‘Mist,’ I explained. It happens to mean ‘manure’ in German, but that was all the explanation I felt like right then. I limped over to the lifts and straight up to my room; but though I was bone-weary I poured myself a drink and went out onto the balcony, unable quite to credit the last couple of hours I’d lived through. The physical attacks, maybe, though who had anything to gain I couldn’t imagine. But even they seemed improbable now, faintly ridiculous, as if I’d somehow exaggerated them out of distorted memories. And the mist – okay, I’d had strange things happen before; but surely
that
had to be pure panicky imagination. Hysteria, even, triggered off by stress.
But when I looked down all those floors the car park was still shrouded in that faint haze, setting glittering haloes around all the lights, enveloping the ground floor of the hotel. It stirred as I leaned over, and seemed to stretch a long tendril up towards me, like a wave climbing a sea cliff. But it couldn’t make it, and like a wave it fell back into the stuff it came from, spreading faint ripples of ghostly turmoil.
I sank into bed that night, very tired and uneasy, wondering just what I’d got into, what I’d created, and I dreamed. More than once it woke me, sweating, but only one image remained from a vaguely terrifying jumble. A map of Europe, a child’s map in the dulled colours of an old school atlas, and spreading across it a web, a grey, complex, dirty web, full of shrivelled death. At the heart of it, tense, malevolent, ready
to spring, there crouched a small black spider.
The next morning, oddly enough, I had fewer doubts. That was because I harboured some interesting cuts and bruises, which had taken advantage of the night to stiffen up; and because I had to spend ages arguing with the car-hire company and persuading them to send another car to get me to the airport. The whole thing infuriated me so much I almost forgot 1726, but when I called down, the desk clerk, an old acquaintance, assured me that yes, Fraiilein Perceval had checked out at six thirty and taken her car out of the garage and, speaking of which, mine had just arrived. It turned out to be chauffeur-driven; which is one way of making a point. I sat in stony silence all the dull and drizzly way, brooding. Perceval, eh? Distinguished, as cover-names went.
I’d meant to spend a few days more, at least, but with all sorts of people gunning for me, and complications straying in from the Spiral, I had urgent business at home. So much for my climbing, too. I was feeling mean as a rat; they wanted my head, did they? Well, they’d better watch out for theirs. With my cases poised on a wobbling trolley I went through airport security, which had become twice as annoying as customs and passport controls ever were, and trundled my way over to the behind-hangars backwater set aside as a heliport. The sight of my own little machine rolled out and waiting cheered me up a bit; I threw my cases into the minuscule back seat, sent the trolley to hell and went over everything even more thoroughly than usual, just in case somebody had bribed a mechanic to loosen a nut or block an oil line.
Paranoia rules, okay –
and who told you?
All the same, I felt relieved
when I’d covered all the more obvious possibilities; there are too many of them on a helicopter. At last, wiping oil off my fingers, I settled into the pilot’s seat and pulled on my helmet. I had just time to run through the pre-flight checks with traffic control before the slot I’d booked came up, and the impatient ground staff waved me out. The starter coughed, turned, and unleashed the worst din in the world. It made me shrink a bit, after last night, but I’d no time to spare. Right hand on the cyclic joystick, left on the collective lever, twist the throttle grip and listen to the quickening hiss of the rotors overhead. As it speeded up I rocked the rudder pedals gingerly, checking the tail rotor’s response; I’d only been flying solo for two years, and I didn’t want to lose it right in the middle of a major international airport. My left hand gunned the throttle and eased the collective forward, angling the rotor blades to generate lift, and the tarmac sank away in my windshield as the little beast lifted and began to swing. I eased down on the pedals, pitching the tail rotor to kill the swing, tipped the cyclic to tilt the whole rotor assembly, angling the downdraught backwards, and inched the collective along, sending her slowly forward and upward, all the while obeying the controller’s patient monotone, keeping a wary eye on the airport around me and darting nervous glances at the crowded control display. Flying a ‘copter is a whole-body experience, like sex without the fringe benefits.
I made rather heavy weather of clearing the crowded airspace, but patient the voice remained, so I couldn’t have been doing too badly. Finally I was up and away, and I could do what I’d been yearning to, just lean on the stick and let her soar. As high as she would, anyhow: she was a middle-aged Bell I’d bought second hand, nominally a five-seater provided two of your friends were garden gnomes, and a bit lacking in get-up-and-go. Presumably the company would be able to buy me a better model, maybe one with NOTAR technology – no tail rotor – and faceplate control displays, all the trimmings, but that thought didn’t excite me so much now. It was in danger of feeling like dirty money.
As I burst up through the cloud cover, though, my mood could hardly help improving. Out of grey damp gloom and over an expanse of cloud sparkling in the sun’s long rays, it reminded me of the most liberating moments of my life, when I set sail upon the Spiral. Few other experiences approached the sheer astonished wonder of seeing the bows lift above
mundane seas, heading out towards the cloud archipelagos and the oceans of moonlit mist through which great ships pass to all the seas of the world, in every era there has been and even more that haven’t. They had their equivalents, those eerie oceans, in earth and air – regions of land and sky where horizon and heavens blended, where time and space became one shifting, hazy borderland where perspectives shrank and parallel lines met, a mass of vanishing points through which you could slip into realms of shadow and archetypal myth. I’d encountered some on land, within the shadows of great cities and ancient centres of worship, but never in the air. I’d heard they were fewer and less easy to penetrate and pass, and I often wondered how they must look. Now I guessed it might be something like this, this glittering dream landscape where snow-capped mountain-top and thrusting cloudcap merged and mounted in towering, infinite ranges. Maybe that was how Le Stryge had summoned me …
Even as the thought struck me, so did the surprise. I stiffened, sending the rotor fishtailing behind me. The still low sun mounted over one such row of cloud crests – and its warm light shot two shapes into dramatic silhouette against the blazing whiteness. Twin towers, tall and narrow, just as I’d seen them from the mountain path.
I didn’t have a lot of fuel to spare; you never did in a little machine like this. But I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I banked steeply and went whirling in towards them, sweeping between phalanxes of reaching cloudy cliffs, crags of mist and insubstantial steeps; and the towers grew, or so it seemed. Tall airy things, Gothic structures that made stone seem almost as light as the mists over which they rose. I stared, forgetting my course. A harsh grey cliff-face loomed, and instinctively I pulled away, forgetting it was no more solid than a dream – or was it? Jagged edges, stark crevice and weathered chimney; I was climber enough to register those things as they reeled across my windshield, as dangerously solid as any stone that ever scuffed my shins or drew blood beneath scrabbling fingernails. I hauled back on the stick, pitched the rotors and pulled hard around, banking across a vast expanse of sheer savage mountainside. The sweat trickled down inside my helmet. Ill-judged; too fast. Had I made that mistake? Or was this how the landward ways of the Spiral opened, where instead of islands in an azure ocean the pathless
clouds would resolve into real mountains with fortress summits, castles of cloud into mighty crests of stone – was it like this? The mists swirled before me as the machine plunged away, and seemed to pull me down.
Lost in grey, without up or down, I struggled to control her, swinging this way and that for long moments, until finally I saw the indicator on the artificial horizon line creep level and the altimeter settle at a reasonable figure. I checked the radar, but there was nothing aloft except mountainsides and me. Then I tried to call Frankfurt control. Nothing. Nothing from Munich either; only noise. I thought for a moment, and then I relaxed the rotor pitch and sank; and we burst out into daylight over a wide valley.
It glowed green beneath me, lush and rich, the floodplain of a river that ran down it like a vein of silver, flanked by chessboard fields and rolling meadows. And as I swung the ‘copter away from that all too solid mountainside, I saw where it flowed to, and the reason for those towers. Straddling the river via a tall island at its centre, a town dominated the valley, and was dominated in its turn. A huge walled fortress town, like nowhere I’d seen except maybe Carcassonne; and this was larger, and even more beautiful, with winding rows of red-tiled roof-tops and golden stone walls that glowed in the mellow light. But above them, rising from the island, were darker, taller walls; and from their heart rose those cloud-piercing towers. They were the spires of a massive building like a cathedral, an escalating mountain of Gothic walls and arches and buttresses and scale-tiled roof-tops and towers that looked impossibly delicate until I realized just how enormous they must be. The whole thing was like a minor peak in its own right, glowing dark amber against the sunlight that streamed down through the broken cloud. I swung closer, looking for any clue to where this place might be. There were boats in the river, mostly sailing ships and barges; but though there were ribbons of dusty yellow road, I couldn’t see a single car or truck on them. I thought of coming down, taking a closer look, but I didn’t want to overfly the place, draw attention to myself and maybe start a panic. If I was right, they might not be too used to helicopters here.
Definitely it had a tinge of the Spiral about it, this place, a lingering, haunting timelessness of long shadows and late afternoons, Indian summers of the world. And yet
if so, it had something else that was strange to the Spiral – a settled, stable look, a hint of order and purpose I’d rarely if ever encountered on those random shores of time, scattered with the flotsam of history and the jetsam of men’s minds. I had to know more. I turned for the angle of the hillside, away from the fields. If I could only find somewhere unobtrusive to land …
It rose up to me behind a minor mountain spur, a level shelf of lush upland meadow that positively demanded cows with bells. But the green grass was uncropped, and rippled like water as the downblast of the rotors struck it. I landed with only the faintest bump, and let the motor growl down to nothing, till there was just the whistle of the slowing rotors. Then that too died away, and I was left listening to the rustle of the grass I’d flattened lifting in a more natural wind.
I undid belt and helmet, slid back the cockpit door and swung myself down into the grass. It was almost waist high, intensely green, slightly damp; the stalks I had crushed scented the light breeze. After the choking city the freshness of the air was unbelievable; you wanted to expand your lungs just to keep on taking it in. Across the meadow ran a mountain stream, leaping and splashing over boulders and stone outcrops. Suddenly I felt intolerably thirsty, and ran down to it. I was cynical enough to know that the freshest mountain stream may well have a dead sheep in it round the next bend; but not this one, somehow, not this one. I could almost see its source, up there among the faceted cliffs; now there would be some climbing! But not on my own. I ducked down, dipped a hand in the stream and yelped: it was icy, it must be melt water from high above, kept cool beneath the rock. But when I sipped at it carefully, so as not to chill my stomach, it tasted amazing, with a faint mineral tang that made a fool of everything in a pressurized bottle. Refreshed, I stood up and looked about. About a hundred yards down the stream passed under an old stone bridge, and beyond that a faint track ran downhill, half obscured by the waving grasses. Making sure the ‘copter keys were still clipped firmly to my belt, I strolled down that way, with I didn’t know what on my mind. The bridge was old and crumbling, but still solid underfoot, and from its hunched back I had a clear view down the slope and into the heart of the valley.
The city shone there still, behind
its massy walls, through a slight haze, but the taste the wind brought me was of sweet wood smoke, nothing more. I could see something of its buildings; the massed roof-tops looked like the old quarters of places like Nice or Nuremberg, or smaller towns in Austria and Czechoslovakia, winding rows of houses that tumbled and spilled down the slight slope to the river in cheerful disarray, red roofs and high gables sticking up at all sorts of angles. But here and there were walls wholly alien to that background, the black-veined whiteness of true half-timbering, the squat stucco of a Mediterranean tradition, the warm square-cut stone elegance of Scotland – incoherent, out of place, and yet somehow immensely right, adding up to a total effect that was indescribable but powerful. This was how a town ought to look. High above it, like a crowning achievement, rose the towers of the cathedral, almost level with me; and above them, higher yet, the spires, so high that a man in them could look down upon the hillside where I stood.
The more I saw, the more it intrigued me, one of the most beautiful places I’d ever encountered, on or off the Spiral, one of the most timeless. Yet there was bustle in the streets, clear even from here; and on the approach roads there were carts, farm carts by the look of them, plodding purposefully towards the walls. I crossed the stream, found the path and strode briskly downhill towards the nearest road. After a while, somehow, I was running.
It was all downhill, of course, and by the time I reached the first road I was barely out of breath; all the same, that surprised me. I felt on top form, and the brisk walk then only set me up further. The road was empty, but it came to a crossroads, and there, as I puzzled over a signpost with a weathered inscription in old-fashioned Gothic
fraktur
, I heard a genial hail of, ‘
Grüss Gott
!’ The standard Bavarian greeting, so at least I knew where I was. It came from an approaching train of carts, from the old man driving the leader’s sturdy black-and-tan oxen, and the men and women riding on the carts behind, or strolling alongside, echoed it.