by Michael Shea
“Do you know any other lines of eulogy?” The elder, as she grinned this, stepped forward and displayed the wrack-heaped beach with a sweep of her staff that made Banniple step back and bump the rail. This, with his crooked smile and headshake, set them off again. The younger took the other’s arm and led her off down the pier, for the elder seemed not quite as ready as her friend to abandon the jest.
Banniple looked at the strand again, and found it still made him feel elegiac. He supposed he must grant a justice in the situation. The men’s fraternity of the sea, closed so long to women, now depended on them even for the skilled carpenters needed to keep their surviving piers repaired. Shipwrights the men had in plenty, but so adamant had been their long insistence that only maritime affairs had manly dignity, that men who could build a boat from keel to mast could not frame a window. The clans still won a living from the tricky tides, though their roistering, never-daunted ethic blinked at their declining status on seas now swum by greater sharks than they had ever been. The fruits of some trade, some carriage, some old-style piracy, they still brought home, but now the main part of their gold and foreign goods went to the women for bread, beer and plod meat—for skins, shoes and blankets, spikes and dressed lumber—for everything that came from the abdicated shore. Still, if he had a bias in the matter, it was the feeling that the women were rather rubbing it in—having so much of their own, and then to come in and drink their own beer in the poor boors’ clubhouse Sanctum, just to show they had the economic power to command the privilege—it seemed so vengeful. Then again (here the hall behind him buzzed with a surge of pent noise) these clansmen in their heedless, cheery energy might permanently infuriate any long-associated soul. His fortnight coming hither on the Glide had shown him that. He set out down the pier, judging the two women now far enough ahead.
He wished for the brazenness to overtake them and take them up on their lascivious threat. The sun-flooded lane ahead was empty. The path that branched from the pier’s foot down to the beach hooked through a small duster of houses, and on the porch of one of them a woman sat waxing a bow. He made a cheery salute, she stared. When he was some strides past she called:
“Stranger!”
“Good evening?” He saw she was tanned, trimly solid, had short dark-honey hair bound by a fillet, grey eyes, cool in the sun-darkened face.
“Why are you going to the shore at this hour? Are you going swimming?”
Banniple said: “A splendid idea!”, trying for a roguish blitheness. The woman didn’t smile, sounded irritated:
“Well then don’t knock your head against some stray piece of Score-and-Seven’s glory!”
The traveller faltered, decided no further pleasantry was offered, and turned away with an awkward bow meant to be ironic.
“Wait!” she said. “Haven’t those fools told you? What about the Riddler?”
“Riddler?” He was glad of a chance to show some wit. “Respected Madam, your question itself is a riddle. Are you then the Riddler?”
“Idiot,” the woman muttered, returning to the waxing of her bow. Angered, Banniple marched on, down to the shingle.
The horizon now bisected the sun. The sea wore half its light—a great fan of puddled fire. The hills and the beach glowed with the other half, whose radiance ennobled the dunes of trash; made polished ebony of tarry beams, and beaten copper of rusted iron shards. And, on those stretches of the beach that were unlittered, the shingle itself was sumptuous—black and grey, each egg-smooth stone distinct, each lovingly, singly lathed by the sea, and painstakingly etched with shadows till their shoals seemed treasure, a hoard of polished coin where the surf plunged its white fingers with a greedy whisper. Banniple began to walk, the stones shifting musically underfoot. What he felt was like a foretaste of Kurl itself, this fear compounded with cupidity the scene inspired in him. And in its way, this trash was like the texts and works of art so deeply honeycombed in the museums. For didn’t these jumbled artifacts document—to the instructed eye—a human history as darkly bright as any other? And—as must those far more fabulous relics of buried Kurl—this littoral boneyard wore the melancholy dignity of all things overtaken by their ruin.
His wonder to be walking through this gorgeous desolation precisely counterweighed his fear, as if he alternated between them with every other step. The pier’s skeletal script seemed more than ever to insist on its own deciphering, a riddle much depended on. Yes, surely this ghostly scene was an omen, an admonition to remember the audacity of his larger quest, and the fragility of all human ambitions. The sun was down now. Its afterglow had unexpected richness, like a brazen gong that sent out reverberations of pollen-yellow, rose and violet. The beauty here was only on loan from the sun and already it was leaving. In deep Kurl, of course, half an infinity of marvels burned inextinguishably with their own buried splendour while the dangers there—why, how much greater than those of an evening stroll here on a deserted beach!
He had to stop a moment, to give a headshake, and smile. Slight, bookish Banniple! Sober sub-curate in the Erkish Archivium! Here! Actually, in the flesh, halfway already to legendary Kurl. A daub of colour snagged his eye in the dunes of wreckage. Here, on the corpse-pier’s half of the beach now, these lay thicker. They were already bled of their sharper hues and the little dazzle he saw, though two heaps inshore, stood out, being concatenated of gold, crimson and fresh green. Using his hands, he monkeyed up the nearest hillock, whence the thing looked certain to prove some flower of rare luxuriance. He thought he saw a negotiable path to it, and proceeded.
On his return he would present it to that woman with the bow, and by then would have thought of some remark that would make her laugh. Yet another premonition of Kurl, where the foray would be over far more treacherous ground. He could not know what path he would find, nor, therefore, what precinct it would take him to, so he could not guess his prize’s form. He had his private fantasies, of course—certain of the more famous texts said to lie in the lava tomb—but whatever it proved, wasn’t his real mission with it much like this of the flower? To spark a new light, a new estimation and acceptance in his colleagues’ eyes, and, indeed, perhaps in Ruanna’s most of all? (She was a palaeograph with the Archivium’s Historical Seminary.) Luck would determine if the prize itself were great or not so great. But the prize of having brought it back—this, irreducible, would make him shine, ennoble him for the rest of his life. A laughing matter, decidedly, to see this schoolboy pattern behind his great exploit. Somehow the foolishness did not diminish his joy in it.
Yes, it was a flower. Standing in a little vale environed by the charnel heaps of long-dead enterprise, its brilliance amid that anaemic grey seemed a flame set burning on the fuel of the bleached bones of ships. Those bones creaked under Banniple as he clambered down to it. Its bloom was fat and fleshy. The amphora of its calyx disgorged, it seemed a meld of fragrances, each unisolatable, all sweet. Its fat root came effortlessly free from the woody loam. Happily, Banniple felt the heft of it. It should startle the woman from her peevishness if only because he would—by the principle of contrast—look rather amusing carrying such a splendid vegetable. Wood groaned, and he jumped. Two men were looking down at him from a trash heap. They were tangle-haired and dirty, and their stares looked as startled as his own felt.
“Good evening,” he said, hearing it echo idiotically.
“Good evening,” said the taller, bulkier of the strangers. The pair came down to him. Both were gaunt of face, with the lax mouths of chronic exhaustion. “We were afraid,” the taller told him, “that this whole bay was deserted.”
There was a noise like that of a banner in a stiff wind. As Banniple turned towards it, the flower was torn from his hand while cracking red pain scored his cheek, knocked him sideways and bleared his sight. Kneeling as his vision cleared, he saw the blossom hanging horizontally in the air before him, clamped between white, protruding fangs, to either side of which one red eye balefully glowed. Behind this apparition streamed a long
flag of black, horrid hair snapping like an ensign in a gale, though the darkening breeze that combed the wreckage was gentle, and differently directed. The thing wheeled to lash him again. The little scholar was just quick enough to dodge the snap, though it left his ear ringing. The creature dived upwards and eeled away with its prize as two others like itself plunged down upon the strangers.
So numbed and gaping were the faces of those two—so outraged they appeared by this addition to their evidently much-prolonged woes—that it seemed they would never move in time, though in fact the big one fell aside and yanked his sword free with creditable brio as he dropped. His upswing missed the airsnake. His weaponless friend, rolling agilely aside, came up clutching clubwise a broken spar. The other quickly sheathed his sword, and both he and Banniple hunted up similar bludgeons, for now the dimming air above the vale swam with the creatures. They hung just out of striking range, sharking back and forth, liquidly dodging collisions. Banniple, though tensely poised, club cocked above his right shoulder, found the bigger stranger’s behaviour almost as distracting as these voiceless visitants’. For the man, menacing his cudgel skywards, was grinding his teeth, and shouting with a voice so freighted with rage that it was almost like a groan:
“Oh endless, rotten, stinking, scabby luck! Rest? Respite? Ha! No respite! No, oh NO! What else are meatbags for but hounding? Oh yes! Just hound and hound them! Spare no effort! Why, shite and noseworms! We’ll have no slackers here! After those meatbags! On them, lads!”
Ranting and roaring, this hairy, bulky man began to run zig and zag, taking mighty club swipes at the air when their sinuous, fly-quick tormentors effortlessly hung above their reach. Then a voice welled down against the trio, and as one they turned.
“You stole my blossom,” it had said. The speaker was a hugeness that squatted on the biggest of the trash dunes circling them. His body—a bristly bulb of dreadful shapeliness—hung low-slung between the jutting angles of his legs, four to a side in the manner of all spiders. And such he was, save that, just where a spider’s eye-knobs would be clustered thickest, he had a human face—short-necked and aimed rather skyward, and with what looked like a beard of coarse brown bristles just beneath the chin. This face smiled slightly. It was a thin, ascetic face, bald-pated and pale, and its smile seemed distracted, mere politeness, like the smile of a man with a toothache. He repeated:
“You stole my blossom. You shouldn’t steal.” His voice was dry. It had a cricketlike, chitinous undertone.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Banniple with great feeling. “I honestly did not know the flower belonged to anyone. I took it to be growing in the public domain, as so many flowers do. I am so sorry.”
The painted smile widened an apologetic fraction: “But you see, you did take it. It wasn’t yours, yet you snatched it. You snatched what wasn’t yours.”
“But we stole nothing at all!” shouted the bigger stranger. “We’re guiltless!” He still seemed even more outraged than frightened—flung his voice with stubborn petulance against the manspider, like a prisoner hammering at his cell door. “We just met this man this very moment, and we never touched your stinking flower!”
“That’s the truth,” said Banniple, his heart sinking at his own self-isolating words.
“But you would have snatched it!” sneered that monkish face. Very subtly his great body tensed and sagged, tensed and sagged—a machinelike pulsation that suggested a just-contained lust to spring in the hideous arachnid frame. “You surely would have. All men want what isn’t theirs. Aren’t you seeking Yana? And aren’t you bound for Kurl?”
Banniple traded mute startlement with the strangers and, paralysed, they heard the manspider say on:
“So. For taking what’s not yours, you stand in jeopardy. You must now answer my riddle. You must answer my riddle, or become my food. Here, then, is my riddle:
I’m each salt ocean’s other shore
Where tasteless tides of drought don’t roar.
Defining all like daytime’s light,
I’m all-concealing as the night.
Fuel that feeds all urgent fires,
Extinguisher of hot desires.
I raise all winged enterprise—
I am the gulf where nothing flies.
What am I?
Well then! What’s the answer? Eh? Speak up, any of you!”
The Riddler’s lips pressed shut. His eyes were bright with pleasure-in-suspense. More than before, the subtle flexing of his frame seemed a scarce-chained hunger to lunge and kill. The three searched each other’s eyes, stunned less by the riddle—which had scarcely reached their minds as yet—than by their situation. Now the airsnakes began to seethe, to dip and lash the trio again, shattering the air just by their ears and striking them half deaf.
“Yes, at them! Stir their thoughts!” the Riddler cried. With a whispery quaver of glee he repeated:
“I’m each salt ocean’s other shore.
Where tasteless tides of drought don’t roar.
What am I? Answer!”
The smaller stranger feinted, then planted a mighty swing against the muzzle of one tormentor. As the smitten thing rocketed—locks flapping—from the vale, others dived, one of them biting a chunk of earlobe from Banniple, another dodging the bigger stranger, who fell with the violence of his swing. The Riddler bobbed atop the wooden boneheap in his rooted dance, his voice growing louder:
“Defining all like daytime’s light,
I’m all-concealing as the night.
Answer! What am I?”
The smaller stranger was shouting: “Back to back!” As Banniple formed up with him he was lashed on his already torn ear. The galvanized fury of his counterswing missed, came around, smote the shoulder of the bigger stranger who had just joined their pattern, and knocked him off his feet.
Now the Riddler’s pulsation looked like ecstasy, and his voice came faster, not pausing to separate the last two verses.
“Fuel that feeds all urgent fires,
Extinguisher of hot desires.
I raise all winged enterprise—
I am the gulf where nothing flies.
“What am I? Answer now, or you are forfeit, and my food!”
The bigger stranger had regained his feet and was scourging the air with a lunatic frenzy that did indeed clear it momentarily of the airsnakes, but also had his friend and Banniple crouching and cringing from the murderous sweeps of his whistling knout. The man was transported, lifting himself from the ground with half his swings, regaining footing each time by luck alone and the blind, dancing, inarticulately bellowing élan of his wrath. Distracted by the spectacle, Banniple felt himself seized by the back of his jerkin, and lifted into the air—just as he heard the Riddler’s jubilant cry:
“Forfeit! Forfeit! Bring him to me first, yes!”
The little scholar flailed his knout behind him, felt it snagged by his raptor’s hairbanner. Hauling futilely to free it, kicking mightily, still he rose smooth as a bubble towards the purple sky, now thinly flecked with the first faint stars. Below, the impassioned stranger gave a swing that toppled him at last, one foot snagging, ankle wrenching as he—roaring—fell, but this the floating scholar scarcely noted, as the Riddler, towards whom he drifted, engrossed him wholly. For that monkish face, with a smile now full and joy-foreseeing, was tilting back, and the bristly mass that had seemed his beard was now unfolding, splitting, reaching upward: two jointed, hair-sheathed fangs that probed and twiddled towards their gliding prey. The empty air between the former and the latter seemed a downward-sucking vacuum, and set Banniple a-kicking with a warding rhythm that matched that of the fangs. Behind him now, the fallen stranger gave verbal expression to his first wordless pain:
“STINKING SHITE-SMEARED DUNGHEAP DEATH!!”
Below him Banniple saw the pale face crumple as with pain of its own. The fangs froze in their waggling up-reach. Just short of where the Riddler crouched, Banniple was dropped.
His body was scrambling to
flee even before it had the crazy planking underfoot. He fell, and before he could get up, noticed the emptiness of the air. The airsnakes were gone. The Riddler was still atop his dune but looking smaller because he was frozen and folded up tight, the angles of his legs interlocking above his abdomen, his eyes and mouth squeezed shut as with distaste.
The smaller stranger began to laugh. “Bramt Hex, you clever devil! How intelligent of you to find the answer!” Hex, seated and still clutching his ankle, managed a chuckle through clenched teeth. Banniple, taking what seemed his first full breath in an age, joined in. A fourth voice joined them and all three fell silent.
The woman with the bow stood above them, balanced easily on a jutting beam. Her bow was strung now, with an arrow nocked to it, but only one hand clutched these easily at their intersection, while with the other, still laughing, she made a brow-to-bosom obeisance, accompanied by a half-bow.
“Gentlemen!” (Some further chuckles, decorously suppressed.) “I’m glad you saved yourselves. I followed you, sir,” (this to Banniple) “because I decided I’d been snappish, and you were at a risk that no one had instructed you to appreciate. I got here too late to do more than spy, and maybe learn the riddle. He can’t be killed until he’s answered, you see,” (she gestured with the bow) “and even killed, he returns sooner or later—this much is known of him at least. I must say I’m glad of your deliverance, for I would have felt bad watching your deaths.” Something in her own utterance seemed to displease her, and made her rather frostier as she said it. Whether they found this dubiety of hers quaint, or simply felt an overriding relief, her hearers all laughed anew, even louder than at first. At first she scowled. At length she grinned.