The Incompleat Nifft (11 page)

Haul? In Fregor? But of course—you don't know about it yet! Stupid of me . . . suppose I write you a nice long letter telling you all about it? It's raining here in Chilia where we're visiting Barnar's family. I've got lots of time on my hands, and we won't be getting back down your way till late this Spring. So it's agreed then, and I assure you it's no trouble at all, for I love to reminisce about exploits, especially remarkable ones. Just be sure to share this with Ellen if you see her—you know how she dotes on me and relishes keeping abreast of what I'm doing.

Well, it was swamp pearls, Taramat—
five hundred apiece.
Yes. You may well gape (as I know you're doing). You know their value, I'm sure, but have you ever seen one? Black as obsidian, twelve-faceted (the runts have six) and big as your thumb. They are dazzling to behold—nothing less—and we never doubted that obtaining some was worth risking the Vampire Queen's wrath.

Now we knew that Queen Vulvula's divers go down after them in threes—one pearl-picker and two stranglers. But this is because they are anxious not to kill the pearl-bearing polyps. With a pair of heavies, the thing's palps can be pinned and the picker left free to take its pearls. They attack the polyp's strangling-node only as a last resort, to free one of their team from a lethal grip of one of the palps. But a diver can get sufficient diversion from just one strangler if the man is strong enough and goes straight for the strangling node and squeezes to kill. You try to be quick and not leave the thing dead, as their corpses make a good trail for the archer-boats, but to get by with one strangler, he can't be shy about damaging the things. You know Barnar's strength. I was content to risk the picking with him strangling solo, and he was willing to try it if I was. So we signed up as men-at-arms on a Chilite skirmisher to get passage to Cuneate Bay, and spent three days there in Draar Harbor getting provisions. Then we headed south.

With good mounts the swamps are about ten days' journey inland. It's bad country, but our luck was good right up through the eighth day. Then, on the eighth night, it went bad. We were in the salt marshes near the mountains that flank the swamps when three huge salt beetles attacked us. Luckily, though wood is scarce there, we'd kept enough of a fire going to give us a little light to fight by. We killed them all, but not before they'd killed our mounts. Worse, their caustic blood destroyed both our spear shafts. We still had our bows and blades, but we would rather have lost these than the spears, which would be the only really useful weapons in the swamps. When you're swimming you can't use a bow, so it's no help against lurks, and it's scant help against ghuls because they're so tough-bodied in all but a few places. And swords bring you far closer than you ever want to be, either to a lurk or a ghul.

The swamps begin to the south of the Salt Tooth Mountains. As soon as we reached the upper passes of this range, we were looking across a plain of clouds that seemed to have no end. The range forms a wall the clouds can't pass, and the plains below have been a sump of rains for thousands of years.

Descending the range's swamp side, we were deep in cottony fog most of the way down, but just as we neared the plain we entered a zone of clear air between the clouds and the swamp. In the cold grey light between the cloud ceiling and the watery floor, we could see for miles across the pools and thickly grown mudbars that concealed our illicit fortune-to-be. The bars and ridges of silt are mazelike, turning the waters, which look jet black from a distance, into a puzzle of crazy-shaped lagoons. But the growth on these bars, though thick, is not as lush as you'd expect. It's mainly shrubs and flowers; big trees are rare. The question of cover would be tricky as a result. The place offered many avenues of vision down which a man standing on a flatboat could overlook a dozen lagoons at a glance.

But when we stood on the bog's very rim, pausing before we entered the waters, Barnar snuffed softly, and said to me: "It's got that smell, Nifft. There could be a great prize waiting for us here." He was right, too. It had that peculiar stink of threat about it. You looked at that low-riding cloudcover, looking torn and dirty as a stable-floor, and then at those endless unclean waters, and you knew that obscene riches lay ripening out there, riches so encumbered with danger that their guards had ceased to believe that they could ever be stolen, not in any big way.

The waters only looked unclean. Once you were in them you were amazed to be able to see all the way down to your feet—and down to the bottom of most of the pools, none of which, even of the broader ones, was very deep. The reason is the soil of the swamps. If you dive for a handful of bottom silt, and squeeze the water out, you'll find it hefts like iron, and if you kick at the bottom you set up a low boil of mud that sinks down very fast. I've been told since that the polyps need this dense earth to nourish the growth of their pearls. While the light was still at its strongest, grey and bleached though that was, we made haste to cut our teeth in this business.

In half an hour we were swimming, nudging our packs before us with one hand and holding our drawn swords before us underwater with the other. We had put cork inside our packs and wrapped them in oilskin, and our swordblades were heavily greased. The best way to survive in the swamps is to turn into a water-rat and stay in the water for the whole of your working day, and to crawl out onto the bars only to sleep. For one thing it keeps your water-adjusted reflexes in top readiness. The clarity gives you a few seconds warning when a lurk comes off the bottom at you, but if you're in and out your underwater eye will get fuddled and you'll be too slow to take one of those warnings. For another thing the lagoons are so interconnected that if you swim a mazy path you can go anywhere and almost never risk the visibility of crossing a bar of land.

The first polyp we found grew alone in a small pool. It stood as tall as a man, its palp tips almost touching the surface. Neither of us knew if this was big or average. It would have been beautiful, standing there in the pool, its blurred redness seeming to burn, if we hadn't had to fight the thing. The palps began to writhe with exploring gestures the minute we paddled into the pool. Keeping out of range we sank underwater to view it. Down at the base of its anchor-stalk, right below where the bouquet of its arms began, was the small cluster of exposed fibres that is called the strangling node, from the use men put it to. At the same point on the stalk, but on the other side of it, were two large lumps—pearl blisters for sure.

We surfaced. "Get well breathed, Ox," I said. "I'll hit the blisters the instant you touch the node and draw its arms out of the way. Breathe up."

Barnar nodded. He tied his sword to his floating pack. I wore mine for lurks, but Barnar was going to have both hands full. He emptied his lungs and filled them, each time more deeply. I did the same. We nodded our readiness, and went under.

We swam toward the polyp, dividing to hit it from opposite sides. I had to hang back till Barnar had drawn all its palps, and I watched as he swam in low and seized the node. All those bloodred palps whipped together and grabbed for him, faster than you'd believe anything could move under water. It bent like a bush that's suddenly lashed by a storm wind, and it had him by the neck, trunk and leg so suddenly that he could keep only one hand on the node and had to use the other to free his throat.

I went in. My contact with the thing was brief but still it made my skin crawl—for the thing was like stone that lived and moved. This toughness is what makes one's work so hard, for the things are unpierceable by any weapon. I pressed on either side of one of the blisters and the pearl popped out into the water like a seed squeezed from the ripe fruit. I tried to grasp it, but it kept squirting out of my fingers. Something hit me like a hammer between the shoulders. Catching the pearl with a lucky grab I crawfished madly through the mud, took two more bone-cracking blows on the shoulder, and was clear. I came up starving for air.

Barnar was still down there, a huge blur in the slit where the red arms were still striking like thresher's flails. I pocketed the pearl, took air, and went down. The two of them were deadlocked, because Barnar's one-hand grip on the node distracted just enough palps that he could bear, for a few moments, the assault of the rest. In the steppes he had taken a piece of rock-salt and crushed it in one hand—it was as big as a road-apple. But his lungs were surely fit to crack by now, while the polyp was not weakening. I swam in beside him and added both my hands to the node. It was just enough pain to loosen the rest of the thing's grip on my friend. We scrambled backwards. Something tore flesh from my face, and then I was free. Barnar boomed like a whale as he broke back into the air. We swam weakly to the mud bar and rested our upper bodies on it. I showed him the pearl. His face was torn in two places, the kind of raw, nasty wound one gets from rocks. My left cheek was a ruin. You see the scar of it here?

"Well," said Barnar, "high pay, hard work."

"True," I said. "Still, friend, this may be the hardest work I've ever done." And then we heard a movement, distinct, but perhaps a lagoon or two distant. We drew our swords and towed our bundles round into the adjoining pool. Some bushes atop the farther bar were still shaking. From the lagoon beyond came a flat striking sound, the tearing of water, and the grunts and panting of a man.

We swam to the bar and looked over. A smallish man was thrashing on the surface of the water, driving a spear beneath him against the bottom. Even as we watched his thrusts grew more methodical, and he calmed down. A thick fluid, denser than the water and green in color, was boiling up around him, mixed with bubbles.

I began to think I knew the man. He turned his spear round to prod something down there with its butt—the head showed green above his shoulder. Then he cursed, spat, and swam to the bar, where some bundles lay on the mud, and a sword hung in the bushes. I then remembered he had been at the trade fair at Shapur, where I had first learned of the pearl swamps. He had been in the room where a small group of friends of mine had been talking about poaching. He seemed not to have learned more of the matter than was spoken there, to judge by his spread-out gear. Your goods on a bank are like a promise to any archer squad that happens on them that you yourself are somewhere nearby, and they'll hound you out, even if you've managed to duck them first. As for the sword, even in the dull swamplight its sheath of chased bronze was as good as a signpost.

"I think I know him," I told Barnar. "Best join with him, eh? The work would be easier for three, and if he's not instructed he'll draw patrols into the area."

"All right," my friend said. "But he gets only a quarter share till he shapes up. Obvious amateur. I think he's just lost a partner."

He had indeed, as we saw as soon as we swam into his lagoon. We made gestures of peace. He turned his spearhead towards us and waited warily. Then we had eyes only for what lay under the water.

First, we saw that our polyp had been a small one. This pool was dominated by a nine-footer. Held in its palps was the body of another man, a big one. It was not the polyp, though, that had killed the man—and it was probably not his or his partner's inexperience either, but just bad luck. For a lurk as big as a mastiff also lay on the bottom, its fangs still hooked into the man's leg, its flat, eye-knobbed head broken and giving off a green cloud of body fluids. Lurks look just like spiders except the rear part of them isn't a fat, smooth sac—it's plated and ribbed, instead, like a beetle's body. Their poison balloons a man up a good one and a half times his size. Even allowing for that, the pale sausage of a man down there must have been big enough in life to make Barnar look normal.

Of the three things down there, only the polyp lived, and we learned something further in watching it as we swam past: the things have, amidst their palps, mouth parts for animal prey, and if left with a sufficiently inert body in their grip, they will devour it, though with a disgusting slowness. The polyp had the dead man's arm hugged tight in its arms and was working on the flesh with a slow rasping and plucking movement.

The little man's name was Kerkin. He remembered our meeting, and knew my name without being told, be it said with due modesty. He was no less impressed with the difficulties of this task than we were, and we reached partnership promptly. Kerkin's hopes would have been defeated without us, and he accepted a quarter share with humility. We gave him some cork and helped him remake his bundle.

"Look there!" he cried. The great polyp was thrashing convulsively. It had more purple in it to begin with than ours had—we were to learn that that was generally the color of the big ones. But now it was amazingly pale, almost white, and its rhythmic stiffening had a helpless, purposeless quality, as of sheer pain. In a short time, it slowed, and ceased to move at all.

"The lurk poison!" said Barnar. Of course that was it. The polyp's toughness would have laughed at the biggest lurk's direct assault. But the poison entered the creature handily through its tainted meal. The thing had four blisters, three of which had full sized pearls in them, the fourth a runt.

For a while we had a perfect poaching implement. We dragged the body of Kerkin's friend—his name had been Hasp—to several more lagoons. We found that if a polyp was jabbed forcibly in the node, it would attack and ultimately feed on the corpse we thrust into its arms. We took more than a dozen pearls this way, and then Hasp began to come to pieces—due not to the nibblings of the polyps, but to the lurk poison. The skeleton began to fragment and the skin to dissolve with terrible suddenness, filling the water with unwholesome, stringy clouds of corroded flesh. In a few moments the whole lagoon was transformed into a disgusting broth from which we swam with desperate haste, keeping our faces clear of the water. It killed two small polyps growing there, but we did not dive for their pearls.

The real labor re-commenced. While the takings were so easy Kerkin had begun to whine after all; Hasp was
his
partner, and we should share even thirds. Now that it was again a wrestling game he dropped this theme readily. We took three more pearls in the same time we had taken to make our first dozen. We climbed up onto a broad bar in the evening, too tired to eat the jerky in our packs. We worked our way into the bushes and lay like the dead—that is, Barnar and I. Kerkin had the first watch and in his excitement over the wealth we had already made, sleep was far from him. He would not even let me take mine. He showed his eagerness like an amateur, but I couldn't help seeing him with a friendly eye—he might have been a stupider version of myself at that age. So I talked with him awhile.