by Dave Duncan
Yet even a flexible youngster will have trouble pulling on breeches if he has never done so before and cannot bend his legs. With difficulty, with much straining and puffing, I at last succeeded.
Greatly pleased with myself, I looked to the angel for approval. He was watching me with an unpleasant yellow-toothed leer.
“You’re older than I thought,” he said. “Well, perhaps you can be of some use to me after all, angelspawn.”
“Sir?”
He cackled at some private joke. “You’ll see.”
As I said, he was more than a little crazy.
—2—
WE TRAVELED MOSTLY WITHOUT SPEAKING, for the chariot was noisy. The country gradually became more rugged, but the wind less fitful, and my angel was a master navigator. Breeches or not, when he stopped at camps he left me in the chariot as before, and of course we had little time for conversation at those stops.
Between the camps, he would halt once in a while for a brief break—to eat, for respite from the constant bouncing and noise, or, rarely, to sleep. For sleeping he had a leather cover he could fasten over the chariot, making it into a low, uncomfortable tent. It grew incredibly hot and smelly under the burning sun. We both sweated lakefuls and felt limp and dizzy when we awoke, but he told me that roos might attack a chariot, so he needed the protection. Here was one way a companion could have been of assistance, and I offered to stay awake, as guard. He refused my offer. I think he did not trust me to control my own eyelids, and probably he was wise, for I had never needed to stay awake at will and so had never learned how.
When we camped in this fashion, he slept on the pile of cloth and furs. I had to make do with a rug over the oars, spars, and spare axles.
When we did see roo packs, Violet would give chase if the wind was favorable. Twice he managed to draw close, and then our ride became wilder than ever as he tried to run down the crouching, fleeing roos and at the same time fire his gun over the side. He felled a few with the gun, and I watched carefully how that marvelous weapon was used, but he never managed to crush any with the chariot. He almost wrecked it on boulders, instead. Violet did not like roos, and he left the bodies where they lay. To me that seemed like a shocking waste of good leather.
We did have a few conversations during halts. I discovered what shaving did and what the strange board was that he hung on the mast. I asked to try it, and so I viewed my own face clearly for the first time in my life. Until then I had seen my reflection only in the water, which was usually muddy. The near-white eyebrows were a shock, as were the unwholesome blue eyes. They brought back my hazy image of the angel with my mother—or did they lead me to invent that flimsy scrap of memory?
He had other miracles, too—his telescope, which he let me try, and a jug of rough red pottery, all marbled with white lime. That was the greatest wonder of all, for water left awhile in it would emerge cool—that was the only cool water I had ever tasted.
Violet had accepted me as a passenger. He made no more threats to evict me, but his contemptuous attitude did not mellow. Herdfolk, he said, were the most ignorant, stupid, barbarous people on all of Vernier. I could not argue, not having known that there were other types to compare. I was willing to put up with his jeers if they were the price of the ride. My knees were healing, and I would need those knees in good shape when he did at last turn me out.
Once I dared ask where we were going, for I had noticed that he avoided herds and camps whenever he could do so unobserved, and so concluded that he must have some other objective.
“I’m going back to Heaven,” he said. “You… Well, we’ll see when your leg is healed.”
“Sir? Who is Heaven?”
“Not who, stupid—what. It’s a camp…where the angels live.”
I tried to imagine a camp with more than one man in it. “And if I take that token you gave me…”
He spat, his sign of special disapproval. “If a young man wants to be an angel, then he has to go to Heaven with a token. He’s called a pilgrim. If they think he’s any good, they’ll let him be a cherub and teach him what an angel needs to know. After that, if they still think he’ll do, then they’ll make him an angel—give him a chariot and send him out to help people.”
A chariot! With a chariot I could find my way back to Anubyl. With an angel’s gun I could kill him, as the angel had killed the tyrant. Violet did not wait for me to speak.
“Forget it, herdbrat! You don’t know enough. Herdmen never make angels. They’re too ignorant. And stupid.”
But at another stop I brought up the subject again. “Where is Heaven, sir?”
He pointed east. “Under the stars.”
I had never heard of stars. We were going almost due west.
He read my face. “The sun is that way, dummy. High Summer—it would boil your lungs. No man can live in High Summer, and not much else can, either.”
I must have still looked doubtful.
“I’m going to the March Ocean,” he said grumpily. “It’s faster. Think of a very big water hole. Then I shall sail along the Great River—oh, forget it!”
“I should like to be an angel like you, sir, and help people.”
He laughed derisively, showing his yellow teeth. “A herdman help other men?”
“I should have died without your help, sir.”
“You damn well would have.”
“Will you take me back to Heaven with you?”
“No! That’s very much against the rules. Every man has to find Heaven for himself. It’s a test. They’d ask you if an angel had given you a ride. We’re going the wrong way now, so this wouldn’t count.”
Well, I had to go back east to settle with Anubyl. I decided I would find Heaven first and make my main task easier by getting a chariot. I had no conception of the size of the world.
─♦─
Gradually my knees healed. Gradually the country changed. Sixteen or twenty camps had gone by, and now we were seeing woollie corpses rotting on the grasslands, and solitary wandering woollies, abandoned as the grass became too scarce to support the herds. We passed human skeletons, perhaps loners. Some of them looked old, some not.
The herds were becoming enormous as they packed in closer against the ocean, for when two herds meet, one herdmaster will inevitably kill the other and so own both. My angel came back from his visits looking grimmer every time. Eight women he’d been offered, he would say, or even ten.
Then he decided that I could walk well enough for his purposes.
—3—
“I HAVE NEVER KNOWN ANGELS to travel in pairs,” Herdmaster Agomish rumbled in the deepest voice I had ever heard.
I could not see his face, for I had been told to keep my eyes lowered. I could see the end of his black beard, however, and it hung below his belt. I could see his boots and breeches, and two giant hairy hands, either of which could have snapped my neck without calling for help from the other. I had not known that most herdfolk males were made on the same scale as my father. That rock-smasher voice seemed to fall from the sky.
Violet had ordered me not to speak, for he had said that I spoke like a herdman, not like an angel. I doubt that my dry throat would have put out intelligent sound, anyway. I stood at his side with my eyes down and my mouth shut. I stared at the herdmaster’s enormous boots and fervently wished I was safely hidden in the chariot as usual.
But this time Violet had decreed that I would accompany him, without saying why. He had also told me not to believe anything he said about me. Herdfolk were too dumb to see through a few lies, he had said.
“Even angels have to be trained, Herdmaster,” he now replied cheerfully. “He is merely here to learn and will remain silent in the presence of his elders, as children should.”
The hint was taken. My fair complexion deceived the herdman, as it had earlier deceived both Anubyl and Violet.
“The boy is as welcome as you are, sir,” Agomish retorted. “I offer you whatever hospitality I have to give. Come, then!”<
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I limped painfully behind my guardian angel as he accompanied the giant herdman down the slope toward camp. I had observed the tents earlier, nine of them. The colors and designs looked wrong to me, and there were many more than nine women fussing around the fire, so Agomish had several old wives in his family. There were strangely few children, yet woollies without number swarmed everywhere, in all directions. Perhaps the children were out herding, yet the herd was straggling badly. I disapproved.
As we drew near, though, the familiar bustle and the familiar smells of a herdfolk camp sang softly to me of my lost childhood, and a lump grew hard in my throat. A girl laughed like Rilana. I saw a boy so like Todish that I almost called out to him.
Cushions had been spread on rugs before the tents. Angel and herd-master sat down together. Still favoring my right knee, I lowered myself to the ground behind Violet, keeping my face turned as far away from Agomish as I thought I decently could. I was no angel but a herdman, within sight of his women. If he as much as suspected that, how long would the truce last? As long as one breath—my last.
The unexpected appearance of a second visitor had caused some confusion among the women. There was a brief delay. Agomish clapped his hands angrily, with impacts like ax blows, and then two bowls of water were rushed over to us. One of them was held before my downcast eyes. A woman…a woman…was kneeling on the other side of it. I admired the pattern of her skirt furiously, to avoid seeing anything above her waist. Copying the angel’s actions, I splashed water over my face, laved my hands, and accepted a towel.
But the savory scent of cooking was making my young mouth water. Dried and smoked meat had been my diet for too long. Now I could smell hot fresh meat and juicy delicacies…roo brains…roast dasher! Another dress appeared before me. Two slim hands laid a piled dish alongside my outstretched legs. The woman vanished, and I set to work to make the feast do the same.
“Think of a tall tree, Herdmaster,” Violet was saying, with his mouth full. “If you stand close, you have to bend your head back very far to see the top of it—is that not so? While, if you are far away, then you can look straight at it. Well, the sun is very high, but the same is true of the sun. Is it not higher—closer—than you remember it as a child?”
The herdman growled. “I had not noticed, sir.”
“Think back to when you were a herder. Remember your shadow?”
I paid little attention as Violet went patiently on, trying to persuade his host that the sun did move, although so slowly that a man would not notice. Woollies did not like to be too far from the sun, he said—they became sluggish. But they could not live too close to it, either, for the heat dried up all the grass and also the water holes that the herders needed. So the herdfolk always lived about the same distance from the sun, moving slowly westward as it advanced…in a crescent shape…
Agomish insisted that he had been a herdmaster long enough to sire twenty-eight live daughters and he had not moved westward more than in any other direction. Always he had gone to the best water and the best grazing.
As the conversation dragged on, as my appetite died of its own success, I began to gain an inkling of Violet’s repeated insistence that herd-folk were stupid. It was obvious to me, but not to the mighty thunder-voiced Agomish. I felt rather smug once I understood that, but of course, I had heard this explanation before and had had much time to think about it. And I had enjoyed an angel’s-eye overview on a long journey through a grossly over-grazed, overstocked countryside.
Then I realized that the other two had finished eating. I quickly dropped the dasher bone I was gnawing. I licked my fingers.
“You will need rest, sir.” The doubts had crept back into our host’s voice. “I shall be honored if you will accept the use of one of my tents and a companion to ease your cares. And your…boy?”
He wanted to know how many tents, how many women…and suddenly I wanted to know, also. What did Violet have planned now? A mingled rush of renewed nervousness and incredulous hope began to interfere with my hardworking digestion. My groin tingled strangely. He couldn’t expect…
Could he?
“I shall be most honored to accept your kind offer, Herdmaster. The lad can curl up in a corner of the tent. He will not interfere with my rest, I can assure you.”
“I do have an ample supply of females now,” Agomish muttered, torn between greed and pride. “I have been extending my herds, also, as you may have guessed.”
“One will be more than generous. He is only a child, as you can see.”
I was greatly relieved. And yet, for just a moment, I had almost hoped…
I stood behind my angel as the herdman showed off his women—eight of them, with a cluster of five old wives in the background in case the guest wished to choose experience over agility. I could not help sneaking glances, for I was safely behind Agomish also. Three were obviously pregnant and hence out of bounds.
“…and this is Ullinila,” he boomed. “Not quite the youngest, yet unusually sprightly. The old wives are not certain, but it is possible that she is with child—but do not let that possibility worry you if she pleases you…”
The catalog continued, but even I had caught the extra enthusiasm over Ullinila. Agomish believed that she had already conceived, and therefore he would prefer that she be chosen.
She was. I followed Violet as he followed Ullinila to her tent. I was not looking forward to the experience, and yet I was naturally curious to see how this intriguing activity was performed. Would the angel actually couple with her in my presence?
I waited outside briefly as the old wives bustled in with a second set of bedding. Then they departed. I entered. I made sure the flap was securely closed. I turned around.
The second pallet had not been placed in a corner. It lay next to the other in the center of the stuffy dimness. Ullinila was little older than me or perhaps even younger, for women blossom sooner than men. She was wearing nothing but a sheen of multicolored light, and she sat with outstretched legs, leaning back on straight arms, smiling nervously up at Violet as he lowered himself to his knees beside her. My throat tightened at the sight of her youthful grace, the play of color over her skin as she leaned forward to put her arms around his neck.
“No, just stay as you were, my dear,” he said. He still wore all his clothes, which must have been surprising to her—even if he had no plans for intimacy, the tent was chokingly hot. “Come here, Knobil, and look at this.”
I limped across the rugs toward them. The camp outside was falling silent, giving the honored guest peace for his rest.
“Sit, lad. Closer! Let me show you.”
Awkwardly I seated myself on Ullinila’s other side.
“Closer!”
I heaved myself nearer.
Ullinila, finding herself between two fully clothed men, glanced from one to other of us apprehensively, not understanding.
I feasted my eyes on her as greedily as I had eaten her master’s food. I had seen Jalinan naked, of course, but at a distance, and I had been younger then. Ullinila was no older than Jalinan had been and more deliciously rounded, a miracle in smooth brown skin. One long braid hung behind her slim feminine shoulders, the other trailed down between…
“These breasts, Knobil,” the angel said, “are they not magnificent? Observe the generous proportions, the bold angle and graceful curve, the roseate perfection of the nipples and aureoles. In a hundred camps I have never seen a woman with finer adornments. Feel them!”
They were indeed superb. I remember them distinctly—exquisite, just starting to swell in the early stages of pregnancy. Violet cupped one breast in his hand. Sweating mightily, I obeyed orders and fondled the other. I wished I was able to pull my knees up. I laid my unoccupied arm in my lap instead.
“And the soft, luxurious firmness of these thighs…” Violet sighed and stroked. “Statements of strength and promises of indulgence. Feel them, lad! These hips—the ideal of feminine physique expressed to perfection, do y
ou not agree?”
I may have croaked an answer. I do not recall. My heartbeat had risen dramatically, and not only my heartbeat.
Now the poor girl was thoroughly alarmed. “You will take pleasure with me now, sir?” she whispered to Violet.
He sighed. He sat back and crossed his legs. “Perhaps later. First try that young fellow with the big eyes and the bulge in his breeches. He has a stiff leg, also, so he will need some help.”
I could only gasp, wondering if I had heard him correctly, but Ullinila did not doubt and did not hesitate. She swung around to me with a big smile, white teeth in a heart-shaped child’s face. Still so innocent, I had not dreamed that my slim youthfulness might hold more appeal for her than the balding obesity of my companion. Probably I had never considered that a female could have any preference in such matters.
It is very alarming for a virgin to have his pants pulled off him by a naked woman and then to be straddled by her as she tugs his shirt up over his head, but she sensed that my need was already urgent, and she expertly did what was required. I discovered that the procedure could be completed in only a fraction of the time I had expected—indeed, I did almost nothing except fall backward, drowning in torrents of unendurable joy. And among those heaving spasms of pleasure, I vaguely decided that if this was what herdmen killed for, then their murders were forgivable.
All too soon it was over, and I was lying naked and unashamed, sweaty and panting, but secretly exulting in the knowledge that my fears had been unfounded. I was a real man after all! No more need I worry that my strangely pallid coloring indicated some lack of virility. Apparently all my equipment was satisfactory and operating as it was supposed to.
Ullinila was lying half beside me and half on top, soft yet firm, solid but delicate, smooth and desirable still. I had my arms around her. I reveled in the sweet scent of a herdfolk woman, a distinctive mustiness remembered from my childhood, forgotten once, now recovered and imbued with a new and deeper excitement. She turned her head toward my companion.