For a dozen generations Kraalheeren of the Planetia had tried to breed beasts known to the colonists as hornheads, a moss-and-lichen-eating ruminant resembling an Earth buffalo. The effort had failed. The hornheads being native necrogenes, no gravid female ever survived parturition. Herds multiplied slowly or not at all, and the meat was tough and unpalatable. Riding beasts were another matter. The faux horses were rodent-cognates and were born in litters, thus becoming numerous enough to make husbandry worthwhile. But the riding beasts did not thrive in the heights, thus giving the Kraalheeren of the Planetia excuse to lust after the acres of lush grassland to be found in the plains below.
With the spread across the Grassersee of homesteaders and small farmers, the age of the Kraalheer in the lowlands was ending. But on the Planetia the Kraalheeren were supreme.
It was Ian Voerster’s intention to see to it that their power grew no greater. The independence movement in the high country was an intolerable threat. The instrument of his intention was to be the Fonteins.
The Fontein brothers and their troop of
lumpen
followers had descended to the village of Grimsel by way of the Grimsel Pass Funicular Railway, an engineering marvel whose completion had left Voerster financially exhausted for a generation. The railway reached almost to the Sea of Grass, but not quite. The settlement of Grimsel, in the moraine left by the retreat of the Blue Glacier, supported no more than two thousand souls, an eighth Voertrekker, a half
lumpen
, and the remainder kaffirs.
This was why Eigen Fontein, who had a well-developed taste for kaffir females, always began his hunting excursions in Grimsel.
It was rumored that there was platinum-bearing ore in the Grimsel range, but no one had ever found any. Yet the stories drew
lumpen
and impoverished, hopeful Voertrekkers from as far away as Pretoria and Voersterstaad.
It was customary for Planetians descending the Shieldwall to linger several days in Grimsel, becoming accustomed to the greater air pressure and humidity of the lowlands, before continuing their journeys to Voersterstaad or Pretoria by airship. Temperatures above freezing were rare in the highlands, and on summer days when the mean temperature of Grimsel was in the forties Celsius, Highlanders complained bitterly of the heat. They were a sullen lot, given to fighting among themselves and complaining about the differences in hardships endured by “High Voertrekkers” and flatlanders.
Airships avoided the high plateau. They were limited by their pressure altitude--the height at which the gas in the envelope expanded to the point of requiring a release of volume--in a place where no helium was available for replacement. Rarely, perhaps once in every dozen years, the Staadluftflot and the Society for Planetary Studies sponsored an aerial expedition to the Planetia, and even to the Blue Glacier and the Northern Ice. These expeditions regularly killed adventurous young Voertrekkers and required the rescuing of others. Any lowlanders rescued from the Ice by a team of High Voertrekkers never forgot it. Were never allowed to forget it. Courage and bravado (as well as fool-hardiness and brutality) were the stuff of life above the Shieldwall.
When the Fonteins and their hunter-marauder posse of Winter Kraal
lumpen
alighted from the funicular, they immediately did as they always did in Grimsel. They hired kaffir whores and
lumpen
whores, too, for those who favored them, and proceeded to “tree the town.”
The source of the expression was Old Earth’s western America and it remained in favor in towns such as Grimsel, despite the fact that most of the inhabitants had never seen a tree and others had never before seen a town.
It became immediately apparent to the people of Grimsel that the Fonteins were on hand for more than hunting and whoring. The high-country
lumpen
got drunk and made a quantity of loose talk. What they said was that Eigen had it in his mind to “take a bite of the Grassersee.”
Some feared that he meant Grimsel, which was technically (if not actually) a part of the Sea of Grass. Others said he meant something different. The Voerster’s spies listened.
No one in Grimsel had dared ask a Fontein of Winter what sort of hunt he intended in the lowlands that required so many armed men. But the stablekeeper reported that Mynheer Fontein had been heard to say that he had descended from the plateau “to claim Einsamberg.” Not from the Ehrengrafs, to whom it belonged, but from his father, the KraaJheer of Winter. This shocked the liveryman’s listeners. The mountain lands to the west and south of Grimsel had been the holding of the Ehrengraf clan since soon after Landing Day. The estate was seldom visited by any member of the family, but was always kept in readiness by a staff of kaffirs who were, by any standard shabby Grimsel knew, uncommonly loyal to the Kraalheer family who owned Einsamberg and the Einsamtal Valley.
The Ehrengrafs, everyone knew, were kaffir-lovers dating from the days of the Rebellion. Whatever Eigen Fontein had in mind for property belonging to kaffir-loving lowland aristocrats was no concern of Grimsel’s. But right was right, and no Fontein, son
or
father, had any rightful claim to the old estate.
In stormy, near-freezing weather--it had snowed the night before the arrival of the Fonteins, and there was still ice in the ravines--the Winter men rode out. They were dressed in home-spun shirts and trousers, hornhead leather back-and-breastplaies, ebray leather boots, broad hats with the brim pinned up with the kraal badge (a giant cheet killing a hornhead), and great blunderbuss shotguns across their backs.
No one asked any questions. The leader’s demeanor did not encourage familiarity. The people of Grimsel saw the Fonteins depart and were well pleased to see them go. Of course, there were rumors. Rumors and gossip were all that made life in Grimsel bearable.
The only man with any knowledge of the law in Grimsel was the brewer, a quondam solicitor who had come to the hills seeking gold many years ago and stayed to make beer. The lawyer-turned-brewer contended that Einsamberg was protected by a First Lander’s Portion writ, and that therefore it was not Voertrekker-Praesident Ian Voerster’s to give, but the property of his wife, the kraalheera Eliana Ehrengraf, The subject was discussed over the brewer’s barrels. But it was soon forgotten. The people of Grimsel were, for the most part, disappointed prospectors, crippled miners, and unemployed funicular railroad men. They had a short attention span. And they had little interest in politics and none whatever in the intrigues of Voertrekkerhoem, a quasi-legendary kraal on the shore of the Great Southern Ocean far, far from Grimsel.
It was late afternoon when Luftkapitan Klemmer gave up the attempt to guide
Volkenreiter
around the now fully developed line of thundersqualls. The sun had vanished behind a low bank of clouds over the western horizon; lightning flashed angrily within the thunder cells ahead. At this stage, even without considering the risk to the Voertrekkersdatter, it was impossible to overfly the cold front. The anvilheads topping the cumulonimbus clouds reached high into the tropopause, well above
Volkenreiter’s
service ceiling.
Klemmer cursed himself for allowing pride of airmanship to overbear his natural caution. Behind the turbulence-buffeted dirigible, a fast-moving occlusion had formed still another rank of thunderheads. It was on to Einsamberg or nothing; a return was no longer possible.
The dappled afternoon sunlight through which the airship had been flying was swiftly squeezed into a narrow avenue pointed straight at the only gap Klemmer could see in the line of squalls ahead. The air darkened, the temperature dropped a dozen degrees and the slowly rising ground of the Grirnsers foothills vanished.
Volkenreiter
flew through a turbid sea of gray and black, her frames groaning complaints each time she struck turbulence.
Klemmer reached for a speaking tube and shouted to the passengers in the salon to be seated and strap down. He gave his command in the confident manner expected of a servant of the Voertrekker-Praesident’s family, informing the passengers that
Volkenreiter’s
passage through “some rain showers” would be “bumpy, but quite safe and speedy.”
With these assurances, he steered
Volkenreiter
into the now all-but-nonexistent gap between two thunderhead clouds. Ten minutes later, inside a fast-moving squall, Otto Klemmer grew genuinely concerned. A severe encounter with a vertical gust within the storm tore a long strip of fabric from the ventral surface of the lifting body, and it snapped and writhed in the relative wind like a giant’s pennant. Hail battered the ship. The resulting noise made it sound as though
Volkenreiter
were being pelted with rocks.
Small hailstones were caught in the violent updrafts and lifted into freezing air where they accumulated layers of ice. By the time they fell and struck
Volkenreiter
’s fabric skin they had grown as large as a man’s clenched fist, and they made the airship reverberate like a drum.
Volkenreiter
’s altitude varied with the turbulence. Klemmer could not leave the helm and Blier, on the elevator control, was sweating heavily with the exertion of holding altitude. Hidden below the undercast lay the rising terrain of the Grimsel Mountains. Within minutes the dirigible was flying blindly over the unseen first range of crags, sharp as cheet’s teeth.
Luftkapitan Klemmer felt the undignified sweat of apprehension soaking through the serge of his best uniform. The cabin temperatures hovered near to eleven degrees Celsius, only a degree or two warmer than the outside air. Klemmer followed the feeble light, knowing that to allow
Volkenreiter
to penetrate to the heart of a thunderhead was to risk destruction. Klemmer had never lost a ship and he had no intention of losing this one, not ever, and most particularly while The Voerster’s wife and only child were aboard.
The suggestion of an opening in the squall line showed ahead through the rime-coated glass of the control deck. But the turbulence refused to abate. Blier was swearing at the effort needed to do his job. He was glaring at Buele, who had not returned to the salon, and sat braced between the navigation table and a bulkhead. Klemmer saw, to his annoyance, that the half-wit was grinning, actually enjoying the tumult and uproar of the storm. He probably never once imagined that his worthless
lumpe
life might be in danger.
“Here, boy, Bol damn you,” Blier shouted. “Come help me with this elevator wheel.”
For a moment, the Luftkapitan was tempted to countermand Blier’s order. It was not fitting that a child, and a halfwitted one at that, be pressed into service to help fly the pride of the airship fleet. But when Klemmer measured Blier’s condition, he decided against intervening. Buele might be simpleminded, but he seemed to have a knack for the way things worked, and he was certainly strong enough to help Blier, who was tiring fast.
Buele leaped to the elevator wheel, grinning like a kaffir mask. Klemmer shuddered. At home, atop the clavichord (which no one in the household could play) there stood a toothy hornhead bone carving of Oya, the kaffir god of death. Mynheera Klemmer collected kaffir art, cluttering the house with ugly, primitive images. There was the Earth Mother Mandela, a female with upraised clenched fist and enormous breasts; Nampa, Tutu, and Chaka, the warriors of Angatch, the god of all gods; and there were other, unidentifiable images as old as the colony and perhaps older. Their antiquity should have made them pricey, but Voertrekkers assigned little value to such kaffir things. Helga Klemmer was an exception. She was devoted to her hobby. The captain hated it. The figure of Oya was forever surfacing in his nightmares. Was it, he often wondered, his drop of kaffir blood that made him prey to such superstitious nonsense?
He snapped at Buele to stop his grinning. “This is serious business, boy.”
Matters grew more serious by the minute. The patch of lightness ahead had vanished in the murk. It was replaced suddenly and violently by repeated blue flashes of lightning. The air became pungent with ozone. The lightning bolts, made brilliant by Voerster’s oxygen-rich air, had passed perilously close to
Volkenreiter
. Blier stared at the captain in terror. Lightning was the airship killer. A strike on an aircraft carrying tanks of compressed hydrogen fuel could explode it into flaming rags and plunging bodies.
“Turn back, Luftkapitan,”
Blier shouted hoarsely.
“We will never get through. “
“Get hold of yourself, man. And watch our altitude,” Klemmer said severely.
Volkenreiter
droned deeper into the line of storm. They were staggered, like soldiers in an armored phalanx arrayed for battle. Hail clattered against the gondola windows, then strange flashes of brilliant light from the setting sun struck the cloud banks, turning them to amber. The amber alternated with periods of murky darkness.
For an instant the airship emerged into clear air in a deep ravine between two boiling, silver-white cumulus clouds rising up, up, until their tops were shredded and frozen by the five-hundred-kilometer-per-hour jetstream at the edge of the stratosphere.
It was a scene of unreal and dreadful beauty, but Otto Klemmer was aware only of the need to find a safe path between the two silver-white cliffs. His wet shirt felt cold and clammy against his chin under the heavy Luftschifflot uniform. Buele still had that foolish, skullish grin. He had remained constant while Blier had not. Otto Klemmer shivered, gripped the helm more tightly, and flew on.
In the salon below, Broni spread her hands on the glass and looked with awe at the vast canyon of cloud and sky through which Cloud Rider flew. She shivered with delight as repeated bolts of electric blue lightning flashed in the cloud-cliffs on either side of the dirigible.
The clouds looked as solid as the Northern Ice. It seemed to the girl that if she could reach so far, she might take a handful of silvery white light from the cliffside and hold it in her fingers.