When Tarvos woke up the next morning, the whole upper part of his body was paralysed with painful stiffness. Every smallest movement sent waves of pain shooting through his body and he could only find relief by lying completely still. He heard groans of pain coming from Geirrod too but Fornjot, if he was suffering the same, was doing so in silence.

  Daphnis was already awake, he saw, and was feeding more vegetation to the fire, sending fresh billows of black smoke up into the dawning sky. "How do you feel?" she asked, looking across at him.

  "As if a hammerhorn's spent the whole night battering me," Tarvos replied. Even speaking made his chest hurt. "I can't believe I fought Skoll in this condition."

  "Your condition is your body trying to heal itself," said Daphnis with a sympathetic smile. "Maybe it takes a while for the process to get started. Your body probably thought it shouldn't start healing itself while you still had a fight to win."

  "You make it sound as if my body has a mind of its own."

  "Maybe it does. You should try to move around a bit when you're ready. Keep the stiffness from setting in too deeply."

  "If my body's telling me to keep still, maybe I should listen to it."

  "You should listen to me. Here I'll help you stand."

  "Later, okay? Let me lie here a little bit longer."

  Daphnis frowned at him, but then she nodded and went to check up on the others.

  Tarvos scanned the horizon with his eyes. There was still nothing in sight. Nothing but the red sun rising above a bank of clouds to the east. He looked up and saw skylords cruising in circles above him. "Forget it," he told them. "No-one's not going to die today. Go find a corpse somewhere else." The scavengers ignored him and continued to circle.

  Bracing himself against the pain, he reached into his tunic and pulled out the Storyteller. The moment the sunlight touched it, the number in the corner appeared. It still said zero, but it's very presence reassured him. The device wasn't dead. It was just empty of sunlight, and it would talk again when it had soaked up enough of it. That was good. Despite his defiant words to the skylords, he was scared. Fornjot couldn't walk with a broken leg, and the others couldn't carry him in their present condition. They could only sit where they were and pray to the spirits that someone from a friendly tribe came along and found them. The fact that they hadn't killed the Storyteller with their negligence was a badly needed piece of good news.

  He heard a yell of pain and looked across to see that Daphnis had pulled her brother's trousers down and was probing his hips with her fingers. His buttocks and the lower part of his back was a single bright red bruise. "I can feel something moving in there," she said.

  "So can I!" Geirrod protested, slapping her hand away.

  "Part of your pelvis has broken off," Daphnis continued. "Not a big bit, but it'll have sharp edges. It'll have to be removed before it severs a blood vessel or punctures your bowel."

  "Removed?" said Geirrod. He glanced across at Tarvos with wide, fearful eyes.

  "You've already got several cuts from fighting the bandits," Daphnis added. "One more won't do you any harm. The broken part of your pelvis is right under the skin. We just cut it open, take it out and sew you back up. You'll be right as rain."

  "When you say we cut it open..."

  "I'll have to do it," his sister replied. "The others are in no condition. You'll have to be held perfectly still while I do it. I'll hammer some spears into the ground and tie you to them face down. I'll try to make it as quick as I can." She was trying to keep her voice light and optimistic, but when she glanced across at Tarvos he saw the worry in her eyes. She was scared, probably more than her brother.

  "It'll be okay," said Tarvos, speaking to Geirrod but his words were aimed at Daphnis. "It'll be quick and easy. No problem at all."

  "That's easy for you to say," Geirrod protested. "Get her to cut you open if you want."

  "It has to be your decision, of course," said Daphnis, giving Tarvos a grateful smile. "But if it stays in there, it's like having an enemy spear still in your body, the tip causing more damage every time it moves."

  "I've heard of people surviving with bone fragments inside them," said Fornjot. "They become surrounded by scar tissue that keeps them from doing further harm, but it takes time for that to happen. In the meantime, you're rolling the dice every time you shift position. You should let her take it out. I'd do it myself if I could. I've done it before, but my hand's shaking too much." He held it out horizontally to show them.

  "Maybe I can do it," suggested Tarvos.

  "You sit right there," Daphnis told him sharply. She turned back to Geirrod. "So what'll it be? A few minutes of pain, or living with fear for the next year or so?"

  Geirrod wilted under her gaze and nodded reluctantly. "Fine," he said. "Do it now before I change my mind."

  There was a dry river bed a short walk away with a scattering of rocks half embedded in the ground. Daphnis chose the biggest one she could carry and used it to hammer two spears into the ground while Tarvos, grimacing with pain, held them upright. Panting and perspiring from the effort, she then tied Geirrod's wrists together and tied them above his head to the stump that protruded from the ground. Then she tied his ankles to the other stump. She put the tip of her knife into the fire to sterilise it, then took it over to her brother. "Ready?" she asked.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  "What do you think?"

  Daphnis ignored the tone of his voice. "Don't be ashamed to scream," she said. "You don't have to prove how brave you are. You proved your courage when you rescued us from the bandit camp. Just yell as loud as you like and let it all out. Understand?"

  "This is your revenge for when I put welky droppings in your sleeping furs, isn't it?"

  "Just relax. I'll try to make the cut as small as I can."

  "I'm sorry I did it. I was only eighteen and you were my sister. It's normal for a boy to play tricks on his sister. I shouldn't have done it."

  "Be quiet. Okay, here goes." She placed the blade of the knife against his skin and pressed it in.

  ☆☆☆

  A short while later Daphnis sewed up the cut she has made while Geirrod, lying on his stomach, examined the fragment of bone she'd given him. It was about the size of his smallest finger, but wickedly sharp at both ends. He winced every time his sister pushed the needle in, but he looked grateful.

  "Nice job," said Fornjot to Daphnis. "I couldn't have done better."

  She smiled at him. "Thanks. I think my hands were shaking even more then yours, though."

  "Your hands are fine."

  "Are you okay?" Tarvos asked him. "How's the leg?"

  "Still broken. I think it's going to be that way for some time. Any sign of company?"

  Tarvos had managed to climb to his feet and turned to look around at the surrounding country. "Shoveltusks on the horizon," he said. "Probably the same herd we saw earlier. Nothing else."

  "If there was anyone within twenty miles, they'd have seen the smoke by now." There was resignation in his voice, as if he'd accepted the fact that they were going to die.

  "Someone may still come," Tarvos replied. "We mustn't give up."

  The sun was hot, though, and his chest was starting to hurt again. He returned to the fire and lowered himself carefully to the ground. He threw a few clumps of dry vegetation onto it and fresh smoke billowed up into the sky.

  He glanced at the Storyteller, where he'd left it sitting beside his spear, and was surprised to see that the number in the corner now said seven. "Want to hear what happened to the First Fathers next?" he asked.

  "Just let me finish this," said Daphnis, poking the needle in again. "I just need five more minutes.

  ☆☆☆

  Ten minutes later, after Daphnis had finished tying a bandages around her brother's waist, they sat in a group while Tarvos made the Storyteller speak again.

  6.54pm Day 39 Janus year 52,,Earth year 2369

  The Blackbird is flying again. Charles finally finished his third fusion core, installed it in the aircraft and this time it works just fine. Hans has already taken it up for a test flight, but the trip over to the Eden outpost will have to wait a little longer as the long summer finally returns. Caelus is again looming large in the sky. Janus is being wracked with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and auroras light up the sky as we brush the outer fringes of Caelus's powerful magnetic field. Weather patterns all across the planet have been thrown into chaos as temperatures soar, the ice melts and sea levels leap upwards. With no second aircraft available for a rescue mission, we can't risk someone being stranded hundreds of miles from home if the Blackbird is forced to make an emergency landing. Sally says weather patterns should stabilise in a few months, making the trip much safer, so Bill and Carol will have to wait just a little while longer.

  Down south, the grasslands are dying, turning to desert, and around the habitat the jungle is growing back. The herbaceous trees are leaping up with amazing speed, some of them a full metre higher each day than the day before, and the animals we saw upon our first arrival are returning. Janice, my former wife, was delighted to see a herd of heffalumps crossing the Lazy Hills, fully four metres tall as they stroll along on their two elephantine legs. They must have been hibernating somewhere, but after more than thirty Earth years of searching we never discovered where. Not too surprising, I suppose. It's a big continent after all.

  We're still sending all our findings back to Earth, but after such a long period of silence we're beginning to fear the worst. Clearly some kind of catastrophe has struck back home, almost certainly war. People may have survived on Earth, which is naturally habitable, even if they've been thrown back to the stone age, but the rest of the Sol system is very probably dead. They relied on fragile life support systems, after all, which would have been very vulnerable to enemy attack.

  None of us knows whether the relatives we left behind are still alive. If we knew for certain the grief would be terrible, we know, but what's even worse is the uncertainty. Those whose relatives lived on Earth can imagine them still alive. Stumbling through the rubble, maybe, but alive nonetheless. Even those among us whose relatives were living elsewhere in the system can hope that they might have found their way back to Earth before the end came. If we knew they were dead we could grieve and move on, but this uncertainty is torture for us all.

  We're all feeling a little envious of Robert and Sally Grey, one of whose children, a former soldier, was a security guard aboard the Lucina, on its way to terraform Cardea. Even if the rest of their family's dead, they have one child that they know for certain is still alive, and the comfort it's giving them is very obvious to the rest of us. The only comfort we have is that, even if the worst has happened in the Sol system, civilisation survives on Cardea and New Essex, the other terraforming colony. One thousand human beings of each of those two worlds, along with a million frozen human embryos. Civilisation lives on, therefore, even if it's vanished from the Sol system, and maybe one day we'll hear from them.

  "That's the reason then," said Fornjot sadly. "That's why no-one else has ever come from Zol. They had a war. A stupid war."

  His hands clenched into fists by his sides. "We've always thought that the First Fathers were wiser than us," he said, shaking his head with frustration. "That they were better than us. We always imagined them judging us harshly for all the stupid mistakes we make. The things we do from greed, jealousy. Hate. But they were just as bad us we are, bickering and fighting like infants."

  "The shamen aren't going to like it," said Tarvos. "What's the point in them communing with the spirits of the First Fathers for guidance if the First Fathers are no wiser than we are?"

  "They'll say that the Storyteller's the work of demons," said Geirrod. "That they're trying to deceive us. Who knows, they might actually be right."

  "You believe in demons?" said Tarvos, laughing scornfully.

  "Don't you? They possess people and drive them mad."

  "Locoweed gets into the food sometimes," Tarvos replied, "or some idiot eats just a little bit for the high it gives them. They get hooked and have to eat more and more to get the same hit. There's no such thing as demons."

  "That might be small comfort when the people who do believe in demons want to stone you to death for blasphemy," said Fornjot soberly. "The memory of the First Fathers is sacred."

  Tarvos nodded thoughtfully. "Let's hear what happens next," he said. "Maybe our faith in them will be restored when they do something wise and brilliant."

  "By all means," Fornjot replied, and Tarvos selected the next entry.