Corson hesitated. He was unable to control the pegasone. So he had to rely on the creature’s instinct of self-preservation and assume that for the moment it had brought them to a place which was safe from attack either through time or in space. Of course, the pegasone might have a very different notion of what constituted an attack than did its riders. It might not bother to dodge an acid gas cloud that could dissolve their space suits. Or it might wander off by itself.
Still, Corson decided, it was worth taking advantage of this respite. He undid his straps and helped Antonella down.
He looked the scene over. Some rocks had tumbled down the hillside and offered precarious shelter at its foot. Taking Antonella’s hand, he urged her to a run. Halfway to their goal he noticed a red flower bloom on the plain. He flung himself to the ground, dragging her with him, and by rolling over and over they reached a hollow between the foot of the hill and the pile of rocks. A missile struck the hillside with a gigantic hammer blow. When the dust settled, he saw that the pegasone had vanished.
“At least that warhead wasn’t nuclear,” he said dryly.
He risked a glance over the surrounding country.
“So this is Aergistal! It looks like one vast battlefield—the father and mother of all battlefields.”
Antonella wiped dust from her faceplate. “But who’s fighting? And against whom?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Corson said. “To me the whole thing looks absolutely crazy.”
You could call this total war and mean it—or so it appeared. An ordinary war implied two sides more or less clearly opposed to each other, a shared or maybe two comparable technologies. Here, everybody seemed to be fighting everybody else. Why should armored knights be charging a tribe of Red Indians? Where could you hide the cities, the empires, which you would need to support such forces and which must constitute the stakes that they fought for? What was the nature of this pinkish and rather repulsive sky, featureless, boasting neither sun nor moon? Even the horizon looked somehow wrong, infinitely far away as though the whole of Aergistal were nothing but an endless plain. But if this was a giant planet, why should its gravity be normal or nearly so?
“The air seems to be okay,” he announced after glancing at the gauges on his sleeve. That too was a mystery, given the amount of dust and probably radiation that these ceaseless explosions must be hurling into the sky. Still, the gauges were definitely working. He took off his helmet and filled his lungs. The air was cool and odorless. A breeze brushed his face.
Once again he risked peering out from the shelter of the rocks* Clear to the slopes of the distant mountains the plain seemed to be uniformly deserted. There were puffs of smoke here and there.
A flash caught his eye and by reflex he dived to the bottom of the hollow. In front of them there was nowhere worth making for.
“We’ll have to get over the hill,” he said. “Maybe on the far side we’ll find… something.”
There was no hope of locating an ally, and probably not even a rational being. They were trapped in this war—this inconceivable war.
A black dot had just appeared overhead. It left a line of smoke and with it was tracing signs in the sky. The first group meant nothing to Corson. In the second he thought he detected a vague likeness to Cyrillic, used on a world he had never visited. The third was just a String of dashes. But he didn’t have to wait for the craft to complete its mission before reading the last.
“Welcome to Aergistal!”
Then the black dot made off at high speed over the crest of their hill, while the symbols and letters drifted lazily toward the mountains.
With a shrug, Corson said, “Well, we might as well move on as stay here.”
As quickly as they could they scaled the steep slope. When they reached the top, he cautiously poked his head over, all his back muscles knotting at the idea of the fine target they would make if someone had a scope or an automissile trained on this spot.
What he saw astonished him so much he nearly lost his footing. The far side of the hill slanted gently down to a beach so straight it might have been drawn with a ruler. A blue and perfectly calm sea stretched away to infinity. A few cable lengths from shore a dozen sailing ships were swapping cannonballs, and a dismasted hulk was on fire. On the beach, only a few hundred meters away, two military encampments faced each other. The tents of one were blue and of the other red. Banners saluted a rising wind. Between the two camps soldiers dressed in bright colors, drawn up as though on parade, were firing at each other turn by turn. Although he was too far away to be sure, Corson thought he saw men falling now and then. He heard rolling musket volleys, the sharp cries of the officers, the sound of trumpets, and from time to time the deep boom of the ships’ cannon.
Glancing inland, he saw bulging from a hollow which hid it from the view of both armies something huge, gray, soft, and almost round. A stranded whale?
But much closer to them, at most a hundred meters distant, at the rear of the blue camp, a man was sitting quietly writing at a wooden table. He wore a blue cocked hat with a white cockade, a peculiar frock coat in white and sky blue with gold braid and epaulettes, and from his belt the scabbard of a large saber hung down to touch the ground.
Corson climbed over the hilltop and led the way toward this extraordinary scribe. When they were only a few paces from him, the latter turned his head and said without displaying either surprise or alarm, “Want to join up, young fellers? We just increased our prize money, you know. I can give you a bonus of five crowns even before you put on our fine uniform.”
“I haven’t—” Corson began.
“Ah, I can tell you’re dying to serve under Good King Victor—‘Old Whiskers,’ as we call him, you know. Conditions are good and promotion comes quickly. The war will last a century or two and you can look forward to winding up as a field marshal. As for the lady, she’ll get on fine with our jolly boys and I predict she’ll make her fortune in next to no time.”
“All I’d like to know,” Corson said, “is where the nearest town is.”
“I believe Minor is the nearest,” said the man. “Directly ahead of Us, only twenty or thirty leagues away. We’re going to take it as soon as we’ve dealt with these clowns in red. I admit I’ve never been there, but there’s nothing odd about that, for the good and sufficient reason that it’s in enemy hands. Still, the trip there will be worth it. Come on, sign here—if you know how to write—so that everything is done according to the book.”
And he jingled some discs of yellow metal that awoke a vague memory in Corson. He guessed they must be cash—no, what was the word? Coik? Coins! On the table in front of the man, on either side of a big ledger, lay two peculiar hand weapons which he would have liked to examine more closely. But Antonella was squeezing his arm hard, and he felt her trembling.
“What about those ships?” he demanded, pointing out to sea.
“That, my friend, has nothing to do with us. Everybody here gets on with his own war, without worrying about what his neighbors are up to. That is, until you’ve got rid of the current opposition. Then you sign up the survivors and go looking for someone else to take on. You’re on the run yourselves, aren’t you? I never saw uniforms like yours before, at any rate.”
“We don’t want to join up,” Corson said firmly. “We only want to—well, find work somewhere.”
“Then I’ll have to persuade you, my friends,” the man said. “That’s both my vocation and my avocation.”