‘All right, some of that stuff is nearly true, but that makes no difference. I’m going on, you’re going home. Period.’
‘I can help. I was telling the truth, honest I was, I’m friends with the Silfen. I can find them for you.’
‘Not interested.’
‘You’re going to walk the paths, the deep paths,’ Orion said hotly. ‘I know you can do it. I’ve see all the other losers come and go, but you’re different, you’re Ozzie. That’s why I chose to come with you. If anybody can find the paths to other places it’ll be you.’ He looked down at the ground, shamefaced. ‘You’re Ozzie. You’ll make it happen. I know you will.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, but this is a non-starter.’
‘They’re there.’ It was a whisper from the boy’s lips, as if he was having to confess some terrible secret.
‘What’s that?’ Ozzie asked kindly.
‘Mom and Dad, they’re there. They’re on the paths some-where.’
‘Oh holy . . . No, listen, I’m not going to find them. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. But they’re gone. I know that’s so hard for you. But you have to go back to town. When I come back, I’ll do everything I can for you, I promise; we’ll find you a nice new home, and track down your family, and I’ll take you to see all sorts of wonderful places.’
‘I’m coming with you!’ Orion shouted.
‘I can’t let you do that. One day you’ll understand.’
‘Yeah?’ the boy sneered. ‘And how are you going to stop me, huh! How?’
‘I . . . Now listen—’
‘I’m just going to ride on right behind you, all the way.’ Orion’s eyes were gleaming defiance now, he was on a roll and he knew it. ‘Maybe I’ll even ride on in front – you don’t know the way. Yeah, I don’t even need you, not really. I can walk the paths and find them for myself.’
‘Jesus wept.’
‘Please, Ozzie,’ the boy entreated. ‘It’s not like you can ever get hurt where the Silfen are, so you don’t have to worry about me. And I won’t slow you down. I can ride real good.’
For the first time in over three centuries, Ozzie didn’t know what to do. Quite obviously, he should take the stupid kid back to town and hand him over to the authorities. Okay, so there weren’t any authorities. Hand the boy over to the CST staff, who would do what he told them to. Send him away to some planet far from Silvergalde, which he’d hate. Tidy him up and force him into school so he could be twisted into a model Commonwealth citizen. And if by some miracle his utterly useless life-reject parents did show up in the future, they’d never find him. And how exactly was he going to march the kid back to town anyway? Tie him up and sling him over Polly?
‘Fuck it!’
‘That’s really rude,’ Orion said, and he started to giggle.
*
Ozzie woke up an hour before dawn when his e-butler’s timer function produced an audio impulse like an old-fashioned alarm clock bell. He slowly opened his eyes, looking round with the retinal insert adding a full infrared spectrum to his vision. The boy was a few metres away, rolled up snugly in thick wool blankets, a small tarpaulin rigged on bamboo poles above him to keep any rain off during the night. The fire they’d lit yesterday evening had burned down to a bright-glowing pile in his enhanced sight, for anyone else it would be a dark mound with a few twinkling embers. Infrared also allowed him to see small creatures scampering about beneath the majestic trees, nibbling on seed pods and nuts.
He lay there, keeping still for a long moment. This was all part of last night’s plan, to wake early and walk Polly and the lontrus away before mounting up and riding off. The path had branched many times yesterday, he could take any number of turnings. And the forest was vast; he’d studied the original orbital survey maps made by CST’s exploratory division. It extended for over two hundred miles beyond the mountains, in some places merging with other, equally large stretches of woodland that covered most of this massive continent. Orion would never be able to find him. The kid would wander round for a day or so then head back for the cosy safety of the town which was home. A parentless kid alone in an alien forest.
Goddamn it!
Orion moaned slightly, his eyes fluttering as his dream turned uncomfortable. Ozzie saw the blanket had slipped off his shoulder, leaving his arm cold and exposed. He went over and tucked the kid back up again. Orion quietened quickly, a contented expression falling across his sweet face.
A couple of hours later, Orion woke to find Ozzie had got the fire burning properly again and was cooking breakfast. Milk tablets, Ozzie found to his relief, worked perfectly. Dropped into cold water they bubbled and fizzed until they produced a rich creamy liquid, into which he mashed dry oatcakes. With that came scrambled egg, and toast, thick slices cut unevenly from an iron-hard traveller’s loaf he bought at a Lyddington bakery. Tea was proper flakes brewing in a kettle; he was saving the tablets for later.
Watching the boy munching away as if he hadn’t eaten anything last night, Ozzie started to recalculate how long his supplies would last.
‘I brought my own food,’ Orion told him.
The kid must have been reading his mind. ‘You did?’
‘Cured meat and traveller’s bread for sure. But none of your tablet stuff. There aren’t any in Lyddington.’
‘Figures. What about a filter pump, did you bring one?’
A guilty expression flashed over his face, making the freckles bunch up. ‘No.’
So he showed the boy how his worked, a neat little mechanical unit which clipped onto his water bottle. Its short hose was dropped into the nearby stream, and he pumped the handle grip, pulling water through the ceramic filters. It wasn’t quite as effective as a powered molecular sieve for eradicating bacteria, but it would get rid of anything truly harmful. The kid had fun, splashing about and filling his own ancient plastic pouches from Ozzie’s bottle.
‘What about toothgel?’ he asked.
Orion hadn’t brought any of that, nor soap. So he loaned the boy some from his own tube, laughing at Orion’s startled expression when it started to foam and expand in his mouth. He rinsed it out as instructed, spitting furiously.
Chemistry worked here, its reactions a universal constant. When Ozzie checked his handheld array, it remained as dead as a chunk of rock. The damping field, or whatever the Silfen used, had grown progressively stronger as he approached the forest yesterday. Now, it was even affecting his biochip inserts, reducing their capacity to little more than a calculator. His virtual vision interface was reduced to absolute basic functions.
As a concept, it fascinated Ozzie, rousing all his old physicist curiosity. He started to ponder mathematical possibilities as they rode off down the path.
*
‘They’re close,’ Orion announced.
It was late morning, and they were riding again after giving the horse and pony a rest for a while, walking alongside them. The forest trees were darker now, pines taking over at the expense of the other varieties. Although, to counter their darkling effect, the canopy overhead was letting through a multitude of tiny sunbeams to dapple the ground. The carpet of fallen needles which covered the path gave off a sweet tangy scent.
‘How do you know?’ Ozzie asked. Even the lontrus’ heavy feet pads made no sound on the spongy loam.
The boy gave him a slightly superior look, then pulled his pendant out. Inside its metal lattice, the teardrop pearl was glimmering with a strong turquoise light, as if it contained a sliver of daytime sky. ‘Told you I was their friend.’
Both of them dismounted. Ozzie glanced suspiciously round the grey trunks as if there was going to be an ambush. He’d met the Silfen a couple of times before, on Jandk, walking into the woods with some Commonwealth cultural officers. To be honest he’d been a little disappointed; the lack of communication ability made his human prejudice shine out, it was all too much like talking to retarded children. What some people classed as playful mischief, he thought was just plain irritatin
g; they acted like a playgroup at kindergarten, running, jumping, climbing trees.
Now, he could hear them approaching. Voices flittered through the trees, sweet and melodic, like birdsong in harmony. He’d never heard the Silfen singing before. It wasn’t something you could record, of course; and they certainly hadn’t sung while he was on Jandk.
As their voices grew louder, he realized how much their song belonged here, in the forest; it ebbed and flowed with a near-hallucinogenic quality, complementing and resonating with both the flickering sunbeams and gentle breeze. It had no words, not even in their language, rather a crooning of single simple notes by throats more capable than any human wind instrument. Then the Silfen themselves arrived, slipping past the trees like gleeful apparitions. Ozzie’s head turned from side to side, trying to keep them in his sight. They began to speed up, adding laughter to their song, deliberately hiding from the humans, dodging behind thick boles, darting across spaces.
There was no doubt about what they were. Every human culture had them in folklore and myth. Ozzie stood in the middle of the giant wood, surrounded by elves. In the flesh they were bipeds, taller than humans, with long slender limbs and a strangely blunt torso. Their heads were proportionally larger than a human, but with a flat face, boasting wide feline eyes set above a thin nose with long narrow nostrils. They didn’t have a jaw as such, simply a round mouth containing three neat concentric circles of pointed teeth which could flex back and forth independently of each other, giving them the ability to claw food back into their gullet. As they were herbivores, the vegetation was swiftly shredded as it moved inwards. It was the only aspect that defeated the whole notion of them as benign otherworldly entities; whenever they opened their lips the whole mouth looked savage.
Many skin shades had been seen since first contact – they had almost as much variety as the human race, except none of them were ever as pale as Nordic whites. Their skin was a lot tougher than a human’s though, with a leathery feel and a spun-silk shimmer. They wore their hair long; unbound, it was like a cloak coming halfway down their back, though more often they had it plaited into a single long tail with colourful leather thongs. Without exception they were clad in simple short toga robes made from a copper and gold cloth that shone with a satin gloss. None of them had shoes, and their long feet ended in four hook toes with thick nail tips. Hands were similar, four fingers that seemed to bend in any direction, almost like miniature tentacles, giving them a fabulous dexterity.
‘Quick,’ Orion called. ‘Follow them, follow them!’ He let go of the pony’s reins and slithered down the side. Then he was off, running into the trees.
‘Wait,’ Ozzie called, to no avail. The boy had reached the trees at the side of the path, and was running hell-for-leather after the laughing dancing Silfen. ‘Goddamn.’ He hurriedly swung a leg over the saddle, and half-fell from Polly’s back. Hanging on to the reins, he pulled the horse along behind him, urging her into the forest proper. His quarry was soon out of sight, all he had to go on was the noise up ahead. Thick boughs stretched out ahead of him, always at head height, causing him to duck round the ends, with Polly whinnying in complaint. The ground underfoot became damp, causing his boots to sink in, slowing him still further.
After five minutes his face was glowing hot, he was breathing harshly and swearing fluently in four languages. But the singing was growing louder again. He was sure he heard Orion’s laughter. A minute later he burst into a clearing. It was fenced by great silver-bark trees, near-perfect hemispheres of dark vermilion leaves towering a hundred feet over the grassy meadow. A little stream gurgled through the centre, to fall down a rocky ridge into a deep pool at the far end. As arboreal idylls went, it was heavenly.
The Silfen were all there, nearly seventy of them. Many were climbing up the trees, using hands and feet to grip the rumpled bark, scampering along the arching branches to reach the clusters of nuts which hung amid the fluttering leaves higher up the tree. Orion was jumping up and down beside one trunk, catching the nuts a Silfen was dropping to him.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Ozzie snapped. He was dimly aware of the song faltering in the background. Orion immediately hunched his shoulders, looking sullen and defensive. ‘What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t kept up? Where is your pony? How are you going to find it again? This is not a goddamn game. We’re in the middle of an unmapped forest that’s half as big as the planet. I’m not surprised you lost your parents if this is what you did before.’
Orion raised an arm, pointing behind Ozzie. His lips were quivering as he said, ‘The pony’s there, Ozzie.’
He swivelled round to see both the pony and the lontrus being led into the clearing by a Silfen. Instead of being relaxed and amused as the Ozzie of legend should have been, the sight simply deepened his anger. ‘For Christ’s sake.’
‘This is a Silfen world, Ozzie,’ Orion explained gently. ‘Bad things don’t happen here.’
Ozzie glowered at the boy, then turned and walked over to the Silfen holding the reins. Come on, he told himself, get a grip. He’s just a kid.
Who shouldn’t be here screwing up my project.
He started to dig down into the memory of Silfen language which had been implanted at the Augusta clinic. Nobody had ever taught the Silfen to speak any Commonwealth language. They weren’t interested.
‘Thank you for collecting our animals,’ he said; a messy collection of cooing sounds and impossible Welsh-style tongue-twister syllables, that he was sure he’d got completely wrong.
The Silfen opened its mouth wide, showing its snake-like tongue wobbling in the centre of the teeth rings. Ozzie wanted to turn and run before he was devoured – but his ancillary cultural memory reminded him it was a smile. An answering stream of gibberish flowed out, far more melodic than the clumsy sentence Ozzie had spoken. ‘It is our delight that we are met this fine day, dearest Ozzie. And your poor animals needed only guidance that they might be with you once more. Such teachings are but a trifle of all that we are. To give them is hardly onerous.’
‘I am pleased and charmed that you remember me.’ From another world, decades ago.
‘Nothing so treasured should be lost to that which we are. And you are a splendid treasure, Ozzie. Ozzie, the human who taught humans their first steps along the true paths.’
‘I had some help.’ He bowed slightly and called to Orion. ‘Hey, let’s see you taking proper care of that pony, okay. It could do with like a drink.’
Orion came over and took his animal from the Silfen, leading it away to the pool at the bottom of the small waterfall. Ozzie was thrown several disgruntled looks, obviously still not forgiven. A couple of the Silfen were already bathing, gliding through the clear water as easily as they climbed trees or ran. Orion soon joined them in the water.
‘May I ask with whom I speak?’ Ozzie asked.
‘I am the flower that walks beneath the nine sky moons, the fissure of light that pierces the darkest glade at midnight, the spring that bubbles forth from the oasis; from all this I came.’
‘Okey-dokey.’ He took a moment to compose a sentence. ‘I think I’ll just call you Nine Sky, if you don’t mind.’
‘Evermore you hurry thus, unknowing of that which binds all into the joy which is tomorrow’s golden dawn.’
‘Well,’ Ozzie muttered to himself in English. ‘It was never going to be easy.’ He let Polly rummage through the light-lavender grass which covered the clearing. The Silfen were congregating on the edge of the pool. Flasks were produced and passed round as they munched on the nuts and berries they’d gathered. Ozzie stuck close to Nine Sky; while Orion came back to sit by his side, snacking on his own food.
‘We walk the paths,’ Ozzie said.
That seemed to amuse the Silfen; they laughed their warbling laugh, a remarkably human sound.
‘Others of our kind have,’ he reminded them. ‘Seekers of beauty and strangeness, for are we not all that in the end.’
?
??Many have walked,’ Nine Sky replied. ‘Wilful and skilful their footfalls echo fast upon hallowed lands, came them far, go them further. Round and round in merry dance.’
‘Which paths did they tread?’ Ozzie asked. He thought he was getting a handle on the conversation.
‘All paths are one, Ozzie, they lead to themselves. To start is to finish.’
‘To start where?’
‘To start here amid the gladness of the children and twittering of birds and pesky merriness of the terinda as they frolic over dale and gale. All we bid go in music and light.’
‘I am starting here, where must I go?’
‘Ozzie comes, Ozzie goes, Ozzie flies, Ozzie sees many stars, Ozzie lives in a cave, Ozzie leaves a cave, Ozzie sees trees, Ozzie comes. The circle is one.’
The hair on the back of Ozzie’s neck pricked up at the mention of living in a cave. ‘You know where the wonders live, you walk to the wonders, you see the wonders, you live the wonders, you go. Ozzie envies you. Ozzie goes with you.’
That brought another round of loud laughter, the tips of their vibrating tongues just protruding into the air.
‘Ozzie walks away,’ Nine Sky said. His head came forward, big black eyes staring at the human. ‘Embrace what you be, afraid show you not, long the season are among us, love you we do, for is not all stardust in the end as it begat us all. So that all is joined in eternity which turns again and again.’
‘What do you become; for is it not greatness and the nobility? What do any of us become between the twin times of stardust? It is the greatness out among the stars that burn now where I walk.’
‘Walk you walk without joy strumming its song upon your heart, travel you far without knowing will you fate unfold. For to walk among the forests is to live. See us in glory now, for this fate we ache to be.’
‘Do you walk the forests of the planet whence we came?’
‘All forests we walk, those of darkness and those of light.’
‘And those of greatness? Walk you those?’
‘Light and dark, and those alone. Strike you not the black and the gold for it leaves a terrible mark upon the sky at the height of day. Heed you loud the ides of winterfall.’