by Michael Shea
His jaws gnawed frantically at the sky, trying to gobble down air, and in the intermittent floods of sunlight we saw our craft crumpling in the black velvet fist of his convulsing throat, the timbers cracking with a noise like fire, as the purple blood welled out of the huge, spar-torn tongue and drenched us to the knees.
The glabrous—desperately climbing toward the air he could not have—heaved himself half ashore, and as his struggles slowed toward extinction, hammered himself against the steep, rocky slope of the island. We were so tumbled about by these great concussions we could not leap out of his jaws when he opened them. Then his jaws fell slack, and crashed shut in death.
In the utter darkness, we could hear the beast's mouth still bleeding from a dozen wounds. Back in the utterly crushed stern of the vessel, muffled human death-moans briefly droned, and were snuffed out. Still the hot velvet blood inched up around our legs, with a trickling noise in the perfect blackness.
Not quite perfect. A feeble star of light grew slowly visible. We slogged groping through the sticky, inching rise of blood. Already the air felt hot and dead and hard to breathe. We groped our way out along the bowsprit—foul, slippery work—as good as blind. Our hands encountered the huge mossy teeth of the glabrous, clamped not quite shut on the bowsprit's stump. "I think we might just worm through," I said. "Then we might just hack our way out through one of the lips."
The cusps of the teeth were like oiled boulders reeking of carrion. We bruised our ribs wriggling between them. Had the splintered bowsprit slipped out, the simple weight of the teeth falling shut would have crushed us flat.
Our emergence from between the teeth was a head-first drop into the blood pooled within the glabrous' lips, whose rubbery meat was teetery footing for us once we stood up, calf-deep in the blood. It would have taken a titanoplod and a block-and-tackle to hoist those lips apart. The bowsprit's tip had been pinched between them and a faint ray of light leaked in along the spar. "At least it gives us an aiming point," Barnar muttered. "I'll go first. Stay clear."
And I heard him go to work with Old Biter, his broad-axe, on the lip-meat. "Ugh!" he grunted, hewing. "Loathsome! Slimy! Here's a gobbet free. Huh! . . . Huh! . . ."
"How he bleeds! I'm thigh-deep in blood! Here, give me a turn now—you sound winded. Set my hand to the spar . . . got it! Now Biter's haft . . . got it! Stand clear. Huh! . . . Huh! . . ."
I couldn't match stroke to stroke in the dark. I had to hew blindly, then grapple the wet meat for what chunks I could pull free. Barnar mused moodily as I worked.
"You know, Nifft, dying would be bad enough, of course. But by the Crack it would gall me, after all we've done, all we've seen, to die on this . . . demeaning, pedestrian errand of ours!"
"I have to . . . agree. . . . To think of them . . . talking . . . back in the Tankard and Titbit. . . ."
"Or over mulled tartle at the Thirsty Knave. `Did you hear about poor Barnar and Nifft, then? Dead and done for at last, it seems! What were they about, you ask? Well, it appears the poor lackwits were northbound to Kairnheim to work in a sap mine!' `What? Work in a sap mine you say? Well then, their best years were already past, it would seem!' "
"Peace, Barnar . . . you're using up . . . air . . ."
"Here, give me old Biter back—I'll do a turn."
The hot blood was up to our waists, and the unbreathable darkness choked out all conversation quick enough. We hewed the invisible meat, groping the sticky wedges from the wound. Toward the end we were gasping stertorously, and it seemed we dug ourselves a bottomless grave of flesh. Then I struck that blessed stroke that bit out a little wedge of sunlight, which bled a delicious trickle of salt sea air into our nostrils.
With light and air, our butchery progressed apace, and at length we had a carnal tunnel we could wriggle through. Reborn beneath the sky, we lay exulting, and roared with laughter to look on one another, both of us slick and sticky as fresh turds.
But as we bathed and washed our gear in the sea, and reclothed ourselves, we came to feel sobered, reduced. We had emerged from that monstrous sepulchre with our arms, the slender contents of our moneybelts, and nothing else. The joy of escape soon yielded to a sense of ill-luck, and a nagging conviction that we were entirely too impoverished for men of our years and expertise. A dozen men lay dead in the glabrous' throat, yet somehow our destitution loomed larger to us than our miraculous evasion of their tomb. There is a tide in men's spirits, and ours had perhaps been at ebb for some time now, even before our half-hearted undertaking to rescue nephew Costard's mine.
Glumly we trekked along the shore, and reached Dolmen Harbor by mid-afternoon. This was like most Angalheim ports, less an actual bay than a smallish cleft in a steep shoreline. Most observers agree that the whole Angalheim chain is just a slowly drowning mountain range, and its harbors thus merely embayments in the flanks of the sinking peaks. Above the docks, most of the harbor's buildings and houses climbed on stilts up the slopes.
We found a mead house and bespoke an ample jar of the fiery-sweet potation that the Angalheims are famed for over half the world. Still, our hearts remained gloomy as we drank. The mead house itself was somber—a former clan hall from the islands' piratical days, long since converted to its present commercial use, but proud of its smoke-blackened roofbeam and the crude traditional weaponry racked on its wall; the battered bucklers and unwieldy falchions of a privateering era. Throughout the Angalheims folk hold a similar reverence for a squalid and villainous past.
Mead has of course long replaced piracy as these islands' livelihood, and from the windows we could view the colorful bustle of a vigorous economy. Men bearing panniers of bright seaweed, and plod-trains laden with the same briny cargo, streamed upland. This seaweed was mulch for the flower-pastures on the island's heights, where the sonorous blizzards of bees hummed in the pursuit of their golden harvest. The harbor thronged with island trade; Kairnish vessels laden with hides, salt meat and sap waited at anchor for dock-space, while Angalheim scows scudded outbound riding low with the weight of mead casks. Out in the open channel beyond the harbor, the wind curdled the jade water with veins of foam. There, where the big shoals of 'silvers ran, rode the fishing ketches all at their stern anchors, and we could see tiny men on them toiling at windlasses, and gaffing aboard nets bulging with glittery catch.
But this loveliness and liveliness of sea and sky failed to cheer us. We felt the dejection of men who are imperfectly employed, whose work-in-hand is mediocre and indifferently paid. In point of fact we had only a general notion of the specific duties of a tapper in a sap mine. But it was paid labor, drudgery, and that was enough to put this touch of autumn in our hearts, to make us brood on the long years behind us, and make us ask ourselves where our lives were drifting to.
Barnar downed a third jack of mead, and sighed. His melodious baritone broke a long silence. "It's not so much the toil of it," he mused. "It's the . . . ignominy."
"Why mince words? Mining is wage-work, and from this your soul recoils instinctively, of course! All we can do is try to fix our minds on the charity of it. Your nephew's in a pickle, and his mother would never forgive you for failing to help him."
"Do I rightly infer that you two gentlemen are discussing tapping?"
A sleek-fed man, wearing a green velvet fez, had turned on the bench and, leaning near us, presented us with this query, wearing a smile of prying amity.
"I will be frank," I told him, straining for civility. "My friend and I are far from keen that you should infer anything, rightly or wrongly, from what we are discussing."
"Oh!" He gaped his concern. "Do I intrude? Forgive me!" And he turned back on the bench.
"Anhyldia would break my neck," Barnar resumed, answering my previous remark, "if I didn't help Costard. That's the long and short of it."
I nodded. "And you are wise to remember that she is quite strong enough to do so." Barnar's formidable elder sister had, about two years before this, settled her sap mine on her son and gone off a-pirating.
"But what I keep sticking on," Barnar said, "is that poor Costard is such a dolt! I say it utterly without bias against the boy! He has a sweet, affectionate vein towards his kin, but he is such a petulant young jackass!"
"Yes," I sighed. "At least he'll be topside while we're underground. And mark you that after all, the wage is not stingy. You could do worse a-thieving, half the time."
Barnar dismissed this feeble solace with the snort it merited. "Of course! The pay is more than many a prize I've worked twice as hard to steal, but at least I was thieving, not grubbing!"
"Would it be overbold of me"—again the green velvet fez bobbed just starboard of my shoulder—"to suggest that, if it's a tapper's wage you speak of, I know a way to quintuple even that handsome sum, and at cost to yourselves of no more effort than a brief detour taken through the tunnels of the nest."
Barnar held up one hand in a gesture of polite prevention. Swordwelts veined my old friend's knuckles, rather in the way that veins of smooth quartz sometimes run through rough granite. "You have so lavished your attention on us, sir, that I cannot tamely bear any further generosity. Please. Attend to something other than ourselves!"
The stranger's fezzed brow crumpled with apology. "I have, in my elan to serve, offended you! Accept my most abject apologies!" He turned away again.
"This minework is not just undignified, it's clownish!" Barnar at length resumed. "To be stripped and painted! Orange! And then tapping itself is . . . grotesque! Inherently ludicrous! And we'll be novices, prone to all the humiliating missteps that entails."
"There's more to it of course, eh?" I nudged him gently. "I know at least that I for one just plain don't like being deep underground in Kairnheim—in any part of it."1
Barnar gave that a bit of a sigh. "Sure enough. The flesh of me recoils, right to the bone. At least on this venture, we may count on coming nowhere near the subworld; the only demons we meet will be those the Behemoths bring into the Nest as food."
"Forgive me a thousand times, but I cannot contain an impulse of hospitality toward yourselves!" Here was green fez yet again bobbing near us. "Let me show you my hives!"
We gaped at him for a heartbeat, aghast. "My beehives!" he added. He had a chinlet of black beard—it was barbered close and neat as a tatoo. His plump face crinkled with hostly fervor.
"Sir," I told him, "you bring me to the point of speaking bluntly. We must know why you focus your regard with such tenacity upon ourselves in particular."
"The fairest of questions! Apart from what I could not help but overhear—that you seem to be bound to work in a sap mine—I am motivated by a certain look of competence you have about you. You yourself, Sir, for one, so long and limber yet with a lizardly muscularity (if I may say so), and you Sir, of bulky sinew, with the mass to exert prodigious leverage. The two of you have, as well—how shall I put it? . . . an air of enterprise. You strike me as thoughtful, original spirits, men who can see the world from many points of view. Please, gentlemen. May I have the honor of showing you my flower pastures? And of giving you to sample the comb of my Centennial Hive?"
It seemed an acquaintance with the man was not to be avoided. He introduced himself as Ha'Awley Bunt, a mead magnate with his own hiveries, cooperage and casking plants, and trading fleet; owner also of seven hundred hectares of Scarlet Croppies, Devils-garters and Umber Dandinnias right here on Dolmen. Owner too of the almost ten thousand hives these flower pastures sustained. We decided that, at the least, the man would divert and inform us, whether or not his proposal proved profitable.
His open carriage, hitched to three matched skinnies, stood outside the mead house. We all got in, he flicked the reins, and we sped up the switchbacks of the upland highway toward the flower pastures on the island's crest.
Bunt had an amiable and tactful way about him, explaining that when he made his proposition to us, he must in the same breath disclose a lucrative secret. To satisfy himself that this chancy disclosure was warranted, Bunt begged us to indicate, at least, our destination and projected doings. Accordingly, we conceded that we might indeed be going into the Broken Axle Mountains, and there taking work as tappers in a sap mine. The Broken Axles had in fact just then become visible as we climbed the island's heights in the wind-scoured afternoon: beyond a blue reach of sea to our north, on the coast of the Kairnish continent's southern rim, the Broken Axles were a pale pimpling of low peaks.
"You should know one thing more, Hive-Master Bunt," Barnar told him, "before disclosing your business to us. It is our policy, Nifft's and mine, never to undertake ventures proposed by strangers without a substantial surety in raw gold or specie, on account of services to be rendered."
"This is highly sensible, and acceptable!" Bunt enthused. Then he dropped the business for the moment, and fell to suavely annotating the windswept, scalp-tingling beauty of the prospect that our ascent was opening out below us. The northerlies polished the sky like glass, and its blue was an infinite flame. South of us the other Angalheims rode formationed on the blazing sea, their surf-collared crests like a great docking fleet, cruising in to moor in the mothering underbelly of the Kairnish continent. The windlicked channels, tufted with blown spray, were molten silver rouged with copper fire. Barnar and I traded looks. We were feeling some zest for life return to us. Raw gold (or specie), in substantial excess of the stipend we had but lately, forlornly contemplated, now glowed before us, above a changed horizon.
Dolmen's uplands are all gorgeously crested and pelted by flower pastures. How they ravished the eyes in the slant gold light, those meadowed acres of silken wildfire! Bunt drew a gauzy curtain round our carriage now. The bees thronged every inch of air, hanging stubborn in the wind's sweep, dropping to the blossoms like a steady rain, a rain that hovered, fell, rose, and fell again.
As we toured the pastures, the last of our gloom fell from us like a moulting. Smooth paths brought us to breathtaking vistas, or sank us deep in meadows where we spun along, walled in by choirs of living rainbow, all the colors uniting with the scents, and with the bees' sweet, sonorous hymn, to ravish our senses. Many other tourists were likewise being carriaged through the aromatic maze in similar vehicles bearing the crest of the Bunt Hivery, but the pathways were so cunningly designed and artfully laid out that we glimpsed these fellow travellers but rarely, and felt we had the flowerfields for our own.
"My Centennial Hive is unrivalled here on Dolmen," Bunt told us. "It is equalled only by five or six others throughout the Astrygals. My Centennial Hive shelters seven dynasties of queens, the youngest of them a hundred generations long."
Younger hives, we had seen, were housed in polyhedral wooden cabins, their panels of dark, oiled harmony wood all gorgeously carved with bas-relief motifs of comb and bee and blossom. These structures could be walked through, and were labyrinthed inside with carpentered frames all solid with comb and densely furred with working bees.
The Centennial Hive was thrice the size of any of these others. Inside, we found that skylights of stained glass admitted a murky amber light, allowing maintenance and cultivation. Gossamer netting formed diaphanous tunnels for us to move through in the sweet-scented gloom and deafening primeval song of sleeplessly vibrating wings.
"Hadra-Archonia the Sixteenth," quavered Bunt, drawing us to a deeply grottoed vault. We stood beholding her. This queen was a titan of her race; her restless, gravid abdomen alone was larger than my hand. Her gaster, ever-probing, ceaselessly planted the seeds of workers in new-made cells. Her attendants were not a tenth her size. They flanked her like busy sycophants, seeming to kiss her flanks, speaking to her with touches of jaw and antenna, ceaselessly coming and going, always replaced, worshipping at her side in clusters constantly renewed.
If Bunt had meant some disclosure to accompany this portentous viewing, he changed his mind. He wore an air of inward debate as we drove back to the Hivery. There we retired to the comfortable armchairs of his private office, and he served us some very impressive mead. He drank with us,
and sighed.
"Gentlemen. There is much I might explain, but I feel a reticence I cannot overcome. Will you forgive a vagueness that might be mistaken for distrust? Merely specifying what I seek puts my purpose within the reach of inference to any thoughful hearer.
"Well. Here, then, is my proposition. Your work as tappers will put you in the larval nurseries of a Behemoth nest. In your work's normal course you would find no cause to venture from that nursery chamber.
"But it is my hope that you will agree, with the inducement of three hundredweight apiece of gold specie, to venture at large through the nest till you have found the Royal Brood Chamber, where the Queen lies a-laying her eggs, and there to retrieve some twenty gills or so of a certain ichor which the Queen exudes from her body, and bring it up to me when your tapping tour is done."
Barnar and I exchanged a look. We both did an almost superhuman job of concealing our astonishment and delight at the enormous sum that Bunt had just named. "Let us banish ambiguity completely," I said. "You are telling us you will pay us three hundredweight of gold before we leave here, a hundred and fifty apiece, in exchange for our undertaking to attempt your task? That this three hundred will be inalienably ours for the attempt alone, and that a like sum will be paid us if we succeed?"
Bunt's hesitation was quickly overcome; we saw only the briefest quiver of a merchant's haggling reflex. "Just so!"
With some further struggle, Barnar and I hid our elation. That very morning we had been but a single swallow from an agonizing metamorphosis into glabrine fecal matter. And this afternoon, we were already rich.
II
Oh let us bathe, and put away dissension—
Let's with lissom ladies of the Bath
Explore what joys the golden Present hath,