The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  And her freighter it was, or half hers. She was cargomaster—boss of the freight and its handling, coequal, in Bunt's commercial fleet, to the vessel's captain. This was Radula, a nervous, friendly man with an unusually fair skin that ran heavily to freckles and sunburn, unfortunate skin for a sea-captain. He greeted me very civilly and then told Higaia, an odd quaver to his voice, "I'd like to be standing well away within the hour, my dear. Can you manage it?"

  "With ease, Raddy, with ease. I'm going down now to see the comb secured. Come on, Nifft. Are you heading south? We're bound for the Minuskulons."

  "As are we, and beyond them to the Ephesions. There rides our little carrack Bounty, yonder. We're just putting in to collect a fiftyweight Ha'Awley owes us."

  Higaia paused at the hatchway, looked at Bounty, and then looked at me rather sharply, before she led me down the ladder into the hold. Its gloom was fragrant; aromas of brine and sweetness warred. Her voice echoed below me, "A fiftyweight's no trifle, I suppose . . . but you'll have to go up to the meadows for it."

  "Do you imply that this is difficult, or dangerous?"

  "Let me show you something."

  Leading me over to the canvas balke that had just been laid upon a dozen like it—and the whole hold was stowed full of the same—she plucked from her belt a dagger honed sharp as a razor, and, crosswise down one corner of the packet, she slashed out a narrow flap perhaps a cubit long. Within it was honeycomb, half a cubit thick. Each cell could have coffered the head of a man. In the shadowy hold, the sheen of the wax dimly glimmered, and the liquid gold within it looked dark as amber. It made the scalp prickle with that flush of danger riches give you.

  "It was for harvesting this," Higaia told me, "that I got my promotion from the bath-house. For you see, when they were producing comb on this scale, though huge, the bees could still fly, at least for short stretches, and they had begun attacking men and women. Bunt suddenly needed men-at-arms. For thrice the pay of the baths you may be sure I made my skills known to him."

  "I knew you were a dancer. I don't wonder you're mistress of the dance of arms," I answered, distracted. I was picturing this monstrosity that had come to pass in Bunt's flower fields. "These giant bees," I prompted, "defended their comb, then, from the harvesting?"

  "No. Their attacking seemed spontaneous, a kind of hunting. They had a week before devoured the last of the flowers right down to the roots—all the meadows are bald dirt now. The bees were evidently trying to eat their victims, but naturally their mouthparts were wrong for the work. It is of course as fatal to suffer an attempted eating, by an insect of that size, as it is to be eaten."

  "You distinguished yourself, plainly, to be given this command."

  "I did indeed, my dear. I'm quite an adept of both axe and cudgel, and though this was shield-and-torch work, I distinguished myself in many a battle. It has been Bunt's salvation that, with a bit of pitch flung on them, these monstrosities will burn so readily. When the pressure of battle declined, he was quick to redeploy us for shipping the harvest out—he needs to recoup the hemorrhage of gold he has suffered from this nightmarish metamorphosis."

  "The battle has slackened off, then?"

  "Not exactly. Rather, the defense needs somewhat fewer troops, for when the newer, bigger generation emerged from the hives—which are now great dug caverns in the earth, under where the hive houses stood before—when this flightless generation emerged from the earth, we found they could be barricaded; dammed up in their sluggish, lurching onslaught, and burnt by the score. Still, they come out of the earth in numbers that our decimations barely match."

  "To what dimensions have they now attained?" I asked, a touch of frost upon my spine.

  "Big as titanoplods, or near. Their legs do them little good anymore, but they have a slow, blundering power, lurching like grubs. At favorable points of terrain, our troops have grown adept at throwing up collapsible barricades across the bees' line of progress, and while the brutes are baffled, pitch and torch them."

  "Do you tell me, then, that Bunt holds disaster at bay?"

  "Seemingly. There are some grounds for anxiety. As I've said, the hives expanded, and the bees dug them underground as they grew. I have been down here this last two days but people have been telling me the earth in the uplands is unquiet. And more than one person has also said that the ground around the hives is swelling, rising, doming up, as at huge movement underneath. My dear—may I presume a bit?" Here Higaia reached up and affectionately touched my cheek. She had an air of soothing me as she spoke, as if I suffered from some fever. "You have a nice little carrack, sweet Nifft, and your moneybelt feels quite hefty when I hug you. Let go of this fiftyweight. For one thing, Bunt must be nigh paupered. His bees devoured all the flower fields, including those of the other Dolmen hiveries, and Bunt stands liable to enormous indemnities. And for another thing, I feel to my bones that the worst hasn't happened yet, and I'm glad to be gone from here myself inside the half hour. Quit this place when I do, Nifft! Run with us down across the Agon, and in a fortnight we'll be having some fine mulled tartle together at an inn I know in Quincipolis!"

  Leave fiftyweight lying, and walk away? What was this madness that seemed to run like plague among my woman friends? There was something almost ominous about it, and I frankly gaped at her. There was a commotion of voices topside. Higaia sprang up the ladder, and I followed her.

  A shouted conversation was in progress between a group of cargo handlers at the port rail, and some mercenaries on the dock below. These men-at-arms—the loudest their seeming captain, a gnarled man with a scarred face—seemed to be demanding something the handlers denied. Higaia came to the rail, silencing her crew, and greeted the captain, "Good morrow, Hob. What are you after?"

  "We need half a dozen of your longshoremen, Higaia. We're short troops round the South Dandinnia."

  "Come up and talk to me, Hob."

  As the gnarled veteran came up the gangplank, Higaia explained, "The South Dandinnia is one of Bunt's hives. It's the one lying nearest the highway, just beyond that crest up there."

  We led Hob to the forecastle for privacy after Higaia set her crew back to shipping the last bundles of giant comb. "Is it Bunt sends you?" she asked Hob. "When last he was down here he was most urgent this cargo should be shipped and away—he needs the capital."

  "He needs a hundred more men round South Dandinnia, Higaia, whatever else he thinks he needs. I haven't seen him and there was no time to go asking. The ground is shaking and around the hive it's swollen into a hill! If a wave of even bigger bees comes out we'll need a big wall ready for them and torchmen enough to man it! Bunt's over in the central fields, on the barricades round the oldest hives. I'd be longer getting there and back than coming down here."

  "Well, take them, if they'll go, though if any want to set sail with me I won't deny them passage." She and Hob locked eyes here a moment. The veteran's flinty gaze conceded something. "I might go with you myself," he said, "but I don't like leaving conflicts unresolved."

  I had been listening with a sinking heart, as it grew plainer that Bunt, encircled by disaster, would probably be powerless to pay us our fiftyweight out of pocket. But then I was inspired with a solution. "Good Hob, might I follow you back up to the highlands, and be directed thence to where Bunt is?"

  "How not? But let's make haste."

  "One minute more I beg! Dear Higaia, if I came back with a fiftyweight draft signed by Bunt, could I not draw it in shares from the sale of your comb?"

  "With a properly drawn instrument, my dear, greedy Nifft, how not?"

  Hob took some little further time to recruit more men from another of Bunt's ships, and Higaia's freighter was already getting under way as we trotted single file up the first few switchbacks of the highway. As our line threaded its way up between wagons heaped with bales of torches and kegs of pitch, I could see tiny Higaia standing with Radula on the foredeck, conferring over something, their little features so plain in the limpid air I could make ou
t the bright red of Radula's sunburned nose. Another ship—not one of Bunt's—was standing out across the harbor at about the same time. A knot of emigrants crowded amidships at the port rail, their heads turned in troubled unison toward the home they were leaving, some of them gazing upwards past us at the heights, whence ragged scarves and banners of smoke still blew, and the gusted noise of strenuous multitudes at work, or war, or both.

  Hob had a good threescore men in tow. I'd noted at once that, however mixed their gear, these men had heavy leathers in common—jerkins or doublets above, trousers or chaps below. Each, moreover, had some kind of stout headpiece about his person, be it a half-casque, or just a skullcap with metal plates sewn on, and that all this varied head gear had in common a heavy leathern back flap to protect the neck—clearly standard issue provided by Bunt for hirelings he had drawn from varied sources over the recent weeks of his accelerating disaster.

  At first I hung back in the line to hear scuttlebutt, though most of these fellows were short-spoken, seeming winded by the climb; between working on the "lines" up top, and as cargo handlers down on the docks, most of them had already pulled long shifts over the last few days. Only a worried-looking youth made me much answer to my sociable probings. "Master Bunt must be quick with a lictor to get such work from you fellows, eh?" I asked him.

  "Why, I should think so! If it wasn't for payout every second sunset, and regular gold in my belt, I'd have shipped out a week ago! I mean didn't I see Tark get his head pulled off? See it with my own eyes. Tell me If I didn't see it, Weppel! Eh?" This last was addressed to the man jogging ahead of him, and punctuated with a poke of a finger.

  Weppel shrugged off the touch, and snapped without turning, "So you saw it! We all did! Have done! That risk's past in any case. The monsters can't get airborne any more and pounce on us like that. Have done!"

  "All I mean is," the youth nagged, "was having his head pulled off worth five lictors a shift and kip-and-commons? You think poor Tark thought it was worth it as that damned bee tugged his head off so . . . so clumsily?"

  "Get off the road, then, you nanny's brat, if you don't like the wage!"

  This riposte came not from Weppel but a teamster we jogged past, sweating his team up through a turn, his wagon overloaded with pyramided casks of pitch.

  "Stow the jabber!" Hob barked from above. I would learn most from him in the end, so I worked my way toward the head of the line. We were now a quarter mile up the heights, and the swarming harbor looked small below. The perspective allowed me to notice anew how deep the little bay was, with a brief, grey ring of shallows round the dockside rim, then plunging steeply to blue-black, thousand-fathom depths. There was little Bounty riding on the deep water's edge.

  "I gather then, Captain Hob," I ventured cheerily, coming up with him, "that Bunt keeps ample specie on hand, and pays his troops every two days."

  He gave me little more than his dour, scarred profile in answering. "True. But how much he has left, and how much he'll pay you, are other questions."

  "No doubt. His draft-in-hand will do if cash be short. What do you make of his chances of saving his enterprise—speaking soldier to soldier you understand, just between us."

  I got Hob's whole face for a moment at that, and a glare of surprise. "You look a man of the world, sir," he growled, facing crestward again and redoubling his pace. "What do you think?" We were near the top now, and with the gusts of smoke, the scents of pitch and strange meat burning came wafting down more thickly, and the hubbub of men's voices had a shrill and desperate note.

  And here, in further answer, came an empty wagon clattering down from the crest, the driver wild-eyed, flogging his team and bellowing. He came at once in collision with an up-bound wain of field-rations, pulled by heavy plods among which his team entangled themselves.

  Hob, with a roar, led us pelting up the highway. He grabbed the panicked teamster from his seat before the man's wild shouts had grown coherent and, masking the movement skilfully, clubbed him senseless as he brought him to the ground. Hob then smartly set his men to disengaging the tangled teams, and bringing the vehicle out of the highway, and once the way was clear he roared them to press on double-time up to the crest. Traffic, after a ripple of hesitation, flowed smoothly again. A pulse of panic had been masterfully damped out by the canny old veteran captain. Now we topped the first tier of the heights, and a broad reach of the bee-pastures stretched before us.

  I was the more appalled by what I saw because my last view of this prospect, some months earlier in Ha'Awley Bunt's phaeton, had so smitten me with its polychromatic glory. A rainbow blaze of blossoms, like the wing of some impossible, gigantic blutterfly, had lain draped across the hills. These rolling meadows had glowed crimson, saffron, sapphire, rose and violet, all drenched in wind-cleansed sunlight purely gold as honey! Now stenchful smokes tumbled across torn, naked dirt, and wherever the wind briefly jerked aside the black and smutty curtains, it was to display the litter and wreckage of war: Huge, charred carcasses smouldered amidst the wreckage of barricades; smudged, scorched troops limped to or from new battlements which scores of wagons served with casks of pitch and torches. At one place the smoke parted and, for an instant, framed a huge ballista which launched a blazing dart, before the fumes re-engulfed it from my view.

  Into this confusion Hob plunged with his men at a gallop, and I must needs follow, or lose his directions to Ha'Awley Bunt. But at the crest of a hilltop I paused, instinctively, for a last view down upon the harbor, and saw something that froze me where I stood.

  Out in the open channel, just a bowshot outside the mouth of the harbor, a huge pallid shape slid up from the blue-black deeps. It was Costard.

  In the brief interval since we'd parted he had grown in bulk, and in deformity. His limbs, sunk in his sleek obesity, had shortened, broadened. His jaw jutted hugely, and if humanity remained in his contorted eyes, it was the fleeting, fitful consciousness of the lunatic that flickered there. And then I saw that he was pursued. Huge black haggards, a whole hunting pack of them, dogged his suety flanks, and one nipped a little red bite from his buttock. Costard's blood clouded the water and inflamed the pack with hunger.

  But the wound galvanized the bloated metamorph as well; he blew a wrathful geyser of spray, and wheeled in the water, and plied his haggletooth jaws, biting the haggards in twain. Their blood in the water woke him to a hunger that eclipsed his initial wrath, and he fell to devouring his fragmented attackers.

  The whole spectacle transpired in moments. Costard searched fretfully for further victuals, and then seemed to grow aware of the harbor before him and its swarm of ships.

  It was at this precise juncture that a mighty cry went up from the fields behind me, and a great, dense wall of smoke whelmed against my back, engulfed me, swallowed breath and sight at once, even as the earth shook under me, and I heard, above a thousand frightened cries, an earthquake noise, the sodden groan of a hillside breaking open.

  Thus benighted, I experienced the tearing of an inner veil from my greed-ensorcelled understanding. We should not be in this place, convulsed with dangers as it was. We should never have brought our precious Bounty within a league of it!

  I plunged, blind and choking, back the way I had come, praying to feel the highway underfoot, finding it, and pelting down it.

  I dodged between the wagons. The draybeasts screamed as the teamsters fought to turn them. I vaulted the backs of beast and man, overleapt tilting vehicles caught up and toppling in the turmoil of retreat. Below me, the pale leviathan that had been Costard—red gobbets of haggard eddying about him—nosed zig and zag, tentatively into the harbor-mouth, the traffic of ships still unaware of him, most eyes bent dockwards, though I thought in the tiny multitudes I saw faces turning up towards me, tiny arms pointing. Above and behind me the hilltop thundered with a heaving hugeness whose tremors I felt through my footsoles. Though I fought my way down, down through the switchbacks, still these concussions drew closer, while screaming voices came ava
lanching down behind me, fleeing troops in whose shrill outcry recurred the word queen like a refrain.

  Will my folly be believed? Can such utter abdication of my faculties be credited? I, veteran of a thousand near collisions with calamity, to prove so fuddled with the jostle and uproar. I leapt most acrobatically—twice, straight down across the switchback at a leap, landing once most catlike on the hub of a toppled wagon's wheel after a vault of full two rods and more! My eye danced bayward, gauging monstrous Costard's quickening advance into the harbor, then shot crestward, seeing a great wall of smoke billow out from the meadow, as if the approach of something huge were thrusting the fumes ahead of it. I actually tried to judge the distance I might run before either impending disaster fell, and if I would be in earshot of Barnar (who surely must be looking crestwards soon, as the tiny multitude were beginning to do) in time for him to anoint his hands and feet, fly out to Bounty, cut her hawsers and drag her out to open sea . . .

  And then, of course, it smote me—what I should have done the instant I knew of Doom's advance. I thrust my hand within my jerkin, and anointed my own hands and feet, and leapt into the air!

  And as I did so, the smoke bulged again from the crest, and the wind plucked it away in streamers, and a Queen Bee rolled out onto the very brink of the highlands.

  By the Crack, and by all that crawls out of it! Ten times as big as a Forager she was! Though of a tiny race, it seemed Her Royalty had taken disproportionate impetus from an ichor brewed by a not wholly alien species.

  But Her Royalty was defaced in her deformity. The amber fur that ermined her black, armored head and thorax, blazed glorious gold in the sun, it is true, but her stumplike wings and spindly legs were nigh powerless to move her swollen hugeness. On her abdomen's ballooned distension the black-and-gold armor that sheathed it had separated, the sclerae stretched apart, like polished warshields on a white wall. Her inexorable advance was achieved by a convulsive larval wriggle. I could not turn my face away from her poised immensity. I swam backwards down the air, as one who tilted back and fell. Thus my bellow was aimed at the sky: