Jyp’s eyes were searching. ‘’Fraid you’d seem a mite ungrateful?’
‘Well, yes! The most ungrateful s.o.b. this side of the sunset; but –’ I brushed that aside. ‘It’s more than that – isn’t it? Her kind; it’s in their nature, right? To love pretty much as it takes them.’
Jyp chewed on nothing a moment, considering. ‘So you do understand. Never would’ve expected it, Steve. You’re full of surprises.’
‘After the castle – yes, I understand. Some of it, anyhow. You told me, didn’t you? About people who move outward, towards the Rim, one way or another. Who change and grow – towards evil, or towards good. And Mall’s one of them. Immortals, I mean. Or what would you call them? Goddesses. Demi-goddesses, anyhow.’
‘Just beginning to be, yeah. You don’t often see it, that fit coming on her. Guess it’s got to be there under the surface all the time, though; what makes her such a hell-fighter. Then something wakes it up, and – whizbang! Though, jehosaphat! I tell you straight, I never saw her like last night before, never quite, and for whole minutes at a time. That’s a big step she took. Some day, maybe, a long time from now, that’ll break through forever, and in the end she’ll just slough off the surface like ragged ol’ slops and blaze pure. But till then she’s got her feelings and her weaknesses like the rest of us – maybe more so. When it passes, then she’s at her weakest, all over. Then she really backslides. She needs …’ He frowned. ‘I don’t know. Love, comfort. A lot of it. She reaches out where she can.’ He considered me again for a moment, ‘Not still mad?’
I sighed. ‘No. Maybe not. It’s just … well, the ancient Greeks – with all those randy gods and goddesses around …’
‘Yeah?’
‘No wonder they turned out philosophical, that’s all.’
He laughed softly. ‘I’ve been there. Believe me!’
But he didn’t elaborate. It was my turn to weigh him up. ‘How about you, Jyp? You on your way to becoming a god, too?
‘Me?’ I expected him to laugh again, but he looked mildly appalled at the prospect, like the office junior offered a vice-presidency. ‘No! I’m barely past my first century yet. Got a long way to go – if I want to. But I doubt I ever will. Guess I’ll just go on going around in circles, long as I’m spared – but at least they won’t be ever-decreasing ones. Keep moving, keep living, keep the blood flowing and the vices polished up till one day the meter runs out – that’s how most of us keep going. But some, some with a real passion, a real spirit, they start losing the taste for anything else. They narrow down, they fine out, they grind themselves down to needle points. More and more they become that passion; you can see it in ’em.’
‘Like Hands!’
‘Sure, like Israel Hands. If he lived long enough and he’d half a brain he’d burn right down to a mind of fire and sparks and flying iron. He’d maybe become somebody’s gun-god, somewhere in time, and be whistled up at their ceremonials to cast new cannon, or have gunners sacrifice to him for better aim. Maybe when the storms go trampling ‘cross the skies men somewhere say to their children “Hark! There’s ol’ Israel’s cannons, scaring up the stars!”’ We chuckled, though I still tasted bitter bile. ‘But Mall now,’ he mused. ‘She’s harder to nail. Justice, that’s a part of her passion; but so’s a good fight, and music. And a kind of wisdom, insight, when she’s least troubled …’
I nodded, thinking back to that starry night by the wheel, when she’d drawn my life out of me as few others could have. He pressed on.
‘It’s mostly the ones like that who make it, they say. Who reach the Rim, cross it maybe – who knows? – and come back transfigured. Come back somewhere, anyhow; time means less, the further Rimward you get. Maybe she already has come back. Maybe it’s Minerva we’re shipped with, Steve boy; or Diana. Or some hunting goddess of our first forefathers, squatting in caves among the Great Ice. Or some power only the future’ll know, when all those clever little boxes of yours have crumbled back to the silica beaches they came from. I don’t know. Nobody does. But it sure can happen.’
It was a sobering thought; and when Mall came back from the pool a little later I was ready to look at her with new eyes. But she had never seemed more ordinary, pale even, with her curls plastered damp around her face, rawboned and ungainly instead of sleekly graceful. She looked like a autumn wood wind-stripped of its leaves, and she avoided meeting my glance – or, I noticed, Clare’s. It came to me then that maybe last night had put her through an experience more shattering than any of ours. ‘Bide but ten minutes idling!’ she announced flatly. ‘Then up straitly and to the ship!’ A chorus of groans and complaints arose, but she rounded on us stridently. ‘You witless pack of puling whipjacks! D’you fancy another Bedlam night i’the woods, then? We’ll scarce be to the beach by sunset!’
That did it. Nobody claimed their extra ten minutes, and my urge for a swim vanished mysteriously. Suddenly we were all hopping and hobbling, buckling belts, priming pistols and loosening swords in scabbard. As we moved off Clare fell in beside me and took my hand, quite naturally; then, spotting Mall, she reached out the other to her. Mall hovered, obviously a little nonplussed, till I waved her over impatiently. It didn’t take much effort. Clare pushed her in between us, and I felt Mall’s hand clasp mine and clutch at it like a handhold on a cliff. My resentment was fading fast. Her fate might be the loneliest of anybody’s – and if she really would remember me a thousand years, better it wasn’t bitterly.
The trail soon grew steep and narrow, forcing us apart; and we had to help Jyp. Since he couldn’t hang on to the branches and the outcrops he slipped a lot, and every jolt was agony to his arm. He made it worse by continually looking around sharply at everything except his footing. Wounds had been treated with what was to hand – my powder-burned hands with juice of bitter aloes, for one; but he had nothing to stem the pain, except alternately and colourfully cursing the Wolf who shot him, and his own stupidity.
‘At least he didn’t hit the bone,’ Clare encouraged him. ‘Or just chipped it, anyway. An inch over and he’d really have broken your arm –’
‘He’d ha’ blown it clean off,’ said Mall sombrely. She seemed as edgy as Jyp, continually looking back over her shoulder.
Clare winced in sympathy. ‘Oh god! Well, you’re lucky he didn’t have an automatic, at least.’
I looked at her sharply, but she just smiled. It was just as Jyp had said; she was moving in a dream, almost, accepting, not questioning. Not thinking through the implications of what she’d said. And yet still the old Clare, all right. Unconsciously or not, she’d made a pretty good point.
They were such all-round stinkers, those Wolves, I couldn’t imagine them missing a chance to spread that bit more mayhem. Why didn’t any of them have modern weapons? They could surely get them easily enough. Why not tommy-guns or M-16s instead of cutlasses? Why not, for that matter, naval guns instead of muzzle-loading cannon, fast pursuit boats instead of sailing ships? It had never occurred to me to ask. But in one of our brief halts, at noon under the spreading shade of a vast star-apple tree, Jyp was ready enough to talk – I suspect because it kept his mind off the pain, or other things.
‘Sure, they could use ’em. So could we. Once in a while some Mutt’n’Jeff does get his mitts on what you and I’d call a modern gun, and raises plenty ruckus – mostly till he jams it, or his ammo runs out. Then what? Chances are he ruins it trying to repair it. And for ammo, he could just about handcast .45 shells, I guess; hand-turn new cases, maybe, or save spent ones. Stuff’em with black powder or gun-cotton, at half the power – but making the firing caps, fulminate of mercury or some such stuff, that’s tough work. Hard as handcrafting a whole new musket, even hand-rifling it – one he’d have not rouble loading. But he manages – and then maybe his second or third homemade shell blows in the breech and takes his hand off. See?’