Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  Then she took a careful breath and asked the question.

  ‘Hincc? You’re a story-teller. Tell me another story. Tell me about the stars you’ve never seen.’

  And with a simplicity that could as easily have been victory as defeat, he told her. By the time he had finished, the fire had dropped to embers, her breath was smoking in front of her and there was frost forming on the inside of the hut.

  She barely noticed. But afterwards, she lay awake on a pallet heaped with furs and stared up at a knot-hole in the timbers of the low roof and wondered.

  At first he had not seemed to be telling a story as she understood it. Instead he began by talking about the cold, the snowfields and the few creatures that lived on them. There were slim pale-grey hares that ate the berries of the few tough scrubby bushes that rooted directly in the snow, and drew their scant minerals from the urine of the same creatures. Bigger but slower, a long, almost tubular predator that grew longer, but not fatter, as it aged, and that sprouted another pair of stubby legs for every hand’s breadth of length. Then, tiny and prey to everything, two-legged fur-balls with one strong arm and one weak, and with minuscule eyes set in deep sockets, who could look directly into the ice glare but whose sight was so poor they had to find their own snow burrows by the scent of the mate who never went outdoors.

  Some of these seemed farcical to Seldyan. She had grown up in a world of order, even if it was the imposed order of a confined world, and what Hincc was describing sounded like biological anarchy. But then, slowly, she began to feel the specialized rhythm of life on these permanently white peaks, and following that she realized that the rhythm he described was not a thing only of the present – it came from the past, and reached into it. And as it moved into the past, tracing the histories of the animals and the berries and the peaks, it gathered stories around itself. Eventually, the stories reached their source.

  The past was long, here. The separation of the High People from everyone else was so ancient that it was the stuff not just of folklore, but of folklore about folklore. Their languages had diverged, not so far that the two peoples couldn’t understand each other, but far enough for each people’s story to sound strange to the ears of the others. Even their names for the planet they lived on were different – everyone else called it Trakael, but Hincc’s people used what he claimed was an older name: Solpht. The oldest folklore of all said that there had once been a bigger, brighter sun and that there were bright points in the sky at night.

  ‘Whose folklore?’

  He had shrugged. ‘High People. Others, different stories. See this?’ It was one of the tokens from the bodies.

  She nodded. ‘That’s why I asked you about stars. These dots look like drawings of stars.’

  ‘Maybe stars, maybe not. Down there people say other things.’

  ‘Have you seen them?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. Never here. Always in same place. Hills above Circle Plains. People there make own stories. People, and priest people.’

  ‘Circle Plains? Is that where you send the ice?’

  ‘Almost. Not Plains; Harbour below.’

  ‘Right.’ She stared at the embers for a moment. ‘Is that where you think I should explore?’

  He laughed, an unexpected explosion in the close quiet of the hut. She looked at him, eyebrows raised, and he shook his head again. ‘You ask me what to do? You fall from sky and I call you Sky Girl, but that is wrong. Yes?’ He sat up, leaned forward so his face was less than an arm’s length from hers. ‘Not from. Through. You fall through sky from somewhere else. Now you tell me: somewhere else, are stars real?’

  She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked down. ‘Yes,’ she said, to her lap. ‘They are real.’

  ‘I knew!’ He clapped his skinny hands. ‘Real stars! And you come from them. Travel between?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And you ask me to tell you stories? To tell you what to do? You are Star Girl, not Sky Girl. Go where you want.’

  ‘No, Hincc.’ She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work like that. I barely know about where I came from. I know nothing about here.’

  For a while he was silent. Then he compressed his lips. ‘Go to Harbour. Find out why green lights in sky make them send me bodies of priests.’

  There hadn’t been anything else to say. Hincc had lain down and pulled some furs over himself, and after a few moments Seldyan did too.

  He seemed to be sleeping, but she couldn’t.

  The next morning she was fuzzy with sleeplessness. She sat wrapped in her furs while Hincc melted snow-water over a fire of what she thought at first were long, straight twigs. Then she looked again and realized that they all tapered to a needle point. She frowned, then waved at them. ‘Hincc? Are they thorns?’

  He took the shallow pan off the flames and poured the water over dried leaves in another pan. ‘Yes, thorns. Leaves, here, from same bush. Above snowline, world shrinks; I use all parts. Thorns and leaves grow back. Branches, not so much. Now drink, then eat.’

  She drank the acerbic brew and ate hare meat, salted and mixed with dried berries and pressed into flat cakes. The sour berries and salt cut across the sweet dry flesh so she didn’t know whether to lick her lips or suck in her cheeks.

  It didn’t matter. Right back to the Hive, she knew the value of food as fuel. She ate everything. It helped more than she expected; she felt energy returning. She looked up to find Hincc grinning at her. She raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Feel better?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Not surprise. Food always good, and leaf brew is stimulant.’ His grin widened. ‘I use little. People down below sometimes use much. Then more, then more, then can’t stop. You know?’

  ‘Yes.’ She explored her senses; the effects seemed mild and she didn’t feel dangerously altered. ‘Do you send the leaves down?’

  ‘Did. Not do. Since bodies, ice line still. Nothing down, nothing up.’

  ‘I get that.’ She stood up. ‘Hincc? I have to go.’

  ‘I know. Circle Harbour.’

  ‘Yes, Circle Harbour.’ She thought for a moment. ‘You could come with me. If you wanted?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. Too warm, too damp. High People die fast below snowline. Stay here, eat hare and berries, brew leaves and wait for better time. Maybe you send better time, Star Girl.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She tried to smile, because it was better than the alternative. Then she pushed her thoughts away. There would be time for them later, maybe. ‘So, how do I get there?’

  She had taken the med kit from the pod, and a few other things. A comms bead tickled her inner ear but did nothing else. Totally dead.

  Now she was standing, looking down along the huge sweep of the ice line. The part of her that wasn’t busy being worried was very impressed.

  A growing part was also intrigued. She turned to Hincc. ‘Who made this? How does it work?’

  He shrugged. It was a very expressive gesture in someone so skinny. ‘Who, unknown. Always here, always same. How, easy. Heavy ice goes down, only light things come up.’

  ‘How long is it?’

  ‘To top of Circle Harbour, thirty days’ walk.’

  Seldyan caught her breath. From her short experience a day here was roughly standard. A day’s walk might be twenty klicks, if you could deal with the snow.

  She looked down the line again. It was a simple thing, but on a vast scale – two cables strung between pylons that were about twenty metres high. They must have been under huge tension, because they barely dipped at all. There was a pylon about every fifty metres, marching down the snow slopes in a paired procession that blended into one in the middle distance and then disappeared in the mist bank that was hanging at the base of the snowline. At regular intervals, the complicated metal claws that Hincc called ice hooks hung down from the cables.

  The pylon nearest her seemed to be some sort of concrete. She couldn’t tell what the cable was made of, but it didn’t look like metal. I
t had a matt grey look, and the frost didn’t seem to stick to it.

  It was much higher tech than anything she had seen here so far. Of course, that might mean nothing. Hincc’s people had a particular take on technology.

  Might. Six hundred kilometres of line, presumably twice as much cable?

  She felt a smile trying to break out. ‘Hincc? You just told me something important.’

  He spread his arms. ‘Always. You come back, tell me what joke is.’

  ‘Oh, I will. You’ve got my ship, remember?’

  ‘I take care. Star Girl? You go, or you stay?’

  She laughed. ‘I go. How long will it take?’

  ‘To Ice House in Circle Harbour, three suns. Be cautious – maybe wise to drop off sooner, walk.’

  ‘Yes.’ Well, she thought, he’s right. I go.

  The down cables were on the right. Hincc had uncoupled the ice hooks on the nearest one; they lay on, and partly in, the powder snow. In their place a sling hung from the cable. It was made of furs.

  She looked at Hincc. ‘You made that?’

  ‘Yes. In case. Star Girl? Keep eyes away from other cable. Look right. Now climb in.’

  She didn’t need to climb. The sling was at knee height. She stood in front of it and sat back. It took her weight, swaying. ‘What do I do now?’ she asked.

  He gestured. ‘Pull on hanging line.’

  A thick loop of cord dangled in front of her. She took hold of the nearer half and pulled. She felt it take up a load and the sling twitched upwards with a quick squeak that sounded like pulleys. A minute of brisk hauling and she was twice her own height off the snow, level with the ice hooks on the other cable.

  She checked her pouch – everything was there. She seemed ready to go. She looked down at Hincc.

  ‘How do I stop it?’

  He laughed. ‘You don’t! Stop from here. Maybe stop from Circle, if they remember how. In between, only go until ice all melts.’ He pointed down the line. ‘Twenty blocks, see? Enough for go; not too fast.’

  ‘So how do I get off?’

  ‘Lower.’ He mimed pulling the cord, hand over hand. ‘Then jump. Easy. But back on again, not possible. Be sure! Ready?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Then go.’ He kicked the lever. ‘Good luck, Star Girl!’

  The sling canted forward and, far more smoothly than she had expected, she was moving.

  She didn’t look back. For the first hour she didn’t look left either, although she wasn’t sure why Hincc had been so adamant. The wind bit her face and she sank as deep into the furs as she could.

  Then something caught the corner of her eye and she did look to the left – just a little, because the thing was still a long way down the line. But it was moving towards her. She corrected herself. Things, not thing: a line of black dots swaying upwards.

  She swallowed. The corpses of priests were still coming. Hincc must have known they would.

  She wondered if whoever had set up the line, and had presumably at the same time rewritten the future of this poor little planet, had ever anticipated that.

  Three Quarter Circle Harbour Wall

  THREE THINGS HAD saved Belbis after they had thrown him into the shack, unconscious and with a broken arm and broken ribs and slashed heels – if he could count himself saved. The first had been water and that, he was sure, had been accidental. The roof of the shack, as he could tell from a combination of memory and smell, was tar-paper, old and holed. A few of the holes must have lain at the bottom of sagged areas, and they formed dew collectors. If he shuffled himself beneath them and lay with his mouth open he could take on enough water, if not to live, then not to die that day. There had been forty-one of the days so far. He had not lost the ability to count things. Sometimes, and especially in the dark, he lay still, cradling his stubbornly unhealed arm across his chest, and re-counted the Gods in his head. He always came to the same number, and it was always the wrong one.

  The second was that he had regained just a little of his vision. Not enough for details, but enough that some of the blurs could mean something if he looked carefully out of the corner of his eye. Straight ahead, there was nothing but greenish black darkness.

  That was how he had found the bottle. It had been lying in a corner of his shack in just the right place for a shaft of morning sun, slicing through one of the many gaps in the walls, to glance off it.

  The gaps allowed many things into his shack. The sunlight, certainly, but also the smells of the docks and a piercing wind that permitted him little sleep. They should also have let in the sounds of the docks, but those had gone, replaced by the restless creak and slam of abandoned boats and, further away but no less noticeable, shouts and the sound of anger.

  He had been glad of the bottle. There had been nothing else suitable. The wooden walls of the shack were built off a stone plinth that was wider than the timber; he had chosen a protruding edge, took the bottle by the neck in his good hand, and brought it down hard.

  He had cut his fingers searching amongst the pieces, but that didn’t matter. He had found what he was looking for.

  It was nearly time for the girl to visit, if she was going to. He had to hurry.

  He took the large shard, lifted his right leg so that the foot lay on his left thigh, and began to scrape out the worm-infested flesh from his heel.

  When he had first done this he had used the unbroken neck of the bottle to bite on. The glass was thick, and he knew he wouldn’t break it no matter how he bit. But recently the nerves in his heel had begun to die and the daily job was merely agonizing.

  Every day he had to go a little deeper to make sure he had cleared all the hard little egg sacs. If they managed to penetrate the cartilage of his heel and grow into his bones, they would kill him in weeks.

  In the extremes of the hunger that had come to him before the girl, he had once tried to eat his own scrapings but the taste of his poisoned flesh had been vile, and the combination of the restless maggots and their gritty eggs had made him vomit. Now he buried the daily mess in a little hollow he scooped out of the earth floor with another of the glass fragments.

  He had just finished when he heard the uneven shuffle of her feet outside, and the diffident little knock.

  Before the girl came, he had been starving to death. Now he was just starving. She had never explained why she came – why she had shuffled up to this shack, where he had been dragged and left to die after they had crippled him, and knocked, and thrust a bit of bread under the door and then run away.

  The bread had been stale and hard as wood. He had moistened it with saliva a drop at a time to soften it, and eaten each musty crumb like a banquet.

  The next day she had been there again. There was a little more bread and, this time, one of the little fish-skin bags of water the men had used to take out with them on their boats, when the boats had still gone out.

  Belbis had always hated fish. He still did, but thirst overcame anything. The oily tainted water managed to taste good enough. It lifted him from dying slowly to just barely holding ground.

  The girl was the third thing, obviously. And now she was here. He lifted his head from the pallet and called out.

  ‘Come in!’

  And someone came in, but it was not the little girl because whoever it was had to open the narrow door wide to get through it, so that the light became brighter than it had ever been since he had been left here, and then dimmed as a body passed through, and then brightened again, and a voice, a woman’s voice said, in an odd accent, ‘Hello?’ And then, after an interval when he heard a breath sharply drawn in, ‘Oh shit …’

  The accent was the same as the machine on the hill had used, before the light came. Belbis tried to raise himself on his elbow, but he had chosen the wrong elbow. His broken arm collapsed beneath him like a twig and he collapsed with it.

  Three Quarter Circle

  IT HADN’T TAKEN Seldyan long to find what she was looking for. She had assumed it was going to take
her a while even to frame the question, but the state of the town made it obvious.

  Circle Harbour was – had been – a small sea port with, she guessed, not many more than a few thousand houses. It had a walled harbour enclosed by a rock-pile wall that formed almost a complete circle. Hence the name, she assumed. The area around the harbour was thick with huts and ramps and yards, mostly fouled with the decaying remains of what looked like fish processing. Within the harbour, black water full of floating rubbish and inflated corpses lapped at the edges of ramps through a scum of sickly foam.

  The smell was indescribable. She had held out until she was within sight of the harbour; then, feeling somehow ashamed, she had rummaged through the med kit, found a couple of filter plugs and jammed them in her nostrils. The labels said they were to exclude inhalable bacteria, which was probably a good thing. They reduced the stench to merely disgusting.

  She had been able to smell the town from a long way away, but it wasn’t decay she noticed first. She had been glad to leave that behind.

  She had dropped off the ice line six nights ago, just below the snowline, when the smell from the thawing, decomposing bodies began to make her retch. With a detached part of her she theorized that they had already been decaying when they were hooked on. Whatever; as soon as her feet were on the ground she had half walked, half run, fifty or so paces upwind of it. Then she had turned parallel with the ice line, and begun to walk.

  The ice line slanted obliquely down the coast, following an almost level path between a grey sea to the left and a long dull heather-blue rise towards cloudy mountains to the right. At night the clouds shone green. Even during the day she could see a hint of colour. She watched for the source of it, but the clouds never lifted far enough.