The Sterkarm Handshake (9 page)

Sim and Hob came up on Fowl's other side, on horseback. “Here, lad,” Hob said. “That's who tha've to thank.” He held up, by the hair, the head of the man who'd made the wound. Sim was wagging the hand that had struck the blow.

Per looked at the head. He knew its face, and his shoulders flinched in a shudder. “Jem,” he said. If it hadn't been for Sweet Milk and Ecky, his own head, hacked from his body, could easily have been dangling from someone's hand.

“We've got sword—for tha mammy,” Hob said.

Sweet Milk, as he folded cloth into a pad, shook his head. Like many others, Hob believed that if Isobel washed the sword blade that had cut Per's leg, and rubbed it with ointment, it would heal the wound. But Hob hadn't seen how deep the slash was. Sweet Milk pressed the pad against the wound and held it in place. Fowl stood like a rock. “Hold it,” he said to Per, and bound the pad in place with a second strip of cloth, slipping it between Per's leg and Fowl's side.

“If tha'd hit me with that butt end,” he said, looking up at Per, “I'd have had thee off there and knocked seven colors out o' thee. Tha knows that, don't tha?”

Per laughed. Laughter came easily; he felt dizzy and lightheaded, as if drunk.

“Try to keep it still,” Sweet Milk said, and remounted his own horse, which Davy had caught for him. His own bruises were beginning to burn and ache. The metal plates of his jakke had been driven into him in several places. He thought longingly of his safe bed.

They rode gently back along the valley to rejoin Gobby. Sweet Milk watched Per as they went. There seemed nothing wrong with the boy—except, maybe, he was a bit quiet. Fowl, stepping gently, obediently followed the other horses, so that Per had no need even to kick him on. But the wound was a bad one.

The other end of the valley was full of the harsh baaing of sheep as Gobby's men tried to gather them in the dark. Gobby himself came riding to meet them. Before he reached them, Ecky and Sim had called out, angrily, that the May was hurt.

Per turned his face aside, looking down, as Gobby nudged his horse close to see the bandage on Per's thigh. The white linen showed, a blur in the dark, but was already blackening. “Badly?” Gobby asked.

Per said, “Nay.” He wouldn't have told his uncle of the wound, and wished the others hadn't.

Sweet Milk said, “Deep.”

Gobby said nothing. Per, whose temper had already been rising in expectation of his uncle's anger, was puzzled by his silence and said to Fowl, “Walk on.” Fowl, on his best behavior, walked forward without a kick.

“Where art ganning now?” Gobby demanded.

“To help with sheep.”

“To help with—!” Gobby said. “Stay there and no move! I wish tha'd half as much sense as a bloody sheep.”

Per reined in, feeling mutinous and comforted. The cut to his leg couldn't be that bad, if Gobby was still yelling at him. He would be able to ride back to the tower, and have something to boast about. Something to worry Andrea with.

Gobby was silent, drawing his thumb along his lower lip again and again as he stared at Per. Sweet Milk, guessing his thoughts, said, “Davy Gibb's place.” It was a small farm, little more than a hut, but it was within an hour's ride. Per could be left there while his blood settled. A litter could be rigged at the tower and sent out to fetch him the next day.

Gobby's eyes flicked to Sweet Milk's, showing that he'd been thinking the same thing. He went on stroking his lower lip.

“I can ride,” Per said. The cut muscles were smarting, but he could stand it. He wanted to ride through the tower's gate, not be carried through it.

Gobby ignored him but shook his head at Sweet Milk, who nodded in agreement. It was autumn. Reivers were riding every night. Huts and shepherds offered no protection against them. Any Grannam ride would know Big Toorkild's Per May. They'd probably take him for ransom, but there was always the chance they'd kill him, in revenge for the Grannams killed on this ride. Or sell him to the citizens of Carloel, who'd hang him.

Sweet Milk thought of offering to escort Per ahead of the sheep, at a faster pace—but it would be no use. A fast pace, over the rough, broken ground that would take them directly to the tower, would put an even greater strain on the wounded leg. And there was no knowing whether other Grannam rides were out. Two men, one wounded, would be easily taken.

Gobby dragged his thumb along his lip again. He had three sons of his own—two to spare, he joked—but he wouldn't have given up any one of them. He could not, and would not, take the smallest risk with his brother's one tup lamb. The ride, with its armed men and its slow-moving sheep, was the safest place for Per to be.

Sighing, Gobby looked at Sweet Milk, and gave the slightest of nods toward Per. Sweet Milk needed no such order.

Gobby turned his horse, said to his nephew, “Stay!” and rode away to check on the gathering of the sheep.

Per sat his horse. The helmet on his head felt heavy. His thoughts kept circling around the man he'd stuck in the thigh, and the head that had been held up to him, with Jem Grannam's face. He neither thought nor felt anything very clearly, except a fuddled desire to laugh.

Sweet Milk, sitting his horse a little behind Per, watched him while, in his head, he rode every stride of the long ride home.

6

16th Side: Lunch with the Sterkarms

Windsor drove his scarlet Range Rover up the ramp and onto the platform before the Tube. Bryce, who had been waiting for him, opened the passenger door and got in. “All set?” Windsor said. “Let's give 'em hell!”

The green light beside the Tube lit up, and Windsor drove forward into the hanging screen of plastic strips, which rattled against the car and slithered over its windshield. Then they were into the Tube, its white tiling vaguely reminding Bryce of a urinal. In addition to the light filtering through the screens at either end, there were cat's-eyes in the road and lights set into the roof overhead.

Going through the Tube was bizarrely mundane, Bryce always found. Your brain told you that you were doing something impossible, exciting, strange, wonderful—but your eyes and ears told you that you were only driving through an old road tunnel. There was a fixed, tarmacked road under the wheels, and the curved walls were covered with tiles, pierced with maintenance panels. There was no sensation of it spinning. Crossing from one dimension to another, and going back five hundred years in time, took roughly a minute or less. Though he supposed that minute actually lasted five hundred years.

The Dow-Jones Index was being read on the radio, and Windsor was humming some unrecognizable tune to show how unimpressed he was. Bryce made a guess at where the center of the Tube was, the point at which they would vanish from the twenty-first century, and gripped the edges of his seat, bracing himself in case something went wrong and his atoms were disassembled. In fact, they left the 21st a little later than he guessed—the transition was marked by the buzzing of static as the radio cut out. There were no other strange noises, no bump, no eerie sensation. The roadway and the tunnel simply continued smoothly on, until the car brushed through the hanging strips on the other side.

Windsor braked the car on the platform just outside the Tube. Bryce looked through the windshield at the rutted mud of the compound below, surrounded by its high chain-link fence and, beyond that, the moorland hills of the Sterkarms' country. Five hundred years had just been sidestepped. They were also about twenty miles farther north than the spot they'd left in the 21st—Bryce wasn't exactly sure why. There'd been talk of wishing to avoid the small sixteenth-century city of Carloel, where everyone's business was too readily known to everyone else, but also technical talk of a “temporal-spatial dislocation.”

What was truly hard to grasp was that the hills before him, though solid and in every way real, were not in the same world as the one he'd just left.

A security guard stepped out of the office alongside the platform and stooped to look at them. Recognizing his immediate boss, Bryce, and Bryce's superior, Mr. Windsor, he smiled and waved them on down the ramp.

Windsor drove down the ramp and across the small compound to the gate. A guard opened it for them, dividing the big FUP logo, and then joining it again as he closed and locked the gate behind them.

Windsor stopped the car, a great shiny, metallic scarlet box on the green hillside. “How long are we going to have to sit here?”

Bryce smiled. “The Sterkarms don't have watches.”

“They have the ones they stole from our geologists,” Windsor said.

“Yeah, well … I told young Andrea nine thirty—”

“Which it is now, and there's not a sign of them.”

“We'll just have to be patient,” Bryce said.

Windsor tutted and got out of the car, slamming the door. The metallic sound echoed back from the hills. As Bryce got out of the car into the wind, he had a feeling of immense space opening around him. He joined Windsor in leaning against the car's hood. “What a view,” Windsor said.

Before he admired the view, Bryce took his pistol from its shoulder holster and checked it over. It was his own and, unlike those carried by the security guards, it was loaded. He didn't think there was any chance he would need it—if he had seriously thought that he might, neither he nor Windsor would be here—but if anything did go wrong, he was prepared. He noticed Windsor smirking at him and waited for some crack about playing soldiers. Windsor was one of those who thought that, because they weren't like him, the Sterkarms were nothing more than overgrown, rather dim and naughty children.

But it was a wonderful view. The FUP compound was built about halfway up a hillside above Bedesdale, a long, wide valley cut deeply through the moors. Long hill spurs, now from this side, now that, sloped down from the hills toward the river of Bedes Water. Between the spurs were narrower side valleys, making the shape of Bedesdale a long, intricate zigzag. It was impossible to see very far up or down the valley, because the long hill spurs blocked the view.

But from where they stood, just outside the gates of the FUP compound, it was possible to catch a glimpse of Toorkild's tower. Look across the width of the valley to the hills on the other side—and look high up, high on the shoulder of the nearest hill spur. There, just poking above the ridge, was the top of the tower. It was built on the slope of another hill, farther away than the one that blocked most of it from view, but it stood tall enough to give the Sterkarms' watchman a clear view up and down the valley. The Sterkarms had a better view of the FUP compound than FUP had of them. As the bird flew, the distance between them probably wasn't much more than a mile, but by the time you'd climbed down the hillside and over the rough valley floor and forded the river, and climbed up the opposite hill, you'd have been walking for a good hour and a half. And then you had to walk back. Andrea said she'd never been fitter.

It was rough country, but fresh and beautiful. Above them, the sky was thick with clouds moving so fast before the wind that patches of clear blue were torn open, letting through the sun. The sunlight shone in patches on the hillside around them, and on the slopes across the valley, gleaming on red bracken, lighting green and tawny grass—and then vanished as the break in the clouds closed, leaving the hillsides shadowed, grayed. But somewhere else other patches of sunlight were dancing briefly before closing.

Scores of little streams fell down from the hills in silver streaks, to join the silver of Bedes Water as it ran down the valley. Here and there were stands of trees, pretty birches mostly. Some of them, those highest on the hills, where the wind blew coldest, were turning yellow.

Bryce was never sure if he imagined it, but the details of everything, even outcrops of rock and bushes on the opposite hillside, seemed pin sharp, as if there were a lens in front of his eyes, magnifying things and intensifying colors. There seemed to be more tints to the colors here than there were at home in the 21st. More greens, subtle but distinct: rich greens, luminous pale greens, golden greens, tawny greens. In the stone, the bracken, the trees, there were tawnies, russets, grays, ochers, purples—and all the colors seemed to softly vibrate somehow, to shimmer.

It was the air. It was so clean, so clear. His eyes were no longer looking through a filter of smog and dust. Behind them, the bright-yellow paint of the office was as bright and fresh as when new, and the concrete of the Tube was pure white.

Windsor let out a long sigh. “People are going to pay big money for this. Just listen to that silence!”

The silence was, indeed, more a presence than an absence. It made you realize that what passed for silence in the twenty-first century was more often a din of disregarded sound: of traffic, and people talking nearby, of radios and televisions, of piped music, of machinery running. The silence of the 16th's hills seemed to travel to them from miles away, to coddle their ears in fold upon fold of silence. When there was a sound—when a sudden gust of wind flapped their coats, or a sheep bleated miles away—it was startling. Then they realized how much the silence had calmed them, without their being aware of it, how it had slowed their hearts and made them draw their breath more deeply.

“Yes,” Windsor said, sighing again. “How can you beat this for a get-away-from-the-rat-race vacation? We'll be able to ask any price.”

“Not if the Sterkarms are going to keep up their little games.”

“Oh, I can deal with the Sterkarms,” Windsor said. “God, they can't even write their names. And it's early days. By the time we get vacations here under way, the Sterkarms will be walking to heel and fetching sticks, don't worry.”

They're ill to tame, the border men
… Bryce, who'd seen more of the Sterkarms than Windsor, tried to picture this. He said, “It's a shame we'll spoil it all.”

“We're not going to spoil anything,” Windsor said. “We'll improve it. Improve it and preserve it, not spoil it.”

“But coal mining,” Bryce said. “And drilling for oil. And tourists are going to want electricity—it all adds up to pollution, doesn't it?”

“You're still in the past!” Windsor said. “Catch up! Cold fusion! Clean, cheap power!”

“But isn't there a—”

“It's perfectly safe,” Windsor said. “One hundred percent. And the pollution at home was built up over two hundred years. Way back then, they didn't care how much mess they made—but we've learned a lot. We know about filters and safeguards—and we've got a big incentive to keep this place clean! Money! All this …” He waved a hand at the landscape spread before and below them. “It's all money in the bank. Are those sheep or goats?”

A little troop of animals had appeared from a fold of the hillside below them and went trotting past, following a narrow track down into the valley. They had long, shaggy coats of wiry hair rather than fleece, black with the odd rusty brown streak. All of them had at least two horns—several had four, in a sort of star burst.

“They're sheep,” Bryce said. “They do keep goats, though—for their milk.”

“Free-range, organically bred meat on the hoof,” Windsor said. “Unpolluted by insecticides, antibiotics or radioactive fallout. That's why they're so tiny and skinny, of course, but the health-food mob won't mind that. The health-food nutters are just going to eat this place up. See that river down there?”

“Water,” Bryce murmured. The Sterkarms called it “a water,” not a river, and he liked the phrase.

“Fresh trout, fresh salmon, freshwater mussels—and oysters! All plentiful, unpolluted and cheap. Freshwater pearls! Vast shoals of fish in the sea, not just oil!” He spread his arms wide. “Their fishing grounds haven't been vacuumed clean of fish by factory ships until there's nothing left but sardines—there're still whales out there! Do you know how much ambergris is worth an ounce? No heavy-metal pollution in these seas. No mad cow disease in the food chain. Fruit, grain, vegetables, all organically grown.”

“There'll be a big demand,” Bryce said, and watched Windsor nod. He was wondering himself how long it would be before FUP quietly introduced growth hormones and insecticides and artificial fertilizers into the 16th, to maximize production. How long before they imported big fat modern sheep to replace the hardy but small and skinny Sterkarm sheep. The Sterkarms themselves would probably welcome every innovation once they saw that they would gain from it, so how could you say it was wrong? There was no way he could stop it from happening anyway.

“Whiskey!” Windsor said. “Can you imagine the ad campaign for a whiskey made here? All you'd have to do is list all the pollutants in every make of whiskey made 21st side, just because it's made in the 21st, never mind how special their ‘pure, natural spring water' is. And forget ‘twelve years old' and ‘twenty-five years old'—ours'd be five hundred years old! You wouldn't be able to keep the shelves stocked. I tell you, this place is a gold mine. But here comes the grit in our Vaseline.”

Bryce had already spotted the approaching party of horses and people. They were on the near side of Bedes Water, having crossed the ford out of sight, and were just rounding the corner of the nearest hill spur.

“We'll go and meet them,” Windsor said, and got back into the Range Rover. Bryce climbed in beside him. The Range Rover was going to be a shock to the Sterkarms, but it wouldn't do any harm to impress them with the power of the Elves. Slowly, in four-wheel drive and first gear, they lurched down the rough slope.

Andrea was plodding along on foot, having walked all the way from the tower, as she always did. The Sterkarms had offered her a horse many times, but she didn't like horses much, and liked the idea of falling off them even less. Toorkild, from good manners, had dismounted and walked beside her, leading his horse, though walking was normally beneath him. His men either dismounted too or curbed their horses into walking behind and beside them, though occasionally one of the party would canter off to stretch his horse's legs before returning to them.

The Range Rover had been glaringly visible from the moment they'd rounded the hill spur and started climbing toward it: the brightest color in the landscape, a scarlet dot against the green hillside, flashing light from its windshield and mirrors. The men around Andrea exclaimed and pointed. “It's an Elf-Cart,” she'd said. “You've seen them before.” But the Range Rover was very different from the drab trucks that had been brought through the Tube when the office and compound fence had been set up.

Then it started down the hill toward them, which the trucks had never done. The noise of its engine reverberated across the valley. The horses shied and bucked. The men themselves, as they struggled with the animals, sent white-eyed glances at the thing jolting down the hill. The nearer it came, the stranger it looked. Even Andrea thought so, after spending so long in the 16th. The chrome and glass and metallic finish sending out blinding flashes of light; the great, four square, machine-tooled frame; its coughing, snarling, growling; its strange smell. It was utterly alien.

“Take the horses back,” she said. “I'll go and ask Elf-Windsor­ to stop.”