Then it was over. My spirit floated in air, without substance, without organs, but I saw and heard. She and Edmund walked together in the palace garden, their fingers linked. They whispered and I heard their whispering. “Poor Luke, dead in the snow. Poor Luke.” They laughed and, laughing, kissed.
My spirit winged like a bird, high over the city walls and across the blind white land. I hunted for my body, with one end in view. A body had an arm and an arm could hold a sword, and a sword would cut them down . . .
All this and more. Time had no meaning, any more than place or person. It went on endlessly, the taking and giving of pain. But at last there was quiet, and after the quiet, voices that neither jeered nor wept, but spoke evenly and with sense. I knew the voices, and knew this was no dream. I opened my eyes and there was whiteness here, too, but the whiteness of sheet and pillowslip. And I saw the broad wrinkled face of Murphy, the High Seer, clear in electric light.
• • •
He smiled. “How are you, Luke?”
“Well enough.” I felt weak but the fever was gone. “How did I get here?”
“You have that dwarf of yours to thank.”
“Hans? Is he well?”
“Yes. Since you were here last we have set up a television scanner on one of the standing stones. The barbarians press closer from the west all the time, and we cannot be sure they will recognize holy ground when they see it. We need to keep an eye open for visitors. But scarcely in a blizzard. Robb switched it on to make the routine test we carry out once a day. And to his astonishment he saw two horses coming up the hill through the snowstorm, with a dwarf mounted on one and a body strapped to the other. And as they neared the circle the snow cleared and he saw the body had a face he knew.”
“Hans brought me here? That took courage.”
“So I would think.” Murphy chuckled. “You should have seen his face when the earth opened up in front of him!”
I thought of it. To have followed me to Sanctuary would have been a great enough thing. I remembered my own fear when I first saw the Stones, enormous in the empty hillside, and that had been on a fair day, with Ezzard the Seer guiding me. To have ridden up into the dread circle through a snowstorm, leading my horse with me unconscious or even dead on its back . . . I had been right to make him warrior. I did not think there was another in my army who could have done it.
My army . . . I said:
“He has told you what happened—or what he knows of it?”
“We knew already,” Murphy said. “From Grimm.”
Of course. Pigeons might not fly in a blizzard, but nothing stopped the invisible radio waves which bound the Seers in the cities to the High Seers in Sanctuary.
“I have served you and your cause,” I said. “Now I come to you for help.”
“You were right to do so.”
“I want . . .”
I started to rise from the bed but weakness made me fall back. Murphy said:
“There will be plenty of time to talk of what you want. Get your strength back first.”
“Is Hans . . . ?”
“We had difficulty in getting him from your bedside but in the end tiredness overcame him. He is sleeping. You need to do the same.”
• • •
It was two days later—days marked by electric clocks, not by the rising and setting of the sun—that I spoke to the High Seers together. We sat in the big room whose walls were painted with landscapes, a trick to deceive the mind into thinking we were not underground but looking out through windows at the living earth. I do not know about the High Seers but my mind was not deceived. It made me miss the reality all the more.
But the High Seers, perhaps, having lived in this way so long, had grown used to it. And they had their mission, compared with which nothing else mattered. I looked at them: Lanark, Murphy, Robb, Gunter and the rest. They wore no formal robes but ordinary simple clothes, and their heads were not cropped. There was nothing to remark on in them. Nothing except the knowledge they held and hoped to restore; and the power that knowledge gave.
They put questions to me and I answered them as patiently as I could. Murphy said:
“It is a setback. There is no denying it. But there are favorable possibilities. This Eric of Oxford, who favors change. He is only Prince in Waiting, but we may be able to do something about that. Lukis is Seer in Oxford . . .”
I interrupted him. “I am sure there are intrigues that can be woven. But I did not come for this.”
Murphy started to speak again but old Lanark put a hand up to stop him. He said:
“Let Luke speak.”
I tapped the sword in my belt. There was no need for it here but I wore it. Perhaps it did for me what the painted walls did for the High Seers. What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.
“You gave me this,” I said, “the Sword of the Spirits. I killed my brother with it and took the city which you had planned I should have. But the city is lost to us now, and no sword will win it back. I need another weapon.”
They were silent, watching me.
“Our ancestors had weapons which killed at a distance. They called them firearms. You know of them and can make them for me.”
Robb said: “You would still need an army. One man cannot conquer a city even with firearms.”
“I will get an army.”
“From Oxford?” Murphy said. He shook his head. “Even if Eric were Prince he could not put guns in the hands of his army. There more than in most places their minds are closed against such things, but there is not a city throughout the civilized lands where men would accept them.”
“Not in the civilized lands,” I said, “but there is a city. The Prince at night watches a cinematograph film. They cut grass with machines and have crossbows to drive arrows. His Chancellor is polymuf.”
“Klan Gothlen? It lies very far away. And what makes you think that Prince would help you? His daughter is in Winchester, and your enemy.”
“He owes me a debt.”
“Debts are not always paid.”
“One can seek payment.”
Murphy shrugged, in doubt. But Lanark said:
“This may offer something. There is no harm in trying in that quarter as well as at Oxford. We could send someone north in the spring, and see how the land lies.”
“The weapon,” I said. “You could give me such a thing?”
Lanark said to Robb: “Do you have a film to show us?”
“I think I can find what you want.”
While he was getting the film and others set up screen and projector, I said to Lanark:
“I thought I might find Martin here. He arrived safely?”
Lanark nodded. “And went on.”
“Went on? Where?”
“To the other Sanctuary. In the ruins of London.”
“You sent him there?”
“No. It was his choice.”
“What is it he is seeking?”
“I do not know,” Lanark said, “but he did not find it here.”
Robb ran the film. It was not like that scratched and jerky picture of comic animals which I had seen at Cymru’s court. What one saw, unlike the paintings on the wall, looked almost real enough to touch. Men walked across a field, a line of fifty or more of them. They walked easily, talking and laughing. Then one saw other men, a few only, waiting in a thicket at the field’s end. They carried long tubes of metal, with a triangle at the end and something sticking down underneath. They raised the triangles to their shoulders and put their hands round the part beneath. Harsh and savage sound, the stammering of tongueless giants, broke out. And the line of men fell, sinking like wheat to the sickle’s sweep.