“This is a bad day,” Chakkell said in a halting voice. “The King is dead.”

Not yet, Toller thought. He still has quite a few hours to go. Aloud he said, “You saw what happened. We’re lucky to be here. I had no choice.”

“Leddravohr won’t see it like that.”

“No,” Toller said pensively. “Leddravohr won’t see it like that.” That night, while Toller was vainly trying to sleep, Gesalla came to his side, and in the loneliness of the hour it seemed perfectly natural for him to put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder and brought her mouth close to his ear.

“Toller,” she whispered, “what are you thinking about?”

He considered lying to her, then decided he had had enough of barriers. “I’m thinking about Leddravohr. It all has to be settled between us.”

“Perhaps he will have thought the thing through by the time we reach Overland and will be of a different mind. I mean, it wasn’t even as if sacrificing us would have saved the King. Leddravohr is bound to admit that you had no choice.”

“I may have felt I had no choice, but Leddravohr will say I acted too quickly in rolling us out from under his father’s ship. Perhaps I would say the same thing if the positions were reversed. If I had waited a little longer Kedalse or somebody else might have got their burner going.”

“You mustn’t think that way,” Gesalla said softly. “You did what had to be done.”

“And Leddravohr is going to do what has to be done.”

“You can overcome him, can’t you?”

“Perhaps — but I fear that he will have already given orders for me to be executed,” Toller said. “I can’t fight a regiment.”

“I see.” Gesalla raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him, and in the dimness her face was impossibly beautiful. “Do you love me, Toller?”

He felt he had reached the end of a lifelong journey. “Yes.”

“I’m glad.” She sat up straighter and began to remove her clothing. “Because I want a child from you.”

He caught her wrist, smiling numbly in his disbelief. “What do you think you’re doing? Chakkell is on the burner just on the other side of this partition.”

“He can’t see us.”

“But this isn’t the way to.…”

“I don’t care about any of that,” Gesalla said, pressing her breast against the hand that was holding her wrist. “I have chosen you to father my child, and there may be very little time for us.”

“It won’t work, you know.” Toller relaxed back on the quilts. “It’s physically impossible for me to make love in these conditions.”

“That’s what you think,” Gesalla said as she moved astride of him and brought her mouth down on his, moulding his cheeks with both her hands to coax him into an ardent response.

Overland’s equatorial continent, seen from a height of two miles, looked essentially prehistoric.

Toller had been staring down at the outward-seeping landscape for some time before realising why that particular adjective kept coming to mind. It was not the total absence of cities and roads — first proof that the continent was uninhabited — but the uniform coloration of the grasslands.

Throughout his life every aerial view he had seen had been modified in some way by the six-harvest system which was universal on Land. The edible grasses and all other cultivated vegetation had been arranged in parallel strips in which the colours ranged from brown through several shades of green to harvest yellow, but here the plains were simply…green.

The sunlit expanses of the single colour shimmered in his eyes.

Our farmers will have to start the seed-sorting all over again, he thought. And the mountains and seas and rivers all have to be given names. It really is a new beginning on a new world. And I don’t think I’m going to be part of it…

Reminded of his personal problems, he turned his attention to the artificial elements of the scene. The two other ships of the royal flight were slightly below him. Pouche’s was the more distant, most of its passengers visible at the rail as they journeyed ahead in their imaginations to the unknown world.

Ilven Zavotle was the only person to be seen on Leddravohr’s ship, sitting tiredly at the controls. Leddravohr himself must have been lying down in a passenger compartment, as he had done — except during the traumatic episode two days before — throughout the voyage. Toller had noted the prince’s behaviour earlier and wondered if he could be phobic about the boundless emptiness surrounding the migration fleet. If that were the case, it would have been better for Toller if their inevitable duel could have been fought aboard one of the goridolas.

In the two miles of airspace below him he could see twelve other balloons forming an irregular line which increasingly flared off to the west, evidence of a moderate breeze in the lowest levels of the atmosphere. The general area into which they were drifting was sprinkled with the elongated shapes of collapsed balloons, which would later be used to build a temporary township of tents. As he had expected, Toller’s binoculars showed that most of the grounded ships had military markings. Even in the turmoil of the escape from Ro-Atabri, Leddravohr had had the foresight to provide himself with a power base which would be effective from the instant he set foot on Overland.

Analysing the situation, Toller could see no prospect at all of his living for more than a matter of minutes if he put his ship down close to Leddravohr’s. Even if he were to defeat Leddravohr in single combat, he would — as the man charged with the death of the King — be taken by the army. His single and desperately slim chance of survival, for a term to be measured in days at most, lay in hanging back during the touchdown and going aloft again as soon as Leddravohr’s ship was committed to a landing. There were forested hills perhaps twenty miles west of the landing site, and if he could reach them with his balloon he might be able to avoid capture until the forces of the infant nations were properly organised in the cause of his destruction.

The weakest point of the plan was that it hinged on factors outside his own control, all of them concerned with the mind and character of Leddravohr’s pilot.

He had no doubt at all that Zavotle would make the correct deductions when he saw Toller’s ship being tardy during the landing, but would he be sympathetic with Toller’s aims? And even if he were inclined to be loyal to a fellow skyman, would he take the personal risk of doing what Toller expected of him? He would have to be quick to pull the rip panel and collapse his balloon — just as it was becoming apparent to Leddravohr that his enemy was slipping out of his grasp — and there was no predicting how the prince might react in his anger. He had struck other men down for lesser offences. Toller stared across the field of brightness at the solitary figure of Zavotle, knowing that his gaze was being returned, then he put his back against the gondola wall and eyed Chakkell, who was operating the burner at the one-and-twenty rhythm of the descent.

“Prince, there is a breeze at ground level and I fear the ship may be dragged,” he said, making his opening move. “You and the princess and your children should be ready to go over the side even before we touch the ground. It might sound dangerous, but there’s a good ledge all around the gondola for standing on, and our ground speed will be little more than a walking pace. Jumping off before touchdown is preferable to being in the gondola if it overturns.”

“I’m touched by your solicitude,” Chakkell said, giving Toller a tilt-headed look of surmise.

Wondering if he had blundered so early, Toller approached the pilot’s station. “We’ll be landing very soon, Prince. You must be prepared.”

Chakkell nodded, vacated the seat and, unexpectedly, said, “I still remember the first time I saw you, in the company of Glo. I never thought it would come to this.”