It was only when I stopped to catch my breath as I reached the top of the talus that I noticed Maruman had followed me. Since there was no stopping the cantankerous old cat from doing what he chose, I merely offered him my shoulder. He accepted with alacrity, whereupon I made the mistake of asking why he wanted to go up. His claws sank in deep enough to prick me through my vest for an answer. We had left off our coats, for they would be too bulky to climb in.
I looked up and discovered that I could now see only the bulge that was the bluff. The building atop it was completely obscured. I had never made such a steep climb and I thought again uneasily of the abyss.
Ahmedri went up first and alone, secured rope and sent it down for Swallow who scaled it and then half hauled me up to him as Ahmedri scaled the next stretch. Then he dropped down another rope for Swallow. We left the ropes tied in place for the descent. I could not have managed without them, for in one stretch the face of the mountain was so perpendicular it was as if a knife had cleaved through it. I could not think how the tribesman had scaled it without rope, for there were no sizeable juts or rocks sticking out that he could have used for foot or handholds. It was not until we had almost reached the bluff that I saw with incredulity the way that Ahmedri made a fist to secure his hands in the narrow cracks that criss-crossed the cliff face. Several times my heart was in my mouth as he raised himself up in that way, one arm sometimes bearing the whole weight of his body hanging from a fist he had jammed in a crevice. I could not imagine where in the desert lands he had learned such a skill, but even if I had been inclined to ask, I would have had no breath for it.
By the time we reached the lip of the bluff every muscle in my arms and legs was burning and I could do no more than crawl over it and scrabble away from the edge like a beetle before lying flat and resting my cheek gratefully on the smooth stone. Maruman stepped lightly from my shoulders, sat down neatly and began to wash himself thoroughly. It was several long minutes before I could summon the will or energy to lift my head and look at the building we had come to see, but when I did, it was so radiantly white in another errant beam of sunlight that I could not gaze at it for long.
‘Look,’ Swallow said for the second time that day, and I turned to see that he and Ahmedri were standing on the eastern edge of the bluff looking east. I got up on legs that trembled and went to join them. ‘I’d call it a twoday march to the edge of the range,’ Swallow said, glancing at Ahmedri.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘More like three, I’d say. If that is the way we are to go.’ He looked at me as if he expected me to speak, but instead, some impulse made me look down. My head spun as I saw the drop we had so laboriously ascended, and far below the abyss between the two mountains opened darkly like a gaping mouth.
Swallow put a casual hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I think that there used to be a way across the gap to that other mountain. Look at that flat place over there. That mound of broken stone forming the talus had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was a bridge.’ He knelt to examine the edge and announced triumphantly that something had broken away.
I gathered my wits and turned to look at the Taillard Observatory.
It was set atop a great stepped platform of the same white, very smooth stone as the building. I went up onto it, admiring the precision of the stone cuts and the angles. The building was centred on the platform so as to leave a terrace on all sides. It was beautiful and strange to my eyes, its walls rounded so there were no corners, and the roof was smooth and curved as an egg, save for the split I had seen from below. There was no glass in it, but some queer sort of machine stood just inside, blocking the way, so that it would be impossible to enter through it.
There was a door round the other side.
‘It’s locked,’ Swallow said.
I looked at the door, which seemed to be made of plast. There was a lever handle and a slot for a key under it. It did not look very complicated but, remembering the device set up on the door to Ariel’s chamber on Herder Isle, which had been set to explode if anyone tampered with the lock, I did not touch it. Standing well back and making the other two do the same, I formed a probe and delicately worked the lock with my mind.
‘Is it open?’ Swallow asked, and when I nodded, he reached past me to pull the lever. The door swung wide and we stepped into what seemed to be a single enormous circular chamber centred on a huge Beforetime machine fixed to the floor by massive metal and hard plast fittings. It was one part of this that was blocking the opening in the wall.
‘What did they observe here?’ Swallow murmured.
‘The moon,’ Maruman sent absurdly, casting a brief malevolent look at the slice of sky visible through the split in the roof before padding over to sniff at the giant device fixed to the floor.
‘Jacob scribed that these machines and devices would help him to locate the city of his dreams,’ I said. ‘Maybe this was built to let people look at other places.’ I thought for a bit then I said, ‘He seemed to think his dream city was a settlement that had grown since the Great White. Apparently there were a number of settlements east of the mountains in the Beforetime and he wanted to be sure it was the one he thought it was.’
‘Pellmar Quadrants,’ Swallow said, nodding.
I frowned, remembering something else. ‘He said Hannah had once visited it because she was interested in the research being done there.’ I looked at him. ‘I wonder what sort of research it was.’
He did not answer for he was watching Ahmedri, who had found a metal ladder set into the wall of the building, and was climbing it. When the Sadorian had reached the top, he looked down and called out that there was a walkway and it looked like there was another one above it.
‘The walls must be thick,’ I muttered, as Swallow followed the tribesman up the ladder. Examining the walls, I discovered there were sliding panels opening to small bedchambers, a little cook room, transparent bathing rooms and even one of the strange relieving chambers the Beforetimers had built. All of the cloth and paper had long since perished but there were several pots in the kitchen that were far lighter than those sold by jacks in the Land, and none of them had a spot of rust. Their handles were cracked and broke away, but new ones could easily be carved. I set these by the door to take with us, along with a very light piece of shining silver matting that would serve as a ground sheet and a knife with a metal handle that was still sharp. There were places where there had been shelves fixed, but they had long fallen to dust along with whatever had stood on them. Obviously people had lived here but it must have been a strange existence, dwelling in a remote place and observing distant places such as the settlement called Pellmar Quadrants.
I abandoned my search and went back to look at the device fixed to the floor. There were parts of it that looked like parts of the machines that the teknoguilders had found in Beforetime ruins, but I had never seen anything as large at Oldhaven. I discovered a set of long narrow levers protruding from near the base of the machine where there was a seat fixed to the ground, and prodded at them gingerly, thinking they might be controls. Nothing happened. Climbing up it, I found another phalanx of levers and buttons and tiny glass windows with numbers behind them, but they gave not the slightest hint of the machine’s function. Higher up, there was a computermachine with a seat built into it. The seat covering and padding had long decayed, leaving no more than a metal plate to sit on. I sat down.
There was a small spyglass protruding from the end of the device right before me. I put my eye to it but saw only darkness. I touched a few of the panels and numbers and even a few keys, but nothing happened. As far as I could see, the device was dead. Was that how Jacob had found it? Had he come here at all, I wondered. He had intended to do so, but how could an old man have made that climb? Unless Swallow had been right about there being a bridge.
Ahmedri called out and I turned to see he was now on the ground examining the floor by the split in the wall. ‘There are words scratched into the stone,’ he said, looking up as I approa
ched.
I dropped to my knees and my heart began to pound as I read the neat, spiky script.
My darling Hannah, nothing works here, but my instrumentation is picking up a strong power source to the north-east. That is the direction in which the Pellmar Quadrants lie. I remember I suggested to Cassandra that she had better carve her messages to the future in stone. She said only a dinosaur like me would come up with such an idea. Now here I am playing dinosaur, for any note I would write will soon perish in this place. There is so much I would say but this is a tedious method of writing a letter and I fear the little neochisel I am using is near blunted. So I will say it has been a terrible, bleak journey and the only thing that kept me from despair was the thought of you. These mountains, once so beautiful, are now utterly barren and so contaminated that they glow at night, but I am safe enough in my biohazard suit and my little hover still serves me well. I hope it will continue to do so, at least until I leave these poor blighted peaks and cross the worst of the plain between the mountains and Pellmar. I leave this message so that you will know which way I have gone.
My dearest love, I am yours, always, Jacob O.
‘It must have been a remarkably delicate chisel to scribe that,’ Swallow remarked, when I sat back, for he had come down to see what we were doing.
‘North-east,’ I muttered.
‘He thought the city he dreamed of was there,’ Ahmedri said quietly. ‘But it may not have been so.’
‘It matters not. He is our destination, not the city he seeks. For he has Cassandra’s key with him and we must follow in his tracks because he might not have reached it.’
We all gazed down at the carved words in silence for a time, thinking our own thoughts. Then Swallow heaved a sigh and said we ought to go back down.
‘Soon,’ I murmured. ‘We have a little time and there might be something we can use. I found some pots and a good knife.’
The others moved away and I wondered why I was delaying. The sooner the climb was done with the better. The last thing I wanted was to delay so much that we would end up having to descend by moonlight.
24
I went outside onto the white terrace and was delighted to find that the dark clouds had again opened up to let the late sunlight shine down on the bluff. After the chilly interior of the observatory, the light seemed very bright. I squinted against it and turned to study the strange building. It was almost as bright and I went round the terrace to the shaded side, wondering why the Beforetimers had built it. I thought of the deadly weapons that had flown up from the hole where the Skylake had been, and wondered if the people who had been here had seen them fly, and had understood what they meant.
‘She came here,’ Maruman said dreamily, padding along at my side.
I looked down at him. ‘Hannah?’
‘Hannah carrying Hannah’s bones and following her mother’s dream,’ Maruman sent. I frowned, the nonsense he was talking making me uneasy.
‘There is nothing but a lot of devices that mean nothing to me,’ Swallow said, coming up behind me. I gathered my wits and turned to him as he added, ‘I brought a few small things that would fit into my pockets but whether we can figure out how to work them or not, I do not know. The pots and the knife you found were the best of it.’
Ahmedri came out too, and closed the door behind him. Hearing the heavy thud, I wondered if anyone would ever open it again. The tribesman went to stand on the edge of the terrace gazing east. Was he thinking of his brother? He must question his presence on the expedition, and yet, in a strange way, he had become part of it. An expedition always had the effect of bonding even very different people, because in the end, you had to rely on one another. I had so completely accepted the tribesman by now that I spoke freely of my quest in front of him, for if he had not been chosen by Atthis, then she had surely foreseen that he would go with us.
‘Do you hear that?’ Swallow asked suddenly.
I looked at him. ‘Hear what?’
‘Water,’ he said.
I listened and realised he was right. I could hear the faint but unmistakable sound of running water.
It did not take us long to locate the source in a jumble of rocks where the mountain face rose up from another tumble of cracked stone forming a small talus at the rear of the bluff. It looked as if it was the result of a landslide, perhaps the same one that had caused Swallow’s bridge to fall, and maybe both had been the result of tremors in the mountains resulting from the Great White.
But when we had shifted enough stone, I was astonished to see that the water was dribbling from the mouth of an enormous pipe protruding from the mountain, half buried under rubble. ‘Why would the Beforetimers want such an enormous pipe to bring water here?’ Swallow wondered.
‘What purpose was there in any of the things done by the Beforetimers?’ Ahmedri asked softly.
Swallow drank the mouthful of water remaining in his bottle and filled it from the pipe, being careful not to splash his hands.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I want to find out if it is tainted. I’ll ask Darga to sniff it when we return. Speaking of which, we ought to head back now. It’s getting late and the wolves always come at sunset.’
He was right, though in fact Rheagor had not mentioned sunset this time. The sun set before we were all the way down, but the moon had risen and the clouds had frayed enough that there was plenty of light to see by. But Swallow had been right about the climb down being worse in its own way than the ascent. It was utterly unnerving to go backwards, feeling for footholds and climbing slowly down the rope. Whenever I made the mistake of looking down for a foothold, my eyes were drawn to the black abyss, even though our descent was above the talus. I could hardly bear to think about Ahmedri, who was untying the ropes before climbing down.
I had obviously irritated Maruman with my fears, for he leapt down from my shoulders the second we reached the talus. My relief was so great that I felt nauseous and I sagged against the mountain face, wondering if the rubble under my feet truly had once been a bridge. The thought made me look up as I straightened and at that same instant, the flat stone I had stepped onto pivoted and tilted under my weight, sending me stumbling sideways. I might have caught myself if I had not been looking up, and it might have been no more than a fall with grazed knees and a split lip, except that when I landed, the whole pile of rubble, which had seemed so stable, began to shift under me. Half stunned from the impact of the fall, I had time to see the startled face of Swallow, who had already reached the plateau, and then somehow I was spinning so that I was looking at Ahmedri, who had delayed at the top of the talus to stow his ropes. I saw him shout something and point, but the rumble of the stones was too great for me to make it out. Then I was facing down again and my heart leapt into my mouth, for I could see that the stones were flowing down into the dark abyss between the mountains.
I reached desperately for a boulder to stop myself, but it was no use for everything was moving around me and under me. I opened my mouth to scream, but something struck me hard on the temple, and night fell like a black curtain.
I dreamed that Ceirwan and the enthraller, Freya, were looking at me in consternation and pity.
‘Are ye so sure she’ll nowt return when she has done whatever she went to do?’ Ceirwan asked.
‘Maryon said that she will never return to Obernewtyn or the Land, and that, leaving, she knew it.’ It was Rushton’s voice, coming from my mouth. I must be experiencing another of his dream-memories. He went on in the same hard, despairing voice. ‘I would have ridden after her but Maryon forbade it. She said my task is to go to the Red Land and free the slaves there. I told her there were others who could take my place on that journey and she answered that it was not so. None would do what I would do.’
‘That mun have been hard,’ Ceirwan said.
‘Harder to obey her words than to hear them,’ Rushton answered.
‘I meant that it mun have been hard fer E
lspeth,’ Ceirwan explained gently. ‘She had to walk away without saying a word to you or to any of us. When I think back on those last days afore she left, I sensed there were somethin’ weighing on her heart, but she was never one to invite personal questions. And then other times I thought I mun be mistaken, fer she seemed so happy.’
‘She seemed so to me as well, and she spoke with such certainty of the time we would have together on the journey to the Red Land, as if she looked forward to it as eagerly as I did. It is hard to believe that she knew she would never set foot on the ships.’
‘Elspeth was no liar,’ Freya said with conviction. ‘I think if she had known she must leave before the ships departed, she would not have mentioned the journey. Maybe she did not know it till the last minute.’
‘I would like to believe that,’ Rushton said, ‘yet in the end it does not matter whether she lied or not, or why. She is gone.’
‘It matters,’ Freya said.
Ceirwan said earnestly, ‘Rushton, surely ye ken that Elspeth loved ye no less than ye love her. I dinna doubt that she suffers right now, even as you do. In fact it may be that her sufferin’ is the greater because it was she who had to leave you without a word.’
‘Am I to be soothed by the thought of her sorrow?’ Rushton asked, and there was pain and anger in his voice. He looked down so that I saw his hands, clenched into fists on the table. ‘Perhaps the worst thing to know is that even if she had told me what she must do and sworn she loved me with all her heart and did not want to leave me, still she would have gone. Nothing I could do or say would have stopped her.’
‘Then maybe this, however painful, was the better way,’ Freya said, reaching out to lay her smaller hand over Rushton’s. He looked up into her kind face. ‘You are strong and great-hearted, Rushton. I knew it the first time I saw you ride up on your horse, when you spoke to my father and bade him sell me to you. And because of that, you will do what you must do even as she does.’
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