Cowl

  The jungle was a dense wall of green, spilling into mangroves to the Roman’s left as he faced seaward on the strip of sand on which he had been deposited. To his right weird trees, and other strange plants he could not identify, halted their march towards the sea at the beginning of a rocky promontory. Resting his hand on the pommel of his sheathed gladius, he headed towards that, assuming that wherever rocks were bathed by the sea there would be shellfish, which had served him well enough thus far. As he walked he suddenly felt ebullient, light-headed. The air here had a strange clarity and was as intoxicating as wine.

  Reaching the edge of the sandbar, Tacitus scrambled up the rocky face and began to head out onto the promontory itself. After a moment he noted that scattered over the stone were nautiloid shells the size of dinner plates. He laughed and kicked one into the sea. Drew his sword and waved it at the sky.

  ‘Send them now, curse you!’ he shouted at the gods. ‘Send your monsters and your trials!’

  But there was no immediate response and, from past experience, he expected none. Usually the monsters came in the night, sniffing after him as if after spoiled meat.

  He moved on towards the end of the promontory, where he squatted and gazed down into the deep water. His head was buzzing almost as if he was getting too much air, and he noted that his breathing was shallow. Observing a nautiloid drifting along in the pellucid depths, with its tentacles outstretched and its shell striped red and white, he wondered if he was beginning to see the kind of visions wounded soldiers saw before dying.

  He prodded at the surface of the water with his gladius and something rose up out of those same depths, in an expanding ring around the nautiloid, like an odd piece of jewellery carved from grey rock, ivory and rose quartz. The nautiloid jetted aside in a cloud of ink and the circle kept growing larger. Then Tacitus realized his challenge had been answered.

  Recognizing the apparition in that instant as an enormous open mouth, Tacitus flung himself back as a huge fish shot up over the rim of stone in an explosion of foam. Its mouth was filled with jagged teeth, its blunt head armoured. He shoved himself further away, sliding on his backside, the sea boiling behind the great creature as, with its moray tail, it tried to force itself further onto the promontory. Realizing he was getting close to the sea on the other side, he scrambled to his feet, and turned and ran. After thrashing around, trying to get to him, the sea boiling and spindrift tumbling through the air, the giant fish flipped back into the water with a huge splash, then came hammering alongside the promontory, driving a wave before it. Tacitus leapt onto the beach as the wave also reached it, and didn’t stop running until he reached the wall of vegetation. Turning, he watched the fish, half emerged from the water, begin thrashing from side to side to pull itself back into the sea. He spat on the sand—recognizing this sending from Neptune—then turned to peer into the greenery.

  The vegetation was so dense that there was no easy path through it. Large, unlikely insects moved about in its shade, clinging to the underside of bedspread-sized leaves, or camouflaged against the trunks of plants like green spears. He did not care to venture in there amongst those horrors, but was hungry again, and certainly didn’t want to be down near the shore collecting shellfish.

  ‘Curse you,’ he muttered.

  Tacitus removed, from the sack he had made from his tattered cloak a jug he had found on one of those past seashores and drank water collected from another age. Looking around, he noted how dank everything seemed inside the jungle, while at the upper edge of the beach extended a drift of bleached wood and other dried-out organic matter, including piles of triple-ribbed carapaces. Warily eyeing the shoreline, he collected some of these and, using a flint spearhead he had taken from some primitive who had been sent against him and tinder he had collected from a place as dry and hot as his native land in summer, he began the laborious process of striking sparks from his sword to ignite a fire. When it was going he piled on a log, from underneath which scuttled large horrible sealice with scorpion forelimbs, then turned back towards the jungle in search of food. Spotting a horrible insect the size of a flattened chicken, he pinned it with his gladius to one of the spear trees, then roasted it over the fire, before devouring its fragrant prawn-flavoured flesh. Later, having partially denuded the nearby jungle of similar creatures, he lay down and slept in bright sunlight, surrounded by the carnage of his meal. And dreamed of vengeance.

  AFTER CARVING THE HERRERASAUR he had roasted with the microwave setting on his carbine, Tack tentatively ate a piece.

  ‘Chicken,’ he said.

  ‘Chicken’s grandad about a billon times removed,’ Saphothere replied.

  Tack wiped his knife on fallen needles and rejoined the traveller.

  ‘What happened?’ Saphothere asked without raising his head.

  ‘From what point?’ Tack asked.

  Saphothere now looked up. ‘My memory is completely blank from the moment we embarked until I came to and saw you fighting our dinner there.’

  ‘The interspace adjacent to Sauros was … rough. The second attack came earlier than Goron or his people supposed, and we went straight into torbeast incursion surfaces, displacement fields and spillover from the occasional tactical being employed. We came out of it here with actual momentum. The mantisal bounced a couple of times and came to rest against this tree. I got you out and the mantisal returned to interspace—on its second try.’

  Saphothere nodded, then held up his injured arm enquiringly.

  Tack went on, ‘I checked you over thoroughly. Besides vorpal draining you had suffered a broken arm—both bones—and some cracked ribs, and your heart had stopped. I used adrenalin and a discharger to get things going again and made some necessary repairs.’

  ‘You saved my life,’ observed Saphothere. ‘Yet your programming probably gave you a choice—you could have just gone on and left me.’

  ‘It seemed the right thing to do.’ Tack sat, staring at the fire and feeling uncomfortable. ‘I need you to take me as far back in time as possible by mantisal, so I can conserve my energies for the fight that follows.’ But his words fell on deaf ears, for when he looked up again, he saw that Saphothere was fast asleep.

  Saphothere needed five days of rest before attempting to summon the mantisal again, and it was a relief when it appeared intact. The two surviving herrerasaurs, which had been lurking around the encampment all the time and twice had to be driven off, were left to dispute the ripe remains of their kin, and the bones the two men had stripped of meat. Interspace no longer seemed as dangerous as it had done, but Tack sensed in it a weird difference, like some presence. He gazed out at the grey void overlying midnight—the nearest interpretation his customary senses could put upon the view—and noted the terminus of the wormhole, looking like a distant sliver of silver inserted at what might be called the horizon. But whatever was bothering Tack wasn’t there.

  ‘Look to the interface,’ suggested Saphothere.

  Tack peered at the black surface of the pseudo-sea. Then, with that ability to distort perception he had acquired by riding the mantisal, he looked harder. There at first, infinitely deep, he observed a great tree like some vast water plant. Focusing on it was like trying to discern the final edge of a Mandelbrot pattern. Leviathan heads of tissue consisted of feeding mouths and wormish tangles of endless necks, surfaces of skin curved away into nether spaces. Thicker branches were at once serpentine torsos and the interior glimpses of bottomless intestines. Organs layered over and within each other like mountain ranges. And when at last Tack felt he was gaining some focus, some perspective, it all tumbled away and he realized he was seeing only that fraction of it his mind could interpret.

  ‘It’s quiescent at the moment,’ Saphothere explained. ‘Though “moment” is stretching the word—like us all it exists in its own time, and that time might bear no relation to any other.’

  ‘The torbeast,’ Tack stated.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Saphothere.

  ‘What are you go
ing to do about this creature when Cowl is dead?’ Tack asked.

  ‘That is a question we have yet to answer,’ Saphothere replied, closing his eyes and truncating the conversation. Some hours later, personal time, the mantisal brought them down on a drizzly mountainside overlooking an endless sea of foliage. Wordlessly, Saphothere activated his tent. It self-erected into a ground-hugging dome a metre high and two metres wide—the entrance to the dome being an elasticated thing like an anus. It closed tightly behind him when he crawled inside.

  Tack walked down into Carboniferous forest, armed with his newly acquired knowledge of the flora and fauna, in search of food. When he returned with a metre-long newt slung over one shoulder and a bag of cycad fruits like spherical red pineapples, he found Saphothere was fast asleep in the tent. Tack sat gazing out at the ancient forest and considered all he had now come to understand, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being lied to.

  Perhaps that was just natural paranoia arising because he didn’t understand everything. He could see that, before Pedagogue’s education of him, he would have been suspicious about things that he now understood perfectly. The length of this recent jump was a case in point. To reach this forest they had crossed a hundred and fifty million years whereas, before, half that distance had crucified Saphothere. Now Tack knew that, prior to their first violent meeting in twentieth-century Essex, Saphothere had been hunting down Umbrathane for a long time, and draining himself—and his mantisal—down to the limit continuously. Five days sitting on his butt in the Triassic had been the most rest he’d enjoyed in five years. And stuffing dinosaur meat, roast nuts and some sort of root like Jerusalem artichoke into his face had increased his physical bulk noticeably. Also Saphothere explained that the energy detritus from the torbeast’s attack on Sauros had, once the danger passed, provided a rich feeding ground for the mantisal. But, no, it wasn’t apparent inconsistencies like that. It was the simple idea of himself being the most effective assassin the Heliothane could send against Cowl. Yes, he understood how they could not get through without a tor but, surely, with their technology there had to be another way …

  ‘Admiring the view?’ Saphothere asked from behind him.

  Tack turned and nodded as the traveller left his tent.

  Saphothere went on, ‘Fossil fuels, that’s all it becomes. And your profligate society burnt it all up by fuelling uncontained growth without making any serious effort to get out of the container.’

  Tack stared at him questioningly.

  Saphothere gestured towards the vast forest. ‘You mentioned predestination, though I should think you are now beyond such ideas. But, if you really wanted to find it, there it is spread below you. For millions of years the Earth stored energy in the form of fossil fuels, as if making it ready for intelligent use by a future civilization. With such energy to hand, your people could have powered their civilization into the solar system long before mine. It could be said that this was their destiny. And they wasted it.’

  ‘What power did you use?’

  ‘Nuclear fusion, bought at great cost. For your people it could have been easy, for mine it was hard.’

  Tack wondered quite what he meant by ‘mine’, for it was the Umbrathane who had taken that step. He turned away and proceeded to gut the big newt, while Saphothere opened one of the red pineapples. The minutiae of day-today existence pushed speculation to the edge of his consciousness. After they ate, Saphothere retired again. Tack dozed with his back against a rock, too lazy yet to bother setting up his own tent, even though it was hardly a difficult task. Vaguely he heard Saphothere speak, then later a breath of cold, washing across him, pulled him into full consciousness. He was staring dozily at the endless forest when something pressed against the back of his neck.

  ‘Not one word, one movement, or I cripple you now.’

  She was supposed to be dead—incinerated in an atomic blast—but Meelan now sounded very much alive.

  AGAIN THE AIR WAS growing stale and Polly had to fight a rising terror to look for the other place in which she could control the careering progress of the scale and of the cage that contained her. She did not want to see more because, at the edge of perception, she just knew that a nightmare lurked underneath the midnight sea, watching her. When she did reach out, brief chaos surrounded her and she glimpsed a vast torso curving above, its edges lost in spatial distortion: an endless tangle of necks and mouths like the one that had taken Nandru; and she felt the regard of some feral intelligence.

  ‘Oh Christ …’

  She was groping for a way out, fear freezing her will and shoving her perception back to that of the black sea and grey void. Then something reached out, opening a surface at the end of which the coloured light of the real gleamed, and she fell down the slope into day, the cage smoking and dissipating as she hurtled out over cold desert and dropped down towards a rock field. She clung to the glass cage’s struts, willing them to retain integrity, feeling them grow thin under her touch. But it was enough. She dropped two metres to a boulder, slid down the side of it, and rolled in a scattering of yucca-like stems, snapping them over onto ground coated with the green buttons of other primitive growth.

  What did you see? I couldn’t see anything.

  ‘That thing—I saw the thing that killed you.’

  I saw only two surfaces: one black and one grey. That’s all I’ve ever seen.

  ‘Perhaps you’re lucky,’ said Polly, standing up and brushing green slime from her coat, before looking around.

  The mountains rising up to her right were jagged, unrounded by the elements. From somewhere behind them a column of smoke rose into the sky, staining the clouds in shades of sepia, black and crimson. Between them and the rock field lay a gritty plain dappled with green. The few plants were simple: constructed from a child’s drawing by some inept god. In the stony ground there were occasional cracks filled with stagnant water in which miniature rainbow larvae wriggled and swarmed. Again the shift had brought her down near the seashore, for she could hear the hiss of waves beyond the rocks, though she could not yet see the ocean. Negotiating her way between some boulders, she headed in that direction, for despite her recent, near-lethal experience by the sea, it was at least something reassuringly familiar.

  The shoreline was cluttered with the shells of sea creatures; water snails as big as human heads, crab things and lobster things, worm things and just plain things. Some of the shells were still occupied, and stank like a trawler’s bilge, but nothing was moving. Polly kicked over a ribbed shell resembling a knight’s shield and squatted down beside it to inspect the decaying creature it contained.

  I don’t think there’s anything on the land that can attack you now.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Polly asked bitterly.

  I think you’re beyond any land animal other than insects … or their ancient relatives.

  ‘That’s a comfort.’

  About to stand up to move on, she yelled with fright. A figure was looming over her.

  Dressed in dark clothing like army fatigues, the man was rangy, hard-looking. His skin looked almost bluish-white and his close-cropped hair resembled a layer of chalk. At first she had the crazy notion that he was some sort of inhabitant of this same age, then realized he could be nothing other than a time traveller like herself.

  ‘Who … ?’ was all she could manage.

  The man smiled, though it was hardly reassuring. Polly’s hand strayed to her pocket and the comforting weight of the condom-wrapped automatic.

  ‘My name is Thote—if that is relevant. I’m here to help you.’

  ‘NOW, LIE FACE-DOWN WITH your legs and arms outstretched.’

  Tack considered going for her, but in this situation his new strength meant nothing and his reactions could not be faster than her trigger finger. So he obeyed, stretching out, but turning his head so he could just see Saphothere’s tent. With the barrel of her weapon still pressed against his neck, Meelan tossed a small silver sphere at the
tent, which burnt through the fabric like hot iron through tissue paper. The interior was suddenly filled with a phosphorescent blaze, becoming a bright lantern for a few seconds before erupting from the fabric and consuming it. The heat was intense and Tack recognized that she had hurled a molecular catalyser, like the one Saphothere had used on the palisade of Pig City and like those still contained in Tack’s pack. Saphothere was not even given time to scream.

  As the fire died down, a filigree of solidifying black smoke fell through the air as from an acetylene flame. Tack felt the pressure of the gun barrel lift from his neck.

  ‘I have placed on your back a small mine, which, should you move abruptly, will detonate and drive into your spine fragments of glass coated with a paralytic. Do not move.’

  Tack recognized that both Heliothane and Umbrathane possessed numerous varieties of explosives that could be programmed to detonate under varying circumstances—changes in temperature, humidity, position, whatever—so he did not disbelieve Meelan. His recent education had opened his eyes to just how dangerous her kind were.

  Soon after she stepped into view as she went to inspect the ruins of the tent. He watched her running the toe of her boot through the thin layer of ash. Her new arm, he saw, was now nearly the size of the other, there was some sort of brace extending down the forearm and dividing up to spread down each finger. This was clearly to prevent any deformation in the rapid growth of the limb. Unfortunately, such regenerative ability was not one the Heliothane had been able to impart to himself, along with his other augmentations. Tack then realized Meelan might not know about those. Maybe the mine’s detonation was programmed to the slower movements of a twenty-second-century human, not for what he had become. Tack calculated that he had at least one and a half seconds.