Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

The tall nurse shrugged “His folk are awaiting him. And so we give him to them, as always. You would like to see it?”

Dumbly, Elizabeth nodded.

The nurse swiftly wrapped the baby in a soft towel and hurried out of the birthing room. Elizabeth had all she could do to keep up as the woman raced down flight after flight of stone stairs, all empty and echoing and lit only by the tiny ruby and amber lamps. They finally came to a cellar. A dank corridor led to the outer wall of the town and a great, locked water-gate, beside which was an indoor anchorage full of deserted small boats. The gate had a wicket with a bronze bolt, which the exotic woman shot open.

“Guard your mind,” she warned, and stepped outside onto the fog-obscured dock.

There were lights out there, and they converged with alarming speed, making no sound whatsoever. Then came a single deep-green glow that became a sphere some four meters across, rolling on the surface of the water and burning the mist to shreds as it approached the dock.

With great caution, Elizabeth pried apart the fabric of the illusion and looked inside. There was a boat, a punt rather, with a dwarfish fellow poling and a round-cheeked little woman sitting in the bows with a covered basket in her lap.

So you see us, do you?

Elizabeth staggered as a barrage of lightning seemed to explode behind her eyes. Her tongue swelled as if to strangle her. The flesh of her hands blistered, blackened, burst, and cooked in a living flame.

That’ll show the upstart!

“I warned you,” said the Tanu woman. Elizabeth felt the tall one’s arms about her, holding her up. She saw only the glowing ball receding into the mist. Her mouth was normal, her hands unhurt.

“The Firvulag are operant metapsychics of a sort. All most of them can do is farsense and spin illusions, but those can be strong enough to drive an unready mind mad. We handle them well enough, at Grand Combat time and at most other times, too. But you must not let them take you unaware.”

The baby was gone. After a few seconds the green glow vanished as well, and daylight broke fitfully through rags of vapor. Far up on the battlements, a woman’s voice was singing alien words to a familiar melody.

“Well go back now,” the nurse said “My Lord and Lady will be very grateful to you. You must receive proper thanks, then refreshment and rest. There is a small family ceremony, naming the child and giving her the first tiny golden torc. They will wish you to hold the baby. It is a great honor.”

“Imagine me as fairy godmother,” Elizabeth murmured. “What a world! Are you going to name her after me as well?”

“She already has a name. It is traditional among us to give anew the name of one who has recently passed on to Tana’s peace. The baby will be called Epone, and the Goddess grant that she be more fortunate than the last who bore that name.”

Amerie came down to the lakeshore where the freed prisoners were ballasting their hastily inflated boats.

“I’ve had to sedate Felice. She was ready to tear the poor noddy apart.”

“Not surprising,” Claude growled. “Once I’d thought the matter through, I was tempted along those lines myself.”

Richard was treading siphon bulbs with both feet, flooding the interstices of his and Claude’s beached dinghies while the old man loaded equipment into the two small decamole craft Richard had changed back into his pirate costume, curtly telling the nun to keep his spacer’s coverall “for the duration.” Now he glowered at her. “Maybe Dougal did us all a favor without knowing it. How do we know what Felice would turn into once she got hold of a golden torc?”

“There’s that,” Claude had to admit. “But if she’d got it, we wouldn’t have to worry about any immediate danger from the soldiers. As it is, some kind of armed force is going to be breathing down our necks any minute now. We couldn’t have been far from the next fort when the fight started.”

Amerie said, “You two come up and help me with Felice when you finish here. Yosh has been going through the baggage packs, retrieving some of our stuff.”

“Any weapons?” Richard asked.

“They seem to have left ours back at the castle. But most of the tools are there. No maps or compasses, I’m afraid.”

Claude and Richard shared a glance. The paleontologist said, “Then it’s seat-of-the-pants navigation and devil take the hindmost. You go on up, Amerie. We’ll be along in a few minutes.”

In the aftermath of the fight, when all of the prisoners had been released, they had held a hasty conference and decided that the best chance of escape lay in taking to the water, one or two people to a decamole dinghy from the Survival Units. Only the five Gypsies had ignored Claude’s warning about the dangers of riding the torc-susceptible chalikos. They had gone back to attack the suspension bridge guard post after donning the gory armor of the slain escort and taking most of the soldiers’ weaponry.

The remaining escapees had reestablished the bonding forged back at the auberge, the original Groups coming together once more to plan their collective getaway. Claude, the only person with a working knowledge of the Pliocene landscape, had suggested two possible escape routes. The one that would take them most quickly to rugged country entailed a short voyage northeast, across the narrow upper portion of the Lac de Bresse to canyons leading into the heavily forested Vosges highlands. This had the disadvantage of crossing the main trail to Finiah on the opposite shore of the lake; but if they managed to elude mounted patrols, they could reach high country before nightfall and hole up among the rocks.

The second route would have them sailing southeast across the widest part of the lake to the shore of the Jura piedmont some sixty kilometers away, then continuing south into the mountain range itself. There seemed an excellent chance that the land in that direction was completely uninhabited, since beyond the Jura lay the Alps. On the other hand, the lakeside forts were likely to have boats of their own that could be used for pursuit. The escapees might outsail the Tanu minions; but the breeze was fitful and the nearly cloudless sky suggested that the air might go dead calm as it had the day before. If the boats were becalmed at nightfall, they might attract the attention of the Firvulag.

Basil had confidently elected for the Jura route, while Claude’s conservatism inclined him to hold out for the Vosges. But the climber was most persuasive to the majority, so in the end it was decided that all of the time-travelers except the remnant of Group Green and Yosh, the surviving ronin, would go south. The prisoners had hastily unloaded their baggage from the chalikos and followed a gully down to a tiny beach below the cliff. There boats could be launched. A few of the small craft were already spreading their sails when Richard completed ballasting the two Green boats and scrambled back up the embankment in search of the others.

He discovered Claude, Amerie, and Yosh standing over Felice’s unconscious body. The Japanese warrior said, “I’ve found Claude’s woodworking tools and the knives and hatchets and saws from our Survival and Smallholder Units.” He held out a hideously stained packet to Richard. “And here are also a soldier’s bow and arrows that the Gypsies overlooked.”

“We’re grateful, Yosh,” said the old man. “The bow could be very important. We have very little food except for the survival rations, and the kits have only snares and fishing gear. The people going south with Basil will have time to make new weapons if they reach the Jura shore. But our Group will be in much more danger of land pursuit. We’ll have to keep moving and do our hunting on the run.”