West of January

by Dave Duncan

  And my ambition to be an angel? I could feel it seeping away. If I didn’t leave soon, I never would.

  We loaded my supplies into one of the coracles. I sang for Frith, but Gorf came instead, having noticed Pebble. I tossed him the towing hoop and sat down quickly, knowing how fast a boat would leap forward when a great one began pulling.

  It leapt, but seaward. I gestured toward the shore. We continued to plunge in the wrong direction, bouncing violently over the swell, with Pebble leaning back and grinning at my annoyance. I knew the procedure, though. I cast off the towing line and we came to a stop, rocking gently. In a moment Gorf tossed the hoop back at me and raised his head over us to gibber angrily.

  So we began again. This time we raced twice around the grove at high speed, until I thought my teeth would be shaken from my head or the boat would fall apart. Once more I had to release the line. All this was typical of the great ones’ idea of fun, but at the third attempt Pebble held up my bale of rope so Gorf could see it. His curiosity aroused, Gorf then took us where we wanted to go.

  We beached the boat and indulged ourselves by bathing in the creek, removing the salt that always encrusted us, luxuriously drinking our fill. Then we set out along the shore to my treasure of driftwood. We waded through the edge of the waves, for the dry sand would have roasted our feet. The sun’s reflected glare made my head swim. After the shady grove, the beach was a murderous white crucible and the wind as rough as rasp-shell.

  Pebble scratched his woolly pate and studied my collection of tree trunks with a puzzled expression. They were arrayed like the rungs of a ladder, the latest addition already a few steps from the water and the earliest a long way off. “Why did move them so far, Golden?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I think the wind must roll them. It usually blows shoreward, doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps is why called ‘driftwood’?” he suggested seriously. “Keeps on drifting?”

  I admitted I should have thought of that.

  So, in our innocence, we decided that the wood itself must be at fault. Not having thought to bring any sort of foot covering, we could not reach it. Pebble yawned, stretched, and lay down in the lacy edges of the ripples. “Too hot! Need rest.”

  Not surprised, I sat down beside him to survey the waves breaking and the great ones lolling offshore, spouting and watching what we were doing.

  “Sorry are leaving,” Pebble said, his eyes closed against the glare of the sky. “Want you to stay.”

  “I made myself a promise. My family all died, Pebble, because there weren’t enough angels. I promised myself I would get to Heaven so I could learn to help people.”

  “Can have a new family. Lots of girls! Thump them all the way through moss! Make big, big waves! Make babies.”

  “A man is more than just a baby-making machine!” I protested, in a surprising insight for a herdman.

  “Are best hunter after me.” Of course he was joking, but I had never heard Pebble sound so close to serious before.

  “If I wrapped out two pagnes around my feet,” I said hastily, “I could roll the logs. How many do you think I’ll need?”

  Pebble sighed and sat up. “None.”

  “What?”

  For once there was no smile in that curly mat of beard. “Can ride great ones now, Golden. Suggested raft before that learning. If have to go against flow of river, much easier to carry you than pull raft!”

  He nodded and for once looked quite solemn. “Want you to stay, Golden. Women all like you. Need you! Are not enough men.”

  “The women like me,” I admitted. “How about the men?”

  “Men like you!” His voice went softer. “Need you also, think.”

  Startled, I glanced at him and then quickly away. Did he suspect what Sparkle had been proposing?

  “I think I should leave,” I said, weakening.

  “Sand will have child soon. Want son, Golden!”

  I wanted to scream. I knew my face must be burning hotter than the blistering beach behind us. I racked my brain for something to say.

  “Merry-son-of-Pebble!” Pebble said sadly. “Have song all ready.” And then he sang a little name song. It was as banal jingle as could be, but it brought tears to my eyes.

  He knew about Sparkle’s invitations. He might even have suggested the idea to her, and in another moment he was going to suggest it to me.

  “No!” I shouted. “To black hell with the raft, then! I’m not going to stay here and…and… Oh, damn!”

  I jumped to my feet and ran into the surf. I dived through the first breaker and started to swim. Soon Frith surfaced below me, and my legs found his back. I headed for the grove.

  ─♦─

  I collected two water bottles, a spear, and a hat as fast as I could, but in one of the leafy corridors, Pebble blocked my path.

  He spread his feet and put his hands on his hips. In that stance, Pebble was very wide. “Going to collect oysters!” he announced. Even in the dim green shadow, his smile would not have convinced a blind shark.

  “Good!” I said, and my smile probably rang no truer than his. “Make sure someone goes with you, though!”

  “Very good for manhood.”

  Oysters had that reputation. “Maybe,” I said. “But it would be easier to save the shells and fill them with seawater. They’d taste just the same.”

  Pebble regarded me sadly. Then he threw his arms around me and hugged me until my ribs creaked.

  “Go in care of Great Mother, Golden.”

  “And you,” I mumbled. “Give my love to everybody. Kiss all girls for me.”

  He let me by, and I ran for the open sea.

  ─♦─

  I sang for Frith and he came at once. I mounted his back, singing the notes for far journey.

  We headed south. Ironically I could also have gone west, for a ride across the whole width of the March Ocean might have been physically possible, although I never heard tell of anyone trying it. Had I done so and survived, then I should have found the west shore well watered at that time and the herdfolk reestablishing their way of life after the great dying. The future of Vernier might have been changed…but I went south.

  I waited for Loneliness to find me and start his maniacal laughing and jeering, but he did not come. Perhaps Frith was keeping him away—or maybe he knew that I was not going far.

  I felt Frith’s great body tense. Then he issued the brief squawk that meant he was going to submerge. Startled, I sucked in a quick breath and grabbed tight to his fin. Down we went into silent blueness, with me peering anxiously around, wondering what unexpected threat had provoked this. I saw nothing except the vague shapes of the two companions he had invited along, or who had perhaps chosen to come with us. I heard nothing, either—but the great ones did, for they can talk across great distances underwater.

  Frith spun around so fast that I was very nearly torn loose. Then he surfaced and went surging back toward the grove at all the speed he dared expose me to, while his comrades bounded around us impatiently. They were singing.

  Trying to tell me something.

  I had very little skill at understanding the great ones, and this was a very strange song, a single line of melody instead of their usual complex harmonies. It was maddeningly familiar, and so simple a refrain must be a human message.

  Then I knew it. It was a name, a human name, transposed into haunting minor keys.

  I kicked Frith savagely for more speed. I gripped his fin with all my strength and wept into my shoulder from mingled fear and pain. My arms were almost wrenched from their sockets as he dragged me through the water, streaming behind him like trailing weed. I gasped for breath whenever I had the chance, but the lower he sank in the water, the faster he could travel. Once or twice he slowed slightly, rising so that I could settle onto his back again. It was a form of question: Can you take this? Each time I answered with harder kicks: More speed!

  But human hands and shoulders have their limits, and I was being
slowly drowned. My grip failed, and I was gone. Frith spun on his tail with a surge of power that seemed to churn the whole ocean; he took me in his mouth. It was neither comfortable nor dignified, but it was faster. Sitting on his tongue, with my legs jammed hard against his palate, I was forced steadily backward through the sea at a pace I had never experienced before. Buffeted by the torrent, crushed by the pressure. I needed all the strength in my ill-used shoulders just to hold my head up and force my chest away from his snout far enough to breathe. I could see nothing but Frith’s great fin and the white wake we were leaving behind us, and I felt every savage beat of his massive tail.

  When he spat me out on the moss, I was so battered that Sand and Breakers had to lift me, and hold me up. I looked around the platform, and dread became stark reality. The seafolk in assembly were waiting only for me; Pebble’s body lay by the water’s edge.

  “How?” I screamed, “What happened?”

  He had gone to collect oysters, they said. No one would go with him, so he had gone alone, still weak from the snark stings.

  He had told me, asked me. I could have done that for him, at least. I had refused to impregnate his wife for him, but I could have helped him gather oysters. One sleep s delay would not have hurt. I could have helped him gather oysters.

  Quietly wailing a sad hymn to the Great Mother, the seafolk stood in head-hung dejection, loosely grouped by families, each composed of a hunter and those who usually ate at his feasting place. I stumbled through the wash to join Sparkle, for I belonged nowhere else. With her were Jewel and Sun, who had never been married and never would be, but who had been eating at Pebble’s feasting place lately.

  The hymn ended and heads rose to watch the sea, speckled now with fins as the great ones surfaced. I had never seen so many nor known that the pod was so large. From time to time one would spout, but otherwise they just seemed to be floating, silent and still. I had seen funerals on the grasslands, when a boy was mauled by a dasher or a babe sickened, but I had never imagined anything like this.

  Gorf rose silently from the depths, close by the grove, his great triangular fin like a chariot sail, and one shrewd cold eye watching us, barely above the water. A great one speaks through a spiracle on top of his head, just in front of the third eye. Now Gorf began to sing Pebble’s name. I had heard that often as a summons to come hunt or play, but now it was transformed, a wordless melody converted to a dirge. Gradually the other great ones joined in, harmonizing and embellishing, migrating through strange minor keys in a manner too complex for the human ear to follow, rising to triumph and joy without losing the basic theme or the underpinning of grief, mourning and yet celebrating, dying away at last through desolate fragments of sorrow and pain until only the song of the ocean itself remained.

  Then Gorf drifted in right to the platform edge, and Pebble answered the call from the sea, his body across his steed’s wide back for his last journey.

  We watched without a sound as Gorf moved slowly away toward the horizon, the rest of the pod closing in around him as escort. When fins and waves were barely distinguishable in the glare and tears, Sparkle began to sing, calling Pebble back again. One by one the rest of the tribe joined in, echoing the harmonies of the great one…but that call was not answered. Slowly the lament faded away into stillness and quiet weeping. Pebble had gone.

  Why, when the gods created friendship, did they leave us mortal?

  The funeral was over, yet I sensed that there was more to come. All eyes were turning in my direction, but it was the women beside me who were the source of interest. Widows and spinsters must eat somewhere, so now Sparkle and the other two must choose a feasting place. I knew what rights they would be granting in return…and only a married man could have a feasting place.

  I had been moved to tears by the singing, like everyone else, but now my fury came howling back, my rage over an unnecessary death. I had killed him. I had accepted appointment as tribal stud, so I should have agreed to service his wife, and then he would not have gone looking for the stupid oysters. Or I could have postponed my departure and assisted him.

  But any of those brainless, thoughtless seamen there could have gone with him, too. It was as much their fault as mine—more, in fact! Pebble would have asked them, or at least some of them. He might not have thought of danger, but he loved company. Eyes, Sand, Blossoms, Breakers…one by one I glared at the men, and each dropped his gaze before the silent accusation.

  I glanced down at Sparkle, and her red-rimmed eyes were fixed on me.

  “Stay now, Golden?” she whispered. “Need you.”

  “Need babies, you mean.”

  She flinched and then nodded. “And need wise hunter.”

  I looked bitterly around the groups again. Young as I was, in a sense I was older than anyone there. Loneliness had done that for me—hunger and thirst and unending screaming loneliness. Not one of those seamen had ever endured anything like my long solitary wandering on the beaches. If they needed me it was not to father babies. They needed me to mother the adults. The seamen were killing themselves off through thoughtless stupidity. Even among the herdfolk, a boy never left camp alone—not even to visit the nearest miniroo warren. Why should I struggle all the way to Heaven in the hope of helping people, when here I had a whole tribe in desperate need of a little common sense and discipline? I could do more good here than in Heaven.

  I turned back to Sparkle.

  She was no longer off limits, and I began to shiver as my desire flamed up to white heat at the thought.

  “Marry me!” I said.

  She gasped and shook her head. “Would be wrong!”

  “Why? Tell me why!” I stepped closer and gripped her arms.

  She stared down at the water. “Must make babies for Pebble. If marry you, then make babies for you.” She looked up at me in despair, then she winced, and I realized I was squeezing too hard.

  “Marry me anyway.”

  “Marry Thunder?” she said. “Sun? Or Jewel? Can make waves with me, too, then, Golden! Promise.”

  “No. I am a herdman—I will not share you.” I did not ask if she loved me. I don’t think the question ever entered my mind. I don’t think I even wondered if I loved her. I craved her fiercely, and I must have her for my own.

  I could resist all the others, but for Sparkle I would give up even Heaven.

  If she was merely one more of the widows, she would be free to leave my feasting place and transfer to another man’s. I wanted Sparkle more than anyone or anything else I could imagine, but she must be mine alone.

  “I will marry you and no one else!” I said, hearing mutters of disapproval. A crowd was gathering around us as the unmarried women moved in. The platform sank lower.

  “But Pebble?” Sparkle wailed.

  “Pebble is dead. Say you will be my wife, or I am going—and going now!”

  She glanced around the angry throng. The whole world seemed to stop, hanging breathless on her decision. But I knew. Only Sparkle among all of them would risk the tribe’s censure—that was why Sparkle was special to me. And suddenly a small smile of triumph escaped at the corner of that seductive mouth… She had known what I would say, had foreseen every word. She raised her chin in defiance and nodded agreement at me. “Will be my husband, Golden?”

  Without a word I kissed her until I was giddy with arousal, then hustled her off to her bower to quench my lust. I did not even wait for all the good wishes and congratulations being showered on us. Cheers and wedding songs had broken out. Seafolk cannot mourn for long.

  ─♦─

  So I killed my best friend through selfishness. Before my tears were dry I stole his wife and her future children and thereby dishonored his memory. I betrayed my promise to Violet. I discarded forever my ambition to become an angel.

  From then on my affairs with the other women were no longer merely mutual fun, they were deliberate baby-making.

  I laid down rules for the hunters to reduce the dying. They smiled and o
beyed—until the next time I wasn’t looking.

  I might as well have tried to regiment the great ones.

  I became a seaman.

  ─♦─

  Forgotten and unwanted, my collection of driftwood crawled away across the plain until it disappeared in the heat haze.

  —5—

  BROWN-YELLOW-WHITE

  WITH SALT STILL DRYING ON MY SKIN, I crept in through the door of Sparkle’s bower and paused to make sure I had not wakened her. Then I started picking my way as quietly as I could over the sprinkle of yellow leaves on the floor. The grove itself helped me, its creakings and rustlings much louder in the rough water near the beach. Below that continuing chorus I could still hear the jabber of the great ones. They had been very excited for some time now, but no one in the tribe could understand their distress. I had just cut short my swim because they had been pestering me so much.

  At the far end of the bower, Merry muttered and stirred, crinkling the blanket of bronze leaves that had settled upon him. Then he seemed to go back to sleep, and silence returned. Merry was Merry-son-of-Pebble, because Sparkle claimed that she had been bearing him when I married her. I had accepted that obvious falsehood and so the tribe had also, but Merry had straight hair.

  So did Sea Wave’s boy and Wave’s, and Silver’s daughter and many others. Many of their mothers, like Sparkle, were big again. My second crop, a herdman would have said, but I was careful not to use that expression among the seafolk.

  I reached my wife and settled down beside her as quietly as I could. I don’t know why I bothered—I doubt that any husband in the history of Vernier ever managed to be quiet enough under those circumstances.

  “Who was it this time?” she inquired drowsily.

  She had been asleep when I departed. She needed much sleep now, for her time was near.

  “Don’t remember.”

  With a great heaving, as if a storm had struck the grove, she rolled over to face me. We adjusted position, but it was hard to cuddle her present bulk satisfactorily.