The Sterkarm Handshake (48 page)

He reached the car, out of breath, and leaned on the hood. A policeman wound down his window and looked out at him.

Glancing over his shoulder, Joe could see one edge of the parking lot and Sterkarms running about on foot, with pikes, and a couple of horsemen carrying lances. “Reenactment,” Joe said. “Historical society. Battle of. Battle of Dilsmead Hall!”

Joe backed off as the policeman opened the door and got out. “We had a report—”

“It's all an act!” Joe said. “A family day out.”

The driver had got out too. “In the week?”

“Rehearsal!”

From the parking lot came an ear-thumping crack. The policemen looked at each other across the car. “Gun!”

“Blanks!” Joe said, while wondering who had been shot.

“That was real!”

The driver was speaking into his radio. “—need assistance. Gunfire. Urgent assistance.”

Joe turned and ran back toward the parking lot. God help us! he thought. Any minute now, up the drive, fast-response units with rifles in the boot and marksmen at the wheel. And who'd been shot?

Windsor lay sprawled across the car's front seats, toppled by the gun's recoil. It had thrown his arms upward and punched his hands into the roof of the car, crunching and bruising his fingers. The noise had been so loud, he felt he'd been kicked in the head and then had both ears stuffed with cotton. Christ! Guns in films never sounded like
that
. Where the bullet went he had no idea. But the gun worked.

Windsor hauled himself upright again. The car alarm was still whooping, the police sirens were bawling, and through all the din people could be heard shouting. Windsor aimed the gun through the broken windshield. He had to keep the Sterkarms off until the police could reach him. This time he'd be ready for the stiffness of the gun's trigger, its powerful recoil, its noise. He pulled the trigger a second time.

As he ran, waving his axe, Joe was desperately trying to think of the Sterkarm words he needed. Even if he could think of them, he didn't know if he had breath to speak them. He ran between two parked cars and then along the open aisle toward the black Mercedes where the horses shied and wheeled.

Stopping, he looked back over his shoulder and, seeing no policemen, heaved for breath.
“Gaw!”
he yelled, and made shooing movements in the direction of the Elf-Gate.
“Backa!”

There was another report, so loud that he tried to cover his ears with his hands despite holding the axe.

In front of the Mercedes, a mounted man toppled from his saddle. The horse went racing away, back toward the Hall.

Joe started running again.
“Gaw! Erlf-Yett! Gaw!”

Per's ears were deaf from the gunshot. In ringing silence, he saw his father keel from the saddle, saw his body thump heavily into the gravel—and then the horse raced away and Toorkild was dragged behind, his foot trapped in the stirrup.

In Per's mind there was a collapse, a crash as if the tower had fallen. He watched as the stirrup broke and Toorkild's body lay still while the horse sped away. Per's next breath shook him, and he took a couple of running steps toward Toorkild before stopping, afraid to go nearer.

Per turned, moving without thought or plan, a stillness of fury in his mind. He drove the lance through the Mercedes' broken windshield and into Windsor.

Windsor felt he'd been slammed in the belly with a cricket bat. He looked down and saw the lance shaft, as thick around as a woman's wrist, leaving his belly. He said, “No!” He refused to believe it. His shirt was turning red. He could see the wood grain in the shaft. He could see it resting on the steering wheel and angling up through the broken windshield. “No,” he said. His right arm rested on the steering wheel's other edge, and the hand was loosely clasped around the heavy gun, though his fingers were beginning to open and let it go.

Per swam across the smooth hood of the Elf-Cart, scattering pieces of broken glass. He reached in through the window, leaning against the lance as he did so, and moving it. Windsor cried out. He tried to lift the heavy gun, but Per caught hold of it and wrenched it from his fingers. He struck Windsor across the face with it once and then threw the pistol away, onto the gravel beside the car. Pistols were clumsy and unreliable, and he wanted no part of the ill-starred weapon that had shot his father.

Windsor lay slumped in his seat, his head on one shoulder, bleeding from the nose and mouth. Per, on the hood of the car, swiveled on his hip, sat up and got to his feet, the metal of the hood denting under his weight. He was startled when Joe suddenly appeared, yelling, beside the car, and he clutched at the lance shaft for support. “Chyo,” Per said. “Give me thine axe—give it me! I'll take his head.”

Joe threw his axe onto the path in front of the car. Per, standing on the hood of the car, turned in surprise and stared at it, and wasn't prepared when Joe reached up, grabbed his wrist and yanked him from on top of the car. Per landed, staggering, and only just kept his feet.

Joe looked back toward the front of the Hall as the din of sirens increased. The assistance the policeman had called for was arriving.

Joe caught Per by the arms, spun him around, pushed him forward. In front of him, Per saw his father. Toorkild was looking knocked-about and shaken. He leaned against the flank of Sweet Milk's horse, one hand pressed to his own ribs. A jakke made a good bulletproof vest.

Per ran to his father, slowing only to avoid frightening the horse. “Daddy—thine knife! Give—”

“Mount up.” Toorkild's voice was thin and wheezing. He hunched as he spoke.

“Daddy—”

“Mount up!”

Wat, in the saddle, held a riderless horse by the reins. Per, instead of mounting it, stood beside it and cupped his hands. Toorkild, moving awkwardly, set his foot in his son's hands, and Per threw him up on to the horse's back. When Toorkild was settled in the saddle, Per stood at his knee, looking up.

Toorkild gritted his teeth against the pain of his bruised and possibly cracked ribs, and looked down at his son's bruised, scared face. Putting his big, heavy hand on Per's head, Toorkild turned his son's face against his own knee, then rapped Per's skull with his hard finger ends. “Mount. Now.”

One of the footmen brought up the horse Toorkild had been riding. It was still skittish, and shifted and shied as Per tried to mount.

Joe, hopping from one foot to the other, had been staring over the roofs of the cars at the corner of the Hall. He saw policemen appear, one carrying something long. A rifle?

But the horses were moving, their hooves thumping, the muscles shifting under their shaggy coats. The footmen ran with them, often clutching at the horses' stirrups and going in great bounds.

Joe made to run after them, then turned back toward Windsor. He was a Sterkarm now, there was no going back on that, but … The man in the car was a man. And he had a lance stuck in him.

The policemen were coming between the cars on the other side of the parking lot as Joe, already wincing from what he might see, peered in through the broken windshield. He saw a shirtfront soaked in blood and looked away, looked at the policemen again. One of them shouted, “Hey, you!”

Joe knew he should run—but wondered whether he should try and pull the lance out of Windsor. Would it be good for him, or do him more harm?

“Chyo!”

Joe turned his head so fast he hurt his neck. Per was riding toward him, was coming back to him.

“Go!” Joe said. “Get away!”

Per reined in beside Joe and, looking at the policemen, offered Joe his hand.
“Opp!”

“I can't get up there! I can't ride! Go!”

“Chyo! Opp!”
Per took his foot from the nearer stirrup, so Joe could use it.

Per obviously wasn't going to go without him. The policemen were still yelling at them from the other side of the parking lot. No time, no choice. He set his foot in the stirrup, grasped Per's hand in one of his and the back of the saddle in the other. He tried to heave himself up, and Per pulled, but Joe's already tired leg ached under his weight; he gasped for breath and dropped back to the ground. The horse shifted, and he hopped after it, still clinging to the saddle and Per's hand. Sweat ran into his eyes, and he felt as foolish as he did scared.

“Stand still or we'll fire!”

“Hoppa, Chyo. Opp, opp! Hoppa!”

He was hopping. The horse kept moving and he had to hop, with fresh sweat breaking out under his arms and across his back.

“Hoppa, Chyo!”
Sense broke through. He had to listen like his grandad. Per was urging him not to hop, but to jump, as the older Sterkarms did when mounting, giving three little jumps before hauling themselves up. Joe gritted his teeth, took a fiercer hold on Per's hand and saddlebow, gave three little jumps and then pushed with his leg and heaved with his shoulder, gritting his teeth harder still. Just when he thought the muscles of his thigh would crack, and his arm come out of his shoulder, he found himself lifting up on a level with Per. Desperately, he swung his right leg over, and had no time to enjoy his triumph before the horse was moving, terrifyingly fast, and he was clinging to Per, his backside jolting against iron-hard bones, his inner thighs and bits being bruised against the high back of the saddle.

From behind them came the deafeningly loud crack of a firearm—but higher pitched than the sound Windsor's gun had made. The policemen were firing at them. Joe held his breath, thinking either he or Per, or the horse must have been hit. But Per laughed—he actually laughed, when Joe had never felt less like laughing—and the horse went on pounding along, the grass and redbrick going by in a blur. How much did it hurt, to fall off a horse? Joe wondered. As he was jolted again and again on the horse's hard bones, and the hard saddle, he thought it couldn't possibly hurt more than riding one.

Ingram had turned his horse back to look for them, and he fell in behind them, guarding their backs. They turned the corner of the Hall, and there was the Elf-Gate, with a knot of Sterkarms, on horse and on foot, gathered before it.

“Entraya!” Per called out, and kissed his hand, and there was Andrea, on foot alongside them, trying to stay with them as they joined the other horses.

Per, still breathlessly laughing, reined in. Wat turned his horse toward them.

“Erlf-Yett air lukket.”

Joe thankfully slid down over the horse's backside—and then had to hop and jump away as it kicked out at him. But he was glad to feel his feet smack the ground. Then, belatedly, he understood Wat—or thought he did, while hoping he was wrong. The Elf-Gate was locked?

28

21st Side: “I Have No Wings”

Gobby wrapped the fingers of his big right hand about Andrea's arm and wouldn't let go. He dragged her about with him as he posted guards about the Tube's control room, and even if she could have thought of something to say, she didn't think she would have dared speak to him.

From the other side of the building, drifting over the rooftop, they heard the thumping hooves, the whoops and cries of the ride. There were other cries too, with a harsher edge—cries of fear. As Andrea listened, her hands clenched and she bit her lip, her imagination showing her atrocities and slaughters—showing her Per killing and being killed. It was miserable, not knowing for certain what was happening.

Small bands of Sterkarms returned on foot, bringing with them curtains, cushions, framed pictures, small coffee tables, coats and umbrellas. One pushed along a large, wheeled office chair. All the booty was carried up the ramp to the mouth of the Tube. Some men, despite being told that the Gate was closed, ventured inside and found that the road led only to another platform above the lawn at the rear of the control room.

“Tell them to stay out of it,” Andrea begged Gobby. No one had been in the control room when the Tube had suddenly come home, so she suspected that it was running on a preset program. It might have been set to go traveling again in thirty minutes' time, or an hour—and what would happen if the Tube traveled while curious Sterkarms were poking about inside it? She had no idea. Would their very molecules be scrambled, reassembling them as parts of the cushions and coffeepots they carried? Or would they just vanish into the cracks between dimensions? She wouldn't have risked the life of a laboratory rat to find out.

Gobby said, “Quiet, woman!”

From the other side of the Hall came a wailing, a screaming. Gobby, alarmed, and with no idea of what the noise was, squeezed her arm painfully hard. Andrea, who did know what it was, was probably more alarmed. Police sirens. And blows and bangs, resounding on metal, and smashing glass. The Sterkarms recognized the explosions as gunfire before Andrea did. While she was still gaping in shock, they were jerking to attention, hefting their pikes, sickles, axes, even running a few steps toward the noise.

“Stand!” Gobby bellowed, his yell numbing Andrea's ears. The Sterkarms fell back into their places, their hands gripping their weapons, glowering at Gobby or staring in the direction of the gunfire.

And then the ride returned, a hurly-burly of racing horses and stamping hooves, of lances and yells and running men. There was Toorkild, clutching at his own ribs, and leaning far forward in his saddle, with Sweet Milk riding close beside him on one side, and his nephew Wat on the other. Gobby let go of Andrea's arm to go forward and help his brother from the saddle.

Andrea, clutching at her bruised arm, looked for Per and couldn't see him. She tried to make her way through the gathering Sterkarms, now being shoulder charged and nearly knocked down by a man on foot—“Watch thysen, Honey!”—and now almost stumbling under the hooves of a horse.

She reached the edge of the crowd and saw, just at the corner of the Hall, a horse being turned in the center of the broad gravel path, its rider looking back. For a moment she thought the rider was Per—it looked like him—and then she saw that it was the youngest of Per's cousins, Ingram.

Another horse and rider appeared, pelting for the Gate, and Ingram fell in with it. Per was the rider of the second horse, and someone was clinging to his waist and jolting about on the horse behind him. As the horses came nearer, she saw it was Joe.

Waving, she turned and ran alongside the horse, though they soon overtook her. Per saw her, laughed, and kissed his hand. Then they were past her, and Per was reining in beside Wat, and Joe was awkwardly sliding down over the horse's tail.

She saw Per drop down from his horse, but instead of looking for her, he pushed into the crowd of Sterkarms, his reins looped over his arm and his horse following him. When she found him, he had his arms around his father. “Winded,” Toorkild was saying, patting Per's chest. “Take more than a fall off hoss to finish me!”

“Per!” Andrea said, and was glad to see him turn to her, though for a moment she was shocked by his bruises, his closed eye and swollen nose and mouth. No one, seeing him then, would think of calling him “May.” She put her arms around him, and felt his arms tighten across her back. “Oh, thank—I thought tha'd been shot!”

Per laughed. “So thought we!”

Joe was behind Per. “Police,” he said to Andrea. “Fast-response units. Marksmen.”

“Oh God!” she said, and Per, still holding her, said,
“Vah?”

Joe said, “The Elf-Gate's
locked
?”

Andrea was looking toward the corners of the Hall, but couldn't see any sign of armed policemen. Perhaps they'd gone inside the building, to aim their high-powered rifles from windows overlooking the Sterkarms. Absently, she said, “It closed down.”

“Oh, great!” Joe said. “Just—” A whirring rapidly rose to a whine, grew shriller, rising to a scream. Everyone turned to look at the Gate.

Andrea leaned close to Per's ear and yelled against the noise, “When that light turns green …” She pointed to the warning lights near the Tube's entrance. The scream abruptly stopped as it passed beyond hearing, leaving her shouting in silence. “That light, there. When it turns green, gan! Gan through!” The lights changed. “Gan on! Quick! It be open now—gan!”

Gobby lifted his lance above his head, pointed and bellowed. The Sterkarms moved. Footmen scrambled up the ramp and into the Tube, shouldering pikes and lugging curtains between them. One man carried a coffee table over his helmet, clutching a table leg and a sickle in one hand. Horses were led up the ramp and into the Tube, and across the horses' backs were slung curtains and rugs and coats.

Toorkild trudged up the ramp slowly, one hand on his ribs. Joe was close behind him. Per, holding his horse's reins in one hand and Andrea's hand in the other, started up the ramp. “Wait!” Andrea said, and pulled back against his hand.

Per looked around and stopped. Other people, on foot or mounted, some leading horses, passed them by. “Entraya, we must gan.”

Looking over her shoulder, Andrea saw a policeman look around the corner of the Hall and then quickly withdraw. The sight made her want to shove Per ahead of her up the ramp and hurry after him—but her heart seemed to be a weight of iron inside her, holding her back. “Nay. Nay. Wait.”

Ingram stood beside Per, waiting for him, and holding the reins of his own horse. Per handed him his reins too. “Gan. Grammie, gan.
Gan!
” Ingram led both horses up the ramp, and Per turned to face Andrea, taking both her hands, and trying to pull her along.

“Per, nay. I no ken … I can no …”

“Tha must!” Only a few Sterkarms were left at the foot of the ramp, and they were climbing it fast, passing them. From the top of the ramp, Gobby shouted, “Per!”

Andrea's mind was in a panic. She had so much to decide, and she had to decide immediately. She couldn't think in words, only in a whirl of images. The warmth and darkness of her bower, with Per in the bed beside her, his smell and touch and laugh, and the rain dripping from the thatch outside the shutters, was replaced by the picture of her mother and father sitting together in their little house, with the radiator keeping them warm and the television crooning to them, and if she went with Per, she might never see them again … But if she went with Per, she'd be the lady of the tower, and an Elf-May, with more power over the people around her, and more respect from them, than she could ever have 21st side, and she'd have Per … And, after all, if she went to work at the other end of the country, or in America, she wouldn't see her parents either …

Per dragged her a few steps farther up the ramp. They were nearly at the top, and there stood Gobby, glowering. Joining the Sterkarms again wouldn't be easy: Most of them must believe her a traitor, and not all of them would be willing to believe her account. Could she live among them, all alone? If they chose, when Per was absent, or when she and Per fell out, they could make her life miserable …

“Per! Kom!”

“Entraya! Be kind, be so kind—”

An explosion—a shot fired from a rifle—set their hearts banging, and they ran, hand in hand, up the ramp and into the Tube. But once inside, Andrea stopped and dragged Per to a halt too. “I can no!”

Gobby gripped Per's upper arm and dragged at him.
“Kom!”

Andrea tried, in the seconds that she had, to imagine living in her own twenty-first century again, without Per and without any hope of reaching him. She saw, in her mind, a bland, neat landscape, all pastel painted walls and smooth carpets. Warm, safe little boxes of brick and glass. All comfort and convenience, at least for her. Prepackaged food, and buses and trains and telephones. And how lonely and drab and dull it was going to be without Per, without his foxy smell and loud voice, without the comfort of his hugs and self-assurance and readiness to defend her. She ached as if her heart were being dragged out of her. If she took her hands from Per's and went back down the ramp to the 21st, it felt as if she would leave her heart with him. It was no poetic turn of speech: That was exactly how it felt.

She let him pull her another step or two into the Tube, and a flock of terrors flew from it into her face. Sickness without medicine, accidents without hospitals—Per killed in some skirmish and she left alone and five hundred years from home. “I can't! I can't!” She twisted her wrists, trying to break his hold, but his grip was strong. “Per, loose me!”

“Ssh! All be right. Little bird, it will be all right.” He leaned back, pulling her on.

“Per—Per, come thou and live with me!”

Per's face was aghast, and Gobby said, “Nay!” and clasped one arm around Per, as if he thought Andrea had the strength or power to drag Per away against his will. And from the farther end of the Tube came Toorkild's voice, shouting Per's name in alarm.

“Per,” Andrea said, “gan!” The Tube had shut down once, and it might do so again. They shouldn't be lingering here inside it. But once they parted— But if she went with him— Oh, she hadn't time to start considering it all over again. Instead of pulling back against his hands, she went toward him suddenly, stretching her neck as she lifted her head to kiss him. He let go of her hands, and she put them around his neck. His arms clasped crushingly tight around her.

“Entraya, Entraya—” She felt his tears on her face.

“Per, we have no time. I can no, I can no. I'd only end by hating thee—” She pushed him away, and he let her go. She turned to go but looked back over her shoulder. “Gan! Run!” Gobby was already dragging Per farther into the Tube. Good. Gobby would see that he went. “Fare well!” she called.

Per called after her, but the ramp was before her, and she pelted down it, hardly keeping her feet, with a great, swelling pain in her chest that was relief and grief. She'd reached the gravel path at the bottom of the ramp before she remembered the police marksmen and raised her hands, feeling foolish, and called out, “Don't shoot!”

Someone shouted back, “Stand still!”

She stood still and heard, behind her, the screaming that meant the Tube was closing down. Was closing down and might never be opened again. Even if it was, she doubted she'd be going through it. The pain in her chest swelled into her throat, threatening to burst her. She sat down in the gravel, bowed over her knees and sobbed.

As if she were just hearing it, she suddenly heard what Per had called after her as she'd run away from him, back to the 21st. He'd shouted, “I have no wings.”