Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

“But you should go with us, Yosh,” Amerie said. “Won’t you change your mind?”

“I have my own Survival Unit and Tat’s lance. I’ll take the rest of the tools that I scavenged down to the people on the shore. But I won’t go with them, and I won’t go with you.” He gestured to the sky, where dark specks wore already circling in the morning gold. “I have a duty here. The Reverend Sister has given my poor friend the Blessing of Departure. But Tat must not be left to the scavengers. When I’ve finished, I plan to head due north on foot to the River Marne. It joins the Pliocene Seine and the Seine flows into the Atlantic, I don’t think the Tanu will bother to track one man.”

“Well, don’t hang around here too long,” Richard said dubiously.

The ronin knelt swiftly beside Felice’s limp form and kissed her brow. His grim eyes swept those of the others. “You must take good care of this mad child. We owe her our freedom, and if God wills she may yet accomplish her purpose. The potential rests in her.”

“We know,” said the nun. “Go blessed, Yoshimitsu-san.”

The warrior got to his feet, bowed, and left them.

“Time for us to go, too,” said Claude. He and Amerie picked up the pathetically light body of the girl while Richard gathered her helmet and pack, together with tools and weapons.

“I can sail single-handed,” the pirate said when they reached the waiting boats. “Put Felice in with me and you two follow.”

They shoved off, the last to set sail, and relaxed only when they were far out from land. The lake waters were cold and of an opaque blue, fed by rivers running out of the Jura and the Vosges forest to the northeast. Amerie stared at the receding shore, where carrion birds were gradually descending.

“Claude… I’ve been thinking. Why didn’t Epone die sooner from those dreadful wounds? She was literally torn to pieces before Richard and Yosh and Dougal ever got near her. She should have bled to death or died from hypovolemic shock. But she didn’t.”

“The people at the fort told you that the Tanu were nearly invulnerable. What did you think they meant?”

“I don’t know, perhaps I assumed that the exotics were able to use their coercive power to fend off attackers. But I never dreamed a Tanu could survive such physical punishment. It’s hard not to think of them as approximately human, given that breeding scheme Epone spoke to us about.”

“Even human beings without metafunctions have been mighty tenacious of life. I’ve seen things in the colonies that were damn near miraculous. And when you consider the enhancement of mental powers that the Tanu achieve with the torc…”

“I wonder if they have regenerative facilities here in Exile?”

“I should think so, in the cities. And God knows what other kinds of technology they have. So far, we’ve only seen the torcs, the mind assayer, and that frisking device they used on us when we first came through the time-portal.”

“Ah, yes. And that brings us to the lethal dagger.”

The old man stripped off his bush jacket and pillowed his back against one of the boat seats. “I don’t doubt that our anthropologist friend Bryan could tell us all about the legendary faerie antipathy toward iron. He’d probably explain it in terms of the ancient tensions between Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures… Be that as it may, European folklore is almost universal in believing that iron is repugnant or even deadly to the Old People.”

The nun burst out, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Claude! Epone was an exotic, not some bloody elf!”

“Then you tell me why bear-dog bites and dismemberment and stab wounds from a bronze sword didn’t finish her off, while a single thrust from a steel knife blade did.”

Amerie considered. “It may be that the iron interferes in some way with the function of the torc. The blood of the Tanu is red, just like ours, and probably just as iron-rich. Their bodies and minds and the torc might operate in a delicate harmony that could be upset by the introduction of a gross mass of iron. Iron might even wonk them up if it just came near the body’s intimate aura. Remember Stein and his battle-axe? None of the castle people was able to prevent him from doing terrible damage, which didn’t strike me as strange at the time. But with what we know now, it seems significant.

“They frisked us thoroughly enough,” Claude said. “I can understand why the guardians weren’t able to pry Stein loose from his axe. But how did Felice’s knife slip through?”

“I can’t imagine, unless they were careless and didn’t sweep her leg. Or perhaps the gold of the scabbard confused the detector. It suggests possibilities for counter-tactics.”

Claude studied her through half-closed lids. There was an intensity about her that was new and startling. “Now you’re beginning to sound like Felice! That child has no qualms about taking on the whole Tanu race. Never mind that they control the friggerty planet!”

Amerie flashed him an odd smile. “But it’s our planet. And six million years from now, we’ll be here. And they won’t.”

She snugged the tiller under her arm and kept the boat racing eastward, its sail taut before the freshening breeze.

They came up behind a marshy island, hauled down sails and unstepped and deflated masts and centreboards. Armloads of reeds and young willows were cut to disguise the boats. They substituted rear mounted decamole sculling oars for the sailing rudders. A person crouched low in the stern could impart a barely perceptible forward motion by wagging the oar back and forth.

Richard protested, “It’ll take us two hours to travel the half klom to the shore at this rate.”

“Keep your voice down,” Claude warned him. “Sound travels over water.” He brought his boat close to Richard’s. “Somewhere on that shore is the trail, maybe even the fort where we were scheduled to stop for sleep this morning. We’ve got to be careful about showing ourselves until we’re sure the coast is clear. “Richard laughed nervously. “The coast is clear! So that’s where the cliche came from! Probably pirates…”

“Shut up, son,” said the old man, weariness making his low voice harsh. “Just follow me from here on in and pretend you’re a collection of flotsam.”

Claude sculled so slowly that there was no wake; they seemed to drift from islet to islet, gradually approaching a low-lying shore where reeds and sedges grew more than five meters tall and long-shanked water birds with plumage of pink and blue and dazzling white stalked the shallows, jabbing at frogs and fish with their beaks.

The sun rose higher. It became excruciatingly hot and humid. Some kind of biting midge zeroed in on them, trapped as they were beneath the concealing greenery, and raised itching welts before they could find repellant in their awkwardly stowed packs. After a tedious interval of paddling, they scraped bottom on a jungle mudflat where many of the bamboos had trunks as thick as a man’s thigh. Broadleaf evergreen trees perfumed the air with sickly sweet flowers. There was a game trail in the mud, heavily trampled by large flat feet. It looked as though it would lead them to higher ground.

“This is it,” Claude said. “We deflate the dinghies and hike from here.”

Richard extracted himself from the mass of stalks and branches in his boat and surveyed the site with disgust. “Jesus, Claude. Did you have to land us in a fuckin’ swamp? Talk about the green hells! This place is probably crawling with snakes. And will you look at those footprints? Some mighty ugly mothers been cruising through here!”

“Oh, stuff it, Richard,” Amerie said. “Help me get Felice ashore and I’ll try to revive her while you guys…”