by Michael Shea
The Incompleat Nifft
MICHAEL SHEA
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Shea
Nifft the Lean copyright (c) 1982; The Mines of Behemoth copyright (c) 1997; both by Michael Shea
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
ISBN: 0-671-57869-3
Cover art by Gary Ruddell
First printing, May 2000
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
SNAFU!
The sea erupted, and the beast was alongside us, and was seizing our hull in his huge, dripping crab-legs, while his long, eel-slick body bowed and bowed and bowed at the loins with his fierce, lecherous thrustings. The brute was in rut—the worst kind of glabrous to meet; sure death. Amidships and aft a dozen men were instantly crushed by his legs. His sinewy tail scourged the sea behind him in his lust, driving us forward even as he embraced us. The steep, stony shore of Dolmen loomed towards us at incredible speed.
The impenetrability of our hull timbers quickly drove the ardent giant to a fury. He flung our ship clean out of the water, toppling Barnar and me back onto the deck just as we had mounted the gunwale to abandon ship. The carrack sailed creakily through twenty fathoms of thin air, and crashed down at Dolmen's very shore, and even as it did so, the glabrous surged up behind the vessel—a benthic fetor welling from its mossy, gaping jaws—and swallowed it whole.
The glabroous did this with the blind, uncalculating rage his breed is so well known for. Barnar and I, tumbled to the prow by the bow's impact with the shore, saw the darkness of the brute's maw loom over us, and saw his huge teeth bite off the sky.
BAEN BOOKS by Michael Shea
The Incompleat Nifft
(Nifft the Lean & The Mines of Behemoth)
The A'rak (forthcoming)
Running Away With the Circus
an introduction to
Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean
ACCORDING TO JOAN DIDION, both Truffaut and Fellini have talked about the "circus aspect" of filmmaking. I take that to mean generating more wildness and color for its own fevered sake than the material actually requires and I've remembered Didion's remark because that's the kind of entertainment that seizes me, and stays with me after it's done. Often the advice one wants to give to a cautious would-be writer is, "From this point on—from this page on—just go crazy."
But of course that's not quite right. If we want extravagant spectacle, then we don't want frenzied stream-of-consciousness from the writer—any more than we want haphazardly splashed paint from a painter, or inept camera work and incomprehensible editing from a movie director. On the contrary, we want the artist to be the proverbial clear pane of unrippled glass, so that we can easily see the gilded towers and the gladiators and the dancing girls and the monsters beyond. That's where we want to see the thundering industry of the grotesque.
And we do want it to be wild. Goya wouldn't have been right for illustrating Nifft the Lean—we don't need the subtle expressions, the political commentary, the restraint. For Michael Shea's masterwork, I'd like to see what Dore could have done, or Bosch; vast, deep crowd scenes against stone-carved mountains and Piranesi architecture, with end-of-the-world chiaroscuro.
The handicap that challenges fantasy—especially fantasy prose—is that the events in it are not only impossible today, like the events in hard science fiction, but are just plain impossible ever; the reader must be fooled into forgetting this.
What's required is a suspension of flat-out incredulity. To elicit this foolhardy investment on the reader's part, a writer has to make the fantasy world absolutely tangible. We readers need to be able to vividly—lividly!—see and hear and smell what's going on. Nifft the Lean does this at every turn with effortless-seeming power. When Nifft and Barnar are stringing up the corpse of the lurk, in the rafters above the guarded chamber of the doomed Year-King, the dimensions and acoustics are as clear as if we're standing right beside our heroes; when Dalissem appears so hideously out of the desert rock, we see and hear and feel the distressing spectacle; when Barnar and Nifft ride their modified ore-wagon down the precipitous mine-shaft into the underworld, we experience what Algis Budrys has in conversation called "The best entry into Hell in all of literature."
Behind and below the spotlit figure on the high wire, a circus is ropes and pegs and grommetted canvas, and in addition to the costumed performers there are drivers and accountants and somebody to sweep up all the peanut shells and elephant manure; and even outside the tent you can smell cotton candy on the night air. That's how you can tell you're in a real event, and not just dreaming.
Now, a circus would probably be just as affecting without these peripheral details, because it's actually there. Magic urgently needs the weathered scaffolding and worn ropes and scratched bolt-heads, because the reader knows, if given a moment to think, that it isn't really there at all.
And Michael Shea's magic is as unarguable as an overheated car engine. Before going down into the Underworld, Nifft assesses his weapons, and assesses too the physical symptoms of the Wayfarer's Blessing, the Charm of Brisk Blood, and the Life Hook, all as palpable as a hangover or caffeine jitters; the demons he encounters are, though insane and extravagant, zoological specimens on the hoof; and when Lybis leads her mercenary army to find the petrophagic flock, her progress is slowed because her distance from the Goddess is weakening her reception of the telepathic signal. And Shag Margold's prefaces provide us with a fellow member of the audience—a shrewd, erudite, humorous fellow, at that—who obviously believes that the show is real.
Altogether, Shea has snuck in and conquered our credulity before we could muster the forces of our skepticism. And having conquered it, he is a merciless carpetbagger—by the time he has led us to the strangely populated plains and weirdly utilitarian architecture of Anvil Pastures, we can only hang on and gape at the towering wonders around us.
There's nothing wrong with insights into "the human heart in conflict with itself," nor with "holding up a mirror" to a community, nor with having valuable things to say about the ills of humanity—
But sometimes we just want a big, loud damn circus.
Tim Powers
Santa Ana, CA
1994
NIFFT THE LEAN
SHAG MARGOLD'S Eulogy of NIFFT THE LEAN, His Dear Friend
NIFFT THE LEAN is no longer among us, and I have at last confessed to myself that, hereafter, he never will be. Consequently, I have tried to do for him all that remains in my power to do, little though that is. The man is gone, but here, at least, is some record of what he saw and did in the world. It is a bitter thing that each of us must finally be blown out like a candle, and have the unique ardor of his individual flame choked off, and sucked utterly away like smoke in the dark. Do we ever accept this in our hearts, any of us? The waste of knowledge! It never ceases to be . . . infuriating. In Nifft's case I find it galls me cruelly, and the documents I now present to my countrymen—records which Nifft, or Barnar the Chilite, or others of our mutual acquaintance have put in my keeping over the years—have given me great consolation for the loss of him.
In strict truth, I do not say that Nifft is dead. This cannot be known. But for all that he was dear to me,
when I consider the Thing which took him from us I wish him dead. Escape he cannot. He was a man who made some deep ventures and yet always found his way back to the sunlight, but this time I do not look for my waybrother's coming home.
* * *
Nifft was an affectionate man, watchful for his friends' advantage, and hence my present possession of his records. Nifft relished making record of his exploits (simply vanity his sole motive, he insisted), and so did his friends, and from our first acquaintance he contrived to make me the guardian of all such manuscripts, alleging his unsettled life barred his keeping them. This was tactful altruism. He had other friends to leave his papers with, but to me, an historian and cartographer, they could be of unique benefit. Indeed, my latest effort, the Second Revised Global Map, owes the kind praise it has reaped mainly to the wealth of new and detailed information which Nifft's papers put at my disposal during its drafting. From time to time I remonstrated with him, offered payment for his material, until one day he put his hand on my shoulder. (He had huge hands—they were the reason for his preeminence with all forms of dart, javelin, lance or spear.) Solemnly he said to me:
"Enough of this please, Shag. I can't take money from a man I admire as much as you. You're the most widely traveled honest man I know."
If Nifft was not entirely honest, he was entirely honorable, and it is futile to push moral assessment further than this in the case of a thief. That Nifft was one of the master thieves of his generation stands beyond dispute. The reader must note that I write in Karkmahn-Ra, jewel of the Ephesion Chain and much frequented by Nifft's guildfellows. To know his professional standing I need not travel far, and can have it from the lips of such legendary talents as Taramat Light-Touch, Nab the Trickster, and Ellen Errin the Kadrashite. These, and their peers, judge unanimously that Nifft stood in the very vanguard of his guild's greatest luminaries.
He was a limber, gaunt man, a full span taller than the average. Though he was spare, he was densely wrought—rope-veined, gnarl-muscled, and unusually strong. His face was long and droll, the big nose battered, the wide mouth wry. This face was a marvelously expressive instrument whenever Nifft chose, as he occasionally did, to entertain us with some piece of comic pantomime. He was highly accomplished in this art. At the age of thirteen he had finagled an apprenticeship in it with a traveling acrobatic troupe then visiting the town of his birth, therewith commencing the peripatetic career he was to pursue so illustriously and which, though it took him far across the face of the earth, never brought him back to his native city. By his twentieth year he was a thorough adept in all of what we may term the "carnival arts," and already a widely traveled young man. From mastery of the mountebank's larcenous skills to the study of outright felonious appropriation, and all its subsidiary sciences, proved but a short step for Nifft, who always credited his early "dramatic training" with his success as a thief, vowing it had given him a rare grasp of his trade's fundamentals: lying, imposture and nimble movement. For the latter, Nifft had a particular capacity, and was known for a certain inimitable, restive carriage of body. His way of moving—taut, flickering, balanced—made his friends liken him to a lizard—a similitude he professed to deplore, but which I believe he secretly relished.
It is hard indeed to think him gone! He was one of those men whose death one hears of frequently and always, as it proves, falsely—the kind of man who always pops up into view like a cork upon the after-turbulence of storms and shipwrecks, bobbing unharmed out of the general ruin. There was a period of about five years when I and all who knew him believed him dead. During this time I attended a number of anniversary revelries held by his guildfellows in observance of his memory—bibulous festivities which they decreed without allowing themselves to be limited by the strictly calendrical notion of an "anniversary," and of which I had attended no less than eleven when, a lustrum after his "passing," I set out on my first extended cruise of exploration in the southern oceans. I was one of a coalition of Ephesionite scholars. The vessel we had chartered for our year of reconnaissance was rigged with elaborate signal beacons on a scaffold in the foredeck, for we sought parley with every vessel we sighted at sea, and inquired into their crews' affairs—their travels, homes, and modes of life—as studiously as we logged coasts, climes, and oceanic phenomena. In our second month out, as we skirted the Glacial Maelstroms, we spied a brig of exotic design. We hailed her and, shortly, hove alongside her for our habitual trade of amenities and news.
The brig's masters were two wealthy carpet merchants from Fregor Ingens, and there was a third man with them who was in the manner of a junior partner and clerk. This man poured out the drinks for our convivial little assembly. I looked at the broad, rawboned hand that tipped the beaker to my cup, looked up along the stark length of arm, and into Nifft's black, spark-centered eyes. He had grown his hair long and wore it pulled back into a braided club on his neck, in the style of the Jarkeladd nomads, and this revealed that he now lacked his left ear, but Nifft it surely was. Our conversation on this occasion was one of covert looks only, for I quickly perceived his association with the merchants he so deferentially attended was of a type which sudden disclosure of his identity could jeopardize. I did not compromise him, though I smiled to myself to think of all I would hear from my friend the next time we sat at liquor together.
And I would not have compromised him now, as these volumes must do were Nifft ever to reenter the world of men. I would have delayed this work interminably out of reluctance to acknowledge his loss by completing this verbal monument to his life and deeds. But I am old, and my health is more than a little imperfect. No one knows his term, and I have been compelled to accomplish this labor while labor lay still within my power. From this, the great importance I attach to this work should be obvious. At the same time I must confess that during the months I have devoted to these documents, I have been no stranger to the despairing cynicism with which all men must grapple in the winter of their lives. Mockingly I have asked myself my labor's aim. Is it to set my friend's excellence before the eyes of Posterity? But "Posterity"—what a hair-raising gulf of time is masked by that word! An illimitable boneyard of Histories lies already behind us. Worlds on worlds of men have flowered, died and drifted on their time-islands into the desolation of eternity, and worlds more lie ahead of us—that, or the end of all. I have seen archaic maps which showed me the faces of earths utterly different from this, minutely rendered geographies which no man will find today in any of the five seas. Whither, on what unguessable currents, do I launch this man's fame, and what eddy will it end in, an impenetrable fragment in a tongue unknown to the wisest scholars, if it is preserved at all?
But I have set aside this cynical lassitude as a wasteful and childish mistake. Though a light burn comparatively small in the darkness, its first and consuming necessity is to broadcast all the illumination in its power. While it is foolish to deny the dark around us, it is futile to exaggerate it. And I make bold to say that I am not the only one of my countrymen who could profit from taking this admonition to heart.
I have in mind the notion that is so fashionable nowadays, namely that we live in a Dark Age where puny Science quails before many a dim Unknown on every hand. Surely this sort of facile pessimism dampens the energy of inquiry even as it leads to obscurantism—toward a despair of certainty which encourages us to embrace truth's, half-truths, and the most extravagant falsehoods with a promiscuous lack of discrimination.
What responsible person denies—to speak only of the cartographic science—that vast tracts of land and sea remain mysterious to the wisest? The great Kolodrian mountain systems are an instance. The Thaumeton Island Group, the hinterlands of the Jarkeladd tundras, are further examples. But mark in this how clearly we can define our ignorance. The fact is, our world's main outlines—coasts and climes, seas and currents—are known. It is the same in other disciplines. We have sufficient fragments of sufficient histories to know that man has been both far more powerful and far more abject than he
is today. If our tools and techniques are crude compared to the fabulous resources of ages past, they are also marvels of efficacy to what our race has muddled through within yet other periods.
Granting that our knowledge be limited, what can it profit us to traffic in lurid fantasies and errant imaginings? When—certainty failing us—we must speculate, let us recognize the difference between careful enumeration of reasonable hypotheses, and the reckless multiplication of bizarre conceptions. To illustrate with a classic instance, we cannot say what demons are. If the knowledge ever existed, it is lost to us now. Consequently, we must acknowledge several theories which continue to dominate the discussions of serious students of the question. Demons, few of whom lack some human component, may have been the parent stock of Man. Or they may have been spawned by man, his degenerate progeny. Possibly, they are his invention run wild, artifacts of a potent but diseased sorcery he once possessed. And, conceivably, the subworlds were populated according to Undle Ninefingers' suggestion, which holds that the demons arose as a "spiritual distillate" of human evil, a "coagulation" of psychic energies into the material entities we know today. The judicious man, though he have his private leaning, must grant all of these some claim to credence. But must he entertain the idea that demons come from seeds which are rained upon the earth at each full moon? Or that each demon is the "vital shadow" of a living man, engendered below in the instant of that man's conception, and extinguished in the moment of his death?
The spirit in which I offer my prefatory notes to each of the following narratives should now be clear. I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish "explorers," or in the specious "natural histories" compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener's Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception.