“Places do not guarantee security, Lord Cromis, only people”-here, she smiled at him-“a thing we have both learned recently, I think.” He reflected ruefully that it was unwise to forget the astuteness of the House of Methven. “And, besides, I have been safe for seventeen years. I think I would like to be at risk for a while.”
A huge, urgent lurching motion manifested itself on the other side of the fire like a local geological disturbance. Birkin Grif had heaved himself to his feet. He looked down at the Young Queen, mumbling subterraneanly to himself. He bowed from the waist.
“Madam,” he said, “you have the courage of your father. That is a brave attitude.” He sat down again. “Mind you,” he added in a low voice to Tomb, “it’s a bloody long trip for a man in my condition.”
Queen Jane of Viriconium laughed for the first time since she had lost her empire. Which shows at least, thought Cromis, the resilience of youth. He did not mean to condescend.
They stayed in that city for five days. A processing centre in the heyday of the Northmen, perhaps it welcomed the ring of Tomb’s hammer as he worked on his damaged armour-a loop in Time, a faint, distorted echo from a past in which other mechanics had beaten the subtle artefacts of the Afternoon Cultures into cruder, more vital forms.
Grif’s leg was slow to heal; exertion reopened it; the blood seemed slow to clot, and he found walking difficult. Like a convalescing child, he was prone to brief, silly rages. He limped and fretted about, railing at his own limitations. Finally, he forced himself to walk to the wreck in Luthos Plaza, tear a slim cobalt girder from the destroyed engine housing, and bend it into a crutch.
It was an unfortunate admission. His gait thereafter was laborious, unsteady-and Tomb, a cruel humourist, imitated it gleefully, stumbling and capering like a crippled acrobat. That parody was a horrid work of art. Grif lost his temper, and implied that the power-armour was a less respectable kind of crutch. They went for one another murderously, all hooked hands and cunning blows, and had to be separated forcibly. They took to cutting each other dead in the bleak streets.
“You are preposterous,” Cromis told them.
To Methvet Nian he said, “They are bored with inaction; we will leave here tomorrow,” but later that day two airboats bearing the Moidart’s sigil ghosted in off the waste and hung over the plaza. Northmen swarmed down rope ladders to examine the burnt-out launch, kicked noisily through the wreckage, looking for souvenirs.
Cromis took his small party to earth in the archaic suburbs of Drunmore. But it became apparent that the airborne force was the vanguard of an attempt to reoccupy the city after half a millennium’s absence, so they left the place that night, and went undetected into the cold spaces of the Pass of Methedrin.
They began their journey down the Rannoch:
It was a land of immense, barely populated glacial moors, flanked by the tall hills-of bogs and peat streams-of granite boulders split from the Mountains of Monar during slow, unimaginable catastrophes of ice, deposited to wear away in the beds of wide, fast, shallow rivers;
Of bright green moss, and coarse, olive-green grass, and delicate, washed-out winter flowers discovered suddenly in the lee of low, worn drumlins-of bent thorn and withered bullace, of damp prevailing winds that searched for voices in stands of birch and pine;
Of skylines, wrinkled with ridges;
Of heather and gorse, grey cloud and weather -of sudden open stretches of white water that would swell in spring, dwindle and vanish with the coming of summer-mysterious waterways;
It was green and brown, green and grey; it grew no crops; it constituted one quarter of the Empire of Viriconium.
At dawn each day, Cromis would leave his blankets, shivering, to inspect whatever snares he had set the night before: generally, he caught rabbits and waterlogged his boots, but he took a morose pleasure in these solitary outings. Something in the resigned, defeated landscape (or was it simply waiting to be born? Who can tell at which end of Time these places have their existence?) called out to his senses, demanded his attention and understanding.
He never found out what it was. Puzzling, he would return with his catch, to wake the camp and initiate another day of walking.
They were a ragged crew, a queer crew to be walking down the Rannoch like that: Tomb crucified in his leather leggings against the metal tree of his exoskeleton, never tiring, going like a machine over bog and river, leaping ravines and cutting down whole spinneys with his axe; Birkin Grif in the ruins of his splendid cobalt mail, hopping and lurching, cursing his crutch like a mad scarecrow; Cromis, his beautiful black hair lank in the damp wind, the dead metal bird dangling limply by its neck from his belt, stopping to gaze at waterworn stone by the hour And Methvet Nian in her purple cloak, discovering a portion of her lost empire, and of herself. “Towers are not everything, Lord Cromis!” she laughed, and she took his arm. “They are not!” She brought him flowers and was disappointed when he could not identify them for her. He showed her crows and mountains, and expected no identification at all. He smiled; he was not used to that. They were thrown together by small observations.
In this way, they covered twenty miles a day.
During the third week, it snowed. Ice crusted the rivers, rock cracked and broke above the thousand-foot line of the flanking hills. Cromis found his traps full of white hares and albino foxes with red, intelligent eyes. Birkin Grif killed a snow leopard with his crutch: for ferocity, it was an even match until the last blow.
For a week, they lived with a community of herders, small, dark-haired folk with strange soft accents, to whom the war in the North and West was but a rumour. They gave the Queen a sheepskin coat; they were shy and kind. As a measure of gratitude, Tomb the Dwarf cut wood from dawn to dusk, while Grif sat with his bad leg stretched in front of him and split it into enough kindling for a year (they became friends again as a result of this: neither of them loved anything better than cutting and chopping).
Everything began to seem distant: the snow was an insulator. Cromis forced himself to keep in mind the defeat in the North. It was important to his brooding nature that he remember the terrible blades of the geteit chemosit. He imagined them. He saw them lay siege to Duirinish in his head. Would the winter halt them at all?
After seven days of that, and a further fortnight of travel in the grim mountains at the southern end of the Rannoch, he was glad to see the arable lands around Lendalfoot and catch a glimpse at last of the grey sea breaking on the dark volcanic beaches of Girvan Bay.
Lendalfoot was a fishing town built of pale fawn stone, a cluster of one-roomed cottages and long drying sheds, their edges weathered, blurred by accumulations of moss and lichen. Here and there rose the tall white houses of local dignitaries. In the summer, fine pink sand blown off the shifting dunes of Girvan Bay filled its steep, winding streets; the fishwives argued bare-armed in the sun; and creaking carts carried the catch up the Great South Road into Soubridge.
But now the waves bit spitefully the shingle beach. The sea heaved, the mad black gulls fought over the deserted deep-water jetties, and the moored boats jostled one another uneasily.
Determined that news of the Young Queen should not travel north by way of the fish route, Cromis sent Tomb into Lendalfoot to pose as a solitary traveller and gather certain information (he stumped off sulkily, stripped of his power-armour so as not to alarm the fishermen, but refusing to give up his axe), then retired with Methvet Nian and Birkin Grif to a barren basalt hill behind the town.
The dwarf returned jauntily, throwing up and catching a small, wizened apple, which had been given to him (he said) by an old woman. “She was as dried up as her fruit,” he laughed. “She must have thought I was a child.” More likely, he had stolen it.