A Sterkarm Tryst Read online

  Gareth and Sterkarms-B

  Gareth trudged behind a noisy, stinking Land Rover, hating everyone around him. He was pretty sure that if he bet that they all hated him just as much, he would win.

  The other 21st siders despised him; and they were his own people. Supposedly. In the privacy of his own head, where he didn’t have to be polite, he thought they were scum. Big, aggressive, scum. Ignorant and proud-of-their-ignorance scum. Self-satisfied, armed scum.

  And then there were the 16th siders. The Sterkarms. Mounted scum. Murderous hooligans on horseback with eight foot lances. Even their ponies looked thuggish: thick-set, shaggy, stumpy-legged things.

  He could talk to the Sterkarms, after a fashion. Well, he could only talk to the 21st siders after a fashion … He cursed his facility with languages. It had landed him in this hellish place that wasn’t, as yet, even as civilized as what it would eventually be: Scotland’s southern border. That was still five hundred years ahead.

  He’d thought, fool that he was, that learning languages was a good idea. He’d thought that getting ahead, being promoted, was a good idea. So he’d gotten himself assigned to James Windsor’s pet project and learned the Sterkarms’ dialect from a few tapes made by Andrea bloody Mitchell. Being Windsor’s blue-eyed boy made it worth learning a language that sounded like terminal coughing and choking. Or so he’d thought.

  Now he wished he’d concentrated on a career selling hamburgers in a funny hat. He might have smelled permanently of onions and grease, but he wouldn’t have been tired, aching, hungry, damp, blistered, and scared in a place without roads, showers, or decent food, where, if not soaked by rain, you were devoured by midges.

  He limped on, keeping close enough behind the mercenaries not to get lost, but out of their sight. The less they noticed him, the less he had to endure their tedious, lame-brained jibes. It was impossible to talk to them about anything but football and women—or, rather, their curiously stunted view of women and their grandiose vision of football. Having to endure their company was like his blistered feet: persistent, unavoidable pain.

  Trying to decide if the Sterkarms were worse than those blisters distracted him a little from the pain. It was difficult. He had even less idea of what went on in the Sterkarms’ heads than he had of what passed for thought with the mercenaries.

  After all, he could understand the mercenaries perfectly if he shut down his forebrain and operated only the testosterone-­fueled reptile brain. It was simply a matter of closing the algebra and geometry books and counting on his fingers: One plus two equals three. Or, quite often, five.

  The Sterkarms were something else again. They were thugs, but far from stupid. They used a different number base altogether, and he didn’t know what it was.

  Honor was a big thing with them. They couldn’t bear for it to be even hinted that they’d behaved dishonorably. But it seemed lying and treachery were honorable, by their definition. Burning children alive, cutting off an elderly woman’s head, slitting a girl’s throat: All these things were, according to them, honorable.

  They really scared him. Okay, the mercenaries scared him, but they were 21st siders, like him. When they returned 21st side, they’d have to account for at least some of their actions, so he felt fairly sure they wouldn’t kill him.

  With the Sterkarms, who could tell? They didn’t even need a reason to kill him: only some grudge against him that made sense to them. They were proven, practiced killers, and they feared no law because, here, in their country, they were the law.

  Worse, they considered him their hostage for the Elves’ good behavior. Until they’d won their battles, received their reward, and been shipped back to their own world, they might cut his throat on any suspicion that the Elves were double-crossing them—which, if Gareth knew anything about James Windsor, the Elves almost certainly were.

  If he ever got back to the 21st—and for a few seconds he was incapable of anything except blind, intense longing for the 21st. Give him five minutes—even one minute—21st side, and he’d resign. Stuffing leaflets through letterboxes was better than this. Living in a cardboard box with a dog on a string was better than this.

  The ground vibrated beneath his feet. Horses. He’d been keeping his eyes down, to minimize his misery, and the hot, uncomfortable helmet he wore had built-in ear protectors. Not much sound reached him. Before he could lift his head enough to see from beneath his helmet, something cannoned into him, making his heart jump. He glimpsed something large and bounding—it was that bloody great, hairy, lolloping dog.

  Per Sterkarm’s bloody great dog. So he knew who was riding the horse. The bulk and loom and heat and moist stinking sweatiness of the animal lumbered alongside. A fly flew into his face. Hair from a mane drifted across his cheek. He breathed in the Sterkarm reek: horse sweat and dung, greased leather, peat smoke, wet dog, and the salty urinal stink of unwashed man.

  Another horse came up on his other side, penning him between walls of horseflesh. He looked up, squinting against the light. The riders, towering above him, each carried an eight-foot lance, the butt resting on the toe of one boot. They wore helmets—steel bonnets—which looked dirty, having been covered in a mixture of soot and grease, as had their lance points, stirrups, buckles, and all their other metal gear. Heroes in stories have polished, gleaming helms. The Sterkarms needed to protect their armor from the everlasting rain and stop it giving them away by flashing in the sun.

  Gareth tugged off his helmet, and a din rushed on his ears: wind through scrub, creaking horse harnesses, birdsong, stamping hooves, horses snorting, men shouting … Sure enough, one rider was Sweet Milk, who was always easy to recognize with his saucer-round blue eyes set beneath Neanderthal brows. A craggy, scary face.

  And the other was Per May, the bandit-chief now that his father had been killed. His nickname, “May,” meant “The Maiden” or “The Girl,” and referred to his good looks. Both looks and nickname, Gareth knew, were deceiving. This man had married a very beautiful young girl and, hours later, cut her throat.

  The closeness of these killers made Gareth unhappy. Every muscle tight with apprehension, he waited to hear what they wanted.

  “Vah air denna shtead?” Per shouted. What is this place?

  Gareth wasn’t sure if Per meant to shout, or if it was just normal after a lifetime of chatting from hillside to hillside. When in bed with Andrea, he probably leaned close and bawled sweet nothings in her ear. It explained why the woman never listened to sense. She’d gone deaf.

  Per turned in his saddle, looking at the the hills. “Denna air Shtairkairm lant,” he yelled. This is Sterkarm land.

  Gareth saw Patterson glance back at them and sighed. “You were told—”

  “This be our dale,” Per said. “Will our tower be up there?”

  Hill spurs and twists hid it from view, but Gareth knew that the Bedesdale Tower was, indeed, up there.

  “This be Elf-Land,” Gareth said, sticking to the official story. “It only looks like your country. You were told it would. Remember? The enemy Elves have glamoured it to look like your country. To confuse you.”

  “There be no Elf-Cart ruts,” Per said. Sweet Milk, as usual, silently lent his bulk to whatever Per said. Sweet Milk had to be the most unsmiling and silent man Gareth had ever met. Just being near him as he loomed and unsmilingly stared was nerve-racking.

  “There’s no what?” Gareth asked.

  “Ruts. Elf-Carts made big ruts up and down our valley. Where be they?”

  “Er … Elven made a mistake,” Gareth said. “They forgot about the ruts.” In fact, there’d only been a couple of Elf-Carts introduced into this 16th side, 16th-side A, and the Sterkarms of this world had destroyed them. There had never been many ruts in this world, and now they’d vanished.

  Per stared at him for a moment, thinking God knew what, then kicked up his horse and rode ba
ck to the head of the straggling line of men. The big dog ran after him. Sweet Milk loomed and glowered at Gareth before turning his horse and following.

  Something’s on their minds, Gareth thought as he watched them go.

  Per-B and Isobel-A

  Back at the head of the ride, Per shook his head as he recognized a hillspur, a thorn tree, a pebble beach at a stream’s edge. This was Bedesdale. He knew this land so well, he could have found his way in the dark.

  And there, ahead, was the thing that had made him turn back and question Gareth. An Elf-Cart, on its side, dented, twisted, stripped of mirrors and panels, blackened with burning. Who had done that to an Elf-Cart? And when?

  The puzzling wreck had made him realize that there were no deep ruts made by the cart’s big wheels, as there were in his own world.

  A movement on the skyline seized his eye. A woman came down the slope, carrying a rowan branch decked with bright red berries. Her skirts were kilted as if she’d been working in the fields and her hair was covered with nothing but a cloth scarf. A long skein of hair, fair like his own, escaped it and flew in the breeze. His scalp tingled as he recognized his mother, Isobel—who was a world away, mourning for his father.

  Cuddy yelped and bounded toward the woman. “Cuddy! Here!” The hound stopped, looked back, then made as if to continue. Panic touched Per at the thought of his hound lured away by Elvish spells. He stood in his stirrups. “Here!”

  Cowed by the anger in his voice, Cuddy slunk back to Fowl’s side.

  Per watched the woman come on with profound unease. If he hadn’t known otherwise, he would have said this was his own world, his own country. It could not be, because the Elves had led them through the Elf-Gate to Elf-Land. Per had been there before. It was a place altogether uncanny and could not be mistaken.

  In Elf-Land, they’d passed through the Elf-Gate again and arrived in this place. The Elves said it was another part of Elf-Land, where Elf-Windsor’s enemies lived.

  Or did the Elves lie? Had they, in fact, been turned around and taken back to their own world? It looked so much like their own world. … The Elves had warned that the enemy would use magic against them, glamouring the strange to seem familiar. He had to remember that.

  The woman came more slowly down the slope now, hesitant as she drew closer to them, still carrying her bright sprig of berries. She paused and looked back, as if she might run away—but then came on again. Her voice carried faintly through the thin air. “Per!”

  He was shocked to hear his own name. Her face, as she came nearer, was so perfectly Isobel’s that he was scared—and then instantly angry. How dare this thing take on his mother’s shape?

  Closer still came the woman-thing, holding its rowan branch high but now taking long pauses between steps. When it was so close that, if he’d lowered his lance, he could have touched it, the thing said, “Per? Whyfor with Elven?”

  It had his mother’s voice and spoke like a Sterkarm. Or fooled him that it did.

  Its face hardened, and it took a step forward, stretching out the red-berried branch, as if to touch him. He recoiled, his involuntary snatch at the reins making Fowl prance. In his world, rowan protected from witch work—but in this world, wielded by an Elf? He dropped his lance and, left-handed, drew the ready-primed pistol from his saddle holster. As the thing still came on, he pointed the pistol at it.

  The seeming-woman drew back. “Per?”

  Per felt his skin prickle as the other Sterkarm men watched to see what lead he would give, now that his father was dead. He started to turn his head, to look to Sweet Milk, but stopped the movement. Sweet Milk was his foster father, but not a Sterkarm. He had to stop looking to fathers now and lead himself.

  Uncertainty added to his fear, his anger, and his loathing. Gripping his horse with his knees, he dropped the reins and took hold of the pistol with both hands. Over it, he saw the thing quail. This appeal to his pity angered him still more. He pulled the trigger.

  At the back of Per’s mind, as he braced himself for the explosion and recoil, was the hope that the ball would miss. Flintlocks were less trustworthy than bow, lance, or sword. Often, damp powder didn’t explode, or it merely flashed in the pan and lent no force to the ball. Or the ball flew wide. The thing in his mother’s shape would run away, having learned that a Sterkarm was hard to fool—and he would have proved his good faith to the Elves, and himself to his men.

  With a crunch of metal impacting bone and flesh, the ball hit its face, his mother’s face. The thing’s dead-weight thumped into the heather. He didn’t hear it make a sound.

  16th-Side B:

  Inside the Bedesdale Tower

  Isobel Sterkarm

  Isobel walked through her kitchens. Afterward she would visit the dairy, the bakehouse, the brewhouse, the henhouse … As lady of the tower, her work was to see that all the work was done. She was glad of it. Keeping her mind on chores meant she had no time to think of her dead husband or her only child gone through the Elf-Gate to fight in another world.

  She was in the heat of the bakehouse when she shuddered so violently, head to foot, that she had to catch the table’s edge. Darkness crossed her eyes, a loud bang sounded in her head.

  “Lady?”

  Isobel found herself half-crouching by the table. One of her cooks peered at her.

  Catching her breath, Isobel pushed herself upright. “I am well. I think … someone walked across my grave. But I am well.”

  Gareth

  Gareth, trudging along, heard the pistol’s explosion and saw the men running toward the horsemen. Halfheartedly, he picked up his pace and joined the others. Beyond the horses, a bundle of old clothes lay in the heather.

  “He shot the ——” one of the men cheerfully explained to him, using the predictably foul word. “No reason. They’m mad buggers, baint they?”

  Patterson called out, “Nice one!”

  A horse came nudging too close to Gareth, with its bulk and flies. From its back, Per said, “Hva sayer han?” What says he?

  “Oh … er … ‘Well done.’” Patterson’s irony would be hard to translate.

  Per rode away. A Sterkarm laird had no use for praise from Patterson. Circling his horse to where he’d dropped his lance, Per leaned down from his saddle, picked it up, and straightened again. Gareth watched in some disbelief.

  Per whistled his hound away from the bundle in the heather and rode on with his men. Gareth lingered. There was something compelling about a corpse. He watched Sweet Milk crouch over the woman, wiping his knife on her skirts. He tugged a neckerchief from the woman’s dress, and covered her face with it before rising and fixing Gareth with his hard stare.

  Gareth trudged on after the Land Rovers. He thought: Per killed his mother. Even if it was a mother removed by one dimension. No good could come of that.

  4

  16th-Side:

  Wild Country

  Andrea and Per May

  In the late summer of every year, the Sterkarms rounded up their cattle and drove them down from the hills into the valleys. All but the best were slaughtered and the meat smoked or salted. The few beasts kept alive were shut up in warm byres.

  When spring came, the surviving cattle were driven back to the upland meadows. The little crofts, and even the tower, were half-deserted as the people followed the cattle to the shielings—the place where the shiels, or turf bothies, were built.

  Every spring began with repairing the bothies where many of the people would live until the year turned and it was time to go back to the valleys. The men guarded the cattle, hunted, and fished. The women and girls milked the cattle and made butter and cheese, both the soft, fresh kind for immediate eating, and the hard, salted kind for storing.

  During the long, warm summer nights, people sat outside the bothies talking, singing and telling stories for as long a
s they could stay awake. Everyone looked forward to it every year: a time of fresh food, sunshine, flirting, courting, and laughing.

  But, with winter coming, the only reason to go to the shielings was for refuge. Few people except Sterkarms could find Sterkarm shielings, since there were no signposts and outsiders never explored much of Sterkarm country before a Sterkarm band appeared, curious to know what they were doing there. Some intruders never left, which discouraged others from coming.

  But every Sterkarm knew tracks through the hills that led to the hidden dales. There were different shielings, but every Sterkarm could make a good guess at which had been chosen as the gathering place. If their guess was wrong, they went on to the next until they found the one where their friends were waiting.

  Per May’s band climbed into the hills. There was that deep, deep silence that Andrea had never forgotten, a silence that could be startlingly broken by the swish of a horse’s tail against a leather boot or a laugh. Some men dismounted to spare their horses and ease their own hips and feet. Andrea had slipped down from her horse as soon as Per allowed it. She was much happier on her own two feet.

  Per slung his lance at his saddle, dismounted, and led his horse beside her. His free hand gripped hers, warm and strong. He smiled at her, making her heart flip, because it was a smile she’d seen in memory for so long.

  The last time she’d seen it had been the day the Sterkarms rode through the Tube and raided the 21st century. It had been mayhem. Literally: “to injure and make helpless.”

  James Windsor had been to blame. Again. He’d outmaneuvered the Sterkarms, or so he’d thought, by capturing Per and dragging him through the Tube as a hostage. But the Sterkarms had followed, coming through the Tube at a gallop. They’d ridden their horses among the computers.

  As fast-response armed police had arrived, and the Sterkarms hurried to retreat back through the Tube before it closed, Per had asked Andrea to come with him, to come live with him and be his love—in the 16th century.