Starship Home (28 page)

‘Great,’ said Zachary. ‘A fortune in salt and no way of getting it home. That’s just great.’

In the garden of Narranjerry’s establishment, there was a summer house, a square structure with waist-high walls and columns supporting a roof of red tiles, with a terracotta dragon guarding each corner. Around the interior walls of the summer house were benches built into the structure itself. Leaves littered the tiled floor, and a spider had woven herself a residence between one column and the roof. It was to this place that they came for their council of war. Meg had memories of the summer house. She had sat here, talking away summer afternoons, sometimes with a group of friends, but on two occasions with a young man. His face rose in her memory, and she thrust the memory aside. If the Slarn had taken him, he was now far away beyond the stars; if he had escaped capture, he was long dead. It did not do to think too much of the people they had known so well just those few weeks ago.

‘We take the lot,’ the Don was saying. He looked around the group, his eyes resting momentarily on each of their faces, willing their cooperation.

Zachary threw up his hands. ‘We can’t carry eight hundred pounds of salt. There’s eight of us, that’s a hundred pounds average, and there’s some of us can’t carry that. We got women with us, Harold and Maze can’t carry that much…’

‘Certainly the women can’t,’ said Harold.

Meg looked at him hard. Harold knew that look. He used to get it in class when he had crossed the line between being a good student and being a know-it-all. ‘Can you carry a hundred pounds, Zachary?’ she asked.

‘Exactly what I’m saying,’ Zachary answered, poker-faced, ‘Some of us can’t carry that much.’

‘So it’s not just the women…’ Meg was beginning to say when Maze cut in.

‘The Don’s right. We take the lot.’ Maze, in an action curiously reminiscent of the Don’s, looked around the group, her gaze resting on each face. A skinny little child, she radiated for that moment the air of a leader.

Ulf agreed. ‘I can carry two hundred poundweight.’

‘Sure, Ulf, sure,’ said Zachary, and turned to the Don. ‘Can’t we come back for it?’

‘You don’t believe I can carry two hundred poundweight?’ Ulf roared, and surged to his feet and slung Zachary over one shoulder then Harold over the other.

‘I’ve never seriously doubted you could carry two hundred poundweight, Ulf,’ Zachary said in a tone designed to calm down berserk warriors or mad dogs, ‘it’s just that we could make two trips, uh? Is that too much to ask?’

The Don wished that just this once Zachary could understand the situation. ‘Zachary this is salt we’re talking about. Salt. If it were gold, I’d risk it, but this is salt.’

Ulf put Zachary and Harold down. ‘You got that in your head now Zach?’ Harold said, ‘Salt.’

The group in the summer house could be seen from the library window, and at this window stood a tall cloaked figure. Marlowe turned, and took off his wraparound shades, and looked at Narranjerry, who caught a flash of red from the metal eye as it turned from the light. ‘Did they tell you?’ Marlowe said, ‘That they come from before the Slarn invasion?’

Narranjerry smiled at his old friend. Both seekers after wisdom, they had known each other many years. Narranjerry could even remember Marlowe’s father. He too had been addicted to the search for wisdom. ‘They said so.’

‘They’re important to my quest,’ Marlowe said.

‘Quest,’ Narranjerry said, and shook his head. ‘I’ve been saying to you, friend Marlowe, for how long I can’t remember, that the past is gone…’

‘‘The future doesn’t exist yet’,’ Marlowe said, finishing his old friend’s perennial advice.

‘But they’re the two places you live. You’re always living in the dead past or the non-existent future. You never live in the present, and that’s the only time that exists.’

‘I have to live where I can,’ Marlowe said, and again looked out the window toward the group in the summer house. ‘I live for my quest, and my quest needs those thieves alive … for the moment.’

‘Your quest,’ Narranjerry echoed. ‘You’ve spent your life on it, walked and ridden thousands of empty miles, read libraries of books, talked to whole monasteries of sages … and what has it given you?’

Marlowe smiled. ‘You ask me that? Old Man Narranjerry, the Salt King, the Blade Seller, sitting among his books? You ask me what wisdom’s worth?’

‘Wisdom is one thing. But your wisdom’s yoked to a fool’s quest, my oldest friend. I weep for you. Lost in the past, lost in the future, never in the now.’

‘Save your tears for those who try and stop me,’ Marlowe said, staring out from the dimness of the library into the sunlight garden. In the summer house the boy from the starship had just leapt to his feet and was shouting something.

‘The horses!’ Harold shouted in his customary excitement at finding the solution to a puzzle. ‘We load the salt on the horses!’

Ulf looked at the boy, who was clearly another one who did not understand the first thing about life. ‘If we load the salt on the horses,’ he rumbled, ‘we will have no horses to ride.’

‘So we walk,’ Harold said, trying to keep from his voice the impatience he felt. Explaining things to Ulf sometimes felt like running in deep, sticky mud.

‘Trolls don’t walk,’ Ulf replied in a tone which admitted of no discussion whatsoever. He said it as one might say “the sky is blue” or “water doesn’t flow uphill”. He was stating an axiom, an indisputable law of physics.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, E=MC2, and Trolls don’t walk.

Harold did not understand that Ulf was stating a universal law. He thought Ulf was expressing a personal preference about modes of transport. ‘We can get back two hundred poundweight of salt for Guinevere,’ he carefully explained to Ulf, ‘but we can’t get back the other six hundred except by using the horses.’

‘Trolls don’t walk,’ Ulf explained with equal care to Harold. ‘Trolls have never walked. When Don Spider Costello the First led the Trolls into this land on their Harleysickles, they didn’t walk.’ He stood, his face red with anger. ‘We didn’t walk then, and we don’t walk now.’

The Don looked up at Ulf, and smiled. Zachary turned away from that smile. Zachary hated it when the Don smiled, because it always meant that something bad was about to happen, usually, in Zachary’s view, to Zachary. ‘Ulf,’ said the Don, smiling, ‘what do Trolls do for their Don?’

‘Whatever it takes,’ Ulf sighed, dimly knowing that he was about to be asked to do something against his honor.

‘And if your Don says that Trolls will walk?’

‘Trolls ask how far?’ Ulf muttered, in very subdued tones. Then he roared, ‘But only for salt! And only for the Don! And anyone says different I’ll hang him in his own guts!’ And he glared at Zachary and waited.

‘I’m not saying different,’ said Zachary. ‘In fact I agree with everything you say, ever have said, or ever will say in the future.’

‘Never thought you were that smart,’ said Ulf.

They set out at first light on the following day, the four horses, each loaded with two hundred poundweight bags of salt, led by Zoe, Maze, Harold and Rocky, while the Don and Meg walked in front, and Zachary and Ulf made up the rearguard. The sun rose on them as they traversed the salt flats, heading for the road that had brought them here. Already Narranjerry was out on the pans scooping salt, and they waved as they passed him.

‘Nice day for a walk, uh?’ Zachary said to Ulf, Ulf said not a word, merely glowering at the salt-laden horses and trudging on over the crunching salt crystals.

Narranjerry watched them go, and then looked toward his house. A lone horseman was setting out. Marlowe, it seemed, was travelling inland by another route.

Back at the starship, the Looters were now well-advanced in their efforts at decorating Guinevere. While some of the Looters continued with the painting of her hull, the Eldest had sent others to Lootertown to collect the human skulls which had once been piled around the statue of Colonel Light. In the Eldest’s view, since Guinevere had devoured the statue of Dark One and therefore become Dark One herself, it was only right that she should have the skulls of Dark One’s former sacrifices to adorn her. Truth to tell, the Eldest never felt quite at home without some piles of human skulls about. Apart from their artistic merits as pure decoration, there was also their religious significance. To the Eldest, there was nothing quite so satisfying as the symbolism of the skull: the grinning jaws, symbolizing the moral law that all must eat and all must be eaten; and the empty brain case and fleshless cheeks symbolizing the food that all must eat and all must become.

For the moment, though, he had left his followers to their decorating tasks while he sorted out some knotty theological problems with Dark One. There was a problem which was concerning him very much indeed and it was this: until Dark One had been translated into the form of the iron castle, he had always spoken to the Eldest through the voices in the Eldest’s head. For the Eldest did not imagine these voices, nor did he invent them as a means to power over his followers. He heard these voices, and he knew they came from Dark One, and that Dark One was using him as his way of communicating with the Human Race, as the Looters called themselves.

But now Dark One had chosen to speak aloud, and further, had chosen to use the piping tones of a young woman, instead of the manly hissing baritone of the voices within the Eldest’s head. So he now prostrated himself before the iron castle which was Dark One’s new body and said, ‘Dark One? Your most humble servant seeks enlightenment.’

‘I am not your Dargwan,’ said the woman’s voice which Dark One was now pleased to be using.

‘Dark One jests,’ said the Eldest and quickly went on before his god could interrupt him. ‘Am puzzled because in the time before, Dark One spoke only in my head. No one else could hear. Now Dark One speaks so others hear and with the voice of a woman.’

The Eldest reminded Guinevere of a very elderly Inquisitor she had once known in her former life, a man whose motto seemed to be
I talk but I never listen.
‘I speak with the voice of a woman,’ she said sweetly, knowing exactly the reaction she was going to get, ‘because I am a woman.’

‘Nooooooo!’ the Eldest howled, his ear-splitting shriek of horror echoing around the clearing. The Looters ignored it, the Eldest being in the habit of uttering ear-splitting shrieks and also ululating wolf-like howls at quite frequent intervals. To notice them was to risk becoming dinner, so the Looters kept their heads down and continued with their painting.

‘Yes,’ said Guinevere, feeling pleased with the ways things were going. Soon this wooden-head knave might tire of the conversation and go away.

‘Perhaps you remember,’ said the wooden-head knave in question, ‘in the Dark Beginning of All Things, being alone in the Universe, giving birth through Eternity to the World Egg from which all things grew and were made and then telling all to eat all?’

Why do they always speak in Capital Letters?
Guinevere wondered. The Inquisitor had had the same habit, one that infuriated her even as she deflected his questions and denied the rumors which had circulated in the convent that she levitated while in prayer. ‘I remember nothing of that,’ Guinevere replied, adding silently
and if I did I should keep most silent on the subject.

‘Has Dark One lost his memory?’ The Eldest asked, and Guinevere could tell by his hopeful tone that that Dark One probably knew things about the Eldest which the Eldest would be very glad to have forgotten.

‘Nay, good sirrah,’ she replied, ‘I remember all that thou hast done and all that thou do’st and all that thou shalt do in time to come.’

At this, the Eldest trembled in fear. ‘We will bring you many skulls. All will pay for all.’

Hidden in the scrub at the clearing’s edge, a Forester woman watched and listened. After a while, she crept backward in the shadows, then straightened, turned and ran to report what she had seen to Helena.
Looters at the iron castle. Now there’s a thing,
thought Helena on receiving the news. ‘Fetch an expendable male to use as a messenger,’ she told the woman, ‘the Don must know about this.’

But when the breathless messenger was ushered into the hall at Troll Castle, the Duke was not to be seen, and the expendable male had to deliver his message to the Duke’s chaplain. Father John listened to the tale, and then nodded, ordered that the messenger be fed and then sent back to Helena with word that the message had been delivered and would be acted upon.
But how?
thought the priest,
the Looters besieging the Iron Castle? What could that mean?

At the same time as the Forester messenger was sitting down to eat in the castle kitchen, night had fallen and the Don was leading his little party along a track through Sullivan country. Despite the view that the Don shared with Zachary, that a track was something you got ambushed on, he could not afford any injuries. A sprained ankle or a horse’s broken fetlock could slow them down so that daylight when it came would see them exposed and vulnerable on the plain. And then in the distance he saw lights. The Don raised one hand to bring the party to a halt.

Meg asked what it was, and he pointed to the distant lights. They were flickering, and stretched almost from horizon to horizon. ‘Campfires,’ the Don told her. ‘The three Sullivans we ran into must have been outriders of the main Horde.’

‘And there’s the Horde,’ Ulf intoned as he and Zachary came up to join them.

Zoe, Harold, Rocky and Maze, holding the horses’ leading reins, could hear what was being said. ‘Horde?’ Zoe asked.

‘A technical term for the main body of horse nomads,’ said Harold.

‘I already knew that,’ snapped Zoe.

‘Then why did you ask?’

‘Didn’t ask.’

‘There are probably thousands of them,’ Harold remarked. All armed with composite bows and scimitars.’

‘Shut up, Harold!’ said Meg, who had already worked out the grimmer details for herself.

Now the wind must have shifted slightly, because they began to hear a distant howling and the staccato beating of hand drums. ‘That’s probably what they do to work themselves up into a killing frenzy,’ remarked Harold.

‘Guess what, Harold, it seems to be working on me as well, and since you’re the nearest, you’re going to be it.’ Harold did not really believe that Zoe was worked up into a killing frenzy, but he decided there was nothing lost in pretending to believe her, and fell silent.

‘We’ll go around them,’ said the Don.

Ulf was not sure about that. Other and better possibilities beckoned. ‘There’d be much honor, my lord, in cutting our way through them.’

‘Honor’ was rapidly becoming Zachary’s least favorite word. ‘I don’t think so, Ulf. For a start, the word wouldn’t get back and there’s no honor without publicity and applause, am I right?’ Then he felt the Don’s eyes on him. The handsome warlord was looking at him as if some lower order of insect had ventured an opinion on quantum mechanics. ‘But then what would a simple school bus driver know about high and mighty concepts like “honor”?’

‘Under normal circumstances,’ the Don said, very slowly, as if to someone who did not speak his language, ‘it would of course be our duty …’

‘
Duty’, that was another of those dangerous words that could get a man killed in a flash,
thought Zachary.

‘… our duty,’ the Don continued, ‘to attack and destroy them utterly. But,’ he added, after a pause in which Zachary’s blood ran cold and his heart thudded so violently that he thought everyone must hear it, ‘… but Salt Trek takes precedence. The salt must be gotten home. And then, good Ulf,’ he added, as if tossing a bone to a slavering attack dog who had just been deprived of a juicy child, ‘we may make plans to mount an expedition against the Sullivan Himself and his Horde.’ And then he avoided further argument by leading the party off the track in a direction designed to avoid the line of fires marking the Sullivan encampment.

In the centre of that encampment, the Sullivan Himself sat, surrounded by his lieutenants, gnawing the bones which were all that remained of their evening meal. Suddenly, a tall figure, wrapped in a dark cloak, entered the circle of firelight. The Sullivan Himself and all of his lieutenants looked up at the intruder and waited. Sudden death was in the air.

The stranger dropped his cloak and exposed his face. One metal eye glittered in the firelight. It was Marlowe. ‘I seek the Sullivan Himself.’

‘I am he,’ said one of the lieutenants.

Marlowe looked at him and smiled derisively. ‘You are not.’ He looked at the others in turn and finally his basilisk gaze fell on one of them. ‘You are. But you are not the Sullivan Himself whom I last met.’

‘Marlowe,’ said the Sullivan Himself, ‘Old Metal Eye. Where were you when my brother died last month?’

‘Far away. What killed him?’

‘The pendix gutache,’ said the Sullivan.

‘I give you my grief,’ replied Marlowe, and offered the highest praise a plains nomad could receive, ‘Your brother was a stallion among men.’

‘I take your grief. Now why do you, a stranger, come into our horse lines at night?’

‘I cured your brother’s third wife of the fever last summer, and came to crave a boon of him in return.’

The Sullivan smiled, revealing the tattoos on the inside of his lips. ‘If it’s a boon from my brother that you crave, I must send you to where he is so you may receive it.’

Marlow knew the horse nomads, and knew that this was their way of joking, and so replied: ‘I thank you for your kindness but that would be a long journey indeed and I’ve much to do hereabouts. And yet, I seem to remember that among the hordes, the brother of a dead man inherits his brother’s wives. So perhaps she whom I cured is now your wife.’

‘If she is, then what I owe you would depend on what manner of wife she is to me.’

There was silence, and the Sullivan smiled as he watched Marlowe think about his next move. When it came it was direct and to the point. ‘There’s a Troll salt party crossing your turf and I ask for their safe passage.’

‘Troll!’ The Sullivan’s reaction was a bitter barking sound. ‘We found four of my outriders dead today, one the son of a blood-brother. They’d died by the sword. Troll work if I ever saw it.’

‘I know nothing of that.’

‘Do you not?’ In one fluid movement the Sullivan had risen to his feet and drawn his scimitar. ‘You come to my fire by night and tell me you’re the friend of my enemies! That I should give safe passage across my turf to the murderers of the son of my blood oath! Am I a child? Am I a woman? That you insult me like this?’

‘Your pardon. I didn’t know.’

‘Marlowe? Old Metal Eye who knows all things? Did not know? Where are they? Where is this Troll salt party?’

‘Now that, I really do not know,’ said Marlowe.

‘Seize him!’ But as the lieutenants moved to obey, Marlowe pivoted, kicking and striking, clearing his way before reaching into his pouch and bringing out a handful of powder which he cast into the campfire. A great pillar of flame flared out of the campfire, blinding the Sullivan and his lieutenants long enough for Marlowe to disappear into the darkness. Before their sight was restored, they heard the receding hoof beats of Marlowe’s horse, taking him to safety.

The Sullivan was shielding his eyes and screaming commands. ‘I want that Troll salt party! I want them! Get the patrols out!