into the other balloon.
A seam ripped apart — and the balloon
It collapsed inwards, writhing in a perfect simulation of agony, and now the King’s ship was falling unchecked. The leverage it exerted through the strut turned Toller’s gondola on its side and Overland flashed into view, eager and expectant. Gesalla screamed as she fell against the lowermost wall and the looking-glass she had been holding spun out into the blue emptiness. Toller threw himself into the galley, risking going over the side in the process, gripped the end of the strut and — summoning all the power of his warrior’s physique — raised it and cast it free.
As the gondola righted itself he clung to the rail and watched the other ship begin its lethal plunge. At the height of a thousand miles gravity was at less than half strength and the tempo of events had again lapsed into dreamlike slow motion. He saw King Prad swim to the side of the falling gondola. The King, his blind eye shining like a star, raised one hand and pointed at Toller, then he was hidden from view by the swirls of his ship’s ruined balloon. Gaining speed as it settled into the fall, still seeking a balance between gravitation and air resistance, the ship dwindled to become a fluttering speck at the limits of vision, and finally was lost in the fractal patterns of Overland.
Becoming aware of a fierce psychic pressure, Toller raised his head and looked at the two accompanying ships. Leddravohr was gazing at him from the nearer, and as their eyes met he extended both arms towards Toller, like a man calling a loved one to his embrace. He remained like that, mutely imploring, and even when Toller had returned to the burner he could almost feel the prince’s hatred as an invisible blade knifing through his soul. A grey-faced Chakkell was gazing at him from the entrance to the passenger compartment, inside which Daseene and Corba were quietly sobbing.
“This is a bad day,” Chakkell said in a halting voice. “The King is dead.”
“Leddravohr won’t see it like that.”
“No,” Toller said pensively. “Leddravohr won’t see it like that.” That night, while Toller was vainly trying to sleep, Gesalla came to his side, and in the loneliness of the hour it seemed perfectly natural for him to put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder and brought her mouth close to his ear.
“Toller,” she whispered, “what are you thinking about?”
He considered lying to her, then decided he had had enough of barriers. “I’m thinking about Leddravohr. It all has to be settled between us.”
“Perhaps he will have thought the thing through by the time we reach Overland and will be of a different mind. I mean, it wasn’t even as if sacrificing us would have saved the King. Leddravohr is bound to admit that you had no choice.”
“I may have felt I had no choice, but Leddravohr will say I acted too quickly in rolling us out from under his father’s ship. Perhaps I would say the same thing if the positions were reversed. If I had waited a little longer Kedalse or somebody else might have got their burner going.”
“You mustn’t think that way,” Gesalla said softly. “You did what had to be done.”
“And Leddravohr is going to do what has to be done.”
“You can overcome him, can’t you?”
“Perhaps — but I fear that he will have already given orders for me to be executed,” Toller said. “I can’t fight a regiment.”
“I see.” Gesalla raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him, and in the dimness her face was impossibly beautiful. “Do you love me, Toller?”
He felt he had reached the end of a lifelong journey. “Yes.”
“I’m glad.” She sat up straighter and began to remove her clothing. “Because I want a child from you.”
He caught her wrist, smiling numbly in his disbelief. “What do you think you’re doing? Chakkell is on the burner just on the other side of this partition.”
“He can’t see us.”
“But this isn’t the way to.…”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Gesalla said, pressing her breast against the hand that was holding her wrist. “I have chosen you to father my child, and there may be very little time for us.”
“It won’t work, you know.” Toller relaxed back on the quilts. “It’s physically impossible for me to make love in these conditions.”
“That’s what you think,” Gesalla said as she moved astride of him and brought her mouth down on his, moulding his cheeks with both her hands to coax him into an ardent response.
Chapter 20
Overland’s equatorial continent, seen from a height of two miles, looked essentially prehistoric.
Toller had been staring down at the outward-seeping landscape for some time before realising why that particular adjective kept coming to mind. It was not the total absence of cities and roads — first proof that the continent was uninhabited — but the uniform coloration of the grasslands.
Throughout his life every aerial view he had seen had been modified in some way by the six-harvest system which was universal on Land. The edible grasses and all other cultivated vegetation had been arranged in parallel strips in which the colours ranged from brown through several shades of green to harvest yellow, but here the plains were simply…
The sunlit expanses of the single colour shimmered in his eyes.
Reminded of his personal problems, he turned his attention to the artificial elements of the scene. The two other ships of the royal flight were slightly below him. Pouche’s was the more distant, most of its passengers visible at the rail as they journeyed ahead in their imaginations to the unknown world.
Ilven Zavotle was the only person to be seen on Leddravohr’s ship, sitting tiredly at the controls. Leddravohr himself must have been lying down in a passenger compartment, as he had done — except during the traumatic episode two days before — throughout the voyage. Toller had noted the prince’s behaviour earlier and wondered if he could be phobic about the boundless emptiness surrounding the migration fleet. If that were the case, it would have been better for Toller if their inevitable duel could have been fought aboard one of the goridolas.
In the two miles of airspace below him he could see twelve other balloons forming an irregular line which increasingly flared off to the west, evidence of a moderate breeze in the lowest levels of the atmosphere. The general area into which they were drifting was sprinkled with the elongated shapes of collapsed balloons, which would later be used to build a temporary township of tents. As he had expected, Toller’s binoculars showed that most of the grounded ships had military markings. Even in the turmoil of the escape from Ro-Atabri, Leddravohr had had the foresight to provide himself with a power base which would be effective from the instant he set foot on Overland.
Analysing the situation, Toller could see no prospect at all of his living for more than a matter of minutes if he put his ship down close to Leddravohr’s. Even if he were to defeat Leddravohr in single combat, he would — as the man charged with the death of the King — be taken by the army. His single and desperately slim chance of survival, for a term to be measured in days at most, lay in hanging back during the touchdown and going aloft again as soon as Leddravohr’s ship was committed to a landing. There were forested hills perhaps twenty miles west of the landing site, and if he could reach them with his balloon he might be able to avoid capture until the forces of the infant nations were properly organised in the cause of his destruction.
The weakest point of the plan was that it hinged on factors outside his own control, all of them concerned with the mind and character of Leddravohr’s pilot.
He had no doubt at all that Zavotle would make the correct deductions when he saw Toller’s ship being tardy during the landing, but would he be sympathetic with Toller’s aims? And even if he were inclined to be loyal to a fellow skyman, would he take the personal risk of doing what Toller expected of him? He would have to be quick to pull the rip panel and collapse his balloon — just as it was becoming apparent to Leddravohr that his enemy was slipping out of his grasp — and there was no predicting how the prince might react in his anger. He had struck other men down for lesser offences. Toller stared across the field of brightness at the solitary figure of Zavotle, knowing that his gaze was being returned, then he put his back against the gondola wall and eyed Chakkell, who was operating the burner at the one-and-twenty rhythm of the descent.
“Prince, there is a breeze at ground level and I fear the ship may be dragged,” he said, making his opening move. “You and the princess and your children should be ready to go over the side even before we touch the ground. It might sound dangerous, but there’s a good ledge all around the gondola for standing on, and our ground speed will be little more than a walking pace. Jumping off before touchdown is preferable to being in the gondola if it overturns.”
“I’m touched by your solicitude,” Chakkell said, giving Toller a tilt-headed look of surmise.
Wondering if he had blundered so early, Toller approached the pilot’s station. “We’ll be landing very soon, Prince. You must be prepared.”
Chakkell nodded, vacated the seat and, unexpectedly, said, “I still remember the first time I saw you, in the company of Glo. I never thought it would come to this.”
“Lord Glo had vision,” Toller replied. “He should be here.”
“I suppose so.” Chakkell gave him another searching look and went into the compartment where Daseene and the children were making ready for the landing.
Toller sat down and took control of the burner, noting as he did so that the pointer on the altitude gauge had fully returned to the bottom mark. As Overland was smaller than Land he would have expected its surface gravity to be less, but Lain had said otherwise.
He glanced at Gesalla, who for an hour had been motionless at the outer wall of their compartment, her attention fully absorbed by the expanding vistas of the new world below. Her bundle of possessions was already slung on her shoulder, giving the impression that she was impatient to set foot on Overland and go about the business of carving out whatever future she had visualised for herself and the child which, possibly, he had seeded into her. The emotions aroused in him by the sight of her slim, straight and uncompromising form were the most complex he had ever known.
On the night she had come to him he had been quite certain he would be unable to fulfil the male role because of his tiredness, his guilt and the unnerving presence of Chakkell, who had been operating the burner only a few feet away. But Gesalla had known better. She had worked on him with fervour, skill and imagination, plying him with her mouth and gracile body until nothing else existed for him but the need to pulse his semen into her. She had remained on top of him until the climactic moment was near, then had insensibly engineered a change of position and had held it, with upthrust pelvis and legs locked around him, for minutes afterwards. Only later, when they had been talking, had he realised that she had been maximising the chances of conception.
And now, as well as loving her, he hated her for some of the things she had said to him during the remainder of that night while the meteors flickered in the dimness all around. There had been no direct statements, but there was revealed to him a Gesalla who, while displaying chilly anger over a fine point of etiquette, was at the same time prepared to defy any convention for the sake of a future child. In the milieu of the old Kolcorron it had seemed to her that the qualities offered by Lain Maraquine would be the most advantageous for her offspring, and so she had married him. She had loved Lain, but the thing which chafed Toller’s sensibilities was that she had loved Lain for a reason.
And now that she was being projected into the vastly different frontier environment of Overland, it had been her considered judgment that attributes available through Toller Maraquine’s seed were to be preferred, and so she had coupled with him.
In his confusion and pain, Toller was unable to identify the principal source of his resentment. Was it self-disgust at having been so easily seduced by his brother’s widow? Was it lacerated pride over having his finest feelings made part of an exercise in eugenics? Or was he furious with Gesalla for not fitting in with his preconceptions, for not being what he wanted her to be? How was it
