The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  Through this lush, liquid commotion, I heard outside a far, muted clatter of hooves on old flooring, with a crisp punctuation of whip-cracks . . . and a strange, faint, fierce hilarity as well? Pompilla at work, of course, though I felt an odd shiver, as if that clamor in the barn were touching me in some subtle way. But I shook off the fancy at once. Pompilla's vigorous nonsense was a waste of my attention, far better directed at the luscious sight of the three fair Bozzms' bodices swelling and straining with the tidal heaves and surges of their breasts in counter-tempo to their churning.

  The nog was complete, and crocked to cool and set. "The costards next!" was then the cry, said costards constituting the pie's silken foundation. Shortly the cellar seethed with new doings. In a great ceramic bowl on the charcoal warmer, honey and cream must be scantled, while prooms were simmered and sweeted with the lavender squeezings of the giant sugar-sloth beetle, dozens of whose deflated husks soon littered the floor. The sisters, sharing their grips on their implements with my crew, sang jolly pastie-chanties:

  This dainty sweet in mouth once put

  Shall make thy tongue as stiffly jut

  As spunk-bone doth on ram in rut!

  —and other droll indecencies. How warm and flushed and rollicking we had all become!

  Once more a faint burst of hooves and whips somehow reached me amid our jollity, and, along with that muffled noise of stampede, a sound of wild cachinnation. And that strange sense of being touched by the doings in the barn returned—touched in the nostrils, it seemed, with a scent of ancient straw, and humid gleets in estrus. Irritated at the interruption, I resumed our delights more ardently, shucking off my tunic, retaining only my light linen shift. The sisters squealed delight and shucked off their own billowy dresses and shirtwaists, so their thin shifts manifested the splendor of globed haunch and bosom.

  Were we still confecting? I have a fragment of memory of costard being poured . . . to cool? To cook? But all thereafter was amorous embracing. Shinn and Bantril, bare as weasels, feasted on Dulcetty, each claiming his own hemisphere, while Dulcetty sang:

  Oh Dear! Oh me!

  Oh Shanky! Oh Banty!

  Sleeky sat astraddle of Olombo, who lowed like a contented momile while Sleeky sang:

  Upsy-wupsy, Oooohsie-eeasie!

  Downsy-wownsy, Slowwww-sie-whoaaaa-sie!

  Whilst above me hung doting dame Bozzm, luminously nude and lovely as the full moon, and we set to feasting on each other with such gusto as annihilated us utterly more than once, yet left us miraculously reconstituted each time after. . . .

  |

  LAGADEME IV

  Pompilla, self-released from her ramshackle prison, woke us before dawn. We left the Bozzm belles snoring softly and followed Pompilla out of the cellar. Thence she led us out to the road, driving before her a shadowy flock that looked at least two-score strong. We lagged some distance behind her for the first few miles, shamelessly indolent, rejoicing in how well we had turned this bizarre detour to good account in erotic benefit. And indeed, even when, not long after, we learned how brazenly we had been deceived and practiced on, we prized our amorous adventure all the more as priceless salvage saved from the shipwreck of our dignity.

  Meanwhile, the growing light confirmed that our widow's harvest was substantial: at least twoscore ewes indeed, all dramatically swollen with kid. That they should—bulged as they were—trot so unflaggingly before her, not one of the beasts falling behind, was a minor marvel in itself. "She can leech!" Olombo muttered, and I had to grant it, though we couldn't understand how we had so drastically undercounted the number of pregnant ewes, especially ones as close to yeaning as these.

  We recrossed the Ebonflux before the sun had topped the trees, and the Rattlespate before noontide. Her endurance at a jog-trot could no longer surprise us, and now it seemed we must grant a new respect to her competence in general. This is not to say that our re-entry of Big Quay along the North Highway, led by bulbous gleets a-bouncing and our dwarfish dame a-billowing, did not cause us the most acute embarrassment. She drove the beasts implacably through the civic core's thickest traffic, with neither hesitation nor collision, though frequently so near collision that our embarrassment often yielded to alarm.

  Only now, our errand ending, did it sink home to me that she had trotted near twenty leagues to take ten leagues off our delivery's overland route. If this was a worthwhile trade, what must be the mission's peril? Most puzzling, why hadn't this struck me sooner? On our reaching Bozzm's dairy at least, when the detour's length was plain?

  And what of our dalliance with the Bozzm belles? Though it was lovely in itself, it was so unlike me and my crew to plunge in without qualm or self query about the ethics of such a self indulgence, when we had only that day been commissioned and paid. Where had my thoughts been?

  But here once more was CLUMMOCKS GARDED DOCKING AND BOTTUMS OURLY AND WEEKLY RAITS. Amusingly, Clummock had resumed his seat on the coffin, and by droll chance was so postured and positioned as to seem he hadn't stirred a hair since we left him there yesternoon—the coincidence so exact that Olombo and I burst out laughing.

  Pompilla bade us rest outside the gate, and with a shooing gesture sent the strangely obedient flock swirling down the dock before her. As the beasts came to a milling, bleating halt near him, Clummock started exactly as if he were just waking from a twenty-four hour trance, and lumbered to his feet. His bigness bent to the Dame's littleness; he seemed impressed, intent. His brows raised, and he seemed to doubt his ears. Then he nodded and retired into his office, a raft-buoyed shed. We saw him emerge with large key, undoubtedly for the padlock that chained the sternpaddle raft to the dock. Just then a jingle of harness made us turn.

  A fashionable little chariot pulled up, drawn by a skinny caparisoned in excessively musical silver bangles, like an overbedizened dowager burdened with bracelets. And though she was bare of bracelets, the lean, elegant dame who stepped out was luridly decorated, with silvered fierce-maned coif, eyes coronaed with kohl in sharp flametongues, and languid gestures that displayed rich rings. This stylish serpent's advent brought Pompilla's veils sharply round, then she turned back to Clummock and they spoke more urgently. The lean dame approached, smiling a tight snaky smile.

  "Dear Nuncio! I am Madam Eelritter. Your, ah, Widow Pompilla is my pupil, in pursuit of an advanced degree at our Schollegium Academinary. I am afraid I must snatch her from you. She is to perform her Exordium before the Senior Somnolasts. Fortunately, I believe, she has your commission quite poised for undertaking, and you are even now at the point of taking your leave, so I am confident that I do not intrude."

  I glanced down the dock, where Pompilla and Clummock still communed closely. "As it happens, Madame Eelritter, we cannot embark until we have engaged a second spearman. One of ours was injured while we were crossing the Great Shallows."

  "Well! How fortunate you spoke! Down-quay, at the southern stretch of balustrade fronting the Maritime Museum, the Hire Market is held at mid-morning. Mercenaries abound there, due to the war in the Shamnaean Bogs, where the Demonarch Gehenna-Gaad, claiming title to the island's north peninsula, wages war against the Shamnaean Sisterhood. You would do well to seek a spearman there."

  "We are grateful, Madam," I said, which we were. "I must of course have our Commissioner's formal dismissal, and I suppose such charts or itinerary as she intends to provide. . . ."

  Madame Eelritter had been darting ever fiercer glances at Pompilla's busy disattention. "Will you excuse me?" she asked—her voice scarcely concealing a sharp impatience. "I see I must prod my pupil . . ." Down the dock she strode, an impressive reptilian muscularity evident in her limbs.

  I will not say that the two dames, when confronted, exploded in screechings, but such a muted storm of hissings and furious posturings ensued that huge Clummock staggered aback from it. Eelritter had the command, though, it seemed, and it was she who hissed the last hisses. The only words I distinguished were, "she whom you know," but the upshot was that
here at last came our widow rippling petulantly back down the dock. She confronted me, and thrust out a scrolled parchment. "Your map gives your route in red ink. You are particularly enjoined to consult this chart anew at each branching or juncture, however sure you feel of your memory. Consult the map anew at every branching or turning of the way. Understood? Good. Lash yon casket on your 'shaw and lash the latter to the sternpaddler. Get ye upriver to hire your spearman, leaving the raft moored and well guarded the meanwhile, and then cast off and head for mid current and set a paddling upriver at once. Carder's Weir is ten leagues, the fourth hamlet you'll encounter along the north bank.

  "And, ah, one further caution: Stay clear of Clummock and his flock, and if he should chance for some reason to hail you and confront you, evade him and have no further doing with him. Your craft's hire is paid and overpaid!"

  The pair of testy dames lowered themselves into the chariot, Dame Eelritter made the little lash flicker, and the skinny flew spangling and jangling away, almost loud enough to conceal the furious hissing altercation the two of them at once resumed.

  Now we were finally shut of the impossible widow, I suddenly felt she was too abruptly gone. Unscrolling her chart I found it exquisitely calligraphed and lavishly detailed, with cuneiform hill symbols and bristly forest symbols, and silver and blue veining in the larger rivers reporting deeps and shallows. The red ink thread that strung our route through this symbolic terrain terminated, at the map's opposite edge, at an octagonal ikon lettered small, but with passionate clarity: FANE ENDOZ THION.

  I secured the chart in my belt. All was in hand except myself—my clear mind and collected will were absent. I felt I was but dazedly half-emerged from a long stupor, as if some stultifying influence had just been lifted from me, and I noted a vague air in my crew as well. Still we got our 'shaw from Clummock's office where we had sheltered it, got it on the raft and loaded the coffin onto the balance-board between its two tall wheels. It poised there quite perfectly, and was surprisingly light in the lifting, though sized for a man of heroic stature. When the laden 'shaw was secured to the raft, Olombo and Shinn worked the two-handled crank of the paddle, and backwheeled us out to open water.

  Clummock had not been idle meanwhile—had got his yeaning ewes inside the rope-and-rail pen of a stock-raft and with a hired boy was himself getting ready to cast off. As we glided past him, he cried out to me, with an hysteric note odd for his massive stolidity, "They're watching me! See em? Their eyes are telling me things without words!"

  He seemed, nonsensically, to be pointing at his gleets. And then I saw it, just as we glided past: some of the gleets, grouped near their pen's rim, were indeed eyeing the bottoms man in a very pointed, fixed, ungleetlike way.

  I and my crew grimly ground on upstream. Just below the Maritime Museum's pinnacled facade, we put in at a complex of small-craft docks, where ship's chandlers and other marine provisioners' shops were clustered. We moored. I left my pullers with the 'shaw, and Olombo and I started up the stone stairs to the Quay.

  Even as we climbed, here came Clummock's raft. He docked a fair ways off from us, however, at a butcher-and-salter's establishment that made pickle and jerky for the larders of long-haul mariners. It seemed the bottoms man was wasting no time converting his new flock to coin.

  |

  NIFFT III

  When I rose at midmorning, I found myself inclined to embrace the enigmatic Eelritter's urging to hire out my spear. In a country where the gods can smell thieves, it seemed prudent to merge myself with some larger body for whatever camouflage that might afford.

  As I learned on enquiring at breakfast that the Hire Market would not yet be in full swing, I visited one of the 'Changes to see Hagia's renowned fiscal furor at first hand. Under the Change's vast-ribbed vault, a mob in well-tailored doublets seethed on the floor, and vied at screaming in unison and vigorously brandishing paddles of various colors, while, up in the great balcony above them, men with poles flicked incessantly at colored counters (corresponding to the paddles' colors) that were strung beadlike on the wires of a complex framework, the whole frame obviously a tallying apparatus.

  The energy and ingenuity of it all soon grew tiresome, and I went to visit a public bath, wishing to test a notion I'd had about why I'd found the Fob and Weskitt's baths subtly unpleasant. There were robing and gaming rooms at the street level, but the actual baths were, again, below. I strolled about till I had found the furnace room, where the cisterns and pumps were also located. And here it was—that chill of unease filled the chamber, and I soon learned why. The water main feeding the cisterns came in from a sizeable natural vent in the living rock, and the attendant there explained that all the city's water pipes thus ingeniously took advantage of a natural system of caverns in the bedrock. I thanked him and left, musing on the Fane's altar pit, and on the A'Rak's and his spawns' hidden channels wormholing the great city's foundations.

  From a quayside storage compound I reclaimed the arms I had stored on debarking yestermorning. I'd brought a quiver of five javelances, hangared to ride aslant the small of my back, and a brace of spears, tundra shortspears of my own modification. They were just my own height from shaft-butt to the tip of the leaf-shaped head, and I'd had the shafts lathed a shade thicker than tundra mode, though from the same Carnalin whipwood. I'd banded the shafts with iron here and there for added weight and balance, and made the shafts with threaded joins midlength so I could carry them halved in slim, manageable sheathes. One of these I quivered with my javelances. The other I assembled, for I supposed it was time to advertise what I was carrying to market.

  The Hire Market was held where a balustraded terrace fronting the Maritime Museum created a considerable widening of the Quay. Seekers of employment congregated about this terrace, and a wooden platform was wheeled out, from which warehousers, shipmasters, teamster bosses, and other such contractors could announce their needs and the wages they offered. The work-seekers, many deployed along the balustrade's curve, formed a lounging, sociable sort of assemblage some fifteen or twenty-score strong, and they were, as I soon discerned, loosely sectioned into professional camps. Weaponry was concentrated by the upstream end of balustrade's arc, and thither I made my way.

  This zone was a bit out of voice range from the contractors calling their needs from the platform, but I soon noted recruiters moving among the men-at-arms themselves—here a pair of strategoi, there a centurion of the Lulumaen mercenaries, yonder a draughtmaster wearing the plume of an Ingens dragoon, tapping his wax tablet with his stylus as he chatted with some net-and-knout men. Such discretion was better suited to matters military, I judged, where opponents may learn soon enough as it is what one is mustering.

  Employment abounded, and, easing into the crowd, I met none of the abrasive jockeying common where scarce work draws surplus seekers, and one must go careful of a fight. Here, I found smiles and a bit of gossip easily come by. The Shamnaean Bog Wars loomed large here, and seemed to have drawn hither the great majority of these hopeful pikes, bows, nets and axes, and swords of every forge and fashion. A crossbowman told me that Gehenna-Gaad's artillery was breaking vents and fissures in the subworld's vast, basaltic vaults, and that demon leakage was the main work for human soldiery. A siegeworks teamster with a huge plodwhip seconded this—a nasty mopping up war it was for human soldiers. The real armies, the Witches' force as well as Gehenna-Gaad's, were such troops as few men dared encounter.

  I leaned against the balustrade, and waited. After some time, I overheard the plod-skinner I had lately spoken with describing "titanoplods with squashers" to someone. I was idly picturing the house-sized brutes thus shod—an impressive sight to anyone who's seen it—when a murmur from the plod-skinner's questioner rang familiar. I discretely looked over, and there was Fursten Minim, Pandagon's colleague, talking to the 'skinner, and in a discreet voice which explained my not having noted him sooner. The oddity of a churchman doing this kind of shopping made his caution easy enough to understand, and I was
careful not to let him see me. I was yet to learn, of course, what had just passed between the Ecclesiarch and the deity, which might have given me grounds for speculation.

  I moved away, and resumed my watch. I was gazing idly down at the waterside, where there was a zone of small-craft dockage serving a cluster of marine outfitters—chandlers and picklers and bakers of ship's biscuit and the like—and I noted a tableau a bit out of the ordinary. There was a raft moored with a Nuncio's quickshaw anchored on it and a long dark something, looking more like a coffin than anything else, lashed on the 'shaw. There were two nuncials posted by the 'shaw, and these men seemed fascinated by another raft, laden with gleets, that was moored two docks away near a butchering-and-pickling establishment. Their attention directed my own to that concern's loading dock, where a large man gesticulated at the bloody-aproned butcher. After a bit, the butcher nodded grudgingly and retired within his shop. The big man looked uneasily at his restive flock, and just as he did so, something big and black exploded from the hindquarters of one of the gleets, and took to the sky with a mad flapping of batlike wings. The big man shuddered and turned his back on the flock, seeming less astonished by this rectal eruption than confirmed in a terror already tormenting him.

  But here was someone right at my side, saying, ". . . spearman?" I turned, begging the speaker's pardon.

  "I asked," said a lean, silver-maned woman with a Nuncio's little golden chevron dangling from her left earlobe, and accompanied by one of her men-at-arms, "if you are by chance a spearman? For hire, I mean?" She eyed me with an odd fixity, as if she knew something more about me than the two facts which my accoutrement and my location had made obvious enough. Perhaps it was just that she had such very direct grey eyes, sharp-judging eyes on all occasions, they looked to be.