Bob Shaw: The Wooden Spaceships

The words he had spoken—his own sentence of death— quickly leached away into the surrounding stillness, and yet it seemed to Toller that he could hear them still being chanted, slow-fading in the passageways of his mind. I must have planned to die, he told himself. But why did my body proceed with the scheme on its own? Why did it make the fatal move so quickly? Did it know my mind to be an irresolute and untrustworthy accomplice? Does every suicide recriminate with himself as he contemplates the empty poison bottle?

Bemused and numb—stone-faced because the last thing he could do was to show any sign of regret—Toller waited for the King’s inevitable reaction. There was no point in trying to apologise or make amends—in Kolcorronian society death was the mandatory punishment for insulting the ruler—and there was nothing Toller could do now but try to shut out visions of Gesalla’s face as she heard how he had engineered his own demise…

“In a way, it has always been something of a game between us,” Chakkell said, looking reproachful rather than angry. “Time after time I have allowed you to get away with things for which I would have had any other man flayed; and even on this foreday—had your bout with Karkarand taken its natural course —I believe I would have stayed his sword at the end rather than see you die. And it was all because of our private little jest, Toller. Our secret game. Do you understand that?”

Toller shook his head. “It is entirely too deep for the likes of me.”

“You know exactly what I’m saying. And you know also that the game ended a moment ago when you broke all the rules. You have left me with no alternative but to…”

Chakkell’s words were lost to Toller as, looking over the King’s shoulder, he saw an army officer come running from a doorway in the north wall of the palace. Chakkell must have given a secret signal, Toller decided, his heart lurching as he tightened his grip on the steel sword. For one pounding instant he considered making the King his hostage and bargaining his way to the open countryside and freedom, but the obdurate side of his nature came to the fore. He had no relish for the idea of being hunted down and trapped like a bedraggled animal—and, besides, the act of threatening Chakkell would rebound on his own family. It would be better by far to accept that he had entered the last hour of his life, and to depart it with what remained of his dignity and honour.

Toller stepped clear of Chakkell and was raising his sword when it came to him that the orange-crested captain was hardly behaving like an arresting officer. He was not accompanied by any of the palace guard, his face was agitated and he was carrying binoculars in place of a drawn sword. Far behind him other soldiers and court officials were reappearing at the edges of the parade ground, their faces turned to the southern sky.

“… if you make no attempt to resist,” Chakkell was saying. “Otherwise, I will have no recourse but to…” He broke off, alerted by the sound of approaching footsteps, and wheeled to face the running officer.

“Majesty!” the captain called out. “I bear a sunwriter message from Airmarshal Yeapard. It is of the utmost urgency.” The captain slid to a halt, saluted and waited for permission to continue.

“Get on with it,” Chakkell said irritably.

“A skyship has been sighted south of the city, Majesty.”

“Skyship? Skyship?” Chakkell scowled at the captain. “What is Yeapard talking about?”

“I have no more information, Majesty,” the captain replied, nervoulsy proferring the leather-bound binoculars. “The air-marshal said you might wish to use these.”

Chakkell snatched the glasses and aimed them at the sky. Toller dropped his sword and reached into his pouch for his telescope, narrowing his eyes as he picked out an object shining in the south, about midway between the horizon and the disk of the sister world. With practised speed he trained the telescope, centring the object in a circle of blue brilliance. The magnified image produced in him a rush of emotion powerful enough to displace all thoughts of his imminent death.

He saw the pear-shaped balloon—impressively huge even at a distance of miles—and the rectangular gondola slung beneath it. He saw the jet exhaust cone projecting downwards from the gondola, and even discerned the near-invisible lines of the acceleration struts which linked the upper and lower components of the airborne craft. And it was the sight of the struts—unique to the ships designed more than twenty years earlier for the Migration—which confirmed what he had intuitively known from the start, adding to his inner turmoil.

“I can’t find anything,” Chakkell grumbled, slewing the binoculars too rapidly. “How can there be a skyship anyway? I haven’t authorised any rebuilding.”

“I think that is the point of the airmarshal’s message,” Toller said, keeping his voice level. “We have visitors from the Old World.”

The thirty-plus wagons of the First Birthright expedition had travelled too far.

Their timbers were warped and shredded, little remained of the original paintwork, and breakdowns had become so frequent that progress was rarely as much as ten miles a day. In spite of adequate grazing along the route, the bluehorns which provided the expedition’s motive power were slouched and scrawny, weakened by water-borne diseases and parasitical attacks.

Bartan Drumme, pathfinder for the venture, was at the reins of the leading wagon as the train straggled up to the crest of a low ridge. Ahead of him had unfolded a vista of strangely coloured marshland—off-whites and sickly lime greens predominating —which was dotted with drooping, asymmetrical trees and twisted spires of black rock. The sight would have been unappealing to the average traveller, but for one who was supposed to be leading a group of hopefuls to an agricultural paradise it was deeply depressing.

Bartan groaned aloud as he weighed various factors in his mind and concluded that it would take at least five days for the party to reach the horizontal band of blue-green hills which marked the far edge of the swampy basin. Jop Trinchil, who had conceived and organised the expedition, had been growing more and more disillusioned with him of late, and this new misfortune was not going to improve the relationship. Now that Bartan thought of it, he realised he would be lucky if any of the other farmers in the group continued to have dealings with him. As it was, they only spoke to him when necessary, and he had an uneasy feeling that even the loyalty of his betrothed, Sondeweere, was becoming strained by his lack of success.

Deciding it would be best to face the communal anger squarely, he brought his wagon to a halt, applied the brake and leapt down on to the grass. He was a tall, black-haired man in his mid-twenties, slim-built and agile, with a round boyish face. It was that face—smooth, humorous, clever-looking—which had led to some of his previous difficulties with the farmers, most of whom were inclined to distrust men not cast in their own mould. Aware that he already had enough problems to cope with in the next few minutes, Bartan did his utmost to look competent and unruffled while he signalled for the train to halt.

As he had anticipated, there was no need for him to call a meeting—within seconds of glimpsing the dismal terrain ahead, the farmers and their families had quit their wagons and were converging on him. Each of them appeared to be shouting something different, creating a confusion of sound, but Bartan guessed that their scorn was about equally divided between his ability as a pathfinder and this latest in a series of infertile, unworkable tracts of land. Even small children were staring at him with open contempt.