They spent the night under canvas. There were only two tents, and the men gallantly offered her one of them for her own use… but before that they spent a long time talking.
Helward had evidently told Blayne about her, and how she was different, as he saw her, from both the people of the city and the people of the villages.
Blayne now spoke directly to her, and Helward stayed in the background. He spoke only rarely, and then to confirm things that Blayne said. She liked the other man, and found him direct in his manner: he tried not to evade any of her questions.
By and large he affirmed what she had learned. He spoke of Destaine and his Directive, he spoke of the city and its need to move forward, and he talked of the shape of the world. She had learnt not to argue with the city outlook, and she listened to what they said.
When she eventually crawled into her sleeping-bag she was exhausted from the long ride through the day, but sleep came slowly. The interface had hardened.
Though the confidence in her own logic had not been shaken, her understanding of the city people’s had been deepened. They lived, they said, on a world where the laws of nature were not the same. She was prepared to believe that… or rather, prepared to believe that they were sincere, but mistaken.
It was not the exterior world that was different, but their perception of it. By what manner could she change that?
Emerging from woodland they encountered a region of coarse scrubland, where tall grasses and scrawny bushes grew wildly. There were no tracks here and progress was slow. There was a cool, steady wind blowing now, and an exhilarating freshness sharpened their senses.
Gradually, the vegetation gave way to a hard, tough grass, growing in sandy soil. Neither of the men said anything; Helward in particular stared ahead of him as he rode, letting his horse find its own route.
Elizabeth saw that ahead of them the vegetation gave way altogether, and as they breasted a ridge of loose sand and gravel, only a few yards of low sand-dunes lay between them and the beach. Her horse, who had already sensed the salt in the air, responded readily to the kick of her heels and they cantered down across the sand. For a few heady minutes she gave the horse its head, and exulted in the freedom and joy of galloping along a beach, its surface unuttered, unbroken, untouched by anything but waves for decades.
Helward and Blayne had ridden down to the beach behind her, and now stood close together by their horses, looking out across the water.
She trotted her horse over to them, and dismounted.
“Does it extend east and west?” said Blayne.
“As far as I explored. There’s no way round I could see.”
Blayne took a video camera from one of his packs, connected it to the case, and panned it slowly across the view.
“We’ll have to survey east and west,” he said. “It would be impossible to cross.”
“There’s no sign of an opposite bank.”
Blayne frowned at the beach. “I don’t like the soil. We’ll have to get a Bridge-Builder up here. I don’t think this would take the weight of the city.”
“There must be some way.”
The two men entirely ignored her. Helward erected a small instrument, a tripodal device with a concentric chart suspended by three catches below the fulcrum. He hung a plumbline over the chart, and took some kind of reading from it.
“We’re a long way from optimum,” he said eventually. “We’ve got plenty of time. Thirty miles… almost a year city-time. Do you think it could be done?”
“A bridge? It’d take some doing. We’d need more men than we’ve got at the moment. What did the Navigators say?”
“Check what I reported. Do you check?”
“Yes. I can’t see that I can add anything.”
Helward stared for a few seconds longer at the expanse of water, then seemed to remember Elizabeth. He turned to her.
“What do you say?”
“About this? What do you expect me to say?”
“Tell us about our perceptions,” said Helward. “Tell us there’s no river here.”
She said: “It’s not a river.”
Helward glanced at Blayne.
“You heard her,” he said. “We’re imagining it.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes, turned away. She could no longer confront the interface.
The breeze was chilling her, so she took a blanket from her horse and moved hack to the sandy ridge. When she faced them again they were paying no more attention to her. Helward had erected another instrument, and was taking several readings from it. He called them out to Blayne, his voice whipped thin by the wind.
They worked slowly and painstakingly, each checking the other’s reading at every step. After an hour, Blayne packed some of the equipment on his horse, then mounted and rode along the coast in a northerly direction. Helward stood and watched him go, his posture revealing a deep and overwhelming despair.
Elizabeth interpreted it as a tiny weakness in the barrier of logic that lay between them. Clutching the blanket around her, she walked down across the dunes toward him.
She said: “Do you know where you are?”
He didn’t turn.
“No,” he said. “We never will.”
“Portugal. This country is called Portugal. It’s in Europe.”
She moved round so that she could see his face. For a moment his gaze rested on her, but his expression was blank. He just shook his head, and walked past her towards his horse. The barrier was absolute.
Elizabeth went over to her own horse, and mounted it. She walked it along the beach and soon moved inland, heading back in the general direction of the headquarters. In a few minutes the troubled blue of the Atlantic was out of sight.
PART FIVE
1
The storm raged all night and none of us got much sleep. Our camp was half a mile from the bridge, and as the waves came crashing in the sound reached us as a dull, muted roar, almost obliterated by the howling gale. In our imaginations, at least, we heard the splintering of timber in every temporary lull.
Towards dawn the wind abated, and we were able to sleep. Not for long, for soon after sunrise the kitchen was manned and we were given our food. No one talked as we ate; there would be only one topic of conversation, and none wished to speak of that.
We set off towards the bridge. We had gone only fifty yards when someone pointed to a piece of broken timber lying washed up on the river-bank. It was a grim foreboding and, as it turned out, an accurate one. There was nothing left of the bridge beyond the four main piles that were planted in the solid ground nearest to the water’s edge.
I glanced at Lerouex who, for this shift, was in charge of all operations.
“We need more timber,” he said. “Barter Norris… take thirty men, and start felling trees.”
I waited for Norris’s reaction; of all the guildsmen on the site he had been the most reluctant to work, and had complained loud and long during the early stages of the work. Now he showed no rebellion; we were all past that. He simply nodded to Lerouex, picked a body of men and headed back towards the camp to collect the tree-felling saws.
“So we start again,” I said to Lerouex.
“Of course.”
“Will this one be strong enough?”
“If we build it properly.”
He turned away, and started to organize the clearing up of the site. In the background the waves, still huge in the aftermath of the storm, crashed against the river-bank.
We worked all day, and by evening the site had been cleared and Norris and his men had hauled fourteen tree-trunks over to the site. The next morning we could start work yet again.