Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Brod! Brod! …’

  VIII

  They were to travel only fifty kilometres on their first set of horses, Tripp said. Then they’d change to a solution better suited to the long haul – which spanned no less than twelve thousand kilometres north, all the way to the Pole itself.

  In those first hours Brod was intensely excited, charging along the open road into unknown realms, with a beautiful girl at his side and an enraged enemy at his back. ‘We’re making history!’ he cried. ‘They’ll tell our story for generations!’

  Vala laughed prettily. But she stayed back with Tripp, who kept her own horse at a steady trot.

  When Brod finally reined in his own mount, Tripp praised him for being ‘sensible’. ‘Horses must have their own ancestral dreams of a lost world where their grandmothers were slender and fleet. They’ll always run if you give them their head. But on this world they are better suited to a gentle, steady trot. Their hearts won’t take it, not if you push them too hard – and you’re likely to break their spindly legs.’

  Brod felt restless to hear this sage advice. Sensible? Shepherding his horses for fear they might drop dead under him wasn’t in his nature at all – and not what he had expected of this journey, which he had vaguely imagined as a kind of running skirmish with Khilli and his warriors.

  But Vala surprised him by adapting quickly to the ride. She even seemed interested in Tripp’s yakking about the horses’ history. ‘How strange, to think that horses, like people, might have been brought here from somewhere else. And, I suppose, sheep and cows and pigs and chickens as well.’

  ‘Yes. Along with grasses and wheat and fruit trees – everything you can eat must have been brought here in Helen Gray’s ship, for we can’t eat Slime or tractors.’

  ‘I can imagine carrying a box of grass seed. But how could you carry a horse? I’ve seen the trouble it takes to ferry a horse a few kilometres by sea. My father says this is proof that we live in a Sim, because you could never carry a horse in a spaceship.’

  Tripp shrugged. ‘There’s much we don’t know about our origins. Perhaps you could carry a living horse frozen, like meat. Or perhaps you could take it from its dam’s womb as an infant, and carry it that way.’ She slapped her own mare’s neck. ‘But certainly, if this nag is an Avatar, why isn’t she better suited to this world?’

  ‘I suppose you’d say humans should be better suited to living here too.’

  ‘Well, so we should. If we were designed for this world, there would be at least some parts of it where we could go naked.’

  Vala actually blushed.

  Brod’s interest was snagged for the first time. ‘Naked?’

  ‘Sure. Presumably at the equator, the Substellar, at least. Why should we need thick layers of clothing even to survive even there? Why should we not have been made fit to go unclothed, like animals?’

  Brod roared laughter. ‘There you are, Vala! If Elios and Khilli went around the Navel bare as babies, they wouldn’t seem half so impressive!’

  ‘And nor would you,’ Vala said pointedly, and trotted a few paces ahead of him. But he could tell she was teasing him, and his heart warmed.

  After the first fifty kilometres Tripp directed them off the main north road, which even this far from Port Wilson was reasonably metalled, and led them a couple of kilometres down a track to a travellers’ stop with a small inn and a much larger stable.

  ‘Wonderful!’ Vala cried, leaping down from her horse. ‘A bath, a change of clothes, a good meal -’

  ‘But we can’t stop,’ Brod said, glancing back down the road. ‘Your brother won’t be far behind.’

  ‘Brod is right,’ said Tripp. She climbed down stiffly, and made for the small dwelling house. ‘We’re going to change our transport here. But we must press on …’

  Vala pouted, and she looked as if she was going to protest. Brod had seen her deploy her temper before, and he knew it was a formidable weapon. But she quickly perked up when Tripp began to assemble their mode of transport from here on.

  On the way down, Tripp had left a compatriot here at the waystation, another Polar, a man Astiv Pellt. Older than Tripp, he was shorter, rounder in his layers of coats, and fierce looking – until he smiled, to reveal rows of discoloured teeth. He said he was Tripp’s cousin. ‘But then we’re all cousins up there,’ he said, grinning again. ‘Not a very big place, you see. We all have lots of husbands and wives, and cousins and second cousins …’

  Astiv brought over two carts, covered with wool-lined tarpaulin, with three teams of horses to drag them.

  ‘My backside wouldn’t stand twelve thousand kilometres on horseback, even if yours would,’ Tripp said. ‘And we design for redundancy. We can lose one whole horse team, now that we’ve a spare. We could lose a cart; we’ve a spare. Astiv has made sure we’ve got plenty of food – we at the Pole have perforce become experts at drying, salting and other storage methods – and we can collect the water we need as we travel. We have plenty of coats, boots, hats, blankets.

  ‘We’ll travel for two watches and rest for the third; the horses need their sleep. But we’ll sleep in shifts, with at least two of us awake – and driving the carts – at any moment.’

  Brod tried to look as if he knew what he was doing as he walked around the wagons, checking their iron-rimmed wheels and leather harnesses. He had more experience of ships than land transport, but he could tell when something was soundly made. He was impressed by the Polars’ preparations and evident competence.

  Vala, though, seemed faintly disappointed. ‘I half-thought we’d be bowling along in some magic chariot driven by photomoss or something. Like the gadget you gave my father. How long do you think it will take us to get there?’

  Astiv shrugged. ‘Three hundred watches. Maybe a little more.’

  ‘Three hundred?’ Vala’s eyes were wide. ‘That’s twenty small-years!’

  ‘It’s a big world,’ Tripp said, ‘and we have to cross a fair chunk of it.’ The carts both had simple hourglasses fitted. Tripp turned one of these over. ‘We’ll wait one hour,’ she said. ‘Go bathe, eat, eliminate – whatever. And then we leave, with or without you.’

  The landscape was monotonous, a rough plain littered with eroded hills and patches of grassland and forest, and wider lakes of Slime, black as the inside of Brod’s eyelids. The towns were few and far between, and they never stayed over anyhow, pausing only to change their horses. You rarely even saw any evidence of farming or logging save close to the towns, though you did sometimes see untamed horses and cattle, and even a few wild tractors patiently ploughing furrows in non-existent fields.

  Tripp said that this continent of Seba was the largest on the planet, a great shield of rock that covered a quarter of the world’s surface and stretched all the way to the Pole and beyond, though it was broken by inland seas and lakes. And as watch after watch wore by, though the four of them became used to exchanging their roles as drivers and passengers and sleepers, the sheer immensity of the landscape began to bear down on Brod’s limited imagination.

  It made it worse that he was never alone with Vala, and neither of them had the nerve to do more than a little gentle flirting in the presence of the stolid figures of the Polars.

  And, even deeper than that, he started to miss his old life – his companions, his ships, his adventures – even his enemies – even his mother! It had been a grand gesture to uproot himself from everything he had grown up with, and set off into the complete unknown. But somehow he had not thought ahead to how it would actually be to have his whole world stripped away, to be plunged into a situation where he wasn’t even particularly competent, let alone in command. Sometimes he even wished Khilli might catch up with them, so he could remind Vala how good he was in a fight.

  It got worse yet when the mixed landscape of grassland and scattered copses gave way to a belt of trees, of fir and larch and pine, that gradually thickened until the road cut between towering green walls of forest, and the Star, a little lowe
r in the sky every watch, sent its light in long shafts between the slim forms of the trees. Tripp softly told them there was some element of danger here, from dogs, cats, even pigs long gone wild, and Brod kept a blade ready at his belt.

  Vala, though, seemed fascinated. ‘I never saw so many trees. But why are there so many just here?’

  ‘Because of the latitude,’ Tripp said. She spoke carefully; in their early conversations it had become evident that Vala, a pampered creature of the Palaces of the Navel, hadn’t even been entirely clear that the world she lived on was a sphere. ‘The Star is lower in the sky here, and gives us less heat. These trees are more suited to the cold than the shrubs and grasses of lower latitudes. This boreal forest stretches right across Seba, to east and west, between the grasslands to the south and the tundra to the north. And wherever there is land in the southern hemisphere, at the same distance from the Substellar, you’ll see similar vegetation.

  ‘If you could see the world from space, it might look a bit like an archery target, with bands of vegetation all circling the Substellar point, broken only by stretches of ocean.’ She sketched a sphere for Vala. ‘You see? From everywhere in this band around the face of the world, the Star would be seen to be at the same elevation in the sky. And so similar vegetation will grow.’

  ‘How strange,’ Vala said. ‘How wonderful! And there’s more to come? This tundra you spoke of?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Tripp said, smiling. ‘And wonders beyond that too.’ Vala smiled back.

  Brod was irritated. They seemed to be building a relationship, like that between an eager student and a patient teacher. A relationship that excluded him.

  It got even worse when it started to snow.

  IX

  The first serious resistance the holy army met was at the southern rim of the great forest belt.

  A few kilometres to the west of the main trunk road running north from Port Wilson, Khilli’s scouts found a community of loggers. Over the generations they had cut their way into the world forest, and had built a veritable city, of wooden buildings roofed with grass turf or moss. This green town was surprisingly populous, and the people lived well, on the meat from the herds of semi-wild cattle they cultivated, and crops purchased from farms on the grasslands to the south, traded for their wood.

  Before this journey Elios had only been dimly aware of the place. Accompanying his son on this long military adventure was teaching him the sheer scale of the world – and he was gathering an uneasy sense of just how little of it was even nominally under the Speakerhood’s control. Which, of course, was a justification for this long and expensive military adventure in the first place.

  Khilli followed his usual practice of sending in senior officers with demands for provision for his army – horses, food, labour. The elders among the loggers seemed astounded to be asked, and politely refused. The loggers were a major power in their region; they were used to making demands, not meeting them, and to winning wars, not losing them.

  So Khilli burned the city.

  The holy army set up its camp a little way off the road, in a rare patch of open grassland in a country that was increasingly grown over by the forest blanket. Elios accompanied his son on a quick tour, Elios treading delicately on the raw, trampled earth, nodding to soldiers who as usual tended to their feet and complained about the weather and the food.

  Khilli had established a discipline in this as in all things relating to his mission. When the army paused, even for just a few watches, he had his sergeants organise squads to dig out a roughly circular compound with embankments, ditches, latrines and open drains, while the holy Shuttle Banners fluttered over their heads. Only then were the men allowed to set up their tents, build their fires and go hunting and foraging.

  Today there had been fighting, the raid on the loggers’ town. After the battle was done, the Speaker of Speakers paused by the small field hospital that tended to the wounded, and reassured the dying that death was not an end, merely a return to the frozen patterns of thoughts in the greater Memory of the Sim.

  Then Khilli sat with his father on the porch of their own lavish tent, sharing a stolen flagon of the loggers’ rich, dark beer. The flames from the loggers’ city burned high in a sky that was never bright, so low was the Star, and there was a thick resinous smell in the air.

  Elios said, ‘I hope that the fire doesn’t spread to the wider forest. We’ll cook half the world.’

  Khilli took another slug of beer. ‘Your Designers surely they won’t allow their Sim to be wrecked by a bit of fire.’

  A hardening cynicism about his father’s religion was an unwelcome aspect of the remarkable transformation of Khilli, in the watches since his sister’s abduction. Elios murmured, ‘You better hadn’t let your men hear remarks like that. It’s only the flag of the Speakers that unites this bunch of soldiers of many nations under your command, remember.’

  ‘Duly noted.’

  ‘And – was it entirely necessary to burn the city? We’re looking for worshippers, remember. The dead don’t pay tithes, son.’

  ‘Those wood-cutters put up a surprisingly good fight. They were no match for us when they dared venture out onto the open field. It was the usual one-two, with cavalry and infantry. When the army was broken the city fell quickly …’

  Elios listened to this soldiers’ talk absently.

  This was no hasty expedition but a planned, provisioned and thought-out invasion of the interior of Seba, intended to consolidate the Speakers’ power across the continent. Even the way the army advanced was designed to awe populations into fearful submission. The troops were solely provisioned by what they could scavenge and seize, and they stripped the landscape they crossed like a swarm of voracious ants. Any who resisted this ‘liberation tithe’ were punished.

  Since leaving Wilson, Khilli had forged an effective army out of the disparate corps provided by the Speakers’ tithe-paying allies. He had resolved the Wilson siege with a swiftly concluded, if punitive, treaty. Then, listening to the advice provided by his more experienced soldiers, he had spent a whole fifty watches preparing for this expedition: gathering supplies, planning the route from the sketchy maps available, forming up his troops into a unified command structure, and training them in battlefield and siege tactics. It had been a remarkable sight for Elios to watch as his warrior son, through some forging in the frustration of the long siege of Wilson and the fire of his own anger, had mutated into a general.

  And so they had marched, roughly following the trail of Vala and Brod. Elios believed that Khilli had relished the resistance put up by the loggers; it had been the nearest thing to a full-scale battle he had been able to throw his troops into since they left Wilson.

  ‘There was actually more resistance when we entered the city – some of those fires were started by the citizens themselves – but we aren’t brutes, father; my men were under orders to kill only if unavoidable. So we drove a whole herd of them, women and kids too, off into the forest.’

  ‘All save those your men kept back for themselves, I suppose.’

  Khilli shrugged. ‘You have to be punitive, father.’

  ‘But the butchery of children, the rapes – we can’t condone such savagery and you know it.’

  ‘Savagery? I spare enough to tell their children in the future when they build this place again, how much more savage I could have been. After all, it’s in all our interests to protect the Integrity of the Sim, isn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t quote theology at me, boy.’

  But Khilli showed no remorse at the rebuke, no reaction save a sip of his beer.

  Elios often wondered if this transformation of his son had been entirely for the good. His mother, and Vala’s, had died young, and Elios, then a mere Scribe, had taken his children with him into the embrace of his church. It was a safe environment, if a restricted one, he supposed, as if you sat on a mountaintop looking down with faint disdain on the rest of mankind. And there were only a few career choices available, all
essentially academic – you could become a theologian or an administrator, or if you aspired to the Speakerhood you could combine the two.

  Neither of Elios’s children, both clever in their own ways, had turned out to have the patience for study, which blocked off many options for them. At least Elios had found a safe role for Vala; beautiful and vain, she had seemed an ideal candidate for the pampered virginal life of a Sapphire, meant to embody the idealised perfection of humanity that resided in the heads of the Designers. With Khilli it had been more difficult. Physically powerful and headstrong, he had been coached by his father in a cut-down and simplified version of the faith - and he had been trained to use his muscle and his aggressive instincts to protect his father, and most especially his delicate sister.

  Well, Elios admitted ruefully, it had all gone wrong in the end. Even Vala, wily and manipulative, had evidently rejected the career her father had selected for her; Elios was sure she wouldn’t have let herself be taken anywhere she didn’t want to go, although he wouldn’t have expressed this to his son. And Khilli, as soon as he had got a taste of true combat, had discovered the soldier inside himself, and had set off on this global rampage. Perhaps if their mother had survived, she might have developed a gentleness in Vala, a more controlled temper in Khilli … But she had not. And all that was now unfolding, Elios supposed, was his responsibility. Or his fault, if it went badly enough wrong.

  Perhaps it might still turn out well. He knew from communication through runners that his subordinate Speakers were delighted with the progress of the force so far, and with the slowly increasing streams of tithes that were already flowing into the Navel. But as he watched the loggers’ city burn, a city whose existence he had been barely aware of a few watches ago, Elios wondered how long this march of destruction and submission would continue, and what would become of them all, and the world, when it was done.

  And he wondered about the hardening of Khilli’s heart.