by Michael Shea
The succeeding frenzy, just at its fullest pitch, caused me an eerily calm moment of remembrance. I had done fisher-work on the Ahnook trawlers when I was young, and there had been one late afternoon when we made a stupendous strike. Our greedy skipper plied the nets with epileptic ardor and buried our decks with a spill-over haul, in a mad race to ship every possible ounce before it grew dark. Half of us had to stand the decks with spars in our hands and club the fish like a devil with his arse afire. They were shadfinns, big as dogs with the fight of wild pigs. In the dimming light, on the heaving, slithering decks, walloping and dancing berserkly, I had for a short eternity fore-lived what I lived now.
The boy hadn't noticed anything below the upper layers, and kicked at us furiously as he wormed himself into the endless grapple. Instantly, he had a dozen allies aiding his immersion. I felt for a horrified time the certainty that we wouldn't get him out in time. For even in our distraction, we got many glimpses of the deeper action of the fiendish congress. Several layers down you saw a kissing mouth that suddenly grinned and sank its teeth in flesh. A hand with a thumb and four bleeding stumps was seen to pound helplessly against a massive thigh. A rib broke under a powerful knee. From down there you heard the smothered undercurrent of a different oratorio, one of horror covered by the chorus of lust.
Wimfort gave us great thumping kicks of painful authority. When we could spare a blow from the rest, we parried him and struck at his legs to stun them. He sank under the first layer of stroking hands and worshipful lips, and suddenly pain stamped his face, and he howled. He began to fight like mad to become free, but now his allies had become his captors.
In desperation I drew my sword. I lopped off a man's arm, another's foot. Mercifully, this sent a shock through the massed orgy—arms recoiled and torsos writhed away. This helped Barnar as much as it did Wimfort, for several thralls had gotten arm-locks on my friend's neck, and in the last instant before he was freed I saw his left ear bitten off flush with his head.
I must say that Wimfort, when he had his feet under him again and his club restored him, began to ply this weapon with a vigor that greatly sped our passage through and exit from that region. This performance had purchased him a measure of forgiveness from our hearts by the time we had sat down in a safe place to bind Barnar's wound.
But then Wimfort, that prodigal youth, managed to squander all he had purchased in a few brief words. He was looking at us absentmindedly when suddenly his eyes narrowed, and a look of pleased discovery dawned on his features. He laughed triumphantly, in innocent enjoyment of his enemies' defects—for I must mention that, some years prior to this time, I had had the misfortune to lose most of my own left ear.
"Your ears!" Wimfort cried, and laughed again. "Now the two of you match!"
XVIII
We gave ourselves another, shorter period of rest, until Barnar's wound had scabbed cleanly and stopped throbbing, and then, once again, we marched. Endlessly.
Long and long we marched. Unendingly we marched. We marched, and Wimfort nagged us.
The boy was unquestionably a great natural talent, if not an outright genius, in the art of complaint—tirelessly inventive, and completely shameless in the matter of interpreting his dissatisfactions as someone else's—anyone else's—criminal failures to content him.
And so we marched, and Wimfort, marching too, also nagged us, and at length the sheer influx of his voice, relentless as the surf's assault on the rock, began to expunge my mind, scour away any thought of my own that tried to sprout from my fast-eroding brain.
"STOP!" I bellowed. "Stop right here, sit down, shut up, and listen."
Wimfort skidded down the slick, pink knoll I had just descended, and obeyed three of my commands. Given the loathsome wetness of this spongy terrain, I didn't insist on his sitting down. I said to him, "Now. Your mouth will remain shut, and your ears open, until I'm finished; First: you are aware of the Life-Hooks in us which hind us to Charnall, who is in your father's power. Second: you were present—though you may not have been listening, since the discussion concerned persons other than yourself—when we asked Gildmirth to remove the hooks for us. He told us that, as the hook is a primitive, strongly talisman-linked spell, we stood a two-to-one chance of having our hearts ripped out if he removed the hooks from us without using the control-ring. Now here is the new bit of information I want you to have. A while ago Barnar and I had a lengthy conversation out of your hearing in which we pondered, at length, the relative merits of abandoning you, returning to the Privateer and taking our chances on the operation, so that we could win the freedom to escape this place without the burden of yourself encumbering our efforts. We weighed the merits of this course of action for a long time, Wimfort. Do you understand my meaning? I am in no manner joking."
We marched on. I knew my speechmaking had bought us only a morose and temporary silence from the boy. I was undefinably uneasy, aware of a peculiarly sharpened rancor toward the boy, and aware that my patience with him was dangerously frayed, while at the same time I acknowledged that, though intolerable, he had been no worse than usual lately. Moreover, I deeply disliked this zone we had recently entered, and yet so far it had been remarkably free of dangers and difficulties alike.
I couldn't discover what it was about the place that had my back up like this. It had quickly become clear that the impossibility of precisely retracing the path of our descent had resulted in the deeper penetration of an area which, evidently, we had encountered only peripherally before. And though this left the dangers of the leagues ahead an unknown factor, at least the unfamiliar territories were proving no more perilous than the remembered one had been. Here, for instance, in these wet, pillowy fields of rosy tissue, it was easy enough to fall, so ridged and seamed the stuff was, so scalloped, wrinkled and whorled—but then it was nearly impossible to suffer hurt from a fall on such moist, blubberous ground. The prospect was wide and unthreatening. Here and there from the twisted, velvety billows rose huge buttes and mesas of the whitest, smoothest stone we had ever seen. Out toward the limit of our vision the plains could be seen to grow smoother and paler, and to be thinly forested with some kind of growth.
We found that whiter zone to be sharply demarcated from the pink one. It was a wholly different material, tough and dry, and faintly resilient. And it was quite smooth, save for a system of shallow striations that printed on its surface vast, swirled patterns reminiscent of the wave lines the wind engraves on untrodden sands.
As for the treelike things that sprouted from it—quite sparsely at first—they were harmless things, but inexplicably repellent. Their substance—wet, purple twists of bundled fiber—resembled nothing so much as raw meat, thick strips of it all torqued and braided together in rubbery stalks and flaccid branchings. Pythons of translucent, silvery cord were complexly spliced throughout this tree-meat, and their network corruscated faintly, with a rhythm roughly matching that of the trees' movement. For all these growths stirred vaguely in the windless air, and faint, intricate shudders of torsion incessantly agitated their limber frames.
The ground began to rise. The trees grew ever denser and ever bigger. As the sticky forest closed in above and around us, my oppression of spirit grew almost crushing.
"Listen," Barnar said. "Do you hear something?" I shook my head angrily, and didn't answer. I had been hearing something, a slow-cadenced booming—vast, but also soft, diffuse. The grade got steeper. We wound through the carnal jungle up toward what promised to be a major ridge-crest.
When we topped that crest, I saw everything in an instant—my own stupidity first and clearest of all. The land fell away before us in a broad, shallow valley more thickly forested than the ridge, and with a different growth—with black hair, jungle-high. Erupting from the valley's basin at its farther end was an immense mountain. Its crest was lost in the phosphorescent gloom of the subworld's vaulted ceiling, but its smooth and tapered shape was immediately identifiable. One stark vein ran up across this mountain's face, and a s
warm of aerial entities hovered near the vein at about its midway point
It was the mountain we had been hearing, and whose thunder now rolled unhindered across the shaggy lowlands—a thrumming, buzzing knell; a sound as of a million bowstrings simultaneously loosed. Wonderingly, Barnar said: "We've found—we are in—the giant Sazmazm." I nodded, still gazing. Then we jumped, our wits returning to us at the same moment. We whirled around. Wimfort was gone.
* * *
Though we failed to pick up his trail, there was at least no doubt about the direction the boy would be taking. He would be impossible to spot until he reached the clear ground at the mountain's foot, the very threshold of his lunatic desire. Seeking him en route in the giant's snarled pectoral pelt would be futility itself, giving the young idiot plenty of time to destroy himself—and thereby us—unhindered when he reached the perimeter protected by Sazmazm's tertiary slaves.
So down we went, and threw ourselves into the arduous, oily struggle, which was hard enough to let us hope that our greater strength would enable us to reach the mountain before the boy. Our bejungled approach denied us any chance to view the situation we were nearing. When at length we stepped onto clear ground again, we were in a scorched, war-torn zone, hideously heaped with the wreckage of war, and beyond these intervening dunes of dead, the visible part of the mountain bulked huge, fearsome in its nearness.
We stood numb awhile. Some high point had to be reached from which we could overlook this cyclopaean disorder.
"The best thing seems to be to look at what we're dealing with," Barnar said bleakly. "And then try to anticipate where he'll choose to make his rush."
I nodded, and another silence passed. I answered: "If he has formed a plan at all, and doesn't just rush in on a blind faith in his luck."
We sighed. All was speed now, but a melancholy languor was on us. Insistent despair, soliciting yet again our weary hearts, woke no more fight in us. We were almost emptied, and beginning at last to accept our destruction.
Glumly, with audible loathing, Barnar said, "That seems to be our only adequate vantage." He nodded toward the hirsute carcass of a gigantic slothlike beast that lay on a debris-hill of smaller corpses and their broken chariots of war. Somehow, we started walking toward it. "Yes," I said, "we can climb up that spike it has strapped to its head."
It appeared that the beast had died among—upon—its own cavalry. The eyeless, beetle-jawed apes whose multitudes underlay it had died in a wreckage of chariots whose prows projected great spikes identical in all but size to that the giant wore. These eyeless charioteers were small only beside their monstrous ally, for their vehicles were the size of galleons, and they, when standing, could have spread their nasty jaw-scythes and clipped the crow's nest off an Astrygal windjammer's mainmast.
The sloth's flesh, puddling in cheesy wrinkles around each huge shaft of its hair, stank. Dead fleas the size of yearling horn-bows lay half sunk in the charnal mire. We kept to the spine-ridge, which was a little balder of this stinking pelt. "Corpse-fleas!" Barnar raged as we clambered past an ear, and stumbled onto the knoll-top of the cranium. "That vile, willful little moron makes corpse-fleas of us!"
Death had frozen the giant's head at only a slight forward droop, and the steel spike strapped to his forehead jutted a hundred feet farther out at the half-vertical. We started shinning up the bright needle. Already we saw all we needed to, but we climbed mechanically, up and out, our eyes lost in what confronted us.
The dreadful grandeur of that monstrous, chambered muscle, shapely as a Shallows wine-jar, bottling the colossal vintage of the demon-giant's vitality, thundering endlessly with the stoppered power of these contents—it was more than a life of looking could truly take in. The great vein serpenting up its flank was itself a thing of awe. The pulse and volume of more than one mighty river charged through that gargantuan blue pipe.
And we now saw just how that vein was tapped, and saw more clearly too the genesis of those things which tapped it. A tough, glassy capsule both sheathed and vaguely displayed the fibers of the heart's underlying sinew. And all this inmost, toiling demon-meat was infested—riddled with encysted shapes, slimly tapered ellipsoids like sarcophagi of carven wood.
These could be seen at every stage of growth, in fluid-filled bubbles that slowly swelled with their growth, sundering the muscle of the giant's tortured, consenting heart. Ultimately the bubbles' swelling ruptured the heart-sheath. Everywhere across the living wall, stilt-legged, stingered monsters were to be seen wrenching their drenched and folded wings from broken natal husks. They hatched, they spread and dried their wings, they took flight, and moved toward the vein.
Around halfway up its length, at perhaps half a dozen different places, the vein had been clamped by vast brazen collars, each of which bristled with steel couplings. It was upon these couplings that the winged Regatherers converged. Each one in its turn sank its caudal barb into one of those sockets and waited as its hive-mates worked spigot-wheels, which diverted into its tail-bulb its alloted iota of the Master's blood. Not infrequently, the strength of the current they tapped mocked their precautions. Spigot-wheels would stick, and helplessly coupled individuals would claw the air with panicked legs, their bodies swiftly burgeoning, then exploding in a fine, red mist. Then every nearby worker flew crazily, lapping the bright spray from the air till others succeeded in reclosing the spigot, whereat—unfalteringly—another would take its turn at the coupling.
They had emerged only to drink in this manner, and, having drunk, each immediately set about the work of its return. Each engorged Regatherer began a steady, hovering descent toward the war-strewn flesh that floored this cosmos. Each settled on this floor in the zone closest to the heart and clearest of debris. Settling on this floor, each sank its jaws into its master's skin and chewed until its head was wholly buried. While its front end ate this anchorage, each monster's stern half compacted—its legs and wings folding up tight—and started a rhythmic convulsion. Swiftly, the folded body began to split. Now it was a husk. A great, shining maggot's body moulted from the husk and started worming its way underground after its sunken head. The obscene, ribbed barrel of its new body was little more than a cistern, a tiny-legged tank wherein to convey another jot of the tyrant back to his dominions. And though these grubs ate their way all the way under with truly sickening speed, their tapered body-casks did protrude defenseless for several minutes during the process of their descent. We came to this realization at about the same time.
"Hmph," Barnar muttered. "Notice the next-highest ones waiting their turn to settle down and moult—they hover on guard over their siblings while they wait for them to dig in."
"Yes. Still, it has that first-glance look of feasibility. If the boy takes note of it, his eagerness will see it as a sure-fire tactic."
Barnar nodded, somewhat disinterestedly. It was the spectacle as a whole that absorbed him. "Such a labor," he mused. "Since the Red Millennium, did he say?"
"Yes."
"Did they ever sing you that cradle song when you were small?" Amazingly, he began to sing me the song he meant. His frayed basso rendered the simple tune with surprising sweetness:
". . . And that Neverquit bird, though small
and weak,
Lights again and again on Neverend Strand.
And he packs into his narrow beak
One little bite of that infinite beach,
And recrosses the sea till he reaches that land—
That land of his own he is building to stand
In a sun-blessed place beyond harm's reach,
That land he is making with stolen sand
And a will that will not be denied what it seeks."
It made me smile to hear those lines, which I knew, sung here by my friend as we hung there dreamingly, hugging the great sloth's spike-tip, looking rather like sloths ourselves, I suppose.
"And when they've regathered his essence," I asked, "when the Elixir's been brought below again? Though Sazmazm's spirit
might live in the brew, what freedom will the titan have if he must lie in a vat, a bottled ocean of bodiless soul?"
"You know, I asked Gildmirth that question. He didn't have an answer. He'd heard a rumor that the giant's slave-hosts have long been at work building him a second body out of stone."
I shuddered, trying to throw off the stupor that lay on me. "Come on," I said. "We have to try. The effort is utterly pointless, but inaction seems an even greater agony."
We shinned down the spike, and repeated the verminous traversal of our dead host. We reached the major claw of its left hind paw and, with a leap, departed from its rankly meadowed slopes. We jogged toward the naked mountain, carrying our shields and spears at half-ready, watching for ambuscades—for we had noted that many of the giant dead surrounding us had been quarried for their meat. The carrion-appetites that haunt all battlefields most surely haunted this one. Mechanically we jogged toward the moulting grounds, near the heart of the thunder that filled this morgue-ish world.
And we had almost reached it when we came across a corpse worth pausing over. It was one of the stingered, stilt-legged giants, a dead Regatherer. A toppled siege-tower had, in falling, sunk a spur of its broken beamwork through the middle segment of the creature, which was the segment its legs and wings were jointed to. The spur had pierced it laterally so that the corpse lay on its side. It was huge partly in its great lengths of leg and wing, for its slim-built, tri-part body had perhaps somewhat less overall bulk to it that the hull of a mid-sized merchantman.
We took our lances to it, climbing to prod its body for vulnerable features. It was everywhere as supple as leather and as unpierceable as steel. Finally we stood near its head, looking up bitterly at its face. I saw in the black moons of its eye-bulbs, in the cruel barbs and shears of its mouth-tool, a pitiless amusement with our littleness, our urgent, dwarfish ambition to do its demon hugeness harm. In my gloom and mortification I contrived, unthinkingly, an excuse to hurl my hate against the thing.