“The place is just a place,” Bartan said lightly, determined not to be offended at this late stage of the gathering, “and I won’t surrender it. Good-bye, Majin.”
“Good luck, son!”
Bartan saluted the rest of the company and walked out to where his bluehorn was tethered. The alcoholic warmth in his stomach and the pleasant optimistic tingle in his brain, important allies in the day-to-day battle of life, were at their height. He felt privileged to be alive, a beautiful feeling which in the past had suffused his existence, but which of late could only be recaptured near the bottom of a demijohn of black wine. He hoisted himself into the saddle and nudged the bluehorn forward, delegating to the intelligent creature the task of getting him home.
As the sky gradually deepened in colour the daytime stars became more prominent, and the spirals and braids of misty light began to emerge from the background. There were more major comets than usual. Bartan counted eight of them, their tails fanning right across the dome of the heavens, creating alternate bands of silver and dark blue among which meteors darted like fireflies. In his mellow speculative mood he wondered if men would ever solve the mystery of the sky’s largest features. The stars were thought to be distant suns; the single green point of brilliance was known to be a third planet, Farland; and the nature of meteors was well understood because sometimes they crashed to the ground, leaving craters of various sizes. But what was the vast whirlpool of radiance which spanned the entire night sky for part of the year? Why did the heavenly population contain so many similar but smaller spirals, sometimes overlapping each other, ranging in shape from circles through ellipses to glowing spindles which concealed their structure until examined by telescope?
The train of thought caused Bartan to pay more attention than usual to the luminous arches of the sky, and thus it was that he noticed an entirely new phenomenon which might otherwise have escaped him. Due east, roughly in the direction of his farm, he saw a tiny and oddly-formed patch of light a short distance above the horizon. It was like a four-pointed star with in-curved sides, the kind of geometrical shape created at the middle of four touching circles, and each point appeared to be emitting a faint spray of prismatic colour. The object was too small to yield much detail without a glass, but its centre seemed to be teeming with multi-hued specks of brilliance. Intrigued, Bartan watched the eerily beautiful apparition sink swiftly downwards and pass out of sight behind the crest of the nearest drumlin.
Shaking his head in wonderment, Bartan urged his bluehorn forward to the high ground, greatly extending his range of vision, but the object was nowhere to be seen. What had it been? Meteors falling to earth sometimes blossomed into vivid colour, but they were accompanied by violent thunderclaps, whereas the phenomenon he had just witnessed had been characterised by silence and the smoothness of its movement. He tentatively reached the conclusion that the object had been much larger than he had supposed, dwarfed by distance, mysteriously sailing through space far beyond Overland’s atmosphere.
With his mind fuelled for further musings about the wonders of the universe, Bartan continued on his way. Almost an hour later he caught the first glimpse of the yellow lights of his own farmhouse and felt a fresh pang of guilt over having detained the Phorateres until after darkness. The fact that Sondeweere and he had only one bed made it difficult for him to invite them to stay until morning, unless Harro and he were to spend the night sleeping on the floor. It seemed a poor reward for their kindness to him, especially as neighbourly acts had become so rare in the Basket. Wondering how he was going to excuse himself, he increased the bluehorn’s speed to a trot, trusting it to maintain a sure footing on the star-silvered ground.
He was about a mile from the house when his surroundings were suddenly drenched in a varicoloured light so intense that his eyes reflexively clamped themselves shut.
The bluehorn reared up, barking in terror, and Bartan clung to it, quaking in expectation of the cataclysmic explosion which instinct told him had to accompany such a flash of brilliance. There was no explosion—only a ringing, reverberating silence during which he felt his clothing ripple and flap although there was no rush of air. He opened his eyes as the bluehorn dropped its forefeet to the ground. He found himself to be virtually blinded by after-images of trees and shrubs, orange and green silhouettes which seemed permanently printed on his retinas.
“Steady, old girl, steady,” he breathed, patting the animal’s neck. He blinked hard, knuckled his eyes and looked all about him in search of clues as to the origins of the bewildering, frightening and wildly unnatural event. The dark landscape had regained its eternal quietude. The sleeping world was trying to reassure him that things were as they had always been, but Bartan—prey to crawling apprehensions—knew better.
He urged the bluehorn forward as fast as he dared and in a few minutes was approaching the farmhouse. The very fact that Harro and Ennda were not outside and scanning the skies was a subtle indication that things were seriously amiss. Or was it? Perhaps he had been caught up in an essentially local disturbance of nature—after all, there were those who claimed that lightning sprang out of the ground, entirely contrary to the popular belief that it struck downwards from the heavens. He rode into the yard, dismounted and went to the farmhouse door. When he opened it the scene before him was a tableau of commonplace domesticity—Ennda doing her embroidery work on a sun hat, Harro in the act of tilting a demijohn to pour himself a cup of wine.
Bartan sighed with relief and then hesitated, his uneasiness returning, as he realised that the couple were indeed like part of a tableau. They were unmoving, rigid as statues. The only hint of animation in their features was a false one, due to the flickering of the lanterns in the draught from the open door.
“Harro? Ennda?” Bartan advanced uncertainly into the kitchen. “I… I’m sorry I’m so late.”
Ennda’s needle began to move on the instant, and wine gurgled into Harro’s cup. “Don’t fret yourself, Bartan,” Ennda said. “The sun has hardly set, and…” She looked through the doorway into the blackness beyond and began to frown. “That’s strange! How did it…?” Her words were lost in a dulled splintering of glass as the demijohn Harro had been holding crashed on the stone floor. Tentacles of dark wine raced outwards from the shattered vessel.
“Curses!” Harro grabbed at his right shoulder and massaged it. “My arm hurts! My arm is so tired that it… hurts!” He looked down at the floor and his eyes grew round in self-reproach. “I’m sorry, lad—I don’t know what…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bartan cut in. “What about the light? What do you think it was?”
“The light?”
“The blinding light. The light, for pity’s sake! What do you think caused it?”
Harro glanced at his wife. “We didn’t see any lights. Did you by any chance fall and knock your head?”
“I’m not drunk.” Bartan was staring at the couple in perplexity when his gaze was drawn to the bedroom door. It was partially open, allowing a strip of light to slant across the bed, and from what he could see of it the bed appeared to be empty. He strode across the kitchen and pushed the bedroom door fully open. Sondeweere was not in the small square room beyond.
“Where is Sondy?” he said quietly.
“What?” Harro and Ennda leapt to their feet and came to his side, their faces registering astonishment.
“Where is Sondy?” Bartan repeated. “Did you let her go outside alone?”
“Of course not! She’s in there!” Ennda thrust her way past him and halted, confounded by the room’s patent emptiness and lack of hiding places.