Night time came and
still they were no nearer to the cathedral-like structure. The Rider decamped
them in a grassy valley and positioned the guards in a circle around them. He
didn’t have them untied though and they had to muddle through all roped
together. After dinner they were allowed to bathe in a nearby river but that
did little to raise their spirits. Angelo, Dutch and Sweet Mary sat tensely in
the twilight, listening to Rose singing happily away at her nonsensical rhymes,
providing a macabre counterpoint to Righteous who would occasionally burst out and
berate an invisible foe, shouting and laughing intermittently.
‘We’re all coming
apart,’ thought Dutch with a shock, wondering if she was next to lose her
marbles. “If I have to listen to this much longer….” But she was very glad that
Sweet Mary was alright. At the beginning she was very suspicious of her chirpy
cheerfulness, but as the day wore on Sweet Mary’s sanity became very
obvious…the opposite of Rose and Righteous. Whatever the Rider had done to her
it had obviously not damaged her mind in any way – and her body seemed healthy
enough. In fact she looked less affected by the journey than all the
others…including the Ahram. Dutch’s eye wandered involuntarily towards the
Rider some yards away and caught him looking at them with a strangely empathetic
expression on his face. They both looked away at the same moment.
The next morning dawned
before they had even fallen asleep. No one wanted to get up, except Rags who
was flapping and creeping and gorkling so loudly they didn’t have a choice. Breakfast
was being served by him whether they liked it or not. Angelo wasn’t interested
in food; his mind was on Rose, and her
mind was definitely missing. There had been no change to her condition during
the night. He held her hand and talked to her, trying to elicit some spark of
recognition from those beautiful eyes he loved so much, but alas, they remained
as blank as the new moon.
“I will pay you anything you like,” begged the
Counsellor as he tried to bribe some of his bearers into being more merciful.
“Why are you so horrible to me?
What have I done to….” The Counsellor never finished his
sentence as it was drowned out by a chorus of derisive hoots and coughs.
“Never mind. We’re nearly there now Counsellor. Just a few more
miles,” laughed the Rider and set off down the road
before they finished eating.
And once again they all
followed on behind him, the power of his crozier flaming in the shimmering heat
waves of another hot day, distorting the air out of all recognition and almost
hiding him behind a veil of turbulent energy - as if he was passing through into
some other realm. Hour after unholy hour passed, the marchers hanging their
heads and staring at the road as yet another foot came into view and kicked up
another puff of dust, and then the other, left, right, swish, swash, swishing
tails adding to the dust in their mouths. So little feeling did the humans have
left in their bodies that sometimes it seemed that their feet didn’t even
belong to them, but to someone else who was carrying them.
They were marching along
the road that ran down the centre of the valley, never too far away from the
spine. Occasionally as they went through a village they could see some Ahram
watching them curiously from the cool shade of a doorway, but no-one dared come
any closer with the Rider there. No one even waved or said anything.
After a while however,
Dutch became aware that something was going on. There was definitely a hum of
excitement running through the Ahram host. There was coughing and hooting
amongst the bearers and even some disturbance in the normally surgical marching
precision of the soldiers.
“Something’s up,” murmured
Dutch.
“What are you doing you fools?” shouted the Counsellor.
“Stop that!” The bearers seemed to be
in the throes of a full scale protest. They began hooting and jumping up and
down, pitching the poor counsellor this way and that and finally dropping him
on the ground with an emphatic thump. Then they made a break for it and took
off across the fields. The soldiers, though also agitated, held their ranks.
The deserters didn’t get
very far though. A flash of fire seared the path in front of the fleeing
bearers and a huge concussion wave knocked them all over backwards, effectively
stopping the rout.
“Now,” said the Rider. “Unless you want me to fry your lazy carcasses, you will return to
your duties and behave yourselves.”
A disoriented group of
Ahram picked themselves up and shuffled reluctantly back to the counsellor, who
was moaning in pain.
“And carry him properly from now on. I am tired of listening to his whining…so
one more complaint from him and I will decapitate you all.”
“What’s going on,” Dutch
turned to Garm for clarification.
Garm pointed across the plains.
In the distance, half hidden in a grove of trees, they could see a high white wall
enclosing what could barely be discerned as many small buildings within. It was
hard to tell in the heat haze and the glare. Garm looked at the Rider and
whispered to Dutch, “I will tell in a little while.”
The Rider waited until
the Counsellor had been hoisted back up on his palanquin, then turned and
floated away down the road again. Garm waited until they were well underway.
“That is a breeding den.
The men get excited,” said Garm, his English improving with every sentence.
“There are twelve, hidden
in the countryside. Well guarded. They keep the most beautiful women there. To
breed.”
“And the
not-so-beautiful women?” asked Dutch brusquely, feeling a bit of a sore point
here. “What happens to them?”
“The…er…others are
sacrificed to the Worm. It is said they pass through the Dragons Door to the
other side. This ensures good health for the race and the valley.”
Everyone was very silent
for a while, Dutch remembering what the Rider had said earlier about a giant
snake.
“What happens to the
children?” she said to change the topic
“The male children are
taken away after weaning and live with the men. The girls stay with their
mothers until they reach childbearing age and the Seesh decides which are to
stay and which are to go. Anyway, that is why the bearers became so agitated.
None of them have seen a woman since they were very young, probably too young
to even remember.”
“Who fathers the
children then?”
“The men are chosen from
the strongest and cleverest in the land…and they are kept in the Cantave,” his
eyes indicating forwards to where the Warship towered over them.
*
And then they were
there. Coming over the rise of a hill it finally stood in front of them. The massive
spaceship rose up into the clouds so high that they couldn’t see more than half
of it. It was a startling sight. But even more so was the shanty town that
sprawled like a dirty grey blanket over the countryside for miles in every
direction, and washed up in waves against a massive wall that encompassed the
spaceship, still some ten or so miles distant. The sprawling slum city looked
like a battleground of trenches and tents, decay and detritus stretching out
towards them, lapping almost to the foot of the hill upon which they stood.
“Oh my god, is this where all the people live?”
asked Angelo.
“This is where most of
the workers sleep, nobody ‘lives’ here. The administrators and such like me
live inside the wall,” replied Garm.
They watched as distant
lines of workers streamed back and forth like ants along the maze of muddy
walkways that wound through the slum-city, curling this way and that, some
winding towards the spaceship, others away, but always on the move. And even on
the spaceship they could see Ahram construction workers crawling like a
creeping grey fungus all over the pristine white of the ship, shaping and
polishing. Everywhere they looked, hundreds of thousands of Ahram were on the
move. It was a mammoth workforce like they had never seen before. Even Rose and
Righteous were silent at the sight. For many minutes no one even seemed to draw
breath.
“They have laboured like
this day and night for fifty years,” said Garm, shaking his head in sympathy. “The
power of the bones is dying, just like the sun. They are working so hard
because the wormhole is closing. If they do not complete the ship in time, then
we all die.”
“It’s closing? When?”
asked Dutch.
“Soon,” said Garm
The road through the
slum narrowed to a single track and the Rider tightened up the cordon. The
humans were sandwiched up between the soldiers while the counsellor brought up
the rear. It was a humbling feeling being crowded in by these soldiers, all of
whom were over seven feet tall with massively muscled haunches. It was like
walking next to a herd of Tyrannosaurus Rex just hoping you didn’t get stepped
on.
The little band wound
this way and that through the city, unable to avoid tramping in the many
dubious piles and puddles that lay in their way. There was no sanitation of any
sort, just reeking rivulets running down the path. Sullen, red-eyed workers
stared at them from the hovels and from under makeshift constructions. A few
brave ones came out and stood at the side of the path to get a look at these
strange creatures being paraded in front of them like in a carnival procession.
None made any sound. They all looked emaciated and unhealthy – some of them
even held their hands out for tit-bits of food, which sent Rose into a lather
of unrequited mercy, desperately turning this way and that but unable to help
any of the poor souls she saw. And to add to the pot of things bubbling under,
Righteous was starting to become disturbed again. Noot held onto him, cooing
and mooing and trying to calm him down, but the proximity of the ship seemed to
be having a strong effect on him. Soon Righteous was making that same keening
sound, like a choir of dead people singing. The Rider however didn’t take much
notice of any of this and continued blithely on with the journey. The rest kept
their eyes on their feet and tried to avoid stepping in anything nasty.
When they looked up
again the great wall surrounding the ship loomed high above them. Everyone
sensed they were nearly at the end of their journey and paid more attention to
where they were going. For the next half hour they followed the curve of the
wall until they finally came to a gate.
Unlike the flamboyant
Greek or Roman temples with their colonnades and pillars and ornately carved
friezes, this entranceway was just a smooth white opening cut out in the shape
of a Gothic arch. What it did have in common with the ancients was the scale.
It must have been over a quarter mile high. There was no actual gate to guard against
anyone getting in or out; merely a huge opening in the wall. A flat, wide
pathway ran from the gate towards the mass of white that was the base of the spaceship.
How long the path was, they couldn’t tell, for everything now was white, unless
one craned ones neck straight upwards towards the sky, and even that was washed
out from the glare of the polished bone.
It was at about this
point that Dutch noticed Garm was no longer with them. Noot still held onto
Righteous, and the Counsellor continued to creak and complain…but no Garm. He
must have taken off sometime before they entered the gate. Dutch turned round
to see if she could spot him and got the shock of her life. Even though they
had just come through it, the gateway was no more. It was as if the wall had
just closed up behind them.
’Trick of the light’ she
thought to herself, but the glare was beginning to get her down. Everything was
white. There were no shadows to give anything definition; even the ground they
walked on was not quite there. It was a bit like walking on a cloud; white
before, white after, and white underneath. She felt at any moment that she was
going to slip through into the world below.
WHAT HORROR AWAITS THEM IN THE CANTAVE? AND HOW WILL THEY SURVIVE THEIR MEETING WITH THE SEESH? DON'T FORGET TO WATCH OUT FOR NEXT WEEKS EPISODE.
