“Sorry, but you hardly scratched me,” Toller said as he cleaved downwards with the black blade.
“And this is for my brother… Prince! ”
He turned away from Leddravohr’s corpse and with difficulty steadied his gaze on the square shape of the gondola. Was it swinging in a breeze, or was it the one fixed point in a see-sawing, dissolving universe?
He set out to walk towards it, intrigued by the discovery that it was now very far away… at a remove much greater than the distance from Land to Overland…
Chapter 21
The rear wall of the cave was partially hidden by a mound of large pebbles and rock fragments which over the centuries had washed down through a natural chimney. Toller enjoyed gazing at the mound because he knew the Overlanders lived inside it.
He had not actually seen them, and therefore did not know if they resembled miniature men or animals, but he was keenly aware of their presence — because they used lanterns.
The light from the lanterns shone out through chinks in the rock at intervals which were not attuned to the outside world’s rhythm of night and day. Toller liked to think of Overlanders going about their own business in there, secure in their tumble-down fortress, with no concern for anything which might be happening in the universe at large.
It was the nature of his delirium that even in periods when he felt himself to be perfectly lucid one tiny lantern would sometimes continue to gleam from the heart of the pile. At those times he took no pleasure from the experience. Afraid for his sanity, he would stare at the point of light, willing it to vanish because it had no place in the rational world. Sometimes it would obey quickly, but there were occasions when it took hours to dim out of existence, and then he would cling to Gesalla, making her the lifeline which joined him to all that was familiar and normal.… “Well, I don’t think you’re strong enough to travel,” Gesalla said firmly, “so there is no point in carrying on with this discussion.”
“But I’m almost fully recovered,” Toller protested, waving his arms to prove the point.
“Your tongue is the only part of you which has recovered, and even that is getting too much exercise. Just be quiet for a while and allow me to get on with my work.” She turned her back on him and used a twig to stir the pot in which his dressings were being boiled.
After seven days the wounds on his face and left hand needed virtually no attention, but the twin punctures in his side were still discharging. Gesalla cleaned them and changed the dressings every few hours, a regimen which necessitated re-using the meagre stock of pads and bandages she had been able to make.
Toller had little doubt that he would have died but for her ministrations, but his gratitude was tinged with concern for her safety. He guessed that the initial confusion in the fleet’s landing zone must have rivalled that of the departure, but it seemed little short of a miracle to him that he and Gesalla had since remained unmolested for so long. With each passing day, as the fever abated, his sense of urgency increased.
We are leaving here in the morning, my love, he thought. Whether you agree or not.
He leaned back on the bed of folded quilts, trying to curb his impatience, and allowed his gaze to roam the panoramic view which the cave mouth afforded. Grassy slopes, dotted here and there with unfamiliar trees, folded gently down for about a mile to the west, to the edge of a large lake whose water was a pure indigo seeded with sun-jewels. The northern and southern shores were banked forests, receding and narrowing bands of a colour which — as on Land — was a composite of a million speckles ranging from lime green to deep red, representing trees at different stages of their leaf cycles. The lake stretched all the way to a western horizon composed of the ethereal blue triangles of distant mountains, above which a pure sky soared up to encompass the disk of the Old World.
It was a scene which Toller found unutterably beautiful, and in the first days in the cave he had been unable to distinguish it with any certainty from other products of his delirium. His memory of those days was patchy. It had taken him some time to understand that he had not succeeded in firing a cannon, and that Gesalla had made an independent decision to go back for him. She had tried to make little of the matter, claiming that had Leddravohr been victorious he would soon have advertised the fact by coming in search of her. Toller had known otherwise.
Lying in the hushed peace of early morning, watching Gesalla go about the chores she had set for herself, he felt a surge of admiration for her courage and resourcefulness. He would never understand how she had managed to get him into the saddle of Leddravohr’s bluehorn, load up with supplies from the gondola, and lead the beast on foot for many miles before finding the cave. It would have been a considerable feat for a man, but for a slightly-built woman facing an unknown planet and all its possible dangers on her own the achievement had been truly exceptional.
Gesalla is a truly exceptional woman, Toller thought. So how long will it be before she realises I have no intention of taking her off into the wilderness?
The sheer impracticability of his original plan had weighed heavily on Toller after his rationality had begun to return. Without a baby to consider it might have been possible for two adults to eke out some kind of fugitive existence in the forests of Overland — but if Gesalla was not already pregnant she would see to it that she became pregnant.
It had taken him some time to appreciate that the core of the problem also contained its solution. With Leddravohr dead Prince Pouche would have become King, and Toller knew him to be a dry, dispassionate man who would abide by Kolcorron’s traditional leniency with pregnant women — especially as Leddravohr was the only one who could have testified about Gesalla’s use of the cannon against him.
The task ahead, Toller had decided — while doing his best to ignore the gleam of the single, persistent Overlander’s lantern in the mound of rubble — was to keep Gesalla alive until she was demonstrably with child. A hundred days seemed a reasonable target, but the very act of setting a term had somehow increased and aggravated his unease about the fleeting passage of time. How was he to strike the proper balance between leaving early and only being able to travel slowly, and leaving late — when the swiftness of a deer might prove insufficient?
“What are you brooding about?” Gesalla said, removing the boiling pot from the heat.
“About you — and about preparing to leave here in the morning.”
“I told you, you aren’t ready.” She knelt beside him to inspect his dressings and the touch of her hands sent a pleasurable shock racing down to his groin.
“I think another part of me is starting to recover,” he said.
“That’s something else you aren’t ready for.” She smiled as she dabbed his forehead with a damp cloth. “You can have some stew instead.”
“A fine substitute,” he grumbled, making an unsuccessful attempt to touch her breasts as she slid away from him. The sudden movement of his arm, slight though it was, produced a sharp pain in his side and made him wonder how he would fare trying to get astride the bluehorn in the morning.
He pushed the worry to the back of his thoughts and watched Gesalla as she prepared a simple breakfast. She had found a flattish, slightly concave stone to use as a hob. By mingling on it tiny pinches of pikon and halvell brought from the ship, she was able to create a smoke-free heat which would not betray their whereabouts to pursuers. When she had finished warming the stew — a thick mixture of grain, pulses and shreds of saltbeef — she passed a dish of it to him and allowed him to feed himself.