The Many-Coloured Land Read online

  After a moment's conference, two of the soldiers from the fort rode off to one side and in some manner called in the pack of amphicyons. The bear-dogs were led away on a side path while the rest of the escort fell in beside the caravan for the last part of the journey. A gate in the palisade opened and they rode inside, two by two. Then, in what was to become a familiar procedure, the prisoners had their mounts tethered to posts in front of double troughs of feed and water. At the left of each chaliko was a dismounting block. After the soldiers unlocked their chains, the muscle-sore travelers descended and gathered in an untidy group while Waldemar addressed them once again.

  "All you travelers! We'll rest here for one hour, then go on until early morning, another eight hours." Everybody groaned. "Latrines in the small building behind you, get your food and drink in the bigger building next door. Anybody sick or gotta complaint, see me. Be ready to remount when you hear the horn. Nobody comes into the area beyond the hitching rail. That's all."

  Epone, who was still on chalikoback, guided her beast delicately through the throng until she loomed over Richard.

  "I'm glad to see you're recovering."

  He gave her a quizzical look. "I'm just dandy. And it's nice to know you're a lady who cares about the health of her livestock."

  She threw her head back and laughed, cascades of sound like the deep strumming of a harp. Her partially hidden hair gleamed in the torchlight. "It really is too bad about you," she said. "You've certainly got more spirit than that silly medievalist"'

  She turned her animal away, rode to the opposite side of the compound, and was helped out of the saddle by obsequious men in white tunics.

  "What was that all about?" inquired Amerie, who had come up with Felice.

  Richard glowered. "How the fuck should I know?" He went tottering off toward the latrine.

  Felice watched him go. "Are all your patients this grateful?"

  The nun laughed. "He's coming along just fine. You know they're on the mend when they bite your head off."

  "He's nothing but a stupid weakling."

  "I think you're wrong about that," Amerie said. But Felice only snorted and went off to the mess hall. Later, when the two women and Claude were eating cheese and cold meat and maize bread, Richard came and apologized.

  "Think nothing of it," the nun said. "Sit down with us. We've got something to talk over with you."

  Richard's eyes narrowed. "Yeah?"

  Claude said softly, "Felice has a plan for escape. But there are problems."

  "No shit?" the pirate guffawed.

  The little ring-hockey player took Richard's hand and squeezed. His eyes bulged and he pressed his lips together. "Less noise," Felice said. "The problem isn't in the escape itself, but in the aftermath. They've taken our maps and compasses. Claude has a general knowledge of this part of Europe from his paleontology studies more than a hundred years ago, but that won't help us if we can't orient ourselves while we're on the run. Can you help us? Did you study the large-scale map of Pliocene France when we were back at the auberge?"

  She dropped his hand and Richard stared at the whitened flesh, then threw her a glance of pure venom. "Hell, no. I figured there'd be plenty of time for that once we arrived. I brought a self-compensating compass, a computer sextant, all the charts I'd need. But I suppose all the stuff was confiscated. The only route I looked at was the one west to the Atlantic, to Bordeaux."

  Felice grunted in disgust. Claude persisted in a peaceable tone, "We know you must be experienced in navigation, son. There's got to be some way we can orient ourselves. Can you locate the Pliocene polestar for us? That would be a big help."

  "So would a frigate of the Fleet Air Arm," Richard grumbled. "Or Robin Hood and his merry men."

  Felice reached out for him again and he dodged back hastily. "Can you do it, Richard?" she asked. "Or are those stripes on your sleeves for good conduct?"

  "This isn't my home planet, dykey-doll! And the noctilucent clouds don't make the job any easier."

  "A lot of volcanism," Claude said. "Dust in the upper atmosphere. But the moon has set and there aren't any ordinary clouds. Do you think you'd be able to get a fix as the glowing patches come and go?"

  "I might," Richard muttered. "But why the hell I should bother beats me . . . What I want to know is, what happened to my pirate outfit? Who put this coverall on me?"

  "It was there," Felice said sweetly, "and you needed it. Badly. So we obliged. Anything to help out a friend."

  Claude hurried to say, "You got all messed up in some fight you were in back at the castle. I just cleaned you up a bit and washed your other clothes. They're hanging on the back of your saddle. Should be dry by now."

  Richard looked suspiciously at the smirking Felice, then thanked the old man. But a fight? Had he been in a fight? And who had been laughing at him with lofty contempt? A woman with drowning-pool eyes. But not Felice . . .

  Amerie said, "Please try for the polestar if you feel well enough to manage it. We only have one more night of travel on this high north road. Then we'll be angling off every which way and traveling in the daytime. Richard, it's important."

  "Okay, okay," he grouched. "I don't suppose any of you Earthworms knows the latitude of Lyon."

  "About forty-five north, I think," said Claude. "Around the same as my boyhood home in Oregon, anyhow, from the way I remember the sky over the auberge. Too bad we don't have Stein. He'd know."

  "A rough guess is good enough," Richard said.

  The nun lifted her head. The sound of a horn came from outside in the fort's yard. "Well, here we go again, Group. Good luck, Richard."

  "Megathanks, Sister. If we follow any escape plan tins kid dreams up, we're gonna need it."

  They rode on through the night, traveling from beacon to beacon along the plateau trail with the river valley at their right and the scattered small volcanoes of the Limagne giving an occasional ruby pulse in the southwest. Constellations totally unfamiliar to the Earth natives of the twenty-second century crowded the sky of Exile. Many of those stars were the same ones that would be visible in the planet's future; but their differing galactic orbits had twisted the familiar star patterns all out of recognition. There were stars in the Pliocene sky that were destined to die before the time of the Galactic Milieu; others that Milieu people would know were at this time still dark in their dust cloud wombs.

  Richard viewed the Pliocene heavens with nonchalance. He'd seen an awful lot of different skies. Given plenty of time and a fixed base for observation, finding the local Polaris would be a snap, even with eyeball instrumentation alone. It was only the fact that they were moving on animal-back, and the need for a quick fix, that made the thing a bit tricky.

  Now, if the old fossil-flicker was right about the rough latitude, and if they were on a near-northerly course on this trail as Claude thought they'd have to be, given the lay of the land, then the polestar should be about halfway between the horizon and the zenith somewhere in . . . there.

  He had picked up a couple of stiff twigs from the litter back at the fort and now bound them together into a cross-sight with a hair from his mount's mane. Each stalk was twice as long as his hand. He hoped the field wouldn't be too limited.

  Adjusting his position in the saddle to minimize the effect of the chaliko's rocking gait, he memorized the constellations that had to be roughly circumpolar. Then he held the cross-sight at arm's length and aligned the vertical axis with the straight track ahead (analog: two upright chaliko ears) and centered it on a likely star he had tentatively selected. He carefully noted the positions of five other bright stars within the quadrants of his sight and then relaxed. Three hours from now, when planetary rotation had made those six stars seem to change position slightly, he'd take another sighting His near-photographic memory would do an angular comparison within the field of the cross-sight, and with luck he would be able to discern the imaginary hub in the sky about which all those stars were turning. The hub would be the pole. It might or mi
ght not have a star on it or near it that could be dubbed Pliocene Polaris.

  He would center the cross-sight anew on this point in the sky and try to verify the pole's position before dawn with a two-hour shot. Failing that, he would check it tomorrow night with a good long time interval for maximum rotation.

  Richard set his wrist chronometer's alarm for 0330, glad that he hadn't followed the impulse to throw the thing away back in Madame Guderian's rose garden on that rainy morning when he had abandoned his universe . . . Less than twenty hours ago.

  Chapter Ten

  Even though he had been partially briefed by Creyn on what to expect, Bryan found the reality of the riverside city of Roniah nearly overwhelming. The party of riders came suddenly upon the place after wending their way through a dark canyon where the guards' torches barely illuminated a narrow trail cut in buff sandstone. The caravan emerged onto a knoll overlooking the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône and saw the town below on the west bank, just south of the snout of forested crags where the two great rivers joined.

  Roniah was built on a rise adjacent to the water. Twisting around the hill's base was an earthern rampart crowned by a thick fortified wall. All along the top of this, glittering like lavish strings of orange beads, were closely spaced little fires. High, square watchtowers jutted out from the wall every hundred meters or so, and these, too, were outlined in pricks of fire all along their crenellated battlements, around the windows, and even up and down the corners and angles of the walls. A mauve city gate had almost every detail of its architecture picked out in small lamps. Leading to the gate was a colonnaded avenue half a kilometer long, every column of which was capped with a huge flaming torch. The midway was flanked with spangled geometrical patterns that might have been lamp-bordered lawns or flowerbeds planted in parterre designs.

  From the caravan's vantage point above the town, Bryan could see that Roniah was uncrowded, its mostly small houses laid out along wide curving streets. Since it was well past midnight, most of the dwellings showed no window lights, but along the edges of the roofs were little dots of fire; and the parapets that fronted the houses were also illuminated by thousands of the evenly spaced lamps. Closer to the riverside were a number of larger structures bearing slender towers of varying heights. The walls and major features of these buildings were outlined in light as elaborately as the city gate was, but instead of oil-lamp orange, the facades glowed with blue, bright green, aquamarine, and amber. Many of the towers had their windows ablaze.

  "It's like fairyland," breathed Sukey. "All those little sparkling lights!"

  "Each inhabitant is obligated to contribute to urban illumination by maintaining the lamps of his own house," Creyn said. "The common fuel is olive oil, which is extremely plentiful. The taller Tanu dwellings are lit by more sophisticated lamps energized by accumulations of surplus metapsychic emanations."

  They rode down, following the track until it merged with a road paved in granite setts that widened to nearly eighty meters as it approached the avenue of fire-topped columns. Between the great pillars stood neat frameworks of bamboo arranged in aisles, separated by dark shrubbery and clusters of palm trees. Creyn explained that booths for a market were set up in this exterior garden every month, featuring the goods of local artisans as well as luxury products of all kinds brought in by caravans. Once a year there was also a Great Fair, which attracted people from all over western Europe.

  "You have no daily market for foods, then?" Bryan asked.

  "Meat is the great diet staple," Creyn replied. "Professional hunters, all human, bring in large quantities of game to the plantations in the more northerly reaches of both the Saône and Rhône. It is sent downstream daily to the town provisioners on barges, together with grain, fruit, and other produce from the farms, such as olive oil and wine. Most of the food processing is done at the plantations by rama workers. In years gone by, our own people supervised the plantations. Now almost all of them are overseen by humans."

  "And you see no potential hazard in such an arrangement?" Bryan asked.

  Creyn smiled, the flickering lights striking sparks from his deep-set eyes. "No hazard at all. The humans engaged in critical occupations all wear the torc. But try to understand that coercion is seldom necessary. For all but the most deeply disturbed of your people, the world of Exile is a happy one."

  "Even for the women?" Elizabeth inquired.

  The unperturbed Tanu said, "Even the lowliest non-meta women of the commonalty are completely free from drudgery. They may engage in the occupations of their choice or live in indolence. They may even pleasure themselves as they will with human lovers. The only restriction is that their children must be by us. The more fortunate humans possessing genetic codons for metafunction enjoy a privileged position. They are welcomed into our society as probationary equals. In the fullness of time, those who have proved their loyalty to the Tanu may exchange their silver torcs for gold."

  "Both men and women?" Aiken asked, his lips twitching.

  "Both men and women. I'm sure you can appreciate our reproductive strategy. We not only strengthen our line against the effects of the local radiation but also incorporate your genes for latent and operant metability. Ultimately, we may hope to evolve fully operant metapsychics", he nodded at Elizabeth, "even as you will have done six million years from now. We will then be freed from the limitation of the golden torcs."

  Elizabeth said, "Quite a grand design. How do you reconcile it with the reality of this planet's future . . . with no Tanu?"

  Creyn smiled. "The Goddess wreaks as she wills. Six million years is a long time. I think we Tanu will be grateful to settle for a small portion of it to call our own."

  They approached closer to the great gate, which was twelve or thirteen meters wide and almost twice as high, fashioned of titanic balks of timber heavily reinforced with bronze plates.

  "Not much action outside here at night, is there?" Aiken commented.

  "There are wild animals and other dangers," Creyn said. "The night is not a time for humans to be abroad unless they are going about the business of the Tanu."

  "Interesting," Bryan said. "These city walls and the rampart must be effective against almost any kind of night prowlers. They're certainly over-elaborate as a protection from animal menaces. Or even aggression from outlaw humans, and I understand there are some here and there."

  "Oh, yes," Creyn admitted, with a dismissing wave of his hand. "Little more than a minor nuisance."

  "Then what purpose do the fortifications really serve?"

  "There are always," Creyn said, "the Firvulag."

  They came to a halt immediately in front of the gate. Above its arch was the same golden mask emblem that had adorned the entrance to Castle Gateway. Captal Zdenek, accompanied by one torch-bearing soldier, rode to a shadowed niche and detached a stout chain that dangled from the soffit of the overhanging archway. The chain had a ball of metal-caged stone on the end that measured a good half-meter in diameter. Zdenek rode out a short distance holding the ball and then turned, took aim, and let it swing back toward the gate in a pendulum arc. It struck a blackened bronze lens set into the timbered valve and there was a deep-throated boom, as from a huge Old World church bell. Even as the soldier caught the returning ball and put it back into its niche, the ponderous gate began to swing open.

  Creyn rode forward alone, rising above the saddle to his full height so that his scarlet and white robes streamed back in the breeze rushing from the widening aperture. He cried out three words in an exotic tongue, simultaneously transmitting a complex mental image that the torc-wearing humans and Elizabeth were unable to decipher.

  Two squads of human soldiers with crested helmets stood at attention on either side of the open entrance. The engraved plates and scales of their ceremonial bronze armor gleamed like gold in the light of countless flaming lamps. Beyond the gate, lining the otherwise deserted street for almost an entire block on both sides, were the ramas. Each small ape wore a metal
collar and a blue and gold tabard. Each held a wand of some glassy material tipped with a blue or an amber light.

  Creyn and his retinue passed between the ranks of ramapithecines, and the little animals turned and pattered alongside the chalikos, escorting the riders through the streets of the sleeping town. At one plaza, where the waters of a large fountain splashed onto floating lanterns, Captal Zdenek saluted Creyn and rode off toward a dim barracks with the soldiers Billy and Seung Kyu, their night's work at an end. The timefarers gaped at the houses, dark except for the myriad twinkling oil lamps along every roof gutter, garden wall, and balustrade. Exile architecture in the human quarter was a melange of mortared stonework, half-timbering, and quasi-biblical mudplaster, with thick walls for coolness, tiled roofs, vine-hung loggias deep in shadow, and small patios planted with palms, laurels, and aromatic cinnamon trees.

  "Munchkin Tudor," Bryan decided. Humanity had retained its sense of humor in spite of the six-million-year banishment. They saw no people at all; but here and there other child-sized ramas, wearing tabards of differing colors, went about mysterious errands, pushing little covered carts. Once, in an oddly reassuring incident, an unmistakable Siamese cat streaked across the main avenue and disappeared into the open window of a house.

  The chaliko riders neared a complex of larger buildings close to the river. These were constructed of a material resembling white marble and set off from the rest of the town by an ornamental wall breached at intervals by wide stairways. The parapet at the top was decorated with planter-urns spilling flowers. In place of the homely town lamps of ceramic or metal fretwork, torchères like great silver candlesticks lit the precincts of the Tanu. The dwellings were hung with chains of faceted glass lanterns, their blue and green and amber making an eerie contrast to the friendly warmth of the oil lamps on the streets of the outer town. There were a few familiar touches: waterlilies in tiled pools, climbing yellow roses supported on delicate trellises of marble filigree, a nightingale, wakened by the sound of their passage, that uttered a few sleepy notes.