Starship Home (10 page)

Zoe led Meg and Zachary to the Ponds which had given Dalrymple Ponds their name. Originally they had been part of the river, more of a large creek, but then the river had changed its course, and the ponds had for a time been a billabong, an arm reaching off the river. And then the entrance had silted up and the billabong had become a series of ponds.

They had been on private land in the 21
^st
century, but now the fences had fallen, and the forest had regrown and they were part of the landscape again. As they neared the Ponds, they crossed a well-worn path. They could not be sure whether the path had been worn by animals or people, but, on Zachary’s instructions, they avoided it, for Zachary, from his Army training, knew that the easiest way was never the safest way, and a path was something you got ambushed on.

So it was that they took a track through the bush parallel to the path, moving as easily and as quietly as possible until they came in sight of the Ponds. They could see where the path led down to the water and broadened out into a drinking place. Emerging from cover now, they went down to the drinking place and found the wet earth there patterned by all kinds of hoof and paw marks.

‘Cattle drink here,’ said Meg, pointing to cloven hoof marks. ‘A horse,’ she added, pointing to the marks of an uncloven hoof. ‘Shod. Someone’s riding a shod horse.’

‘Kangaroo,’ said Zachary, ‘big wallaby maybe.’

Zoe was now pointing to another sets of prints. ‘Please tell me those are dog prints.’

‘It’s not a dog,’ said Meg. ‘It looks more like…’ And then she looked up and around. ‘A big cat,’ she added in a strangled voice. She was staring across the pond, and the others looked up to see what she was staring at. The lioness looked back at them. She was a female, and very big. Other lions lay sunning themselves in the grass near her.

‘We don’t scream,’ said Zachary, ‘and we move very slowly, no fuss, no panic…’

‘I read somewhere that if you fix a lion in the eye with a really mean stare,’ Zoe began and then stopped.

‘We just quietly move off,’ said Zachary. The lioness began to move round the pond in their direction. ‘And run!’ Zachary added. And they turned and ran, taking the path, not caring about ambush and concealment any more. The lioness loped after them.

They were doing very well for a while.

Then Meg tripped and fell. At the cost of some dignity, she let out an inarticulate cry for help, and Zachary and Zoe stopped, turned, ran back and dragged her to her feet and they ran on.

As far as the lioness was concerned, this meant that she had gained ground. The possibilities of lunch were looking better all the time.

Meanwhile, Harold and the Wyzen were wriggling through long grass. They had smelled the wood smoke before they saw it, and had followed the smell through the forest until they heard the ringing sound of metal on metal and then followed that sound to the village. They had then circled the village until they came to the high side of it where they could look down and see what was going on.

What they saw was a set of twenty or thirty round huts scattered in among the trees, with garden plots between them. The huts were made of upright poles hammered into the earth, with the lower part of their walls composed of thin branches woven together and then covered with mud. Harold knew from his history lessons that this building technique was called “wattle and daub”. In some huts, the upper part of the wall was left open, and in others, it was composed of the same sort of tree bark that formed the roofs, a bark which Harold recognized as coming from the stringybark gum tree.

There were people working or moving about the village, people who looked as if they were a blend of Aboriginal, Pacific Island, European and Asian ancestry, the blend evening out as the people got younger. Among the very old, Harold could spot people who stood out as one or the other, but the smallest children very often looked like a blending of all races.

They were dressed in a mixture of cloth and leather, the cloth ranging in color through browns and mustards, with some yellows. Harold had an aunt who did natural dyeing with native plants, and he recognized the color range as being the basic set of colors obtained from eucalyptus leaves.

Everyone seemed to have something to do. There was a blacksmith working at an open air forge, hammering out what looked like a spade. Up at the far end of the village, away from everyone else, some tanners had stretched a cowhide and were scraping the flesh side of it. Women were weaving cloth in strips about two feet wide. They were using what his craftswoman aunt called a backstrap loom. Several other women sat on the steps of one of the huts, spinning woollen thread on spindles, and others stirred dyepots over fires.

Children were bringing in dead wood and stacking it for the fires, and others were weeding the garden plots. Nobody was idle. Harold was trying to think what it reminded him of. He had seen this sort of thing somewhere before. Then it hit him. He had not seen it in the flesh. He had seen it in National Geographics and in television documentary programs about the Third World. A few miles from the ruins of his First World home, he was watching the ordered rhythms of life of a Third World village.

As he lay watching, he began to see differences between the huts. There was a big one facing what he took to be the village square. Someone important must live there. Opposite the big hut was another, also facing the square. This one, he saw, with a cold tingle running up his spine, had skulls hanging from its poles.

The cold tingle was still in his spine when he thought he heard a slight noise behind him. He turned to look, but there was no one there. He turned back to continue looking at the village. He had to remember everything in order to tell the others.

Behind him, in cover, Maze watched the stranger who was spying on her village. He was one of the ones from the Slarn-demon iron castle. She watched to see what he would do.

Meanwhile, in a tree halfway between the Ponds and the starship, sat Zoe, Zachary and Meg. The lioness walked round and round the bottom of the tree. ‘There usen’t to be any lions around here,’ said Zoe.

‘That’s very observant of you,’ said Meg.

‘But yes there were,’ said Zachary. The other two looked at him. ‘In Safari Parks. Open range zoos.’

Zoe snapped her fingers. ‘Like roads and planes. You take all but 2% of the population, and time spent maintaining fences in zoos is a luxury, right?’

Meg cleared her throat. ‘Are we saying that the bush is now full of lions and tigers and jaguars?’

‘Could be. Though the lions’d be better off on the plains. That’s where they come from isn’t it? African veldt? But if there’s kangaroos, wallabies, wild sheep and cattle to eat…’

‘Not to mention passing tourists…’

Zoe suddenly shuddered. ‘The snakes could’ve escaped. Kraits, mambas, cobras, rattlesnakes.’

‘That’ll be all, Zoe!’ Though a countrybred woman, Meg did not care for snakes.

‘Pit vipers.’ Zoe smiled and paused. ‘Though, come to think of it, Australian snakes are the most venomous in the world anyway, so who cares?’

The lioness just kept pacing. She had all the time in the world.

Harold was wriggling back from his vantage point and the Wyzen was moving with him when they both heard the noise again. The Wyzen’s hearing was more acute than Harold’s, and she had been hearing tiny noises all the time, but to up this point her interest in the sights and smells of the village below had been occupying her full attention.

Now, however, she turned her attention to the feral human whom she could smell in the bushes behind them, and she decided to play with it. To begin the game, she leapt into the bushes. The effect, to the Wyzen’s way of thinking, was entirely satisfactory. The small feral human let out a loud yell, and ran.

Maze took the path away from the village. The man and the animal were between her and home, and besides, good forest child that she was, she was trained to lead danger away from her clan not toward it. If one died, even if that one were a female, that was sad, but if the clan died, that was disaster.

She glanced back, and saw that the weird animal and the strange male with it were running after her.

‘Wait!’ Harold yelled, ‘We won’t hurt you!’

The shout simply made Maze run faster with Harold and the Wyzen in pursuit. The Wyzen was enjoying herself. Bounding through a forest again brought back memories of cubhood on her home planet. Harold for his part, just wanted to talk to the small girl who was running from them.

Maze had thought to throw the pursuit off very quickly, but the animal and the male from the iron castle were fast. She decided there was nothing for it but to feed them to the Trolls. They had a lookout tower near here. She took a sharp right and made for the tower.

There were three of them in the tower, lean, hard-muscled men, two with white scars on their arms, one with a more recent scar running down one cheek. They wore breastplates and backplates made of steel and painted in camouflage patterns, and their helmets fitted tight around their ears but left their faces exposed for full vision. The helmets were decorated in various ways, one painted with the clan emblem of a Troll with blood dripping from its fangs, one with a heavy chain welded to it, running from the centre of the wearer’s forehead to the nape of the neck like the crest of some dinosaur. The third’s helmet was engraved with the wearer’s ancient family motto:
Born To Ride
.

To these three men, tower duty was a necessary evil. There were towers like this spaced around Troll territory. You never knew when the Sullivan Himself might think they were getting soft and decide to raid, or the mad King of Vic might decide to enlarge his territory. ‘Better Ready Than Deady’ as the Don’s father had always said.

Since dawn, the three Trolls had cleaned their armor, touched up their camouflage, sharpened their swords, sharpened their belt daggers, sharpened the throwing knives sheathed on either shoulder, sharpened their boot knives, and had started applying neatsfoot oil to their boots. Boredom was setting in fast. Then they heard the shout, and were on full alert.

‘Stranger!’ shouted the Forester girl as she ran into sight among the trees. ‘Stranger!’

And there was the stranger all right, chasing the Forester girl. He was neither Forester, Looter nor Troll. He was Stranger indeed.

‘Is he a Sullivan?’ said the first Troll.

‘Nah. You ever seen a Sullivan off a horse?’ replied the second.

‘Only a dead one. A Vic?’ asked the third.

‘You ever see a Vic out of armor?’

‘Okay. So he’s a Stranger.’

The Forester girl was smart. She ran the stranger to the foot of their tree tower and then took off at an angle. He was running right beneath them, perfectly placed for them to net him. One moment Harold was running and the next he was tripped and falling and struggling in the meshes of a net. The Wyzen had heard the whistle in the air as the net dropped, and had bounded away to safety. ‘Missed the big dog. Woulda liked the dog,’ said the first Troll as he slid down his rope.

‘You ever see a dog run hind-legged? Was a monkey,’ said the second Troll.

The third Troll said nothing. He was already on the ground, rolling Harold out of the net, dropping on him, holding his hands together behind his back and tying his wrists together.

The Wyzen looked up at Zoe, Meg and Zachary sitting in the tree. She wondered dimly whether this was part of the game she was playing. The other one had stopped to play with the men from the tree. She had felt left out of that game so she had come to look for the others. It had not taken long to pick up their scent, and here they were. ‘Wyzen?’ she enquired, wondering if they would like to play.

Zoe looked at the others. ‘This mean the lion’s gone?’

She was about to climb down when Meg put a hand on her arm, restraining her. ‘You go first, Zachary.’

‘Sorry, I’m now a convinced feminist,’ Zachary said, ‘and agree with you about this macho “me Tarzan” nonsense, so if you two want to go first…’ Meg was looking at him and he trailed off. ‘Oh well here we go I guess,’ he said and climbed down to the ground. The women followed. As they moved off toward the starship, Zachary said, ‘Well at least we found water.’

‘You call that finding water? Lions drink it.’

‘You’re going to have to learn to share is all.’

Maze squatted in Our Mother’s hut. She had told the ancient woman what had happened, and the ancient woman had told her once again not to tell anyone of the iron castle. They were both still sitting, Our Mother on her chair of office, Maze on the floor, when two Trolls dragged Harold into the hut, the third Troll having stayed in the forest tower on watch. The Trolls knelt as an act of courtesy to the village leader, and pulled Harold down with them. Then they were back on their feet, dragging Harold to his feet again.

‘You know this one?’ asked the ranking Troll.

‘Bring him into the light,’ Our Mother said.

The Trolls thrust Harold into the lamplight. His eyes flicked toward Maze, and then to Our Mother. The chair she was sitting in, he knew it from somewhere. He had seen it somewhere not long ago.

‘He is not ours,’ said the old woman.

‘Thank you.’ The Trolls began dragging Harold out.

‘Please,’ said Harold. ‘Can we talk? Can we discuss this?’ Before he had finished asking his question, the sunlight was on his face again and he was being dragged across the village square. It was then that he remembered where he had seen the big chair before. The bishop had sat in it in the Dalrymple Ponds church when he had been through Confirmation the year before.

Inside the hut, Our Mother spoke. ‘He’s not of the Slarn-demon race.’

‘Not Slarn-demon?’ asked Maze. ‘Then what?’

‘The writing on his shirt,’ Our Mother said. ‘I’ve seen it before.’

Outside, Harold was being dragged across the square. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Let me go.’

‘Once you talk to the Don,’ said the ranking Troll.

‘Who?’

‘You trespass on the Don’s turf, you talk to the Don,’ the Troll answered.

‘You a Vic spy, you talk till your jaw ache,’ said the other Troll, and laughed in a way that Harold did not find at all funny. There was a senior at school who laughed that way but only when he was torturing juniors.

And then there was someone standing in front of them. He was a tall man, dressed in clothes of handloomed woollen fabric, dyed in dull reds and browns. He was wearing a lion’s skin cape, with his greying hair tied back into a ponytail. Harold looked up into his face, and found himself looking into the wraparound shades the man was wearing. The frames of the sunglasses had been decorated with teeth and behind one of the dark lenses there glinted something red.

‘I see you’ve found my runaway slave,’ said the man.

The voice was resonant with authority, and the Trolls backed off from him.

The soldiers who had taken him prisoner had armor, and bladed weapons, but Harold saw that they were afraid of the man in the wraparound shades, who appeared to be totally unarmed.

‘Yours?’ said the ranking Troll.

‘Mine. I recognize him by his livery.’ The man in the shades gestured at the Dalrymple Ponds High School coat of arms on Harold’s windcheater. ‘The mark of his last owners. He must’ve run from his slave line.’

‘Runaway, you say.’

The man in the wraparound shades nodded. ‘Always a good sign. If they don’t have the courage to run, they don’t have the courage to be trained in my…’ and he paused to give the final word full value, ‘…craft.’

The Trolls crossed themselves, showing what they thought of the tall man’s craft. ‘Devil’s craft, Marlowe. You’ll burn for it one of these days.’

‘And perhaps you’ll burn with me.’ The tall man smiled. ‘Perhaps we’ll all burn together.’

‘Before you die, Marlowe, not after.’ The Troll thrust Harold at Marlowe. ‘If he’s one of yours, you keep him.’

Harold made a move to run, but Marlowe’s right hand closed on his arm. It was like the grip of a machine, like a vise, for the man was incredibly strong. As the Trolls moved away, Marlowe walked toward the skull-and-fetish-hung hut, taking Harold with him.

One of the Trolls, walking away, muttered: ‘Druther be hanged by the Don clean than work for that one.’

Marlowe tossed Harold into his hut and leaned against the door frame. ‘Who are you?’

‘Harold Lewin. I’m, ah … you’re mistaking me for someone else, I didn’t escape from any slave line…’

The man smiled. ‘Of course you didn’t. I just didn’t want you dragged off before we talked.’ He was looking at Harold’s windcheater. ‘Dalrymple Ponds High School. Where did you get that shirt?’

Harold looked down at his windcheater. ‘It’s just what we wear. In the place I come from.’

‘And what place is that?’

‘A long way away from here.’ Harold pointed, indicating a direction at random.

‘Interesting.’ Marlowe looked at him in silence for a long moment. ‘And this place you came from was called Dalrymple Ponds, was it?’

Harold did not trust himself to speak, so he simply nodded.

‘Do you know the name of this place?’ the man went on.

Harold shook his head.

‘The name of this place is Damplepon.’

Harold smiled with relief. He was off the hook. ‘Pretty name.’

‘But older people call it Dalrimblepon.’

‘Uh huh?’

‘And really old people, people I remember from my childhood, used to call it Dalrymple Ponds.’

Harold forced a smile. ‘That’s, uh … that’s quite a coincidence.’

‘So you can see why I didn’t want the Don’s Troll warriors to take you away and do something … nasty … to you.’ Marlowe was silent for a moment. ‘Do you have somewhere to go?’

‘I’m … travelling … with some people.’

‘Then I suggest you join them. Before the Don’s men take you again.’ He moved from his place at the doorway, and spun Harold around. Harold felt cold steel touch the insides of his wrists as something cut his bonds, but by the time he had turned again the blade was nowhere to be seen. ‘Go!’ said Marlowe.

Harold went, running in a beeline for the starship. Marlowe watched him out of sight, and then followed. The only one who had seen what happened was Maze, who was watching from the verandah of Our Mother’s hut.

Zoe, Meg and Zachary emerged from the clearing with the Wyzen romping in front of them. The hatch opened, and the ramp came out and the Wyzen, feeling distinctly hungry, led the way inside. She was on the bridge, lying in a couch, drinking like a baby from a squeeze bottle, by the time the others got there. ‘Harold?’ Zoe called.

‘Too much to think he’s washing his disgusting clothes,’ Meg said, looking around the bridge, having to duck to see under the washing on the line.

‘Harold sallied out for a time,’ said Guinevere.

‘He went out? By himself?’ Zachary decided he was going to have to explain to Harold about orders.

‘And you let him?’ Meg’s teacher training was getting into gear.

‘I sent the good Wyzen with him,’ Guinevere said.

‘Right,’ said Zachary. ‘Now, since the good Wyzen’s here, Harold ought to be here, so where is he?’

The main screen came to life. On it, they could see Harold running across the clearing toward the starship. The four of them, including Guinevere, breathed a sigh of relief and waited. By the time Harold had made it from the ramp to the bridge, they had gotten over feeling afraid and relieved and were ready to tear him limb from limb.

‘Where have you been, I’ve been frantic about you, I…’ started Meg.

‘You were left to guard the ship, kid, and when you’re left to guard the ship I want you guarding the ship, okay? You leave your post, I wear your guts for garters, do you understand me?’ Zachary continued in a very good imitation (minus the swearwords) of a company sergeant major he had once known.

‘Harold, I thought you were dead or something,’ continued Zoe, who really had thought the little nerd might have been eaten by a lion.

Harold did not exactly apologize. ‘Have I got news for you lot,’ he shouted over them. ‘I found a village with really primitive people in it and I chased a girl and some soldiers caught me and a witchdoctor made them give me to him because he said I was his slave, and he asked me a lot of questions and boy did I fool that old idiot!’

The old idiot whom Harold thought he had fooled lay in cover watching the starship. It was the happiest moment in his life. The moment he had waited decades for. Once, simply on the rumor of a Slarn landing in Europe, he had travelled for a year by horse, by boat, by foot. He had travelled across Australia on horseback, by boat up through the islands to the north, then by horse and foot again through Ind, and up through the mountain passes, taking a sailing ship from one end of the Mediterranean Sea to the other, tracking the rumor to the Kingdom of Bretagne, only to find the Slarn had left one week before his arrival.

And now, a dozen years later, a Slarn starship had come, this time in his own backyard. A Slarn starship, there for the taking. Maze watched him from cover, and wondered what evil Uncle Marlowe was plotting now.