Cloud Castles

by Michael Scott Rohan

  Alison alone seemed close to losing her temper. She paced the floor furiously between one little group and another, occasionally stopping at our corner of the massive scarred table to report, or rummage around in the snowdrift of maps and old reports, describing what little was known of the Brocken. I’d read them all at least twice, and I was struggling not to feel left out. It was good of the Knights to have us in here at all, and several of them had come to consult us at length about our experiences. But nobody had actually asked our advice, or said whether they’d accept my offer, and I couldn’t help chafing at the bit.

  ‘Well, they’re agreed on one thing!’ was Alison’s verdict. ‘Whatever’s to be done, we have to have more of the Order. Most of those here can’t leave. There must always be a guard, in case of some direct assault on the City, or even the Graal itself. And they’re mostly old or young, with too much experience or too little. So whatever we decide on, we’ll need others. But that’s not easy. Most are committed to the Graal’s battles, scattered throughout the Spiral. The others are out on the search still, only to be contacted when they check back with us or pick up a message somewhere safe like the Tavern; we could put them in danger otherwise, break their cover. All that’s too slow. And beyond that …’ She kicked at the pale marble floor. ‘The Knights are divided. They like your plan, yes, but some want to wait till the Graal chooses to answer, build up our forces meanwhile, but wait. They say messing with the Brocken is so appallingly dangerous we daren’t take chances, we should concentrate on defending the Heilenberg; and I can sympathize with that. But the others know it, too – and they’re ready to act as we want, to go after the Spear.’

  ‘Then why don’t we?’ I said rebelliously. ‘The Graal can stop us if it wants to, can’t it?’

  She winced. ‘Yes, but what then? We’re not puppets, you know, or slaves. The Graal doesn’t choose us for that – would you? It knows it’s not infallible, either. It selects us as well as it can, it helps us make the best of ourselves, it shares its power with us – and it trusts us. More than that, it makes us trust ourselves. Sometimes it makes us act for ourselves, stand or fall, because guiding us would interfere somehow.’

  ‘So it might not stop us even if we were doing the wrong thing?’

  ‘Not if we were the only ones who’d suffer, and the responsibility was ours. If we all agreed on something that was wholly wrong, then it might intervene, I think.’

  I nodded. ‘I begin to follow its way of thinking. Get the right people to begin with, motivate them, give them the skills and the targets and then let them do the job. Sound management theory, as far as it goes. But there’s another golden rule: Be there when they need you. Either it really has gone doolally, or it thinks you have the answer already.’ Even as I said it something filtered through the boredom and the bafflement and the dull besetting ache. ‘Wait a minute! Maybe you do. You can’t get through to the searchers – but there must be some you can pull out of the fighting line. How about them?’

  Alison looked very dubious. ‘Maybe a few – but it’s no good, we can’t contact them either. The Graal could, in an emergency, if it had the Spear. The Spear can carry its power far afield; it concentrates and directs it, it can guide our people through the deepest shadows of the Spiral, between the places and times that cast them. Without it the Graal’s influence is confined to its own location, to this realm. Any messenger we sent would be as lost as you were that night of the riots – and in even more danger. Sorry, Steve—’

  ‘No, hold your horses! I hadn’t finished. All right, you can’t recall them. Why not go out and pick them up?’

  ‘Uh-huh!’ exclaimed Jyp, with a snap of the fingers.

  ‘What—’

  ‘Sure. You got me. Name of Jyp the Pilot, remember?’

  ‘He can speed you places not yet i’ your dreams!’ chimed in Mall. ‘Here, there and any the where! The swirlings of the Spiral are his playthings, its wastes his chessboard!’

  ‘Yes, but we haven’t any large ships in port, and we’d need to go to some places nowhere near the sea—’

  Jyp’s fingers drummed loudly on the table. ‘So? You got those damn great dirigible things there.’

  Alison blinked. ‘Those? Could you—’

  ‘Anywhere. After a goddamn whirlybird those things’d come easy. Only it gets harder the longer we delay here.’

  Something like an echo of that strange shock ran through my bones. It left a kind of grim relief, like the loss of a broken tooth, the sick throb overtaken by a keener but more wholesome pain. ‘That’s it!’ I snapped, loudly enough to stop every voice in the hall. ‘That’s what we’ll do!’ I rounded on the elderly Knight who’d come with Alison. ‘Torquil, isn’t it? Is that bird down there ready for flight?’

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘But who would captain it? We are vowed to the city’s defence. We are too old to be much use outside.’

  ‘You can spare me,’ said Alison. ‘I was only waiting to be assigned. And these three, Steve, Mall and Jyp, each one of them’s as good as another Knight in their way. And as trustworthy.’

  I expected Torquil to baulk at that. He only nodded, judiciously. ‘So I gather. Very well, then. I’ll put it to the rest—’

  ‘No time,’ I said sharply, feeling prickling fires spring up at the back of my neck, invading my mind. ‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but we’ve wasted enough already. This is it, isn’t it? This is the way we can both do something and leave the City guarded. So that answers both parties. What’s the quickest way down to the far bank?’

  The old man – how old? – looked at me for a long moment, then he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No need.’

  The fires roared up. ‘Now you listen one damn minute—’

  His gesture stopped me. ‘I meant, it would be quicker to bring it here. Raoul! The telegraph, if you please. My compliments to Ritter von Waldestein, and will he have the Dove brought over to the West Tower. Have them check the stores on the way over. And in the meantime,’ he added, ‘we will – inform – the others.’

  ‘You mean you agree? They’ll agree?’

  His smile was wry. ‘You leave us hardly a choice. The Lady Alison commands this expedition for us, she will find our brothers and sisters. But who is its real leader – of that I’ve little doubt. I have known men like you before; I am glad I have met another.’

  ‘But … I started this!’ I blurted out. ‘I stole your bloody Spear, didn’t I?’

  ‘Who better to get it back?’ He smiled. ‘You didn’t realize what you did today, stepping on the floor of the Hall, speaking to the Graal. Not that it would have hurt you, willingly; but its very existence, so close, is a flame to those who lack fires of their own. The Lady Mall was warmed by it – but you, my friend, you were kindled.’

  He clicked his heels and bowed, then turned to the others clustered around him, speaking rapidly. He left me speechless. But maybe I did feel inspired, at that; or something more. Driven, fired – filled with fire. It was the memory of a shaft of flame that leaped and roared at the lightest touch, consuming, shrivelling. The Spear would be at the Brocken; well then, so would I, and anything or anyone between me and it had better watch out. I needed it.

  Through one of the tall windows I saw movement, and went to look. From the mast on the far bank the white dart shape of an airship swung up and out, cables trailing away and last of all the heavy mooring link. Its reflection glinted in the river as its propellers spun, gradually turning the weightless bulk in the air, swinging its nose around to face the island and the great hall of the Sangraal. Into my thoughts another bulk heaved up, as it had out of whatever hellish depths lay within that pentacle, the ridged spine of the Brocken; and it was greater by far. There was the Spear, and more; there was Katjka, if she had survived the transition. It was that thought that struck the real sparks within me. That was what the spear meant to me now. To get it back for these people, for this enigmatic Graal, for Alison – fine. But to have hold of that power,
to have a chance, the only chance of rescuing Katjka – that was what mattered. That was what fed the flame. Just let me get it in my hand once more …

  I jumped. Alison had touched my shoulder. ‘The Dove’s mooring at the Graal Hall. We’d better go; there are a lot of stairs.’

  I looked at Mall and Jyp. ‘This isn’t your fight, not anymore. It’s so dangerous I don’t even want to think about it. We’ll drop you off once we’ve got the Knights we need.’

  Mall’s face was wry. ‘Messire, did I not once tell you, upon a certain moonlit night, that I was sworn to set evil to rights, wheresoever I might set eyes upon it? And you laid the name of paladin upon me. A heavy burden, yet one I’d not willingly be discharg’d of.’ She caressed the worn hilt of her own great sword. ‘Then paladin let me be, and try not my pride with lesser esteem. That suffices.’

  ‘Yeah, and you can stick a hat on that an’ a pipe in its kisser an’ call it mine, too!’ spluttered Jyp, though his face was grim. ‘Thought we got through all this crap before. ‘Sides, how else’re you ever gonna find the Brocken, ’less you happen to trip right over it?’

  Racing to the rescue is all very well, but before we were more than half-way up that tower we were walking, sedately; by the top I was almost on all fours. We were already high up here, and the extra altitude of the tower-top made quite a difference. I hadn’t felt like this since Cuzco. Fortunately the ladder above was quite short, and my straining lungs lasted the course; also, I had the sense not to look down. Crewmen in striped overalls hauled me into the gently swaying gondola, and then, at a sign from Alison, swung themselves down to the tower-top.

  ‘Can’t ask them to come along on this,’ she sighed. ‘We’ll need all the capacity we have for combatants. Mall, would you haul up the ladder? Jyp, if you’d take the wheel – it’s much like a ship’s, but there are other controls, I’ll show you. Steve? We’re ready to go. If you wouldn’t mind signalling them to cast off …’

  I leaned through the doorway and waved down to the crewmen, who scurried to unlatch the moorings; it seemed almost sacrilegious having them hooked around that beautiful Gothic tracery. They swung free, I returned the crewmen’s salutes – and looked down.

  It was worse than my first look down from a swaying mast; it was worse than the first real rock face on the Eiger, with the glacier plunging away into nothingness and birds flying beneath my feet. The Dove swayed gently, her strange engines idling with little puffs of steam, just off the face of the tower. The lines of its sides struck down into the depths like arrows, carrying my mesmerized stare with them to the cobbles of the square and the tiny figures who clustered there. With the motion of the airship the red-tiled roof-tops surged beneath me like waves of blood, swelling and sinking in a peculiarly sickening slow motion. A strong hand caught my shoulder and pulled me back, just in time. ‘To spill one’s jetsam from the maintop’s poor enough, be the wind i’ the wrong quarter,’ remarked Mall, sliding the door shut. ‘But from this height and onto innocent heads ’twould be counted ill-bred, I think. And no way to sail off to war.’

  I sat back on the gondola’s polished wooden floor, closing my eyes for a moment. Behind us the engines altered suddenly from soft chugging to a pulsing thunder as Alison leaned on the throttle, though they were still far quieter than anything that powerful and steam-driven had a right to be. A flurry of startled pigeons fluttered past the window. The swaying stilled, and the Dove was no longer a helpless balloon-like bulk but a powerful nosing arrow, thrusting for the greyness above, the uncertainty of the Spiral, where the high peaks of stone and the ridges of shifting vapour became one, mountain-throne and mist-crest merged, each tracing the other’s contours, each joined by common paths, the most and the least solid meeting at the far horizons of the Spiral. Where they joined, where wide roads opened between the ocean and the air and archipelagos stretched out into the clouds, the mighty shadows of all times, all places stretched; and men who spied their way could pass between. Jyp, grasping the controls with his usual uncanny ability, gunned the throttle to a deep drone, tilted the nose and brought us circling upward till all trace of the ground fell away like debris in our wake, and overhead the clouds drew back, out flung arms of a receding land, reaching out to the islands of the sunset sky. I stood at the gondola’s forward window, and Alison joined me there. ‘Over the sunset,’ she whispered, and I wondered what had moved her to express it like that, so close to the helmsman’s call I’d heard first on another such desperate chase.

  ‘Over the airs of the Earth!’ I answered. And something of the old exultation did break out in me then, for all the gloomy cloud that overhung us and the danger of what was to come.

  Jyp caught it, and his old grin broke through. Mall’s smile flashed like the sun through an overcast, and she slapped the sheath at her thigh. ‘Over the airs of the Earth! We’re under way! We’re coming!’

  ‘Whither away?’ demanded Jyp, spinning the wheel experimentally. ‘Where first, Alison?’

  ‘North-west ten degrees,’ she said, quite quietly. ‘Then north a degree, and I’ll guide you in. The Urwald, the heartland forests of Europe. The late summer, fifteen years after Christ.’

  We came floating out of the clouds into darkness, a darkness more absolute than you could find almost anywhere in our light-polluted modern world. Alison had the wheel now, guiding us out of the shadows of the Spiral to the Core locations she knew. ‘In Rome Tiberius is still emperor,’ she said, steering us over hilly country whose skylines were a solid fringe of forest, broken only by a winding seam of dull silver. ‘Probably off in Capri just now. But down there somewhere his nephew Germanicus is leading a great campaign to drive the barbarians back from the Danube frontier …’

  It didn’t look as if anything could be stirring down below, let alone two sizeable armies, so dense were the trees under their faint carpet of chill mists. But Jyp, with his night eyes, suddenly pointed ahead, to where a tiny ember of red pulsed among the blackness. As we came closer we saw it was the wreck of a largish fort or township, walls reduced to stumps now but still crackling with fitful bursts of flame. We glided in under low power, almost brushing the pine tops, with our airscrews barely turning, and drifted like a cloud over the wreck below. Alison passed Jyp the helm, shot back the gondola door and swung down onto the unreeling ladder, waving. Under the forest shadow dull gleams of metal stirred, and a head crest of high red plumes. A tall centurion in scarlet cloak moved out, peering suspiciously, with a dozen or so men behind him. Then he flashed a hand in quick salute. ‘What’s this? Reinforcements?’

  ‘Recall!’ said Alison, thumping down onto the bushy slope. Within minutes, while she was still explaining, the centurion was chivvying the men up the ladder and through the gondola into the body of the machine. He sprang after them, loricated breastplate clanking and caligae squeaking, his hard face pale around the cheekbones, and tossed me a chest-thumping salute. ‘Caio’ Marco’ Fevronio’, centurio’!’ he announced, and then, with hardly an accent, ‘You’re Fisher? The Lady Alison, she tells me we follow you. Okay, here we are. But we need more than my handful if we go lay siege to the Brocken, eh?’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘More than one airship load!’

  ‘Not siege,’ I told him. ‘Blitzkrieg. Alison, where next?’

  ‘Westward,’ she said. ‘Western France, south-west of Paris on the Loire, summer of 732. Look for a battle and you’re there.’

  Even in the dark we couldn’t have missed it, even over our motors; the sounds drifted up to us, clanging, screaming, the snap of bows and the shrill neighing of horses. Here and there dark silhouettes capered against the light of burning buildings, widely separated; peasant farmsteads, I guessed. Alison was scanning the darkness, peering at the shoals of banners as they swept past the fires, following some kind of signals I couldn’t even sense. ‘Our man’s with the armies of Charles Martel, the Hammer, turning back the Moors,’ she said absently. ‘This was as far into Europe as they got.’

  I frowned. ‘Han
g on a moment. Around that time the Moors weren’t so bad, were they? They were the civilized ones, they built the Alhambra and all those other great buildings in Spain. More civilized than a load of Frankish head bangers, anyhow.’

  ‘It’s not what they were,’ she said. It’s what they could become. And don’t assume that cultured equals humane – the Moorish nobles treated their own people like dirt. It helped bring them down during the reconquest – there!’

  I couldn’t make out one group from another, but we went drifting down like a stray cloud over a group of startled Moors, who let out one unison wail and bolted. The group of horsemen harrying them also bolted, except for a small knot who held their ground, calmed their plunging horses, and came trotting over, evidently well aware of what we were. Alison spoke to them hastily, and we held our breath every time an arrow sang past. Somebody blew a complicated horn signal, and within moments we had five or six chunky blond men with braids and moustaches clambering up into the gondola, their short mail shirts and studded belts clinking as they climbed. ‘That’s all they could spare,’ Alison reported. ‘And they’re leaving their horses, Charles is short of them for the pursuit.’