Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  I recalled yarns of how you’d come upon them in the woods, tootling on reed pipes and capering about in their goatskin trousers. I looked carefully for hooves and saw they had feet just like mine—except whiter, dead white skin like a shark’s belly, and eyes as blue as the paint that striped their faces and bare torsos.

  A short one stepped forward. A bulge beneath the short cloak suggested it might be a woman. Her face and belly were not painted like the others. Her skin was as dark as my own, and her hair was tangled into tight curls, almost kinks.

  “Are you from Tarshish?” she asked.

  “Phoenician!” Abner muttered.

  I could see all kinds of trouble staring me in the face, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. She was Phoenician, so I had to reply. “Are you captive?” I asked.

  The girl nodded.

  I glanced past her at the timid-appearing band of Firbolgs. “I thought they were harmless.”

  “These had an unfortunate experience with a Tarshishman a month before we stopped. He was short of rowers.”

  Who isn’t? “Will they sell you?”

  The Firbolgs were not as large as the average paleface, nor as well fed as a Phoenician, but they looked like they could be trained. “Get her afloat,” I muttered. Oarsmen leaned imperceptibly on the Ishtar until she moved. I held up a string of blue glass beads. “See,” I said in pidgin. “These for her.”

  The tallest Firbolg reached for the beads, but I held them until the darkskinned girl climbed aboard. “You king?” I asked.

  The tall paleface nodded ingeniously.

  “Me king, too. Want see ship?”

  A man I took for the prime minister winked broadly at the way they were fooling us, and the pair climbed aboard. The rest crowded up around the oar frames. “Shove off!” I yelled, vaulting up over the stern. These simple minds had thought they were going to rush us. They jumped back from spears that suddenly bristled over our oar frames. King and prime minister gave outraged roars that stopped as Abner swung his mallets. I felt a fleeting pity, then I remembered what they’d done to Sargonid’s ship. And that reminded me of an uncomfortable feeling I had about that cylinder seal.

  Keel lashings thrummed as the Ishtar caught the first surge of Channel swell. A few minutes later the king and prime minister came to with knots on their heads as big as Abner’s mallets. They gazed forlornly at the receding land, shivered when a dusting of spray came over the bow, and promptly vomited.

  “It’s good to feel a ship again,” the girl said. She stretched luxuriantly in the watery sunlight, and her breasts pushed the short cape out at an absurd angle. “Crazy Firbolgs can’t stand the sight of a milk factory,” she said, and took off the cape. “You know, in three months not one of them made a pass at me.”

  She had a skinny, spinsterish air about her, but as I glanced at my oarsmen, I imagined she’d find a brand new set of problems.

  The fur cape arced overboard and floated in the Ishtar’s wake like some waterlogged animal. She stretched again and lay down in the narrow stern. The girl was maybe eighteen—past the first bloom but well shaped from the waist up. Until she took those hairy breeches off I’d have to guess about the rest. I glanced at her breasts and stared. And stared!

  “Haven’t you ever seen a woman before?” she asked.

  I looked forward where Abner was bullying the king and prime minister into place, showing them how to grip an oar. I’d thought the girl was Phoenician or I wouldn’t have picked her up. She was as brown as I. But where the cloak had protected her shoulders from the sun, her skin held a tinge of whiteness. The nipples of her small, perky breasts were pink. “Paleface!” I said.

  “Half,” she agreed. “So what?”

  Here I’d risked my ship to rescue her, and she wasn’t even human!

  “My name’s Hatchi.”

  “Do you belong to any man?” She shrugged. “You?”

  Now what? She’d be nonpaying cargo all the way. And how much could I get for a half-breed girl in Tarshish? I could just hear Uncle Hiram screaming when he saw a talent and a half of female on the tonnage list. “Start any trouble on my ship and I’ll feed you to the Underwater People,” I promised.

  She gave me a funny look and went forward.

  The weather seemed colder than it ought to be as we worked northeast, along the Frisian Islands, past the Weser and the Lavan. I’d been afraid we might have an extra forty days around Lower Thoule but the railway was working, so we chocked the Ishtar into a cradle. No ships were coming the opposite way, so we had to load stones into the counterbalance at each hill. Bullwhackers cursed the oxen. Slaves grunted and smeared water and tallow over smoking rollers, but slowly the Ishtar jolted her way across into the Myrtos Sea.

  I never got over marveling at the way the ancients had engineered this smooth stone roadbed with its pulleys and counterweights to get ships over the little hills of the isthmus. Only the gods knew how old it was —older than bronze, we all knew, and still it ran whenever these half-wild palefaces stopped feuding long enough to keep twenty-five miles of roadbed in repair.

  “They don’t build things like they used to,” Abner said, and I guessed he was right.

  The bullwhacker was a typical northern paleface, a head taller than a Phoenician, with blond hair in twin braids and dressed mostly in skins. But like all these railroaders, he knew the value of an axe. I finally haggled him down to only two, but that was still higher than usual. While I was digging the money out of the chest next to the stern post, I wondered why coinage couldn’t be cast in some shape a little easier to carry. But Uncle Hiram had told me time and again that the palefaces were used to Tarshish money and they’d lose confidence if it changed size or shape. Who knows? Maybe someday somebody will actually cut something with one of those trade axes.

  I asked the railroader how many Tarshish ships had crossed this season.

  “Six,” he answered.

  “How many came back?”

  He shook his head.

  We camped in a siding halfway across, and Abner was as worried as I. A chill wind blew across a bog and made unhappy sounds in the pines. “Notice something?” I asked.

  “No mosquitoes,” Abner said. “You don’t suppose we’re going into another ice age?”

  “Sacred Ancestor made a deal with the gods when he followed the glaciers up here.” Abner shrugged. “Between gods and women, a man doesn’t know what to believe.”

  Finally I realized what he was talking about. “Is she making trouble?”

  “She refuses to perform those duties for which the gods created her.”

  “With you?”

  “With anybody.”

  She came to sit by the fire. Her hair was shorter and tortured into a saladlike crown with leaves and flowers. She’d begged some oil, which made her breasts glisten in the firelight. There was still a faint line where the Firbolg cloak had bleached her shoulders. “Tell me again how the Firbolgs got the drop on Sargonid,” I said.

  “We’d been out two or three months. It seemed like I’d always lived aboard that ship, beaching night after night, making camp, trading, fighting, stealing. There had been a few storms the first month—especially when we came through those narrow headlands where the current is so strong. And once we passed them, it really started to blow.”

  I supposed she was talking about the Pillars of Herakles. “Would you mind getting on with it?” I asked.

  “Finally, just a few days from here, we caught a big storm. That’s not just my idea. The men on the ship all said it was the worst they’d ever seen.”

  “Why didn’t they go ashore?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the wind was wrong. Anyhow, the men were worn out. Half the oars were broken, and the sails looked like the fringe on a prayer shawl. We’d been out of beer for three days when we finally saw land.”

  By now I was convinced she was either crazy, a liar, or had no sense of time. On mature reflection I decided it was the latter. None of these palef
aces can understand that time is money. They live in a dream world, and no matter how many times you get their X on a contract, they never deliver on time.

  Anyhow, nothing in her story had suggested what happened to the other ships. One storm, I could believe. But where did she get that two or three months to the straits? Two days sounded more like it. Why had they started from one of those little trading posts inside Thalassa in the first place? Some kind of hot cargo and they wanted to avoid customs? Sometimes you could sneak through the straits on a foggy night. But somehow I’d never taken old Sargonid for enough of a bucko to try it.

  “What,” I finally asked, “is this about you giving the men a bad time?”

  She gave me an odd look. “I guess my mother raised me old fashioned.”

  “Well, I’m old fashioned, too. I don’t like trouble on my ship. Either you’re friendly with all the men or you’ll be friendly with none.” I went off to bed down by the cradled Ishtar. She was still chattering at Abner when I dozed off.

  We reached the Myrtos shore at noon next day and launched again. There was no shipping in this sea, save for a few palefaces in skin boats who fled at the sight of us. This struck me as odd. Usually they liked to hang around and trade fish or cranberry pemmican for beads, lying just beyond grabbing distance if they saw any empty places on the rowing benches. So who had been scaring them?

  We were in long daylight now, and the shores were changing to that dark and evil bluegreen of the north where no man knows what silent, savage thing lurks behind the next tree.

  Hatchi was acting like a woman. With cold weather she’d taken to wearing a boat cloak which draped like an ill-fitting tent and partially concealed the angular muscularities of her body. I couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked her better covered or bare. One day she stood behind Abner at the sounding board, and the wind suddenly blew the cloak tight. Several oarsmen missed the beat, and Abner traced their pedigrees in some detail. I stopped daydreaming and gave the steering oar a jerk to get the Ishtar back on course. Why would any captain in his right mind have a woman on board?

  Day followed day and I fingered Sargonid’s cylinder seal absently. The seal was proof that the Sidonian Baal was wrecked, and might help Uncle Hiram collect his insurance without the usual waiting period. But that little piece of terra cotta worried me. A forgery? I fingered it again and decided it was genuine.

  The wind grew chillier, and one morning while everybody else dozed I sighted an iceberg. I was skirting it when suddenly I stared straight into the round-eyed earless face of an Underwater Man. His mustache twitched, and he gave me a sneer before slipping noiselessly from the ice into the water. I sheered off. The wind was behind me, and maybe the Ishtar could get well away before he could call his friends. There’d be time enough for fighting if they came back in force. And if they didn’t, why frighten my oarsmen? I told Abner about it, though. He looked worried but didn’t say anything.

  Raw weather and continual salt spray were making sores on the oarsmen’s hands. Thighs and buttocks festered no matter how much tallow we smeared on the benches. I decided to stop and brew pine needle beer before we lost our teeth. Then the godless wind veered until I couldn’t land. A whole gale drove us for a day and a half; then suddenly we were scooting up a long, narrow inlet.

  A steep shingle beach separated us from the forest. The depot seemed much as it had the last time I saw it: a small palisade of pointed logs with a catwalk inside. Blockhouses overhung the wall, ready to pour a welcome on overeager visitors.

  We did not beach, for I had an uncomfortable feeling. Abner glanced at the stockade, and I knew he shared it. He stayed aboard with half the rowers. I took the others, and weapons ready, we crossed the hundred cubits of silent beach.

  No beacon fire, no welcoming party, no sign of the six ships. I pounded at the gate with my axe, and it swung open. Fresh water still bubbled from the spring beside the steam bath. We moved cautiously toward the warehouse, a log building with a thatch roof pitched high to shed snow. A damp, mildewed look suggested no fire had been lit for some time.

  Curtains were ripped from both ends of the tunnel-like entrance, and the interior of the warehouse was visible in the dim light that came through the smoke hole. A ripe carrion stench came from one corner.

  We grunted the Ishtar up inside the stockade, and after posting a watch, Abner and I returned to the empty warehouse. Bits of kinky black hair and beard still clung to two skulls.

  “Wolves?” Abner asked.

  I shook my head. “Wolves go for tender parts like livers and kidneys, but they don’t take them out with knives.”

  “Gods,” Abner said. “To think such things go on in our day and age.”

  “I never knew these palefaces were cannibals.”

  “They aren’t,” Hatchi said indignantly from the doorway.

  “What do you know about it?” Then I shrugged. No use bringing that up again.

  The goods were spread out to dry, and the men had patched the oven. I started the brewing ritual while Abner took a work party into the dim building.

  Three days later our fallen friends squatted, facing east, each with his loaf of bread, an axe to pay his fare, and a beaker of beer in his right hand. While Abner and his men shoveled I fired the hoops. As the last shovelful fell, I rolled their flaming sun-wheels downhill, westward into the sea.

  There were no supplies in the depot. We had seed, but it was too late in the season to plant. I wondered where all the palefaces were, but there was no time to worry about that. The stockade was secure after repairs on the gate. The spring was flowing. All we had to do was find out what had gone wrong. I suspected it would be some time before we got the goods moving again.

  We gathered wild currants and gooseberries. I put paleface-born men to gathering bark. Hatchi went out with a band of Tarshishim to point out which kinds of birch and poplar were edible, and the difference between a Thoulean and a Boresti pine. Soon tubs of pitch and tar lined the warehouse walls, and the stockade was festooned with drying bark. I put the older men to pounding it to flour.

  The Firbolg king and prime minister had learned a smattering of Phoenician by now. As oarsmen they were nothing to write home about, but they showed an aptitude for spotting oysters and whelks. The tides were wrong one morning, so they went bark gathering. When the party came in that afternoon, Hatchi was missing.

  “Still a couple of hours of twilight,” Abner said. “Want to look for her?”

  “Lose ten oarsmen looking for one worthless woman?” I glanced across the clearing into the forest of shadows and said, “We’ll look around tomorrow.” But as I rolled up in my cloak alongside the still-warm oven, the stockade seemed strangely silent. Why wasn’t I relieved to be rid of her incessant chatter? She wasn’t goodlooking even for a paleface. More than ever I wished I’d had a chance to buy one of those nice fat Egyptian girls before my uncle sent me off up here. Abner left the fire and squatted beside me. “Wolves or palefaces?” I asked.

  He grinned. “I have another theory, but I don’t know whether I should inflate your ego by divulging it.”

  “She been cooperating?”

  Abner shook his head. “Told me some involved story to the effect that she never had and wasn’t about to start now. But it’s been my experience that this type of woman enjoys being rescued. Especially when young.”

  “Young! She’s eighteen if she’s a day. What you mean is she’s got her eye on one of my men.”

  Abner gave me an odd look. “Something like that,” he finally said.

  I turned over and tried to sleep.

  When she did not turn up by midday, I armed a party, king and prime minister invited, and they led me to where they’d lost her yesterday. The king tossed his mane this way and that, then trotted off, bending double as he nosed some invisible spoor. From behind, his naked haunches and their dangling accessories reminded me of a bobtailed greyhound.

  He halted suddenly with a “whuff’ more hound than human. It
was some time before I could coax him back to Phoenician. The Firbolg was frightened. He capered about in a small trampled space, pointing this way and that. “Ogre!” he said, and I wondered what he meant. “Bad!” He raked leaves aside, and I saw a broad-splayed footprint bigger than the Gilgamesh giant’s.

  “Did he get Hatchi?”

  The king nodded. “Two him that way.” The king obviously wanted to go the other way.

  An oarsman glanced at the tracks and muttered unbelievingly. It was Tyrker, the tall, redheaded paleface who’d joined us just off the Iberian coast.

  “A bear?” I asked.

  He rolled bead-blue eyes and called on unknown gods. I wondered what “Nibelung” meant, but he wasn’t talking. When we crossed a mud creek bank, it became obvious that this animal walked on two feet. I thought of the knifemarks on the Tarshishim we’d buried. What kind of animal can chip flint? I recalled Uncle Hiram’s warnings about Centaurs. But this wasn’t Centaur work; no hoofmarks or arrows.

  We came out of the tall shadows, through low scrub timber to a meadow, and the Firbolg gave another low “whuff.” I saw things poking about on the other side of the grass. I strained and squinted through the haze for more than a blur of things that hunched along like a straits ape. But these were larger. As I watched, one stood up and walked as erect as any man.

  We had axes and javelins —and the trade knives we always carry. “Can we take them?” I asked.

  The Firbolg looked at me as if I were insane. Then he got a sudden grip on himself. “Tarshishman do anything,” he shrugged.

  “What do you say?” I asked Tyrker.

  “If we can catch ’em.”

  The meadow was a thousand cubits across and perhaps twice that long. “Take six men,” I told him. He nodded and began moving as I started in the opposite direction. We were halfway round before I realized my mistake. If they could smell, Tyrker would spook them before I was close enough. Dodging from tree to tree, we came within a hundred cubits and squatted behind a log, waiting for the redhaired giant to bring up his people.