The Sterkarm Handshake (38 page)

“Oh certainly,” Windsor said. “Oh yes.” Dirty hands held his upper arms in bruising grips, and he was surrounded by a fug of sweat and onions. He could hear the blood thump in his ears, and the beat of his heart was shuddering through him, he hardly knew whether with anger or with fear. “Promise him anything you like. Pile cream. Corn plasters.”

“What about this man, this injured man?” Bryce called.

Andrea spoke with Toorkild again, briefly. “They'll take care of him if you give up. They won't hurt any of you if you give up, I can promise you that. Well, no more of you. They aren't a cruel people.” The man on the floor of the basement below her writhed as she spoke. “I mean, they're not sadistic.” I'm babbling, she thought. “I mean, they won't beat you up just for kicks or anything like that. Please—give up and do just as they say. Don't let's have anyone else hurt, please.”

“We give in!” Windsor said. “For God's sake, we give in!”

“What's going to happen,” Andrea said, “is, they're going to open the door. One or two of you will go out into the yard. They'll disarm you. I promise you it'll be all right if you don't fight.” She put a hand to her head, thinking: I was telling someone else not to fight. Who?

Bryce sighed and lowered his head. Whatever was promised, there was no knowing that the Sterkarms wouldn't murder them in ones and twos as they went out into the yard. “I'll go first,” he said.

It was a slow business. Toorkild shouted orders from the window, and the door of the tower was opened a little. Against the light was a shaggy-haired black shape. “
Kom!
” Bryce raised his head, straightened his shoulders and walked out. The other 21st men hung back.

Sweet Milk, stooping over the open trap, pointed at the men nearest the door. “
Ut!
” The two nearest ducked out through the door, and it was slammed shut.

Bryce and the other two, out in the bright light of the yard, were surrounded by people, many of them women, who grabbed at them, shrieking, and pulled them, shoved them, dragged them off their feet into the mud. It was terrifying. Bryce's heart pounded and his body shook. It was the sheer malice of the women that was so frightening, their twisted faces, their shrill voices, and the certainty that they saw no value in
him
but only in his clothes. His jacket was dragged off, revealing the grenades on his belt and the pistol in its shoulder holster. Then men moved in, shouldering the women aside. They held Bryce down in the mud and took off his belt and holster, while the women tugged off his boots.

When both his boots were off, everything went still around him. The Sterkarms had lost interest. Bryce sat up in the mud, moving slowly so he wouldn't alarm anyone. The other 21st men were near him. Both had lost their boots and jackets. One had lost his shirt as well. Their clothing and their boots were now being bundled up in the arms of different women.

A Sterkarm man stooped over Bryce, took his arm above the elbow and dragged at him to let him know he should get up. Another man stood by with a long knife in his hand. Bryce got up.

He and the other 21st men were taken along a narrow alley, paddling through the mud and muck in their stocking feet. The turns and twists of the alleys among the crowded buildings were confusing, and when they stopped, there seemed no reason why they'd stopped at this building rather than another. They all looked much alike. A ladder led to the door in the upper story, and Bryce and his companions were made to climb it.

Other Sterkarms were waiting to receive them at the top, and they were brought into a long, dim room, smelling of wood and thatch. A trapdoor was opened in the floor, and they were made to climb down another ladder, into the building's cold, dark, stone-built lower floor. There were no doors or windows down there. The ladder was pulled up, the trapdoor slammed down, and the bolt shot across. The darkness, except for a few cracks of light reaching them between the floorboards, was complete.

They waited a long time in the dark. Bryce felt his flesh turning to stone in the cold. He couldn't see the others, and was ashamed to speak to them. They must be blaming him. He upbraided himself, screaming at himself inside his head. He should have ignored Windsor, should have insisted. What was the point of keeping your job 21st side if you were killed on the 16th?

The trapdoor above was opened again, the ladder lowered and three more half-naked men clambered down it. They shuffled about in the dark for a while and then found a place to sit on the floor of hard-packed earth. None of them had anything to say.

Gobby Per was in charge of the tower yard and had been considering the problem of the Elves guarding the Land Rovers. They were still unsuspecting—the uproar in the tower had been muffled by its thick stone walls. But there were ten of them, and they were armed with Elf-Pistols. Gobby had no time for pistols himself: They were cumbersome, slow and unreliable. A bowman could shoot countless arrows while a pistol was being loaded for one shot. But Little Per had said that Elf-Pistols were different, and sheep-brained though the boy too often was, he did have some sense.

Gobby sent men with bows, to be let down from the tower wall out of sight of the Elves. They made their way quietly around the tower, keeping out of sight below the hill's ridge. Other archers went up on the tower's wall.

A sudden shower of arrows fell on the Elves, some from above, some from the side.

It seemed the arrows came from nowhere, sudden flickers of darkness, whacking into the ground around the Elves, hitting the Land Rover, sinking deep into flesh. Some Elves were hit at once—others, not realizing they were beset with arrows, turned, looked up. Arrows hit them in the face. Down they went, without firing a shot. Others tugged at the arrows in their bodies, found they were barbed, and forgot their guns. Some fumbled at the unfamiliar weapons and couldn't make them fire. One Elf shot two Elves beside him.

A couple of the pistols were fired, with long bursts of terrifying noise that had the Sterkarms ducking below their wall and covering their ears. Stone chips flew. When the noise stopped, the archers bobbed up again.

When it seemed that all the Elves were disabled, Gobby himself led out five men with spears, to finish them off. The archers came out of cover too, drawing knives.

One of the Elves heaved himself up, and again there was that deafening, terrible noise that set the sheep and horses running in the valley below. One of the archers went flying backward. Gobby and his men took cover behind the Elf-Cart.

The noise of the Elf-Pistol stopped. Cautiously, the Sterkarms raised their heads or peered out from behind the cart. Not all the Elves were dead, but none of them seemed to be raising Elf-Pistols. Gobby and his men went forward, kicking the pistols out of the way and spearing the men. When they saw what the pistol had done to their archer, they chopped the Elves into pieces small.

The basement emptied slowly as the day passed. The men, filing out, passed by the wounded man, who had been moaning, trying to get up, falling back and crying out for hours now. Andrea had begged Toorkild to do something for him, and Toorkild had said, “In a while,” “When we can” and, finally, “Gan where it can no be heard if tha can no stand it.”

She'd gone over to the big stone fireplace and, leaning in its corner, she cried, over so many things and for so many people, she wasn't sure, from minute to minute, who she was crying for.

Windsor shouted, “For God's sake, can't you do anything for him?”

When the basement was empty except for the wounded man, the door of the hall was opened and Windsor was hustled down the steps, past the sobbing man, and out into the gray light of a damp, chill afternoon. His escort dragged him straight past the excited women—Windsor's boots, jacket, swagger stick and watch had already been taken from him in the tower.

Now only the wounded Elf lay in the tower's basement. Sweet Milk went down the tower stairs from the hall, drawing his dagger as he went. In the basement, a long stripe of light entered from the open door, showing the straw and dung. The wounded Elf lay in shadow, behind the door. Sweet Milk crouched over him and cut his throat.

As Sweet Milk straightened, with blood on his hands, Toorkild came down the stairs, laughing and clapping Joe on the back. Sweet Milk couldn't laugh.

Windsor was shoved to the ladder, and shaken and prodded until he preferred to climb down it into the darkness below rather than be pushed down. As he went down, the chill of the stone building closed around him. His feet touched a damp, cold floor, and the ladder was tugged from his hands and pulled up, out of sight. The trapdoor was clapped down. The sound boomed dully between the stone walls.

Windsor stood still, listening to the blood thump in his ears and feeling the beat of his heart shudder through him. Gradually, the worst of the fear began to fade, and anger began to rise.

He saw, clearly, that nothing could be done with the 16th Project while those savages remained in possession. There was no reasoning with them. Offer them all the benefits of the twenty-first century, and because they were too ignorant to appreciate them, they flung them back in your teeth and spat in your face too.

Wipe them out, the lot of them.

I'll kill them myself, he thought. With my own bare hands. He could do it. Any monkey could kill. Look at the monkeys that did.

Aloud, he said to the men huddled around him in the dark, “Well? How are we going to get out of here?”

19

16th Side: Making Promises

The Sterkarms were triumphant. They had, they thought, taken on the Elves and beaten them again, and they were all, men, women and children, flown with their own magnificence. Their glee had been quite unashamed and, for Andrea, unsettling. She'd half expected to be locked up again, but her earlier treachery seemed forgotten. Toorkild had hugged her and called her “Bonny lass!” Sweet Milk and Sim had kissed her. She'd felt as she imagined a Christian might have, if caught up in a self-congratulatory Roman crowd while the lions were still hungry.

She'd gone looking for Joe. In the yard outside the tower there had been dancing, laughing women waving the 21st boots and clothes they'd taken from the prisoners. Some of the clothing was heavily stained. Bloodstained. It had been her first clue to the fate of the 21st men guarding the Land Rovers.

From outside the tower walls had come a loud, alarming, percussive noise that had made her heart beat though she hadn't recognized it. Only when she went out through the gate did she realize that it was rifle fire. Even at a distance the noise was far worse, far more violent to the ear, than anything she'd heard on television or film.

The rifles were being fired by Sterkarms—mostly men, but one or two women. They were standing on the ridge of the hill, firing out over the valley. Joe had been among them, showing them how. The Sterkarms were thrilled to be handling Elf-Weapons of such power, noise and destruction. They fired into the air, they shot at rocks, sending bullets ricocheting and chips flying.

Andrea had been appalled—if no one had been hurt so far, it was only a matter of time before someone was. She'd begged the men to put the rifles down, but they were too excited to take any notice. Why should they listen to her? She was only an Elf, and they'd beaten the Elves.

She'd shouted at Joe, “Why did you start this?”

“They asked me!” he shouted back. “I thought it'd be better if I showed 'em how to do it instead of just letting 'em fool around; I didn't expect everybody and his dog to join in!” Some of the rifles ran out of ammunition, but the Sterkarms fetched others from the Land Rovers and started again. Seeing Toorkild coming out of the tower gate, Andrea had run over to him and asked him to stop his men playing with the rifles, but he said, “Away, woman!” and waved her off. “I've other matters to think on.” What matters, he didn't say.

It had been Per who'd stopped it. He'd been climbing the steep path to the tower with his cousins, leading their horses, when a burst of fire had startled the animals, setting the horses rearing and the dogs jumping and howling. When the rifle fire paused for a moment, Per had yelled, “Stop that!” Most of the fire had stopped. Some of the men had even gone down to help with the horses.

Per had reached the hilltop at a run, having left his horse behind. He came among the Sterkarm men, most of them older than him, and had roundly slapped the faces of the first three he'd reached. What business had they with the Elf-­Pistols? Did they know nothing about horses? Were those sheep's heads on their shoulders? Pointing to the ground at his feet, he'd demanded that all the pistols be laid down there, now!

Some of the men brought their rifles and laid them down immediately, but a handful of them hung back. One of them said, “A pup yapping when old hound be quiet!” And then he'd grinned at the other men.

Per had darted at him, dragged the pistol from his hands, and thrown it down with a clatter. He'd shoved the man in the chest and tripped him, sending him sprawling on the hard, rocky ground. Standing over the man, and looking around at the others, Per had said, “You God-damned, back-jumping, horn-brained, dead-eyed cod's heads!”

The fallen man, plainly furious, had twisted to his knees before he saw that Wat and Ingram had come up behind Per, neither of them in good temper. All the other rifles had been brought and laid on the pile, and one of the men helped up the one Per had knocked down and hustled him away, telling him to calm down. Per had said to them all, “You rut-minded, gutless runts! You should all be bent over tables this night and whipped!”

Andrea had been startled. She'd never seen Per so angry, and couldn't help feeling a little impressed. She'd looked at Joe and had seen by his expression that he was also taken aback. He'd scuttled over to the heap of rifles and started putting the safety catches on, trying to look as if he'd had nothing to do with shooting the bullets off.

While Per had been organizing the carrying of the rifles to a storeroom, he'd seen Andrea and had eyed her, obviously wondering whether an approach would be snubbed. The possibility had been too much for his pride; instead, seeing his father and uncle come from the tower's gate, he'd run down to meet them, followed by his cousins. “We shot 'em all, Daddy! All three!”

Toorkild had opened his arms to him, hugged him and lifted him off his feet. Andrea, coming up, had heard an excited account of the killing of three men, and had watched Toorkild and Gobby proudly kissing and petting their sons as they listened. The cousins had competed vociferously to claim their share in the murders, and Andrea had been quite unable to convince herself that Per had somehow been a bystander, going along for the adventure but holding back from any unpleasantness. The best she'd been able to do had been to remind herself that the Sterkarms had been defending their land against invasion—and she would have found that an excellent excuse if the people they'd killed hadn't been
her
people. And if the stains on Per's clothes hadn't been, quite clearly, blood.

Soon after that, the Land Rovers had been wrecked. Their hubcaps had been taken off, their mirrors wrenched off and seats torn out, their windshields smashed. Someone had accidentally released the handbrake on one, and it had gone careening off down the hillside, the gathering rumble shaking the ground beneath their feet. The uneven ground had sent the Land Rover shooting into the air, and it had crashed down onto its wheels several yards lower down, with an impact that made Andrea cringe almost to the ground. When she'd looked up, it had been to see the Land Rover run into an outcrop of grayish-reddish rock and rear up over it. A crunching, grinding, ripping sound of buckling metal had carried back to them as the Land Rover's underside was torn away.

The Land Rover exploded. Andrea had seen it happen often on film but had never heard such a shattering noise in reality before. She thought her eardrums had been burst as the whole world became muffled in the aftermath—the noise was even louder than the rifle fire. The force of the explosion had shoved at her, and the heat of it touched her. Bits of metal, dirt and rock had pattered down around them. Orange flames had leaped up from the Land Rover, and black smoke spread from it. The first pollution, she thought, that FUP had succeeded in bringing 16th side.

From the Sterkarms there had been a long silence, then wild cheers and screams. The second Land Rover had soon followed the first—it hadn't taken them long to work out how to take the brake off deliberately. They cheered and danced as it went down the slope, tilting and tilting at such an angle that, despite its wide wheel-base, it tipped over on its side. There had been disappointment all around when it failed to explode.

But there's nothing like an exploding Land Rover to set the mood for a party. Isobel had promised to set a feast on the tables, and there'd been more cheering and dancing. People had run off to find fiddles and pipes, and such finery as they possessed. Isobel looked around for Andrea, and beckoned to her. “Tha must learn,” Isobel said, “what be in store and where to find it. No better time to start than now.”

Andrea had gone with her, not knowing how to refuse, but the words had sent a dart of fright through her. Why should she have to learn what was in store, and why now? Because the Elves were beaten, the Elf-Gate closed, and she wasn't going home.

Now, in the hall, the din rang from wall to wall as people shouted, laughed, sang. At least three different groups were singing “Come, Who Dares Meddle with Me!”

It was a special occasion, and so Isobel was waiting on the tables herself, serving bread and ale. Andrea had elected to help. It kept her away from Per. She wasn't sure this was a good idea. Under the circumstances, she should probably be doing all she could to get back in Per's favor. If her past experience was anything to go on, it wouldn't be difficult—except that it would, because she'd have to pretend to forget all the dead 21st men and her own predicament. She'd have to try and pretend, all over again, that Per was a lover and a loving son, and not a killer, raised to cut throats at his mammy's knee.

A man raised his cup to her. She filled it from her jug and raised her eyes to find him smirking at her. What he was thinking was as plain as if he'd spoken: She was one of the defeated. A captive, as good as. She turned her head and looked the length of the hall, to where Per was, and the man quickly, guiltily, looked in the same direction.

Per and his cousins were defending the family table from the main hall with scuffles and thrown bread and bones. A crust hit Per, and he was jeered at because he was looking at Andrea instead of paying attention. She looked away quickly, pretending that she hadn't really been looking for him at all.

Per saw her turn away. She was still in a bad temper with him, then. If he tried to go to her, she would call him a sheep's head and a sheep's son again, in front of everyone.

He withdrew from the defense of the table and leaned against the wall behind his father's chair, watching Andrea. If she looked around again and saw him like that, she might feel sorry for him.

Would she have been happier if the Elves had won, and he'd been killed? Or if they'd lain down in the mud and let the Elves use them as stepping-stones on their way to take Sterkarm land? Maybe she would. There was no telling with Elves.

I stand outside my sweetheart's bower door,

Where I've stood many times before,

But I can't enter nor yet win in

To that pleasant bed that she lies in.

After having killed the Elves on the hillside, he didn't want to spend the dark hours alone. Company he could always find: Ecky, Hob, Sim … He didn't want to listen to them braying and laughing. He wanted to be cuddled up with Andrea, in her bed. And he wanted her to want him there. Vaylan stole his Elf-May's swanskin and made her his wife by capture, but she flew away and left him as soon as her chance came.

He made up his mind that he would stop shillyshallying, go across to Andrea and speak to her. Straightening, he pushed himself away from the wall—and then leaned on it again and slid down it until he was sitting on the floor. Cuddy, lying under the table, saw him and her tail wagged. There was one bitch who loved him!

Andrea moved to a table where most of the men were from Gobby's household. As she leaned over the shoulder of one to fill his cup, their conversation faltered, and one said, “Shut it. She no wants to hear.”

She glanced around at the men. Their faces weren't friendly, though a couple held out their cups. She held her jug back. “What do I no want to hear?” They looked at each other, and no one answered. She turned away. “No ale for you then.”

Behind her, one of the men said, “Elves should be trod down in water.”

She turned to face them, as others at the table nodded and agreed. Some looked away from her, others stared her in the face.

“They trod Grannams down just for cutting May. Elven
killed
Luggy.”

Andrea moved away, leaving them to be served by Isobel. Looking back, she saw them still talking. Three of them rose, moved to the next table and stooped to talk to the men there. As she poured ale on the other side of the hall, she saw those three and several others pushing their way down the hall to the family table. They leaned across the board, speaking to Toorkild and Gobby.

Toorkild stood up and called his nephews over to him. Strangely, Per didn't seem to be there—but then he rose up from behind his father's chair, with Cuddy leaping up to rest her paws on his shoulders. All of them began to talk with the men of Gobby's household.

It wasn't hard to guess what they were talking about. Andrea stood amidst the noise, holding the jug and watching everyone near the family table being drawn into the argument. She felt queasy. She hadn't lived so long with the Sterkarms without learning how they felt about justice. They expected a life for a life. Or, in exchange for a Sterkarm life, many lives.

They were talking about taking Windsor, and Bryce, and the other 21st men—who all had families, wives, children—and treading them down in Bedes Water.

Locked in the storeroom, the 21st men pressed close against each other's sides, arms around each other, trying to keep warm. They breathed each other's breath, listened to each other sigh and snuffle, and were silenced by embarrassment. Close as they were, it was so dark that they could only glimpse an occasional movement of a head.

Hours before, they'd heard rifle fire from outside, and an explosion, muffled to a rattle and a
ker-ump
by the stone walls around them. A rescue party? No rescue had come.

It hadn't taken long to establish that the only way out was up. The walls were of stone, and the floor, though only of earth, was hard packed and they had nothing to dig with. A search, scrambling around on hands and knees in the dark, banging heads and bruising knees, had made certain of that. There was nothing on the floor but straw, and nothing hung on the walls.

But above their heads were wooden floorboards, either nailed or pegged into place. They could reach up and touch them, usually dislodging a shower of dust. Sterkarm guards were above too. They could hear them walking about and talking. Long before the prisoners could succeed in forcing a floorboard out of place, the guards would raise the alarm.