“That’s not it,” Ondobirtre said gravely, refusing to be goaded. “Everybody thinks I’m an idiot, but in all the years we’ve been watching this kind of thing has anybody seen a day when three globes showed up before the bluehorns had stopped farting after the climb? I’m telling you, my shortsighted friends, that the ptertha are on the increase. In fact, unless I’m getting winedreams, we have a couple more visitors.”
The company turned to look at the space between the nets and saw that two more ptertha had drifted down from the obscurity of the cloud ceiling and were nuzzling their way along the corded barriers.
“They’re mine,” Gehate called as he ran forward. He halted, steadied himself and threw two sticks in quick succession, destroying both the globes with ease. Their dust briefly smudged the air.
“There you are!” Gehate cried. “You don’t need to be built like a soldier to be able to defend yourself. I can still teach you a thing or two, young Hallie.”
Hallie handed his glass back to Ondobirtre and ran to join Gehate, eager to compete with him. After the second brandy Dalacott and Thessaro also went forward and they made a sporting contest of the destruction of every globe which appeared, only giving up when the mist rose clear of the top end of the alley and the ptertha retreated with it to higher altitudes. Dalacott was impressed by the fact that almost forty had come down the alley in the space of an hour, considerably more than he normally would have expected. While the others were retrieving their sticks in preparation for leaving, he commented on the matter to Ondobirtre.
“It’s what I’ve been saying all along,” said Ondobirtre, who had been steadily drinking brandy all the while and was growing pale and morose. “But everybody thinks I’m an idiot.”
By the time the carriage had completed the journey back to Klinterden the sun was nearing the eastern rim of Overland, and the littlenight celebration in honour of Hallie was about to begin.
The vehicles and animals belonging to the guests were gathered in the villa’s forecourt, and a number of children were at play in the walled garden. Hallie, first to jump down from the carriage, sprinted into the house to find his mother. Dalacott followed him at a more sedate pace, the pain in his leg having returned during the long spell in the carriage. He had little enthusiasm for large parties and was not looking forward to the remainder of the day, but it would have been discourteous of him not to stay the night. It was arranged that a military airship would pick him up on the following day for the flight back to the Fifth Army’s headquarters in Trompha.
Conna greeted him with a warm embrace as he entered the villa. “Thank you for taking care of Hallie,” she said. “Was he as superb as he claims?”
“Absolutely! He made a splendid showing.” Dalacott was pleased to see that Conna was now looking cheerful and self-possessed. “He made Gehate sit up and take notice, I can tell you.”
“I’m glad. Now, remember what you promised me at breakfast. I want to see you
— not just picking at your food.”
“The fresh air and exercise have made me ravenous,” Dalacott lied. He left Conna as she was welcoming the three witnesses and went into the central part of the house, which was thronged with men and women who were conversing animatedly in small groups. Grateful that nobody appeared to have noticed his arrival, he quietly took a glass of fruit juice from the table set out for the children and went to stand by a window. From the vantage point he could see quite a long way to the west, over vistas of agricultural land which at the limits of vision shaded off into a low range of blue-green hills. The strip fields clearly showed progressions of six colours, from the pale green of the freshly planted to the deep yellow of mature crops ready for harvesting.
As he was watching, the hills and most distant fields blinked with prismatic colour and abruptly dimmed. The penumbral band of Overland’s shadow was racing across the landscape at orbital speed, closely followed by the blackness of the umbra itself. It took only a fraction of a minute for the rushing wall of darkness to reach and envelop the house — then littlenight had begun. It was a phenomenon Dalacott had never tired of watching. As his eyes adjusted to the new conditions the sky seemed to blossom with stars, hazy spirals and comets, and he found himself wondering if there could be — as some claimed — other inhabited worlds circling far-off suns. In the old days the army had absorbed too much of his mental energy for him to think deeply on such matters, but of late he had found a spare comfort in the notion that there might be an infinity of worlds, and that on one of them there might be another Kolcorron identical to the one he knew in every respect save one. Was it possible that there was another Land on which his lost loved ones were still alive?
The evocative smell of freshly-lit oil lanterns and candles took his thoughts back to the few treasured nights he had spent with Aytha Maraquine. During the heady hours of passion Dalacott had known with total certainty that they would overcome all difficulties, surmount all the obstacles that lay in the way of their eventual marriage. Aytha, who had solewife status, would have had to endure the twin disgraces of divorcing a sickly husband and of marrying across the greatest of all social divisions, the one which separated the military from all other classes. He had been faced with similar impediments, with an added problem in that by divorcing Toriane — daughter of a military governor — he would have been placing his own career in jeopardy.
None of that had mattered to Dalacott in his fevered monomania. Then had come the Padalian campaign, which should have been brief but which in the event had entailed his being separated from Aytha for almost a year. Next had come the news that she had died in giving birth to a male child. Dalacott’s first tortured impulse had been to claim the boy as his own, and in that way keep faith with Aytha, but the cool voices of logic and self-interest had intervened. What was the point in posthumously smirching Aytha’s good name and at the same time prejudicing his career and bringing unhappiness to his family? It would not even benefit the boy, Toller, who would be best left to grow up in the comfortable circumstances of his maternal kith and kin.
In the end Dalacott had committed himself to the course of rationality, not even trying to see his son, and the years had slipped by and his abilities had brought him the deserved rank of general. Now, at this late stage of his life, the entire episode had many of the qualities of a dream and might have lost its power to engender pain — except that other questions and doubts had begun to trouble his hours of solitude. All his protestations notwithstanding, had he really intended to marry Aytha? Had he not, in some buried level of his consciousness, been relieved when her death had made it unnecessary for him to make a decision one way or the other? In short, was he — General Risdel Dalacott — the man he had always believed himself to be? Or was he a…?
“
“I’m sorry.” He gave her a wry smile. “The older I get the more I look into the past.”
“Were you thinking about Oderan?”
“I was thinking about many things.” Dalacott sipped his wine and went with his daughter-in-law to make Smalltalk with a succession of men and women. He noticed that very few of them had army backgrounds, possibly an indication of Conna’s true feelings about the organisation which had taken her husband and was now turning its attention to her only child. The strain of manufacturing conversation with virtual strangers was considerable, and it was almost with relief that he heard the summons to go to the table. It was his duty now to make a short formal speech about his grandson’s coming-of-age; then he would be free to fade into the background to the best of his ability. He walked around the table to the single high-backed chair which had been decked with blue spearflowers in Hallie’s honour and realised he had not seen the boy for some time.
“Where’s our hero?” a man called out. “Bring on the hero!”
“He must have gone to his room,” Conna said. “I’ll fetch him.”
She smiled apologetically and slipped away from the company. There was delay of perhaps a minute before she reappeared in the doorway, and when she did so her face was strangely passive, frozen. She pointed at Dalacott and turned away again without speaking. He went after her, telling himself that the icy sensation in his stomach meant nothing, and walked along the corridor to Hallie’s bedroom. The boy was lying on his back on his narrow couch. His face was flushed and gleaming with sweat, and his limbs were making small uncoordinated movements.
He placed his hand on Hallie’s slim body, just below the ribcage, immediately found the telltale swelling of the spleen, and a moan of pure grief escaped his lips.
“You promised to look after him,” Conna said in a lifeless voice. “He’s only a baby!”
Dalacott stood up and gripped her shoulders. “Is there a doctor here?”
“What’s the use?”
“I know what this looks like, Conna, but at no time was Hallie within twenty paces of a globe and there was no wind to speak of.” Listening to his own voice, a stranger’s voice, Dalacott tried to be persuaded by the stated facts. “Besides, it takes two days for pterthacosis to develop. It simply can’t happen like this. Now, is there a doctor?”
“Visigann,” she whispered, brimming eyes scanning his face in search of hope. “I’ll get him.” She turned and ran from the bedroom.
“You’re going to be all right, Hallie,” Dalacott said as he knelt again by the couch. He used the edge of a coverlet to dab perspiration from the boy’s face and was dismayed to find that he could actually feel heat radiating from the beaded skin. Hallie gazed up at him mutely, and his lips quivered as he tried to smile. Dalacott noticed that the Ballinnian ptertha stick was lying on the couch. He picked it up and pressed it into Hallie’s hand, closing the boy’s nerveless fingers around the polished wood, then kissed him on the forehead. He prolonged the kiss, as though trying to siphon the consuming pyrexia into his own body, and only slowly became aware of two odd facts — that Conna was taking too long to return with the doctor, and that a woman was screaming in another part of the house.
“I’ll come back to you in just a moment, soldier,” he said. He stood up, tranced, made his way back to the dining room and saw that the guests were gathered around a man who was lying on the floor.
The man was Gehate: — and from his fevered complexion and the feeble pawing of his hands it was evident that he was in an advanced stage of pterthacosis. While he was waiting for the airship to be untethered, Dalacott slipped his hand into a pocket and located the curious nameless object he had found decades earlier on the banks of the Bes-Undar. His thumb worked in a circular pattern over the nugget’s reflective surface, polished smooth by many years of similar frictions, as he tried to come to terms with the enormity of what had happened in the past nine days. The bare statistics conveyed little of the anguish which was withering his spirit.
Hallie had died before the end of the littlenight of his coming of age. Gehate and Ondobirtre had succumbed to the terrifying new form of pterthacosis by the end of that day, and on the following morning he had found Hallie’s mother dead of the same cause in her room. That had been his first indication that the disease was contagious, and the implications had still been reverberating in his head when news had come of the fate of those who had been present at the celebration.
Of some forty men, women and children who had been in the villa, no fewer than thirty-two — including all the children — had been swept away during the same night. And still the tide of death had not expended its fell energies. The population of the hamlet of Klinterden and surrounding district had been reduced from approximately three-hundred to a mere sixty within three days. At that point the invisible killer had appeared to lose its virulence, and the burials had begun.
The airship’s gondola lurched and swayed a little as it was freed from its constraints. Dalacott moved closer to a port hole and, for what he knew would be the last time, looked down on the familiar pattern of red-roofed dwellings, orchards and striated fields of grain. Its placid appearance masked the profound changes which had taken place, just as his own unaltered physical aspect disguised the fact that in nine days he had grown old.
The feeling — the drear apathy, the failure of optimism — was new to him, but he had no difficulty in identifying it because, for the first time ever, he could see cause to envy the dead.
PART II
The Proving Flight
