Strata (13 page)

He was wearing his lift belt. The dragon tried to twist in mid air, tumbled, regained its balance and tried to flee for height and safety. It didn’t work.

On the other side of the boat the water foamed and a wingtip beat the surface listlessly. Then the hull canted sharply. Silver was climbing aboard.

The men around Kin shouted and struck out, laughing as they heaved themselves up the side.

High above the dogfight the surviving dragon screamed and disappeared speedily into the east, giving Kin a short and tantalizing glimpse of its high-speed propulsion. Those horror-story wings were too clumsy for anything except ponderous flight. To travel fast, the dragon folded them along its side, bent its head back under its body, and exhaled. By the time it was too far away for Kin to see details its breath was yellow-hot.

She followed something else down the sky as it tumbled lazily. It was a dragon head. Shortly afterwards, although to the silent crowd on the boat it seemed much longer, the body followed, wings still spread wide, spiralling slowly with Marco climbing to its back and still hacking with the knife. When he hit the water a cheer went up.

It turned to anger when they saw that Silver was dragging her dragon aboard, still alive. When the men moved hurriedly aside they gave Kin a good view.

The beast flopped mournfully on the deck, water streaming from its wings. It raised its dripping head towards her and sneezed, violently.

Two jets of warm water hit Kin on the legs.

Marco was helped aboard by all four arms. His comb blazed blood red and, as he stood up amid the admiring crowd, he raised his black-stained knife over his head and yodelled:

‘
Refteg! Ymal refteg PELC!
’

Kin looked across at Silver, who was unscrewing her fangs. The shand grimaced.

‘Tell me again about his being officially human,’ she said. ‘I keep forgetting.’

‘What’, asked Kin, ‘do you intend to do with
that
?’ One of the men beside her had drawn his sword and was offering it proudly to the shand, hilt first. Silver ignored him.

‘It’s dead,’ she said, ‘but we have the body. I would very much like to know how an organic creature can breathe fire.’ She grabbed the corpse by neck and tail and dragged it aft.

Marco swaggered over to Kin.

‘I triumph!’ he shouted.

‘Yes, Marco.’

‘They declare war on us! They sent dragons! But They reckoned without me!’

‘Yes, Marco.’

‘Together They conspire against me yet I overcome!’ he screamed, eyes glazed. Then his expression faded.

‘You just think I’m a paranoid kung, don’t you,’ he said sulkily.

‘Since you mention it …’

‘I’m proud to be human. Make no mistake! As for the other,’ he said, turning, ‘just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean They aren’t out to get you.’

She watched him stride back to the men, who clustered around him. Frightened of everything except immediate physical danger. And as human as a tiger.

Silver was gazing ruefully at the dumbwaiter. It was not damaged, but the plastic panelling would never be the same again.

When the men were at the oars again Kin took out her suit toolkit and arranged the dragon corpse as best she could on the tiny foredeck. The kit was small but comprehensive. A marooned spaceman could use it to survive on an alien world for years. Some had. Kin selected a medical scalpel.

Later she opened the kit fully and found a multi-chisel.

A minute later she reached in and assembled the vibro-saw. The
screeee
as it skidded and juddered over scales set her teeth on edge, but she didn’t switch off until the blade broke.

She went to find Marco and Silver, who were taking a turn at the oars, and hunkered down between them.

‘Those dragons are jet powered,’ she said. ‘I could open the neck – it’s lined with some sort of light spongy substance. It cut like jelly. When I tried the welding laser on it it didn’t even warm up.’

‘How about the body?’ said Marco.

‘Those scales are
tough
. You will note I am holding the remains of a vibro-saw. They say a saw like this will cut hull metal.’

Silver grinned. ‘One finds oneself thinking in terms of creatures that drink kerosene.’

The kung snorted. ‘No doubt you neglected to run a geiger over it?’ he said.

‘No. I tested it all right. Nothing.’

‘I am surprised.’

‘Want to hear what happened when I cut the neck off and dropped the geiger head into the body cavity?’

‘I am agog.’

‘It’s as hot as hell in there. That creature is a living atomic furnace. And you can’t tell me it evolved, not on an Earth-type world. It’s a construct! That’s where you’ll find the disc builders – wherever that thing came from.’

‘The centre of the disc,’ said Silver thoughtfully. Kin gawped, and the shand nodded casually as she leaned on the oar.

‘I have some facility with languages, as you know,’ she said. ‘I have been talking to some of these men. We’ve got to the say-and-point stage. They see these things sometimes. In these parts they come from the east, but when the boats sail down south the dragons pass over from the north-east. Therefore I deduce they come from the central regions. Why are you staring?’

‘Marco already wants to go to the centre,’ said Kin. ‘He wants to offer them a barometer – I think.’

The next dawn saw them sailing through an increasingly choppy sea into a fjord between white mountains. There was a colony of turf-roofed stone huts, and some sparse meadows. People hurried down to the shingle, then shied back noisily as, with the crew in their seats smirking like demons, Silver dropped over the side and ran the boat up the beach by herself.

There was a glassy-eyed dragon head roped to the prow.

Leiv led them into a long high-roofed hut that made Kin wonder whatever happened to Grendel. But, of course, Grendel was slinking alongside her, swinging his too-many arms and eyeing the crowds for possible assassins.

When her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom inside she saw an open fire in a pit and, beside it, a man sitting on a rough stool. One leg was stretched out in front of him. He was redheaded, and bearded.

He rose unsteadily from his stool and embraced Leiv, both men holding themselves as if there was just the faintest possibility that the other might attempt a stabbing. Then the younger man spoke.

It was a lengthy saga. After a while the older man was taken outside and shown what remained of the dead dragon. He was introduced to Silver, and hobbled several times round Marco, who looked at him sidelong. He grinned at Kin in a way that expressed horizontal desires.

Encouraged by this display, other inhabitants turned up. Kin’s attention was drawn to two men in black robes. One of them was looking at Marco fearfully and reciting some sort of incantation.

Silver’s head swivelled round.

She spoke a sentence in the same language.

From then on Silver did the translating.

‘The tongue is Latin, the Remen tongue. Except that these men refer to Rome not Reme.’

Kin considered it. ‘Romulus and Remus,’ she said at last. ‘The founders of Rome. Ever hear the legend?’

‘I think I recall it in a folklore anthology.’

‘So on the disc Remus won the naming privilege. What else did they say?’

‘Oh, quite a lot of gibberish about demons, the usual primitive world stuff. Ever heard the word
troll
? They keep looking at Marco and saying it. There’s also a lot about gods, I think.’

Kin looked around. These people were either primitive or superb actors. Perhaps the gods were the disc builders.

‘Ask about them,’ she said. A long conversation followed. Sometimes the older of the men would point to the sky. Leiv and his father watched carefully.

Finally Silver nodded and turned to Kin. ‘Let’s see if I get this right, now,’ she said. ‘There’s a whole lot of gods about, but the top god is called Christos. The high priest lives at Rome. There was also another kind of god who created this world in six days. Anticipating your questions,’ she said, raising a paw to interrupt Kin, ‘I asked for more details. This creator-god has a lot of minor assistant gods with wings, and there’s another lesser being called Saitan who sounds like an agitator. There’s a lot of other usual, religious stuff too.’

‘Six days is too fast,’ said Kin. ‘It’d take the Company six years even with prefabricated parts. Frankly, I’d put it all down as a myth.’

‘It’s unusually straightforward,’ Silver pointed out. ‘In most myths the world is usually made from the supreme being’s step-father’s pancreas or the blood of the sacred beetle or something.’

Kin frowned. Earth had plenty of religions, and had exported as many as she had imported. For every sect of humans engaged in complicated Ehftnic time rituals there was a group of saffron-dyed shandi drumming and chanting through the frozen Shandi streets. Generally Company people, being in the creation business, didn’t bother with religion or went along with something basic and non-controversial, like Wicca or Buddhism.

Kin had drunk of many cups in her time, just out of curiosity. Stand up, kneel down, climb a mountain, chant, go naked, whirl, dance, fast, abhor, gorge, pray – sometimes it was enjoyable, but it was always introverted, unreal.

Leiv’s father spoke at length to one of the priests, who spoke to Silver. Silver laughed and replied.

‘He wants to buy the Valhalla oven,’ she translated.

‘The what?’

‘The dumbwaiter. He says that he knows that in Valhalla all men eat and drink endlessly and now he knows it is because they have these ovens that grind out food and drink.’

‘Tell him it’s not for sale.’ She looked directly at Eirick Raude. Red Eric. Back on Earth there was a worn mound in the heart of Valhalla where the water from the five inland seas spilled over into the Long Fjord. Eirick’s Beard, they called the water. Red Eric had been buried in the mound. It was a big tourist attraction.

Silver took a deep breath.

‘He also wants us to adjust the sun,’ she said. The man, seeing Kin’s face, began to speak slowly in Latin.

‘There has been spring in winter, he says. The sun has sometimes dimmed. On several nights the stars have flickered. And, uh, something happened to one of the planets.’

Kin stared. Then she walked into the hall where Silver had deposited the dumbwaiter and dialled for a big cup of the sweet ale. She brought it back and put it in Eirick’s scarred hands.

‘Tell him that was our fault. Tell him that if only we can learn the secrets of the world, we will replace the planet and do what we can about the sun. Did he say that stars
flickered
?’

‘Apparently this is expected. The aforesaid Christos was born almost a thousand years ago, and it is widely believed that he will come again around about now. Take a look at the sea, will you?’

Kin turned. The waves were lashing at the beach, even here. She could hear the thunder of the storm out in the open sea. But the sky was blue, windless …

‘I said the disc wasn’t a reliable artefact,’ she said. ‘It sounds like its governing systems are going wrong. Eirick doesn’t seem all that worried, Silver.’

‘He says he’s seen and heard of a lot of gods. He can take gods or leave them alone. If we can repair the weather, he will give us much timber.’

‘Timber?’

Silver turned to look at the village. ‘It seems to be a scarce commodity here,’ she said. ‘Notice the lack of trees.’

This should be the Climatic Optimum, Kin told herself. On Earth it had been. The Northern expansion had taken place during a long warm spell, when even a strip of coastal Greenland was reasonably habitable …

Here, on some nights, the stars flickered out.

Marco and Kin spent the night in the hall, although Silver opted for the chill air of the boat. No one had attempted to bundle Kin off with the women. Goddesses were different.

She lay looking at the glow of the fire. The boom of the surf was still loud. Tides, she thought. That half-pint moon couldn’t cause them. There must be some sort of regulated rise and fall of the sea, and it’s going haywire.

She longed for a sleepset. They left your mouth tasting like an ape’s urinal, but they were quick. You didn’t suffer from insomnia with a zizz, or get bothered by rocks sticking in your back. A short, deep, dreamless sleep.

Finally she gave up, got up and walked through the darkened hall. The man at the door moved aside hastily to let her pass.

The sky was ablaze with fake stars. Kin shivered, but couldn’t help but admire the ersatz universe that blazed over the dark, sea-noisy fjord.

This wasn’t Earth. It was a disc about fifteen thousand miles across, massing around 5.67 x 10
²¹
tons. That meant it either had generated gravity or neutronium veneer as a bedrock. It spun very slowly, like a tossed coin in treacle, dragging with it a fake sun and a fake moon and a family of fake planets. She knew all that, but sitting here it was hard to believe.