And then, test this my word, and find it true.’
Having finished reading his sonnet, the Don rolled up the paper again, and looked longingly at the starship, awaiting Meg’s answer. He was not, of course to know that, far from being in the starship, Meg and the rest of the starship crew were bound hand and foot and lying in the library building in Oldtown, while outside Looters were performing domestic duties like lighting fires, filling pots with water, and sharpening knives.
Guinevere should of course have interrupted the Don before he had finished and explained to him that Meg had gone off with the others to get some copper for the Starship’s healing, but she had been so delighted to find that the Don wrote the sort of poetry which had been popular in her own youth, that she had let him finish. Guinevere did love a sonnet, particularly if it were very romantic and included a lot of playing around with words. Now that he had finished, of course, she was happy to bring him up to date.
‘I’m sorry, my lord,’ she said, ‘but the Lady Meg’s not here.’
‘Where then?’
‘She left at dawn with the others, my lord. They’ve hied themselves off to what folk hereabouts call “Oldtown”, some desert village, there to find a brazen statue for me to feed upon.’
The Don stared at the starship in horror. ‘Oldtown? They’ve gone to Oldtown? To take the statue?’
‘What ails thee Don? Is it not lawful so to do?’
The Don ran to his horse and he and Rocky mounted. ‘It’s suicide!’ the Don yelled, his calm leaving him. ‘Looter country at the time of Looters’ Moon! Get men!’ he yelled at Rocky, ‘get men and follow!’ and he rode like a madman out of the clearing as Rocky turned and galloped toward Trollcastle.
‘But they have weapons,’ Guinevere said to the empty clearing. ‘They went in all preparedness my lord.’ And then she sighed. ‘What a man,’ she said to herself. ‘What a man.’
53: SACRIFICE
Harold was now conscious again, and he and Zoe and Meg and Zachary were lying bound on the floor of the old library. Harold knew this library well. This was the library whose computer system he had spent so much time hacking into. The books were gone, and also the shelves, and the roof was half gone, but it was obviously the same room. Outside he could hear chanting and other sounds which seemed to indicate that the Looters were trying to get the statue of Colonel Light upright again. He wondered whether there might have been a better source of copper after all. Some of the older buildings in the city of Adelaide had had copper sheathed roofs, he now remembered, and of course there had been other statues down there. It was just that Colonel Light had been so close to hand.
Marlowe now walked in, and Harold glared at him. ‘You show up in some very funny places,’ he said in accusing tones.
‘Trust me,’ said Marlowe.
This incensed Zoe. ‘Trust you? You said you’d intercede with the Don for us, then told him to sell us up the river!’
‘That is absolutely normal behavior from anyone who says “trust me”,’ Zachary told her.
‘It’s disgusting!’
‘Trust me,’ Zachary told her.
Marlowe was looking at them with both his human eye and his metal one. The effect was infinitely disconcerting. ‘You’re in very deep trouble,’ he said. ‘That statue you cut down is the Looters’ god. They worship it.’
‘And what are you doing here with them?’ Zoe asked.
‘I’m going to try and get you out of this,’ Marlowe continued, ignoring her question, ‘but I have to know why you wanted the statue.’
‘That’s easy,” Zachary said, and then added ‘to tell you the absolute truth,’ as he tried to think up a convincing lie.
Harold cut in hard. ‘Why do you need to know that?’ he asked Marlowe.
‘Why do I need to try and get you out of this?’ Marlowe answered.
There was silence. Finally Harold said: ‘We wanted the statue for its copper content.’
‘What do you want the copper for?’ Marlowe sounded genuinely puzzled.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Harold told him.
Marlowe turned and walked toward the doorway. ‘Then I don’t understand why I should help you,’ he called to them over his shoulder.
‘Wait!’ yelled Zachary. ‘We, ah … we’re working a new kind of scam. We told the Don we had mines, we could supply him metal, you know? And we’re going around, picking stuff up….’
Marlowe had turned again to listen, but now he interrupted. ‘I don’t believe you.’ Then he paused. ‘Did the starship tell you to get it?’
They did not answer, all of them feeling the same compulsion not to tell Marlowe any more than they had to. It was not until Marlowe got as far as the doorway that Zachary yelled: ‘Wait!’ Marlowe stopped in the doorway but did not turn around. Zachary looked at the others, and they all nodded. They were whipped. Like it or not, they had to tell him. ‘You’re right,’ Zachary said. ‘The starship wants the copper.’ Marlowe turned now to look at him. ‘She’s sick. She needs it.’
Marlowe’s face set like stone. ‘You’re a liar. A Starship needs nothing. They’re like gods, they live forever,’ he said with the absolute conviction of the true believer, and then he walked out. They looked at each other. Things were not going so well. ‘So far, so good,’ said Zachary. This was an over-optimistic assessment, but to be fair to Zachary he probably knew that.
Marlowe had scarcely left the old library when the Eldest led a swarm of Looters in. They ignored Harold and Zachary, but dragged Meg and Zoe to their feet and began adorning them with garlands of flowers and, more surprisingly, gold chains and bangles which they took from their own necks and wrists. ‘Are you planning on doing anything about this?’ Meg said to Harold and Zachary, but all they could think of doing was to try once again to free their hands from the lengths of century-old non-biodegradable plastic rope with which the Looters had tied them up. The strength of their bonds was a credit to the ecologically unsound lasting qualities of the material, but no help in the present circumstances.
‘I never did get Guinevere to work out the eclipses,’ lamented Harold.
The Eldest was pleased with Zoe and Meg. ‘This best sacrifice. Got old woman, got young woman.’
‘I am sick,’ said Meg, ‘of people making cracks about my age. I am only 24, and…’ and here she made a shuddering noise because the Eldest had leaned close to inspect her teeth and she had inhaled a blast of his foetid breath.
‘Got good teeth for old woman,’ the Eldest told his followers.
‘What about us?’ Harold asked him. ‘What’s happening to us?’
‘You men, you nothing but foods.’ Harold was not sure whether to take this as a form of discrimination or as a lucky break. What he was sure of was that the situation was not getting any better.
Marlowe had returned, and now he moved to Zoe and Meg. ‘It gets very nasty after this,’ he said. ‘If you’ll tell me the truth, I could still try to help.’
‘We told you the truth!’ There was an edge of hysteria in Zoe’s voice. She had always believed she could fight her way out of anything, but she was now losing faith in that proposition by the second.
‘The starship got damaged in space, Marlowe!’ Harold yelled from the floor. ‘In a space battle. She needs certain elements to rebuild herself, and we were trying to get them.’
‘Starships are immortal. They can’t be damaged.’
‘That’s just Slarn propaganda. They fight wars out there in space, starships are destroyed…’
Harold broke off as Marlowe dropped to one knee beside him. ‘What do you know of the Slarn, Harold Lewin?’
Harold nodded toward Zoe and Meg. ‘What’s going to happen to them?’
‘Blood spilled. Burned.’
‘Why put the gold on them then?’
Meg had been listening this with mounting impatience. ‘Harold,’ she yelled, ‘I appreciate your passion for knowledge for its own sake, but would you please get on with the bargaining?’
‘They recover the gold from the ashes. Gold melted with a living sacrifice is highly prized among them,’ Marlowe answered, then asked again, ‘what do you know of the Slarn?’
‘We’ll tell you if you get us all out of here,’ Zachary said. ‘We know plenty.’
‘You could be lying.’
‘If we die, buster, you’ll never know.’
The Eldest was getting impatient. ‘Come! Dark One speaks. Dark One say in my brain … thirsty!’ He gestured toward the door, and the Looters bustled Zoe and Meg out as others picked up Harold and Zachary and carried them out to watch the show.
Outside in the street, the Looters had been busy. Colonel Light was now propped upright with scavenged pieces of heavy timber. In front of him, and between the two decorated posts, a firepot was burning along very nicely. Meg and Zoe were each tied to a garlanded post with the bundles of wood stacked around their feet. The mingled scents of roses and jasmine and burning wood were in their nostrils. Neither of them would ever smell those scents again without feeling the sudden grip of panic in the gut.
Harold and Zachary were now tied to two verandah posts which were still standing in front of the derelict general store. Zachary was pleased to see that he had sown doubts in Marlowe’s mind, for the village sorcerer was now arguing with the Eldest. ‘We could be making a mistake,’ Marlowe was saying.
‘No mistake,’ the Eldest said. He had a perfect theology for dealing with life. Dark One spoke in his head, he did as Dark One said, and whatever happened was Dark One’s will. There was no room in his closed system for the concept of error.
‘They’re friends of the Slarn,’ Marlowe said, ‘the sky gods.’
The Eldest’s eyes never left the preparations. ‘Dark One stronger than sky gods. If Dark One eat friends of sky gods, make him friend of sky gods too.’ And having spoken, he abruptly walked away from Marlowe, thus terminating the conversation.
Meg and Zoe watched the Eldest approach them. He stood before the firepot, and lifted his bone-handled sacrificial sickle to the statue of Colonel Light. ‘Dark One!’ The Eldest said. ‘We sorry we let blasphemers hurt you! You say now in my brain you thirsty, need blood. Old woman blood, young woman blood. We thank you for foods.’ Here he gestured toward Harold and Zachary, and then paused, and turned to face the Looter pack, who had arranged themselves in a solid phalanx behind him. ‘All eat!’ said the Eldest, cueing a ritual response.
‘All eat!’ answered the Looters.
‘All be foods!’ cried the Eldest.
‘All be foods!’ came back the response.
‘All eat all!’
‘Till all are one!’
‘Then Dark One eat all!’ intoned the Eldest.
‘Time end!’ answered his flock.
Harold looked at Zachary. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I once struck a religion like this in an on-line game.’
But the Eldest had not finished. ‘Dark One vomit all!’ he went on.
‘I guess everyone has a right to their sincerely-held beliefs, kid,’ said Zachary, still trying to get free of the plastic rope which bound him to the verandah post.
‘Time begin again!’ shouted the Looters.
The Eldest advanced on Meg. She closed her eyes. Courage, she felt, did not necessarily mean having to watch what was happening. She could smell his breath, and then she could feel it as he shouted, ‘Time begin again!’
The words had scarcely died away when she heard something else: the sound of a galloping horse. Her eyes snapped open. Down the centre of the street like a thunderbolt came a black horse with a dark rider. Sun glinted on black burnished steel as the rider leaned over his horse’s head, urging it on. With a fluid movement of his right arm, and a flash of bright steel in sunlight, the rider drew his sword. The Looters turned, and in their next breath the horse and rider struck them at full gallop, riding them down, driving them back in panic as now the swordsman leant over his horse’s neck, with his sword scything a path before him. The Looters broke, scattered and ran before the terrible black horse and warrior and the shining silver of the blade which now glinted red in the sunlight as it rose and fell without ceasing.
The Don was through the phalanx of Looters now, and turning his horse to pass through their thinning ranks again. The Eldest was trying to rally his people, screaming, ‘Only one! Blasphemer! Interrupt church service! Get! Eat!’ but his demoralized followers were still running before the dark horse and rider and that terrible death-biting sword.
Marlowe was behind Harold and Zachary, swiftly cutting their bonds. ‘You’re in my debt for this,’ he muttered.
‘Sure, sure,’ Zachary said.
‘Anything you say,’ Harold added, and they stumbled forward to release Meg and Zoe as Marlowe turned and ran toward one of the deserted buildings. The Eldest had now managed to regroup some of his followers. He was marshalling them, getting them ready to launch a human wave attack against the lone rider. The Don sat his horse, sword in hand, ready to charge when they came at him. He was not suffering from any misconceptions about his chances. Without looking around, he shouted, ‘Zachary! Harold! Get the ladies out of here! I’ll hold them!’
Harold and Zachary had gotten Zoe and Meg free, and were moving them back along the street when Meg baulked and turned. ‘Can’t leave him to face them alone!’
‘You heard him!’
‘Get them out of here!’ shouted the Don again. ‘Don’t make this be for nothing!’
The Eldest lifted his sacrificial knife. ‘Eat! Eat! Eat! Eat!’ began the chant, and then suddenly, from the other end of the village, a band of Troll men-at-arms, led by Ulf and Rocky, came galloping into view. The Looter line wavered. They were trapped between the Don and the rest of his men. They did not waver long. They turned as one person and fled for the safety of the buildings as the Trolls galloped down on them.
The Don turned his horse and rode at a walk to where the starship crew stood waiting. When he reached them, he slipped from the saddle, dropped to one knee and took Meg’s hand, and kissed it.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Just happened to be passing,’ he answered.
When he stood, she found herself shaking, wobbly on her feet, and it was only natural that she should lean for a moment against the Don’s armored chest. She became aware that Zoe and Harold and Zachary were watching this development with some interest. ‘What do you three think you’re grinning at?’ she snarled.
‘Nothing!’ they grinned.
Further down the street, Ulf and Rocky were leading the Troll men-at-arms in a house to house search for the surviving Looters. The search proved fruitless. The Looters, together with Marlowe and the Eldest, had vanished.
54: THE STARSHIP BURPS
A trapdoor lay open in the floor of the old Dalrymple Ponds library building. From the square dark hole emerged a burning wooden resinous-smelling torch, followed by the huge arm which held it, and this was followed in turn by Ulf’s face, scowling in disappointment. The Don stood waiting for his war leader’s report. ‘Like a rats’ nest down there, m’ lord. A maze of tunnels. We haven’t found them yet.’
The Don considered the situation, then made his decision. ‘Pull the men out. I’m not going to lose good fighting men in ambush to burrowing vermin.’
Ulf’s scowl of disappointment deepened. ‘Retreat?’
‘They’ll be far away by now. Pull the men out, we can deal with the Looters another day.’
The Don walked away from the trapdoor toward the doorway as Ulf climbed back into the hole bellowing, ‘Pull out! Count off and pull out! Make sure no one’s left in there!’
When the Don came back into the street, he found Zachary standing over the statue, which was now prostrate again, cutting it up with his Slarnstaff. The Don also noticed with a mild pang that the three other Slarnstaffs, which had been lying on the verandah of the ruined general store when he had last seen them, were now firmly in the grasp of Zoe, Harold and Meg. He also noted that Z
oe and Meg had not relinquished the Looter gold with which they had been adorned to make them suitable sacrifices to Dark One, and wondered what Father John and his bishop would have to say about that.
Across the street, two Troll warriors, detailed to the task by Ulf in an access of military neatness, were arranging in rows the bodies of the Looters killed in the Troll attack. The Don permitted himself a grim smile at this evidence of Ulf’s compulsive tidiness. As Zachary made the last cut to reduce Colonel Light to manageable pieces, the Don approached him. ‘I released you from my immediate service to provide protection for the Lady Henderson,’ he said coldly. ‘Explain to me why you placed her in deadly peril?’
‘Well,’ said Zachary, ‘it seemed…’
‘Don’t say “like a good idea at the time”,’ the Don said.
‘Now look, Don,’ Meg interrupted. ‘I’m my own person, I do what I like, I go where I like…’
‘Of course you are my dear and of course you do, but for the moment I’m speaking to your male protector.’
Suddenly all but a very small part of Meg’s gratitude to the Don for saving her from a gruesome death evaporated, and she looked at the sky in speechless rage. The nerve of this man! The Don was apparently willing to let the point pass now that he had reprimanded Zachary, being fully aware that Zachary’s lapse had helped in his wooing of Meg: by saving her life he might have opened up the channels he had feared closed as a result of his kidnapping her and trying to force her into marriage. He knew that if he were to win this courageous and lovely woman’s hand he must pay at least some lip service to the barbarous customs of the primitive society from which she sprang. So he simply said to Zachary: ‘Anyway, all’s well, you’ve had your revenge on the Looters by cutting up their god, so perhaps we can move out of here.’
‘Well actually,’ Harold said, ‘we need to take the statue back with us.’
This proposal seemed to puzzle the Don.
‘Guinevere needs the metal in it to heal herself,’ Zoe explained.
‘I mean, if you don’t want her blowing up in your back yard,’ Zachary added.
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