by Michael Shea
“You know, Sarf,” Hex began humorously to chide, “I didn’t realize the enthusiasm you’d developed about Yana. You always act dour enough when I try to bring it—”
“You know, I think there is a low reef there, just off the big cluster. Watch in the troughs of the swell.”
Yes. A fanged sparkle of rock, barely glinting between the wavecrests. Even now the Blubber-backs, slightly swerving, skirted it. Unswerving, their keel ploughed after. The pair looked aft. Banniple’s head, small, fleecy planet, bobbed utterly a-sea amid the jostle of shaven scalps and brandished arms round the cabin. They looked forward again. Plainly, while their course would skirt the big rocks, it was now dead-aimed to broadside the reef. Unbelievingly, standing quite calm, they watched the unwavering prow surge right across it. Then it seemed that the upthrust hand of a giant shoved the entire ship against the sky. Hex and Sarf tumbled through a long arc, as from a catapult, out of the bow. They sprawled down through the long rush of the empty air. Hex smashed the water, cringing from the fracturing thrust of rock, but meeting none. Empty-lunged at impact he started sinking fast. He wrestled out of his cape, fighting in a hornet-swarm of bubbles, the dead Frisp in his mind. The cape’s weight fell. He clawed through the ceiling of light, and breathed.
Not far off he heard screams, but the first thing he sighted was a carven, oblong box bobbing towards him, with a pale hand visible clutching its top. The bier.
“Sarf?”
“Yes! It floats well! Grab the other side!” Clinging to this funereal furniture, they watched the Glide, not far off. The reef had hoisted her, bucked her up and sideways and dumped her drykeel on to the clustered rocks. Both her wheels were broken open, and the greedy vigour of the two liberated Gollips, from whose champing jaws a dozen broken limbs already jutted, explained why not a single other passenger had so far joined the pair in the water. They hung there in a daze of anguish, until Sarf asked Hex if Gollips could swim.
The box was narrow and rode high. One man might have straddled it. A load or two invariably turned over. To ease their clinging to its slick surface they stuck their shortswords upright in it, and bound the blades with wraps cut from their tunic hems. Thus they could hold one-handed, or one of them lie atop the bier between these makeshift stays, while one took a turn drifting astern.
They had thought themselves to be no more than a day’s sail off the West Shore, but as the day grew late, though they paddled doggedly, not even the slightest silhouette relieved the perfect flatness of the horizon. The liquid desert’s vastness swallowed all hope. And all that waste, it seemed, had no other life but theirs to show. Once a line of shimfins passed. In the arcing manner of their huge cousins the Blubber-backs, they came near enough for the oddly commiserative expression of their eyes—close-set to their little sharp-toothed snouts—to be readable. In the after-absence, the pair’s sense of futility grew almost paralysing. Sunset had laid down a highway of fire before them and they—impotent specks that moved by inches through this endless molten gold—gazed stupefied at that Solar Glory never to be reached by any of the lives it raises to seek it. The dark felt near—they felt it in the waters first. Their legs, prickling with a thought of lurking carnivores, keenly sensed the abyss that hugged them and teemed with appetites.
Never, it seemed to Hex, could two lives have been so good as gone—while not yet strictly dead—as their lives were then. He cleared his throat. In the sky-drowned silence it was a quaintly formal sound.
“You know, Sarf, I’ve been wondering.”
Silence. Then, flat and unwilling, Sarf’s voice came from the bier’s other side.
“Wondering what?”
“About poor Banniple’s question. What do you think? Will we find vulnerable or invulnerable immortality in Yana?”
Silence again. And then, a rusty, slowly rhythmic noise. Sarf was laughing. Hex joined him. They laughed wildly, irresponsibly, in barking, pickled voices. Their laughter populated the air like a scattering of startled glides. The sun was down, and the dark moved in behind them from the east.
17
Kagag Hounderpound and the Shorewitches
Each bound one of his sleeves to his sword and off and on they slept, hanging like dead counterweights from the drifting bier. The sun was two hours high when they fully woke, feeling it starting to bake their salty scalps, while the arms they hung by were ice, lifeless things not their own but curiously attached to them. Their voices were agony to their parched and swollen throats, but then they found little to say. The horizon’s circle was flawlessly flat, no smudge of land defacing it.
They paddled. Time, their strength, and the water passed. At least they assumed the water passed. The only thing whose progress was incontestable was the sun in its climb.
“Hex,” Sarf croaked. “See how shallow it is.”
It was true. Below, through exceptionally clear water, he saw scarcely thirty feet down the black-and-silver of a mussel-crusted plain. They eagerly re-scanned the horizon.
“Nothing,” Sarf said. “This is a shallow sea in many places, that’s all. Not too shallow, oh no! There’ll be plenty to drown in wherever we collapse.”
Hex summoned strength to speak some encouragement. But his mouth stayed shut, for he noticed that the crusted plain below already lay much shallower. He could now make out upon it the greyish lace of corals, and the movements of large crabs.
He looked dazedly around. Were they drifting faster than they guessed, that the depth-change should be so rapid? But already he had felt the answer—felt the water’s whole vast fabric faintly grow dense beneath him, thicken and press with the gentle upswelling of something huge.
He gasped, panicked, thrashed to climb the bier, to uproot and retract his footsoles from contact with that dread substrate’s rise. He slipped and sank and—trying simultaneously to warn Sarf—breathed in a half a pint of water. As he coughed it up, helplessly clinging to his sword, a soft, enormous voice surrounded them, bathing them in mellow volumes of greeting.
“Poor friends, good morning! Castaways in these deadly waters? How glad I am to have found you in time to help.”
Still coughing, Hex swung round. There, perhaps two shiplengths away, and perhaps five storeys high from chin to brow, was a beautiful pallid face. It was reared from the water at an angle suggesting a man who floats on his back and studies his chest. And indeed, not two fathoms down now, the shell-studded plain exhibited, but half obscured, the symmetries of an heroic musculature. Worms of fear burrowed swiftly up Hex’s legs and groped through his stomach.
“Your aid!” Sarf’s voice, though a surprising full-throated shout, seemed a piping accident of breeze after the giant’s welling resonance. “We are as you see, great stranger. We must soon die if we are not brought to land.”
The titan smiled. His long, coal-black hair, high cheekbones, tapering jaw and elegantly wide mouth, would have had angelic impact even on a human scale. As it was, their serene force smote the pair like a tidal wave—Hex felt as if he hung in touching distance of the full moon rising from the sea. Mellifluously, the stupendous voice smilingly tolled:
“What ironies the world is woven of! Behold this situation of ours! Look how powerless you are, with your slight frames, to reach even the nearest land before you perish—while I could carry you there so simply, and soon! And then look again! For once there, I would be—for all my might—utterly impotent to climb one step up the littoral shelf! For I am debarred by malicious witches who’ve got the upper hand of me, you see. And meanwhile your slight selves would be able then to swim and wade—oh how easily—to land! Now if I could get ashore I’d work my deliverance from those witches, and doing it would be so easy! Oh double—or is that triple irony? that once ashore I could be as small and feeble as yourselves, and still handily work my own liberation!”
Gently the giant shook his head, causing his hair to boil silkily round his vast shoulders, and the bier to rock. The fullness of this proposition, its coyly rich detail, were s
tunning, given the scale of their utterance. Swiftly, distinctly, Hex’s ear had judged the suasive titan a liar. Yet, a lie so huge, he found, had all the planted firmness, the towering stature, of Truth. He grasped—amazed—that they were being bargained with by this sun-blocking phenomenon. It made him feel that he was himself surreally enlarged.
The giant asked, “Where are you bound?” resuming in a new key, for now an ineffable irony quivered on his lips as he queried. And almost, Hex found, he could laugh—howl at it himself. He fought to draw a long breath.
“We are bound,” he cried, “to the bottom of the sea, Great Stranger! This day or the next! As you’ve just indicated!”
The giant’s smile stretched and he faintly sighed, sending a gust of low tide, of dead kelp and reeking fishguts, to roll down across the bier. “Too true, I’m afraid. But of course, I’m asking where you wanted to go.”
“To the Museums of Kurl, and past them.” This—he thought as he spoke—was how lunatics felt, madly discoursing with the rising moon which, they fancied, questioned them. Meanwhile the longer he looked at that lunar visage the more he saw—underpinning its urbane noblesse—a subtle mordancy, a sarcasm dissembled but fundamental to the Titan’s nature. The latter displayed gladness at Hex’s answer.
“My friends, I must now think us even better-met, considering how disparate our courses might have been. There is a little beach at the foot of the cliffs where my adversaries must be met—and do you know? It lies well on your way to Kurl. It’s just south of Sirril, in fact, less than a day’s swim upcoast—for me, that is.” He paused. His gigantic calm made that silence tremendous. Hex and Sad—who now hoisted their heads above the bier to look at one another—were awed to feel their own frail voices awaited by such a silence. Somehow, across the funereal carvings, their eyes traded full acknowledgement of the hand they had been dealt, and Hex was able, in a nod, to tell Sad they agreed, and bid him speak.
“Great stranger!” Sad called, and gratefully Hex heard the vigorous timbre of his friend’s voice. “You hint that you might save our lives. Our lives are all we have. We would do much to purchase them. You further hint—astonishingly—that such as we could help you, once ashore. We’d gladly do this if you put us there!”
“Oh, most excellent castaways!” The giant’s brio set the bier a-bobbing. “We must introduce ourselves! I am Kagag Hounderpound.”
“I am Sarf Immlé.”
“I am Bramt Hex.”
“Gentlemen!” Two nods, gracefully apportioned, though the pair must have formed a unitary jot to those great eyes, made the sea shudder them twice more. “Well-met indeed, sirs. Felicitously met! If you’ll forgive the liberty, I’ll scoop you up and begin immediately to convey you towards our mutual excarceration. You’ve no objection?”
“None! Not at all!” they jointly cried, yet felt—both—only terror at the prospect. Giddily they viewed the pale, colossal hand, an island-sized hydra, slide beneath them. It raised them off the sea in a captured lake the size of a town square. The fingers flexed to let the imprisoned brine drain out. The pair and their bier settled on the broad, whorled hillocks of Kagag’s padded palms. The low-tide stench, more haunting than overwhelming, exhaled from the waxen micro-furrows dizzyingly patterning that dermal hollow. Some dozen yards above the swell Hounderpound palmed them, the remote thunder of his legs’ slow kick following them as they skimmed at a wave-smashing pace across what now seemed minor wrinkles in the open highway of the sea.
Head inclined, Kagag told them sadly from his briny cushion: “To starve is like being devoured, but slowly. Look, friends, upon my shameful emaciation—shameful to my tormentors, not to me!” Rolling to his back he lifted high his other arm. Thicker than a big house is high, the dire, massy block-and-tackle of its sinews shone brilliant with corals in the broad noon. “I am, you see, a peaceful grazer—I browse the multitudinous tiny life that throngs the sun-warmed littoral. My food are the green dust-mote hosts that make pastures of the shallows. But every morning these two witches—a warlock and his stinking dam, blood-sworn against me for my chaste abstention from their mephitic arts—these two chant, every morning, an incantation which bars all that coast to me where I might most profitably feed. They damn me to a creeping inanition, to wearying migrations to glean at large too scant a sustenance.”
Looking to Sarf, Hex caught an almost angry glance from him, one that touchily protested: and why shouldn’t this be true? But indeed, he’d felt the same. Fearsome and strange though this skin meadow was that they were camped on, it hovered firm and dry, one vital remove above sodden death, and the muddy nibbling of fish in cold darkness. In this, oddly, they felt their pride restored, which had been so sorely bruised by disasters. How restorative—just when Chance had again reduced them to flotsam, bobbing wreckage—to be offered a job! The hostile cosmos had discerned a use in them. They had some weight to pull, some power that could buy their lives. Goals, aims, ethics apart, how tonic that was just in itself!
“Great Hounderpound!” Hex shouted. “It seems to me these nighthags who torment you, are the most vile and poisonous sort of vermin!”
The fierce, angelic smile this won from Kagag thrilled the mendacious scholar. Truth after all was anything that loomed this large, and saved one’s life. Even a bloody job seemed right now no more than a just vengeance taken upon their long-term helplessness. These witches—any witches—would surely kill them to survive. Inspired, Hex pulled their swords from the bier, sheathed his, and started tumbling—with Sari’s quick-comprehending help—the bier towards the great hand’s brink. They shoved, it struck the sea and sped back to their mighty wake.
“Our pledge!” Hex cried. “You are our vessel, we will be your sword.”
Kagag laughed, a drumroll of mirth. “Ah friends! How can mere physical scale divide, where there’s a kinship of the heart? But now, I swim best when I attend below. We’ll talk before you go ashore, near dawn. The day and night are yours for rest. Move as you please, I scarcely feel you.”
Kagag Hounderpound submerged his head, and was thenceforth a mute blur underneath the swell. His forearm alone broke the crests, His cupped hand, like a finger-ribbed aerial boat, sailed them frictionlessly forth with the smoothness of unstoppable mass. Fearing finger-twitches, the pair walked astern across that eerie leathery plaza, and up on to the fat, sternward hump of the thumb’s base. Here their view commanded the whole horizon, and the warm winds scouring them proclaimed their membership, dubbed them fellow-traffickers of the glides, who had looked so poignantly exalted from down in the water all those hopeless hours.
Hex looked at his friend. Sarf’s eyes shocked him a bit. Renewed life thrilled them, but they also had a cutting edge of truculence, sharp for a glimpse of some reproach.
“Sarf. Listen. When I did what I did for Madam Poon, I forswore canting ethics for a life of heroic opportunism. I was like a child, not knowing what I did. But now I do. And now I know that rakish opportunism doesn’t win your fortune. It just barely buys your life, as this world goes.”
Uncannily, Hex found that this was as plainly as he wished to speak, as though the fleshly planet they were camped on might hear through its skin. So he shrugged, and made a rejoicing gesture at the sky, the glides, the breeze. Sarf nodded. Having found accord, he was now willing to show his own misgivings. Pointing to their vessel, he shook his head, eyes grim. Hex nodded in his turn.
They lay back, two creatures restored to the solid world. They reposed their weight and lo, it did not sink. The breeze laved them and very soon, in the hand of the giant who needed them, Hex and Sarf slept.
They first knew of the land’s nearness by a raggedness in the rim of the starry bowl ahead of them. Behind them, the horizon’s line got faintly silver with the hint of dawn. Then, after a time, when the glacier-slow pallor had begun erasing the eastern stars, the coast took on some hints of mass and feature, and they realized they had drawn quite close to it. Frighteningly, Hounderpound’s voice welled up from below
.
“Prepare to disembark, gentlemen. This rock ahead should accommodate you while you learn the balance of our pact. I can approach the shore no nearer.”
The rock they jumped down to was broad and white with guano. The giant, turning belly-down, crossed his forearms on a larger reef nearby. The dawn, gathering strength behind his head, made his face hard to see.
“You are upright men, Sarf Immlé, and Bramt Hex. You can’t know the chagrin of being forced to skulk, and hire henchmen. Murk, indirection and intrigue are not my way, sirs, for upright I too have always sought to be.”
Oddly, the pair found the mellow boom of the voice somehow diminished here. The surf’s wide mumble, though middlingly distant, seemed to nibble its resonance away. His words, here and there, crumbled at the edges into the sound of wind and sea.
Hex cried consolingly, “The forces of destruction surround all lives, great Kagag! That we can help—”
“How true that is, good human! How well you put it! And if you had cruised the Abyss as J have done, how much more strongly you’d feel it! What an impudence, an insouciance Life is! The universal Rule is Void. Gaping, freezing blackness without feature, without force, without end. Yet here, there, everywhere this buffoon Life staggers, struts, swells and plumps out its plumage, rearing its grotesque elaboration screechingly, shamelessly from the vast environing Nullity! All this, while at every step the slightest tremor shatters it, the merest squeeze annihilates it—”
Hounderpound’s head was reared back. He had raised one hand against the silver backlight of the dawn, then sighed. “Ah, Life! Brave bagatelle!” and chuckled. Replacing chin to hand, he now plunged the other underwater, and seemed to rummage. He brought up, on his forefinger’s tip, two black stones that were sandgrains on it, but big as goose eggs to the pair to whom he delicately presented them.