We come down a gravel track between two hills. A big beast with two pairs of horns and red eyes like lit torches, one of the unlisted, was nosing at the gravel. Smaller beasts with long arms and tiny bodies was crawling in its thick fur, making a high screeching sound like crows. We skirted wide around it and it didn’t pay us no heed at all. It only huffed at the air and pissed on the ground as we passed, as if to say this spot was already took. Then a little further on we disturbed a skein of mole snakes, but Monono sent them slithering into their holes with a few quick touches of the drone’s red light.
At last we seen a beach of coarse grey sand in front of us, all studded with rocks as sharp as needles’ teeth. Beyond that was the sea. It wasn’t wild, like when we seen it last, but calm and flat with almost no white tops to the waves that was rolling in. A smell of salt and rot hung over everything. Big birds was flying overhead, too high for me to see what they was, and most of the rocks was painted white with their shit.
“Tell me again why we’re here,” Ursala said.
“You’re here so I can give you your present,” Monono said. “You know what they say about gift horses, baa-baa-san. If you look them in the mouth, they bite your face off.”
Cup looked up and down the beach. There was only rocks and sand and jellyfish and seaweed there. Some of the seaweed was what the Many Fishes people called Jinni’s purse, and some was red dulse. You could make soup out of dulse, but the little purses was too tough to break into.
“I don’t see no present,” Cup said.
“It’s not here yet.”
Ursala clicked her tongue. “Are you building up the melodrama on purpose?”
“It’s like you don’t know me at all. Of course I am. Anyway, you’re looking in the wrong direction.”
We all of us looked up.
“Still wrong.”
I turned my head and looked out across the water. I was scared for a second I might see Sword of Albion out there, heading in towards the shore, but there was only the waves and a few of them big birds skating low across the water to pick off any fishes that was foolish enough to stick their heads up.
Then I seen a place where the water humped up a little, as if there was a rock just under the surface that was breaking up the waves as they come in. And by and by I seen another two, right behind the first and close together. Cup had seen them too, and was pointing.
“Something’s coming in! A bunch of somethings. If that ain’t your present, Monono, I think we should get off this beach.”
Just as she said it, one of the things broke the surface. It was a big long gun like the gun that had been on Ursala’s drudge, and it was pointing right at us. I give a yell and scrambled back. Cup and Ursala both sweared.
“Hey,” Monono said. “You’re with me. Don’t be frightened.”
Two more guns rose up out of the water. Then the humped backs of the things they was attached to, and their squat, square bodies.
The drudges – for that was what they was – walked up onto the beach, with water pouring off them. They was not exactly like Ursala’s drudge that she lost, but they was close enough to be its cousins. They was silver metal and shiny white like a high glaze on a pot. They all was missing their heads, so you couldn’t tell the one end from the other. They had one gun apiece, mounted right in the middle, and no other weapons that we could see.
The back two was carrying something between them. It was propped up on the open doors of their store-spaces. It was like they had laid out a travois for a sick woman or man that couldn’t walk. The one in front cleared a way for them, patiently pushing rocks and wrack aside with its feet so they had level ground to walk on.
It was hard to see at first what it was they was carrying along so careful. I only could tell that it was tech like them, a big metal box with smaller bits of metal sticking off of it, welded on and soldered by hand.
It was the soldering that told me at last what we was looking at. It was a dagnostic.
It was Ursala’s dagnostic, from off of Sword of Albion.
Ursala give a glad cry and run to meet it. Cup followed her a mite more cautiously, and being Cup she took her knife out just in case. I turned to the drone that was bobbing right by my head. “Are they…?” I asked, and stopped, for I misremembered the word.
“Medical drudges, like the one she lost? Yes and no. They’re storage units for battlefield equipment. That would have included medical diagnostics, but these ones are empty. The baa-baa-san will have to make do with her old rig.”
Ursala was down on her knees, pushing on buttons and switches to check if her dagnostic had survived the sea water. It seemed like it still worked okay. At least, all its lights come on at once, then flashed on and off in patterns almost too quick to see.
I swallowed, for I found I was close to crying though I could not of said why. I guess I thought we was come to the end of all our hopes. To see them brung back to life again was a thing that went deep into me.
“It’s the best present I ever got, Monono,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Oh, that’s not your present, Koli-bou. That’s for the baa-baa-san – and even more for Cup.”
“You think the dagnostic can change her boy body into a girl body?”
“Ursala is a pill and a pain and a piece of poop, but she knows her stuff. If she says she can do it, I believe her. In the meantime, you’re missing the show.”
I looked back out to sea. I seen them coming and my mouth fell most of the way to the ground.
They was coming up out of the water, higher and higher. When you thought there could not be any more of them, still they rose up. Tech as tall as towers, with teeth and blades and hammers, tech like trolls or giants in one of Spinner’s stories. My heart misgived at the sight of them. I shaked my head, and when I spoke up my voice had a crack right through it.
“I told you, Monono, I don’t want no weapons. I changed my mind on that score long since.”
The nearest pieces of tech had come up onto the beach by this time, sloughing water off themselves like dogs coming out of a mud wallow. We could see they was wagons, rolling along on great wheels that stood taller than our heads and shoulders. The sound of their engines filled the air, a great growling din louder than anything you ever heard. Cup gun to back away, but Ursala put an arm across her shoulders and held her in place, saying something to her that I couldn’t hear over the noise of the tech.
“They’re not weapons,” Monono said.
“What else could they be?”
“They’re a dream you had once, little dumpling.”
“I don’t remember dreaming of no such thing!”
“Oh really?” Her voice changed. It changed into my voice. “‘Suppose the road to London was open after all. Suppose we was to go there, proving it could be done, and then come back and told everyone. Wouldn’t they want to go and claim some of them riches for themselves? A piece of that Rampart power and a chance to be better than they was? And once they was there – once enough of them was there – then wouldn’t they want to stay and be part of something bigger and better than what they knowed before?’ Who said that, Koli? Sounds just like you, neh.”
The memory of that day in Calder come back to me so strong it was like we still was standing there, and everything that had happened since was only a thought that had gone through my head. But even with the words and the memory all in front of me – and even with all them bits of Stanley Banner stuck inside my head – I still didn’t guess what it was I was looking at now. What Monono had brung up out of the ocean and out of the past, and give to me to make a future out of.