Quest Beyond Time Read Online Free PDF

Island. On it are wise folk, who follow the Hanged God. Could you fly to the Island on your kite?’
    ‘It depends how far it is . . . if there are cliffs . . . the winds. . .’
    ‘If the gods can bring him through Time, they can fly him to the Island,’ rumbled Fergus.
    ‘There are high cliffs,’ Simon paused. ‘Could you do it with one other? Could you take her with you?’ He gestured at Katrin.
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘The wise ones on the Island collect the old wisdom. They could look at her blood and give you the cure.’
    ‘But how far are the cliffs? I’d have to get there. . .’
    ‘Fergus and Katrin would get you there.’
    Mike paused, and thought about lions, and Wanderers, and the fact that he had to get home, and to school on Monday. Somehow he managed to fit home and school and Wanderers into the same world, and come up worried. By now his mother would be frantic. She would have telephoned his father. His father would be feeling guilty, and when his father felt guilty, Mike would sooner or later be made to feel guilty, too. He had to get out of here.
    ‘Look, I don’t have time. I’d like to help you but. . .’ They looked at him, puzzled, and suspicious. He felt guilty under their gaze. ‘I’m really not the hero type!’
    Fergus’s hand dropped to his sword hilt. ‘He’s of man’s years and not a man!’ He was on his feet in one smooth movement, his sword coming out of his scabbard. ‘I claim his Culling!’
    ‘Stop!’ Simon was on his feet, his own sword halfway from its scabbard. ‘He’s a guest! He’s eaten my bread!’
    Fergus stood frozen, clearly unwilling to draw on his chieftain. Then slowly he slid his sword back into its scabbard.
    ‘I say he’s from the Dark Ones, sent to mock us.’
    Simon looked at Katrin. ‘Show him to his bed. We’ll talk more in the morning.’
    As Katrin led Mike to a comer of the hall, he tried to understand what had just happened. He had said something which had put him in deadly danger, and Simon had intervened to save his life. But what had he said wrong? And why had Simon helped?
    As Katrin indicated the wooden shelf where he would sleep, and the sheepskin covering which would keep him warm, he asked, ‘What happened just then?’
    ‘You do not have the Cull and the Guestright in Before?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Among the Clans, if a male grows to man’s years and is not a man, he is given back to the gods.’
    ‘Like, ah . . .?’ Mike made a throat-cutting action.
    She nodded. ‘It is called the Cull. It keeps the Clans strong.’
    ‘And by not wanting to go to the Island. . .?’
    ‘You proved you were not a man.’
    ‘When is a male a man?’
    ‘At fourteen. It is then that he does the Tests.’
    Mike thought about asking what the Tests were, but then decided that he really did not wish to know. ‘So Fergus was going to Cull me, but your father. .
    ‘You had eaten his bread. You had Guestright.’
    ‘Would he really have fought Fergus for me?’
    ‘And died. And I would have killed Fergus, for the Payback.’
    Mike looked at her in silence. She was standing there telling him that her father would die to protect a guest, and that if he had, she would have murdered her uncle to avenge him. He could think of only three explanations: these people were either wonderful actors having a very bad game with him; or he really was in a barbarian future; or, and for some reason this seemed worst of all, he had stumbled into a drop-out commune which had developed its own culture. A culture based on ritual homicide.
    ‘Katrin, has it ever occurred to you that you people tend to take things a little too seriously?’
    ‘We have the Law,’ she said. ‘Do you not have the Law?’
    And he found he had no answer to that. No answer at all.

CHAPTER 7
THE NIGHT HUNTSMAN
    Mike lay in the dark on the hard shelf, trying to think it through in a way that made sense.
    Every time he thought it through, the answer made no sense whatsoever.
    The thing that he