‘But how long has this monster kept these women as his slaves? Can you see the faces of the children? They look like him.’
‘It won’t happen to you.’
‘Oh, you can be sure of that,’ said Tira, her voice full of hate.
Life in Teeg’s nasty little kingdom turned out to be simple.
They lived outdoors, on the arid plain. For the first couple of days they stayed close to the cliff where the time chute had decanted, huddling at night in caves or under rocky overhangs.
But then they were led away by Teeg and the enigmatic hovering machine, the ‘Weapon’. So, by default, Belo was exploring the Lowland, the greatest mystery of all to Shelf Philosophers of all persuasions. If it hadn’t been so brutally hard it would almost have been interesting.
They slept out in the open. They ate berries they gathered from the sparse bushes, or they chewed on strips of dried meat – Belo wasn’t sure yet where the meat came from. Their clothes were rags, replaced if they came across a handy corpse, like poor Dane’s. But it appeared Teeg always got the best pick, like Belo’s own boots.
And, while they walked, they carried fragments of Dane’s corpse with them. The women of Teeg’s grim harem seemed used to this. Even the blank-eyed children stumbled along with grisly butchered remnants. Belo had no clear idea why they did this.
Indeed, Belo’s own continued existence puzzled him. It was obvious what Teeg wanted of Tira – but why keep Belo alive? Another man could only be competition, a threat; why tolerate him taking another breath?
And towering over all these personal issues was the deeper mystery of the Weapon: where it had come from, how and why it had been made – and what its true purpose was, for Belo was beginning to suspect that it had nothing to do with Teeg and his petty lording. Belo couldn’t even see how Teeg communicated with it; he never spoke to it directly, never touched it. Sometimes, Belo thought, it was almost as if Teeg was following the Weapon, rather than the other way around. Belo longed to examine the Weapon, but he dared not approach it, not until he understood more.
Belo tried to talk to Teeg as they walked. In his military service he had learned that any knowledge could be a lever. But he had to bury his resentment as Teeg marched along in his own spindling-leather boots, while Belo’s feet bled on the rough ground.
‘You are a victim of the time pit,’ Belo essayed.
‘As are you,’ Teeg snapped, as if Belo had tried to insult him.
‘We are soldiers. We fled a lost battlefield.’
Teeg listened, his massive face closed up. For all his brutish behaviour, Belo sensed that this man was no fool. But Belo’s talk of his war clearly meant nothing to Teeg.
Belo tried again. ‘You were cast in the pit by your enemies. Perhaps it was unjust—’
‘Unjust? More than that. I was born in the Attic, over Foro.’
‘I know it.’
‘I was a bastard, sired by some red-tinged Foron who raped a servant, my mother. Nobody accepted me, neither the Forons nor their slaves. In the end they stuck me down the pit and stranded me in the future. But not before I got to my father.’ Teeg grinned, remembering; Belo could see that this moment of patricide had been the peak of his life.
‘Teeg, the Forons are my enemies. But they no longer keep time-accelerated servants.’
Teeg twisted his face. ‘How long?’
‘I’m not sure.’ It was history to Belo. ‘Many generations.’
Teeg shrugged. ‘Then that’s how long I’ve been down here, isn’t it?’
And here was the cruel reality of the time pit. Even if you survived, to be cast down here was to be sent into the future, to live out a futile life adrift from family, friends, cut off even from the context of your crime.
It was this that distressed Tira more than anything. After all, she and Belo were not criminals; had devoted their very lives to a cause.
Foro had long been a centre of the traditional ‘Mechanistic’ philosophy, an argument that the world was a product of blind natural processes, while the community of Puul, further along the Shelf, had become a haven for heretics, ‘Creationists’, who clung to the idea that everything about the world had been shaped by mind – perhaps human mind. The sharp intellectual content of these ideas had burned away the last of the old animist religions to have emerged after the last Formidable Caress, among the tribes that huddled in the ruins of a fallen civilisation. But these contrasting world systems, sharpened by incompatibility, had become a banner of identity, as such theologies often would, and hostility had deepened.
At last, border friction between the growing trading empires of Foro and Puul had provided the excuse everybody wanted for a cathartic war. It was a war that Belo had eagerly signed up for – a war that the Creationists of Puul had managed to carry all the way into the heart of Old Foro itself – but which, at the last, the Mechs had turned, thanks to their stunning bit of inventiveness with the balloons.
And now he and Tira had been ripped out of their time, out of the very context of their war.
As they discussed this, Tira said grimly, ‘We don’t even know how slowly time passes here, compared to home. We are surely already stranded far from our time. Everybody we knew must be dead. The war must be over, one way or another – perhaps even forgotten. And every day we are stuck here we are further removed from home.’
Belo took her hand. ‘As long as we are alive the war is not over, for the truth burns in our hearts.’
‘As long as we are alive,’ Tira echoed.
They held each other’s hands in a silent pact.
Some of Belo’s questions were answered perhaps a week after their stranding on this doleful plain, when Teeg’s group of captives, shepherded by the patrolling Weapon, encountered others.
It was a convocation of several groups, eight or ten of them, coming together across the emptiness of the plain. There were no more than a dozen people in each subdued little flock – and each was patrolled by a circling Weapon. These machines seemed more or less similar to the one associated with Teeg, but some showed wear, their carapaces patched with dull materials.
Belo was surprised to see a herd of spindlings, six-legged, nervous and skittish, briskly controlled by a Weapon. While most of the machines were content to patrol, this Weapon regularly spat fire into the dirt; perhaps the spindlings needed reminding how to behave.
And Belo spied another class of machines altogether: squat, ugly carts that ran along the ground. These devices gathered together heaps of dirt, which they circled jealously. Belo had no idea what their purpose could be.
As the groups converged, Belo expected Teeg to call out to the other slave-keepers and Weapon-masters, perhaps even to socialise with them. But he stayed as silent and sullen as the rest, following the machines as they swept busily over the dusty ground.
Their group was brought to a central place, marked out by the Weapons’ patrols. And here a very strange trade began to take place.
Under Teeg’s direction, Belo, Tira and the others began to hurl the rotting scraps of Dane’s corpse into the rough arena marked out by the toiling wheel-based machines. Belo saw that similar body parts, and even corpses, some heartbreakingly tiny, were thrown out by other groups.
Meanwhile one Weapon peremptorily isolated a spindling and sliced it up with brisk slashes of its sword of fire. The other animals bucked and mewled, their long necks twisting. The people took their chance to grab slices of meat, bloody, still warm.
But the other Weapons were circulating. Some of them settled on the mounds of rusty dirt that had been gathered by the wheeled machines. Others took chunks of meat, spindling or human, charred it black with their belly-fires, and absorbed it within their metal carapaces.