by Michael Shea
"We grant we are not unmindful of this perspective on the matter," Barnar answered him. "But Nifft and I, you see, are simply overborn by a native loathing for yourself—your very race of being! For instance, by way of illustration, I would venture to hazard that the cycle of your life thus far has been one unbroken sequence of the most appalling parasitisms and loathsome plunderings of other beings. Please correct me if I err in this."
"Well," said the demon impatiently, "how else would I have reached adulthood? The larval forms which bore my spores across the desert, these tunnel to the forebrains of their hosts, and their little eyes feast as directly upon their hosts' nightmares as do their little jaws upon their hosts' cerebral tissues. Then too, my cercarial shapes for aqueous transmission strip the host's spinal cord as they ascend it. The predators that devour the emptied husks of these hosts engulf as well my nymphal instars, and these eat those second hosts as well quite hollow, before we fly out like thistledown across the wind and light upon our rooting places.
"But what of this, gentlemen? Surely all things that live and breathe are entirely fed, shod, garbed and girded with the bodies of their many victims? What being lives, down here or in the over-world, whose blood is not the stolen sap of other lives?"
"I grant," I said, "you say no more than truth. But, you see, you offer mere reason to confute in us what is not reasoned, but is a brute, unarguable revulsion. And yet, do you know . . . ? It now occurs to me that this sullen and retrograde emotion of ours, though it can't be argued with, might be appeased, might be bought off so to speak, if you could think of some further service you could do that would increase our profit from our sojourn here below."
This produced, at last, a silence in my subworld side-piece. And indeed it scarcely needed further talk to assure us Ostrogall's guidance would be ours on our return to the Royal Chamber's awesome precincts.
Now the terrain rose towards the mountain roots. We turned to take our last look at 'Omphalodon's Talons. Even thus distant from them now we could see they swarmed, wholly furred with Foragers. The great claws struggled with awesome and undiminished vigor—clenching again and again, crushing hundreds with each grip then flailing side to side, smiting the plain with distant thunder. But though whole armies of Behemoths died at each stroke, their convergent tides neither slackened nor diminished.
"Have the Foragers ever before brought Tertiary meat back to the Nests?" Ha'Awley Bunt mused below us, with a note of something like fear. No one had an answer.
We turned a parting look to 'Omphalodon's Eye. Its ragged black pupillary hole seemed contracted in agony, while its glossy orb bled even more copious crimson rivulets across the seamed ceiling vault, and down to the stream-netted plains.
Then we turned our flight up to the mountain wall, and began to swim through the air with a will, gathering speed for the perils of re-entry.
XIX
What say we sally forth once more,
A-scouring the subworld floor?
What say we cast our nets again,
And bring more shining riches in?
OUR LARVAL CHAMBER—how homelike it seemed to us now, after the greater terrors we had tasted! Barnar saw to our companions' entertainment in the operations nook while I discreetly added our re-collected gems to our cache. We then wasted no time in coming to business.
"Here's how we reckon relative values," Barnar told them cheerily. "For two amphorae of giants' pap, we will require no more than the stipulated three hundredweight of gold specie, in consideration of your misfortunes with the Unguent. In addition, however, it seems only fair to require an annual tithe, in perpetuity, of all your earnings from the pap's use."
I think they literally gasped in unison, so equal were they in the little arts of haggling. We did not budge of course, and of course, ultimately, they had to agree. Nonetheless, they really made quite a convincing display of outrage and vexation, and, for all that we knew it was mere art, we could not help but find these remonstrations a bit offensive.
Their reckonings among themselves were fierce. We courteously abstained from eavesdropping, but it was clear from his half-muffled bleatings that the cashless Costard was inexorably squeezed down to yielding outright what we knew to be his only asset, the mine itself, in consideration of the Bunts' providing his share of the specie, which we, of course, required in advance.
It happened that the Bunts' Hivery had many casks of mead warehoused in Dry Hole, and these could be liquidated within a day or so. The requisite sum might reach our hands in a little more than three days, " . . . if we ride without sleeping," Sha'Urley concluded, rather stiffly.
"That is highly convenient," I told her warmly. "We don't mind waiting a bit for you to muster the gold, but we don't want to cool our heels down here any longer than necessary." In fact we had a further, far more lucrative enterprise in mind, and this was the real reason for our impatience.
As Costard and Ha'Awley Bunt trudged toward the gangway bucket, I gave Sha'Urley a tender little signal to draw her a bit aside. Her face inscrutable, she came a few paces away with me. "Oh beauteous Dolmenite," I smiled to her, "is it overbold of me to remember the joys we took together here, not so long ago?"
She gave me an indefinable look of shock, and stared a moment, emotion struggling in her face. Then she laughed—a little stridently, I thought.
"Dear Miser," she grinned at me. "Can you actually suggest lovemaking? Let me try somehow to express to you how little I am inclined to make love to you. Let me describe what I would rather do to you! Not beat your head repeatedly with a knout or cudgel, no—not actually crack your skull, I suppose. But let's say, tie you on your knees, and then take a good two-handed grip on the tail of a large, dead fish—a fish some two or three days dead—and then spend a leisurely half hour or so smacking your long, broken-nosed, greedy face with it."
"Forgive me. I've chosen an unpropitious moment."
"Come, please, and help me get Niasynth into the bucket with us. We'll be back with your gold as fast as we can."
Niasynth, the pallid sojourner-below, sat upright now, and her eyes saw us more steadily, less often lost in inner vistas of nightmare. Looking in Barnar's eyes, and mine, she said, her voice shaking slightly, "I am going to see the sunlight again." She gave us her hands. Cold and infinitely frail they seemed, those sun-starved hands of hers!
When they were gone, I wished I had gone with them. How I craved the sunlight, longed for the wide cerulean sky and its sweet, cool breath against my face, for the night's jewelled black, sailed by a slim-hulled moon. . . . But Barnar and I were agreed that our attunement to these subterranean realms was a precious asset, and that it would be folly to interrupt our acclimation here with a heady but disorienting sojourn in the upper world.
"Now for a good long sleep," Barnar enthused, readying his hammock.
"Yes, " I said, "I suppose I should feed the rest of this demon back to the grub I took it from."
Ostrogall, in what for him amounted to a transport of rage, had been absolutely silent since our return to the Nest. We had placed his stump in his usual nook where he could look about him, and he had sat there dead mute from that moment.
"You might as well," Barnar boredly assented. "Mind your hands putting him in—you might get them bitten off."
"Well bethought. I know! If I skewer him on a spearpoint, I can poke him in from a safe distance."
"Excellent idea."
I made a business of choosing my longest spear. Then I tucked Ostrogall in his holster on my hip, took up the spear, and strolled off down the nearest lane-way amid the larval shoals. At last Ostrogall broke the silence.
"In mere point of information, I must remind you that if you . . . consummate that larval meal you interrupted, then I will emerge in the form of minute eye-spores mingled with the grub's feces. I can then exist as an exiguous brood infection till some adult, or series of them, tracks me out again to the subworld's floor. In no more than a century I will be growing on the plain once mor
e, greeting the Eye of 'Omphalodon with my gladsome gazes!"
"I rejoice for you!" I answered. "In your present extremity, what comfort you must draw from this reflection!"
A pause. "I will not conceal," Ostrogall sighed, "that I'd prefer a quicker restoration of my interrupted life, and one that did not involve the workings of those loathsome larval jaws upon what remains of my person."
"Do you know, Ostrogall, your saying this is most opportune! Barnar and I were only lately musing how your expertise in matters Behemothine might be of use to us in our upcoming venture. And we even agreed we could offer you your restoration to your native soil as recompense for this service. What stymied us was our fear that you would now mistrust our offer, and refuse it!"
"Mistrust?" fluted Ostrogall, his voice quavering as he strove for a honied tone. "Mistrust your irreproachable selves? I won't deny I hesitate. I won't deny your . . . recent decisions give me pause. But how could I mistrust such paragons of rectitude, such patterns, such epitomes as your peerless selves? Still, may I humbly hope that you really will re-plant me, if I aid you in the, ah, milking of the Royal Mother?"
"Ostrogall, if you aid our enrichment in this next foray, there is nothing on earth or under it so firm as our intention of re-planting you!"
Barnar and I slept—how can we say how long, beyond that it was long enough to purge the poisons of fatigue from our muscles and minds? When we woke, and ravenously breakfasted, we found our thoughts not so much engaged by the milking of the Queen, as by that even more lucrative project we contemplated—dared to contemplate!—after the milking was accomplished. To follow the Young Queen, and her conquering army, across the hell-floor. The question that consumed us was, in essence: how much wealth could we fly with? At the outset, we burned with a delirium of possibility, for we had seen the Unguent put Foragers aloft.
So we looped some line around the tapered ends of a grub, and strove to fly with it. We could not budge it from the ground. At this juncture Ostrogall warbled from his perch, "It is said that the Unguent allows the flier to carry ten times his own weight into the air, and that, be he light or heavy, this is the limit of what he may bring aloft with him. I forebore to speak before you'd tried it for yourselves, feeling sure you'd insist on a personal test."
It galled us to find our hunger for gain thus trammelled, but we made our peace with it at length, reflecting that with selectivity, more than a ton apiece of subworld plunder could amount to a wealth vast by any standards, especially when added to what we had already won.
But any thought of what this wealth might purchase led us straight to that gulf that yawned between us. Some airborne exploration of the Nest seemed preferable to reopening this controversy.
Hovering ghosts, we haunted our way through another nursery, then through several Incubaria, where lay pearly troves of eggs, which Nurses incessantly turned, and groomed of parasites. The hatchlings from these eggs, smaller versions of the grubs we knew, were fed up to size with lumps of a pale food of cheesy softness. We tracked a Nurse to the source of this substance—chambers full of a fungus unlike the growth which gave the Nest its light. This stenchful mold sprouted obese fruiting bodies like giant, hairy strawberries, which, macerated in the Nurses' jaws, became the hatchlings' nutriment. This fungus crop grew from a substrate of demon mulch, a coarse mash of chopped bodies, of bone and limb, talon, wing, fin, skull and thorny muzzle (some of it still a-twitch and astir with stubborn vitality) which melted slowly, consumed in the slow fire of the fungal growth. Here and there melting mouths still muttered, and fragmented visages alertly flashed at us their shards of eyes. . . .
"This fungus perhaps provides a kind of predigested demon pabulum," Barnar hazarded.
"Can we wonder," I answered, "that a diet of demon meat must be eased up to?"
We were chary of our Unguent, or we might have pushed exploration further. We found besides that, once returned to our operations nook, we were more than ready for more sleep, such had been our recent exertions. And when we awoke for the second time, it was to the voices of our returning partners.
XX
Airily wander the Royal terrain
Where profit and pasture so vastly abound.
But warily plunder when findest thy Gain,
For the taking may break thee, and drag thee
a-down!
THE QUEEN'S abdominal surface was oceanic; between the broad, glossy undulations of her major ribs were endless local texturings of the mottled hide, lesser vales and knolls, troughs and tumuli. We flew, and viewed the wonder of Her planetary scope.
The abdomen's harlequin puzzle of black and white was—as we had been prepared to find it—alive with parasites and hyperparasites. "There now!" warned Barnar. Side-stroking through the air, we veered leftward above a little valley-bottom whence, with a glittery ripple of their jointed backs, a host of hound-sized crustaceiods arose on glassy wings. These airborne lice moved in a low, mazy cloud to a neighboring swale, where we knew they would resettle, for they grazed on the sebaceous oils the Queen's back sweated out, and these lay thickest on low ground. Their flight had the slow-rolling movement you see in flocks of starlls when they're gleaning the winter fields, blowing like gusted leaves from plot to plot.
The spectacle did not lack a certain ghastly charm. Indeed, it was not these creatures themselves we avoided, but rather their larger, grimmer predators, a triad of which now surged up in pursuit of the flock. Of reptilian make, with jaws extravagantly fanged, these hunters dined on the wing, and when they struck their flustered quarry, fragments of the sundered lice—body plates and bleeding legs—drizzled down.
We were learning as we went. Not many moments before, flying incautiously close to a flock of these lice, we'd been attacked by one of these same predators. I lopped off half the brute's jaw for him with Ready Jack, and Barnar clove his pate with Biter, but we were both set spinning and whirling by the violence of our own battle-blows. We tumbled so helplessly at first it seemed our weapons must fly from our hands, and Ostrogall wailed with terror from his precarious holster on my hip.
So we paused aloft to practice executing sword and axe strokes. We learned that any blow required a simultaneous countering, cancelling blow from an opposite limb, otherwise we were left spinning, or see-sawing madly, like skiffs in jumpy water. Shortly, we caught the trick of standing on the air, and pulling up with our legs as we down-swept with our weapons; this gestural symmetry let us chop hard, yet be left standing steady enough on the air.
We cruised, wary, taking a look about the Queenly terrain and consciously putting off—perhaps even pointedly putting off—our task at hand.
In some measure we were still peeved (if the whole truth be told) at the Bunts' poor performance of their bond. For they'd come back down with only two and a half hundredweight of gold, alleging that they'd found mead prices depressed in Dry Hole by a momentary glut of the beverage from other Angalheim hiveries, and in consequence they had liquidated their warehoused stock at a loss.
"Surely this won't be a sticking point, gentlemen?" Bunt blandly urged. "The lacking sum, which you may confidently expect within a week, is but a scant sixth of what is owed—a paltry fraction."
"This proportional way of viewing the deficit," I replied, "gravely misses the point." I was finding it hard to keep a civil tone. "A fiftyweight of gold is first to be considered in its absolute value, in concrete terms. With a fiftyweight, for instance, a man might hire a quartet of Stregan gaunts for siegework on the Cidril steppes."
There was a pause. Bunt seemed to find the example baffling.
"Or the same fiftyweight might," Barnar put in with equal heat, and an oblique glance at me, "buy the service of a brace of bog giants for a four-month, to manage the shackles of a gryph-gryph, and see the monster has water to sustain its micturations."
This left them all staring. Sha'Urley, recovering first, reasoned, "Surely the lacking sum is as secure in our temporary keeping, as it would be if added to your cache her
e with what must be another half a ton of gems and specie—safely buried no doubt, but nevertheless reposing in a place where restless giants continually dig the earth. Meanwhile, we may be infallibly trusted for payment. I have rightly called your demands exorbitant. I have never said Bunt Hivery cannot meet them, and handily. We are even extending your nephew a twentyweight or so to finance the venture he envisions with his giants' pap."
"And what might that venture be, Nephew?" Barnar asked.
"Alas," snapped tight-lipped Costard, "the harshly mercenary mood you've shown me warns me to guard my secret."
I had a qualm, just then, thinking that if giants' pap proved potent in upper-world applications, then selling Costard some of it was reckless folly. It was at the very least a serious disservice to the young man's immediate neighbors. I then dismissed the notion. Thus lightly, sometimes, does prescience touch our thoughts with her wing-tips.
But it wasn't just the fiftyweight that peeved me as we cruised above the Queen's abdomen, far inland from her busy flanks where the pap pores were. "It galls me! I cannot shake it!" I burst out at Barnar. "Look how we fly. See what effortless access we now have to these wonders, and to wealth that outgoes computation! And in the midst of it, in the very blaze of all this fortune, all this glory, I cannot rejoice! I am tormented by bitterness, when my heart might otherwise be lifted on the wings of joy! And why? Because your damned, ox-necked stubbornness, Barnar! You won't even grant two months—three at the very most; three paltry months! Your sullen, bovine, belligerent balkiness will not grant even so tiny a delay of your seed-whacking, tree-tilling obsession! How can you be so selfish!? Only think what your madness defers! Pelfer's Buskins! His Cowl!"