In Yana, the Touch of Undying

by Michael Shea

  On the other hand, was it not rather like some new word one has learned, unnoted before, then suddenly appearing everywhere you turned? In the end, he found himself inclined to the conviction he had begun with: Yana existed, and due to some inner merit of his own, he was being led to it.

  When the stripping was nearly done. Hex’s worry about the third ship was removed. A new troop of archers mounted the wall from its harbour end. They made the Cause’s salute to the crusaders—all of whom were now bunched near the surf, and flensing through the peel’s last sections. Cheery cries and slogans were traded, and the league’s scythe banner was unfurled by the newcomers, who relieved the other mercenaries on the wall. These latter shouldered their weapons and shinned down a knotted rope to join the crusaders on the slope. The workers fell to wrapping things up with an eased air, feeling amply guarded from reprisal.

  Sarf grimaced, looking up at the wall. “With our own squad this makes more than sixty bowmen. Kratsk and Benarius must have feared some real trouble.”

  “At least they could spread along the wall. Why do they bunch up near us?”

  “Hex! Look!”

  A ship like one of their own, but bigger, swept round the landspit—sails furled, oars flashing. The bowsprit carried the scythe banner, and a statuesque man in a bravely plumed hat stood in the bow, waving and cheering: “Good News! Good News!”

  The workers stood, rapt by the blatancy of this improbability—for this must prematurely reveal the crusaders’ presence to Snolp’s fleet, and show their hand before the booty was even loaded. The keel ground on to the peel-slick shore. Two dozen spearmen and a score more bowmen—wearing Snolp’s blazon on their armbands—swarmed across the oars and on to the slope. The crusaders found the archers who had just quit the wall now so deployed as to hem them in against it—and their bows were drawn. Atop the wall the new men too stood at full draw, the huddled crusaders their target.

  “Drop all your tools! Instantly!” the splendid man trumpeted from the bow. A snap, a hum, and a dart was planted tremoring in the chest of a man with a flenser—who mayor may not have been about to drop it. As he hit his knees, all the other tools clattered on the rock along with his. The spearmen moved among the crusaders with chains and iron fetters.

  The man in the bow was tall. He had great waxed moustachios and a nobly thrusting chin. He surveyed the shackled men of the Cause with a brightly amiable eye, a look of frank contentment.

  “My friends, I am Forb,” he told them. “We”—his hands displayed the taut, encircling bows—“are Snolp’s. So are you, for you have just undergone a change of leadership. And indeed, it is touching this very fact that I’ve come to address you now. And I feel sincerely privileged, I feel honoured to bear you the message I do. It comes from a man we all respect. It comes from the venerable Kratsk.

  “I stood in his cabin, as near him as I am you, when he dictated it, and I was deeply moved. Though fate has cast us in opposing roles, and I, as Snolp’s man, must deplore your erstwhile leader’s views, yet I still feel as I felt on meeting him: here, I thought, is a man of my own kidney.”

  Forb’s voice, mellow to begin with, had grown serenely sonorous. He drew a parchment from his fur-trimmed doublet. “I pray you,” he said in Olympian tones, “though my own poor voice must speak his words, picture him as you’ve known him, uttering them. Beleaguered man! What a load of responsibility he bears for love of his followers! He spoke so wearily, vainly smoothing his care-knotted brow with his fingertips. Hearken:

  “ ‘My fellow crusaders! It is a golden hour that I greet you in—golden, that is, for a heart enough at ease to savour it! As, from my cabin, I watch the sun-gilt waters, I sit in painful self-confidence, and I ask my heart: Can any end, however high, repay a man for the loss of the simple life? There was a time when I was free to muse upon such small, priceless things as the dancing of the sunlight upon the waters!

  “ ‘Ironic, is it not? It is to Snolp himself that we must sell our daringly won peel! Alas, Inspiration ever chooses its own time, and we had this one too late in the game to share it with the rest of you. Tragically, Snolp’s factors have offered an unrefusable two hundred thousand lictors—yes! In gold!—for both the peel and yourselves. Their deluded reasoning is thus: with yourselves to give substance to a tale of vast piracies, they will conduct you on a pilgrimage to a much publicized place and hour of judgement, spreading a shortage scare as they go, and shortly they will double the price of peel on the open market.

  “ ‘Poor cynical fools! Do they think all justice sleeps? They do not grasp the incalculable impetus their own tainted gold will be giving our Cause! They but nourish the young lions that will devour them! Meanwhile, the pain that yourselves must suffer is yet another of the great burdens that we bear. It heartens us at least to know—had there been time to check this plan with you—what your ringing, brave, bold syllable of answer would have been. The knowledge buoys our spirits.

  “ ‘So now, with your heroic example, we set our jaws and face up to the tasks that lie ahead. For us, to steer the tricky tides of finance, and find safe harbours of investment for the Cause’s funds. For you, to fling proud derision in Oppression’s teeth! To mock its paltry torments with our watchword, reasonably sounded: Swift Justice, and a Scornful Smile for Death! Hail, and Farewell!’ ”

  Forb let fall the arm which he had lifted in a last salute. He uttered an extended sigh. “And so,” he said, with audible regret, “there, my friends, you have it. And now? Now, my friends, you march.”

  As the shackled line shuffled off between two ranks of bowmen, a cheer went up from the wall, where what remained of the Polypolitans now stood. They sent after the crusaders howls of execration, and some few heterogeneous missiles which, flung from that height, struck the line with good effect, and gave the men of the Cause a foretaste of the pilgrimage that lay before them through the cities of Slimshur.

  12

  Judgement, and an Execution

  In the course of the next month, the crusaders came to feel very much like a troupe of travelling actors. Being always in the wains heightened this impression. At first Forb had marched them a good deal, leaving them on foot even when passing through a town, to wear them down and break them in a bit. But as they had a precise circuit to play, and time was limited, they were soon riding in the tumbrels even between the towns. When stationed in some public square where Forb read out his script, those creaking wains felt like stages islanded in a small sea of hostile audience. On all sides the compatriots of the crusaders’ victims stood studying them. Their chains were compelling props—the very costume of Guilt. And they, in their muteness, felt like props themselves. Though they were enforced to this muteness, still they felt the eerieness of it, that they should stand there tongueless in an ocean of accusing eyes and docilely hear intoned Forb’s preposterous declamations—each one tailored for the town that heard it—of their fictive crimes.

  They were the survivors of a vaster force that had been killed in the quelling, Forb said. They had massacred the men of six northern towns, and outraged the chastity of their victims’ wives, before even Snolp’s unsleeping vigilance could prevent it. The particular victim towns might vary as the troupe moved south, so long as the nearest named was at least two weeks distant from the town they were playing. The fiction thus broadcast need not last. Its targets were the observers and purchasing agents of major peel markets who were resident in most of the major cities of Slimshur. Since these must, within a two-week period, bespeak their portion of the coming harvest, they could quickly be forced to ante up or be shut out of a share of the suddenly scarce fabric. Though none saw a shortage locally, they couldn’t disprove this dramatized tale of general dearth, and they anted up lest their competitors should jostle them aside from the trough. That half-moon harvest was a landmark day in the history of peel profits. The troupe was then two weeks north of Hismin, at Slimshur’s southern border, where they were bound for judgement in the Deputarium. Hence t
hey were able—the rest of the way down—to till the economic ground for an equally profitable full-moon harvest.

  Conscripted into such an inflammatory drama, the crusaders harboured the urge to protest their innocence. Alas, the knowledge that they would die for it was no more effective in silencing them than was the inevitable grotesqueness of any self-justification they might make: “It’s not true! We had no other forces! We only massacred seventy-four men and we never laid a hand on their wives!” Still, none could help feeling that each time they stood by silent at the reading-out of these lies, they sank by that much more into the characters which this play had billed them in. And how then, meeting judgement in those characters, could they hope to live?

  Tirelessly, scant data on the Deputarium were pooled. Though communication was held to whispers and hours stolen from sleep, the mercenaries did not inflexibly repress it, and were even themselves occasionally the sources of some information, off-handedly given. Hex for one could not stop wondering what lies were being introduced by this channel.

  “Why shouldn’t they feed us pap to keep us confused? We did it to our prisoners,” he would hiss to Racklin, the man chained just in front of him.

  Racklin, keeping an eye on the guards silhouetted by the watchfire, whispered back, “You’ve noted these chains that bind us? The guards equal our numbers. They don’t need to fool us. They just get bored sometimes, and say what they know, or think they know.”

  Sarf, chained behind Hex, reached over him to prod the speaker. “That’s the real point,” he breathed. “Who knows anything sure about the Dapples? No one’s from around here, our guards no more than us.”

  Hex, in the bone-weary insomnia afflicting him these latter nights of their journey, struggled for hope, but remained inclined to Sarf’s bleak agnosticism. Racklin’s proximity tried Hex somewhat. Till their capture they had never associated although—and because—they were acquainted from Glorak Harbour. He was for Hex one of those academic Doppelgangers one never got friendly with but who was always popping up at the lectures and tutorials one took. A handsome fellow, undeniably, and very trim of body. Somehow Hex had just never taken to him. During the voyage to Polypolis he had contrived to be clean-shaven when everybody not already bearded had yielded to that condition.

  But unarguably, Racklin’s reading of Bindle the Black—whom Hex had long professed to admire—had been more thorough than his own, for Racklin was able to remind Hex that in the sixth of Bindle’s “Evensong Canticles” the Dapples were characterized as legitimate Great Survivors. The historiographer had acknowledged ignorance of the Dapples’ ilk. As likely they were star-spawn from the Archipelago Constellation, as that they were benign demons from an arcane subworld. Still he judged it certain they had brought a more than human wisdom and mercy to their missionary work of offering justice to a thousand rude and criminal generations of restive humankind.

  Racklin supposed, with an ironic smile, that Bindle could be trusted. Starting with that account, then, there was nothing in the current gossip that contradicted it. Bindle recorded no age of decline, but he had written two centuries ago. That the Deputarium for nearly half that time had been unvisited was one of the few certainties among the prisoners’ information. It remained to determine what this desuetude reflected, and Racklin had no doubt as to which of the two current theories was correct. For in both Pil’s satrapies and Slimshur’s towns the apparatus of justice had long been the province of the respective polities’ fiscal ministers. It had been a century since anyone hereabouts would think of wasting the guilty on the Deputarium’s gallows, or risking their acquittal in its halls.

  To Hex the competing theory looked more convincing _ the reason, perhaps, he preferred his nescience. For it was insistently rumoured that, long before the modern technology of peel production was developed, the Deputarium itself had changed, grown draconian and bloody-hearted through long dealing with the race it had come to enlighten and elevate. By this account the Dapples, in their lineal succession—for each served singly, and performed one parthenogenesis near its life’s term—had declined to such a pitch of black misanthropy as had made their gallows yard to flourish and expand like a stand of thriving timber. It was even said that one of this dour latter dynasty had gone abroad, and in a mood of bitter lunacy, had conquered and colonized where the satrapies now thrived. Here the Dapple renegade originated, it was averred, the legal system Pil had since so fruitfully developed.

  When Hex argued that a man like Snolp would not trouble with any tribunal that might fail to take their lives, Racklin answered it was the publicity of being judged by the Deputarium that mattered to Snolp. The almost mythic aura that must surround a call-to-judgement of the long quiescent court—this was Snolp’s goal, and was all but achieved already with its proclamation and their progress thither. And that the aura itself persisted could only reasonably be due to the fact that the Dapples, whatever the changes in their mood, had continued as incorruptible as Bindle had reported them. Snolp was gambling, then. No fix was in. And doubtless the very rumours Hex favoured led Snolp to count on death verdicts. But if there was any truth in Bindle—something scholars could better judge than pirates like Snolp, however cunning—then the Dapple retained his breed’s superhuman discrimination, and would rightly weigh what the crusaders had done. If the dice fell thus, the Deputarium’s protection would thenceforth envelop the acquitted, but Snolp could face this, knowing he could at least forbid them re-entry of Slimshur. Driven south, they couldn’t harm his fable of dearth which, as pointed out, was all but accomplished anyway.

  Such tough-minded and ingenious optimism always silenced Hex, because he craved its balm himself. When left to himself he managed not to debate the question at all, content with a sullen blankness of imagination that granted anything might happen, and thus sneaked in the hope that it would be lucky. Musing was in any case much inhibited two days from Hismin, for then Forb started marching them again. Hex feared he knew why—to wear them down and stupefy resistance as they neared their immolation. Hex’s hidden sword, nested in the chronic sores and blisters it had long established on his flank and thigh, chafed and burned anew. Chained as he was to a master chain linking the waists of fifteen men, the sheer futility of this so painfully hoarded tool of liberty galled him almost as much as its steel did his skin. Still, in the terrible powerlessness of prisonerhood, though scarcely more than a symbol, it glowed like a secret comfort against his leg, and so he hugged it to him.

  They skirted Hismin entirely, and on the third morning of their march went straight up into the hills that backed it, where the Deputarium stood. Seemingly the trial was thought sufficient redramatization of their guilt in Hismin, without need of gulling the citizens in the streets. It looked rather a handsome city as it fell away below the centipedal procession of the chained lines. It stood where that vast, smooth littoral shelf defining Slimshur as a whole came to an end against a sizeable range of mountains, of which these were the foothills. Hismin’s killing-slope was acres broad, its walls resplendent—a town ten times the size of Polypolis.

  The sea looked glossy black beneath a high cloud-rack of iron-grey tufts and plumes, hurrying like one vast wing across the world on a cold, brisk wind. The air smelled like rain, but meanwhile visibility was vast and sharp. The shaggy, green-haired hills showed a first faint dapple of bloom—tight saffron flowers, not quite unscrolled from bud, as if distrustful of the gusty day. Their road wound round a first hill, crossed the saddle linking it to a second, and wound round that second, higher hill in its turn. Beyond it, in a further and far broader saddle, were the Dapples’ gallows yard and, past that, the red sandstone walls and black slate roof tiles of the Deputarium itself.

  But the building, at first, went totally unseen; the chained men’s eyes were fastened to that little wilderness of racks and gibbets. For in that yard’s mere aspect—the un elaborated image of it—was the refutation, the instantaneous extinction of every hope, each sunny supposition and airy argumen
t which such as Racklin might have elaborated. Only crazed and homicidal castellans could have posted such grim sentinels—in such number!—before their citadel. The killing-engines, easily an acre of them, half filled the saddle, spreading right up to its sheerest side—for here talus slopes of a chalky pallor dropped sharply from its rim.

  Forb, who rode point on a bravely fitted Slender, detained the column as it came abreast the gate of the yard. He rose in his stirrups, and swept a displaying arm.

  “Behold these legioned machines, my friends! How much they have to show the instructed eye! See near the thicket’s centre there, those frames of greater bulk and stature? The works of the Deputarium’s earliest age. See the simplicity of line, the classic, unadorned strength of that Thrasher, or that Barbed Wheel just beyond it! In those days, my friends, the Dapples, in the first flush of their altruistic ardour, drew their conclusions in broader, firmer lines than they do today.

  “For see! As one scans outward from that aboriginal grove, how much more involute and fanciful the garden grows! See the intricate, finicking symmetry of that Tenderizer’s flared trip-hammers, the elaborate balance of that Sarcomord’s toothed scrubbers!”

  As he spoke a quick gust of rain swept over them. Black drops spattered suggestively on the bleached wood and rude old iron of those towering sentries. Their dangling chains and collars rattled laxly in the wind like a murderer’s kite-cleansed bones.

  “The conclusion’s inescapable, is it not?” Forb was fluting. “We see here Dapple jurisprudence mellowing through time! We see the very shape of Justice branch and twine, effloresce with ever more Baroque conceptions of reprisal. From this we must learn reverence for the noble Dapples’ patient energy in studying the text of Mankind’s eternally equivocal Brief!