Past Imperative_The Great Game

by Dave Duncan

  Eleal tired of the word game. Teaching D’ward to speak good Joalian was going to take much longer than she had expected. His accent was worse than a Niolian’s and he kept forgetting things she had told him. Just when she thought she was making progress, he would come out with absolute nonsense like, “Onions sings bluer gentle?”

  The day was hot and still. All her nights seemed to be full of wild adventures now, and her days needed for sleep. He was yawning too. She sent him off to the cave to rest, and he went without argument, moving as stiffly as a very old man. It would be cooler in there for him. She climbed up the bank and stretched out on a mattress of ferns under a tree.

  For a while her mind kept racing. Obviously Porith Molecatcher wanted her to leave and take her Liberator with her, and he could probably starve her into obedience. Somewhere farther from the Sacrarium would be much safer. Perhaps tomorrow D’ward would be strong enough to go.

  Go where?

  Go to Tion, of course! Her god was a just and benevolent god. He had saved her from Eltiana’s jail and Zath’s reapers. The Maiden had helped by sending Sister Ahn to kill Dolm Actor, but Irepit’s convent was many vales away, in Nosokland, wherever that was. Here in Sussland the Maiden’s grove had been destroyed. So that left Tion, and now it was safe for Eleal to rejoin the troupe, because Dolm was dead. So she would deliver the Liberator safely to Tion’s temple in Suss, and Tion would reward her.

  Reward her how?

  Paa, the god of healing, was another avatar of Tion. Tion, therefore, was god of healing as well as god of art and beauty. Tion could cure sicknesses—and deformities! Eleal drifted off to sleep, thinking about the reward she would like best of all.

  Porith shook her awake. The crazy old man was so excited he was hooting like a goose and drooling all over his beard. He made beckoning gestures, he tugged her hand. Grumpily she rubbed her eyes and stood up.

  Come! he said in sign language. Come quickly!

  She followed on dragging feet. The afternoon was half-gone, the air as hot as fresh milk. Porith kept running ahead and having to wait for her.

  Soon she realized that he was following a faint trail. Many branches hung across it, so it was never visible for more than a few feet, but it was an easier way through the forest than any she had found. It must be a path of his own making, for no one else would come here. It led past the Sacrarium on the side away from the cliff. Just beyond there, Molecatcher plunged through some bushes and made more wild whooping sounds.

  She followed, and found him capering alongside a tent. It was a small tent, of good linen, colored a very inconspicuous green, and well concealed in the undergrowth.

  “Oh, wonderful!” she cried, suddenly as excited as he. “I heard Gover Envoy invite T’lin to his tent! So whoever stole the bodies didn’t know about this! And the man who owned it is dead, so we can have it!”

  Apparently that was all the reassurance the old man needed. He knelt to fumble with the ties. Then he plunged inside on hands and knees with Eleal at his heels. The interior was a cavern of riches, straight out of The Fall of Tarkor. There were six or seven bales and packs there, leaving barely room for a man to lie down. Some spare clothes and a couple of straw hats lay on top of them, and a pair of good-looking boots, also. Eleal’s fingers itched to start exploring this wealth, but she knew she must wait until it had been transported back to Molecatcher’s cave. Gover Envoy just might have friends who knew where his camp was. He had mentioned a courier on a fast moa.

  They needed two trips to transfer all their treasure, and by the time they brought in the last of it, D’ward was awake and sitting beside the first load. Eleal was relieved to see he had not opened anything, because she thought she deserved that pleasure. It would be like a birthday feast, with presents. He seemed strangely interested in the packs themselves, studying the fastenings and the stitching. In some ways D’ward Liberator was very odd!

  She began with the lumpiest pack, because that seemed likely to be the most interesting. Most of the others smelled like food—bacon and onions and dried fish. Right at the top she found a bronze mirror and a razor. The Thargian had been clean-shaven, so these confirmed that the tent had belonged to him and not a reaper who might come in search of it. D’ward’s blue eyes had lit up at the sight of them, so she gave them to him as a gift. The soap she kept, but she would let him share.

  Next came two iron cooking pots. She gave those to Porith, because she would not be able to carry them away and he was host, and cook. He gibbered over them. And then—wonder of wonders! A leather-bound book—the Filoby Testament itself!

  She beamed in joy and held it up for the others to see.

  D’ward snatched it out of her hand.

  A printed book, by George! A hide-bound, gold-embossed beautiful book! Nightmares of the Stone Age vanished, the Renaissance dawned in certainty, and even the Industrial Revolution began to seem possible.

  Then the title jumped off the cover at him.

  Vurogty Migafilo

  Vurogty Migafilo! He flicked the pages. The language was jabber, but the letters were unmistakable. There were a few unfamiliar accent marks and obviously some of the pronunciations had changed—β was V, as in modern Greek—but overall the alphabet used was too close to classical Greek to be coincidence.

  He barely noticed as Eleal grabbed the book back from him. Creighton had said that the keys to the portals were very ancient. Edward had not understood the significance of that at the time. While the Earth had been inventing steam engines and hot air balloons and now aeroplanes, it had been forgetting the antique wisdom of the shamans and witch doctors. People must have been crossing between worlds for thousands of years. Not many of them, but enough to found races and influence culture. They could have brought nothing with them, no tools or domestic animals, nor even fillings in their teeth, but their memories had come.

  Someone had brought the art of writing from Earth to Nextdoor, or someone had taken the art of writing from Nextdoor to Earth. The Greeks were supposed to have copied the alphabet from the Phoenicians and improved it, but perhaps both had come from outside. The Greek alphabet had spawned the Latin and the Cyrillic and many others. This language of Eleal’s was written in yet another variant of the Greek alphabet.

  What else, who else, had crossed between worlds? For example, Edward thought—wishing he had someone to argue this with—Prometheus, who had stolen fire from the gods, might be an ancient memory of some interworld traveler. Perhaps many myths would make sense as muddled records of people vanishing mysteriously or appearing even more mysteriously. Suppose a man, or woman, popped out of nowhere into the middle of a druid ceremony at Stonehenge—would not the newcomer be hailed as a god?

  With a squeal of delight, Eleal found her name where someone had marked a passage. She showed it to Edward. He nodded and smiled, but his mind was busily chipping out a whole new view of human history.

  49

  BY EVENING, HE WAS FEELING MUCH STRONGER. WITH Porith’s fumbling help, Eleal had pitched the tent in thick shrubbery on the east side of the stream. She probably hoped that any reapers who came snooping around would not venture to cross the gully. The old hermit was so delighted to have his own house back that he had become almost jovial; at sundown the three of them ate a celebratory feast outside his cave.

  Edward’s appetite had come back with a rush. He suffered a stabbing toothache in consequence, but did not inquire about local dentists. His muscles and joints were recovering from their bruising, so he no longer moved like a centenarian. Later he managed to scramble up the bank for the first time, and then Eleal led him to the edge of the cliff.

  The sun had just set. The view was superb—not merely the breathtaking canyon and the waterfall plunging into it, but also the many little white farmhouses standing out clearly on the far bank as if arranged there by an artist. Each had its own cluster of heavy shade trees and lighter, feathery th
ings like palms or frozen green fountains. A background of fertile countryside faded off into distant foothills and a jagged frame of mountains. The land was prosperous, and obviously either tropical or subtropical, because the sun had been overhead at noon. It was better watered than his Kenya birthplace, he decided, and probably at a lower elevation—judging by terrestrial standards, which might not fit the case at all. Westward the ranges were a dark saw-edge against the last glow of evening. To the east the icy summits burned in gold and pink, and some of those peaks could match anything the Alps had to offer. Another range loomed over the forest behind him. The basin itself was about the width of the Mittelland at Lausanne, but closed off to east and west. The river was much bigger than the Rhine, the largest he had ever seen.

  Waving an all-encompassing arm, Eleal explained that this was Something-Suss, which he assumed was what Creighton had translated as Sussland. When Edward asked the names of the ranges to north and south, they were both Something-else-Suss. The river was Yet-Another-Suss, and so was the little town he could see in the distance. He had a lot to learn.

  Still, the town was promising. A gleam of reflected light there was somehow related to another god, Tion—a good god, apparently. Nice to hear that some of them were not horrors! Having discovered that Eleal had strong religious convictions, Edward had resolved to be very cautious on the subject of gods.

  She indicated that tomorrow she was going to take him to that Town-Suss. He could manage that, he thought, five miles or so. Then he asked with gestures about crossing the canyon and learned that there would have to be a detour to the east, to Maganot. Still thinking in English, he translated that to Village-Not…Notham? Notting? Notby?

  “Magathogwal,” she explained, pointing the other way, and then, “Magalame, Magajot.”

  He pointed straight down. “Query name.”

  “Ratharuat.”

  Ratha must be yet another geographical prefix, perhaps meaning “forest” or “place smaller than a village” or “old ruins, nobody lives there now.” Ruat? That name sounded familiar, but his memory was reeling from overwork and he could not place it.

  The two of them sat in contented silence as the stars came out. Birds or something were making a strange racket in the trees and once in a while his stomach would rumble loudly, provoking Eleal to giggles. Then she began to sing. He could not follow the words, but the melody was pleasant. She was a competent little songstress.

  She was a pretty girl, too, although she would never be a classical beauty; her nose tipped up and her hair was more frizzy than curled. She had a quick smile and a remarkable self-confidence. He suspected she was short for her age, but of course he was only guessing, for the local population might be stunted by twentieth century European standards. He wondered what had happened to her leg. It could not be rickets in this climate.

  The song ended. The singer glanced up to see what her audience thought of it. Edward clapped, not sure if that was the local sign of applause. Apparently it was, because she beamed. On impulse he smiled, took her hand, and squeezed it. She blushed. He released it quickly, recalling Miss Eleal’s dramatic tendencies. She was probably old enough to start having romantic notions also. He had no wish to provoke an embarrassing juvenile crush. Call me in five or six years, perhaps.

  Five or six years? Five or six days ago, he had been on the boat train from Paris. Now he seemed to be stranded for the rest of his life on a world unknown, more exotic than anywhere Haggard ever Rode or Rudyard ever Kipled.

  The giant green moon, Trumb, seemed to have disappeared. A small blue light just above the sunset was Ysh, Eleal said, and then she became excited and pointed to a brighter, yellow star. That was Kirb’l, and apparently seeing Kirb’l was an honor, or a good omen, or something. Kirb’l Tion, she said, and gestured toward Suss town.

  Gods again! To change the subject Edward asked about her home and parents. She evaded the question and asked about his. They still conversed in baby talk and gestures, and that could become a bad habit. He decided to give himself one more day of that and then insist on using proper grammar.

  The stars were lighting up with tropical swiftness. He could see the Great Bear low over the mountains to the northeast and Arcturus above that. He asked Eleal about their names, and again she became evasive. She would never admit ignorance. He wondered what other planets might circle this sun, but did not embarrass her by asking, and he probably could not have made himself understood anyway. He located Vega and the Summer Triangle. Then he turned around and peered up the stream gorge, which gave him a south view through the trees. There was the Centaur, which the guv’nor had pointed out to him when he was only—

  He uttered a grunt of astonishment that made Eleal jump. Impossible! These were the stars of Earth.

  Even before he went to sleep, he knew he was in for trouble. In the middle of the night it arrived. He crawled out of the tent without waking the girl.

  Don’t drink the water—but if he was going to be stranded on Nextdoor for the rest of his life, he must drink the water, and his insides would just have to learn to deal with the local germs. He’d suffered from the traveler’s curse in France and in Germany and lived through it, but he was not familiar with the interplanetary variety. What he needed now was a good dose of codeine, Dover Pills. Without that he might be in for a severe case of Delhi Belly.

  By morning he had a corker.

  There was no question of leaving that day. He could barely crawl in and out of the tent, and eventually he stayed outside. He tried to reassure Eleal, but lacked the strength to explain the cause of the problem. She fussed and worried and prayed. She brought him water to drink, and made some thin soup, which he sometimes managed to keep down. Her concern was very touching, and she demonstrated remarkable patience at just fanning flies off him, although she was annoyed that he would not continue the language lessons. Another day ought to do it, he thought.

  The next day he was running a high fever and things were looking dicey. His first term at Fallow he had caught every disease known to childhood, although he must have had as much inbred immunity as any native-born English boy. Those mumps and measles and whooping cough would have killed his Embu friends at Nyagatha. He had inherited some resistance to English diseases, and he was better fitted to survive as an adult in Africa than any homebred white man, but he was not equipped for Nextdoor.

  He began to wander in and out of delirium, never recognizing it until it was past. He did not want to die here, so far from home and everyone he knew. Where was home? Not Fallow. Nor Nyagatha. Certainly not Uncle Roly’s house in Kensington. How ironic to escape the hangman’s noose only to succumb to fever on another world! Oh, Alice, Alice! Perhaps he would have fallen to a German bullet had things turned out otherwise, but that would at least have had a certain dignity. Interplanetary disease had killed H. G. Wells’s Martians.

  Little Eleal was distraught, not knowing what to do. He tried to tell her that she was doing everything possible, but he could remember nothing of the language except her name. Alexander the Great had sighed for new worlds to conquer. They would have killed you, Alec.

  O, brave new world! Lost world.

  He did not want to die.

  The next day he was weakening fast. The girl brought him drinks and washed away his sweat and held his hand. He was immeasurably grateful and could not tell her so. She was a gritty little thing. He heard her berating the old hermit. He tried to say that she should leave and go home to her parents. She didn’t understand the King’s English, poor child.

  A whole new world and he was going to die without ever seeing more than a few square feet of it. He had so much wanted to find Olympus and talk to people who had known his father.

  Creighton came to see him, fading in and out of illusion, talking of strangers.

  Mr. Goodfellow came, sorrowfully. “I can do nothing, Edward,” he said, clutching his beaver hat. “I have no
authority here.”

  Why was the girl still hanging around? What was her interest in Edward? The way she bullied old Ben Gunn was really very funny. What day was this?

  That night—whatever night it was—a monstrous thunderstorm lashed the jungle, while Edward raved in delirious arguments with Inspector Leatherdale, trying to convince him that miracles still happened and could open bolted doors. Poor Bagpipe Bodgley came by and talked of the Lost World, asking how the story had ended.

  Then he found himself in jail, explaining to the doctor that his broken leg had been cured by a minor god left over from Saxon prehistory.

  Eleal was praying again.

  “That won’t do any good!” he said crossly, aware that she could not understand.

  “Well, you never know, old man,” Creighton said. “Let’s just hope nobody hears, that’s all. I told you that they’re not gods, but may behave like gods. But even if somebody does hear, well they’re not all horrors.”

  “Did you give my love to Ruat?” Mr. Goodfellow asked.

  His fever broke that night, and he lived. By morning he was lucid, but as weak as a newborn babe. He watched the dawn steal in through the leaves and smelled the new, wet scent of a cleansed world; he was infinitely grateful just to be alive.

  He hoped he could stay that way, but obviously it would not be easy. Daylight had brought enlightenment. Sometime in his madness he had worked out who the opposition was, and why the Service referred to it as the Chamber.

  The Chamber of Horrors, of course.

  He was young and superbly fit, and he recovered quickly. One day he was a raving maniac and the next he was sitting up and very shakily trying to shave himself. The looking glass showed him the narrowness of his escape. That afternoon he began the language lessons again. The next day he was managing small walks.