The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  But the Reeves—each Bailiff was the nominal commander of four Reeves of the Fane—were salaried only for their work at the Choosing, and lived by any number of means through the year. They had in common with the Bailiffs a life-long exemption from being themselves called to "stand the draw" on Shortest Night, but were inclined to be less at ease with the exemption. Pandagon believed they felt some shame in that one night's work, when they must drag the weak-kneed, wailing Chosen through the God's Gate into the crags where he awaited them. In the days before a Choosing, the Reeves were likely to be out a-drinking, and it was to the missing Reeves' likeliest watering holes that Pandagon had already dispatched constables to retrieve them.

  But should he wait till they were brought in? He sensed he must not let the drama of the moment dissipate. He was now playing a tricky game, performing for two audiences, the invisible one the most perilously crucial to convince, but these front line men at arms also critical, for they must be braced to stand firm without knowing against what. Instinct told him to take the gold's cue. Galvanize these, and they would pull the stragglers into line. He shifted aside the short field cape he wore, displaying the pommel of his shortsword, a good working sword from his Academy days, but newly pommel-stoned with the god's carven onyx octagon.

  "Gentlemen!" He let it ring, startling many, whom the pit's nearness held on edge. "Comrades in arms! I rejoice to see you men of mettle! On this Choosing, we face a grave threat from the forces of disorder! We must be steeled to stand fast to our duty to Grandsire A'Rak, Father of Mines, Finder of Gold, by whom our nation prospers, and to whom we ourselves are the sworn retainers. Ten hundredweight of gold! It will fee a cohort of reserves, directly under my command, reinforcements for yourselves, to secure you against this menace, whose identity I dare not now divulge, lest I augment its strength against you. I urge you only to loyalty and readiness in our great deity's service! Lo there, where our stragglers come! Forward, tardy gentlemen!"

  Luck had blessed his instincts—here, perfectly timed, came a squadron of Constables ushering ahead of them the majority of the laggard Reeves. "Latecomers," he trumpeted, "come up and advance to the altar's brink! Announce your presence to the god, and assure him your lateness betokens no laxity, no delinquency from his service in this hour of emergency!"

  Baffled and anxious the derelicts cringed to the pit's brink, their wine-reddened eyes and dishevelled hair adding to their look of shame and penitence. Their mumbles and mutters echoed down into the pit: "Stimp present, great spidergod, your servant!" "Bawdwick here Sire! I serve!" "Forgive me, Sire, Sodkin, loyally yours!"

  Their discomfiture made the rest grateful to have forestalled such shame, and unified their puzzled resolve. Nothing could have increased their readiness for something completely unspecified—except what instantly followed those Reeves' apologies—spiderthought outwelling from the pit:

  I greet you, faithful soldiers all. I rejoice in your steadfastness. Know too that for your service, as for all services, the A'Rak's gratitude is golden.

  Here was the primal bargain of the Covenant all over again: the raw gust of alien terror perfumed away with the equally raw scent of naked gold. Paanja Pandagon exulted. His invisible audience had indeed been at hand, and had been persuaded by his performance.

  LAGADEME VI

  We were afoot at dawn, but our hostess was away before us. One of her daughters—dear, solemn and capable little things they were!—repeated her annoying reassurance of the night before. "If you please Dame Nuncio, our Ma says she'll overtake you on your way if she have ought for you in way of findings-out."

  "Thank you, dear. I hope we don't prove harder to overtake than she seems to expect."

  "Oh nay!" piped the smaller sister, anxious to put my mind at ease and ignoring a look from her elder, "our Ma's mickle quicker than you'll be, dear Dame—she can stomp flat the arse of a runnin' conney, can our Ma!"

  I could not forbear to kiss their little cheeks goodbye—which they bore sweetly enough—thinking of my Persander as a little piper no larger than this small one, bragging to his friends of his mother's "thousing leagues" of travels.

  Some five or so miles along, with the sun up and the Ribbonrill Valley now opening out to our right, it was coming on time to review our witch's map, for ahead I could descry a silver arc of the eastward highway, switchbacking down to cross the Vale, and it was now clear that we must in truth confirm our turnings before making them.

  But how loath I was to look at the hated vellum, token of our dupe-dom! Doubtless we'd often been catspaws unknowing, but now it was too stingingly plain. And as I struggled with my anger, Nifft and Olombo at point signed a halt.

  Here, angling towards us out of the grass, came four low, shambling figures, the lead one's lurching gestures plainly signalling a wish to parley with us.

  They were like big, short-haired dogs whose forelegs have begun to be crude arms, with even cruder hands on them. They were blunter-eared than dogs; they were somewhat shorter-muzzled too, but easily as bigly tongued, said organ being carried at a canine dangle as they trotted. Their gait was ungraceful, a loping, bobbing jog that used only one of the forelegs to help them along. All four had some kind of sling, belt, or leather harness around neck or chest, supporting a holstered club, or hatchet, or sheathed shortsword hung under their ribs, so it appeared each held a foreleg free to use the weapon at need.

  And for gesture too, the lead one making much play with his blunt paw as he neared us. We stood his approach at half-arms. With a crude salute—for he could not quite touch his paw to his head, the brute began a vigorous routine of gesture and utterance which was clearly intended as a communication. With his mouth full of dogteeth and wallowing tongue, and aimed as it was more groundwards than otherwise, his breathy, slobbery syllables were exceeding hard to distinguish. But at length we agreed that he was continually repeating the phrase: "snuff-meat, snuff-meat." At the same time, he kept making a grabbing gesture with his free hand (loosely so termed, for its dog-clawed fingers were only two joints long), and lifting his leg to exhibit to us the more clearly a bright red erection.

  Whatever his specific proposal was, I could not help feeling its general tenor was unpromising. I made him a polite bow. "Thank you," I said, "but I think not. We are engaged, you see, on a nuncial mission."

  He returned me a rapt gaze, tongue lolling, eyes vacant of comprehension. I tried again. "Thank you, but snuff-meat, no. No want snuff-meat. You understand?"

  "In fact," said Mav's voice behind us, "it's no contemptible service these yapps are offering. It's I who recruited them out of the bush for you. Shall I translate?"

  "Please do, my dear."

  "The grabbing gesture is his question: Do you want to deal? Do business? Snuff-meat is his and his pack's service of nosing out things for you as you travel, specifically of nosing out A'Raks that might be a-near your line of march. It's us highlanders have cultivated this useful skill in them over the years, you see. And he's showing his spunk-bone there by way of expressing his eagerness to deal—he's saying he'll give you a good price, in short."

  "Does one pay them in specie?" I could not help but ask, which made her smile.

  "Nay—as you'll have noted they haven't fingers enough for handling coin well, though the main thing is they haven't the arithmetic. They're ready enough to accept money, except they know no one'll accept it of them, for they always quarrel with their change—pretending to understand, you see. One pays them with such hand-weapons as you see they favor, or with harness to sling them from."

  The yapps—seeing a native interpret—were watching us at ease, tongues hanging patiently. Mav turned slightly away from them, and added a notch more softly, "In fact they'd fight best with their teeth, like the hounds they mostly still are, but they take great pride in being bipeds, and wielders of arms, and endure considerable inconvenience to maintain that illusion."

  "They sound cheap at that price, dear Mav, if they enhance our security . . . but lacking thei
r language, will we be able to take full advantage of their, ah, reconnaissance?"

  "Well I'd come with you, you see, if you'd like—at no charge. For I've taken it into my mind that by going with you, I'll get to do what I've yet never done, for all my wanting to, which is to kill a godspawn of my own."

  I felt with sudden certainty that she was not telling an untruth, but that it was a pretext, not her real reason for joining us. I somehow knew this woman, standing here giving me her level blue gaze, while keeping her own counsel from me. Or rather, I recognized her. She was just like a woman I had imagined many years ago. I mean the woman I had dreamed—in that intricate way that mothers dream of such things—the woman I had dreamed that my precious wee Lilu would grow into, during those few months I had her to hold in my arms, and to dream on, before the fever took her.

  I looked away—I hoped before she'd seen my eyes filling. I pretended to scan the visible fraction of the valley we'd soon be crossing. Clearing my throat, I said, "My dear, isn't it bad enough that our pious mission is a probable counterfeit, and may by itself procure us the gods' anger? Must we be hunting them as we go?"

  Mav swept the lot of us with a quick, compassionate look that was, on balance, unsettling. "I've not spoken plainly enough, Nuncio," she gravely answered, "nor no one told you what the Choosing means. It's not just Grandaddy A'Rak gets his nibble in the stadium tonight. His sons big and small come crookedy-legging it out for a bite of man-meat as well. It's all unofficial and unacknowledged by the church of course, but it amounts to a feeding far worse than their usual nips-and-bits, here-and-there kind of hunting that goes on any normal night, and only the desperate are out on the highways tonight. The spawn I hope to kill will likeliest be one that comes hunting us."

  Taking this in, I hissed, "That runty, foul, sorcering bitch!"

  Not asking who I meant, Mav said, "Probably so . . . though it needs pointing out that the mere fact she's masked her aims does not prove they're ill ones. And as you mention her, have you eyed her map since last night?"

  And indeed, the map had changed yet again. "Now once more we're to stay to the ridgeline, this time past the Murkside to the next valley north—what passes here?"

  Mav looked pleased with the change. "Look you now—I was hoping for just such a switch as this. I believe that your client is learning the ground as she goes—probing by witchery from wherever she is for the lay of things as they unfold. For mark—I just learned from these fine Yapps here this very dawn that the Ribbonrill there she was having you to cross, is alive with spawn, such a mustering as the yapps have never nosed before. Whatever she wants with you, it appears that she's trying to keep you alive. So. Am I invited?"

  I was glad of her presence—we all were. She fell into pace with us—the yapps vanishing back into the grass to run scout far ahead.

  "It was just this sort of fine summer's day," Mav said, "that I first saw an a'rak. I was a little fry of a half score years, and our Pa had us out pasturing with him. A dry year—we were grazing the flock lower down, for the greener grass at the forest fringes, down nearer the rivers. He'd sat us down with a loaf and a skin of milk, and gone a little way off after strays, leaving Danab my brother to watch me.

  "The fringe of the forest was lush, all gaudy with flowers and woven with vines, and sparkling and darting with bees and nectarwasps and bumblebuzzers and needle-flies and moths with stained-glass wings. The flowers alone bedazzled me, for they grew so much sparser and smaller up on the ridges I was used to; here there were purple bells, and red-and-gold cartwheels, and lilies with crimson pistils shooting like fireworks from their white gullets. And all the bright insects added extra glory—like tiny angels rejoicing, they wove a rippling fabric round the leaves and flowers, embroidering the air.

  "Then I noticed, among all the other winged things, some black bumblebuzzers of notable size. A cluster of them, just a little inside the thicket's leafy fringe. They hovered so still that they scarce seemed to move at all. Indeed, did they move at all? Was it just the leaves round them, stirred by the breeze, that moved? How intriguing, how odd that a cluster of such big black bumblebuzzers could hover so utterly still there!

  "I was going to look closer when a slight sound distracted me—a tiny faint stir in the leafmold down under that hovering cluster. I had to look a moment before I saw it, through a little gap in the undergrowth's skirt—the cause of that little stir. It was an old Yapp lying on his side and staring fixedly out at me from his covert. He might have been napping, and just come full awake at seeing me. But no. This Yapp's eyes stared a little too fiercely, somehow . . . indeed, his eyes were bulging almost out of his head! And this was because . . . impossibly, but yes! . . . because his face was growing even older as I watched. His skin was getting tighter and tighter before my eyes, his cheeks were caving in, I could see the bumps of his teeth growing stark under his dewlaps, that were themselves drawing tight as baked leather. . . . And even now his eyes were changing, turning dull as wax, and collapsing inward, becoming wrinkly little domes like dried snot. . . .

  "I could not understand, how the Yapp grew so terribly old in just moments, till at last I saw what explained it. At last I saw them there in the side of this shrivelling old Yapp's neck: two long, black, polished shafts were rooted in his tendony mummy-neck. I'd heard of such shafts, such fangs, from Danab telling stories to scare me.

  "Then did I raise my eyes back up to those hovering black bees, and saw them for the clustered spider-eyes they were. I was looking at one of the god-spawn as he fed, and he was looking back at me. . . .

  "The Ribbonrill's quite the pretty valley, is it not?"

  Mav's question may have meant some irony, but it was in fact a pretty valley indeed that now opened out full and fair on our right. The sun was risen high enough to bathe its western slopes, just under us, in gold, and the light etched far, tiny farmsteads and other buildings in perfect detail, and set the dew a-sparkle on the grassy slopes and thickets. What lent the prospect added drama was that just here the ridgeline, instead of sloping smoothly away on our right down into the valley, had a sheared face, falling off in a dramatic little precipice. And down some two hundred feet or so at its base—formed perhaps by the same unquietness in the earth that had sheared this escarpment—opened a wide ravine. This was choked with vegetation, no doubt from the springs or drainage the ravine channelled. This jungled gully ran all the way down the valley's flank to join the valleyfloor forest whose axis was the Ribbonrill River.

  I was taking in this scenic anomaly, and trying to discern the distant structures—a few of them of imposing dimensions—on the valley floor just on the river's farther side, and so I failed to note that Nifft, entranced by something he spied in that same far prospect, had veered off from his position at point, and agilely scrambled up onto the knoll flanking the left side of the highway—the better to view what so excited him. He did not lag—would that he had!—but continued a jogging progress atop the knoll, half-mindful of his duty to remain at point while at the same time gratifying his curiosity.

  "Ho, Mav!" he called back. "Yonder there just beyond the forest line! That octagonal dome of silvery stonework. Could that be one of the famous monastia?"

  As such an ordinary appeal to one's visual acuity will automatically do, when we saw him—above and ahead of us—pointing, it drew all our eyes for a moment in the direction indicated. It was just in this moment, I judge, that Nifft's foot accidentally dislodged a stone from the knoll, which came jouncing unperceived down to the highway, which it impacted just as the 'shaw rolled up to the same point. It struck the pavement just behind Bantril and Shinn, and just in front of the 'shaw's left wheel, which jounced mightily upon encountering it, bucking with a high, rightwards twist. The wrenching thrust this imparted to the massive, polished coffin jetted it smoothly free of its lashings, and launched it—a glittering black missile—off the highway.

  Time slowed, and, as if in a dream, I heard my own voice frostily informing our veiled clien
t, back on Clummock's dock, that we were not in the habit of dropping the consignments entrusted to our delivery. In the same dreamlike daze, I saw myself in a lighting-quick series of glimpses—glimpses covering thirty years of nuncial duty—saw myself, I say, delivering scores of consignments, undropped consignments, consignments, many of them, not only undropped, but rescued from dozens of dangers, from dire adversities of climate, terrain, and environing entities. In the space of three heartbeats I saw my entire, theretofore unbesmirched nuncial career, as the jet-black coffin turned lazily, almost voluptuously, twice, thrice in the golden morning air, before plunging, with a distant, leafy whisper, into the foliage-choked ravine two hundred feet below.

  And when the green whelm had swallowed it, we all, as one, turned our eyes upon Nifft up on his knoll. I could almost see his thought: if he took to his heels on the instant, could he outrun us all?

  I am to this moment sure that was his thought, but I must grant that he concealed it smoothly. Clearing his throat, he said, "There was no noise of impact. The foliage has caught it! Insofar as I have been the proximate cause of its . . . ejection, I alone will retrieve it!" And he bounded back down to the highway, and led off at a sprint.

  What room was there for debate? He never looked back, and perhaps would have acted alone, but how could he doubt we would follow him?

  The terrain demanded we advance to the highway's cross-valley branching, descend a little way down the slope by this, and cut back towards the precipice and ravine through the high grass. The Ephesionite stayed well in our lead; though good-hearted Olombo struggled to keep up and share the dangers of point position with him, he was less nimble than the lean vagabond, and Nifft, spear at port arms, cleaved the breast-high grass with an admirable lack of hesitation, considering what it might conceal. But by then Mav's whistling had brought our squad of yapps back to us, and though the meadow submerged them, their wakes in the grassy whelm soon branched ahead of Nifft. We were all glad of their forerunning us as we pressed towards the jungled ravine.