by Mick Farren
He couldn't believe that she could actually make the offer in rhyme. He quickly shook his head.
'Thanks all the same, but I don't think so.'
She propped herself up on one elbow.
'Did you have a good time?'
Phaid concentrated on buttoning his shirt. 'Sure . . . Sarli, I had a good time.' She knew he was lying. He couldn't really believe she'd bothered to ask. He began to struggle into his breeches and was working on the fastenings when, to his surprise, she suddenly launched into a monologue that went into greater and even more elaborate detail of the beatings and sexual abuse that she had received at the hands of her stepfather. This, too, was delivered with her eyes closed.
By the time she stopped, Phaid was fully dressed with one hand on the handle of the cabin's sliding door. Once again she opened her eyes and shot him one of those disconcertingly direct looks.
'You sure you don't want to go again?' Again Phaid shook his head. 'I don't think so.'
'Suit yourself.'
'Thanks anyway.'
She let herself flop back on the bed. 'Don't thank me. You paid.'
With that he seemed to have had all that ten tabs bought him. He silently wished her luck in her chosen career and let himself out. He felt dirty, but the steerage accommodation didn't run to cleanoffs. All they had were water showers that came directly off the crawler's cooling system. He realised they must be already on to the edge of the hot plains. He found that all but one of the stalls had been shut down. The sign read 'To conserve system fluid.' The only one working was occupied by a happily singing matron. There seemed to be nothing left but to return to his cabin and the strange Makartur.
As Phaid opened the cabin door, Makartur was sitting on his bed fingering and apparently muttering to a small beaded bag that hung around his neck on a leather thong. As soon as he saw Phaid he quickly stuffed it out of sight under his tunic.
Phaid pretended he hadn't noticed. He'd seen pouches like that before. They were amulets of the old religion, the one that worshipped harmony with the earth and its creatures. All too often their owners found themselves dragged away by the Religious Police. The Consolidated Faith went to great lengths to stamp out any competition.
Makartur looked curiously at Phaid and then lay back on his bunk.
'So how was the canteen, my manny?'
Phaid forced a companionable smile.
'It could have been worse, but I had a win in a game of pit and pass, so I'm happy.'
'You're a sporting man are you, a bit of a gambler?'
Phaid shrugged.
'We all got to make a living.'
'I don't gamble myself.'
Phaid turned away so Makartur wouldn't see his face. All he needed was a religious fanatic who was against gambling sharing his cabin.
'Yeah well, it takes all sorts.'
At that point Phaid had climbed into his bunk and laid flat on his back. With the temperature noticeably starting to rise, the crawler had to be moving into the heat. All Phaid could do was to shut his eyes and try and sleep through as much of the discomfort as possible. Unfortunately sleep refused to come. His mind kept drifting back to both the bitter hopeless girl and the red-haired giant in the lower bunk. The girl was now just a memory, a part of the past, but Makartur was very much a piece of the present.
Although it often didn't pay to voice it, Phaid had an instinctive distrust of religion. Whether it was the calculated combination of guilt, fear and promise of reward with which the priests maintained their armlock on the population or the darker, underground mysteries of the old proscribed faiths, Phaid wanted as little contact as possible with any of it. The idea that the lower bunk was filled with a devout and highly unlawful believer added a degree of mental unease to the already very present physical discomfort of travelling steerage.
Although Phaid's people came from the comparatively comfortable northern foothills, it was close enough to the cold bleak fells for him to have a very clear picture of Makartur and his people. His long-left-behind relatives had even worshipped a milder version of the grim, vengeful and totally unforgiving ancestor gods who ruled the spirit world of the high hills with a rod of iron. Phaid could picture how the man's mind worked. He had been through the dehumanising cruelty of warrior training, a fate that Phaid had gone to very serious lengths to avoid. At the end of warrior training you emerged with muscles like steel bands, a mass of arm tattoos and a mind in which rigid and inflexible will was clamped down on a seething cauldron of festering resentment and white hatred. Whenever the control was relaxed, this whole mess would boil over into the murderous beserk rage that made the warriors of the hills such valued mercenaries.
These warriors were dour, humourless men, closed and private, rarely showing emotion. They were taciturn and slow to anger, but when they did, their destructive ruthlessness was frightening. With them, slights were never forgotten, grudges went deep and a feud could last for generations. They judged everyone according to their exacting warrior code and trusted no one. To complete the mixture, their every move was dictated by omens and portents and dogged by symbol and superstition.
It seemed like hours had passed and still Phaid was unable to sleep. He was rocked and jolted; sweat was flowing from every pore in his body. He knew there must have been times when he'd been more uncomfortable but he couldn't remember when. There was no mistaking that they had hit the hot plains and the refrigeration plants were battling to keep the interior of the crawler at something like tolerable temperature. Down in first-class they were winning, up in steerage, however, it was a losing fight.
The throb of the motors was regularly punctuated by loud clangs and crashes as quite large rocks, hurled up by the violent super gales, smashed into the sides of the big machine. Phaid tried to imagine what the inferno outside really looked like. Thing a crawler didn't come equipped with was windows. Even if a transparent material could be made thick enough and strong enough to withstand the flying pebbles, there was nothing to stop it being quickly rendered opaque by the blasting sand.
The closest Phaid could get in his mind to a picture of the hot plains was a dull glowing red, like the middle of a furnace set in violent motion. It was hard to conjure an image of something that could destroy a man's eyes in a matter of seconds.
For more centuries than anyone could remember, the hot plains formed the real boundaries that kept peoples and cultures confined to their own narrow territories. Men had crossed the icefields and braved the frozen gales long before they'd attempted to journey through the impossible heat. The hot plains were shrouded in legend and mystery. From the border lands they looked like some mighty wall of dark red swirling mist. Primitives thought it was the edge of the world, the beginning of the lands of demons and devils. Up until the invention of the crawler, and the massive loss of life that had gone into making it operate properly, the heat had been the ultimate barrier. It was only a matter of five hundred years since the hot plains had been penetrated by regular travel routes.
Yet, according to many legends, they hadn't always existed. Most cultures had folk legends about how man had once been able to wander freely all over the world. The Church claimed these legends with the doctrine that the bands of heat and cold had been thrown across the countries of the earth by the vengeful Lords when they grew angry at man's wickedness. Heretics countered with the idea that they were the result of some terrible, long-forgotten cataclysm.
From primitive to philosopher, everyone was in agreement that the hot plains and the icefields were something that had occurred after man walked the earth. Facts tended to bear out this theory. Ancient artifacts from supposedly isolated cultures showed too great a similarity to each other, more than could be dismissed as strictly coincidental. And then there were the androids. Identical types of android could be found in almost every part of the globe.
Although the androids were able to reproduce themselves, and a few humans could manage simple repairs when they were damaged, the secre
t of their construction was one of the great, lost mysteries. Somehow they had existed before the bands of heat and cold had formed and had spread to every part of the world. Nobody knew how or when or even why.
If all religions agreed that the evidence pointed to the establishment of these belts of extremes of climate as something that had occurred during the time of man, then it was possible man or man's ignorance might have been in some part responsible for their creation. Few sects or dogmas disputed this.
Broad agreement was all very well, though. It didn't prevent bitter disagreement over fine points of interpretation or theory. These disagreements had, in their time, been responsible for countless hangings, burnings, torture, pogroms, a dozen or more wars and all the other trappings of theological dispute.
Phaid found that his head was whirling. It must have been the heat. Politics and religion were usually things that he avoided even thinking about. His ancestors had had a mystic side to their natures, but most of that had been knocked out of him by his early wanderings in a rough world. His mouth was dry and the heat was close to unbearable. He felt as though he was burning up. It was difficult to breath and his mouth tasted like well walked sand. Just as he felt that he was starting to lapse into hellish red hallucinations, a voice came from the lower bunk.
'Manny?'
Phaid leaned over the side of the bunk. His voice was a rasping croak.
'Yeah?'
'You sound like you're having a hard time.'
'I can't take much more of this goddamn heat.'
'You never ride steerage before?'
'Yeah, but I don't remember it being as bad as this.'
'You never do . . . afterwards.'
'Maybe.'
'Could you use a drink?'
Phaid sat up, almost banging his head on the ceiling.
'I could drink anything.' He swung out of his bunk, dropped to the floor and squatted down beside Makartur. The clansman was holding a ceramic flask with silver mountings. He handed it to Phaid, who was relieved to discover that the big man wasn't against drinking. Phaid took a swallow and only just stopped himself gagging.
'Sweet Lords, what is this stuff?'
'It's a tight little brew they make back where I come from. Just the dew from a good still and a few herbs. It's a drink that makes men.'
'You also eat babies for breakfast?'
The big man's grin broadened."
'We never go that far. You don't want to believe the stories you hear.'
Phaid offered him the flask back, but Makartur shook his head.
'If you want to get some sleep, you'd be best advised to take another couple of pulls.'
Phaid took a deep breath and once again put the flask to his lips. The liquor went down a little easier, but he knew it'd be a long time before he actually developed a taste for Makartur's 'tight little brew'.
'I got to tell you, Mak, that's powerful stuff.'
'Aye.'
Phaid straightened up, aware of a slow burning sensation in his belly.
'I think maybe I'll lie down and see what happens.'
'Just a couple of wee things before you go.'
Makartur was no longer grinning.
'What are they?'
'The first is that 1 know you saw my amulet earlier.'
Phaid was suddenly ill at ease.
'And?'
'And I know a traveller like you has maybe seen an amulet like it before.'
'That's possible.'
Phaid didn't like the drift of the conversation.
'I don't believe in getting between a man and his religion. You don't have to worry about me, Mak. I won't say anything.'
'So you know about the old faith, do you Master Phaid?'
'A bit, it doesn't worry me none.'
'So you wouldn't think about turning in anyone who worshipped in the old ways?'
'Hell no, Mak. Live and let live. I stand by that.'
Makartur nodded his head very slowly.
'Even when the temple priests are offering a reward for anybody who points the finger at one of us?'
Phaid took a step back.
'Wait a minute, I'd never do a thing like that. I don't have any dealings with the priests or their lousy money.'
Makartur smiled.
'I'm glad you said that.'
'You are?'
'Very glad, manny. If you had been entertaining thoughts of claiming a reward on me, you would never have lived to spend it. We who follow the old ways are not as scattered and beaten down as those canting priests of the Consolidated Faith would like folk to believe.'
Phaid let out a relieved breath.
'Like I said, I never get between a man and his religion.'
Phaid started to climb back into his bunk, but Makartur grabbed his leg.
'There is one other thing, Master Phaid.'
'There is?'
'I said I had a couple of things to say to you.'
Phaid nodded.
That's right, you did.'
Makartur tightened his grip.
'For as long as we are forced to be together, will you remember one thing?'
'I'll try.'
'Don't call me Mak. Where I come from it's a mark of disrespect. It's close to an insult.'
Phaid remained very still. He could feel the strength in the big man's fingers and was glad that they were gripping' his thigh, not his throat. He kept his voice as level as he could.
'I wouldn't want to insult you.'
'You'll remember.'
'I'll try . . . very hard indeed.'
Makartur suddenly burst out laughing and let go of Phaid's leg.
'You're a good boy, Master Phaid. You'd better get some rest.'
Phaid scrambled back into his bunk once again and mopped his brow. He now had more than the heat to make him sweat. Not only was he being roasted alive, but he also seemed to be sharing a very small cabin with a very large religious madman. Then there was the horrible liquor he'd been handing out. Makartur had claimed that it would send Phaid to sleep. As far as Phaid could tell from the taste, about the only thing that it was likely to do was to poison him.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Phaid started to feel drowsy. His eyelids were heavy, he found that it was hard to concentrate. He had a final alarming thought that maybe he actually had been poisoned, but then it hardly seemed to matter as he drifted into darkness.
Chapter 6
Phaid woke up with a start from a very deep sleep. It had been crowded with dreams that faded rapidly as he came back to consciousness. For a few seconds he was totally disorientated. He didn't even know where he was. A red-bearded face was staring into his and a powerful hand was shaking his shoulder.
'Whaa?'
Things started to fall into place. The face belonged to Makartur, but why the hell was he shaking him out of the first good sleep he'd had in days?
'What's the matter?'
'It's time for you to show a leg, my manny.'
'Why? What's going on?'
'It's time to go.'
Phaid suddenly noticed that the crawler was very quiet, and the temperature had dropped considerably. He struggled to sit up.
'Have we stopped?'
'Aye, manny, we've stopped.'
Phaid was confused.
'We can't be at Wad-Hasa Wells already.'
'Oh yes we are, my boy. You've been out cold for a day and a half.'
'A day and a half?'
'Slumbering like a baby. You must have been overdoing it.'
'I don't understand it, the last thing I remember is . . .'
Phaid bit his lip. The last thing he remembered was a bout of paranoid fear that Makartur had poisoned him. The clansman was busily strapping on his belt.
'What are you blathering about, manny?'
'Nothing.'
'Don't mess around then. They'll be throwing us off any moment. You don't get courtesy service when your crawl steerage.'
Still feeling like a z
ombie, Phaid managed to get his gear together and follow Makartur out of the cabin. As they descended through the crawler, they ran into Sarli on one of the middle deck companionways. Phaid smiled at her.
'You doing all right?'
'I suppose so.'
'You getting off?'
The girl shook her head.
'No. A fat old merchant from first-class came slumming. Now I've got enough to make it all the way to the end of the trail and stay drunk and by myself while I'm doing it.'
'You're lucky.'
Sarli grimaced.
'I guess you could call it that. Me, I thought I earned it.'
Phaid smiled and walked on. There was something about the girl that made him uneasy.
Makartur and Phaid emerged on to the exit ramp and immediately found themselves having to shade their eyes against pitiless, bright sunlight. Even Makartur seemed a little awed by the view that presented itself.
'Mother earth, have you ever seen such desolation?'
The desert stretched all the way to a line of low, rounded hills on the horizon. It wasn't a view without beauty, but it was hardly what either man really wanted to see. On the just tolerable edge of the hot winds, it was a dust bowl where no rain ever fell. A white hot sun beat down on an expanse of sand that was predominantly a pale ochre but here and there was splashed with vivid streaks of dark red, purple, blue and dull gold. Outcrop-pings of rock had been eroded by the sand into weird and twisted shapes that might have been petrified monsters, or the works of some insane sculptor. There was something almost frightening about the wild colours and tortured shapes. Most frightening of all, though, was that nowhere was there the slightest sign of any life.
A ramp bull bustled up to them.
'Okay! Okay! Let's get going! If you ain't got a ticket, on your way. Go watch the scenery from someplace else.'
He made the mistake of attempting to push Makartur on down the ramp. Makartur swung around and was about to grab the bull by the front of his stained brown tunic. Phaid quickly caught hold of the big man's arm. He noticed that two more bulls, part of the crawler's own muscle squad, were at the bottom of the ramp and starting to unclip their clubs from their belts. Phaid got between Makartur and the bull who'd done the pushing. He smiled ingratiatingly.
