by Michael Shea
“No no!” she cried with mock concern. “Don’t thank me for my tender feelings! Nonetheless, my friends, it is said that even though the Riddler be answered, if his head is not quickly cut off, then the moonlight soon revives him.”
The woman’s knife and hunting savvy made a neat end of what Bramt Hex, with his shortsword, messily began, and the party headed back towards Huffuff pier, Banniple carrying the dripping head by one of the fangs, which they had wrapped in a scrap of sailcloth.
Their feet crunching tunefully on the shingle, they walked in silence after the first spate of introductions. Shyly, in rather a rusty voice, Banniple poked a question at Raymil, the huntress:
“Will you tell them in the hall what the riddle was?”
The woman stopped and stared sardonically, letting the unintended frankness echo.
“Why Banniple! I assumed you would! Why should I!?” She smiled, further savouring the foreigner’s assumption of her inhumanity, visibly enjoying his discomfort. He—flushing—nodded twice, cleared his throat, and spoke to Hex.
“Tell me, Bramt Hex. I am bound for the Museums of Kurl, Was the monster right in saying you were bound for Yana?”
Hex, his hurt leg angled back of him, leaning on a broken plank, smiled as he grunted to keep up. The smile was half hilarious, a bemused glee just wakening from the pain and shock that—almost visibly—still drained from his loosening neck, his ever more flexible shoulders growing winglike in the easy gusto with which they crutched him onward.
“Oh yes! And that’s why I was so… so insanely angry! I thought we were so close, you see! For you must understand we flew here, yes!” (Here he held up a warning palm, delaying explanation.) “And suddenly thinking we were stopped dead here…”
Banniple was nodding, his smile broadening, growing almost tender in his sudden sense of revelation so enswathed with luck it beamed upon and from him like pure sunlight. “You know, I was going to tell you I had heard that Yana was thought by many to be merely legend, and then it hit me that my own goal was the same, that even the Museums of Kurl are dismissed as wistful vapours by some scholars. To be so delivered, and so accidentally! Doesn’t it make you feel… feel…”
“Weightless! Yes, though I limp! Let’s simply throw our luck into the same pot, good Banniple! An instance of my newly buoyant, trusting spirit: are we not on the Isle of Kray? Note I scarcely ask this, I all but swear it. Sarf says that while I slept we crossed some open sea, and I now do not hesitate to say we’ve crossed to Kray itself, where both our goals are located! Do I err?”
Faced with such ebullience, Banniple felt his reply already half-plucked of its sting—felt eager for the energy he already saw this new ally must bring him on his voyage.
“You do not err. You may, in one regard, misconceive things: ‘Isle’ is something of a misnomer for Kray. Kurl is no less than five hundred leagues north of Score-and-Seven, which lies on Kray’s southern tip. The fabled Yana lies yet farther north than Kurl—at least if my sources are to be believed.”
15
An Interlude of Fleshy Pleasures
The bathing-shed behind the Boasting Hall was furnished with overhead tanks of cold water that had showercocks worked by pull-chains. There were no lamps but the light of the gibbous moon—for the shed was wall-less, open to the breeze—showed bins of scrubbing sand and sponges for drying. Hex and Sarf scoured their shivering nakedness, snorted, blew, and gasped as they drenched themselves. The sand was compacted with disuse, and the sponges were crumbling, and Sarf murmured: “These Huffuffians and their manly rigours! And yet to a man of them they’re years unbathed, I’d swear it.”
“And that Hardkeel! Give me a man of few words, by all the demons! A man of few words, sir!”
They grinned as they shuddered back into their clothes. The cold, which in peril and destitution would have been misery, was a kind of intoxicant. Now transport and protection, weeks of shelter and sure meals, stretched before them, a shining corridor of days with Kurl at its end. The Museums of Kurl, Banniple had confirmed, were, by report, at least, “not far” from Yana, also called the Place of the Touch. Hex palmed a square of thorn fish skin and started brushing his hair.
“Sarf. Answer me something. Admit it once and I won’t bring it up again. It’s there, isn’t it? You feel it now too, don’t you?”
Sarf returned him a head-shaking smile. “I’m in because there’s a chance, no more, and we’ve already come so much of the way. Your powers of belief astonish me, Bramt. Your wish feeds even on contradiction.”
Banniple, at Hex’s urging, had allowed that of the half-dozen commentators on the matter known to him from the Archivium’s vast shelves, there was one who did not dismiss Yana as merely fabulous. Ongerlahd conceded it a possible existence. Hex, though he had never read Ongerlahd, knew his name through an admiring allusion to him in Undle Ninefingers’ The Tarquast Reconsidered, and was at once convinced that this Ongerlahd had the truth of the matter.
“I won’t say you’re wrong—” He laughed. “But my belief is great! I feel like… like we’re still flying.”
“Well, I wish these high spirits of yours a long life.” Dryly he then reminded Hex of his recent raging despair.
“Bah! It was hunger, and thinking we’d come to a dead city, and—and didn’t it save us anyway? Each knock we’ve taken so far has also struck us off the coin of new luck—and that’s fact if you will, and not wish.”
They felt skinned by the cold and cleanliness; just moulted, their bodies reupholstered with fresh nerves both inside and out. Re-entry of the Boasting Hall was a second drenching of sensation. Blinking in the roaring glare they regained their seats by Banniple at the Shiplaw’s table. The kitchen heat and vapours, with the bodyfever raised by all the swarming business, had their brows already wet again. The caves of craving tissue that were their noses, throats and stomachs quivered, tightened and growled at those savour-sweating gusts that overs wept them all each time a table boy erupted from the double doors with some new steaming vessel.
Hardkeel, on seeing his guests seated, made some faint smiles and inaudible remarks to them. Then he rose—a blocky man with little squirrelish eyes—smote the table with his flagon, and bent a prefatory scowl on the assemblage. Hex asked Banniple: “I hope all this celebration isn’t on our account. What we did after all was really quite—”
“Oh no, I think not. It was just like this last night too.”
Hardkeel now delivered himself of some brief remarks about the trio’s heroic slaying of the Riddler. Since neither his flagon-pounding nor his scowling produced the slightest alteration of the environing holocaust, some of his remarks were lost to the eulogized trio. Hex heard almost half the speech as he was just two chairs away and Hardkeel—however wooden his intonations—had a naturally loud voice:
“… far as these three foreigners go… no introduction needed… contribution these outlanders have made… their customs or morals or strange destinations might be, their contribution is undeniable… service done us by these three aliens… likened to the rock that a good navigator steers from… have to be an idiot to waste my breath telling you… so let’s face it, what more can I say?”
At this, surprisingly, the whole table paused in its grabbing and guzzling to roar confirmation. Hardkeel sat down and waved for the the waiting tableboys with their platters. Pitchers of strong dark beer docked cosily near each plate. Hard by, bowls hilly with hot breadrolls were planted, near dewy lumps of golden butter. The roast, hacked into fat-rimmed chops, oozed brown gravy at its many wounds. Hex forked his plate full—it rattled with the impacts. He filled his cup, and poured his gullet full of beer. His fork then hotly plugged him with the gravy-drenched gobbets of meat his knife deftly sectioned off. Bread sopped the bleeding business, gravy-bloated spongechunks of it. A second flask of beer rivered down him in two breaths. Wine then standing by, he dumped a sparkling pond of it into his cup. Throughout these labours he traded smiles and nods with the fat, bald man
opposite, whose sauce-splashing, guzzling vigour matched Hex’s own.
Now the first toast glided through the hubbub, dented pewter cups rafting overhead on agilely toted trays. Scarce turning round, the gamesters at the pits reached up expert hands and plucked the trays bare of the brandy. Again Hardkeel rose, his smile a notch wider and his face a shade redder. Jovially—perhaps even eloquently, it would never be known—he spoke, while the din erased his voice and all eyes not bent upon the games were fixed on an impromptu leg-wrestling match being held three tables over. Nonetheless, when he lifted his flagon, two hundred matching flagons were hoisted in lusty unison, and with one voice the hall thundered the pledgeword, too deafeningly to be understood. The flagons went bottoms-up, there was a vast gurgling, and then the vessels were flung through the air in one great blizzard which crashed with surprising accuracy against the kitchen doors. As tableboys regathered the cups in baskets, others sailed out with more platters.
The brandy’s heat ballooning in him, Hex looked complacently over at the Riddler’s head, where it had been nailed through one ear to the side of a beer-tun, with a pan set beneath it to catch the blood which, amazingly, never ceased to drip from its neckstump. And there by the tuns, amid several women taking their Draught, was Raymil. Fluidly, for all his injury, he was on his feet. Eloquence, like a part of the buoyancy that lifted him, welled from his lips:
“Shiplaw! Clansmen! You’ve honoured us greatly! But we’d never have thought of cutting yon trophy—” A perfect silence had fallen on the hall, and every eye was on him. Hex blinked, smiled, and welled to his conclusion: “—had it not been for the aid of a fourth who stands before you even now—whose care for a stranger’s safety led her to the scene of our ordeal, and whose counsel guided us once there. I mean Raymil there, the huntress!”
He did not hear his own last syllable, so abruptly did the general uproar recommence—not in applause, but in resumption of a hundred different businesses, as though he’d never spoken. Raymil, grinning, made him a bow which he returned, and sat back down. Banniple said in his ear: “You’ve touched a bit of a nerve there, Bramt Hex. The sexes are bitterly divided here—have been for over a generation.”
“I see, I see,” Hex murmured. He drained his wine, refilled the cup. “Fascinating. Fascinating.”
And, with a moment’s thought, it was, he decided. Everything, in fact, was a little fascinating, slightly radiant round the edges when seen in the overall glow of their reversed fortunes. The big crabs’ garish mutual dismemberments in the pits, the breadroll missiles hilariously lobbed by the tun-bellied roisterers, the rumbly music of the gamesters’ barbaric oaths, even the Riddler’s face, which seemed wryly to squint with the pull of its nailed ear—all was exotic, each detail of it a specimen of the world’s infinite variety. All of it glowed with meaning, if only the meaning that it would all some day be part of Hex’s consummate Map of the World. Or better, perhaps, Map and Ethnic Atlas of the World. Or even, conceivably, his New World Map and Ethnic Atlas with Brief Historical Indices. It would all be part, in any case, of that compendious net of lines and words—whatever its eventual title—in which he meant to snag and snugly wrap the world and deliver it, triumphantly, to its own stupefied gaze. A captured giant, yes!
And how captured, though men more talented than he had tried and succeeded piecemeal only? Why, snared in the snaky toils of travels through limitless time—the long, world-lapping loops, crisscrossing coils of his endless itinerary that must, if only by mere multiplicity, end with the huge prize’s utter envelopment. What a spur to even moderate genius—the knowledge that it need only remain true to its work, and that the mere scope offered it must win the world. Of course, Yana was not yet reached. He knocked wood, but his secret gloating smile displayed his real belief.
He snatched a flask of berry wine from a man passing with a tray of them. Merrily he cried, “Set to, my hearty!” to the fat man opposite, and filled his flask. He speared the last slabs of roast on to his plate, dragged nigh a bowl of kelp salad, as well as a platter whereon smoked a foot-long fish. His fork and knife hovered, then, from their opposing angles, dived. With soldierly gusto his weapons conquered and his jaws possessed him of this pleasant realm.
The second toast appeared. As this, traditionally, was to the coming voyage (in this case the one to Kurl, two days thence), it was a toast both to the winds and the tides—hence a double toast, by ceremonial requirement. A set of much larger pewter goblets rafted on their spinning rounds. The pledgeword thundered (twice as loud and thrice as indistinct as erst), a larger gargling followed, then the booming volley of the goblets on the kitchen doors. These cyclopean concussions, like a summons, woke a further wave of tableboys with smoking tubs of food. Hex gazed raptly at the twin porticoes of fish-ribs his hunger had unearthed; they hinted strange cities, the buried marvels of some nation’s past. Immortal, he would know, possess such pasts almost as fully as he would the world’s future!
He surrounded himself with new culinary territories: before him, a lake of soup. Beyond this on the same meridian: an isle of peppered yammash and a gnawed-looking block of plod-cheese. The pools of his drink moved as if tidally, the beer surging up in foam and draining down to froth, the swirling wine lifting and falling in his flask. A roaring in his ears now matched the environing roar and it seemed—in a silence beneath their mutual cancellation—that he could hear his own voice. He began to explain to the bald fatman opposite him how it had been more luck than any particular heroism of his own that had delivered the Riddler into their hands. He—Hex—was a scholar by vocation, you see, and certainly no one before now would have thought of describing him as a man of action. In fact he had just lately, and most astonishingly as well, been obliged to leave, or been ejected from, that vocation of scholarship.
From many of those fervent parentheses into which Hex side-tracked himself, he never emerged. Undaunted, he explained on. Waving his knife and spoon, self-propelled on swooning waves of wine, he expanded on his ambitions. He explained to the bald man what endless time would mean to the intrepid cartographer, provided he unflinchingly embraced his challenges. As he spoke he annexed a schooner of ale and he explained to the bald man the kind of heroism that would be required to really do the job he had set for himself. With impartial fervour he extolled the self-transcending soul of such a hero. The passionate particularity of his paean, the intimacy with the subject it bespoke, incidentally bespattered him with some of its glory. The intent look on that bald, fat face was like a mute cheer, a cryptic stare of complex confirmation.
Hex drained a swamp of savoury tuber stew, while twin rivers of wine and beer sank jewel-bright down him to the sunless seas of his craving. Indeed, to get to the heart of the matter, would the fatman like to know the crux of the question? It was the map, of course! Were not maps the very bones of empires, the lifeblood of wealth? And this map, potentially the greatest the world had yet seen… Of course, it was best to say little of such matters.
Proceeding to say that little at length, Hex toiled, like a fearless expeditionary, through formidable compound sentences. These simultaneous feasts of food and speech inevitably overlapped. From his lips, plosive crumb-bursts decorated his diction. The bald man—the table being wide—stared undismayed, and Hex soared on the tonic of his fiercely interested gaze, until it was discovered that the man had suffered a stroke from overeating and, to judge by his stiffness, had been dead since the second toast.
The bald man was carried off, and Hex deflected the torrent of his ideas to someone else—anyone else. With benign, inspired directness that overleapt any need for tact, he seized upon and untied forever many knotty questions. These included all he knew, and didn’t know, about the estrangement of the sexes in Score-and-Seven Bay, for at about this time Raymil was his interlocutor. Complicated though the matter might be, he assured her, it was a simple matter, and would be all right, perfectly all right.
He resolved many other things that night, though he was not destin
ed to remember either the solutions, or the questions. His last memory was that he sat talking while all around him men sprawled on the benches, snoring in the reeking desolation. The snoring, his own voice, and the slow surf under all were the only sounds, save that now and then, over where the Riddler hung watching him with his antic squint, was heard the tick of his dripping blood. Then Hex saw, heard, nothing.
Unwillingly, Hex’s mind approached its awakening, wincing in advance at what it was going to have to remember. He raised his eyelids. He sat up.
He was on the bench where he had dined. Chill, ashen dawn sifted in at the windows. Around him in the malodorous hall snorted and rumbled the paralysed clansmen. He viewed, on the table by him, the scummy hill of his empty dishes. And he inhaled, without wishing to, their bouquet. Hex felt queasy loads of excess squirm within him. Urgently he rose, totteringly crutched outside and back to the rear of the hall.
In the latrine shed he vomited and shat, then, shortly thereafter, he shat again, and vomited once more. He took another shower, cringing penitently in the purgative shock of icy water. Before dressing, he limped from the shed to stand at the rail, prolonging his cold to numb his shame.
He watched the surf creaming in, cleansing the fog-slick shingle, feeling the sight might expunge the fatuous highlights of his last night’s performance which, irresistibly, resurged from memory now. The images would not be erased. And what a flabby soul, what a shabby little egotism preened and ranted in those tableaux! How far from heroic the whole history of that gluttonous posturer—himself—now looked!
It caused him something close to terror to have this faint glow of heroic exemption—which he had unconsciously allowed to persist in his thoughts—so brutally extinguished, so that now he reeled to view the unadorned memory of his deeds at Polypolis. There was a stark and moon-bled scene—a dank, seamed deathscape as cold as the black, brothy sea! It seemed the very embodiment of his guilt. There he—once more the greedy, hasty, murderous dupe!—there his own self-seeking little meat rack might justly be chained for destruction.