Of Machines & Magics

by Adele Abbot

  “An opportunity to do what? Hmm? There aren’t that many insects big enough to hunt us.” But in the silence which followed, Ponderos too heard the click of a hard claw on the rocky surface, the scrape of chitin against an outcrop. “Yes. You’re right. Let’s go back.”

  Faramiss and Charylla were already standing, stiff with concentration, staring past them into the gloom.

  “If only there was magic in these parts,” Calistrope complained and then bent towards Roli. “Roli,” he said, tapping the boy’s shoulder. “Up and get your sword out.”

  Roli shook his head to clear the drowsiness and made ready, standing between the two Mages. Ponderos lifted the globe of light high and rested it atop an angular jut of rock. Three pairs of eyes reflected the light back at them, white from each leftward eye and the red of the fire from each right hand side.

  “What are they?” asked Roli, his voice low, tense.

  “I don’t know. They have the look of pack insects, hunters. Probably not sure how to deal with us—mixed species like this.”

  Hunters and hunted stared at one another for several minutes, the pack of three moving in an intricate pattern which would have made it difficult to fire a bow or use a sling. The stand-off continued and just when the humans thought the insects were going to slope off, they darted in.

  The lead creature swerved around Faramiss and underneath Charylla while the other two engaged the ants. Ponderos was ready for the leap and wielding his blade in a blur of blue glass, he cleaved one of the front legs away and half of the mandible. Roli took it on as another dashed away from the ants towards the softer looking targets.

  Calistrope’s and Ponderos’ swords almost met in the insect’s thorax while to the side, Roli decapitated the injured one. Meanwhile one or other of the ants had bitten through the third’s waist and the two halves—dead but still deadly—twitched on the ground with a stinger emerging from one half and its jaws snapping from the other.

  The engagement had lasted no more than four or five minutes but all three humans were breathing heavily as though exhausted. The affray with the dragonflies out on the lake had in no way prepared them for hand to hand combat, it was not yet an activity which they could react to with equanimity. Calistrope hoped sincerely that they might never become so accustomed.

  Leaving the carnage behind them and with a heightened awareness of possible predators, they trudged onward, comparing landmarks with those marked upon their chart.

  Ponderos pointed to a rough pillar of rock which must have been half a league high yet no more than thirty paces across at its base. “God’s Finger. Do you think it’s natural or artificial?”

  “Natural,” said Calistrope, not greatly interested in its provenance. “Though which God? Hmm? According to the notes in the margin, it stands close to the high point. How far do you think?” he thrust the map out towards Ponderos.

  Ponderos squinted in the gloom. “Three leagues?” he shrugged. “About three leagues.”

  The chart showed the massif as a long narrow peninsular of highland trailing southward from a great continent more than a thousand leagues in width. On the western side it was bounded by Lake Mal-a-Merrion, on the east—the farther side—the Long River emptied through its vast delta into the Last Ocean.

  Another three leagues and they did, indeed, reach the watershed. The ground underfoot had become soft and marshy, the stream they had followed became a series of stagnant pools where pale insect nymphs wriggled away from the light and other—more developed—larvae snapped wicked claws and mandibles as their shadows fell across the scummy surface.

  The humans trod carefully through or around the noxious ponds and came at last to where the valley floor tilted imperceptibly towards the east and water drained sullenly from the bogs and sloughs. Bubbles rose sluggishly and burst on the surface tainting the air with the smell of things long dead.

  Gradually, their footing became less spongy; the water collected into a sizeable river which coursed downhill carrying with it a murky burden of silt and mud. In past epochs, this side of the landmass had undergone greater erosion; ahead, the valley widened considerably and the sides sloped away from the vertical.

  In the final narrow throat of the ravine, the ants insisted upon a halt. This, Faramiss told them in its buzzing tones was as far as they would go.

  “But your instructions,” Calistrope frowned, “you are to go with us to Schune.” This arbitrary decision quite bewildered Calistrope, it was a truism that the lower orders of ants—the workers and the soldiers—obeyed the Nest to the letter, acquiescence to Nest orders was cemented into their genes.

  “Our food is almost exhausted,” Faramiss explained. “Only so much was salvaged from the raft after the attack. We will stay here for as long as we live and protect you from the pursuers.”

  “Pursuers?” asked Ponderos. “What pursuers?”

  Faramiss waved her antennae expressively. “Creatures of the marsh. Eight have followed us. A fire will halt them for a time, after that we will kill them until we die.

  The humans looked back the way they had come. Was there a suggestion of shapes and stick-like limbs lurking in the shadows? Perhaps.

  “Surely you can forage for food?” Roli asked, outraged at what he had heard.

  Calistrope shook his head. “Their mouth parts can cope only with the honeydew in those bladders,” he explained. “Even broth, their gut cannot digest it,” Calistrope bit his lip. “This is something that had not occurred to me, I must admit.”

  While Charylla and Faramiss watched the prowlers, the humans collected great piles of brush and dead wood. They heaped it up in mounds across the open ground, effectively sealing off the way they had come. Ponderos set it alight at several places and as it began to burn, slowly at first and then more furiously, they backed away from the heat.

  How are good-byes made in such circumstances? The two ants continued to stare into the gloom beyond the flames and ignored them. Eventually, Calistrope just said a simple emotionless goodbye and when there was still no response, they turned about and glumly resumed their journey.

  Calistrope and both his companions had come to regard the two insects as friends simply because they had shared so many leagues of their trek with each other and had fought first the dragonflies and more recently the pack insects together. The comradeship they had felt was a false relationship, Calistrope saw that now. The ants were so far removed from humans that there was not the merest chance of social understanding.

  Calistrope remembered the remark he had made to Formicca: “our goals are yours.” The high caste ant had agreed. The air was not cold but Calistrope shivered and drew his cloak protectively about himself. There really was no comprehension between the two species. Even so, he felt depressed that the two ants were not the brave comrades he had briefly supposed them to be.

  He trudged after his companions.

  A well-defined game trail ran along the riverside, meandering around bushes and copses or outcrops and rejoining further on. Often, there were signs of past flooding and the trail branched from lower to higher levels.

  They moved at a good pace on the downhill grade until the river—now a sizeable watercourse—crowded them closer and closer to the southern side of the valley. There were still trails to follow but they became narrower, worn into the mosses and clay by more sure-footed creatures than humans. While the far side of the river was flat and home to small swarms of grazing insects, the paths to which they were confined were often narrow ledges or passages between fallen boulders.

  They came to the end of one such trail which had taken them fifty or sixty ells above the water’s edge, the trail turned a corner and opened out onto a series of wide terraces. “There’s a light ahead,” Ponderos observed as he rounded the corner. “A glow.”

  The gorge opened out before them into a wide valley with a sedimentary flood plain on either side of the river which curled through the valley in a succession of curves and discarded ox-bow lakes. To on
e side was a small settlement—a dozen or so houses and other buildings clustered around an open space with a larger meeting hall on one side. A few outlying structures bordered a rude track way running the length of the open part of the valley. A faint suggestion of smoke came to them on the air. They could discern no activity however, no people, no animals.

  After some discussion, they decide to skirt the village by remaining close to the steeper slopes until they were well beyond the farthest house. The companions crossed the end of a small gorge where a busy stream tumbled down to join the river below them. Beyond, they continued again and a league onward, perhaps a little more, came to a point where the valley once more closed up and the river funneled between almost vertical cliffs. They found a way well above water level which, from its well-trodden appearance they judged would take them all the way though the narrows.

  They marched single file along a ledge little wider than a pair of feet, their new familiarity with such walkways lending them some skill. Calistrope, leading the group, stopped abruptly after stepping around a cracked column of rock; he move forward a pace or two to give the others space to stand on and pointed.

  All three of them could hear a constant hum, just audible above the sound of the rushing waters below them.

  “What is it?” Roli asked.

  “A nest?” Suggested Ponderos.

  “A wasp nest,” Calistrope shook his head. “I don’t care to get any closer than this. If only Valdemar had been a little more circumspect with his improvements.”

  “Valdemar?” asked Roli.

  “Valdemar?” Repeated Ponderos in the same tone.

  “Valdemar the Entomophile.”

  “Entomo… Insect lover? The improver? Ah! I thought that was Nimilick?”

  “Nimilick favored crustaceans.”

  “I never heard of intelligent lobsters.”

  “Just so.”

  They stood and gazed at the gigantic pear shaped nest which hung over the water and at its largest girth almost filled the gap between the cliffs. It was suspended from the trunk of a tree which had fallen—or had been felled—and lodged between the two cliff faces. There was an entrance near the bottom where great black and yellow furred insects came and went. Guards were posted at strategic positions around the nest, on ledges, on tenaciously clinging shrubs, in cracks in the rock walls, wherever possible.

  “It’s bigger than the Inn,” Roli ventured.

  “The Raftsman’s Ease? By the Lake?” Ponderos rubbed his chin. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “Bigger. Much bigger.” Calistrope was firm. ‘There is room for several man-sized stories in there. Nine perhaps, or ten. There will be thousands and thousands of insects inside.”

  “So what shall we do?”

  “That settlement. Surely people need to leave the valley now and again. Perhaps they know of another way out.”

  “It may not be all that old an obstruction,” Ponderos observed. “It does not take long to build something like that. A swarm could construct it in, what, forty, fifty hours? Perhaps they aren’t aware of it yet.”

  Calistrope shook his head. “It is quite mature, I’m certain. Look at the stains on the rocks to either side, observe the rubbish which has accumulated on the banks underneath.”

  “I’ll wager there will be someone who would take us down river in a boat,” said Roli, his eyes shining with excitement. “I’d wager someone will shoot these rapids just for the fun of it.”

  Calistrope looked at the white foam swirling between jagged limestone teeth and the great standing waves of water leaping high into the air. “Perhaps a boat is not the best way out of here. Perhaps we could climb the cliffs, walk past that way.”

  Ponderos looked up at the edges of the high cliff tops against the dark sky, as sharp as newly broken glass. “I fancy that we would find it difficult to breathe up there, my friend and it is a very long way to climb. Under or around, that is the only way.”

  “Let’s consult with the villagers first.”

  Chapter 6

  They turned back and retraced their steps, leaving behind the humming nest and its dangerous occupants. They approached the village once more and began to descend the terraces. As they came nearer, a pall of smoke became visible—first as a thin layer, then as an overhead stain in the air which shrouded them and the village in an artificial twilight. A few minutes later, Ponderos threw out his arms to stop them.

  “A strange thing,” he said. “Strange,” Ponderos frowned for a moment. “Go back a few paces then watch the village as you come back.”

  Calistrope and Roli backed up as Ponderos had suggested. From a few hundred paces away, the village was a ramshackle collection of structures built from logs and unpainted planks with often unglazed windows gaping at them. As they walked forward, between one step and the next, the dilapidated houses were metamorphosed.

  The buildings stretched and twisted, changed color; overhead, the stars became softer, the sun brighter but smaller—now just peering over the south western end of the valley. Dressed stone replaced rough-hewn logs, colored glass and delicately carved mullions shone with the quivering light of candles.

  They walked on, into the village. Most of the changed buildings were low: one and two stories with high pitched roofs of red terra-cotta tiles. There were several taller structures though, tall and narrow, towers with many stories and tiny windows, masts rose from the tops with long gauzy pennons flapping and wriggling in a make-believe breeze.

  At the center was a small plaza bordered with low box hedges. The open area was paved with smooth mosaics depicting knights mounted on unlikely looking animals and engaged in some sort of dual with long curved swords. Coy maidens looked on from the side lines.

  “I am tempted,” Calistrope said, “to believe I have reached some kind of latter day heaven, that I have left Old Earth entirely.”

  Ponderos was already touching finger tips to the stonework around them, rubbing them and feeling the dust between his fingers, tasting it. “This is all marble,” he said.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Calistrope agreed.

  “But it’s real,” he said. “Real. Not an illusion, glamour.”

  Calistrope looked about him at the many different colors of marble: red and green, pink and blue and white with here and there black or silver tracery weaving its way like lace through the mottled colors of the stone. Windows and doors were tall and narrow with high-arched lintels, they were lined with glazed tiles showing leaves and flowers and abstract designs. Roof lines were bordered with tessellated patterns garnished with colored stones and glasses.

  A scene from a story book, a fantasy.

  “Magic?” asked Calistrope.

  “Magic?” Ponderos wrinkled his brow. “We have detected no magic since departing the Raftman’s Ease,” he drew a long breath through his nose, repeated the exercise and raised his eyebrows. “A trace maybe. Just a trace.”

  Calistrope followed suit and nodded. “A trace.”

  Roli, ignoring the interchange, put his own point. “I want to know where everybody is. No sounds, no cooking smells, no people. Where are they?”

  Calistrope shrugged. “It looks well kept, someone must sweep the paths and clear away weeds.” Three pathways converged upon the square, the one which they had followed back from the wasps’ nest, one on the northern side and a third on the western side. Calistrope nodded to the north side where the alley led between a saddlery and a baker’s shop—the latter with still-warm ovens and fresh bread on the shelves. Both contributed a redolence to the air, one pungent, the other piquant. “The village is empty. Shall we try down there? It must lead down to the river.”

  The lane took them to the rear of the shops which fronted the square. Behind these were high blank walls enclosing silent courtyards where fruit trees lifted boughs over the walls, boughs laden with apricots and apples and dark rich plums.

  “It seems darker,” said Roli, turning a full circle as he walked. “Look at
the sun, it’s almost gone and the stars are brighter.”

  “That’s remarkable,” Calistrope stopped and looked at the last fragment of the yellow sun shining between jagged escarpments. “Does the world turn again?”

  “Has the world returned to its old orbit?” Ponderos added. “If so, it saves us going any farther on our journey,” he sighed. “However, I suspect after all, that magic is responsible.”

  “Perhaps but it is a spell that I have never come across before.”

  The lane wound between two of the secretive dwellings and out on to the level ground beside the river and here was a vast tent pitched upon the grassy expanse. Scores of animal pelts had been stitched together to make the canopy which was supported on a multitude of poles and drawn taught with hundreds of guy ropes pegged into the ground.

  The side nearest to them was raised so they could see inside where people—the villagers, they assumed—were reclining on silk cushions and thick carpets. Tall golden jugs stood everywhere and from these the villagers poured clear liquid into enameled goblets. They drank from their cups and ate fruits and sweetmeats from beaten gold plates. Men gazed at dark-eyed women and smiled, the dark eyed women smiled back and licked their red lips in anticipation.

  So engrossed in each other were they, that no one seemed to notice the travelers until they stood between the sun and the nearer of the village folk.

  “A good day to you all,” Calistrope greeted them. Some nodded, a few replied with murmured words, most turned their gaze in other directions and ignored the newcomers. The sun vanished but even so, darkness did not come at once as was the case with eclipses or storm clouds.

  “Perhaps I should bid you a good evening, for that is what it seems to be.” And even less interest was shown.

  Roli asked, “Why don’t we just join them? There seems to be plenty of food and drink here. Enough and to spare.”