by Kage Baker
“But it’s damned boring,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Give me the Children of the Sun any day. If only they would learn to use birth control!” He looked back at Smith imploringly.
“Sex is good for you,” said Smith. “And you don’t get a baby every time, you know. If we have more than anybody else, it’s because we’re made better than other people, see? Physically, I mean, and no offense to any races present. But you can’t ask people not to make love.”
“But—” Lord Ermenwyr pulled at his beard in frustration. “You could use—”
“They don’t know about it, my lord,” said Willowspear.
“I beg your pardon?” The lordling stared.
“They don’t know about it,” said Willowspear quietly, gazing into his cup of wine. “My Burnbright was as innocent as a child on the subject. She didn’t believe me when I explained. Even afterward, she was skeptical. And, of course, with our baby on the way, there has been no opportunity—”
“Oh, you’re lying!”
“I swear by your Mother.”
Lord Ermenwyr began to giggle uneasily. “So that’s why prostitutes always seem so surprised when I—”
“What are you talking about?” Smith demanded, looking from one to the other of them. Lord Ermenwyr met his stare and closed his eyes in embarrassment.
“No, Smith, you’re a man of the world, surely you know,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh, gods, you’re old enough to be my father, this is too—it really is too—you really don’t know, do you?” Lord Ermenwyr opened his eyes and began to grin. He set down his drink, wriggled to the edge of his seat, and leaned forward. Swiftly, in terse but admirably descriptive words, he told Smith.
Smith heard in blank-faced incomprehension.
“Oh, that’d never work,” he said at last.
On the seventh day, they came to the falls.
Smith had been expecting them. He had heard the distant rumble, seen the high haze of mist and the land rising ahead in a gentle shelf.
“You’d better fetch his lordship,” he told Willowspear, who was standing at the rail between Cutt and Crish, scanning the riverbank. So far there had been no sign of the Yendri.
“What is it?”
“We’re going to run out of navigable river up ahead, and he’ll have to decide what he wants us to do next.”
“Ah. The Pool of Reth,” said Willowspear.
“You knew about it?”
“The monastery is not far above. Three days’ journey this way, perhaps. His Mother corresponds with them often.”
“Fine. What are we going to do about the waterfall?”
Willowspear spread his slender hands in a shrug. “My lord assumed you would think of a way. You people are so clever, after all,” he added, with only the faintest trace of sarcasm.
Smith spun the wheel, edging the Kingfisher’s Nest around a dead snag. “Funny how everyone thinks we’re the worst people in the world, until they need something done. Then we’re the wonderful clever people with ideas.”
Willowspear sighed.
“You mustn’t take it personally.”
“All I know is, if you put a naked Yendri and a naked Child of the Sun down in a wilderness, with nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep, the Yendri would sit there and do nothing for fear of stepping on a blade of grass. The Child of the Sun would figure out how to make himself clothes and tools and shelter and—in ten generations the Child of the Sun would have cities and trade goods and—and culture, dammit, while the Yendri would still be sitting there scared to move,” said Smith.
“If I were going to argue with you, I would point out that in ten more generations the Child of the Sun would have wars, famine, and plague, and the Yendri would still be there. And in ten more generations the Child of the Sun would be dead, leaving a wrecked place where no blade of grass grew; and the Yendri would still be there,” said Willowspear. “So who is wiser, Smith?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Lord Ermenwyr, climbing up on deck. Stabb followed him. “But the only way anyone would ever win this stupid experiment would be to make the naked Yendri and the naked Child of the Sun of opposite sexes. Then they’d think of something much more interesting to do. What’s that noise up ahead, Smith?”
“You’ll see in a minute,” said Smith. They came around a long bar of mud alive with basking water snakes, yellow as coiled brass, and beheld the Pool of Reth.
It opened four acres of forest to the sun, and the water was clear as green glass endlessly rippling, save at the edge where the Rethestlin thundered down in its white torrent from the cliff, along a wide shelf the height of a house. Green ferns taller than a man leaned from the bank, feeding on the air that was wet with rainbows. Tiny things, birds maybe, flitted across in the sunlight, and now and then one of them would make an apparently suicidal plunge into the cascade.
Willowspear pointed silently. On the bank to one side was an open meadow, and two tall stones stood there, carved with signs as the three at Hlinjerith had been carved. The same flowers had been planted about their bases, but in this more sheltered place had grown to great size. Rose brambles were thick as Willowspear’s arm, poppy blooms the size of dishes, and the standing stones seemed smaller by comparison. A trail led from them to the base of the cliff, where it switchbacked up broadly, an easy climb.
“Here the Star-Cloaked faltered,” said Willowspear. He drew a deep breath and sang: “ ‘Leading the unchained-lost-amazed, holding the Child, the blood of his body in every step he took; this was the first place his strength failed him, and he fell from the top of the cliff. The Child fell with him. The people came swift down running lamenting, and found Her floating, for the river would not drown the Blessed-Miraculous-Beloved; and in Her fist She held the edge of his starry cloak, as in Her hand She now holds the heavens and all that is in them.
“ ‘And so he was brought into the air, the Imperfect Beloved, and the people wept for him; but the Child pulled his hair, and he opened his eyes and lived. And he was stunned-silent-forgetful a long while, but when he spoke again it was to praise Her. And the people praised Her. In this place, they first knew She was the Mother of Strength and Mercy, and they knelt and praised Her.’ ”
Lord Ermenwyr grimaced, and in a perfectly ordinary voice said, “So, Smith, how do we get up the falls?”
“Oh, that’ll be easy,” said Smith, guiding the Kingfisher’s Nest into the Pool. “You just arrange to have a team of engineers brought in, with a small army and heavy equipment. We could work out a system of locks and dams that’d get us up to the top in ten minutes. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of years to build.”
“Ha-ha,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “No, Smith, really.”
“Drop the anchor!” ordered Smith, and opened the stopcock as the demons obeyed him. Steam shot forth white, adding more rainbows to the air as it gradually subsided. The ever-clanking sound of the oars stopped. “Really,” he said.
“Look, I happen to know the Yendri get up this river all the time,” said Lord Ermenwyr heatedly.
“Not in one of these galleys, they don’t,” said Smith.
“Well, can’t you do something with one of those, what are those things called, levers? One of my tutors, another one of your people by the way, told me you could move anything with a lever.”
“Why, yes. All we need is a lever, say, ten times the length of the keel, and a place to balance it, and a place to stand … oh, and tools and materials we don’t happen to have,” said Smith.
“You’re being unnecessarily negative about this, aren’t you?”
“Why don’t you use sorcery, then, your lordship?”
Willowspear cleared his throat.
“The Yendri,” he said, “travel in small light craft. When they arrive here, they get out and carry the boats up that path, and so along the bank above until they can set sail and push against the current again.”
“Portage,” said Smith. “The only trouble being, this
vessel weighs a lot more than a canoe.”
“Coracle.”
“Whatever.”
Lord Ermenwyr looked hopefully at his bodyguards. “What do you think, boys? Could you carry my boat up there?”
The three demons blinked at him.
“Yes, Master,” said Curt, and they all three dove overboard and a moment later the Kingfisher’s Nest rocked in the water as her anchor was dragged along the bottom.
“No! Wait!” shouted Smith, tottering backward, for the bow was rising out of the water. “This won’t work!”
“You don’t know demons!” cried Lord Ermenwyr gleefully, wrapping his arms around the mast.
The stern was free of the water, and to Smith’s astonishment the whole vessel lurched purposefully up the shore—
And abruptly there was a most odd and unpleasant noise, and her bow went down.
Willowspear, who had been clinging to the rail, peered over to see what had happened. He said something horrified in Yendri.
“Master,” said a mournful voice from beneath them, “I am afraid that now Crish will need a new body too.”
Lord Ermenwyr blew his nose.
“No,” he said wretchedly, “it has to be me. But I’m damned if I’m going to do it with these clothes on.”
He yanked at one of his boots manfully and ineffectively, until Willowspear arose and went to him and took the lordling’s foot in his hands.
“Pull backward,” he advised.
“Thank you.”
They sat in the lee of the Kingfisher’s Nest, looking vast as a beached whale where it had settled on the shore. Smith had built a small fire and was adding sticks to it now and then, but it wasn’t able to do much against the damp and the growing darkness. Lord Ermenwyr disrobed quickly once his other boot was off. He stood shivering and pale in the purple twilight.
“Right,” he said, and picked his way along the edge of the Pool until he found a broken branch of a good size. Stripping the leaves and twigs away gave him something that would pass for a staff. Muttering to himself, he walked a certain number of paces, turned, and began to sketch the outline of a body in the mud.
He worked quickly, and did not take great pains with detail. The result was a squared-off blocky thing that did not look particularly human, with a scored gash for a mouth and two hastily jabbed pits for its eyes. But it did look remarkably like Cutt and Stabb, who sat like boulders in the firelight, watching him.
“There’s old Strangel,” he said, nodding with satisfaction. “Now for Crish.”
He marked out another figure of the same size and general appearance.
“So he can really … re-body them?” Smith asked Willowspear in a low voice. Willowspear nodded. “How’s he do that?”
“It is his lord father’s skill,” said Willowspear, in an equally low voice, though Cutt and Stabb heard him and genuflected. “His lord father can speak with the spirits in the air. He binds them into his service, and in return he gives them physical bodies, that they may experience life as we do.”
Smith poked the fire, thinking about that.
“Did his father, er, create Balnshik?” he asked.
“Long ago,” said Willowspear. “Which is to say, he sculpted the flesh she wears.”
“He’s quite an artist, then, you’re right,” said Smith.
“My lord is still young, and learning his craft,” said Willowspear, a little apologetically, glancing over his shoulder at Cutt and Stabb. “But he has the power from his father, and he is his Mother’s son.”
“So’s Lord Eyrdway,” said Smith. “How d’you reconcile somebody like him being the offspring of Goodness Incarnate?”
Willowspear looked pained. “My Lord Eyrdway was, hm, engendered under circumstances that… affected his development.”
“Too much magic, eh?"—"Perhaps. He is a tragaba, a… moral idiot. Like a beast, he cannot help what he does. Whereas my Lord Ermenwyr knows well when he is being an insufferable little—”
“I ought to make a couple of others, don’t you think?” Lord Ermenwyr’s voice came floating out of the darkness.
“Good idea,” Smith called back, but Willowspear turned sharply.
“Is that wise, my lord?”
“It is if we want to get any farther upriver,” was the reply.
“What’s the matter?” asked Smith.
“It is no easy process,” said Willowspear, “giving life.”
They sat in silence for a while, and Smith let the fire die back a little so they could see farther into the darkness. They watched as the pale figure moved along the edge of the Pool, crouching in the starlight beside each of the figures he had drawn. One after another he excavated, digging with his hands along each outline, scooping away enough mud to turn a drawing into a bas-relief, and then into a statue lying in a shallow pit. Finally, they saw him wandering back. He was wet and muddy, and no longer looked sleek; his eyes were sunk back into his head with exhaustion.
“Wine, please,” he said. Smith passed him the bottle from which he had been drinking, but he shook his head.
“I need a cup of wine,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “And an athalme. A boot knife would do, I suppose.”
Smith fished one of his throwing knives out of his boot top and handed it over hilt first, as Willowspear poured wine into a tea mug they’d brought out of the galley.
“Thank you,” Lord Ermenwyr said, and trudged away into the night again. They heard him muttering for a while in the darkness, and could just glimpse him pacing from one muddy hole to the next. Willowspear averted his eyes and added more wood to the fire.
“He’ll need warmth, when this is over,” he said. “I wish, in all that indigestible clutter of pickles and sweets he brought, that there was anything suitable for making a simple broth.”
The night drew on. They heard him chanting a long while in the darkness, and then as the late moon rose above the forest canopy they glimpsed him. He was standing motionless, his arms upraised, staring skyward. As the white light flowed down onto the bank and lit the Pool of Reth, his voice rose: smooth, imperative, somehow wheedling and desperate too. He was speaking no language Smith knew. He was making odd gestures with his hands, as though to coax the stars down…
The air crackled blue over the first pit. It became a mass of brilliant sparks that settled down slowly about the figure there. Smith held his hand up before his eyes, for the whole clearing was lit brighter than day, and hollow black shadows leaned away from the tree trunks clear across the Pool as another mass of light formed above the second pit, and then the third, and then the fourth. Flaring, they drifted down, and the four recumbent forms caught fire.
Whoosh. The fire went out. There was blackness, and complete silence. Even the sounds of the night forest had halted, even the relentless thunder of the falling water. Had the river stopped flowing? Then a shadow rose against the stars beside Smith, and he heard Willowspear call out in Yendri. Sound began to flow back, as though it were timid.
“It’s all right,” was the reply, sounding faint but relieved.
Willowspear sat down again but Cutt and Stabb rose, staring forward through the dark.
“Seems to have worked, anyway.” Lord Ermenwyr’s voice was nearer. “Come along, boys. One-two-one-two. That’s it.”
By the returning moonlight Smith saw the lordling, staggering rather as he led four immense figures along the edge of the pool.
“See, boys? Here’s our Crish and Strangel again,” he said, laughing somewhat breathlessly. “Just as I promised you.”
“Now we are a set of six!” said Cutt, in quiet pride.
“Master, what is our name?” said one of the giants.
“Yes, you must have names, mustn’t you, you two newlings?” Lord Ermenwyr reached the Kingfisher’s Nest and looked down sadly at the ashes of the fire. “Oh, bugger. No! No! Let’s not name anybody that!”
Giggling, he turned back to his servants and raised a shaking hand to point at them in turn.
Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he pitched forward into the mud.
Nothing would rekindle the fire, so they made a bed for him in one of the tilted staterooms, stacking mattresses against what was for the moment a floor, and on Willowspear’s advice swaddling him tight in blankets.
“He’s taken a chill,” said Willowspear, looking at him unhappily.
“He should have kept his clothes on,” grumbled Smith, crawling along the bulkhead to fetch more blankets and another bottle of wine.
They bundled up on either side of the lordling, cramped and close but warm, and lay there in the dark listening to the night sounds.
“So … if something happens to him, what do we do?” said Smith at last. “Turn around and go home?”
He heard Willowspear sigh.
“If the Lady Svnae is truly in danger, it’s my duty to come to her aid.”
“But you’re a married man,” said Smith. “You’ve got a baby on the way. Don’t you miss your wife?”
“More than you can imagine,” Willowspear replied.
“Though I suppose it’s a little cramped in that attic room with the two of you…” Smith did not add, And the sound of Burnbright’s voice would have me shipping out after a month.
“No.” Willowspear stretched out in the darkness, folding his arms behind his head. “It’s a paradise in our room. In summer it’s so hot… one night, we … there was a box of children’s paints in the storeroom. A guest had left it behind, I think. We took it and painted each other’s bodies. Orchids and vines twining our flesh. Unexpected beasts. Wings. Flames. Rivers. The stars shone down through the holes in the slates, and we pretended we were seeing them through the jungle canopy. The whole house slept silent in the heat, but we two were awake, exploring … the night insects sang and our sweat ran down and the paint melted on her little body, and she plundered me, she was a hummingbird after nectar … and afterward we ran downstairs hand in hand, naked as ghosts, and bathed in the fountain in the garden. We pretended it was a jungle pool. Oh, she said, wouldn’t it be awful if anybody saw us like this? And her eyes sparkled so…”