Bitter Oath (New Atlantis) Read online

  Bitter Oath

  A New Atlantis Novel – Book 5

  Nhys Glover

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. With the exception of historical events and people used as background for the story, the names, characters and incidents portrayed in this work come wholly from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Published by Belisama Press

  © Nhys Glover 2012

  The right of Nhys Glover to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is copyright. All rights reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Prologue

  Autumn 1770, Prairies of Saskatchewan, CANADA

  The ancient man leaned in to draw a burning stick from the fire, to light his pipe. It was not a peace pipe, nor was it any other ceremonial ritual he followed, but simply a lifetime habit his masters had always reluctantly condoned. After all, he was not one of the Obijwe. He was a Pani slave who had been with this people since he was a youth found wandering half crazed with thirst in the plains.

  Sky Eyes they had called him. He had learned their dialect, worked hard, and made a place for himself, for longer than any man living could remember. Some called him one of the great Miigis, or Radiant Ones, come back to teach them. But Sky Eyes had never tried to teach them. He had made it his Quest, instead, to learn from the people everything they would teach him.

  Tonight, under the bright, full moon, Sky Eyes was ready to ask his last question.

  ‘Has this land we rest on now always been lifeless?’

  The elders of the tribe and the Midew, the Medicine Woman, exchanged looks. The land he spoke of was lifeless, unlike the rest of the arid plains that held a multitude of life, even in the drought – for eyes that could see. But this place was dead, and they would move through it quickly, setting watchers through the night to warn of ghosts who might claim them while they slept. It was a place they would never speak of.

  But on this night, the ancient Pani, who might be a Miigis, asked the forbidden question. While the moon was full and he smoked the sacred smoke, he told them that they must leave him here in the morning when they left. This would be his last question. The question of a dying man.

  The ancient crone was the Midew for their tribe and the keeper of the sacred truths. Her breasts sagged down below the waist band of her skirt, and her face was so wrinkled her eyes could barely be seen. She held up her gnarled hand and motioned for silence.

  ‘Ancient Questioner we will give you your last answer…

  ‘Long ago, when our ancestors, at the warning of the Miigis, came to this land from the direction of the rising sun, this place was rich and green. All manner of plant life grew here, and creatures roamed it, both large and small. Beneath the soil, huge worms seethed. And though the Midew of that first tribe called them sacred, and warned against it, the people ate the worms and found them good. Soon this place had no worms left, and the people moved on. When they returned the following season, this place was as it is now – Lifeless.’

  ‘Were the great worms found elsewhere?’ Sky Eyes asked, brushing back his long, white hair, his rheumy eyes alive with interest.

  ‘No, the great worms were never found again. Although our people came upon a white man, some seasons ago, who showed the people drawings of a great worm that matched the old stories. It was as long as two men’s feet, one placed in front of the other, as thick as a finger, and as white as ash. The land where he found it was said to be lush and green in the midst of the dry.’ The Midew spoke with the skill of a story teller, wrapping her audience of the twenty adults sitting around the fire, in the magic of her words. Every dark eye was trained on her, every mouth agape.

  ‘Did this white man have a name?’ The ancient’s voice wobbled with excitement. His pipe sat on his knee, unused.

  ‘A strange name, as all white men bear. Moolgraaff, Ser Moolgraaff.’ There was a soft gasp of awe from the people.

  The people knew of white men. They had come in contact with them briefly, on their travels, and had heard many stories from the other tribes of their kin. But these white men were still an oddity, still a curiosity to be watched with caution. The Spirits warned against them, and the Spirits were never wrong.

  ‘How long after I came to you, did this man with his drawings come?’

  The wise woman wrinkled her already wrinkled brow, as she thought. ‘I was a grown woman, already wise in the Mide. The Midew of the people who saw the drawings said it had been the season before our Gathering. You were an old man, even then, Sky Eyes.’

  The crone’s lips peeled back to reveal a toothless grin. Her youth compared to his was always a joke between them. He had known her as a baby, and watched her grow. She had treated him like a pet, and he had sought her out for the wisdom she would dribble out to him, as it was passed to her. This Midew had always been proud of what she knew, and always been reckless in sharing the secrets of the Mide with him.

  But why not? He was like a still dark pool that took what was offered, and never gave back. Her secrets were safe with the ancient one, who would soon die in this lifeless place.

  She would miss him.

  In the morning, the tribe gathered their possessions, finding a special place for the gifts Sky Eyes had given them of his goods. Then they rode away, with their back to the rising sun. One naked girl child dawdled behind, her big, brown eyes sad. This would be the Midew in years to come, and he had been her pet, just as he had been the crone’s pet.

  She held her small, brown hand out to him, fist closed tight. He reached out his own shaking arm toward her, palm up and open. She dropped a precious cowrie shell into his hand.

  ‘May the Great Spirit ease your way,’ she whispered to him, drawing her hand back quickly, and turning to go.

  ‘May the Great Spirit guide you, little one,’ he called to her retreating figure, his old voice raspy with emotion.

  None of the tribe he had lived with for a lifetime turned back to see him one last time. It was their way. He was gone from them now, as surely as he would be by the time the sun was set. His life had been a long and comfortable one, for a slave. They had been good to him. But the old must die, and it was this old man’s time.

  From his medicine pouch around his neck, the Ancient drew a palm sized object. He was impatient to be gone. Waiting for the people to be out of sight was a waste, as none would turn to him again. His gnarled and arthritic fingers moved with confidence over the object. In seconds, the morning was made brighter by a showering fall of sparkling lights. The soft hum did not travel far enough to draw the attention of the departing tribe.

  But the child who had lost her old pet could not keep to the ritual. She cast a hasty, parting glance behind her, and saw the Ancient hobble into the shower of light. She blinked several times to clear her vision. But when she looked again, there was no sparkling light, nor was there an old man.

  He was gone.

  He truly was a Miigis.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Spring 2330, New Atlantis GAIAN CONFEDERACY

  The brilliant light of the Portal illuminated the already brightly lit cavern of Start Point. The hum echoed hollowly off the roughly hewn stone walls that were cove
red in threads of rippling light. From the massive sandstone doorway stepped an ancient man dressed in nothing but a loin cloth and beads. His long white hair was drawn back and tied with a strip of leather, and there was a turkey tail-feather bound into a plait hanging down from the side of his skeletal, dark-leather face.

  ‘Well met, Rene York, welcome home,’ greeted a rather stunned technician who moved out to meet him from behind his computer terminal, one of many that radiated out from the ancient stone dais on which the Portal stood.

  ‘Well met Anders, it’s been a long time. You have not changed a bit,’ the old man replied with a toothless grin, as he hobbled down the four stone stairs that led up to the dais.

  The middle-aged technician tried to keep the shock from his expression. He had worked at Start Point for over sixty years, being one of the first to join the Time Travel team. The number of Jumps he’d witnessed was in the thousands. Yet, when one of the long-term researchers went out and came back, it was always disorientating and somewhat frightening.

  Only a half a minute ago, Rene York had entered the shower of sparks that filled the stone doorway as a handsome young man. His blue-black hair had been grown long and straight like a New Atlantean woman’s. His tanned, muscular upper body had been naked, and his thighs covered by a leather loin cloth. His only ornament had been a large leather medicine pouch he wore around his neck that contained his PA, Portal Activator.

  The ancient, white haired man who stepped back out of the Portal, only seconds after he had stepped in, was so different as to be a stranger. And yet, the old man knew him by name, and joked about the time lapse he had experienced. How long had it been? From the look of him, and from Rene’s habits of the past, it would have been close to his limit. Possibly ninety years. What would it be like to live a whole lifetime in-situ?

  As the old man made his slow way down toward the end of the cavern, where the lifts to the surface were located, Anders shook his head. Why would anyone let their body get to that painful state? Certainly, Rene was passionate about his ecological research, and this was his last clone, having reached his nine life limit. But surely that was reason to want to spend the remaining years of his life in comfort.

  Anders was on his eighth and last clone too, so he understood the sense of finality that came with that ninth life. If he’d known back in the early years after the Last Great Plague that there was a limit on the number of clone bodies he could get, he wouldn’t have been so wasteful with them. He’d taken up new clones as soon as each started to age. This was the first time he’d ever reached middle-age in a body, and it irked him. The idea of being in a body as old as Rene’s was unimaginable.

  The lift had arrived at the other end. Jac Ulster and his new Bonded Mate, Cara Westchester, a Newcomer who had recently been made a Retriever, stepped out into the cavern and nodded a greeting at the old Indian man. Jac looked tense and jittery, and was pulling at the lock of red-brown hair that fell across his forehead. He appeared to be a man who, having only recently made the transition into his final clone body, looked no more than twenty years old. Anders knew he was well over three hundred years old.

  Cara strode along beside her Bonded, dressed as oddly as the Indian who had just left. Unlike Jac and the rest of the technicians in the cavern, who wore white, toga-like tunics, she was wearing a short skirt and floral blouse that befitted her Jump to Australia in 2009. Her pretty young face was pale with worry, and she kept casting Jac guilty looks out of the corner of her eye. This was only her second Jump, and there had been a lot of unrest amongst the Retrievers and Researchers since Hakon’s death in-situ yesterday. Maybe she was scared to go on this Jump?

  The Portal had been empty for several minutes since Rene’s return. As Cara made her way slowly up the dais stairs, the doorway came alive with showering sparks once more, and the hum returned in earnest.

  With a last worried glance back at her Bonded, who had turned his back on her, Cara stepped into the Portal. A second later, the shower dissolved.

  Time seemed to warp strangely then, for Anders. What should have been only a few seconds before the Portal reactivated had, instead, become an extended period. There shouldn’t be this kind of gap. No matter how long the Jumper was at the other end, at Start Point they were programmed to return immediately after leaving.

  However, it was much longer than that now. Which meant only one thing – Cara was in trouble.

  And Jac knew it.

  ‘Give me a PA, I’m going in,’ Jac barked at him. For a moment, Anders could do nothing but stare at the banned Jumper in stunned horror.

  By the time he could find words, Benjamin Kent, the Start Point Manager had answered. ‘You cannot go dressed like that, Jac. Go to wardrobe. I will get the rest of your equipment organised.’ The short, slightly portly man had risen from his console and come to stand at Jac’s side.

  ‘I can’t wait… I…’

  ‘Jac, do you want to find her? Do you want to bring her safely back?’ The man’s patient voice was in total contrast to Jac’s panicked tones.

  Jac nodded. Words had deserted him.

  ‘Then get organised. I should send someone else, but I can see you would fight me on this. So, if you want to go after her, Jac, get your head in the game. Get dressed, review her Target’s dossier and the Set Down details. If you go in with your mind in chaos, you will be useless to her. Do you understand me?’

  Jac nodded again, but his face took on a fierceness that was uncharacteristic, not only for him, but for their whole populace. No one showed this level of emotion. Ever.

  As Anders watched Jac hurry away, he again felt the fear that Rene’s return had instilled in him. It was his own mortality calling out, warning him that time was running out for him, just as it was running out for these other citizens of New Atlantis. Their unchanging, peaceful world seemed suddenly off-kilter somehow, like a spinning top that had hit a stone. It wobbled and slowed, as it tried to find its centre once more. Anders had a feeling it would never find that same centre again.

  Rene stood under the shower set for waterfall, as the water bombarded his old, filthy body. It always felt strange to be back here in this unchanging world after being away for a lifetime. Sometimes, when he lay on the hard ground beneath the stars that stretched across the sky like the tiny Christmas lights of his childhood, he wondered if this world was real at all. Sometimes, he felt as if it was simply a dream he had dreamed many times, that had taken on a reality of its own.

  Then, when he came back here, it was as if that other life was nothing more than a dream, and this gentle, cultured place was the only reality. But if that were so, how was it that the body that had stood beneath this shower last had been young and fit – his skin only the light brown of weak tea. Yet now, it was old and wasted. And his skin was now as brown as a hazel nut, and wrinkled, thin and dry as vellum.

  No, both worlds were real. And he crossed between them relentlessly, for his cause – the resurrection of their barely surviving planet.

  Rene had never been a carefree child. From his earliest memories, the weight of the destruction to the Great Spirit’s natural world had been his heavy burden. His mother, an Obejwe of the First People in Canada and a fierce ecowarrior, had laid that burden on him. And his father, a French Canadian from Montreal, who had met his mother on one of her campaigns, and joined her as she fought to save what was left of the Canadian wilderness, was just as purposeful.

  She had taught him Mide, the Medicine of the first people, and he had adopted Animism more readily than his father’s Roman Catholicism. When he was old enough, he went to University and became a Naturalist. His cause was an impossible one, by that stage. Everyone knew the planet had already been destroyed by man. But he’d been determined to go down fighting, just as his parents would.

  He still remembered the day he’d woken up to find himself alone in the world. The winter expedition, of which he was an insignificant part as a graduate student of twenty five, had been in the heart of
what was left of the northern wilderness of Quebec. They’d been looking to track the endangered snow owls.

  Everyone had been sick. They’d all blamed it on food poisoning, when they turned in early that night. By morning – was it the next day or the one following – he was never quite sure, he woke to find every last person of their eight-man team dead.

  And, as he hiked out to their vehicles, and made his way along the rough tracks back to civilization, he found no one else alive but him. By the time he reached the bigger towns, his growing terror that he was the only person in the world left alive, was out of control.

  If he hadn’t seen a flash of colour on the roadside just out of La Tuque, he would certainly have gone mad. But he had seen it, and chased after it, until he found the teenage girl. She had been crazed with loneliness, too, just like him. But she’d also been terrified of the stranger that he was. It had taken him days to calm her down; days to convince her he meant her no harm.

  Saidie had travelled with him in search of others. By the time the military patrol had found them, they numbered ten. He’d wanted to go home to Toronto, to see if his parents had survived. They were strong, he’d told the military, and they would have made it, if he had. Of course, he’d been wrong. Strength had nothing to do with surviving the Last Great Plague. No one had ever found out what the survivors had in common that made them each the one-in-a-thousand who went on.

  But the armed force had their orders – no one was allowed to return to the once-populated areas. The threat of further disease from the decomposing corpses was too great.

  Before he knew it, he was at a holding camp. His wasted, sick body had been traded for a healthy, new one. Then, because of his skills and knowledge, he was redeployed to New Atlantis.

  Here, he’d worked as a curator in the Knowledge Centre for one hundred and fifty years. Then Time Travel was perfected, and he was able to volunteer as a Researcher. His job since that time had been to Jump back to the past and collect primary, ecological data on all that they had lost.