Hylozoic (24 page)

“There's no teep to check that,” she said fretfully. “This place isn't right. Last time, the Hibrane was almost like our San Francisco, and they had lazy eight. This is some kind of primitive backwater with no silps, and our extra memory is missing. Everything's mute. How do people live this way?”

“We're free,” said Jayjay relishing the bucolic air. Already he was learning to ignore the bad smells. “It's great here. No Peng, no voices in our heads, no
Founders
show.” He paused. “I still can't believe you did that with Chu.”

“I can't either,” said Thuy, her voice close by his side. In
this street of moonlit buildings, her face was a faint oval. “I wasn't in my right mind, Jayjay. What we've been through the last two days—it's insane.”

Dogs barked in courtyards nearby, perhaps annoyed by Groovy's buzz. He was standing beside Jayjay, balancing on his handle, vibrating his prongs at an ultrasonic rate. Now he slid down a few octaves, sculpting his reverberant tones into a voice.

“I got a powerful hankerin' to find that harp,” said the strange being. “I know it's gonna work out. We've done all this before. She's already been through most of it.”

“She has?”

“The harp is manifesting as a time loop. That's why we're outta synch. Seems like a god and a devil would be able to show up on the same brane, same place, same time—but Lovva, she always takes a wrong turn.”

“Once you finish with the harp, we still have to get the Peng off our planet,” said Jayjay. “Don't forget. You owe us that much.”

“Gimme, gimme, gimme,” said Groovy dismissively. He went hopping off, his handle rapping smartly on the stones. Someone lit a lantern and swung open a casement, the window absurdly high above the ground.

A slow, draggy squeal issued from a faintly visible alley farther down the street. Horn-shod feet clattered on the stones. Shambling their way was a muddy hairy beast the size of a truck. A giant hog.

“Run, Thuy!” cried Jayjay. The cobblestones were broad and high-crowned, with gaping cracks between them. At his very first step, he caught his foot and fell.

The monstrous hog was coming closer, slow but steady, snuffling his way through the fetid night. And a red-faced man in a nightgown was yelling from the window. The man's speech
was doubly incomprehensible: the voice was warped like a screwed audio clip, and the words weren't in any language Jayjay knew.

“Don't worry,” said Thuy, as Jayjay got to his feet. In the faint, jiggly light, he could see that she was smiling. “There's a six-to-one spacetime scale difference between the Lobrane and the Hibrane. It's like we're one foot tall here—but we're tough as steel, and faster than weasels. I'm gonna terrorize that pig.”

She flanked around the moon-silvered swine and planted a volley of kicks upon his muddy hams. Bellowing like drunken molasses, the coarse beast bucked his way past Jayjay and up the street.

Gazing at the scolding man in the high window, Thuy shook her fist and threw a stone right through his wall. The man made a triangle gesture and slammed his shutters.

“We're fast, dense super-gnomes,” gloated Thuy.

Giant soldiers appeared around a corner, bearing lanterns, singing and swaying, with motley hats of leather and wool. The pig careened into them, producing a slow-motion pileup.

At first the soldiers laughed. But then one them spotted Jayjay and began shouting, his voice shaking the air. Slowly, terribly, the soldiers drew their swords. The blades looked twenty feet long.

“Let's take that alley where the pig came out,” suggested Jayjay. “We need a safe place to rest.” The emotions and the runecasting had totally worn him down.

As they turned the corner into the alley, a vista opened out. The town was on a low hill, and from here Jayjay had a view across the massed buildings, pale and crisp in the moonlight. He saw stepped roofs, a church spire topped by a triangle, a city wall with gates and towers, and beyond that a river and a flat landscape stretching to the north. The sky out there was
a strange shade of red. With a start, Jayjay realized the glow was from a burning village.

Torches flickered in the alley: a sooty, bloodied gang of soldiers was making their way uphill, returning from a nighttime raid, armed with crossbows and halberds, dressed in woven tights with soft boots and light cloaks, bearing shields embossed with swans and toads.

Jayjay turned back, wanting to avoid the warriors, but the besotted soldiers on the main street had drawn even with the alley's mouth. The revelers roared a warning to the battle party—and now Jayjay and Thuy were trapped between two groups of armed, unfriendly men.

All eyes were fixed upon them.
“Duivels,”
rumbled the soldiers' voices, slow and guttural.
“Gnooms. Guelders!”
Blades flickered and footsteps scuffed as the men squeezed closer to see the strange dwarves they'd trapped.

Suddenly the pitchfork returned, briskly pushing his way through the gathering mob. The soldiers flinched back from the curious creature's wriggly touch.

“Found the harp!” he twanged. “She's locked snug in an attic; she sang to me through the walls. She's waiting for Jay to come play that Lost Chord before she goes home. She taught me the local lingo; what you might call Dutch. I can buzz it into your skulls. Then you'll know what these bad-asses are sayin' about you.”

“Don't!” cried Jayjay. “You'll hard-boil our brains!”

“Right now let's get back to the main street,” said Thuy. “With our speed advantage, it won't actually be that hard.”

Jayjay led the way, being careful with his feet and swiveling his head from side to side lest he miss someone coming at him with a sword. He dodged around the first two soldiers he encountered, and gave a third one a hard shove in the shin, a man wearing leather pantaloons. The guy tipped over as easily
as a bowling pin. He had a heavy blond mustache and a smooth blue cap pulled low over his round head. Misliking the soldier's stupid, implacable glare, Jayjay gave him an extra kick.

Once in the clear, Jayjay and Thuy trotted rapidly down the street, evasively weaving from side to side, easily outpacing their few pursuers. Jayjay had a bad moment of thinking he'd been struck by a crossbow bolt—but it was only Groovy tapping his shoulder.

They crossed a bridge over a little canal, cut down a side street to the right, took a left, and leaned against a house, catching their breath.

“Hold on now till I learn you Dutch,” repeated Groovy.

“
You
hold on,” said Thuy. “Where are we, anyway? And when?”

“Harp says this town goes by the name of 's-Hertogenbosch,” responded the pitchfork. The modulated whine of his voice was making the dogs bark again. “We're in the Duchy of Brabant, and it's early on Saturday the twenty-fifth of June, 1496, anno domini. Here's your language lesson!” His hum rose to a furious buzz.

The intricate sound assaulted Jayjay, swarming into his head like hornets. His mind bubbled with words and idioms, with syllables and phonemes. He felt unaccustomed twitches in his tongue, fresh shades of feeling in his throat. In the dark beside him, Thuy groaned. And then, finally, the buzzing stopped. Jayjay felt earthier than before, lower and more irascible—he felt Dutch.

“Joepie!”
said Groovy. “Means
yee-haw
. I'm off to fetch your pal.” With that he stumped off. Jayjay couldn't think what “pal” the pitchfork was talking about now—all he knew was that he was nearing the end of his rope. Had Groovy really said 1496?

Once again a window overhead flew open and a burgher with a lantern leaned out to yell. Reckless with exhaustion, Jayjay answered the man on his own terms.

“Shit-eater!” he hollered in fluent Brabantian Middle Dutch. “Come out here and I'll shove that lantern down your gullet, you addle-pated, pig-faced son of a whore!”

To Jayjay's chagrin, the man clattered down the stairs of his house.

“He understood you!” said Thuy with a weak chuckle. “Let's scurry off. We're darling elves spreading good cheer.”

Hastening down the lane that had led them here, they bumped into a one-legged man with a wooden crutch.

“Greetings, friend,” said Jayjay in the local tongue. “Can we follow you home?”

“We're poor outcasts,” added Thuy, also speaking Brabants Dutch.

“Unclean dwarves despised by the Almighty,” said the one-legged man, sizing them up. “I'm Maarten. I'll show you to a haven for the likes of us. Carry my booty and we'll make better speed.”

Jayjay took a cloth sack from Maarten's shoulder; it held scavenged garbage. The beggar led them through a narrow space between a hedge and wall, across a moonlit vegetable garden, through a squeaky gate, and down a sandy path that debouched into a cobbled courtyard.

 

 

A group of ill-favored figures were gathered around a low fire. A three-legged kettle of soup simmered on the coals. Some of the company lay stretched out asleep, others were sitting up. Jayjay placed Maarten's sack at the fire's edge. A legless man in
a striped blouse showed his teeth and emptied the sack: a fish head, a bone, a soft cabbage, a stale half loaf of dark brown bread. He pitched the first three items into the kettle, gnawed a bit of the hard bread, and passed the loaf to his neighbor.

Maarten nodded toward a large stone building abutting the courtyard. “The monastery of the Brotherhood of Saint Anthony,” he said. “The Antonites are charitable to us. You can rest by our fire as long as you like. I'll fetch you some wine.”

Sitting down between Thuy and the legless man, Jayjay looked around the circle of figures. Some lacked limbs, others had twisted spines or egregious harelips, some stared into the flames with haunted eyes.

“I'm Hugo,” said the legless man. He had short-cropped hair and large, dark eyes. “Sinner that I am, I suffer from a plague that consumes my flesh: Saint Anthony's fire. My limbs loosen and drop. Would you like to see my talisman?”

Not waiting for an answer, Hugo reached into his striped blouse and drew out a small bundle of white cloth. Carefully he flattened out the cloth on the courtyard stones, revealing a leathery, mummified foot with the ankle bone sticking out. “Mine,” said Hugo, a catch in his voice. “As a boy I danced on a rope and chased the maids; now I beg in the marketplace.”

“Ick,” said Thuy, rather loudly. Hugo let it pass.

“Here,” said Maarten, hobbling over with a large bowl of dark wine in one hand. “The Antonites gave us a cask tonight. One of our number is scheduled for surgery in the morn.” He pointed across the courtyard at a puffy beggar hunkered by the small wine barrel. “Lubbert. His leg is quite putrescent, poor soul.”

Taking the large bowl, Jayjay noticed that Maarten's skin was flushed and ulcerous and that he was missing several fingers. But, what the hell, Jayjay drank some of the wine, just to show he was one of the gang. It was a surprisingly good red, quite
light, and smooth as silk. Maybe it would help him sleep. Thuy was already lying on her side, pillowing her cheek on her hands. She had the right idea.

“Do you want any wine?” he asked her.

“I'd better not,” she said, looking up at him with an oddly fraught expression. She was so beautiful in the firelight. Suddenly, she dropped a bomb. “I think—I think I'm pregnant.”

“What!”

“I noticed this afternoon. I teeped into my uterus.”

“After Chu?”

“That doesn't mean it's his, Jayjay. You and I had sex the other day when we were building the foundation for our house.”

“But wait!” said Jayjay, his emotions in a knot. “We wouldn't want to risk having to raise a kid like Chu.”

“Well—” said Thuy, her voice going up an octave, suddenly close to tears. “If it
is
Chu's child, maybe I'd owe that to him. I stole Chu's innocence today. I raped him. And then I let him go off to die in a horrible alien manta ray with a three-eyed junkie.”

“Thuy—”

“Oh, I can't think. I'm exhausted, and I'm still messed up from the Hrull gel. Strung out. I know it's crazy, but I keep feeling like I should whistle for the Hrull so I can get more. Not that they have any Hrull here, do they? I'm sorry I'm so horrible.”

“Just go to sleep,” said Jayjay, patting her cheek. “I love you no matter what. We'll figure out a way to stop the Peng and then we'll go back home to—”

“But wait!” exclaimed Thuy sitting bolt upright. She turned to Jayjay, her face working. “I just realized that I don't have that Knot code in my head anymore. I'd stored it in my lazy eight memory, and when we came over here, all that part of my memory went away. We might be stuck here forever!”

She really broke down then, and Jayjay rocked her to sleep in his arms, nursing his bowl of wine. Finally, she was sleeping on her side.

Jayjay meant to lie down next to her, but somehow he felt too wired. So many things to think about. The strange pitchfork, the endless beanstalk, the squawky Peng, his draining labors as runecaster, the near success of the reset rune, the raw memories of Thuy and Chu, the dizzy sensation of the pitchfork vibrating Dutch into his brain, this medieval beggars' banquet, Thuy's pregnancy—and now the possibility that they might be living here for good. He couldn't remember the Knot, either.