West of January

by Dave Duncan

  Knowledge is dangerous. Every man swore the oath against violence when he was admitted to Heaven, even a pimply new seraph. I had never been formally admitted, so I never had—and Michael alone had remembered. He had guessed that I still yearned for revenge, and he must have been close to guessing how I planned to achieve it. The angel oath would make it impossible.

  He saw my hesitation, and triumph flickered in those bright blue eyes, the eyes of my earliest memories.

  But there were no gods in Heaven. The oath was sworn “by my soul, by my honor, by my worth and self-respect.” I, of all men, should have no trouble with those words. “I’ll swear,” I said with a shrug. Was I bluffing? I’m not sure.

  “You’ll leave me?” he said. Tears welled up. “I saved you from Uriel when you first arrived, remember? You’ll leave your own father? They’ll haul me down now, son. The wolves will tear me down. I need you!”

  I glanced over at Quetti and the other four archangels—obviously concerned now, and impatient. The sunlight was fading; the onlookers becoming restless, shuffling feet. With Michael deposed, the other four would elect Uriel in his stead. He was the obvious choice.

  “Go back and live among those stinking savages?” Michael said.

  It is amazing how easily a man can convince himself of something he really wants to believe. Uriel would be a much better leader than this decrepit old ruin, I decided. And perhaps Quetti was right—I had been propping Michael up, meddling in Heaven’s affairs and thereby only increasing its usual inefficiency.

  “Give me the damned jacket!” I said, and I grabbed it.

  The awful cheering broke out again at once, louder than ever. If Michael tried to tell them that I’d never taken the oath, then no one noticed, for he was swept aside in the rush of people surging forward to congratulate me. That was a horrible ordeal, but better than watching the old man’s distress.

  Add that to my list of crimes, then. I betrayed my mother and, when I got the chance, I betrayed my father also.

  —3—

  THE HARDEST PARTS OF ANY JOURNEY were always the beginning and the end, because Dusk is full of deadfall. Three-blue told me the best route out, but he insisted that I drive. When we stopped for our first camp he let me do all the work, and I began to suspect more knavery. Yet to lounge by a campfire with Quetti was a reminder of long ago, of our trek together and of a certain lost innocence. We slipped back into calling each other by our real names, and we reminisced until our eyelids drooped.

  Not far into the second leg of our journey we came to a long slope with little snow. I spilled wind from the sails and we glided to a halt. “Time for the wheels,” I said cautiously.

  Quetti was picking his teeth with a porcuroo needle. “Go ahead.”

  “You are a traditional, first-class, iron-shod bastard!”

  “It’s your chariot, Three-red.”

  “Slug!”

  He smirked.

  “Creep!”

  He yawned and reached for a book he had brought along, which was strictly against regulations.

  “What exactly are you trying to prove?” I asked.

  He closed the book and blinked his pale eyes at me.

  “You should be an angel. You’re the best. Heaven needs you! But you have a strange inability to appreciate your own accompl—”

  “You got that sludge from Michael!”

  Quetti grinned. “Long, long ago! In fact, I think it was when he gave me my wheels. He thinks—”

  “I know what he thinks! I’ve heard it a hundred times. Michael, you see, could not tolerate the thought that the only son he can ever know is a dumb herdman, a cripple, a coward, and a total failure! So he invented that absurd—”

  “Failure?” Quetti lowered his downy eyebrows. “Coward? Spell that! Careless of me not to have noticed!”

  “Coward!” I insisted.

  “And a failure? You think—”

  “YES!” I could shout even louder than he could. Afterward I was to wonder what lived in those woods and what it thought of this argument. At the time I was too furious to think of anything.

  “You’re an angel. You’re on your sixth mission, and it will probably kill you. What have I ever done—”

  “You saved my life!” Quetti bellowed. He was turning red.

  “Then show a little gratitude and shut up!” I said.

  And I scrambled down to change skis to wheels.

  Quetti smirked again and went back to his book,

  Very soon after that we discovered bog—the hard way. That meant winching, a detestable, backbreaking torment. Quetti read his book. I did what was necessary to haul us out of the bog. Muddy, sweaty and weary, I then settled into my seat and glared hard at my companion. He gazed back at me with the same bland wistful innocence that always made girls want to drag him off to bed.

  “Explain,” I said through clenched teeth, “in small words, just what you are trying to prove.”

  “That you are capable of being as good an angel as anyone.”

  “I know that.”

  He blinked in surprise. What Quetti would never understand was that it was not the amount of good in a man that matters—for we all have some of that—but the quantity of evil. I have always had more than my share of that.

  “I don’t want to be an angel.” I ripped the three red stripes one by one from my sleeve and dropped them overboard. “I never swore the angel’s oath. I never will. I asked you for a ride back to the grasslands, and that’s all I want now.”

  Quetti flushed angrily. “My people are going to die, Knobil!”

  “Mine are dying already.”

  He stared at me blankly, and then all the color ran out of his face. Feeling better, I reached for ropes and brake, and the chariot creaked off down the slope, sails filling. The noise made conversation impossible, and Quetti just sat and stared at me with a very puzzled, very worried expression.

  When I needed to rest, though, he took the tiller without a word, and thereafter we had little time for talk. Sailing double shifts, rarely stopping even to visit with the locals, we made double time. Scarlet hill and scarlet sails, a bloody chariot bore death swiftly to the grasslands.

  Angel chariots travel alone—to cover more country and to ease the burden on the locals’ hospitality. The shortest route from Heaven to Dawn lay along the borderlands south of the Tuesday Forest, and Quetti had sent some of his troop that way, but to detour northward over Monday’s moors was faster. Northward we went, through country new to me. Blustery cold winds chivied us along. Herds of long-legged wildlife fled away before us over cushioned tundra, darkly green and brightly salted with flowers.

  We made good time, yet Vernier is very big. One thing I had not brought from Heaven was a razor. Quetti disapproved of an angel with whiskers, but if mine surprised the ranchers we met, then they were too polite to question. By the time we came to March and began to swing southward, I had a beard I could run my fingers through—perhaps not yet down to herdman standards, but a splendid silver and gold jungle nevertheless.

  For the first time I had a chance to practice angel navigation. With chart, compass, theodolite, barometer, and a rough idea of a date, an angel can locate himself well enough to come within sight of any mountain he chooses. Nothing smaller than a mountain makes a reliable landmark. Violet had not needed navigation to find an ocean, so I had been ignorant of it, which was one reason Quetti and I had taken so long to reach Heaven. Now we knew, but our road was easy. We headed west until we were north of the sun, then west-southwest. Soon we were crackling and slapping our way through the immature growth of the early jungle.

  Sleep by sleep, the sun rose higher and the heat grew more insufferable. Juvenile woodland faded imperceptibly into endless vistas of waving grasses, and our wheels were green with sap. Quetti became growly and ill-tempered, especially when I made up little songs about the smell of boiled wetlander. He was drowning in sweat, and I, in nostalgia—the scent of grass alone brought tears to my eyes. Cotto
n trees appeared around the ponds in the hollows, and the green-gold hills rolled away forever under an indigo sky. I was coming home. My heart sang like a choir of flute bats.

  When we saw the Urals to the west, faint pale smudges on the horizon, Quetti sighed and said they were beautiful. True wetlanders are all nutty about ice. I merely snorted and turned our course more westward. These ranges had been another hazard for the herdfolk, with the flocks emerging larger and less numerous than they went in. Massacre in the passes was a regular affair in every cycle, but Heaven ignored that violence as an internal herdfolk affair.

  These were not the grasslands I had seen with Violet, a hellscape of starving woollies and terrified people crammed like cactuses into a tiny corner of their normal range. Kettle had estimated that two-thirds of the herdfolk had perished in the disaster, and a single generation could hardly have restored their numbers. Quetti and I could go three or four sleeps without seeing a single herd. Woollies leave a grazed track streaked with dung that even a blind snortoise could follow, and yet we saw very few even of those. The landscape was much vaster than I had remembered, and much emptier, and my sense of foreboding grew more deadly.

  I was aware of my weakness. If I brooded too long on danger, my resolve would fail. Suddenly I made my decision. I had halted on a hilltop to check our position. When I laid down my almanac, I knew that we were well into the best grazing. A fine little lake sparkled below us, large enough to attract a herdmaster, yet small enough for my sinister intent. The cotton-tree grove was confined to one end of it, leaving the rest without cover: an ideal ambush.

  I began pulling off my boots.

  Quetti was sitting on one of the bedrolls in the bow. He shoved his hat brim higher and looked at me quizzically.

  “This is it,” I said. I opened a chest and took out my pagne. He watched for a moment and then said, “You’re still determined to go through with this madness? Ritual suicide?”

  “I’m a herdman. This is my destiny.”

  “Shouldn’t you at least wait until we find a suitable herd?”

  I frowned, grunting with the effort as I removed my pants. “Ambush the sucker from the chariot, maybe? Seems to me you ought to have oath problems with that idea, angel!”

  “Oh, Knobil!” His voice went so quiet I could barely hear it over the wind. “Do you really think I’d care about that?”

  I dropped my bag of food over the side. I eyed the bedding longingly and decided it would be cheating to take it. Loners sleep on bare ground. I clawed myself up to the mast until I was upright.

  Quetti also rose and he picked his way closer, saying “Knobil?” again, more threateningly.

  “Yes, Quetti?”

  “You’re trying to prove yourself again! I won’t argue that you’re not capable of being a herdmaster, because I’m sure that you are. But why go about it this way? No herdman is going to ride up to a water hole like this with his eyes closed, just so you can skewer him! You know how grass holds tracks! He’ll see them, and then what’ll you be?”

  “A winner!” I said. “You don’t know how those big lunks think, lad. He’ll also see your wheel marks and assume that angels made the tracks. If he doesn’t, then I just have to show myself—”

  “And he’ll be off like a scared roo!”

  “The hell he will be! He won’t know I’m a cripple, will he? He’ll try to kill me, to stop me trailing him back to his herd. Don’t you see? And I have a secret weapon—this bow of mine has twice the range of any bow made in the grasslands. I doubt that any herdman could even draw it. They’re big, but no one’s ever taught them the knack. My arrows are better, too. So, my shoulders against his legs? That’s a fair match—”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Then I’ll make a good herdman.”

  “You’ll starve to death first!”

  Quetti did have a point there. I glanced around at the bar ridges, barren of anything but grass, rippling in the scorching heat—not a sign of animal life, not a cloud. Yet to use the chariot to find a herd and then lay my ambush in its path would certainly be cheating. I could not kill a man without giving him some sort of chance. But how long would I have to wait?

  “Someone will drop in,” I said. “There may be roos—”

  “They’ll eat you before you eat them!”

  I shrugged and held out a hand. “Bye, friend. Thanks for the ride… Keep an eye on that front axle.”

  Quetti narrowed his eyes, ignoring my hand. “Let’s try it this way, then. Angels trade sometimes—I’ll buy a few woollies and a couple of girls for you.”

  That arrangement would not suit my purpose at all, but how could I explain this to Quetti? He had the sense not to ask too many questions, but he must have known that I was up to worse things than killing one herdman. This farewell was much harder than I had hoped. “And what will those girls see, old buddy? A crippled dwarf, a yellow-haired freak! It’s not me I have to prove myself to—it’s them! The only way I can impress herdwomen is to ride up on their owner’s horse with…with his head under my arm.”

  I still remember the spasm of nausea I felt as I said that.

  Quetti noticed. “And of course you’d need herders, too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  He blinked and shook his head sadly at me. I could almost believe I saw tears form in those ice-blue eyes. Not like Quetti!

  “I’ll scout around—”

  I’d had enough—we’d both start weeping like toddlers in a moment. “Stay out of it!” I snapped. “Even if all you do is to divert a herd in this direction, you’ll still be breaking your angel oath. This is my life, wetlander. Let me live it out.”

  I clambered out of the chariot, awkward as a landed fish. I slung my bow over one shoulder, my quiver over the other, and I hefted out a bag of jerky.

  By then Quetti had moved to the driver’s seat and was leaning on the gunwale. “All right! I promise I won’t send any herds this way. But I’ll come back in—”

  “I’ll put an arrow in you. I mean it!”

  He muttered something I missed. Then he shrugged. In silence we shook hands and smiled at each other uncomfortably. We had run out of words, and some things do not fit into words very well anyway.

  Braced against the thrust of the wind, I stood barefoot in the grass and watched his sails dwindle away along a ridge until they were wiped out by the rippling heat. Then I spun around and roiled off down to the trees.

  By the time I reached them, Loneliness was chuckling in my ear.

  —4—

  I WAS DISAPPOINTED TO DISCOVER that there were no miniroos around, but of course barriers of ocean and mountain would have thinned out the wildlife as much as the people who shared the same habitat. Probably there would be few roo packs, either, although that was a knife with two edges. I made a fishing rod and caught nothing; few grassland lakes contain fish. Birds passed overhead once in a while, but there was nothing I could do about that: only angels have guns.

  So my existence was limited by the contents of my grub sack. That made life simple. I stowed the bag carefully in a tree, in case something with three eyes came by while I slept. If something with two eyes came at those times, then I would never awaken, so there was no complication there, either.

  Herdmasters scout water holes. If one arrived before I did, then he would almost certainly approach close enough to let his horse drink. He would likely ride all the way around, checking for skulking loners, like me. I could hide in the undergrowth, and my arrows would reach any part of the shore. I was ten times as good with a bow as any herdman. If my shot was true, I would fell him. If his horse did not bolt, I could ride back to his herd and claim it. If I could find it. Life was very, very simple now.

  I explored the terrain until my feet were sore. I made myself a comfortable place to sit. I sat. I wished I did not already feel hungry. And I wished that Loneliness would stop laughing.

  ─♦─

  A shot awakened me. The all-red chariot
stood on the skyline. I heaved myself to my feet and reached for my bow. Quetti was already starting down the slope, hatless so that the sun blazed on his golden hair. Obviously he had believed my threats, and the shot had been to avoid catching me unaware and provoking a reflex attack. Good angels are cautious types.

  I had eaten once and slept twice. That was not long enough for him to be seriously worried about me. Nor had there been time for me to have changed my mind, so there was something new. I laid down the bow and waddled out of the trees to meet him.

  He came to a halt before he was within knife range and warily raised a hand in the sign of peace.

  “Approach, friend!” I said. God in Heaven! It was good to see a human face again.

  He came closer and stopped again, his faint mocking smile playing over his lips. He needed a shave, and his eyes were a sleepless red. “Doing all right?”

  “Fine.”

  He chuckled, disbelieving. “Remember when we first met, Knobil? You told me what had happened to your knees—and there you were in a spinsters den.”

  “So?”

  “I said you didn’t have much luck.”

  Again I said, “So?” What was amusing him? If he was playing a game, I could not see what it might be.

  He paused to yawn—mostly for effect, I supposed. “Your luck’s just changed.” He gestured a thumb over his shoulder. “I stopped to check out the sweeties at the first camp I came to.”

  “And?”

  “The herdmaster’s name is Gandrak.” He grinned to let the suspense build…“He’s dying.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Fell off his horse. I think he’s twisted his gut, or something. Nothing I can help with, Knobil, and he’s very close to death. His women are in a panic.” The pale eyes were wide and guileless.

  “This is on the level? You’re not setting this up?”

  Quetti shook his head.

  “A herdmaster should win his herd by killing a man—”

  “No. They need you, herdman. There are no other herds around, not that I can find. Three women and their kids…they can’t ride horses and scout water holes—they’ll die if you won’t come. They need a man, Knobil!”