It was almost like the preparations for a show. But people would gather here, and sit in these stands, to watch a girl tumble from the sky and strike the ground.

Another cart rolled by, escorted by a priest. His dogs stopped and raised their noses, sniffed the air. The priest waited. Susan felt his pale eyes looking through her. She heard the clicking of his Ferris bones as he turned and looked down the road. He spoke sharply to his dogs and they trotted after the cart. She let her breath out slowly. Carefully she crept back through the bush. Then she made her way towards the swamp, putting a hill between herself and the arena. She found the road again and ran across. From the top of another hill she saw the Temple, blinding white in the midday sun, with black marble wings set in its face. It towered over the cliff almost to a third of its height again. The weight of it crushed her into the ground. But she wondered at its name – the Temple. There seemed to be nothing religious about it. It was like a prison, or a block of offices where the work of some tyrannical government was done. She found the likeness oddly comforting. And she wondered if Nick had been right – the priests were political as much as religious, the High Priest a dictator taking his power from a superstition.

She crept through tangled bush and heaped-up boulders until she came to the foot of the cliff. There she found a corner and tried to sleep. She wasn’t going to get any sleep in the night. She tried not to think of the cliff, and the Temple stretching to the sky. But whenever she opened her eyes there it was – the cliff globed and swelling, and the geometrical line of the Temple’s underside. In spite of it, she slept; and woke in the dusk, and ate some berries she had kept for her evening meal. The cliff was pink in the sunset, and darkening by the moment. She studied it, trying to choose her line, but no way seemed better than any other, and she decided the best thing was simply to go straight up.

When it was dark she drew the stone silk gloves out of her pocket. She smoothed them on the ground and pulled them over her hands and feet. Again she felt the comfort of their enclosing movement. They seemed to be alive, and seemed to become part of her. She climbed over the boulders, and put her hands carefully on the living rock of Sheercliff, and tried the gloves several times, releasing her hands, fixing them; and when she was satisfied she started to climb. She did not look up or down, remembering the lesson Seeker and Finder had taught her in the Throat: ‘You are where you are, no other place exists, while you are
here
you cannot be
there
, you cannot fall.’ She told herself it did not matter if she was one metre or a thousand off the ground. Time did not matter either. She had all night.

Slowly she went up, trying to duplicate a lizard’s motion. She moved right hand, left foot, then left and right, with everything slowed down so she should make no mistake in ordering the silk to release its grip. She kept her movements short to lessen the strain on her body, but even so the muscles of her arms and legs began to ache and a pressure grew on her spine, as if a cord had tightened there and was on the point of snapping. She tried resting on the upper slope of a bulge in the cliff. That was no good, the pull against her hands and feet was too great, so she laboured on, and after what seemed hours found a ledge no wider than her body and rested there. It seemed as comfortable as a bed and she closed her eyes and dozed a while: ‘You are where you are, no other place exists.’ Then she prepared herself, cleared her mind of every thought so nothing would get in the way of the order. She would not let herself wonder how far she had climbed. But a cluster of lights showed far below, and without thinking about it, without allowing herself any emotion, she knew they came from the workmen’s camp beside the arena.

Later in the night the sky grew lighter. Over the mountains, far beyond her sight, the moon was up. It would shine on the west face of the Temple before dawn, but by that time she hoped to be hidden somewhere. She found another resting place, a dusty little crevice, and dozed again, hearing the feathery stirring of birds. Then she ate the last of her berries, working them to a paste in her mouth and swallowing it like drink. She climbed again – left and right, right and left – with the rock scraping her forehead. Then she sensed something over her and seemed to be caught in a glow. She looked up and saw the base of the Temple angling out. Its white marble seemed to generate light. She hugged the cliff, panting. She did not want to leave it for cold stone. It would be too smooth, she would fall. And if she did not, she would be plain as a beetle crawling on it. Frantically she looked for somewhere to hide, some hole to crawl into. She saw the black swamp far below, and the sea, huge and distant, shining white in the moonlight, and realized where she was.

Her panic lasted moment after moment. She hung on the cliff and cried and whimpered and moaned. But all that time there was something in her untouched – a hard resolve, a recognition of something she must do, that was
necessary
, or else she would never be Susan Ferris again. Someone was using her name, for evil, and had to be stopped. The knowledge of that was indestructible. So she hung on the cliff-face and let panic beat on her like a storm, and in the end, like a storm, it passed. Then she gathered up her strength and climbed again.

She climbed out on the slope of the Temple’s base, clinging like a fly, and up another twenty metres of weather-pitted marble, and came to a narrow walkway. It had been made for sentries, she thought, but none walked it now. The ledge was caked with bird droppings. What need was there for sentries on the wall over Sheercliff?

Susan rested a while, trying to decide which way to go. If she went along the walkway she would find herself still outside the Temple. And almost certainly she would meet guards. It seemed best to keep on climbing, find a window. She remembered seeing windows. But she knew she was getting weaker and wondered how long she could go on. As long as I need to, she told herself. And saying that, she stood up and began climbing again. But she did not like the marble. She had a feeling the stone-silk gloves were less sure in their knowledge of it. Once or twice she felt them slip, and she started to command them: ‘Grip, hold.’ She felt it was her own strength keeping her on the wall.

The moon appeared over the top of the Temple and she seemed to be held in light as bright as day. And day was close. Already the sky was lightening over the sea. She knew there must be sentries on the wall. But they would have no reason to look over. A greater danger was that a patrol down in the forest would see her. She climbed as fast as she dared, climbed on black marble, smoother than white, and almost laughed. Here she was in the centre of the emblem of her religion, climbing on the wings. What a pity it was she could not use them to fly.