by Michael Shea
She looked him casually in the eye in saying this. He, almost cutting his thumb, bent his eyes on the lungs he was excising. “You can see,” she resumed, brushing shavings from the hole she had bored in the second post, “how soon a chilling stiffness and withdrawal could divide two sexes so… formally linked in the first place?”
She viced a lighter grade of dowel. She sawed six inches off it, then six more. She clutched one piece by its middle and sanded its tips smooth, then dug one tip into the gluepot and gouged up a wad of milky honey which she, holding the peg upright, watched as it crept meltingly down around the shaft, towards her hand.
“Such a waste,” she said almost musingly. “I remember the season of change quite vividly. The rains, when normally my father would be most in port. At first he hit the drum, she let him in. Late at night I could sometimes hear their voices raised. Then, all the rest of those wet months, the drum was not struck but once, and then my mother wouldn’t answer it. Oh how I missed him, Bramt Hex! He was a proper Hall bravo, and a good skilled sailor, but he had a sneaking, indecorous affection for both of us that made him set dignity aside for the drollest kind of hearthside games. And how sad it is, after all, that all of our brothers are now so lost to us.”
Having screwed the gluey pegtip into the hole in one post—producing thus a hand-grip—she polished the second peg’s end, and twisted it into the glue. Hex found his hands growing deft. He stacked the split fish neatly, meaty-shingles, on one side of the platter, and waited for what she meant to say.
“How unbreakably, it seems”—she twisted home the peg—“men have to forge the framework of their self-esteem! We prosper now. More and more we mate and settle inland. Not leaving the sea, but founding our wealth on mother earth. This our fathers couldn’t and our brothers can’t do. Retreat one step from briny bravado? Forsake the poopdeck? Never! And what a waste! What do they have now? Largely, they carry for Krasp at a footling salary. They do some pirating but it is, from the poverty of their fleet, small and mean stuff as a whole. You would like to couple with me.” A statement, easily made. He had to clear his throat: “Yes.”
She replaced the countersunk caps in the vice. She gouged a post into the glue, wrenched it into one cap’s socket. Repeating this, she left the crutches standing there on their heads.
“I think, with that ankle, this will go best if you take it lying down. How do you feel?”
“That would be excellent.”
“Here’s more sacking—widen the mat.”
She pulled her tunic off over her head, and the warm musk of her unpent breasts drifted down to him with her voice.
Afterwards both lay on their backs. Hex looked down at his wide, pale trunk. “I’m a fat man,” he mourned, sad and slightly bewildered to find it still so. Lazily, she scanned him.
“Not quite. I expect you were more so when you left your city, from what you’ve said of your sufferings.”
“Ha! I prove a sottish whiner and complainer to boot! I find myself none too brash today, Raymil. I can’t suppress this feeling that you’ve very much given me the benefit of the doubt.”
She laughed, slapped his thigh with the back of her hand. “Oh I do like the way you’re so clever-tongued and greedy, Bramt Hex. You dirty, oily-tongued man! You did all the right things to get into me, which you plainly wanted to do from the first moment you saw me.”
This was not strictly true, but Hex nodded warmly. “Greedy,” he said. “You keep calling me greedy.”
“Well, while I won’t call you out-and-out-fat, you clearly have much leaner times ahead of you. When I think of it, it’s a greediness like my brothers’. A grandly wasteful craving for absolutes. As if glory lay in the power to disregard all things but one—a vow of stupidity that wastes the fruitfulness that life, even in emergency, offers. At least by your last telling of it you helped rather blithely to waste a number of lives. But if I thought you grasped that evil at the time I would not be coupling with you.”
The words were a reminder to Hex. The urgent issue raised its head again—was socketed, and demolished to their mutual acclaim. Thereafter Hex lay, feeling himself slide towards sleep, watching her bind his crutches’ caps with fat bandages of sacking. She was saying: “I’m sorry that your destination—” Seeing that he dozed, she murmured for herself: “—is so unlikely.”
16
Hex and Sarf Exchange One Vehicle for Another
The hold of that trim Huffuffian two-wheeler, The Glide, was built to take more cargo than it usually carried. This excess stowage accommodated several crab-fighting pens, and now the clamour of the off-duty crew welled from the open hatches. The working crew—deckhands, the stokers for the wheel-furnaces—tended to congregate at the aft half of the ship where, rather rakishly backset, the pilot’s cabin crowned the bridge—for here the constantly ongoing casual betting on matters of course and speed, and animal or topographic sightings was centred, the pilot serving quasi-officially as its arbiter.
Hence the quietest lounging places were in the bow and here, this morning, the handiest seat was a big carven box, a vacant bier. It had borne, laid in state, a dead Frispian patriarch whose burial-at-sea had been the Glide’s last commission, and his city her last port of call on the northern coast of the vast Isle of Kray. On this bier, then, Bramt Hex sat. His crutches lay by him, their support largely symbolic now, with his ankle a month on the mend. His unbelted notepouch also lay by him, but for some while before he opened it, he gazed rather broodingly over the sea, and at the ship’s slender-winged namesakes doing lazy acrobatics above her wake—for the Glide was a well-provendered craft, and cast astern abundant garbage.
The scholar’s face had grown peevish, and once more a little puffy. Each day he forswore his pattern of morning indolence and a double breakfast, and each forenoon he gorged down redundant crumble and wine—feeding, rather than a real hunger, a nervous gnawing in his heart. The notepouch that at length he opened was painstakingly double-lined with whorl-skin, all seams thickly gummed. That this uneasy waterproofing was his sole accomplishment in recent weeks was an irony that did not escape him.
For now, just when Yana had gained some substance—some learned testimony, however fragmentary and concise—just now he found his will to cartographic work weakest, most uncertain. He had months of rare impressions to record. The tumultuous raw matter of his recent mishaps had still to be combed through for the threads of geographic and ethnographic continuity it contained. But he had loafed in a lazy anxiety, done three pages of notes in as many weeks. Compulsively, he re-read and dreamed on Banniple’s notes—as he was about to do again. Alternately, he mused in quiet misery on all that might befall them, allowing death to supervene and snatch the nearing prize of everlasting life. Sighing, he read again the footnote wherein Ongerlahd, during his extensive (and hair-raising) account of the Museums of Kurl, set forth all references to Yana that were known to him. This copy, in a squarish calligraphy faultlessly clear, was Banniple’s gift, for he was carrying a rescript of Ongerlahd’s work on Kurl. By now, perusing it, Hex was reading not so much the words as the echoes, the haunting intimations of miracle they woke in his mind.
“Concerning Yana or Yanai. Its locale is too uncertain for even conjectural location in my North Shore Pantographicon. I hold with the proverb that scholarship is no substitute for taking ship, and none among the following commentators even claims to have reached the place. Here then is what I have read of the matter.
“Six sources offer substantive remarks about the place. Two of these—Barklap’s and the Elder Tine’s in his True Wonders—are clearly derivative from the account of the August Pluril, and so we may speak, in strictness, of only four sources.
“These reports, while highly discrepant, exhibit a certain resonance of conception. I guess a common source, some myth prevailing in the neighbourhood of Kurl, whose catacombs are such cornucopia of marvels. The accounts run thus:
“Farrowgag says Yana is a valley eternally mild with ‘golden
weather’. Entrants encamping here are seduced to copulation with its trees—made briefly compatible with flesh, and unnaturally beautiful. After, they are fixed forever in the age and state of their hour of rutting. The marvel is not relished by them, for their subsequent longings for those apparitions is also immortal, and forever unfulfilled.
“Kadash the Spiteful (in Gnome’s Index, one of his more reliable works) calls the place Yanai, and says it is ‘a vale of damp climate’. He holds that travellers who pass the night there are visited by dreams of such intensity they linger forever—ceasing to age but never waking.
“The August Pluril calls the place ‘the chasm of Yana, inhabited by winged things’. Here a mortal will not have the power of flight, but he will have immortality—for while he falls he will not age, and never will he cease to fall, the chasm being bottomless.
“The plethoric Sannak of Tibia, as is usual with him, says least with the longest throat-clearing. All we learn of him is that Yana is a place of undying, reached by a passage ‘through shoals of the dead’.”
Hex re-pouched the parchment, belted it back on. He sat drumming his heels on the bier’s hollow sides, his stomach acidic with wine, his mind queasily lurching with the two-wheeler’s surge, willing it to greater speed before the intervention of some slight, senseless accident, such as always pops up somehow from the world’s seemingly endless repertory of Harm. He decided he would have some more wine.
He went down to his cabin for it, which lay amidships one deck below. En route he passed the starboard wheel. It was a spinning cage of hot metal, and within its steaming blur the giant head of the Gollip that drove it was visible above the gunwale. The beast’s perennial exhaustion with its race to cool its feet showed in the slackness of its fang-jammed jaw, and the glaze of its one visible eye. Pain, said the black globe, big as Hex’s head. Futile toil. Pain. Death.
He brought his wine back to the bier and now he lay back, steadying himself against the swell. Behind his closed eyes, he recalled the Frisp’s burial. They had glided through a zone whose depth of clarity had made his armskin prickle. Thirty fathoms of lambent green and down there, breaking up through the smoky floor of visibility, were the peaks of drowned hills, big ones by their shadowy spacing. It gave him the sense of flight he’d known in Kabrow’s sloop, over the shoals, but over these much darker gulfs it was an ominous flight.
To this the dumped decadent dived—a skinny, pale face above a massy tunic of gold brocade that insured against any serio-comic buoyancy the patriarch might display, to the detriment of solemn sepulchry. The surface caved in under him in a silver boil of bubbles. Shedding this silver, he sank, and with him slowly rained a school of ceremonial brass medallions, inscribed, by Frispish custom, with the man’s great possessions and accomplishments.
Settling like dead leaves, they shrank with the gaudy mannikin. Slow and remote, they struck a hilltop. A slow green seethe of impacted silt swallowed them from view.
To fall thus amid the trashy glitter of ambiguous deeds—Hex’s sudden pity had included himself. He sat up now to take another swallow, and flinched to find Sarf and Banniple standing near, smiling.
“Black Death! You gave me a jolt! Don’t you believe in knocking?” They laughed.
“Maybe wine blocks your ears,” Sarf said.
“Tidings to be jotted in your journal,” Banniple announced. “On this noontide of your twenty-sixth day out of Score-and-Seven, the pilot makes us less than a week south of Sirril.”
Sirril was the Glide’s northernmost port of call on the West Shore, though still fifty leagues south of Kurl. The information felt like a taunt, though he knew Banniple meant none, being himself an industrious journal-keeper.
“I find I keep my notes poorly,” Hex said. “Perhaps I should just crib from yours again once you’ve finished the work.”
“Accept my sympathies, Hex. We’ve all known such doldrums.” The Erkishite blinked. Though he often wore a stunned, visionary look, now Hex thought to see something new—a sad constraint. Hex grunted.
“Surely I’m an ass! I sit around brooding on the length of life, dreading accidents, and doing nothing.”
“You know”—Banniple’s eagerness to take this up surprised both his friends—“I’ve lately been considering about this idea of immortality, the painful ambiguity of it. To what extent would it entail invulnerability? Leave aside Ongerlahd’s sources, who seem to conceive this endless life as linked to some endless bondage or self-loss. Suppose it is a free gift, but a mere guarantee against Time, against death by age? Think how painful life then becomes! How much more constant the fear of catastrophe grows when you have immeasurably more to lose from death.” Already his friends had cooled, imperceptibly drawn back. The sub-curate hurried, to have the sadness past. “I gather you’ve seen my drift. I won’t go on to Yana with you—we’ll be parting ways at Kurl.”
For the overland miles from Sirril to Kurl his company would be welcome enough, but it was past Kurl they really craved his help. The vast, volcanic slopes where the museums lay buried offered the only ingress to the interior of a coastline which opposed to the traveller impenetrable swampy vales for a hundred miles both north and south. Inland of the entombed city a route to Yana lay—vaguely attested to by Ongerlahd’s charts, though he declined to mark the place itself. It was down this featureless path, neither its strict direction nor its length known, that the pair had wanted his aid—not so much his added sword as his agile, lore-stocked imagination. Hex blew his lips out and shook his head, not really surprised. Still, though he wanted to sound easy, he managed only a stiff smile.
“You’re throwing away gems for pebbles. Artworks, texts, die as men do, merely a little slower.”
“Blubber-backs! Blubber-backs! To starboard!” the pilot bawled, raucously seconded by the stokers of the starboard wheel-furnace. The three in the bow looked briefly. A half mile off, two glossy masses snaked through the swell. Already alarmed, the beasts were making, it seemed, for a cluster of rocks perhaps two miles away. The babble swelled up around the pilot house. “Stokers!” the pilot was barking, “Full stroke!” The ship trembled with its surge to full power. The three, familiar with this sequence, sought each other’s eyes again. Sarf’s look of anger surprised both the others.
“You amaze me, Banniple! To weigh the matter and then solemnly choose to be a fool! The more of us, the likelier we reach the place, if it exists. No need to speculate—go and assess the kind of deathlessness obtainable! Because if, with luck, it’s a livable kind, why then you can come back to your beloved Kurl, and spelunk in those putrefying, buried aeons till the whole foul anthill falls to dust!”
“Blubber’s running!” howled the pilot. “Burn their feet off to the knees!” This last referred to the Gollips, whose wheels now blazed cherry red, and who yodelled and groaned as they toiled into overdrive. That the Blubbers “ran” rather than sounded meant that the ship now had a bettable race on. Erstwhile crab-touters swarmed out of the hatches and thronged the gunwales. Running meant that the Blubber-backs had broken for some rock or islet, for if they could cling to such as these, they could stay deeply submerged for hours, given just a few moments to “breathe-up” before diving. The goal of this pair was plain, the ship’s speed just great enough to put the issue hotly in question. Banniple had to make his answer loud:
“Assess what’s offered—that’s perfectly right! Doubt of the kind of immortality isn’t my reason for splitting from you. Kurt is a prior promise to myself. She is the accomplishment my life has built towards. The life I’ve lived becomes nothing if I jump now to another aim, however splendid. I’ll be sadly missing your help too of course, down where—”
“Amain! She runs amain! Last bets before we close with them—speak up!” The pilot’s voice was trumpet-clear. Seen through the cabin window, he seemed a man transported—his eyes two craters made by meteoric impact and still smoking, his huge, scarred knuckles white upon the wheel. His announcement conjured from his clansmate
s a screeching, booming, hooting, gabbling reply. They mobbed the starboard gunwale, giving the Glide a marked list as it surged forth, the pilot cheerfully counter-pitching the wheel, closing remorselessly with the labouring, glossy backed giants.
Now the Glide had achieved override. By the time they reached the rocks the Blubber-backs would have the ship too close at heel to breathe up. They would plough on, soon tiring. The betting shifted key as new book was made on the type and degree of injury the overrunning would inflict on the titans at the first pass. Sarf nudged the sub-curate, whose nervous eye lingered on the fugitives.
“Listen. There is an absolute good: to crack the game of life. Given only the time to study it all this”—here his handsweep at the ship eloquently implied not only this, but every turbulent idiocy that abundant History had produced—“becomes controllable. Then you have what is truly meant by Power, and can build the world better than you found it.”
“I’m sorry. The power I’m after is more like that in art, which dies—yes—like a man, but which is also, while it lasts, an ectoplasmic monument commemorating some life’s knowledge that it lived. I want more to—I say, isn’t that a rock ahead? I wonder if the pilot saw that!”
While the other two were puzzling over what seemed a senseless question—for obviously there was the cluster of rocks just ahead of them—Banniple had gone aft with startling briskness.