The Land Leviathan (A Nomad of the Time Streams Novel) (9 page)

“Gladly,” I replied. “Will there be someone to escort me there when I have completed my toilet and dressed?”

“I will wait outside for you, sir.” The sailor saluted and left the cabin, closing the door smartly behind him. There was no question that this was a superbly disciplined ship—the efficiency with which I had been rescued spoke of that—and I hoped that the discipline extended to the honouring of the ordinary conventions of war!

As quickly as I could I readied myself and soon presented myself outside the cabin door. The sailor set off along the narrow, tubular passage which was remarkable for possessing cork catwalks positioned on sides and ceiling as well as floor, indicating that the ship was designed to function at any of the main positions of the quadrant. My surmise proved to be accurate (there were also ‘decks’ on the outside of the hull to match the catwalks, while the main control room was a perfect globe pivoting to match the angle of the ship—merely, it emerged, one of O’Bean’s ‘throwaway’ ideas!) and the underwater craft was essentially much in advance of anything I had encountered in that other future of 1973.

The tubular passage led us to an intersection and we took the portside direction, climbed a small companionway and found ourselves outside a plain, circular steel door upon which the seaman knocked, uttering a few words in his unfamiliar language. A single word answered him from the other side of the door and he pulled back a recessed catch to open it and admit me, saluting again before he left.

I found myself in an almost familiar version of any captain’s quarters of a ship of my own world. There was plenty of well-polished mahogany and brass, a few green plants in baskets hanging from ceilings and walls, a neatly made single bunk, a small chart-table on which were several maps and around the edges of which were clipped a variety of instruments. Framed prints of clipper-ships and of old charts were fixed to the walls. The lighting glowed softly from the whole ceiling and had the quality of daylight (yet another of O’Bean’s casual inventions). A smallish, dapper figure, with whiskers trimmed in the Imperial style, rose to greet me, adjusting his cap on his head and smiling almost shyly. He was a young man, probably not much older that myself, but he had the lines of experience upon his face and his eyes were the eyes of a much older man—steady and clear, yet betraying a certain cool irony. He stretched out a hand and I shook it, finding the grip firm and not ungentle. There was something naggingly familiar about him, but my mind refused to accept the truth until, in good, but gutturally accented, English, he introduced himself:

“Welcome aboard the
Lola Montez
, captain. My name is Korzeniowski and I am her master.”

I was too stunned to speak, for I was confronting a much younger version of my old mentor from the days I spent aboard
The Rover
. Then, Korzeniowski had been (or would be) a Polish airship captain. The implications of all this were frightening. Was there now a chance that I might meet a version of
myself
in this other world? I recovered my politeness. Plainly Korzeniowski knew nothing of me and I introduced myself, for better or worse, by my name and my real regiment, explaining quickly how I had come to be wearing my rather elaborate Arabian uniform. “I hope Poland is not at war with the Arabian Alliance,” I added.

Captain Korzeniowski shrugged, turning towards a cabinet containing a number of bottles and glasses. “What will you have, Captain Bastable?”

“Whisky with a splash of soda, if you please. You are very kind.”

Korzeniowski took out the whisky decanter, gesturing casually with it as he extracted a glass from the rack. “Poland is not at war with anyone now. First Germany broke her, then Russia extinguished her, then Russia herself ceased to exist, as a nation at least. Poor Poland. Her struggles are over for all time. Perhaps something less ill-fated will emerge from the ruins.” He handed me a full glass, made as if to toss off his own, in the Polish manner, then restrained himself and sipped it almost primly, tugging at the lobe of his left ear, seeming to reprove himself for having been about to make a flamboyant gesture.

“But you and your crew are Polish,” I said. “The ship is Polish.”

“We belong to no nation now, though Poland was the birthplace of most of us. The ship was once the finest in our navy. Now it is the last survivor of the fleet. We have become what you might call ‘privateers’. It is how we survive during the apocalypse.” His eyes held a hint of sardonic pride. “I think we are rather good at it—though the prey becomes scarce. We had our eye on your ship for a while, but it did not seem worth the waste of a torpedo. You might be glad to know that the ship which attacked you was called the
Mannanan
and that she belonged to the Irish navy.”

“
Irish
?” I was surprised. Home Rule, then, was a fact in this world.

“We could not stop to pick you up right away, but decided that you would have to take your chances. The
Mannanan
was a well-equipped ship and we were able to wound her and force her to the surface quite easily. She was a ‘fine prize’, as the buccaneers would say!” He laughed. “We were able to take stores aboard which will keep us going for three months. And spare parts.”

She had deserved whatever Captain Korzeniowski had done to her. Doubtless he had shown more mercy in his treatment of the
Mannanan
than she had shown to our poor, battered steamer. But I could not bring myself to voice these sentiments aloud and thus condone what had been, after all, a similar act of piracy on the part of the
Lola Montez.

“Well, Captain Bastable,” said Korzeniowski, lighting a thick cheroot and signaling for me to help myself from his humidor, “what do you want us to do with you? It’s normally our habit to put survivors off at the nearest land and let them take their chances. But yours is something of a special case. We’re making for the Outer Hebrides, where we have a station. Is there anywhere between here and there that we can put you off? Not that there is anywhere particularly habitable on land, these days.”

I told him how I planned to try to reach England and that if there was any chance of being put off on the South Coast I would more than welcome it. He raised his eyebrows at this.

“If you had said Scotland I might have understood—but the South Coast! Having been the agent of your escape from death, I am not sure I could justify to my conscience my becoming the instrument of your destruction! Have you not heard? Have you any idea of the hell which Southern England has become?”

“I gather that London sustained some very heavy bombing...”

Evidently Korzeniowski could not restrain a bleak smile at this. “I have always appreciated British understatement,” he told me. “What else have you gathered?”

“That there is a risk of catching disease—typhus, cholera, and so on.”

“And so on, yes. Do you know what
kind
of bombs the air fleets were dropping towards the end, Captain Bastable?”

“Pretty powerful ones, I should imagine.”

“Oh, extremely. But they were not explosive—they were bacteria. The bombs contained different varieties of plague, captain. They had a lot of scientific names, but they soon became known by their nicknames. Have you seen, for instance, the effects of the Devil’s Mushroom?”

“I haven’t heard of it.”

“It is called by that name after the fungus which begins to form on the surface of the flesh less than two hours after the germs have infected the victim. Scrape off the fungus and the flesh comes away with it. In two days you look like one of those rotten trees you might have seen in a forest sometimes, but happily by that time you are quite dead and you have no pain at all. Then there’s Prussian Emma, which causes haemorrhaging from all orifices
—that
death is singularly painful, I’m told. And there’s Eye Rot, Red Blotch, Brighton Blight. Quaint names, aren’t they? As colourful as the manifestations of the diseases on the skin. Aside from the diseases, there are roving gangs of cut-throats warring on one another and killing any other human being they find (not always prettily). From time to time you might set foot on a gas bomb which is triggered as you step on it and blows a poison gas up into your face. If you escape those dangers, there are a dozen more. Believe me, Captain Bastable, the only clean life now—the only life for a man—is on the high seas (or under them). It is to the sea that many of us have returned, living out our lives by preying upon one another, admittedly. But it is an existence infinitely preferable to the terrors and degradations of the land. And one still has a certain amount of freedom, is still somewhat in control of one’s own fate. Dry land is what the medieval painters imagined Hell to be. Give me the purgatory of the sea!”

“I am sure I would agree with you,” I told him, “but I would still see it for myself.”

Korzeniowski shrugged. “Very well. We’ll put you off at Dover, if you like. But if you should change your mind, I could use a trained officer, albeit an army officer, aboard this vessel. You could serve with me.”

This was indeed a case of history repeating itself (or was it prefiguring itself?). Korzeniowski did not know it, but I had already served with him—and not in the army either, but in airships. It would be second nature for me to sail with him now. But I thanked him and told him that my mind was made up.

“Nonetheless,” he said, “I’ll leave the berth open to you for a bit. You never know.”

A
few days later I was put ashore on a beach just below the familiar white cliffs of Dover and waved goodbye to the
Lola Montez
as she sank below the surface of the waves and was gone. Then I shouldered my knapsack of provisions, took a firm grip on the fast-firing carbine I had been given, and turned my steps inland, towards London.

I
f I had considered Korzeniowski’s description of post-war England to be fanciful, I soon had cause to realize that he had probably restrained himself when painting a picture of the conditions to be found there. Plague was, indeed, widespread, and its victims were to be seen everywhere. But the worst of the plagues were over, largely because most of the population remaining had been killed off by them and those who survived were resistant to most of the strains—or had somehow recovered from them. Those who
had
recovered were sometimes missing a limb, or a nose, or an eye, while others had had parts of their faces or bodies eaten away altogether. I observed several bands of these poor, half-rotted creatures, in the ruins of Dover and Canterbury, as I made my way cautiously towards London.

The inhabitants of the Home Counties had descended from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism in a few short years. The remains of the fine towns, the clean, broad highways, the monorail systems, the light, airy architecture of the world O’Bean had created, were still there to speak of the beauty that had come and gone so swiftly, but now bands of beast-men camped in them, tore them down to make crude weapons and primitive shelters, hunted each other to death among them. No woman was safe and, among certain of the ‘tribes’ roving the ruins, children were regarded as particularly excellent eating! Former bank managers, members of the stock exchange, respectable tradesmen, had come to regard vermin as delicacies and were prepared to tear a man’s jugular from his throat with their teeth if it would gain them the possession of a dead cat. Few modern weapons were in evidence (the production of rifles and pistols had been on the decline since the invention of airships and subaquatic boats), but rudely made spears, bows and arrows, knives and pikes could be found in almost every hand. By day I lay hidden wherever there was good cover, watching the savages go by, and I traveled at night, risking ambush, since I regarded my chances as being better at night when most of the ‘tribesmen’ returned to their camps. The country had not only sustained the most horrifying mass aerial bombardment, but had also (in this area in particular) received huge punishment from long-range guns firing from across the Channel. Twice the Home Counties had been invaded by forces coming from sea and air, and these had ravaged what remained, taking the last of the food, blowing up those buildings which still stood, before being driven back by the vestiges of our army. At night the hills of Kent and Surrey sparkled with points of light indicating the locations of semi-nomadic camps where huge fires burned day and night. The fires were not merely there for cooking and heating, but to burn the regular supply of plague-created corpses.

And so my luck held until I reached the outskirts of East Grinstead, once a pretty little village which I had known well as a boy, but now a wasteland of blasted vegetation and torn masonry. As usual I inspected the place from cover, noting the presence of what seemed to be a crudely made stockade of tree-trunks near the northernmost end of the village. From this armed men came and went regularly, and I was surprised to see that many of them carried rifles and shotguns and were dressed in rather more adequate rags than the people I had seen to date. The community itself seemed to be a larger one than the others, and better organized, settled in one place rather than roaming about a small area of countryside. I heard the distinctive sounds of cattle, sheep and goats and surmised that a few of these animals had survived and were being kept for safety inside the stockade. Here was ‘civilization’ indeed! I considered the possibility of making my presence known and seeking aid from the inhabitants, who might be expected to behave in a somewhat less aggressive manner than the people I had observed up to now. But, warily, I continued to keep watch on the settlement and see what information I could gather before I revealed myself.

It was a couple of hours later that I had reason to congratulate myself on my caution. I had hidden in a small brick building which had somehow survived the bombing. It had been used, I think, as a woodstore and was barely large enough to admit me. A grille, designed for ventilation, was the means by which I could look out at the stockade without being seen. Three men, dressed in a miscellaneous selection of clothing which included a black bowler hat, a deerstalker and a panama, a woman’s fur cape, golfing trousers, a leather shooting-coat, a tailcoat and an opera cloak, were escorting a prisoner back along the path to the gate. The prisoner was a young woman, tall and dressed in a long black military topcoat which had evidently been tailored for her. She had a black divided skirt and black riding-boots and there was no question in my mind that she, like me, was some sort of interloper. They were treating her roughly, pushing her so that she fell over twice and struggled to her feet only with the greatest difficulty (her hands were tied behind her back). There was something familiar about her bearing, but it was only when she turned her head to speak to one of her captors (evidently speaking with the greatest contempt, for the man struck her in the mouth by way of reply) that I recognized her. It was Mrs. Persson, the revolutionist whom I had first met on Captain Korzeniowski’s airship,
The Rover
, and whom I understood to be Korzeniowski’s daughter. That could not be true now, for this woman was approximately the same age as Korzeniowski. I had had enough of speculating about the mysteries and paradoxes of Time—they were beginning to become familiar to me and I was learning to accept them as one might accept the ordinary facts of human existence, without question. Now I merely saw Una Persson as a woman who was in danger and who must therefore be rescued. I had my carbine and several magazines of ammunition and I had the advantage that none of the inhabitants of the stockade was aware of my presence. I waited for nightfall and then crept out of my hiding-place, thanking Providence that the full moon was hidden behind thick cloud.