Quest Beyond Time (4 page)

Mike lay in the dark on the hard shelf, trying to think it through in a way that made sense.

Every time he thought it through, the answer made no sense whatsoever.

The thing that he had to cling to, he decided, was that the world made sense. Everything these people told him made no sense. Therefore they must be mad or lying to him.

It all must have a rational explanation. They must be a sect of second generation hippies who had decided to live in a kind of barbarism, he decided. They had developed their own religion, their own customs. If the property they lived on was big enough, they would probably never get bothered by the neighbours. Particularly if they had lions roaming free around the place.

The so-called Wanderers could just be people who did not get on with the others in the commune. That could happen fairly easily, he thought. Particularly if they were all like Fergus.

He was convinced. He was not in some post-nuclear-holocaust future. He was in the present, in 1985, with a mother living in Sydney who was going to be scared witless by this time at his not having shown up for dinner. Probably the police were out looking for him in the water at the base of the cliffs. His mates would have thought he had crashed into the water without their seeing.

He could envisage the scene: the Water Police launch criss-crossing the area, police divers down . . . and then nightfall, and the search abandoned, and the police on his mother’s doorstep telling her that her son was missing. Not to give up hope, but . . .

He looked around the great hall. Apart from the cracking of a log in the fire, all was silent. Slowly, he eased up until he was sitting, and slipped from under the sheepskin blanket. He put on his sneakers, and headed for the door. By the door was his hang-glider still bundled up, but he thought he might have to run for it, and its weight would slow him down. Reluctantly, he left it behind.

Slowly he opened the door enough for him to get out into the night. Slowly he eased it shut. He crept away from the house. The moon was up. It was nearly full, and gave more light than he would have liked.

He moved swiftly across the open space on the landward side of the house, passing the standing stone with its vacant eye. For a moment, as he passed it, the hair lifted on the back of his neck. He did not like that stone. He would not like to sleep beneath it.

It was not until Mike moved from the clearing round the house and into the shelter of the first line of trees that he remembered the lions.

For one moment he almost went back. He stood there, wavering, trying to remember everything he knew about the habits of lions.

As far as he could remember, they hunted by day. He held onto that thought like a security blanket, and turned his steps away from the house.

He had been moving through the bush for perhaps ten minutes when he first became aware of the noise behind him.

At first, it was somewhat comforting. It was the deep sound of a hound baying. It made him think of a neighbour’s basset hound. This sound was deeper but it had the same quality. He must be close to houses if there were pet dogs so near.

Then the one hound’s voice was joined by others.

And then they were getting nearer.

The image in his mind changed from the friendly old over-fed basset hound who lived next door, to that of a film he had once seen, where big hounds had flowed like a yelping wave in pursuit of a stag.

Mike was suddenly very afraid. He had heard of packs of domestic dogs which ran wild at night and hunted.

And the sounds were getting closer.

He was frozen to the spot. It was not until he heard the drumming of a horse’s hooves blending with the baying of hounds that his fear overcame his paralysis, and he turned and fled.

As he ran, the sounds of the hounds and the horse receded for a time, and the sounds of his own footfalls and breathing became louder. He was running in a straight line, heading for the fence he believed with all his heart must be ahead of him. Across such a fence must be the normal world of motorcars and freeways and hamburger bars and movies and friends and family.

Mike did not even know why he was running from the noises. He just knew he did not wish to encounter those hounds. He just knew he never wanted to meet whoever or whatever was on that horse.

He ran like this for some minutes before he noticed the open nature of the woodland he ran through. He had often walked in the bush and it was nothing like this. The bush he knew was hard to penetrate because of tangled undergrowth. This forest was like a park, with tall trees, and grass growing beneath them.

The nature of the forest triggered some memory in him. He reached in his mind for it, found it, and then regretted that he had found it. For the memory was of old Gloomsie, the social studies teacher, saying to them, ‘When white men first got across the Blue Mountains, they thought the whole thing looked like a park. It looked like that because the Aboriginals used to do controlled burns of the undergrowth to clear the whole thing out, and bring up new grass. It made the land better for hunting.’

‘For hunting … for hunting … for hunting . . .’ The words ran through his mind. The hounds and hooves sounded closer, and his breath was rasping in his throat and chest. He was stumbling from fatigue. Of the dreamed-of fence there was no sign. He hit the brow of a ridge, and fell, and found himself rolling down an incline. The hounds were very close now. He could hear their feet on the forest floor.

As he rolled onto his feet at the bottom of the incline, he saw water ahead of him, flat, black water. Without thinking about the depth of the bottom or the possibility of submerged logs, he took two steps forward and launched himself in a flat dive.

The water closed over him and he swam beneath the surface, away from his pursuers. Then he was among reeds. He had reached the other side of a small waterhole. He lifted his head above water just far enough to breathe.

And almost yelled with terror.

For there, on the far bank, framed by the white columns of the gum trees, with big hounds milling about him, was something from Mike’s worst nightmares.

The horse must have stood two metres high at the shoulder, and was black with a white blaze. Seated on the horse was a figure, dressed in black leather.

And it had no face.

No face at all.

Mike’s mouth was open with the scream frozen in his locked throat, when the figure turned its head and the moon caught it and Mike realized that the face was covered by a hood and fine leather mask.

The huntsman turned in the saddle and looked about through the slits in the mask. Mike felt a shudder run through him as the hidden eyes moved across the reeds where he was hiding. Then the figure snarled, and slashed at his pack of hounds with a whip, and turned, and rode away.

Mike lay among the reeds, drained of energy, strength and will.

He lay there in hiding until first light began filtering through the forest. Then he slowly swam back across the waterhole and made his way toward Clan Murray House.

Simon and Fergus were by the standing stone. Katrin was further from the house, casting about for tracks.

‘Gone,’ the giant warrior said.

Simon was not so certain. ‘He left his wings.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps he went walking.’

‘Who walks by night?’ Fergus muttered. ‘Servants of the Dark Ones, that’s who.’

‘If he agrees to go the Island,’ Simon said, more firmly than he felt, ‘he is from the gods.’

‘And if he agrees . . . and then betrays?’

‘Then you’ll be beside him. To slay him.’

‘If he betrays,’ Fergus said, and his eyes went to the eye of the stone, ‘I shall bring him back. I shall bring him back and give him to the stone to drink.’

Simon looked at him with a kind of concern. He himself had never been as religious as his brother Fergus.

‘The stone is thirsty,’ Fergus went on. ‘Four years since we warred, four years since we raided . . . she is thirsty.’

‘For four years there has been no cause for war or raid under the Covenant.’

The Covenant!’ Fergus spat.

Simon smiled. ‘We helped impose it. You and I. With our swords.’

‘And the world’s been a softer place since,’ growled Fergus.

‘Father!’ It was Katrin’s voice.

The two men turned in her direction but she was already running toward the trees, where Mike was emerging, walking toward them.

He was dirty, scratched, tired and wet, and physically and emotionally exhausted. Apart from all that, he told himself, he was in great shape. Also he was within reach of what passed for safety in Twenty-fifth Century Australia.

As she reached him her face was bleak with the rage that in Katrin made do for anxiety. ‘You shouldn’t go out at night!’

‘Now she tells me!’

‘What happened?’

‘A leatherman on a horse had his dogs try to eat me.’

‘The Night Huntsman.’

‘Now, how did I know he’d have to have a name like that?’

‘A neighbouring chieftain. He hunts by night.’

‘In a mask?’

‘My uncle clove his face in battle. He was once handsome, they say.’ She walked alongside him, back toward the house.

‘I guess he and your uncle don’t get on any more.’

‘He scarred my uncle. The only swordsman living who could.’

‘Uh huh. It’s a great little century you’re running here. I don’t know why you don’t open it up for tourism!’

‘What is tourism?’

‘People get into boats and go to other people’s countries.’

‘I understand. We call them “raids”.’ She added, proudly, ‘My father and uncle once raided south of the Great River. To Vickham, where all people are slaves and they have a king.’

‘Beyond the Great River. That’d have to be Victoria you’re talking about?’

‘Vickham,’ she said in the firm tones of someone who was not going to be taught geography by a person stupid enough to go walking at night.

Ten minutes later Mike was sitting in the hall, wrapped in a sheepskin blanket, eating coarse porridge from an earthenware bowl while his clothes dried before the fire. As he shovelled the porridge into himself with a cow-horn spoon, he became aware that Katrin was looking at him with a hard amusement.

He looked at her. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘I think that you believe us now.’ Her gesture at Simon and Fergus defined the ‘us’. They were sitting, their bodies loose, their eyes hooded, wrapped in their cloaks and their own thoughts. The relaxation of these men, their lack of any need to talk when they had nothing to say, reminded Mike forcibly of the big cats at the zoo. They were like lions, tigers, leopards. And as dangerous.

He paused before answering her question. He had thought about it all those hours he had spent up to his neck in water the night before. He had not yet come to terms with it. He thought that he would never come to terms with it. When he tried, a cold terror gripped his mind and made him weak. But he knew that somehow or other, something had happened in the sky, and now he was lost five hundred years from home. ‘I believe I’m in the future. How I got here . . .’ He let it hang in the air. Though there were no churchgoers still alive in his own family, Mike understood that some people took their religion seriously enough to kill over it.

‘The gods brought you.’ Simon said it as simply as he might have said ‘you are sitting on that chair’.

Mike knew you did not argue with that sort of certainty. You might just as well argue with an athletics coach.

‘Or the Dark Ones.’

Mike looked at Fergus. It was always the giant warrior who used that phrase. ‘Who are the Dark Ones?’

‘You don’t know of the Dark Ones in Before? Perhaps you know them by other names. I have met men from the north who call them the Gentle Ones. Because they fear them. The Murrays call things what they are.’

‘They’re . . . what? Devils? Demons?’

‘Is that what you call them in Before?’

‘I don’t call them anything.’ It was on the tip of his tongue to say ‘because they don’t exist,’ but he stopped himself in time.

‘Their Father’s greatest lie . . .’ said Fergus, ‘is that they don’t exist.’

Mike suddenly felt cold, as a walker on a dark night might feel at the sudden emergence of the moon from behind a cloud, revealing that he had been two paces from a cliff’s edge. He wondered what other traps were here for him.

‘What gods then, do you worship?’

Fergus’s flat question hung in the air above Mike like a sword.

He had no answer.

The silence was like a wire, stretched tight and humming under tension.

Simon broke it. ‘Come, Fergus, the boy has Guestright. There’s no end to questioning about the gods. And there is only one question that means anything at all to us here.’ He turned to Mike and Mike knew what the question was. Would he help them by going to this mysterious Island of theirs?

For a moment, he was silent, then he knew there was something he must ask first. ‘I have a question.’

Simon nodded, and waited.

‘You took me in, and fed me. I refused to help you. I ran away. You took me back, and still feed me. Why?’

Fergus looked at Mike with a bleak horror. ‘What must his time have been like? No wonder they fought with coward’s weapons, and not hand-to-hand like humans.’

Simon turned to Katrin. ‘Tell him.’

‘You’re our kin.’ She said it simply, in that calm and certain manner they all seemed to possess.

‘But is everyone your kin?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Night Huntsman?’

‘If he attacked us, we would fight him. Perhaps slay him. But he is our kin.’

‘The Wanderers?’

‘With such we may not breed. But yes. Kin.’ She put out her hand, and he slowly put out his own, knowing that this was what was expected of him. She pointed to their two hands, her finger tracing out the patterns of their palm and fingerprints. ‘Our difference is written in our hands. But also written there is our Kinship.’

If there was one emotion Mike was not used to, that emotion was shame. He had always been taught never to be ashamed of anything. Now he felt shame. These barbarians lived by a code he could wish he lived by himself. They had no cars, no roads and no medicines. They were brutal and bloodthirsty and superstitious. But they had an idea they called ‘Kinship’, and he wished to possess it and partake of it.

‘I guess I’d better come with you,’ he heard himself saying, ‘to this Island of yours.’ He was aware that both Simon and Katrin were relieved. His eyes were caught by a movement of Fergus’s hand. The warrior was removing his right hand from the hilt of his sword. Again, Mike had the feeling of moving in the dark toward an unknown goal. He looked at Fergus and tried a grin. ‘This make me a man?’

‘All you have given so far is words. It is deeds that will make you a man.’

Good old Fergus, Mike thought. He can always be relied on for light relief.