“There aren’t any ropes,” Sondeweere cried from the darkness of the doorway overhead. “What can you do?”
“As before,” Toller replied. “I can lift Berise and Bartan.”
“But what about you? How will you get in?”
Battle fever inflamed Toller’s mind as he heard Wraker fire a musket. “Lower a sword belt—I’ll be able to reach.” He sheathed his sword and extended his hands to Berise. “Come!”
She shook her head. “Bartan is hurt and he needs help even to reach your shoulders. He must go first.”
“Very well,” Toller said, reaching for Bartan, who was swaying drunkenly. Bartan made as if to evade him, but there came the sound of another musket shot and Toller’s forbearance deserted him. Growling with rage and frustration, he encircled Bartan’s thighs with his arms and hoisted him upwards. Berise joined in, steadying Bartan and getting a shoulder beneath one of his feet, and from above Sondeweere lent her own strength to pull the protesting man over the rim of the doorway.
The entire operation had been completed in a few seconds, but in that sliver of time Toller had heard two more musket shots. He glanced towards the moat and saw that Wraker had his sword in hand and was chopping downwards at Farlanders who must have been threatening him from the angled timbers of the bridge. Toller’s heartbeat became a series of dull internal explosions as he realised that his precious store of hard-won seconds was spilling away at a prodigious rate.
Berise had slung her musket on her back and was reaching out to him. He caught her by the waist and raised her to his shoulders in one movement. Even then she was not tall enough to reach the sill of the doorway, and she swayed precariously for a moment before Sondeweere and Bartan reached down, found her hands and drew her up into the ship.
During that moment Wraker was snatched out of sight, down to join Zavotle in the pit of death, and the white-gleaming heads of four Farlanders appeared above the moat’s nearer edge. They threw weapons in front of them and began to squirm up on to the pavement. The slope beyond them was now massed with Farlander reinforcements, swarming like a field of brown insects.
Toller looked up into the mysterious interior of the ship, which now seemed as remote as the stars to which it was to carry him, and after a subjective lifetime saw Bartan’s leather belt being reached to him. It had been re-buckled to form a loop, and the three inside the doorway each had a hand on it.
Two Farlanders, more agile than their fellows, were on their feet and running, swords at the ready.
Toller estimated the time left to him and knew he could expect only one chance to reach safety. Sondeweere’s voice rang in his head: Hurry, Toller, hurry! He tensed himself—aware of the snorting approach of the Farlanders, hearing the slap of their feet—then sprang upwards and caught the belt with his right hand. The sudden manifestation of his weight on the belt was too much for those above, dragging them downwards and away from whatever purchase they had on the inside of the hull. Berise, lightest of the three, was pulled halfway through the opening and would have fallen had she not released the belt and grabbed the rim of the doorway.
Toller let go in the same instant.
He had his sword half-drawn when he hit the ground between the two Farlanders, but there was little he could do to compensate for the terrible disadvantage of his position. He turned the withdrawal of the weapon from its sheath into a cross-stroke which deflected a thrust from the alien in front, and at the same time leaped sideways to evade danger from behind—but he was slowed by his recovery from the drop.
The delay was only a fraction of a second, but it felt like an age in the fevered entropy of close combat. Toller grunted as the Farlander blade stabbed upwards into his lower back. He spun around, his sword singing in a horizontal sweep which caught his attacker on the side of the neck and all but decapitated him. The alien went down in pulsing gouts of crimson.
Toller continued his spin to face the other one, but the truncated warrior was backing away, knowing that time was on his side—at least ten of his fellows were racing across the paving stones and would be around Toller in the space of a few heartbeats. A smile of triumph appeared on the alien’s fat-enfolded face, but almost at once it was transformed into an expression of blank astonishment as Berise—who was directly above him—fired a shot into the top of his head. He sat down abruptly in a vertical fountain of blood.
“Grab the musket, Toller!” Bartan shouted from the ship’s entrance. “We can still bring you in!”
But Toller knew it was too late.
The bounding Farlanders were almost upon him, and even if he could be supported by the down-reaching musket his undefended body would be run through a dozen or more times while he tried to pull himself upwards. Experiencing a peculiar reticence, a desire to prevent his friends witnessing what had to come next, he retreated out of their sight towards the centre of the spherical hull.
But, although there was little pain from the wound in his back, his legs were weak and strangely difficult to control. He halted with the lowest point of the metal curvature almost brushing his head, and tried to make a final stand which would cost the enemy dearly, but his legs failed him and he went down under a concerted onslaught.
Sondeweere, he called as the grey light was blocked out by dripping brown forms and alien blades began to find their marks, don’t allow the pygmies to have the satisfaction. Please fly the ship… for me…
We love you, Toller, she said inside his head. Goodbye.
Unexpectedly, in the seconds remaining to him—before his body was sheared into atoms by a conflict of natural and artificial geometries—Toller achieved a final triumph.
He found he was genuinely sorry to die.
And there was gladness in the discovery.
The full measure of his humanity was restored to him by the realisation that it was far worse for a man to live when he would rather die, than to die when he would rather live.
And there’s another consolation, he thought as the ultimate deepnight closed around him. Nobody could ever say mine had been a commonplace dea—
Chapter 19
Bartan and Berise kept looking back over their shoulders as they walked, and they were almost two furlongs from the ship when it abruptly disappeared.
In one second it was there—a dull grey sphere perched on the crest of a low hill; and in the next second there was a complex of globes of radiance, expanding and contracting through each other. There was no sound, but even the foreday sun was dimmed in comparison to the fierce light which washed out of the spectacle. It rose vertically into the sky, gaining speed, changing shape. For a moment Bartan saw a four-pointed star with in-curved sides, each point emitting a spray of prismatic colour. There was a core which seethed with multi-hued specks of brilliance, but even as he was trying to focus his eyes on it the beautiful star was dwindling out of sight, swinging clear of the great disk of Land before finally vanishing into the blue.
The emotional turmoil within Bartan intensified into an ache which swamped the pain from his wounded shoulder. Less than an hour earlier he had been on rain-swept Farland, watching his friends die one by one—Zavotle, Wraker, and finally Toller Maraquine. Somehow, even in those last terrible seconds, Bartan had not expected the big man to die. He had seemed unkillable, an imperturbable giant destined to go on fighting his wars for ever. It was not until he had asked Sondeweere to take him with her into the bleakness of infinity—an unthinkable prospect which withered Bartan’s soul—that he had realised Toller was more than just a gladiator. Now it was too late to get to know him, too late even to offer his thanks for the gift of life.