A Darkling Plain me-4 Read online

  “What do you make of it?” asked Thien again.

  He wanted her scientific opinion, Oenone realized. She licked her lips, which had grown very dry. “I would say that something—some things —are falling into the upper atmosphere.”

  “More weapons?” Thien sounded very scared.

  Oenone watched for a moment, thinking. “No. No, I think it’s a good thing. I think something big has exploded in orbit, and those stars are some of the fragments, burning up.”

  “The cities’ weapon?” asked Thien. “You think it is destroyed?”

  “It was not theirs,” Oenone said. She was about to explain her theory about the Stalker Fang, and tell him that Grike must have found the ground station and destroyed it, but it would be better kept a secret; if the cities learned who had turned ODIN on them, it would lead to more fighting. “It was all an accident,” she said. “Some old orbital, gone mad. Let’s pray it’s over.”

  Thien nodded and reached for his sword. She had told him what he wanted to know, thought Oenone, and now she was no more use to him. She could not help squeezing her bruised eyes shut. She heard the ringing rasp of the long blade sliding from its scabbard. She heard the chink of metal against stone. She opened one eye, then the other. Thien was kneeling in front of her, laying his sword on the pavement at her feet. Down in the courtyard everyone else was kneeling too. Soldiers bowed their heads, saluting her, fist-to-palm.

  “What are they doing?” she asked, bewildered. “What are you doing?”

  “Our armies are smashed,” said Thien. “The barbarians’ cities are broken. The world is in turmoil. We need someone to lead us down new roads. I’m not the man for that.”

  He rose and took Oenone by the arm, bringing her gently to the front of the balcony so that all the people waiting below could see their new leader.

  * * *

  The engines of the air yacht failed a few miles from Batmunkh Gompa, and Fishcake abandoned her there and set off walking, leaving Pennyroyal behind. Pennyroyal spent a while trying to restart the yacht, but ash had clogged its air intakes, and it would not work. Reluctantly, finding his way by the light of the meteor showers streaking across the northern sky, he set off on foot through the ash drifts to the nearest Green Storm base. There he attempted to surrender, but the Storm were in such a state of confusion that nobody wanted to be saddled with a townie prisoner. “At least send ships to Erdene Tezh!” he begged. “My friends may still be there! It was the ground station! The Stalker Fang was controlling the weapon from there…”

  “No one was controlling the weapon,” said the base commander, waving a communique she’d just received from Batmunkh Gompa. “Naga’s widow says that one of the Ancients’ orbital devices malfunctioned, and it destroyed targets at random.”

  “But …”

  “You are free to go, Professor.”

  It was months before Pennyroyal found his way back to Murnau. He used the time well, making use of the long waits at provincial air harbors and caravanserais to write his greatest work, Ignorant Armies. It was surprisingly truthful by Pennyroyal’s standards. He confessed all his previous lies in Chapter One, and kept as close as he could to the facts when he described what he had seen and done at Erdene Tezh.

  But when he finally reached the Hunting Ground, he found himself in a world that was changing quickly. The predators were growing so savage and the prey so scarce that even the staunchest of Municipal Darwinists were starting to wonder how much longer the system could keep going. People were looking for new ways to live, and Murnau had shocked everyone by settling down on a hilltop west of the Rustwater and going static. Refugees from Zhan Shan were moving there, helping the Murnauers lay out fields and plant crops. Old von Kobold had kept on a few of his harvester suburbs, and an air force, led by Orla Twombley, that whizzed around the margins of his pale tract of farmland and scared off any predator that came too close.

  Undaunted, Pennyroyal went in search of his publishers, but Werederobe and Spoor wouldn’t touch his new book. After Spiney’s expose, said those gentlemen, nobody would believe any more wild yarns from Nimrod Pennyroyal. Least of all them. Anyway, the Mossies were friendly now; had he not heard about the treaty von Kobold had signed with the Widow Naga? And, incidentally, what had happened to the advance they’d paid him for his previous book?

  Pennyroyal spent ten months in debtors’ prison, boring his fellow inmates with endless stories of his wonderful adventures. When some of his old friends from Moon’s clubbed together and paid his debts, he slunk away to Peripatetiapolis, where one of his former girlfriends, Minty Bapsnack, still had a soft spot for him. He lived out his final years in her house, and they were not unhappy. But even Minty took his story with a pinch of salt, and she never lent him the money he needed to publish Ignorant Armies.

  * * *

  Fishcake did not see the shooting stars. By the time the wreckage from ODIN began to streak across the sky he was beneath the lid of smoke from Zhan Shan. He bypassed Batmunkh Gompa in the dark and walked on for days, up roads clogged with ash and refugees.

  He was the only person traveling toward the volcano, not away. The eastern flank of the mountain had been ripped open, and the people who had lived beneath it were fleeing in ragged columns, with tales of whole towns being buried, whole cities swept away. But the western slopes, though shaken and dusted with ash, had not suffered so badly. When Fishcake came over the ridge above the hermitage, he saw the little house still standing, the cattle in their pasture eating bales of hay brought up from the lowlands, fresh prayer flags flapping on the shrine at the head of the pass. He shuffled toward the door on bare, bloody feet and collapsed on the step, where Sathya found him next morning when she came out to milk the cow. In his frostbitten hand he was still clutching the little horse that his Stalker had made for him.

  He would stay there with Sathya for many years, growing into a strong, handsome young man of the mountain kingdoms. He would come to forget a lot of the awful things he had been through, but he never forgot what he had done at Erdene Tezh. That was his secret, and at first it made him feel strong and proud, because he’d carried out his promise to the gods and sent Hester Natsworthy and her husband to the Sunless Country. But later, when he was grown up and married, watching his own children play with Anna’s little horse in the dust outside his foster mother’s hermitage, he came to feel less certain about it. Those were the years when the Widow Naga was pushing hard for peace, preaching her policy of forgiveness toward old enemies. Sometimes Fishcake wished he had shown a little more forgiveness himself, and let the Natsworthys aboard that sky yacht after all. But at least (he told himself) he hadn’t killed Hester and Tom; he’d just taught them a lesson by abandoning them as they’d once abandoned him. They were tough and resourceful, and he was sure they had survived.

  Zagwa

  25th April 1027 te

  Dear Angie,

  It’s hard to believe that it’s four whole months since we left you at that cluster in the Frost Barrens! And that it’s nearly a year since New London was born!! I wish Theo and I could be there with you to join in the birthday celebrations, but we shan’t be ready to leave Zagwa for a few weeks yet. I hope trade is going well up there in the Ice Wastes; that you are selling lots of levitating armchairs to the people of the ice cities, and the Childermass engines are keeping you out of the jaws of predators!

  I’m writing this in the garden at Theo’s parents’ house, sitting on a lovely terrace overlooking the gorge, in the afterglow of sunset. It’s beautiful here, and Mr. and Mrs. Ngoni and Kaelo and Miriam are all very sweet and welcoming, and seem to have gotten used to the idea that their Theo is going to marry a townie girl and live in the sky.

  The merchantman that brought us here put in at Airhaven on the way south for fuel and gas. When I dropped in to the bank there, I found that—guess what?—I’m rich! I had quite forgotten the five thousand that Wolf Kobold had paid us for his trip to London, but there it all was, still safe in the Jen
ny Haniver’s account. I felt a little bit guilty about keeping it, but I suppose we earned it fairly; after all, we took Wolf to London as he asked, and it’s no fault of ours he tried to eat it. Anyway, I have spent some of the money already, on an airship of my own, and she is being overhauled at Zagwa harbor as I write. She’s a converted Achebe 1000, and we plan to call her Jenny Haniver II. So when we come home, we shall be traders in our own right; Ngoni Natsworthy of New London, purveyors of Mag-Lev furniture to the gentry… Trade is opening up again with the east now that the Green Storm has gone and the new League has made peace with the cities. We may even cross the ocean to America, and see my old friends and my old home at Anchorage-in-Vineland, and tell them about everything that’s happened. And of course we shall often come to Zagwa.

  Theo had a letter back from the Widow Naga, which was very nice of her when you consider that she’s got the whole of the new Anti-Traction League to run, and half the mountain kingdoms still knee-deep in ash. She told him that Mum and Mr. Grike reached Batmunkh Gompa with her on the evening before Zhan Shan got zapped, and they rescued Daddy and flew off in the Jenny Haniver. She doesn’t seem to know where they went, or why, but the burned-out wreck of a ship with Jeunet-Carot pods was found later at a valley in the Erdene Shan. She says that, if I want to, I could go there, and pay my respects in the place where they died.

  It’s thoughtful of her, but I don’t want to go. I feel certain Dad and Mum are dead, but even if that is the Jenny’s wreck at Erdene Shan, that’s not where they are. They’ve gone. Nobody knows where, and no one ever will. But I like to think that they’ve taken the bird roads, west of the sun, beyond the moon, flying off together into wild skies and wonderful adventures. Sometimes, without quite meaning to, I find myself looking up, as if there’s still a part of me that expects to see the Jenny Haniver come out from behind a cloud or the shoulder of a mountain, bringing them home…

  And now the light has gone, and the moon is rising, and here comes Theo, running down the stairs from the house to tell me that the evening meal is ready. So I will close now, and hope this finds you soon.

  With love to all of London,

  Wren

  Chapter 54

  Grike in the world to come

  Grike had arrived too late. He ran like a ghost through the mountains, and came to Erdene Tezh just before dawn, when the sky above the lake was scratched with the trails of shooting stars.

  The house was a ruin by then; gray ash; charred beams; a few trickles of white smoke still drifting across the garden. In a chamber full of carbonized machinery he found the remains of the Stalker Fang, and knelt beside her. The gimcrack Engineer-built part of her brain had stopped working, but he sensed faint electrical flutterings fading in the other, older part. He unplugged one of the cords from his skull and fitted it into a port on hers. Her memories whispered to him, and his mind drank them.

  The sun rose. Grike went back out into the garden, and in the gathering light he saw Tom and Hester waiting for him by the fountain. He had not noticed them in the dark, for they were as cold as the stones they lay upon.

  Grike went down on his knees beside them and gently drew out the knife that Hester had driven through her own heart. At first he thought that if he were quick, he could still carry her to Batmunkh Gompa and make Oenone Zero Resurrect her. But when he started to lift her, he found that she had clutched Tom’s hand as she died, and she was still clinging tightly to it.

  If Stalkers could cry, he would have cried then, for he knew all at once that this was the right end for her, and that she would not want him to take her from this quiet valley, or from the Once-Born she had loved.

  So he lifted them together, and carried them away from the house. As he crossed the causeway, the slack weight of their bodies shook a faint memory loose in him. He checked to see if it was one of those he had just absorbed from Anna Fang, but it was his own. Long ago, before he was a Stalker, he had had children, and when they were sleepy and he had carried them to their beds, they had lain just as limp and heavy in his arms as Tom and Hester lay now.

  The memory was a fragment, a gift, a down payment on that knowledge of his past that Oenone Zero had promised would come to him when he died. But that would not be for a long time. He had been made to last.

  He found a place at the head of the valley where a river tumbled down in white cataracts past a rocky outcrop; where a stunted oak tree grew. It reminded him of things Hester had told him about the lost island of her childhood. There he laid her down with Tom, side by side, still holding hands, their faces almost touching. Unsheathing his claws for the last time, he cut away their soggy clothes, the belts and boots they would no longer need. There was a shallow cave at the foot of the rocks nearby, and he went and sat down in it, watching and waiting, wondering what he would find to do in a world that no longer held Hester.

  That evening airships buzzed down to land at the ruin on the lake. After a while they went away again.

  Days flew over the valley of Erdene Tezh. In the fitful sunlight Tom and Hester began to swell and darken beneath their shroud of flies. Worms and beetles fed on them, and birds flew down to take their eyes and tongues. Soon their smell attracted small mammals that had been going hungry in that cheerless summer.

  Grike did not move. He shut down his systems one by one until only his eyes and his mind were awake. He watched the graceful architecture of Tom and Hester’s skeletons emerge, their bare skulls leaning together like two eggs in a nest of wet hair. Winter heaped snow over them; the rains of spring washed them clean. Next summer’s grass grew thick and green beneath them, and an oak sapling sprouted in the white basket of Hester’s ribs.

  Grike watched it all while the years fell past him, green and white, green and white. The small bones of their hands and feet scattered into the grass like dice; larger ones were tumbled and gnawed by foxes; they turned gray and crumbly, and it became hard to tell whose had been whose.

  The oak sapling grew into a tree; spread out a canopy that blushed green in summer and threw dancing shadows over Grike; shed acorns that became new saplings; grew old, trailed beards of lichen; died and fell and rotted, giving up its goodness to the roots of younger trees that were spreading down the hillside to the lake.

  Grike sank deeper into his fugue. Stars blurred over him; seasons blinked at him. The trees became a wood. Bare branches breathed in, exhaled green leaves, turned golden, bare, breathed in.

  At last a human figure began to flash in front of him, stooping again and again to place something around his neck. With a deep effort he began to rouse himself; the flicker of day and night becoming less frantic as the whirl of seasons and centuries slowed.

  A summer morning. Green light shining through the leaves of an ancient oak wood. Garlands of flowers decked Grike’s torso, and the remnants of older garlands lay dried and crumbling in his mossy lap. His shoulders were shaggy with ferns. A bird had nested in the crook of his arm. Of Tom and Hester nothing remained but a little dust blowing between the gnarled roots of the trees.

  Goats were moving through the wood. The bells on their necks chimed softly. A small Once-Born boy came and stood looking at Grike, and was joined by a girl, still smaller. They had ocher skin, brown eyes, dusty black hair.

  “HELLO,” said Grike. His voice was rustier and more screechy than ever. The boy fled, but the girl stayed, speaking to him in a language that he did not know. After a while she went and picked some small blue flowers among the oak trees and made a crown for him. Her brother came back, cautious, wide-eyed. The little girl brought some fat and rubbed it into Grike’s joints. He moved. He stood up. Gravel and owl pellets cascaded off him; he shook himself free of cobwebs and birds’ nests and moss.

  The girl took his hand, and her brother led them down the valley amid a bleating, chiming crowd of goats. They stopped at a village, where adult Once-Born came to stare at Grike and poke him with sticks and the handles of simple farm tools. Listening to their excited chatter, he started to
decipher their language. They’d thought him nothing but an old statue, sitting there in his cave. They had hung flowers about his neck for luck each summer when they brought their goats up to the high pastures. They had been doing it since their mothers’ mothers’ time.

  Down a track to a paved road, riding on a cart now, the children beside him. The sun was redder than Grike recalled, the air clearer, the mountain climate kinder. A town lay cupped in a wooded vale. Grike wondered if his new friends realized that its ancient metal walls were made from the tracks of a mobile city, and that some of its round, rust-brown watchtowers had once been wheels. They seemed simple people, and he imagined that their society had no machines at all, but as they brought him through the town gates, he saw delicate airborne ships of wood and glass rising like dragonflies from tall stone mooring towers. Silvery disks, like misty mirrors, swiveled and pivoted on their undersides, and the air beneath them rippled like a heat haze.

  They took him to a meeting place, a big hall in the city’s heart. People crowded around him to ask questions. What kind of being was he? How long had he been asleep? Was he one of the machine men out of the old stories?

  Grike had no answers. He asked questions of his own. He asked if there were any places in the world where cities still moved and hunted and ate one another. The Once-Born laughed. Of course there weren’t; cities only moved in fairy tales; who would want to live in a moving city? It was a mad ideal.

  “What are you for?” asked one boy at last, pushing to the front of the crowd. Grike looked down at him. He pondered awhile, thinking of something Dr. Popjoy had told Anna.

  “I AM A REMEMBERING MACHINE,” he said.

  “What do you remember?”

  “I REMEMBER THE AGE OF THE TRACTION CITIES. I REMEMBER LONDON AND ARKANGEL; THADDEUS VALENTINE AND ANNA FANG. I REMEMBER HESTER AND TOM.”