by Michael Shea
“Jazm, I’ll speak straight to my meaning. I’m a blunt man and you’ll just have to excuse it.”
He was a block-torsoed man, and his head of short grey hair was squarish. Blunt too were the fingers with which he counted off his points while the younger Jazm whose gold-clasped shoulder braid of black hair bespoke a certain sportive élan—wryly bowed acquiescence.
“Your friendship with Quad is solely due to his being quartermaster. Reason: quartermaster’s recommendations nominate second mates. Further: this ambition for second mate is part of your larger ambition to captain the Oriaph outright.”
“Well, have I denied it?” Some weary pique was evident in Jazm’s voice, though he strove for humour. “Let’s really be frank. Under these upbraidings, Hossle, lies the tacit reproach that we are friends only because I wanted your voice to get me my thirdship. Openly now—you think me a climber?”
Hossle snorted. His humour looked realer than Jazm’s. “Well of course you are, but who objects to that? You’re a friendly fellow and like me well enough into the bargain. It’s your goals I upbraid, not your drive.” Jazm laughed, not displeased by this can dour , but Hossle pressed on, not to be interrupted. “Consider. A captaincy of one of these peeling scows? Your status is bound to your boat. If peel should go out of fashion, what’s your commission worth then? Young men never think of change. Suppose Snolp sniffs more gain in some competing fabric. Remember coiler scales? Everywhere you—was that a man on that rock?”
The question startled Jazm. The peaceful, rock-fanged shallows, gold and red in the new morning light, grew eerier with the thought of some fourth inhabitant besides themselves and their buoyant prey. Though in less than four fathoms of water they were two miles offshore. The Oriaph and her companions (the Wollikan, another peeler, and a nameless transport of snolpian mercenaries that no one knew the reason for) were anchored five miles south, awaiting the harvest to follow tonight’s full moon. Jazm scanned, finding the half-gilt rocks around them vacant, and the wide whisper of waves unmarred by any sound.
Hossle shrugged, seeming embarrassed. “I’m glare-blind, I guess. But let’s not lose the thread—it was in your own time, while you were growing up—all the world was coiler scales, the ultimate gaudy gear, fops would never wear anything else again! So what of all those career coiler-captains? Look for them now—poor, grounded popinjays, shorn of every plume, guzzling cheap gut-stiffener in wharfside tumbledowns! But now, what of all the coiler navigators? Everywhere on any kind of ship, easily steering the tides of change. It’s why I keep harping—the science before the ship itself. It’s in honest counsel, and not pride of post, that I speak. If the Oriaph’s ever deassigned, I only—”
“Did you hear that, Hossle?” Jazm was hearkening towards the big crag—a fractional island, really—where Hossle had thought to see a man. Glides wheeled above it—rather thickly?
“Yes.” Hossle was taut now, his whisper fierce. “It’s oars in locks—a lot of them.” Digging one of his own oars in he began to wheel them around with the other. “Cut that bloody slouch loose.”
Before they had even half come about, a forty-oared two-master slid from one side of the crag, followed instantly by a second from the other side. The overlooming hulls converged to bracket the skiff. Their glinting oars chopped the water so near the skiff they smote and then imprisoned Hossle’s oars.
Standing amidships, Hossle told Jazm in a mutter, “Dig out our ensign, it’s in the gear!” Crying upwards, his voice echoing between the two ships, he displayed the emptiness of his hands: “Ahoy! We are Snolp’s! We’re with the peeling fleet nearby! We mean no harm!”
Through the strangers’ oarports he could glimpse single eyes, fragments of bearded profiles. Jazm was just digging out their banner—a black A and S entwined on a blue ground—when from both unseen decks footfalls flurried. Along the gunwale of one ship a dozen archers appeared, nocking arrows to the strings of horn-tip bows, and to that of the other surged a score of men hoisting casks and bags of ballast overhead. Hossle stood paralysed with amazement.
“Wait!” shouted Jazm, jumping to his feet. Arrows snickered down and a fang of pain sank through the small of his back. A cask jounced off his shoulder, knocking him to his knees. He looked up as, just above him, a large, plump-faced man raised a box. Jazm’s expression of astonishment precisely mirrored the plump man’s as the latter’s arms thrust a growing shadow down against Jazm’s sight, and Jazm’s thought was crushed.
The hammocks were slung amidships of the second deck, below the main deck and above the oars. Hex lay in his, musing.
It was scarcely noon. The rest of the crusaders were topside still gossiping in the bows about the kill, each still busy establishing his or her part of the exploit. Though Hex, in the weeks of crossing, had grown quite cronyish with some of them, he felt no stomach for this discussion, perhaps because he had had a more unmistakable hit than the rest of them.
The image of that impact was vividly recurrent to his mind’s eye, and he had counselled himself to this retreat, to divert himself by going over his cartographic notes. These he kept in a peel pouch that belted flat to the small of his back, safe from theft and weather beneath his doublet. There was little to them at present, a slim packet of his jottings of any yarn or anecdote or datum he had come by with any bearing on places and their customs. He was not studying them in any case. He had his shortsword out of its sheath, and was perusing it. It seemed to him somehow heavier and sharper since this morning, oddly realer, as did the fact that he would have to use it—directly or as a prod—for a killing-tool tonight.
It still made him a little giddy, the oiled ease with which he had brained that man. He keenly felt the larger human machine he had been sucked into—which surrounded him and even plied his limbs to its ends. For the first time he appreciated the degree of surrender his enlistment had involved and, all too readily, some of his initial misgivings about the enterprise returned to him with great clarity.
The movement’s headquarters had been in a defunct dockside eel-picklery. Overturned pickling vats had served for the tables at which various preparations committees had stationed themselves. The rank-and-file dossed down here and there throughout the big, lofted, unpartitioned interior—napped on sacking beds or lounged on crates in merry or disputatious gaggles.
Here had been a general ambience neither unknown nor unpleasant to Hex. That atmosphere of brash articulacy, that carnival variety of sartorial and tonsorial affectations—all smacked of the Academy so lately left. He even recognized a face or two from Glorak. If there was some fleeting pique at this familiarity where he had looked for unguessed challenges, there was comfort by the same token. It was when he and Sarf had to slog through a series of induction procedures that a lively disdain for some of these crusaders was wakened in him.
From table to table they inched to be dipped in vat after vat—as it were—in a piecemeal immersion in the Membership. The functionaries administering each dunking—though presumably idealistic volunteers like all the rest—received the pair’s lowly business of recruitment with complacent disattention. No necessary material was ever right on hand, necessary people were always absent, no one ever knew where anyone else was, and everybody seemed to feel quite cheerful and self-approving about the whole thing. They had to wait half an hour for the necessary tenth member of the Witnessing Committee to be found. What ensued, with his indispensable aid, was an hour’s casual chat among the ten, during which no one more than glanced at Hex—this though the ceremony’s aim was to ensure, in case of spies, that at least ten crusaders knew any new recruit’s face by heart. This done, he was allowed to proceed to the Notarizing Committee for his oath. The hired magus administering the oath, with a mild control-spell attached (who knew if it worked or not?), could not be found for almost an hour. Neither, when it came time to get Hex his membership token, could the woman who had last wandered off with the supply of them. The token, a medallion struck with a scythe symbolic of the crusad
e’s “harvest of justice”, was essential for getting him in and out of quarters past the guards, and presumably the crusade needed recruits, but almost two hours were needed to procure him one.
But it was Kratsk and Benarius, presiding at the last tub he was dragged to, that galled Hex most severely. These, the Steersmen of the Crusade, had engineered the mechanics of merchandising the pirated peel and, being in their own right notable ideologues of the firebrand sort, exercised a kind of Duumvirate in the league. They presided—or rather, were petitioned and consulted—at the biggest vat in the picklery. Its circle of seats was thick with an impromptu court of lieutenants and acolytes.
The burly Kratsk showed a sombre, deaconish energy. He illuminated diverse issues for those who thronged nearest with their questions. Beside him, resting, the cross of leadership laid by a moment, sat the gaunter, paler Benarius. Slowly, eyelids shut, he massaged the back of his neck, wearied by his abundant load of cares. Sarf took Hex’s business to Kratsk, pressed it not shyly—after a decent wait—on Kratsk’s attention, was wordlessly bid hold a bit by Kratsk’s left hand; waited, urged anew, was bid once more attend. Benarius’ lofty weariness was not to be interrupted either. His self-massage was now devoted to his temples, with his head cocked back. The close air of piety, cloyingly pickle-scented, so goaded Hex he found a cask to sit on, pulled off one boot, and began giving his foot a massage—not without audible sighs, and demonstrations of eased distress.
The parody was felt, though the general pose of inattention to Hex and Sarf prevented its being openly resented. Kratsk turned to Sarf, forbearingly asked his business. Hex’s name was entered in the membership rolls, and the pair waved away.
Self-importance being such a common folly, Hex had let the fundamental romance of the crusade carry his will. Its consonance—however marginal—with the bathcrone’s hint was probably enough in itself to settle the matter. The congenial milieu of smart-mouthed academic idealists was a further seduction. Though such assemblages invariably included cynics out for monetary gain or glory, the cause at least was just and, given this, Hex found himself not too disturbed to note a certain gain-and-glory lust in his own feelings. This was natural, and at any rate he was doing no ill.
Now, however, the depth of his allegiance alarmed him. He must help this machine to kill, at risk of dying with it at Snolp’s hands, should his ardour falter. Now the moral vagueness and petty vanities of the crusaders frightened him. Suppose they were stupid in bigger ways as well? Might not this venture pose a real threat to his own existence? Admittedly, the leadership had managed a sufficiently organized beginning. Rowing shifts were short enough to be bearable, provisions were abundant. No more than two-score mercenaries—rowers and archers—had been necessary to provide a backbone of efficiency. And the group as a whole had not done badly for starters this morning. While there was some hysterical over-kill in the recruits’ bombardment, they had at least performed with a will, while the archers had feathered them with ghastly speed, till they seemed half avian—weird, bristle-plumed bipeds twitching against the skiff’s thwarts.
But Hex recalled the half week they’d spent waiting to ship out—recalled some of his comrades’ callowness, and was assailed anew by the worm of doubt. Discretion was difficult enough, of course, in that dense, reeking jostle of humanity. The quayside was a squatters’ jungle of displaced slum dwellers. The parks and alamedas of the Heights were required by civil statute to accommodate riot refugees and provender their camps but, inevitably, the wharves absorbed the bulk of the dispossessed. By the cataclysm’s third day the harbour had filled with ships awaiting discharge of their cargo. On the thronging docks balked merchants—bent in colloquy with irate captains—threaded their way through the bristling tent-towns of the citizens, loud and swarmish with children, and overhung by the garbage-piss-and-blood smell of mass misery. Environed thus, any secret might prove hard to hide. Alas, many of the crusaders seemed to find this group secrecy, this membership in a mystery, a heady thing indeed. Hex himself, whenever he had sat with a knot of them in any wineshop, had heard a score of indiscretions spoken, and none too softly, either. And who could ever tell who—in that hyper-populous surround—was listening?
True, the riot countenanced this rashness, to some degree. Beside the deep convulsion of that green world it was easy to feel invisible, and inaudible as well beneath that vast, rock-rooted thunder, the snap and groan and smash of the embroiled and raging titans, ancient First Citizens of this piece of earth. The inhabitants themselves seemed a gypsy camp of transients beside this primordial turbulence, and foreigners were the readier to feel like patrons of some huge, violent carnival—passing on the fringe of marvels, exterior to its terrors and outward-bound.
Well and good—if only there had not been more than three peelers in the shipping jam. This meant dozens of Snolp’s employees must have been scattered through those crowds, drinking at those wineshops… it nagged his stomach now, that remembered looseness. Perhaps those peeler crews had been distracted, though. Two of them had been killed. Late in the afternoon of Hex’s induction, from a wineshop he and Sarf had watched big rolls of peel being unloaded down the dock. The boat carried a large harvest, and some of the ten-foot rolls had been lashed on deck. These were now being offloaded down a gangway.
Refugees hemmed the operation quite densely and nearly—only the most minimal space was left for the cart receiving the rolls from the foot of the gangway. One of Snolp’s stevedores misstepped, and trod on some by-squatters, and the crowd showed very nasty about it, not at all disposed to see it as an accident. Then, near the head of the ramp, two of the crewmen lost their grip on the wooden axle of a roll. With huge soft speed it thudded down and sprang into the refugees, killing a child and crippling two adults. The two crewmen were dragged down to the dock in five heartbeats’ time—thrown down, one of them, who rolled into the water and swam free. The other was pinned to the dock with the stevedore, and instantly buried under a crowd waving knouts and hammers. Hex could still see the late, red-gold light drenching that scene, half-gilding the flickering clubs and toiling arms. Above the riot noise some trumpet melody was playing—a signal between those crews inside battling the riot. The green seethe of the furious trees was also beautiful in that golden light and, with the music, the whole murder had a gorgeous, ceremonial air, a ritual sacrifice of human life to the bloodthirsty deities, Pain and Fear.
This morning’s snolpians had died similarly gilt with oblique sun, though nearness made that ceremony seamier—its blood more vivid against the skiff’s bleached wood, the meaty noise of killing more distinct—so distinct, echoing between the two ships’ hulls… So far, killing “the minions of Snolp” was indistinguishable from the lynching of any defenceless victim.
Hex rebelted his pouch of notes, resheathed his sword, and went above. He found Sarf lounging portside watching the sinking of their prey, for the crusaders deputized to this were only now wiring the two men with weights and scuttling the skiff, likewise weighted.
“Are they still at it?”
“They’ve been retrieving the arrows—very squeamishly and with much delay.” Sarf laughed grimly at the memory, and they watched the silver-haired one sink.
“That one died hard,” Sarf added.
“A powerful man. ‘Snolp!’ Remember? ‘We are Snolp’s!’ That seemed so poignant, somehow.”
“Yes.”
“Sarf. How do you think we will do?” They were looking at the almost circular little bay of the town of Polypolis which could be seen, two miles distant, through the rocks concealing their ships. Hex tried to wedge his imagination into that sharp little spit of silver—that headland of shiny slate rooftiles bright in the noon sun. How would he do there tonight? Sarf’s answer was unexpectedly solemn:
“I think we’ll do quite well, Hex. The more I think of it, the more impressive it seems to me—I mean all we might accomplish if we pull this off.”
“I’m impressed with us too, but also edgy.”<
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“Listen. If you stand quiet here a while, the breeze brings you snatches of the revels in the town. I swear it does. Our information’s accurate—and what more likely in any case than that they’d drink deep and long before a harvest? I tell you I feel it quite distinctly. Hex—touch wood—we’re going to find them ripe for taking, and we’re going to take them.”
10
Two Musical Friends
The air was utterly clear—cool and dry, scoured by an offshore breeze. The full moon’s light flooded Polypolis, bleaching the cobbles to knobs of bone, and burying half the world in shadows black as charcoal. The still, stony street echoed the pair’s footfalls, though they tried to muffle them. The bulky smokepot they carried on a stick between them did not help.
“Wait,” Sarf hissed. “Hear that?”
After a moment, Hex nodded. From two streets above there drifted the scuff and whisper of a large group moving parallel to their own course. The two looked a question at each other: Was the noise as loud in fact as it seemed in their anxious ears? No shutters opened. No heads were thrust from doorways. They moved on.
They had drawn, for their assignment, the Musicians Lodge. This stood—as did Peelers Hall—near the wall, but two streets downhill and shoreward of it. The Hall would probably hold every working man in town, and hence the bulk of the crusaders now approached it. But since their informants had indicated that some few of the harvest-eve’s celebrants occasionally slept at the Lodge, the planners had thought it prudent that the Lodge be penetrated simultaneously, thus securing at a stroke every vigorous male in Polypolis, which their reconnaissance reckoned at some seventy souls.
The Lodge was a three-storey building whose dormered, slate-tiled roof overtopped the wall but whose lower floors were comfortably sunk in its shadow. Beneath one of its western windows, they set the smokepot gently on the ground. Hex tried the shutter. It swung open. The sash, pried with his shortsword’s tip, slid up. This ease of access was almost daunting. Fumblingly, they fed one end of the pot’s hose beneath the sash, and clamped the other to the smoke vent of the pot. Sarf inserted the bellows’ tip into the intake vent and began to pump with a steady rhythm. Within the Lodge mute swells of thin, white smoke moved through the darkened rooms, as if seeking out corridors and stairways.