Death Game

Chapter Five

John turned over restlessly for the fourteenth time. The hanging lamp guttered, the flame burning low. Teyla sat up.

“Does your head hurt?” she asked quietly.

John shrugged. “It’s not awful. I just can’t sleep.” He was under a mound of covers against the chill of the desert night, his back to her.

“I can’t sleep either,” Teyla said.

“Sorry.” He rolled over again and sat up, the bandage drooping down over his eye.

Teyla put her hand to his forehead. “You don’t seem feverish.”

“I’m fine. It just hurts.”

“I think I have some Tylenol,” Teyla said. “Can you take that?”

He nodded. “Should be ok. It’s not very strong but it’s better than nothing.” She fetched the Tylenol and the remains of the tea, and he gulped the pills down. “I’m sorry to keep you awake.”

“Well, I can’t very well throw you out, since we’re locked in,” Teyla said. “So I suppose I have to put up with you.” She sat back down on the edge of the bed, propping up against the headboard and pulling the covers over her feet. “We could tell stories.”

“Tell stories?”

“That is what my people do when keeping watch,” Teyla said serenely. “And since we must pass the cold hours of the night together, it is better to do so in companionship.” She folded her hands across her stomach. “I have suggested it, so you may request the story.”

“I don’t know any Athosian stories,” John said, settling back down, the firm pillow like a bolster beneath him. It would take some little time for the pills to help, she thought, but perhaps then he would sleep.

“Still, you must pick one,” she said. “It can be anything. About a person or a place…”

For a moment he looked thoughtful, his eyes shadowed by the bandage. “How about the first time you went through a Stargate?”

Teyla looked up at the dim lamp swaying. “You do not pick an easy one,” she said.

“If it’s a bad idea…”

“No. You chose fairly.” Teyla smiled at him. “I will tell you of my first gate.”

I am springborn, so I was already weaned my second summer when my mother walked through the Ring of the Ancestors and never came back. My mother was Tegan of the Gate Field, of Emege That Was, and she was beautiful and wild both. My father loved her, and how not, when she was like the storm on the mountains or the wild birds in flight? Four years they lived together, four years they dreamed, and my second summer she walked through the gate and never returned, a smile on her lips and her pack on her back. She was Tegan, and nothing could hold her. She was meant for walking away.

My father never loved again, never chose another, and so in my childhood it was just the two of us. My father, Torren, was a trader. He was a mild man with keen blue eyes and a quiet way, the kind of man who misses nothing but says little. He represented us when people came to buy our wares, and sometimes he walked through the gate himself to sell the things we had made on other worlds, to trade them for things we could not make.

And there were many things we could not make. Plastics — these things you use so freely, even throw away — we prized them for their durability, their lightness, and most of all because we could not make them. The best came from Sateda, but we had nothing they wanted so anything manufactured by them must come through layers of middlemen, traded again and again before it was sold for Athosian grain or the furs of animals we had trapped. An energy pistol like Ronon’s would have been worth a year’s harvest. And so we knew what they were, but we had none.

I was six years old and a bit when I walked through my first gate. My father had business on Narara. We traded with them fairly often, for they were a good market for our furs and our pottery and in return we bought from them the richly loomed cloth that they are famous for, raw silks in all the hues of the rainbow. I loved their cloth even as a child. I could not imagine how they made such bright dyes colorfast, russets and brilliant greens, reds and lambent purples, the turquoise that is my favorite.

“It’s only a short trip,” my father said. “There is no reason Teyla cannot come. We will stay one night on Narada and return in the morning.” I was beside myself with excitement, especially when my father got out my winter coat, now packed away neatly for the season, as it was coming to summer in the lowlands by Emege That Was. “It’s winter on Narada,” he said. “Their winters are cold, so you must bundle up when you play in the snow.”

It is true that some parts of Athos are cold. There is snow in the mountains aplenty, but I had lived my life in the lands near Gate Field, where winters are rainy and cool, with ice in the mornings that sometimes coats the trees until they shine like glass. Real snow is rare and does not stay long. That is how we were, on Athos. You came to us in the uplands, when we had just moved to our summer pasturage with the return of the sun. In winter we were far away, in the deep valleys where the cold does not cut one to the bone. It is good that you came then. Had you come a tenday sooner, you would have found no one at all.

And so I stood beside my father in summer, bundled into my winter coat, while the great Ring of the Ancestors hummed to life, flaring blue as I waited. With good wishes ringing in our ears we stepped up, hand in hand, eager and unafraid.

I do not remember what I thought of the gate itself, of the transit, the sudden cold and the sense of disorientation, but we stepped out into snow. We stood in a broad courtyard, sculpted evergreen trees bowed beneath the weight of the snow, high mountains almost invisible, white against the pale sky. Great white flakes were falling, sticky and huge, drifting on the light wind. The stones around the gate had been cleared, and the new snow there only barely covered my boots, but the drifts around were higher than my waist. I let out a breath, and it came out steam in the frosty air. I turned my face to the sky, watching the flakes in their swirling dance, while in the distance we heard the voices of people and the sound of bells moving in the wind.

What may I tell you except that I was entranced?

We spent the day in the markets of Narada, where every good thing is sold, and my father made many trades. I played in the snow, drank warm tea on a bench beside a park where bigger children played a game I didn’t know, sliding around on snowshoes with two hide balls. We stayed in a small hostel, eating beside a roaring fire alive with the crackling of evergreen wood, and went to the Temple of the Bells by starlight to watch night play on the snow, with the distant glow of lights on the mountains where people lived. We sat in the pool of a hot spring to warm up afterwards, and I was half asleep already when my father took me up to the loft where we would pass the night. I lay drowsy and comfortable, wrapped in a soft feather quilt, looking out the tiny window at the late moon rising in a silver crescent over the mountains, the snow reflecting its pale light, until waking turned into dreams.

That was my first gate, and I have never looked back. Since then I have never ceased from travel, from wanting to dare one more gate, to see one more sunrise. It makes me a bad Athosian. We are stolid people in many ways, fatalistic and accepting of the world as it is. We have consigned our romantic past to stories, to tales of daring deeds that once were, but life is too hard for such things now. We are children of war, of a war that never ends. Most of us do not grow old, and while we tell stories of the great cities we once lived in, of heroes who once lived and dared all, we know those days are past. Such things do not happen in the real world.

When you came to Athos, we thought you were marauders who would try our strength. What else is there to think of a group of wary armed men whose eyes are not hard but frightened, as though they did not know what waited around each corner? Your Colonel Sumner looked through me as though I were nothing, as though he had assessed the value of all he saw and found it wanting.

We are a careful people. We try not to make enemies, especially enemies with weapons that could level our village in minutes.

We did not know we were being pulled into a Story.

Once there was an Ancient city, sleeping beneath the moon, abandoned by her children, sheltered by the sounding seas. Once there was a city that came to life at her son’s touch, woke from her long dream and thought of her other children, those scattered like seed before the wind.

And so the story began. It began as stories always begin, in the blue flare of a gate.

“They’re in trouble,” Ronon said.

Radek looked up from his laptop, its light reflecting off his glasses in the darkness. “You conclude this now?”

“Yeah.” Ronon said. “Sixteen hours. There’s no way they wouldn’t be back by now unless something was wrong. We have to go help.”

Radek closed his laptop to save the battery. He was getting tired of batting away flying insects attracted to it anyhow. “And how do you suggest we do that?”

“There are Wraith out there.” Ronon got to his feet, pacing back and forth for all the world like a nervous panther he’d seen in the Prague zoo. “The cruiser probably picked up the jumper.”

“And where would we look for them?” Radek asked reasonably. “Ronon, it’s a very big planet. In the jumper they could be thousands of kilometers away in any direction. We are two men on foot. How do you propose we find them?”

“We can’t just sit here,” Ronon said in a tone that seemed to disdain Radek’s cowardice.

“I did not say we should sit here. But let us not go off half cocked, as they say. We do not know where Colonel Sheppard and Teyla have gone. He said they were going to ‘fly around and have a look.’ We do not know where they went, or even which direction. They could be on the other side of the planet, and we will not find them this way.”

“What’s your suggestion?” Ronon crossed his arms on his chest, glaring down at Radek.

“We should return to the gate, get Rodney, and get another jumper through. We can search for them much more effectively from the air, and then we will have the jumper’s weapons if we run into the cruiser or Wraith Darts.” Radek stood up to his not very impressive height. “Otherwise we are just wasting time wandering around that might be spent getting back to the gate.”

“You know where the gate is?” Ronon asked skeptically.

Radek opened the laptop. “I have the telemetry from our survey as we flew over. I was patched into the jumper’s navigational computer. Yes, I know exactly where the gate is. Unfortunately, it’s quite a distance, about 900 km. We are approximately 350 km from the mainland, on one of an archipelago of islands in a sub tropical sea. The coastal regions appeared inhabited, though there is an interior desert which contains the actual location of the gate. Still, it’s doable.”

Ronon looked at the map, his eyes darting keenly from one thing to another, fingers nimble on the keys as he focused in on first one place, then another. One always forgets, Radek thought, that he came from an industrial world. Much of Ronon’s idea of technology was the same pre-war stuff he’d grown up with. Antiquated, to be sure, from the perspective of forty years later in the West, but hardly primitive. The idea of a keyboard, for example, was not new to Ronon. Did they have manual typewriters on Sateda? Presumably, if they had printing. Radek had learned to type his first year in polytechnique on a manual typewriter. Electric typewriters were for the offices of important men. He had found this manual one junked and had made it work, though there were some keys that stuck. To this day he always banged the C on his keyboards out of force of habit.

“What we need, yes? A map of where we are going.” Radek said.

Ronon grinned. “Exactly what we need.” He handed the laptop back. “But first we need a way off this island. There’s a fishing village down at the end not too far away. We steal a boat, head for the mainland. Sound good?”

“Sounds excellent,” Radek said, and grinned back. Ronon was, on the whole, less trouble to work with than Rodney. “But I believe overpowering the fishermen is your part.”

In the end it was more a matter of stealing than overpowering. The fishing boats were pulled up on the beach, single masted, sails furled, and there was no guard. Who would steal them, if there was no one on the island except the fishermen and their families? About the half circle of white beach, a few houses stood above the high tide line, while more clustered back in the shade of the trees. There were no lights and no one stirred.

“Good. There are no dogs,” Radek whispered, then wondered if there were dogs in the Pegasus Galaxy at all. No one had mentioned them, but it seemed that wherever people went their dogs went too, and the domestication of the dog far predated the Ancients’ last contacts between Earth and the Pegasus Galaxy.

Ronon glanced at him sideways. “No guards either. Follow me.”

They slipped across the sand, feeling extremely vulnerable silhouetted against the white sand. Ronon put his shoulder to the prow of one of the smallest boats, shoving. It slid backwards, splashing as the surf came up around it.

“Get in!” Ronon hissed.

Radek didn’t have to be told twice. Knee deep in water, he scrambled aboard, managing to fall on his nose in the bottom in the process. Several inches of water slimy with old bits of fish sloshed around, distinctly unappetizing. A pair of oars lay in the bottom, and he managed to hoist one of them up — surprisingly heavy, he thought — nearly hitting Ronon in the head as he stuck his head over the side.

“Sorry,” Radek whispered.

Ronon said nothing, only shoved. The fishing boat moved backwards into the water, scraping against the sandy bottom with a sound that seemed awfully loud to Radek. Of course it probably wasn’t, with both wind and waves for company, but to him it was as loud as an alarm.

On the beach nothing stirred.

Ronon shoved again, and the boat rocked as it came free, Ronon chest deep in the swelling rollers. One broke over him, and he threw his head back, shaking water from his long hair with an expression that spoke more of exhilaration than fear.

It must be nice, Radek thought. He, on the other hand, was once again reminded why he hated to go offworld. Something always went wrong. Sometimes it was a big thing, sometimes it was a small thing. Sometimes one was bitten by ants. Other times one was lost on a strange planet with only Ronon Dex for company. But something always went wrong.

Ronon hauled himself aboard dripping. “That’s good,” he whispered.

The boat rocked freely on the incoming waves, bobbing up and down easily.

“We row?” Radek asked, proffering the oar.

Ronon looked at it dubiously, then at the furled sail on the mast.

The current was strong, already pulling them further out and down the beach, away from the village and possible pursuit. No doubt for a swimmer it would be dangerous, Radek thought. But fortunately they had a sturdy little boat. So it would help put distance between them and the boat’s owner.

“I think we need to go that way,” Radek said, pointing ninety degrees off the faint flush of dawn in the east. “Southward toward the mainland. There are many other islands, but eventually we will need to go south and west.”

“Sounds good,” Ronon said, leaning back against the mast and emptying water out of his boots. Instead of putting them back on he remained barefoot on the planks. “We should do that.”

Radek looked at him and at the mast, furled sail waiting. “So you’ll be sailing?”

Ronon frowned, and Radek thought for the first time he saw actual worry in the man’s eyes. “I thought you knew how to sail.”