Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  The animals were big, heavier than a blond paleface and, stretched out, would have been nearly as tall. But they crouched like an ape, and their arms were longer than a man’s. Sparse reddish hair covered the males’ shoulders and chests and ran down in a bristling line, terminating in a tuft that nearly concealed their masculinity. Both sexes had long yellow hair that streamed in a tangled mass from their skulls. This convinced me, even more than the flints they carried, that they were not apes. Uglier than usual they might be, but these things were palefaces.

  I remembered the picture on a Tarshish beer-joint crock— the gorillalike things I’d thought were gods. Whoever made that crock had seen these things. They poked along, moving slowly toward us. The big male grunted mightily as he strained at a rotten log. Two females joined him, and they turned it over. Females and cubs made eager clucking sounds as they scrabbled for beetles. The boss male sucked a snail from its shell while half-grown bucks watched from a safe distance and perhaps dreamed of a day when they’d be bigger and the boss older. But the old fellow’s stiff beard betrayed no gray. It would take a long fang to reach that throat.

  Minutes passed and there was no sign of Tyrker. I wondered what was keeping him.

  Suddenly there was a “whuff’ surprisingly like my Firbolg’s, and the male stood upright, his little eyes glaring suspiciously. And still no sign of Tyrker!

  The old boy made sounds that might have been language. His subjects scurried away while he stood rear guard, baring teeth and making threatening gestures. I stood and threw my javelin. Six others followed it. We shifted axes to the fighting hand.

  His long arms plucked at the shafts. Little eyes glared at us, and he gave a final coughing grunt. The young males could decide amongst themselves who got the biggest snails now.

  We wiped our spears and studied the still form. I would have liked to skin him, but we had more pressing matters. Where in Sheol was Tyrker? We had nearly circled the meadow before we found him.

  At the base of a slender pine lay an ogre—as the Firbolg called them. He was younger than the one we’d killed, his beard ruff less bushy. I wondered what he’d intended to do with Hatchi.

  “Eat um!” the Firbolg assured me.

  But I remembered how the old boy had monopolized all the females and wondered if the young ogre had not had something else in mind. There were marks at the base of the tree where he’d been chipping away with his flint. I wondered how Hatchi had managed the ten cubits up to the nearest branch.

  “You know,” Tyrker said reflectively, “back in Neanderthal the old folks told stories about Nibelungen, but I thought they’d all been killed off.”

  “Get me down out of here!” Hatchi screamed.

  I glanced up again. She was naked from the waist up but still wore hairy Firbolg trousers. I grinned at a sudden thought.

  “What’s so funny?” Hatchi shrilled.

  I was thinking about the young ogre with no way of knowing that goatskin didn’t grow on her.

  I could think of no dignified way to get the girl out of the slender tree. There was a general feeling that we’d wasted too much time on her already. Before we’d gone a hundred cubits she’d stopped squalling and caught up, panting and too out of breath for chatter.

  That night I filled Abner in. The Teuton had told conflicting stories about Nibelungen, and I was convinced his people’s knowledge had long since retreated into legend. The Firbolg was more explicit. “Bad,” he said. “Live in hole. Make fire. Catch Firbolg. Eat um!”

  Those I’d seen didn’t look smart enough to build a fire. But with those long arms they’d sure make oarsmen. “Think we can break them?”

  Abner shrugged. “The question is, have they got enough brain to gather amber?”

  I sighed. Amber was what we came for—that congealed sun sweat that washed up along these Myrtos shores. A small piece of it was worth a talent of copper. Without foreign exchange to buy Cyprus copper, Tarshish would go under. But we couldn’t get amber without palefaces, and ours had all disappeared.

  Hatchi avoided me. I was happy for the peace and quiet, but I wondered why. She squatted near Tyrker and his friends, who laughed uproariously while she pantomimed the amatorial advances of something not quite human. I studied her lithe body in the firelight and wondered if it was some trick of shadow that made her appear darker. From some angles she looked almost Egyptian. “You suppose she’s got her eye on that German?” I asked.

  Abner gazed at me for a long moment. “I couldn’t say,” he finally shrugged.

  So far there’d been no fights among the oarsmen. I crossed my fingers.

  The short northern summer was passing. These forests were usually teeming with food, but the reindeer had disappeared along with their owners and other game was equally lacking in our snares and pitfalls. I wondered if the climate was really changing. It seemed rawer than usual. Even through the hottest part of the summer it rained one day out of two. Then came days of rain until I wondered if the Ishtar was going to float out the gate. The fjord became roiled and muddy from the river somewhere east of us. Two days after the rain stopped, the Firbolgs came running from their oyster beds. I went and saw flecks of silver in the fjord. Salmon were running!

  We had no nets, and the fjord was too wide anyway. “Can you hold her with ten men?” I asked.

  Abner surveyed the stockade thoughtfully. The blockhouses were in repair now, and the palisade had been reinforced. “Twelve,” he said. Abner was older and seemed to have a way with women, so I left him Hatchi, too. The rest of us rowed all one day to the head of the fjord.

  We were well upriver before the tide changed and rowing became impossible. We towed the Ishtar, looking for a rapids.

  Two days of grunting and heaving on the towlines passed before we found one. Beside it was a single pile of ashes.

  We studied the rain-washed ashes, poking at bits of burnt bronze and pottery shards. The oarsmen found a cylinder seal, and that cinched it. I’d seen Uncle Hiram authorize cash vouchers against that seal too many times to mistake it. I juggled it with the little terra cotta cylinder I’d found in Pretannion and decided neither was a forgery. But why? What had happened here? And where were the other five ships? We were a sober and silent lot as I sacrificed and started the brewing ritual.

  Oarsmen started repairing the drying racks and cutting spears. Someone had already rolled logs into the channel at this point and built a woven sapling bridge over the narrowed flow. We had been finishing for three days, working frantically amid scales and the stench of offal that had somehow missed being thrown back into the river. I was superintending construction of another drying rack when we heard an uproar from the fishing bridge. I supposed it was another bear trying to muscle in, but when I got there, the oarsmen held a struggling paleface.

  He was a typical northerner with long blond hair and blue eyes—like half the men in my crew. “Came floating down in a skin boat,” an oarsman said. “We snagged him as he came toward the bridge.”

  The paleface ceased struggling and regarded me with the despair of one who knows himself already dead. “Tarshishim sick,” he said. “Touch man; man die.”

  Aha!

  So at last I knew what had happened. I couldn’t imagine those bumbling ogres getting the drop on a Tarshishin—or even a paleface. But if men were dead or dying . . . Once again I was thankful I’d never watered the beer. You can mock the gods just so long. Then some night a black mist comes creeping up out of the swamp . . .

  “Look around,” I told the paleface. “See anybody who looks sick?”

  The paleface ate with the appetite of a man newly reprieved from the dead. At length he emitted a tremendous belch and commenced picking his teeth with a fishbone. The tame natives who had survived the epidemic, he told us, had moved on to where the gods might be less angry. He insisted that some dying Tarshishin must have fired the ship, for the palefaces had been afraid of the site. Along with the sickness the gods apparently had sent the ogres, for the pale
faces had no memory of ever seeing them before.

  “How many you?” I asked.

  He held up both hands and clenched fists five times.

  “That just men or everybody?”

  He made an all-encompassing gesture.

  Their upriver camp was bleak and unfriendly. The gods were strangers, and his people could not get the hang of getting along with river spirits. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been swept down to us. They were living in a constant state of jitters from the ogres, who’d steal any unguarded woman or child. Only this paleface called them “trolls.”

  “How you fixed for winter?”

  “Some fish. Not enough.”

  “Want to come back to the stockade?”

  He thought a moment. “Tarshish no make sick?”

  I decided to pour out an extra pot of beer the next morning. “How far your people?”

  He held up one finger and made the sun sign.

  “You tell ’em we fish here. Bimeby everybody go to stockade.” I gave him a few strips of dried salmon, and he trotted off upriver.

  Three days later a hungry, pockmarked band straggled in. For a while I thought they’d eat faster than we could catch fish, but soon their women turned to with the gutting and we built still more racks. The weather improved a little after the big storm, so the only troubles we had drying the fish were the thieving crows and gulls, and the rats that were created from piles of decaying offal.

  It was hard to keep dates this far north, but I knew the autumn equinox couldn’t be more than days away. For all the help we’d gotten from the gods lately I’d just as soon have forgotten the whole business but . . . the trouble with any kind of god business is, no matter how bad things are, they can usually find some way to make things worse. I began running it over in my mind, trying to remember the chants and prayers that would keep the divine bastards off my back for another three months, until winter solstice. Damn all gods anyway! It made me furious to have to waste a day right in the middle of the salmon run. In the end I compromised. My own men sacrificed, and the palefaces, who had other gods anyway, went on fishing.

  The spawning season seldom lasts over a month, but it was no coincidence that it ended abruptly next morning. Since there were no more fish, I called a halt and did what I could to patch things up. I’d get even with the gods if I ever got back to Tarshish.

  The simple way to get down to the stockade would be to load the Ishtar and row down the fjord, leaving the palefaces to walk around. But I couldn’t fancy any paleface trusting us that far. If I left part of the catch behind, they might decide they’d be happier away from the stockade. And if a band of trolls showed up meanwhile . . .

  We built a raft. I loaded the Ishtar and picked a dozen of the strongest palefaces. The rest went aboard the raft along with the women and children, who could stand a wetting better than the half-dried fish.

  Towing against the tide was impossible, but we made the stockade in three days of alternate drifting and anchoring. I was afraid my equinoctial bungle might have gotten Abner in trouble with the gods, but he reported business as usual and his men had pounded most of the bark into flour. Now we had another problem.

  Tarshish traders have learned never to let more than a half-dozen palefaces at a time into a stockade, especially if they’ve earned enough to buy a crock of religion. But with those ogres around, the palefaces couldn’t live outside. And I didn’t want them ever to get an idea like building a stockade of their own. I talked it over with Abner.

  “They can check their weapons at the gate,” he said, “but what about their smell?”

  “Maybe we could build them some lean-tos inside the wall. We could move into the warehouse. Have to soon anyway the way it’s turning cold.” I was thankful these palefaces didn’t raise cattle. I could still remember the stench of those one room house-barns around the Rine stockade.

  Our palefaces smeared mud over woven willows and topped off with thatch. Leaves turned yellow, and as I reluctantly switched my kilt for native dress, I wondered how the ogres would make out in cold weather.

  Even behind the headland that sheltered us from the Myrtos’s fury, wind howled unmercifully, and there was a trace of salt in the air. We sat in the stockade and shivered. I would have cursed the weather if we hadn’t needed it so badly.

  Three days later the wind subsided, and whitecaps disappeared from the fjord. “Time to earn your keep,” I said, but the palefaces were way ahead of me. With dawn the whole clan had trooped out to pick among the newly tossed up pebbles for those drops of sun sweat that meant life to Tarshish.

  An old paleface once told me he thought amber was only pitch which had undergone a hardening with age, like a beer priest’s liver. But congealed sun sweat sounds more expensive when Greeks and Egyptians fight to trade their gold and copper for it.

  The storm had been a good one. My palefaces brought in nearly a tenth of a talent—half of it in one magnificent piece as big as a man’s fist. I began the brewing ritual, and next day we paid off. Though I’d never water the gods’ beer, I did not hesitate to cut my palefaces’. Things were tough enough without any war god visions inside the stockade.

  Hatchi had gotten over her huff and was making my life miserable again. She seemed to be rounding out a little. Or was I only imagining it? One morning when I was nearly through chanting roll call of the seventy-two beer gods she interrupted me. I forgot my place and had to start all over again. When I’d finished, I ran her into a stockade corner. At the last minute I refrained from fracturing her. After all, it was partly my fault.

  “Look,” I said, “I told you I’d fix you up as soon as we reached the depot. Now don’t blame me if your idiotic conduct has scared all the men away. If you really need one, tell me which pleases you, and I’ll detail him to give you a few lumps or whatever else it’ll take to quiet you down.”

  Hatchi got a sudden look as if her breakfast had gone down wrong. She started hanging around Abner, and I wondered if that was where her desire lay. But my oarmaster’s beard split into an even wider grin. For some idiotic reason he was amused by the whole situation. Maybe I could have seen the funny side, too, if I hadn’t had to worry about getting the Ishtar back to Tarshish with something to show for the months we’d spent in this miserable hole. The amber collected so far wouldn’t begin to pay the docking fees.

  Hatchi still wore those tight goatskin pants instead of the paleface garb we all wore now. I hated the shapeless tube that ran from knees to armpits, so heavy it had to be held up with shoulder straps, but it and the fur cloak were the only things that kept us from freezing. I longed for spring and Tarshish.

  It snowed during the night, and I pitied the palefaces as they scrabbled among surf-washed pebbles. I was standing by the open gate watching them disappear over the ridge when Abner called me. I recognized the splayed footprints immediately.

  “Barefoot in this snow!” Abner breathed.

  And too close to the stockade to suit me!

  If the ogres were going to patrol the walls, we’d have to do something. I didn’t consider them much of a threat, but they’d spook the palefaces and make it impossible to get any work done.

  The rill that flowed from our spring was already rimmed with ice. I didn’t relish the thought of chasing ogres through waist-deep snow.

  “What about poison?” Abner asked.

  “Monkeys are too smart.”

  “Monkeys don’t eat meat,” he countered.

  Come to think of it, they don’t. I wondered if these animals might be human—as much, at least, as palefaces.

  There was no hemlock, but Abner found nightshade and toadstools where pines kept the ground free of snow. We boiled down an essence, keeping carefully upwind of the vapors, and I stewed a mangy paleface dog in it. We had no tiger whiskers, so I chopped the dog’s into short pieces and mixed them into the stew. I studied the concoction awhile, still not satisfied.

  Abner went into the warehouse and returned with a fistful of che
ap, off-color beads. He ground the glass into powder and sifted it over the stew. We set baits out around the stockade. There were no dead ogres next morning, but we had some mighty sick amber pickers.

  Those who could navigate went to the beach again. Our oarsmen kept to the warehouse and tossed knuckle bones, waiting for winter to end. I decided I’d better write a report. I made a tablet and sharpened a stylus. I’d gotten the list of evidence for the insurance examiners and was rolling the two cylinder seals into the clay when Abner came in. He glanced at Sargonid’s mark and grew thoughtful. He picked up the terra cotta cylinder and hefted it. We looked at each other and the same thought struck us.

  “Gods of Shinar!” Abner breathed. “What was he doing clear up here?”

  I drew a deep breath. Sargonid had never sailed the Myrtos routes. That was what I’d been trying to fit into place. He was an easterner—Thalassa and Pontos Axeinos runs. He must have been nearing Tarshish when the big storm drove him north. The Ishtar had cast off a week later, and the tag end of that same blow had shortened our run to Pretannion most miraculously.

  Suddenly I recalled what Hatchi had said. All that time through a stormy sea, and then a narrow place where the current ran strong. Sheol! She wasn’t talking about the sunny Thalassa and the twin Pillars of Herakles. She was talking about the long dismal passage from the land of the Amazons way up in the Pontos Axeinos and down through the Bosphorus and the Hellespont. Making allowances for her time scale, Sargonid must’ve been heading for Tarshish when the big blow swept him on past, up the coast along my own route to Pretannion.

  But Sargonid was an easterner, not used to the ways of the wild Ocean. No wonder he’d gotten the worst of it in a blow.

  And he’d been carrying the paleface girl the king was waiting for—the one somebody was supposed to impregnate with a half-breed prince to smooth out trade relations up in the Pontos Axeinos area. So near and yet so far . . . If she’d known when to jump overboard she could practically have swum to Tarshish. “Do you suppose Hatchi’s the missing merchandise?” I asked.