Future Tense by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

Author:Barbara Gaskell Denvil [Denvil, Barbara Gaskell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gaskell Publishing
Published: 2017-10-20T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

All along the cliff top the pterosaur nests jutted like bare basins, gouged from the thin soil and scraped from stone, roughly circular and pitted close together, overlooking the wild incoming tide.

There was a bustling busyness, a chattering and flapping, pushing and squabbling with at least a hundred nests and little space between, more stretching back beyond sight of the beach. The Tupuxuara pterosaurs incubated their eggs in pairs, one on the nest, the other soaring far over the waters and fishing on the wing. They screeched and chittered, elbowing their neighbours. They were huge. Their wing span was fifteen feet or more, their elongated heads and bony crests pointing into massive toothless jaws. They were agitated with the stress of shielding their eggs from the onslaught of the terrible and unrelenting sun. Now they were threatened by unnamed intruders. No predatory Tyrannosaurus, but the running figures of unknown creatures, two humans below and the billowing shadows of the verenparr above.

Tancred pulled Mercy along with him, gripped tight by one hand and engulfed by his aura until she felt she flew. There was no threat of panting breath behind, nor footsteps, and the sound of the sequence giant’s chase was distant and surreal, simply the blowing of intangibles through the whistle of the wind. The sense of dread loomed and then faded. The verenparr could not hold shape in the normality of real Time and forward direction. They were dissolving into space like shredded memories. Mercy had outrun time after all. Tancred was laughing.

Mercy said, in her thoughts because she had no breath to spare for talking, “But you were chained. I was too, but they let me go. They didn’t mean to let you go. They said -,”

“Once through the manhole,” Tancred answered her mind, “they saw their mistake. Not the Dulltimes after all of course, but another failure. They immediately lost strength and focus. Time chains are only an illusion anyway, as time is, and timelessness too, so once the pirates lost concentration, the chains melted. Besides, within the burrows those bonds are stronger than iron - but within time they don’t exist.”

She loved his words warm in her thoughts again, even when she understood little of them. Still holding to her, he had now slowed their pace to a leisurely walk, feet sinking into the swirls of soft sand. A cold spray scattered across their faces and the beach eddied, tiny banks forming towards the base of the cliffs as the tide swept in. Far off into the dazzle of a distant horizon the ocean rolled and the waves were flung high and wild.

“So they’re not too bright, these giants?” She had her breath back and could speak aloud again. A smear of foam at her feet turned the golden sand to cinnamon.

“Bright? No, not so bright. I arranged the wrong manhole and tempted them inside it. They’ll never leave here now, not without the strength to reverse into the burrows. Eventually they’ll be swept up in the blink, but there’ll be only tatters to fall back into timelessness.

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