In Yana, the Touch of Undying

by Michael Shea

  Indeed, what of Zelt and her workmates—so many!? There he had needed not even the tawdry draperies of idealism to beautify the brutal act he had embraced. The poor Loop’s leer, her breast-wagging jibes—Hex could imagine her hooting the truth at him now as vividly as if she had actually done it:

  “Heroic? The only thing you’ve done on a heroic scale, oh Royal Enormousness, is be gulled! Bamboozled! Blindfolded and buggered!”

  Hex shuddered. Before the nullity he felt himself to be, those he had destroyed appeared in flashes of irreducible beauty: the arch-footed, panther-smooth sureness of Zelt’s legs; Umber’s guileless contralto, warbling in the valley of shadow; Oberg holding him, knuckles silvery with his tears.

  Hex’s remorse was great, but greater, perhaps, was his sense of personal loss. For clearly, the world-embracing career he had dreamed of could not belong to a fool. In being less than that luminous soul he had fulsomely hymned, he was disqualified from the rarity of supreme achievement. It was like receiving some thaumaturgic measurement of his spirit—concise, magically definitive—to see in searing recollection this crapulous poseur parading so blithely the equipage of greatness, his soft, excessive character buffoonishly bulging from the seams.

  So Yana, then, to him must be an irrelevancy—a will-o’-the-wisp all the sadder if real, for it could not be his. Any knowledge he gained of the place must be as futile to himself as Oberg’s was to him. Yana might be real, hut Hex saw he was doomed to be part of that murderous common mill of humanity who blundered together, colliding, churning each other to pieces, only tormented by rumours of immortality—like snatches of melody, unbearably sweet—while fated finally to sink—torn meat themselves—and rot on the sunless floor of Time’s abyss. He deeply sighed, a sound of real pain which nevertheless rang rather comically from this large, moist, somewhat doughy man—half-baked, as it were—standing nude by the railing, leaning on a broken board. He saw this himself, and feeling his own ludicrousness put the finishing touch to his misery.

  Slowly he dressed. Slowly he crutched back around the Hall, and down the pier, meaning to find some perch in the wreckage on the beach where he might lie in peace and—once the day warmed up—sleep a bit. The plank had already worn a raw spot in his armpit. He was using it gingerly and when, just ahead, a figure stepped into his path his prop skidded on the fog-slick boardwalk, and he only saved his balance by hurling his shoulder against the wall of a shed. Here he leaned till he had replanted his support.

  “Sorry. Did I startle you?” It was Raymil, whose faint smile did not echo her question’s solicitude. “You’re probably still pretty fuddled from last night,” she added, clearly amused. Her hair was wet—lay in shiny black feathers on her nape. She held a string of some half dozen small fish.

  “I’m sure I said many idiotic things,” Hex stiffly answered. He was feeling less remorseful by the second. “Pig-drunk people do, you know. Celebration was my sole excuse. We’ve been through some trying times just recently.”

  His dignified and reproachful tone failed to make her penitent. She laughed. “Oh yes, you told me at length. No doubt you don’t remember a tenth of what you said last night.”

  “So spit and roast me for a fool!” he said. “I got sodden, so what? At least I remember one thing—trying to give you public credit, which you sneered at as promptly as your menfolk ignored it! Ridiculous I grant I’ve been. But churlish like that to a well-meaning foreigner, who could know nothing of your customs—I like to think I wouldn’t be that however drunk I got!”

  “What eloquence!” She was still laughing, yet this was not purely sarcastic. The cadence of his words seemed actually to tickle her a little. “You know, that’s why I listened to you as long as I did. Because who does listen to drunks unless for some kind of entertainment? Correct?”

  For this amiable directness Hex felt, after a moment, gratitude. It invited him to relax from the swaggerings of self-justification. He released a short laugh in his turn.

  “Quite right. I will abandon further injured posturings, as I am sufficiently crippled as it is.” He quickly added—indicating her catch and her hair—“Did you dive for them?”

  She got a good laugh out of this, letting herself go a bit. “Am I an otter?” As though seriously researching an answer, he found himself looking her over. Her face was squarish but trimly modelled; her torso broad but also trim, and big breasted. More sea-calf than otter, though the suggestion of supple quickness was appropriate. Her eyes were grey. “But wait,” she said with mock urgency, “perhaps you’re confused because you don’t know how we fish here. Those idiots didn’t tell you! All we need to do, you see, is beat a drum on the shore. This startles the fish sleeping in the surf. They awaken in alarm. In their panic, they bolt seaward, not looking where they’re going, and more than half of them knock themselves senseless against some piece of all that junk out there. We just wade out and pick the little beggars off the surface. It’s an easy living. Didn’t you hear my drum just now?”

  They had started moving downpier together. “I didn’t,” Hex said, “but I won’t say you’re lying. It’s an unusual place you people have here.”

  “It is unusual in its women,” she said promptly, easily. “The delusions afflicting its men are ordinary ones.”

  Hex glanced a little anxiously at her. “To be honest, Raymil, I don’t feel in the right position to join you in mocking your menfolk. I mean free board, passage, trail gear, provisions—indebted to us or not, they’re behaving pretty handsomely as the world goes.”

  “Oh, certainly our men are upright enough. So is a mindless post, a rotting piling. And the Riddler’s head can be sold quite profitably to a sorcerer, by the way. Where are you headed now?”

  “I thought I’d sit on the beach, wait for the sun.”

  “You should give your ankle a soak in our bathing creek. It’s on your way—I’ll show you.”

  They passed the small group of houses at the pier’s foot where Hex—from Banniple—knew Raymil to live. She led him along the upper beach to where a creek that entered the bay from the hills widened in a gravelly shallows. She watched him find a perch, unbind and immerse his foot—making him conscious of the awkwardness of his movements but not seeming to attend to it herself.

  “The fools should have commissioned you some crutches from one of us—you’ll need them on shipboard. Am I right in feeling you judge us sour, and our men not such bad fellows as all that?”

  “Well. I don’t know what’s passed between you, but I never assumed it was only your doing. Your countrymen, estimable in many ways, do have a certain, mmmm, heedless vigour.”

  Raymil chuckled. “Heedless vigour. Yes. With the same vigour they built all this, they destroyed it.”

  From something in the bitterly disdaining fling of her hand at the tide-rack and the corpse-piers, Hex realized that for her this vista of dereliction was not as he saw it. For her, its former self was also real, or at least not so long dead it had not touched her life. “What was it,” he asked carefully, “clan wars?”

  “Not as you mean, but in a way it was. They were always competitive, but had achieved an overall coordination—held together with infinite treaties, pacts, much ceremonial harrumph and balderdash, oh to be sure! But fundamentally in league. A thousand miles of this coastline—as many more of the East and West Shores, why, they’d strung a web of carrying-trades big as any in this ocean, the greatest cargo-taxis of the northern seas. And they achieved it by learning to back each other up with convoys, trade tonnage, and the like. Still. In the end, when they needed to gather under a sole and effective command, to counter a powerful enemy, they just didn’t have the give, the limberness to manage it. Chafed by the crisis, each clan chief swelled and swaggered. Such a jostling and shoving over admiralties and flagships, and the uppermost position of mast pennants! Such epic rumblings in the boasting halls!” She gestured with her string of fish at the Huffuff hall, a spark in her eyes hinting a comparison. A kind of narrative gu
sto made her now seem to find the tale almost a merry one. “A tight, flexible command would have done it, you see, one that did not fear strategic withdrawal as a brand of shame, and which got quick compliance from its forces. Snolp might have been beaten back just far enough to leave their sphere of trade largely intact. As it was, they ploughed head-on forward, every craft they had. What followed wasn’t a war, but a single battle, a decimation.”

  “Snolp, you said? Arple Snolp?”

  “Well, it was Krasp, in fact. But he’s long been SnoIp’s underling or his partner—no one’s sure which.”

  “Fascinating! When did it happen?”

  “A little over thirty years ago.”

  “He would have been just a young man then! Snolp, I mean. Would you believe, Raymil? I have actually met Arple Snolp, and not many months past? I’ve stood talking with him, closer than we are, on a street in Glorak Harbour!”

  “You mentioned the city last night. I never heard of it before that. It is strange, isn’t it, that the great corrupters and destroyers are also ordinary little men as well, who can actually be met, and talked with on a city street—whose warts can be counted, and foul breaths smelled?”

  This not only forestalled the enlargement of his experience, which Hex had assumed would be eagerly desired—it even seemed to dismiss the entire topic, and something in the pronunciation of “men” suggested that it was sexually specific, and no generic term. He bowed ironically.

  “Or little woman, as the case might be, of course. My own ejection from my home-city, in fact, was—”

  “Madam Pin or something, yes, you told me last night. If you haven’t bathed yet, that’s how we use this very stream. You really ought to get them to commission you some crutches before you set out.”

  She had laid her fish by, and was using both hands to squeeze the short feather-mane on her nape. This extorted some final run off, which snaked down to spelunk beneath her tunic, and meanwhile the operation proclaimed the midsummer swell of her breasts, the burgeoning, harvest-time curve of them out from the sturdy, embowering frame of her shoulders. The picture gave poignancy to her abruptly leavetaking tone. He had already had time to be a bit surprised at his own irritation’s quickness. Again the Foolish Traveller, to a T. Reacting—as he had last night—with a blind spontaneity to cultural problems he had not first troubled to learn. And with fresh guilt came a corresponding gratitude to this woman for being as decent to him as she had been.

  He laboured to his foot-and-plank. Conscious of the absurdity of his useless extremity—a blanched and dripping tuber curiously appended to his leg, purple round its stem—he hastened to render both thanks and apology at once.

  “Raymil—you’ve shown me great good nature, considering how sotted I’ve been. What can I say but thank you?” He debonairly smiled this last—drolly conceding his awkwardness—and bowed, a second droll gesture. Unhappily, he was not quite braced for such comic flourish, and his sodden reflexes did not correct him in time. He leaned too heavily, and the fog-slick shingle squirted from under the planktip. His prop left earth, stabbed air in a rising arc that left him to plunge shoulder-first to the bank. The plank, upflung at impact, twirled once, smote a rock, and flew in half.

  It was, on the whole, a striking manoeuvre; performed with an abruptness, an economy of movement, that irresistibly suggested intention, even aplomb. It left Raymil laughing so hard that, as if felled herself, she had to sit down. She clutched her head as she laughed, as if trying to dump the humour out of herself. She stopped. Caught her breath. Exploded anew.

  Hex joined her with what vigour he had breath for, and this equable reaction seemed to chill the humour for Raymil.

  “Listen,” she was able to say, “I wish you’d seen yourself. You’d forgive my laughing so hard.”

  “I know! I can never help laughing when I see someone fall extravagantly.”

  This made her yet graver. “Look,” she said, “I’ll make you the crutches. I really shouldn’t have laughed so hard.”

  “That’s very kind of you! I’ll get them to pay you if I can. Do you mind my watching? It’s worse than dull hanging around the Hall.”

  She paused, blinking, long enough for Hex to blush for his hasty exploitation of her courtesy, but he didn’t retract. Crutches would be a great relief, and so would connected conversation, as opposed to the croaked monosyllables of his crapulent co-celebrants back at the reeking hall.

  “Come on then. It’s just back this way.” She handed him another plank that was lying by. When he was afoot she gave him the string of fish to carry. “You can split and gut these for me while I work.”

  Her house was in essence a big workroom with a bedchamber and a kitchen appended. It was made of a close-grained yellow wood, snugly and solidly carpentered—its floors and walls of drum-tight tongue-and-groove, its workbenches and stools of dowel-and-peg construction, strong and shapely. The three walls of benches, varied in height and function, supported on shelves or racks the tools of half a dozen crafts. She made him a heap of coarse sacking where he could lie on the floor out of her way and prop his foot up. Gratefully he received from her a fish knife and her catch heaped on a platter. He was glad of a way to pay her for this respite.

  “What a theatre of industry!” he marvelled, to ingratiate himself. “I can see that you cobble, carpenter, braid rope and bowstring, spin thread and weave it. What a sense of freedom this kind of… omnicompetence must give you.”

  Raymil, mounting a stool in her carpentry corner, answered this sunny fervour with an arched brow as she gathered augers, a short saw and a stone jar of glue near a vice. Taking two lengths of stout dowel down from a rack, she came and squatted by Hex with the rods, whipping out a poignard. “Stick out your arm, please—I need your heel-to-armpit length.” Placing the rods flush to his heel she marked them with two brisk knife-flicks that almost made him wince. “Thank you.” Returning to the bench she set a pole in the vice and took up the saw. “Try to get the lungs out too,” she advised as she cut. “Those purplish globes. And when you’re done take this”—she flipped her knife to stick neatly in the floor beside him, and he did wince then—“and cut some of that sacking in palmsbreadth strips. A tight bandage will take the throb out of that swelling.”

  “Lungs?”

  “Yes. They climb out on to the rocks to mate.” It seemed to amuse her. Sanding the ends of her cuts, she looked at him amiably. “I’m glad my competence impresses you. I have to say your praise sounds pretty naive. I take it this Glorak Harbour of yours is large and thriving.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Then surely, on reflection, you can see that in places where trade doesn’t thrive, certain necessities are unobtainable except by manufacture.”

  Hex, concentrating on his second evisceration, managed it better than the first. “You know, you sound almost as if that circumstance makes you angry at me.”

  She laughed. She had taken down some square stock, and marked off two short lengths of it. She viced it, and answered while she cut them. At each saw-stroke her tunic brimmed sideways with her breasts, a phenomenon which had Hex’s covert attention. “You know, I believe you’re right. Isn’t that odd? Maybe—and don’t think I’m trying to insult you—it’s because there’s a certain… greediness about you that reminds me of my countrymen. Does that offend you?” Her inquiring look seemed half to hope it would.

  Hex countered with swift self-effacement—his strongest card, he knew it in his bones. If her anger made her harsh to him, her guilt would augment her hospitality, as it had done so far. “Ah Raymil; I’m the intruder here. Because of the various misfortunes I’ve already bored you with, I’m in no position to resent insult. Did I tell you about how—”

  “Oh yes. You did, you canny, fork-tongued foreigner you.” She addressed this smilingly not to Hex, but to the two square cuts—the crutches’ caps—which she had viced. Hex felt a scared pang of awareness that she knew him beyond what he could recall having revealed to her. He watc
hed her auger holes half through the middle of both caps. A faint, belated shame for his meekness nettled him.

  “You know, Raymil, I’m a little confused when you talk of your countrymen. I’m not trying to be impertinent, but it doesn’t seem you could have had much to do with them in your lifetime.”

  “My father visited my mother’s house, and often dined with us, till I was seven. Then Snolp, through Krasp, worked our mercantile assassination. At that age I loved my father wholly, uncritically. I hated my mother for losing him when the great estrangement set so quickly in. I grew wiser soon enough to ask her pardon, and love her rightly for a while before she died.”

  She had plucked the cap-pieces from the vice, and reinstalled a crutch-post in it. The neat dispassion of her moves was like her voice, which laid out its sad matter in calm measures that bespoke a lived-with pain. She augered a hole into the post’s middle, her cranking forearm rhythmically etched with fine muscle.

  “Sorry to sound nosy,” said Hex. “It sounds so… sudden and final, this estrangement.”

  “Yes, though there was always a ritual separation of our activities.” She viced the second post. “I commiserate. I really do. There they were, the remnants of the battle. Running empty-ribbed from port to port, starved-out wolves chasing the scent of trade. Scattered bones of it were all they could find and they had to sail nearly year-round to glean them. You can be sure the special dignity of the Male and Maritime took on a critical importance in those demeaning times. Meanwhile a major recovery of our fortunes was just then possible. The first seasons of starvation were enough to goad the women to a new plateau in their development in the land-bound arts. We’d long had the big, plod-drawn ballistae that make the mountain roads passable. Indeed they are one reason the Gronds forage far afield, as did those that brought you. Now steady trade and mutual habitation are long established between us and both Grandim and Kark Valley, neither one more than a day’s ride inland. But from the first our men refused this inglorious landward turning. We had weaving and leatherwork, hides and saltfish to be produced, if we were to trade enough to buy even modest comfort. We turned away from our men because we had to, and they would not turn with us. Connubiality was already ritualized, as I said. A little drum hung from each wife’s lintel. Her husband, in from the sea, must strike it and wait to receive, in a simple phrase, the right to enter the house and the right to enter his wife.”