Quest Beyond Time (10 page)

For what remained of the night Mike slept in the wooden chair by Katrin’s bed. At some stage he woke to the sound of singing. It was a low sweet blend of women’s voices which moved from singing into a kind of chant and then returned to singing once more.

He went to sleep again, and the next time he woke, it was to silence.

Again, he slept.

When he woke this time, it was because Katrin was punching him.

‘Mmmm?’ He blinked himself awake. Katrin was sitting up in the bed and thumping him with both fists. From the force of the blows, he knew she was well on the way to full health.

‘You called me coward!’

‘Katrin!’ He was smiling, delighted to see her awake and well and scowling at him. It was just like old times.

‘You called me coward!’

‘I was trying to save both our lives!’

‘That’s no excuse! I should challenge you!’

Mike burst out laughing. ‘Challenge me? To a duel? You’d win every time!’ He took her hand, and he said what he had thought for all their time together. ‘You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.’

She could hear the sincerity, and her anger fled. She smiled.

‘Also the most foolhardy, aggressive, stupidest . . .’

She punched him again.

‘Loveliest . . .’ He ran out of words. So he leaned forward and kissed her.

She stared at him and for a moment he was not sure what her reaction would be. He had the sudden thought that he had a good chance of being cut up for cats’ meat. She frowned, as if trying to assess what had happened. Then she said, ‘That was nice,’ and kissed him back hard, and pushed him away. ‘Now get out. I have to get out of this stupid dress they’ve put me in and put on some real clothes.’

When he got to the door, he turned. ‘The head sister here . . . the head wise woman . . . she says that I’ll probably be pulled back to my own time. If it happens, I want you to know it’s against my will. I want to stay here.’

She looked at him in that solemn way of hers. ‘If it happens, I shall be sad. Now get out.’

He got out.

The wind blew from the channel, buffeting them on the Island’s clifftop. Mike was roped into his side of the hang-glider, and Katrin strapped into her side. She looked at the water below, and Mike saw, with a slightly smug feeling, that she was afraid.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he said to her.

‘Don’t talk down to me!’ was all the answer he got.

Mother Teresa and Sister Clair and others of the sisters were with them.

‘You could stay here, Mike, if you liked,’ Teresa said. ‘After you get Katrin to the mainland, you could return and work with us.’

He shook his head. ‘She needs me to look after her,’ he said, his face deadpan.

Katrin kicked him in the shin. ‘You’re free to stay.’

‘I couldn’t do that to you,’ he answered, still deadpan.

‘One more remark like that. . .’ she began.

He joined in with her,’. . . and I’ll challenge!’

And then they were laughing together.

Mike turned to Teresa. ‘Goodbye. Thank you.’ He looked at the other sisters. ‘Goodbye sisters.’ Then he turned to Katrin and nodded. She swallowed hard, and they began to move down the slope into the wind.

The great hand of the air caught them up, and they were airborne.

The raging channel slipped away beneath them.

They fought the gusts, and rode the air, and suddenly, through the roaring of the wind in the nylon, Mike heard Katrin laughing. He looked at her. She was loving it.

The cliffs of the mainland were coming toward them as they rode the air.

And then, on the clifftop, they saw an extraordinary figure, a stocky little man with a big beard, dressed in armour, and waving.

Woodcat!

Beyond him, the four ponies grazed at the rough grass on the clifftop.

They swooped in, and caught at the ground with their feet and were running to a perfect landing.

As they got clear of the glider, Woodcat ran up to them. ‘Greetings!’ he yelled.

They were still amazed at his escape. Katrin, laughing, asked, ‘Did you beat the Patchies off? Did you slay them?’

Woodcat shuffled, as if embarrassed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘not exactly.’

‘What then?’ asked Mike.

‘I thought of Isolde at home. The poor woman loves me passionately, you know. And I knew she would be inconsolable at my loss. So I took off my helmet and showed that I was of the Little People. And invoked the Covenant.’ He smiled at Mike. ‘We’re protected you know. We’re very important people.’

Mike and Katrin were both laughing, not so much at Woodcat, but with relief at his escape.

‘You must not tell this around!’ the little man said.

‘Oh, Woodcat Patchie-slayer,’ Katrin said, embracing him, ‘your secret is safe with us!’

They pushed the ponies hard, and by nightfall had reached the middenlands where Woodcat had his home. As they came close, they saw Isolde standing on top of the highest midden, watching anxiously.

As soon as she saw them, she hurried down and went to their house and slammed the door.

Woodcat had to plead with her to open it. When she did, she rushed out at him in a rage. ‘You’ve been having adventures!’ She turned on Katrin and Mike. ‘You’ve been letting him have adventures!’

‘There were no adventures, my dear, I assure you!’

‘The day you left, there were Patchies through, and I’ve been worried sick that they’d eat you and the poor things’d get indigestion!’ She looked at Woodcat with terrible scorn. ‘Having adventures at your age with a plough to mend and a wheel to rim!’

‘You’re right, my dear. You’re right. Indeed,’ he said, ‘I did meet Patchies . . .’

‘You did?’ She was immediately caring and anxious.

‘I did, but told them if they harmed me, they’d have Isolde to deal with. And they turned tail and ran!’

She embraced him, and looked at Katrin and Mike, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘He’s a terrible man, this. A most terrible man, and I rue the day I married him!’ Then she kissed Woodcat soundly and pushed him through the round doorway into his house.

The ambush happened within an hour of their leaving the Little People. Isolde had abused them roundly several more times, fed them a huge meal, and sent them off on two of the ponies, leading the third, on which were the hang-glider and the pack containing the precious medicine.

‘There’s another ford across the river, west of the one the Yobbies are guarding,’ Woodcat had told them, and it was toward this ford that they were heading when it happened.

The Patchies must have spied them far off, for they were in position and waiting for them. One moment, Katrin and Mike were pushing their ponies at a canter down a deserted road. The next moment, two squat, bow-legged figures had stood up from a concealing fold in the grassland, their bowstrings drawn back to their ears, an arrow aimed at each rider’s heart.

Katrin did not hesitate. Her hand went, not to her bow, but to her shortsword, either to attack the Patchies or to end her life, but as she did so, a rope with a running noose dropped over her chest and drew tight, pinioning both arms to her sides.

The rope had come from behind, and Mike turned in the saddle to look. There was a third Patchie behind them, holding the end of the lasso. With an easy movement, the Patchie jerked Katrin from the saddle, and in the same moment one of the two bowman had lassoed Mike and dragged him to the ground.

It took the Patchies only seconds to tie their ankles and wrists with untanned leather thongs, and hang them over their ponies. Moments after the ambush happened, the Patchies had retrieved their own horses, and they were on their way again, heading north, with Katrin and Mike as their prisoners.

‘It could be worse,’ Katrin’s upside-down head said to Mike’s upside-down head as they bobbed along.

‘How?’

‘We’re still alive, and we’re heading north. They could have taken us south to sell at the Vickharn border.’

‘I thought it was better to die than have the Patchies take you prisoner?’

‘Well, yes, there is that,’ she replied. ‘But since we’re alive, it’s better to be sold anywhere than Vickharn.’ Her face turned grim. ‘Unless they mean to keep us for their own use.’

‘What, ah . . . what kind of use?’

She shook her head. It seemed she thought it better that he not know. He did not press the point. He was not at all anxious to be informed on the question.

The Patchies kept a fast pace, and toward nightfall they reached the river ford guarded by the Yobbies.

Mike tried to see if the Yobbies were the ones they had stolen the boat from. If their luck was in, they would not be the same men.

Their luck was out. The two Yobbies who had not blundered into the forest were alive and well and looking at them longingly.

The biggest of the Yobbies, the one they had snared and hung in a tree, strolled up alongside them and looked at Mike and Katrin with a keen interest. Then he looked up into the tattooed face of the Patchie leader.

‘We would like to buy them.’

The Patchie shook his head.

‘How much?’

The Patchie shook his head again.

‘We have a religious reason,’ the big Yobby said. ‘Our lord Grym wishes to drink their Murray blood and spit them into the hall of their Dark Father.’

And once more, the Patchie shook his head.

‘You will sell them or we will take them.’ The Yobby’s hand moved to his sword hilt.

Mike now understood why Yobbies were thought to be dumb. The big Yobby putting his hand on his sword hilt was the dumbest action Mike had ever seen.

The movement was answered by a thrumming sound followed by choking cries as the other two Patchies’ bows seemed to leap into their hands, and arrow after arrow cut down every Yobby in sight. It was a death-dealing so brutally calm that Mike scarcely believed he had witnessed it.

Then the Patchies clapped their heels into their horses’ flanks, and urged them across the ford, leaving the Yobbies’ camp to a silence broken only by the harsh moaning of one who still lived.

As they cleared the other side of the river, Katrin spoke. ‘You’ll never see better work with a bow than that.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say? They just killed all those guys back there!’

‘If they hadn’t, the Yobbies would have given us to Grym before nightfall.’

‘I guess there’s something in what you say.’ Mike did not really have his heart in what he was saying. He felt sick to the stomach at what he had just witnessed.

The Patchies rode on long past nightfall, and Mike despaired of ever being able to walk again. His hands and feet had gone numb some hours since.

He drowsed off.

He woke as he hit the ground. A Patchie had tossed him onto the ground as one might a parcel. Mike looked around. Katrin was lying nearby. The situation was hopeless. They were both trussed tight, and in the hands of what in Mike’s short experience were the cruellest barbarians in this whole cruel barbarian future.

If they were lucky they would be sold as slaves to gentler masters. If they were unlucky, they would be kept for the Patchies’ own use. Mike found himself remembering Teresa’s warning that he would return to his own time. He wished it would happen very soon. In fact, he wished it would happen right now. As soon as the wish was there in his conscious mind, he felt sick with himself. He was wanting to run out on Katrin. ‘But it won’t be your fault,’ said the voice in his mind. ‘Yes it will,’ he told the voice, ‘because I wished it.’

The Patchies set a guard, and two fell on the ground and slept. The third, bow in hand, moved about the camp, and then found a shadowed place in which to keep watch.

Mike lay, watching the shadow where their guard sat. He tried his bonds. There were as tight as they had been all day. He found himself reflecting that, if this had been a story, he would have discovered a sharp stone or a piece of broken glass with which to cut the thongs about his wrist. This was not a story and there was no sharp stone or piece of glass.

He looked over at Katrin. He saw to his astonishment that she was asleep! How could she sleep at a time like this? Then he remembered what she had said to him once. ‘Eat when you can, sleep when you can. You don’t know when the next chance is coming.’ It was one of her sayings, like ‘don’t get skylined’ or ‘a path is what you get ambushed on’. It was part of her people’s code of survival. And here she was sleeping because she could do nothing else. Mike knew she was conserving energy for the time when she could use it. He tried to follow her example. After a while, he slept.

He woke to the worst smell he had ever experienced. He opened his eyes, and would have screamed if there had not been a dreadful furry thing pressing his mouth shut.

He was looking into the face of a Wanderer: at the lumpy outline, the non-existent nose with the two nostrils set flat in the face itself, at the two glaring eyes, one set higher than the other. ‘Kind man. No sound.’ The Wanderer was whispering, and the smell which had wakened him flooded over his face again.

Kind man? No sound? Then he knew where he had seen the face before. It was one of the Wanderers with whom they had shared their food. His eyes slid sideways to the place where the guard had been. The other Wanderer squatted there. Of the Patchie there was no sign.

Now the Wanderer took his hand from Mike’s mouth and with his strong yellow fangs he bit through the thongs binding Mike’s wrists. Then he slouched silently over to Katrin and woke and released her in the same manner. Mike fumbled with the thongs tying his ankles, but could make no headway. His hands were so numb from being tied for hours, he could not untie the knots in the thongs.

One of the Wanderers, seeing Mike’s predicament, brought him Katrin’s shortsword from the packs. Mike cut through his own ankle thongs and then went and helped Katrin with hers.

As all this went on, he was still looking around for the Patchies. They were simply not there. Their horses were there, their bows and quivers were there. But the Patchies were not.

‘Where are the Patchies?’ he whispered to Katrin.

‘You don’t want to know that,’ she whispered back, and pushed him toward the ponies.

‘Thank you, kind man, kind woman. We remember,’ the Wanderer said, as they mounted, picked up the leading rein of their packhorse and rode north into the night. ‘We remember.’

At first light before dawn, they dismounted and walked the horses for a while.

‘The Wanderers . . . they let us go because we shared our food with them?’

‘I suppose so.’ Katrin seemed angry at the thought. ‘Yes!’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘I don’t like owing Lifedebt to a Wanderer.’

They walked in silence for some time.

Then she spoke again. ‘Yet we have Kinship with them.’

‘What happened to the Patchies?’

She looked at him, and when she spoke it was with some reluctance. ‘The Wanderers believe that what you eat, your child becomes. When their women are carrying their young inside them, they feed only on what is well-formed. So that their young will be well-formed. While carrying young they will eat only the perfect. A perfect sheep … a perfect cow . . .’

‘A perfect human being?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s their belief.’

‘The Patchies? Perfect?’

‘More perfect than themselves.’

Mike thought he should feel disgust. Instead, he felt only pity. ‘They really believe that.’

‘It’s their only hope. Would you take it from them?’

He was silent.

‘It may be true, what they believe,’ she said, as the sun rose on their right hand.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t true. There are true things and false things, and what they believe in isn’t true.’ He was surprised to hear himself say so. He had always been taught to respect other people’s beliefs as if they were true. Somehow he had changed, and truth now seemed more important than politeness.