I looked back at the long rear gondola, which had a ramp for loading horses up into the body of the airship. ‘We could use some horsemen. We may need to get somewhere fast, through rough country.’
‘It’ll have to be later. They’re too precious in these early periods, they’d be missed. We won’t get them at the next stop either. That’s eastward, Jyp. To the shadows of Byzantium, and beyond. Out into its northern territories, the steppes by the Dnieper, spring of the year 1091.’
The centurion Marco nodded. ‘The Emperor Alexio’ Comneno’, where he defeats the Pecheneg horde. We go for Hastein, eh?’
Alison nodded. ‘If he’s still all right.’
There was no way we could approach that great circle of campfires and colourful tents across the rolling land. We came down swift but light, like a driven cloud, and Alison and Marco went to fetch their man while I stamped and fidgeted. The man who finally came clattering up the ladder was unexpected; I’d never seen anyone less Greek, a red-blond giant with a drooping handlebar moustache and embroidered fur-trimmed jacket over his scale-mail shirt, an immense axe over his shoulder. He saluted me the same way as the centurion, his English American-accented. ‘Hi. Hastein Hallgrimsson, Icelander. Deputy Spatharokandidates of the Varangian Guard. And, of course, Knight Commander of the Sangraal, at your orders. Even if it does mean that hell-hole. We could only spare ten, but there’s one Knight and four squires, five probationers serving as cataphracts.’
‘They’ll do!’ said Alison, herding a motley group up into the body of the ship. Some were blonds like Hastein, the five cataphracts short and dark and Greek-looking, with lighter mail and bows; all of them were slathered with drying blood, apparently not their own. A couple of them spared a curious glance for this non-Knight who was leading them, but they seemed as sombrely calm as their leaders.
‘Hey, I don’t suppose anyone’s got a cigarette?’ demanded Hastein.
‘Got some cigars someplace,’ said Jyp.
‘Not in an airship, as you very well know,’ snorted Alison. ‘You’ll have to excuse him, Steve, he’s from nineteen forty-eight, apparently they smoked all day and night then.’
‘The Graal helped me break the compulsion,’ sighed Hastein. ‘But after ten years back here drinking watered Greek wine you kind of revert. Besides, what harm’d just one do? The hydrogen doesn’t get down here into the gondola.’
‘No!’ said Alison firmly. ‘Take us out of here, Jyp, before he blows us all up.’
Jyp gunned the throttle gently and spun the wheel; Alison worked the control surfaces. ‘You’re heading north-north-west now, Jyp. To France again, the north-west coast in spring fourteen fifteen – the siege of Calais, under Henry the Fifth.’
Again the darkness, the smoke and flame and screams – and this time the thud and crash of cannon, wafting bitter powder smoke up to us as we glided over the glittering calm of the Channel. ‘And what’s this got to do with civilization?’ I demanded.
‘Unite England and France, that’s what Henry tries to do,’ answered the centurion sombrely. ‘And Bourgogne – that’s Burgundy. A good enough man by the ways of his time; better than the French Dauphin. But he dies young, his lords squabble, and then there is this Giovanna d’Arco, who puts the worthless Dauphin on the throne of France. Pfft!’
I stared down at the mayhem below. Even as I watched, a sheet of flame leaped from the city walls at one point, leaving a smoking gap in the parapet. What good could come from all that, however long-term? But perhaps things like that would have happened anyway; better there was some point to them.
Through noise and fire and a sleeting, miserable drizzle a few bedraggled figures stumbled towards the sea coast where we’d landed, all the Knights here could spare; soon there’d be Agincourt to fight. We lifted away and slipped back into the shadows cast by this land and era, long and bloody shadows; and at their extremity they mingled with others, and Jyp’s skilled hand slipped us between them, and out once more. Into the leaping flames of medieval Germany, to pluck bright-clad landsknecht mercenaries from lordly squabbles, Alison and I dashing into the midst of tramping ranks to find them, between wagons laden with pikes and loot. Into the blood-soaked mud of pastures by the Danube on a stifling August afternoon in 1526, as the vast Turkish armies rolled over the last diminished forces of Hungary, and thought them no more than an advance-guard. There, as thunder crashed and the skies opened, and the young king was swept to his death in the swollen river, we came on a little knot of riders, one of many making a last defiant stand. But when they heard our mission, they turned and came with us; and perhaps we did as much to delay the Turks, when they saw the Dove rising like a portent through the flickering lightnings. Into the sullen embers of Russia in 1609, shattered by years of famine and civil war after the death of Czar Boris, to pluck Polish cavalry from the invading army of King Sigismund – fierce, gallant men carrying curved sabres like those with which their descendants would launch one last charge against German tanks. From there to the same land a century later, as Peter the Great broke the Swedish Empire at Poltava, and King Charles fled to exile and death. In all these places smoke rose, blood fell; men lived, died, rose or were ruined, and the destinies of a continent were pulled and distorted, this way, that way, by forces no man caught up in them could ever have understood. Were we any better?
It grew harder now, as armies became more organized, to spirit away men who had often risen high in their commands and counsels; but we cruised unseen through the blizzards south of Moscow, to pull out some of the Russian irregulars who were harrying the retreating French, serf and nobleman fighting alongside one another to break the first great crack in Napoleon’s dream of dominion. We settled among the smoke and flame at Leipzig, on a warm October afternoon in 1813, to hail a platoon of Scottish infantry as they drove some remnants of French cuirassiers off the field. We rescued Bavarian lancers as they broke before the Prussian guns in the last days of the Austro-Prussian war, and Bismarck forged the future in blood and iron. We came down amid eddying clouds of gas to bring in French cavalry at Ypres salient, five or six of them clattering on board, men and horses alike draped in stinking impregnated coats and hoods. I watched them sombrely as they tore them off and hurled the hateful things away, and wondered at their calm demeanour. If they died with us, they would simply be thought to have vanished into the appalling rolls of death and disappearance in that shell-shattered morass. But if they survived, they might return.
Last of all – I thought – we glided among the north Italian hills, to pick up small groups of men and women in rough, torn clothes and battered hats, long knives in their belts and Stenguns and captured Schmeissers cradled in their arms, partisans fighting on when their armies had broken. I could imagine the same people coming off a mountainside in Greece or France, or out of the icy Russian marshland. They had the fierce haunted look of those who had seen too much, too many ‘security measures’ and ‘due reprisals’ in helpless villages, and had found themselves driven to do the same in turn, or worse.
And yet, like the doomed Hungarians, like the French cavalrymen, like all the rest whose lives might suddenly flare up and vanish like insects in a lamp-flame, they were ready to come back. Straight back from the nightmare of the Brocken to the man-made nightmares we had snatched them from, to tasks however hopeless and causes however lost – because in doing so they might make things that shade better, or at least less bad. Their chances were not good; that was why they’d been chosen, from causes already doomed, or firmly enough won to make their intervention only secondary – but still they were ready, because they might make that crucial difference, might perhaps save a hundred lives later, and from among those hundred one who might save a million. None of these people was under compulsion, none of them under orders; they were people who had been shown a truth, a pattern in which their life and if necessary their death had been given some greater meaning. Most of them had lived long lives already, far longer than the ordinary; but instead of clin
ging greedily to the rest they felt they were making some return in venturing it to help others. Neither the Graal nor its followers threw lives away; but they might, if they chose, invest them.
I wondered at that, wondered if ever I could come to think that way. I’d seen the near-immortality the Spiral made possible, and it made me uneasy. Age brought change; and those changes, however good, meant one was no longer entirely human. They extended you, concentrated you, heightened your abilities, brought out what was dominant in your inner self. That might be good, as it had been for Jyp and Mall; but more often it might be ugly. It could lead to near-divinity, or to things unimaginably hellish. Something of that sort had happened to Katjka, and though she’d pulled back, somehow, from the brink, it had remained there always a few steps in front of her, until at last it had claimed her again. Living forever at that sort of cost wasn’t something I wanted. Better to be content with an ordinary life, and live it reasonably; it could be pretty good. Mine was, by most people’s standards, so why the hell was I hankering after more? Why had I yearned for the Spiral all these years, yet only dabbled in it, flirted with it, never really taken the plunge? Was it because I really wanted something else – like, for example, the strength and belief and purpose these people had?
‘… fifteen, sixteen!’ counted Alison. ‘That’s it, we’ve enough! Set course northward, Jyp, we won’t need to stop at Stalingrad now.’
‘And Lord, am I thankful!’ exclaimed Jyp, who’d sailed in the North Sea convoys. ‘Freeze our asses off up there, if the Jerries didn’t shoot them off first—’
Alison shook her head. ‘We’d have been looking for the German side. Obersturmbannführer Ewald Holzinger, for one, and many others.’
‘Ober—’ Jyp choked. ‘That’s an SS rank! What kind of goddamn game’re you folks playing?’
‘A very rough one,’ answered a leathery middle-aged partisan woman. ‘I had hoped Ewald would be assigned to our part of Italy, we could have prevented so much bloodshed together. But Stalingrad is worse.’
‘You see,’ said Alison gently, ‘you need, sometimes, to have good men serving an evil cause, to reform it, or at worst restrain it. Even the SS was not beyond redemption, once.’
Jyp and I exchanged fairly eloquent glances.
I followed the partisans as they climbed up into the main gallery that ran along the body of the airship, openwork metal platforms that throbbed with the energy of the engines as we pulled away northward, back into the shadows once more. There they all were, knight and squire, commoner and peasant crushed in together in a fuggy atmosphere of blood and sweat and horse dung, perched on every conceivable seat, joking quietly about the variety of smells each one had brought along, and which era had the biggest lice. (Byzantium won, by virtue of its bureaucrats.) They made a tremendous impression on me, a force of savage and dedicated fighters the SAS or Marines or samurai might have envied, yet radiating none of the aggression of a warrior caste. There was even a curious gentleness about them as they talked, swapped news of friends, soothed the restless horses in their wire-mesh stalls, snatched a hasty meal from the rations we handed out, or whatever sleep they could manage in those conditions. Some of them looked to me for more news about what had happened to the Spear; I suggested a briefing, thinking of Alison. They nodded sagely, and I called back down the ladder. ‘Alison, a word? And can somebody unpack that big chart? Thanks.’
Rather to my surprise, Alison didn’t come up; instead, she locked the control surfaces, took over the helm from Jyp and bent over the speaking tube. ‘Attention, all! In two minutes, a briefing on what’s happened to the Spear, and what we’re going to do about it!’ She grinned at me, and added, ‘From the horse’s mouth, right?’
I looked at all those hard, expectant faces, and I swallowed hard, wishing I was somewhere else, far, far away. These were the Knights of the Sangraal, its most dedicated followers, fanatical even; and I’d been playing fast and loose with the object of all that devotion. I was going to have to be pretty fast on my feet, verbally – or maybe literally.
But on the other hand, I’d been doing presentations all my life, and this wasn’t too different, bar the bull. And there was Mall, sitting near me and watching me right through with those disconcerting green eyes. The Knights sat silent mostly, bar the odd question; I got some strange looks with my part in the theft, nothing more. But when I told them about the captain, and the helicopter, a low growling mutter ran through them, a horrible sound. Most of them knew Dragovic, it seemed; and if he’d heard it, I think he might have run to the ends of the earth, or simply cut his own throat on the spot. So the hounds of heaven might give tongue, and I was glad it wasn’t after me. At last it broke up, with nothing more than a few more questions, some nodding and fingering of chins, and Hastein still trying to cadge a cigarette.
‘They accept you as their captain,’ Mall breathed in my ear. ‘Never a doubt on’t. That’s well.’
‘I can’t get over it!’ Not sheeplike, not deferential even, just accepting me with a confidence I didn’t feel I even remotely deserved. ‘I mean – people like these!’
‘They’re fierce, aye, and fell. But then …’ her eyes sparkled in the gloom, ‘so am I! And I follow you, Master Stephen. So is the Pilot, and so are you also, after your fashion, fierce and fast and proud as a goshawk when wrath o’ertakes your quietness. Can you but enchain your doubts and see but a little deeper into yourself, you’ll have few masters. Save one, I think.’ She bared her large teeth, and dug an elbow into my side with her usual robust rib-cracking energy. By the time I had breath to speak she was down the ladder again.
Somehow, despite the desperation of it all, I suddenly felt good. If this pack of fighters could accept their fate, stand or fall, could I do any less? If they accepted me as leader I owed them the best I could do. I had Mall by my side, and Jyp – and Alison too, of course. I owed them even more. I might be adequate or I might not; but whatever there was in me, they were going to get it.
Clouds rolled by us, cloud battlements, cloud towers, cloud castles, vast insubstantial fortresses of nebulous history and misty ideals. They loomed like all the challenges I’d ever faced, all the heights I’d ever hoped to storm, as grey and forbidding as my imagination could make them. All the demands of life, exams, college courses, graduation with a good degree, getting the right job, landing the right contracts, handling the new promotion, launching my brainchild C-Tran – mist, all mist. A clammy veil that blotted out things that really mattered, that shaped itself into seductive phantoms I could chase and catch, only to have them melt away in my fingers and leave me no satisfaction, no real achievement, no solid ground beneath. And then one day, drawn by urges I hadn’t understood, I’d wandered out onto the Spiral. Here, among this shifting morass of space and time and history and legend, I’d begun to face real challenges, real adventures with life as the prize and the forfeit both. Real, amid unreality; real friendships, real relationships. Other people I knew had stepped briefly over the bounds as I had – my colleague Dave, my ex-girlfriend Jacquie – only to step back, hurriedly. See and step back, to wrap the cold fixed Core around them like a security blanket. Dave had long forgotten; I hoped Jacquie hadn’t, not entirely, if only for the odd fond memory of me. I couldn’t do that, I knew it now. Like Alison, I’d been torn, this way and that, afraid of rejecting what my reason insisted must be the hard, the firm, the only true reality. Now, about to walk straight into what stood to be the most hellish thing I’d ever encountered – and by now that covered quite a pack – the mere vapours had been stripped away. This was real, for me at least; this moment now was life, existence. My past life, that had seemed so involving, so important, that was the fog. The cloud castles around us, they were real.
Jyp spun the wheel, took us down a little. The clouds thinned to flying streamers, and we headed west now, straight into the dying sun’s last angry glance before an endless night. I stood beside him, swaying on my feet as small gusts swung and shook us. ‘This
is it?’
‘Surely is. Near as I can get it. Any nearer, we might be too early and scare ’em off.’
‘Okay. Stay in among the lower clouds,’ I warned him, ‘the driven stuff. Hide, as long and as completely as you can. Circle if you have to. It’s our best hope.’
He grinned; his teeth were on edge. ‘Nope. It isn’t, you are. Don’t go losing a holt of that.’
I hung onto the brass handrail instead, and watched grimly. Not alone; I heard the little buzz and whisper that ran through the ship, audible even over the soft engine drone. The dull horizon swallowed up the sun and sucked the colour from the sky, changing the world to lead. The cockpit lights were out, and we were sunk in shadow. This was glacial country, ground out by the great ice sheets, a broad, broken land seamed with river valleys. Against a swathe of pallid clouds the worn teeth of the ancient Harzgebirge stood out dark grey, and above them, twice their height, a vast mountainside shouldered upward. Out of its shroud of forest a central peak protruded, bare and stark, its nooks and crannies gleaming with greyish snow. The sharp little winds that buffeted us herded the clouds in a swirl around it, and it tore at them and shredded them and sent them reeling away in tatters, over the face of the rising moon.
I’d seen the Brocken, in the Core – the real Brocken, I might once have called it. Even there it was a presence, brooding, dominant, looming over the little town in the valley with its quaint station. Only the lure of the Harz mountain railway, with its beautifully preserved steam locomotives, had happened to take me up there, a footloose, footsore student wandering around Europe on a pre-college rail pass. It had impressed me, yes. The dense green forest of its lower slopes, still visibly divided by criss-crossed scars like an old Junker’s sabre cuts where the late unlamented East German border fortifications had been taken up, and their defoliated no man’s land where the greenery was only just returning; high crags, with big birds wheeling around them; the bare and bony flanks of the peak, capped by the concrete blockhouse and spiny antennae set up to improve the border guards’ view and ruin everyone else’s. I’d paused a moment, whistled, made a mental note to pick up some postcards (I never did) then shambled off down into town with nothing more on my mind than the youth hostel, the girls I might meet there, the local Bierstube. That was all; no mysterious chills, no portents, nothing. Nothing to suggest it might somehow become the thing that had risen at me out of the pentacle, that swelled in bulk and menace ahead of me. I’d have laughed myself sick; but I never felt less like laughing now.
Cloud Castles Page 26
