The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) (7 page)

A
fter I left you that morning, Moorcock, I had no intention of departing Rowe Island so hastily. I genuinely intended to do no more than take a stroll and clear my head. But I was very tired, as you know, and inclined to act impulsively. As I walked along the quayside I saw that a steamer was leaving; I observed an opportunity to stow away, did so, was undiscovered, and eventually reached the mainland of India, whereupon I made my way inland, got to Teku Benga (still hoping to get back to what I was convinced was my ‘real’ time), discovered that the way across remained impassable and considered the possibility of chucking myself off the cliff and having done with the whole mystery. But I hadn’t the courage for that, nor the heart to go back to your world, Moorcock—that world that was so subtly different from the one I had originally left.

I suppose I must have gone into a decline of some sort (perhaps the shock, perhaps the sudden cessation of supplies of opium to my system, I don’t know). I remained near the abyss separating me from what might have been the fountainhead of that particular knowledge I sought. I stared for hours at the dimly seen ruins of that ancient and squalid mountain fortress and I believe I must have prayed to it, begging it to release me from the awful fate it (or Sharan Kang, its dead priest-king) had condemned me to.

For some time (do not ask me how long) I lived the life of a wild beast, eating the small vermin I was able to trap, almost relishing the slow erosion of my mind and my civilized instincts.

When the snows came I was forced to look for shelter and was driven slowly down the mountainside until I discovered a cave which provided more than adequate shelter. The cave bore evidence that it had until recently been the lair of some wild beast, for there were many bones—of goats, wild sheep, hill dogs and the like (as well as the remains of more than one human being)—but there was no sign that its previous occupant was still in evidence. The cave was long and narrow, stretching so far back and becoming so dark that I never explored its whole extent and was content to establish myself close to the mouth, building no fire, but wrapping myself in the inadequately cured skins of my prey as the winter grew steadily colder.

The previous resident of the cave had been a huge tiger. I found this out one morning when I heard a peculiar snuffling noise and woke up to see the entrance blocked by a massive striped head and the beginnings of a pair of monstrous feline shoulders. The tiger regarded this cave as his winter home and plainly would not think much of the idea of sharing it equably with me. I leapt up and began to retreat into the depths of the cave, since my exit was completely blocked, as the tiger, who must have grown fatter during his summer in the lowlands, squeezed his way slowly in.

That was how I discovered the cave to be in actuality a tunnel—and moreover a man-made tunnel. It grew as dark as the grave as I continued my retreat along it. I steadied myself with my hands against the walls and slowly began to understand that the rough rock had given way to smooth and that the projections were, in fact, cunning carvings of a familiar pattern. I became a bit flustered, then—a bit mad. I remember giggling, then stopping myself, realizing that the tiger might still be behind me. I paused, feeling carefully on both sides of the narrow passage. I received a sickening sense of disgust as my groping fingers made out details of the carvings; my dizziness increased. And yet at the same time I was elated, knowing for certain that I had stumbled into one of Teku Benga’s many secret corridors and that I might well have found my way back, at last, to that warren of passages which lay beneath the immeasurably ancient Temple of the Future Buddha! There was no question in my mind that, failing to find a way across the gorge, I had inadvertently discovered a way
under
it, for now the floor of the passage began to rise steeply and I was attacked by a coldness of a quality and intensity which was totally unlike the coldness of the natural winter. I had been terrified when I had first experienced it and I was terrified now, but my terror was mixed with hope. Strange little noises began to assail my ears, like the tinkling of temple bells, the whispering of a wind which carried half-formed words in an alien language. Once I had sought to escape all this, but now I ran towards it and I believe that I was weeping, calling out. And the floor of the passage seemed to sway as I ran on, the walls widened out so that I could no longer stretch my arms and touch them and at last, ahead of me, I saw a point of white light. It was the same I had seen before and I laughed. Even then I found my laughter harsh and mad, but I did not care. The light grew brighter and brighter until it was blinding me. Shapes moved behind the light; there were nameless, glowing colours; there were webs of some vibrating metallic substance and once more I was reminded of the legends of Hindu gods who had built machines to defy the laws of Space and Time.

And then I began to fall.

Head over heels I spun. It was as if I fell through the void which lies between the stars. Slowly all the little consciousness that remained had left me and I gave myself up to the ancient power which had seized me and made me its toy...

I
’m sorry if all this seems fanciful, Moorcock. You know that I’m not a particularly imaginative sort of chap. I began my maturity as an ordinary soldier, doing his duty to his country and his Empire. I should like nothing more than to continue my life in that vein, but fate had ordained otherwise. I awoke in darkness, desperately hoping that my flight through Time had been reversed and that I should discover myself back in my own age. There was no way of knowing, of course, for I was still in darkness, still in the tunnel, but the sounds had gone and that particular sort of coldness had gone. I got up, feeling my body in the hope that I’d discover I was wearing my old uniform, but I was not—I was still dressed in rags. This did not unduly concern me and I turned to retrace myself, feeling that if I was in the age I hoped to have left, then I would give myself up to the tiger and get it all over with.

At last I got back to the cave and there was no tiger. Moreover—and this improved my spirits—there was no sign that
I
had occupied the cave. I walked out into the snow and stood looking up at a hard, blue sky, taking great gulps of the thin air and grinning like a schoolboy, sure that I was ‘home’.

My journey out of the mountains was not a pleasant one and how I ever escaped severe frostbite I shall never know. I passed through several villages and was treated with wary respect, as a holy man might be treated, and got warmer clothes and food, but none of those I spoke to could understand English and I had no familiarity with their dialect. Thus it was nearly a month before I could begin to hope for confirmation of my belief that I had returned to my own time. A few landmarks began to turn up—a clump of trees, an oddly shaped rock, a small river—which I recognized and I knew I was close to the frontier station which Sharan Kang had attacked and thus been the cause of my first visit both to Teku Benga and, ultimately, the future.

The station came in sight a day or so later—merely a barracks surrounded by a few native brick huts and the whole enclosed by a serviceable wall. This was where our Native Police and their commanding officer had been killed and I admit that I prayed that I would find it as I had left it. There
were
signs of fighting and few signs of habitation and this cheered me up no end! I stumbled through the broken gateway of the little fort, hoping against hope that I would find the detachment of Punjabi Lancers and Ghoorkas I had left behind on my way to Kumbalari. Sure enough there were soldiers there. I shouted out in relief. I was weak from hunger and exhaustion and my voice must have sounded thinly through the warm spring air, but the soldiers sprang up, weapons at the ready, and it was only then that I realized they were white. Doubtless the Indian soldiers had been relieved by British.

Yet these men had recently been in a fight, that was clear. Had another band of Sharan Kang’s men attacked the fort while I had been on my expedition into the old hill fox’s territory?

I called out: “Are you British?”

I received the stout reply: “I certainly hope we are!”

And then I fell fainting on the dry dust of the compound.

N
aturally enough, my first words on regaining consciousness, lying on a truckle bed in what remained of the barracks’ dormitory, were:

“What’s the year?”

“The
year,
sir?” The man who addressed me was a young, bright-looking chap. He had a sergeant’s stripes on his dusty scarlet tunic (it was a Royal Londonderry uniform, a regiment having close connections with my own) and he held a tin cup of tea in one hand while the other was behind my head, trying to help me sit up.

“Please, sergeant, humour me, would you? What’s the year?”

“It’s 1904, sir.”

So I had been ‘lost’ for two years. That would explain a great deal. I was relieved. Sipping the rather weak tea (I was later to discover it was almost their last) I introduced myself, giving my rank and my own regiment, telling the sergeant that I was, as far as I knew, the only survivor of a punitive expedition of a couple of years earlier—that I had been captured, escaped, wandered around for a bit and had only just managed to make it back. The sergeant accepted the story without any of the signs of suspicion which I had come to expect, but his next words alarmed me.

“So you would know nothing of the war, then, Captain Bastable?”

“A war? Here, on the Frontier? The Russians...”

“At the moment, sir, this is one of the few places scarcely touched by the war, though you are right in supposing that the Russians are amongst our enemies. The war is world-wide. Myself and less than a score of men are all that remains of the army which failed to defend Darjiling. The city and the best part of these territories are either under Russian control or the Russians have been, in turn, beaten by the Arabian Alliance. Personally I am hoping that the Russians are still in control. At least they let their prisoners live or, at worst, kill them swiftly. The last news we had was not good, however...”

“Are there no reinforcements coming from Britain?”

A look of pain filled the sergeant’s eyes. “There will be little enough coming from Blighty for some time, I shouldn’t wonder, sir. Most of Europe is in a far worse plight than Asia, having sustained the greatest concentration of bombs. The war is over in Europe, Captain Bastable. Here, it continues—a sort of alternative battle-ground, you might call it, with precious little for anyone to win. The power situation is grim enough— there’s probably not one British keel capable of lifting, even if it exists...”

Now his words had become completely meaningless to me. I was aware of only one terrifying fact and I had become filled with despair: this world of 1904 bore even less relation to my own world than the one from which I had sought to escape. I begged the sergeant to explain recent history to me as he might explain it to a child, using my old excuse of partial amnesia. The man accepted the excuse and kindly gave me a breakdown of this world’s history since the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. It was radically different either from your world, Moorcock or from the world of the future I described to you.

It appears that, by the 1870s, in Chile of all places, there had emerged the genius who had, in a few short years, been responsible for altering the lot of the world’s poor, of providing plenty where once there had been famine, comfort where they had been only grinding misery. His name was Manuel O’Bean, the son of an Irish engineer who had settled in Chile and the Chilean heiress Esmé Piatnitski (perhaps the wealthiest woman in South or Central America). O’Bean had shown signs of an enormous capacity to learn and to invent at an extraordinarily young age. His father, needless to say, had encouraged him and O’Bean had learned everything his father could pass on by the time he was eight years old. With the resources made available by his mother’s wealth, O’Bean had nothing to thwart this flowering of his mechanical genius. By the time he was twelve he had invented a whole new range of mining equipment which, when applied to his family’s holdings, increased their wealth a hundred-fold. Not only did he have an enormous talent for planning and building new types of machine, he also had the ability to work out new power sources which were less wasteful and infinitely cheaper than the crude sources up to that time in use. He developed a method of converting and reconverting electricity so that it did not need to be carried through wires but could be transmitted by means of rays to almost anywhere in the world from any other point. His generators were small, efficient and required the minimum of power, and these in turn propelled most of the types of machinery he invented. Other engines, including sophisticated forms of steam-turbine depending on fast-heating liquids other than water, were also developed. As well as the mining and farming equipment he developed in those early years, O’Bean (still less than fifteen years old) invented a collection of highly efficient war-machines (he was still a boy and was fascinated, as boys are, with such things), including underwater boats, mobile cannons, airships (in collaboration with the great flying expert, the Frenchman La Perez) and self-propelled armoured carriages sometimes called “land ironclads”. However, O’Bean soon abandoned this line of research as his social conscience developed. By the time he was eighteen he had sworn never to put his genius to war-like purposes again and instead concentrated on machines which would irrigate deserts, tame forests, and turn the whole world into an infinitely rich garden which would feed the hungry and thus extinguish what he believed to be the wellspring of most human strife.