The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  Atraharsis stared in astonishment. I gestured in the direction of the Igigi hordes. Then I turned my back on them and, waving my arms in a whimsical fashion, cried, "Uloolaloolaloo!" in as close as I could manage to the demons' nonsense-speech.

  Those standing nearby laughed.

  I pretended I held a long-knife and spun around. I jabbed. "Swssh!" I became an Igigi again, clutched my stomach, and made "Glugluglug" noises to indicate blood flowing out. Finally, I became myself and, face furious with hatred, hacked and slashed at my imagined foe. "Swssh! Swssh! Swssh!"

  Then I pointed to the bundle of long-knives in Atraharsis's arms. "Swssh." I held out my hand.

  Atraharsis's face darkened.

  He aimed a kick at me.

  I danced back and nearly fell into the campfire. He advanced upon me, speaking angrily. Out of all he said, I caught only the words "traitor" and "Igigi." But it enraged those listening and they rained blows upon me.

  All in a panic, I broke free of the throng and tried to escape their wrath. Jeers and clods of mud flew after me. The children pursued me with sticks.

  I was harried across the camp all the way to the outermost palisade. There I slipped through the half-rebuilt gap in the wall created when the feathered serpent had smashed into it. I ran up the new lakefront until it opened out into marshland again, and there I lost my pursuers. For a time I wandered, lost and miserable, among the reeds and island copses, with nowhere to go and no place I could stay. Then a pack of seven-tailed wolves that glowed a gentle blue in the moonlight surrounded me and took me captive.

  I became a prisoner of the Igigi.

  Now began for me the darkest part of that dark era. Every day I was driven along with the other captives to the lakeside across from the First Haven fortifications. The first time, we were lashed with whips that stung like scorpions while we tried desperately to intuit what we were meant to do. Finally, randomly, one of our number began scooping up mud with his hands and the whips moved away from him. We others joined him with hands and flat stones and scraps of wood and soon it became apparent that we were digging a trench to drain the lake.

  How often I looked up from my work to stare longingly across that lake! The Igigi continued to attack the People by ones and threes. Sometimes they returned with captives, but more commonly they were slain. Yet they seemed not to learn from this, for they neither lessened nor increased their attacks, nor did they alter their tactics.

  Nighttimes, we were herded into a walled enclosure (we had built it ourselves, of course) where we were fed from a trough and slept huddled together like animals. If I'd thought I was an ox before, I was doubly so now, for my fellows were no longer recognizable as People. They had given up all hope of rescue, and when I tried to re-create my crude system of snorts and signs with them, they did not respond. They crapped and coupled in the open as the urge took them and pissed right where they stood. Their eyes, when they looked upon me at all, were dull and lifeless.

  They had despaired.

  Almost, I despaired as well. But the Igigi had taken Silili from me and that meant that she was out there, somewhere, in their vast encampment. So my thoughts were foremost and forever upon her and even when I was most exhausted I never ceased from looking for her. Hopeless though my cause might be, it maintained me when nothing else could.

  Then, one evening, Irra came to the slave pens. He was dressed in spotless white blouse and trousers. There was a coiled leather strap in his hand and a knowing smile on his face.

  Reflexively, I tried to cry out his name—but of course that had disappeared from my mind long ago—and managed only a kind of barking sound.

  Unhurriedly, Irra tied the strap about my neck. Then, holding one end in a negligent hand, he turned and walked away.

  Perforce, I followed.

  We walked not toward the dam but through the Igigi encampment. What a foulness they had made of the clean, stream-fed lands! The trees were uprooted and the marsh grasses burnt to stubble and ashes. Craters had been blasted in the earth. The ground was trampled into mud. This did not bother Irra, for he walked a hand's-breadth above it, but there were places where I sank to the knees in cold muck and was half-choked by his impatient tugging on the leash before I could struggle free. Dimly, then, I began to realize that Urdumheim was not a place but a condition . . . and that, struggle though I might, I was helplessly mired within it.

  Eventually we came to a halt in a place that was neither better nor worse than any other in that horrid and despoiled landscape. Here, Irra pulled a small but obviously sharp knife from his pocket. He held up his little finger before my face and made a long and angry speech, not a word of which I understood.

  Then he cut off the tip of his finger.

  Blood spurted.

  Irra thrust the finger-stub at me, and I backed away uncomprehendingly. With a noise of disgust, he pried open my mouth and shoved the gobbet of flesh in. I gagged, but he forced me to swallow.

  "Can you understand me now?" he asked.

  I could!

  "This will only work between the two of us," Irra said sternly. "Do not think you can return to the People now, for you cannot. To them, you will remain as dumb as a stone and their speech shall be to you as the twittering of birds."

  "I understand." I almost didn't care, so great was my relief to be able to speak again. I felt as if a part of my mind had been restored to me. I could think clearly for the first time since my capture.

  "Then follow me."

  Deep in the Igigi encampment, we came upon a tremendous fish. It was larger by far than any whale. A silvery film covered the vast, listless eye that stared blindly at the sky from its rotting side. Flies swarmed all about it and the smell was so terrible I almost vomited. Irra had to half-choke me to keep me going. The stench grew worse the closer we got, until we reached the pink gill slit and so passed within.

  The interior was opulent beyond imagining. Polished stone floors supported pillars of agate and turquoise and jade, which rose to a vaulted ceiling so high that shadows nested in it. Flambeaux lined the fishbone-ribbed walls and wavering lines of white candles floated high in the air above. Beneath them clay-fleshed homunculi stumped and winged eyeballs flew and giant snails slid, all passing to and fro without any visible purpose amid splendors that dwarfed everything the People had. Such was the power of the Igigi. Yet they had forced their captives to slave in the mud to build what they could have made with a thought!

  To the far end of the great room, a sweep of serpentine steps rose to a dais atop which were what at first appeared to be two mounds of garbage, but on approach revealed themselves as crudely built thrones.

  We stopped at the foot of the dais, and the figures seated upon the thrones arose.

  "Kneel!" Irra whispered urgently. He did not name the two, but by the awe and disgust I felt within me, I knew them for who they were.

  The King and Queen of the Igigi advanced to the top of the steps and stared down on us.

  The Queen's face was perfection itself, as sweet and beautiful as the dawn of the very first day. She wore a billowing robe of soft scarlet feathers which opened here and there to reveal a body that would have been as ravishing as her face were it not for her breasts, which reached down to the ground and dragged on the floor behind her.

  The King was entirely naked, but his legs were jointed wrong, forcing him to walk backwards, buttocks-first. He had no head, but when he came to a stop and turned, I saw that his features were on his chest and abdomen, so that when he opened his mouth to speak, his stomach gaped wide and his penis waggled on his chin like a goatee.

  The hall hushed in anticipation of his words.

  "Brekekekek koax koax!" he cried. "Tarball honeycrat kadaa muil. Thrippsy pillivinx. Jolifanto bambla o falli bambla. Aeroflux electroluxe. Flosky! Beebul trimble flosky! Grossiga m'pfa habla horem. Archer Daniel Midlands codfeather squinks. Spectrophotometer. AK-47. Rauserauserauserause. Zero commercials next!"

  The Queen threw back her
head and laughed like a hyena.

  "They demand to know," Irra said, "what new thing this is that the First have done. We send out our best warriors and they do not return. Why?"

  I said nothing.

  "Why?" Irra repeated angrily. But still I did not respond.

  The Queen looked at the King and yipped sharply twice.

  "I don't think we need to be subliminable," the King said. "I think we agree, the past is over. I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order—order out of chaos. But we will. I understand reality. If you're asking me . . . would I understand reality, I do. There will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences. Our enemies never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. I understand small business growth. I was one. They misunderestimated me. My answer is bring 'em on."

  "He says that if you do not speak voluntarily, you will be made to speak."

  I crossed my arms.

  The King shrugged. Almost casually, he said, "Pain."

  "Paain," the Queen repeated. "Paaaaaiiiinnnn," she moaned. She made it sound as if it were a good and desirable thing. Then she nodded in my direction.

  Pain fell on me.

  How to describe what I felt then? Perhaps once, when you were chopping wood, your axe took an unlucky bounce off a knot and the blade sank itself in your leg, so that you fell down screaming and all the world disappeared save your agony alone. Maybe your clothes caught fire and when your friends slapped out the flames, the burning went on and on because your flesh was blackened and blistered. You could not reason then. You howled. You could not think of anything except the pain. That was how it was for me. I folded into myself, weeping.

  "Kraw," said the King. "Craaaaaawwwawaw. Craw-aw-wul. Crawl."

  Irra looked at me. "Crawl!" he said.

  And, pity help me, I did. I crawled, I groveled, I wailed, I pleaded, and when at last my tormentors granted me permission to speak, I told them everything I knew. "It is called death," I said. "Humbaba invented it." And I explained its nature as best I could, including the fact that the People were subject to it as well as the Igigi. It would have been better, far better, had I said nothing. But the pain unmanned me, and I babbled on and on until Irra finally said, "Enough."

  Thus it was that I became a traitor.

  The next day the war began in earnest. Where before the Igigi had attacked in ones and threes, now they came in phalanxes. Where before they had taken captives, now they sought only to kill. Such were the fruits of my treachery.

  The People fought like heroes, every one. They were heroes—the first and the best that ever were. They fought as no one had ever fought before or ever will again. Glory shone about their brows. Lightnings shot out of their eyes.

  They lost.

  Do I need to tell you about the fighting? It was as ugly and confusing then as it is today. There were shouts of anger and screams of pain. Blood gushed. Bodies fell. I saw it all from across the lake where—pointlessly, needlessly—we animals labored to widen the drainage canal. This despite the fact that the lake was half-empty already and its mud flats no hindrance to the attacking Igigi at all. But if we stopped we were whipped, and so we toiled on.

  The palisades fell. Then the inner walls behind them.

  The People retreated up the mountain. Halfway to the summit they had built a final redoubt and this they held against all the Igigi could throw against them. The sides of Ararat were steep and the way up it narrow, and thus the demons could only attack in small numbers. Always, Nimrod stalked the heights, his great bow in hand, so that they dared not approach by air.

  At night, as I was herded back to the slave pens, I could see the lower slopes of Ararat ablaze with fires too numerous to count. These were not campfires such as armies build against the cold and to cook their food, for the Igigi needed neither warmth nor sustenance. They were built for no good reason at all, as acts of vandalism. The closer ones flickered as the bodies of the Igigi passed before them, for their numbers were legion.

  One evening as the gates to the slave compound slammed shut behind me and I sank to the ground, too tired to struggle through the other animals and fight for food at the trough, it struck me that I was going to die soon and that under the circumstances this might well be no bad thing. As I was thinking these dark thoughts, the gates opened again and in rode Irra on a beast that stumbled and struggled to bear up under his weight. He leapt down from his mount and the beast straightened. It was a woman! She was naked as a child, but leather straps had been lashed about her so that her arms were bound tight to her sides. A saddle was strapped to her back, and there was a bit in her mouth.

  For a second I thought it was Silili and my heart leapt up with anger and joy. I rose to my feet. Then I recognized her and my heart fell again.

  "Mylitta," I said sadly. "You were captured too."

  "She cannot understand you," Irra said. "Have you forgotten?"

  I had. Now, however, I moved one foot like an ox pawing the ground: Hello.

  Mylitta did not respond. Her eyes were dull and lifeless, and so I knew that she had, like so many other captives, given up all hope and sunk down into a less-than-animal state. Either she had been captured in an Igigi raid or—more likely, it seemed to me—she had slipped away to look for her lover. And, finding him, been treated thus.

  I do not think I have ever hated another human being as in that instant I hated Irra.

  "Stop staring at the beast!" Irra commanded. "Nimrod broods upon the mountaintop. Our King and Queen believe he contemplates some sorcery so mighty that even he fears its consequences. They feel his growing resolve upon the night winds. So he must be stopped. It is their command that you kill him."

  "Me?" I struggled against the urge to sink back to the ground. "I can barely stand. I'd laugh if I had the strength for it."

  "You shall have all the strength you need." Irra drew a peeled willow wand from his tunic and with it struck me between the shoulder blades. I grunted and bent over double as enormous wings of bone and leather erupted from my back. When I straightened, I saw that Irra had given himself bat-wings as well.

  "Follow!" he cried, and leapt into the air.

  Involuntarily, I surged after him. Below me, poor Mylitta dwindled into an unmoving speck and was lost among the other captive slaves. That was the last that ever I saw her.

  We flew.

  Under other circumstances, it would have been a glorious experience. Flying was easier than swimming. My muscles worked surely and strongly, and the wind felt silky-smooth under my wings. But the lands we flew over were ugly and defiled. Pits and trenches had been gouged into it for no purpose whatsoever. A constellation of trash-fires that had once been our crofts smoldered under us. The very clouds overhead were lit a sullen orange by them.

  "Look upon your work," I said bitterly.

  Irra swooped downward, drawing me involuntarily after him, so that we skimmed low over the mud-flats of the half-drained lake. They were littered with corpses. "Behold yours," he said. "And tell me—whose creation is the more monstrous?"

  To this I had no response.

  We flew in a wide circle around Ararat, in order to approach the redoubt from its less defended side. For hours we flew. From my lofty vantage I could see the multitudes of invaders infesting and defiling the land below. Their numbers took my breath away. It is scant exaggeration to declare that there was a nation of monsters for each one of the People. I did not see how we could possibly prevail. But at last, in the long gray hour of false dawn, we alit in the steep and disputed mountainside between the People's final fortress and the Igigi encampments. There, at a touch of Irra's wand, my wings folded themselves back into my body. Without dismissing his own wings, he proceeded to take a long and leisurely leak against a nearby boulder.

  Finally, I spoke. "Mylitta
loved you! How could you treat her so?"

  Irra smiled over his shoulder. "You want reasons. But there are none. Even this stone is wiser than you are." He turned, still pissing. I had to jump backwards, almost spraining an ankle, to avoid being sprayed. "You see? The stone knows that the world is what it is, and so it endures what it must. You hope for better, and so you suffer."

  Done, he tucked himself in and said, "Wait here." Then he threw himself into the air again, soaring higher and higher until he was no larger than a flea. Up he went and down he came. Yet as he drew closer he dwindled in size, so that he grew no larger to the eye. When he reached his starting place, he was as small as a midge. Three times he buzzed around my head.

  Then he flew into my ear.

  With a dreadful itching sensation that made me claw desperately at my head, Irra burrowed deep into my brain. Coming at last to rest, he said, "Climb upward. When you reach the redoubt, its defenders will recognize you and let you in. If your actions displease me, I will treat you thus."

  I screamed as every bone in my body shattered and blood exploded from all my orifices.

  Then, as quickly as it had come, the pain was gone. I was still standing, and unhurt. Everything but the pain had been an illusion. "That was but a warning," Irra said. "If you disobey or displease me in the least way, I will visit such torments upon you that you will remember the Igigi Queen's ministrations with fond nostalgia. Do you understand?"

  Abjectly, I nodded my head.

  "Then go!"

  Like a mouse, I crept up the mountain's flank, using its trees and bushes for cover when I could and furtively clinging to the bare rock when I could not. Once, I caught a glimpse of Nimrod's gigantic figure as he stood at the topmost peak, back to me, contemplating the war below. His power was a palpable thing, and in that instant I felt sure that Irra's cause was hopeless for his merest glance, were it to fall upon me, would have burnt me to ashes. Simultaneously, I experienced an involuntary lifting of my spirits, for the upper slopes of Ararat were untouched by the Igigi and the scent of the pines was clean and invigorating. I began to hope and, hoping, began to scheme.