The Incompleat Nifft (31 page)

The boy was nimble as a fox pup. He took some tumbles I vowed to myself had killed him, only to see him get his feet beneath him at the last instant. I couldn't match his speed, and saw the inevitability of the thing I least desired—a struggle with him on the shore, down in the reach of the surf, and whatever lived in it. He hit the cove and pelted for the amphorae. I sprang off the bluff and took the last fifteen feet by air. Wimfort was wrestling a jar from one of the pools, and I saw how suddenly the surf came in, like an extended paw, to swirl teasingly round his ankles. He dragged the jar—half his own size—onto the shingle and began frantically to pry at its stopper with a sharp stone.

I was on him, seizing his shoulders. He hugged the jar with both legs and arms. I was in urgent dread of the sea, and so I gave up trying to pry him off the jar, and dragged them both back toward the cliff. Meanwhile just offshore, the water was beginning to fold and peak in a dozen places. The peaks were sharp, and did not move with the rhythm of water, but fitfully, like things scurrying around under a sheet, all of them coming erratically but steadily nearer the beach. I looked up at the clifftop. Barnar stood and brandished a noose, beginning to move down the gully for a nearer cast. I nodded and bent down to pry at Wimfort's grip in earnest. I would have to stun his arm with a blow to the shoulder. It was not going to be an entirely disagreeable task. The boy sensed my preparatory movement and wrenched himself with unexpected violence to one side, dragging the amphora down with him to the shingle, and knocking the stopper out of it.

What poured out of it was a reeking black fluid—and far more than that. For in the fumes that instantly tangled up through the air, my mind and soul went twisting and reeling into an utterly other being. The sky over me, though it did not alter physically, became something different, became an agelessly familiar thing. The black and white shingle was the only floor my feet had ever known, except that I did not possess feet, but some giant raptor's talons. And my tongue was charged with curses in a language never heard in the world of the sun. I poured these curses from my hooked beak upon my deadly adversary.

This enemy of mine was a crablike thing, half my size. Fluid fire were his eye-knobs upon their ghastly stalks, and his pincers were likewise of flame. We joined battle, as we had done, world without end, whenever we had met in the long eons of our being. He clawed and tore at my chest and legs as I took his eye-stalks in my forepaws and lifted him, shaking him in the air.

When my mind goes back, now, to that battle, it is like stepping into a great shadowed corridor endless in either direction, a hall of memories and dark hates. For in those moments I possessed the entire past of that other being—its shape and senses, its deeds and lusts, all were mine, and I fought for them all. There was a touch, a pressure around my upper body, and then a tightening around my neck and under one of my forelegs. As this was happening, so was something else. The surf arched itself up off the stones, just like a carpet lifted by children who are playing beneath. Crouched forms with merry red sharp-cornered eyes rode mats of coiling slime out from under the shadow of the lifted water blanket. They winked at us. I knew them, and I knew what they wanted, but I was powerless to do anything other than fight my close-embraced enemy to the death.

And then something began to lift me. Haltingly, I rose up the cliff face, and my enemy, whom I could not loose, rose with me, clawing wildly at my body all the while. The sharp-eyed things swarmed onto the shingle. My heels rose just barely clear of their ropy palps, entreatingly upreached.

Somewhere in that jerky climb I began to shed somewhat the being which had engulfed my own, but the madness of battle remained upon both of us. When Barnar landed us on the clifftop he had to act fast to save Wimfort's life. The lad, who had the fight of a drenched cat, was obliviously kicking my shins and clawing my face as I, singlemindedly, throttled him, while trying to grab his hands and stifle their assault. His face swelled above my fist, purple as an eggplant, but he didn't seem to care about being strangled—he wanted my life and nothing else. I began doing my lunatic all to fold him up small enough so I could pound him flat with a rock. My legs had more lumps on them than a mile of city street has cobbles, and the little beast had clawed my arms to such a tatters they looked like I'd been scrubbing them with rose-bushes. I'm not sure how my friend managed to pull us apart, but fortunately the fit waned almost immediately after we were separated.

The boy sat up groggily and set about, cautiously, trying to get some breath through his bruised windpipe. He sounded like a bellows with the nozzle rusted half-shut. I limped about until some of my blood had forsaken my many bruises and returned to my veins. I hobbled to and fro, marveling at the disastrous condition of my shins.

When Barnar saw we were at peace, he sat down to rest from his exertions. As he sat there, he started to laugh. Once he got started, he warmed right up to it. He set himself to laugh in a big, methodical way, sending a great, stately braying sound out across that festering sea. It took more and more of his strength, that laugh, and finally he had to lie on his back and give it his all. I didn't join him at first.

"Just look at you there," I snapped, "just haw-hawing away, snug as a hog in muck."

Barnar fought to breathe, to speak: "You should have . . ." (Some further struggle) " . . . You should have seen yourself!" (A gurgle, and some more braying.) "You looked like two puppets . . . whose handler was having a seizure! . . . I almost . . .
dropped
you!"

This last amusing thought was too much for him, and he went off again. I began to join him, half just to irritate the boy, who was taking on a pout of bitterness and injury as he came back to himself. "You rotten, swaggering bullies!" he shouted at us. It was meant as a preamble, but he stopped short, snagged on the fact that we had just pulled him out of a very deadly mistake. It didn't soften him toward us. As any spoiled child will do, he punished us for making him feel guilty by hating us more. The incident didn't really prove anything to him, since he had only half disbelieved our warnings against the amphorae in the first place. And it left intact the hateful fact of our control over him. After staring at us a moment, he said bitterly: "You just
refuse
to see the importance of the Elixir! It's worth any risk. Don't you see that if we brought some back, you would be rich beyond your most insanely greedy dreams?"

Barnar and I traded a look, and then stared back at him. Our humor had left us. It was more than sad, the eternal unteachabillty of youth.

"Wimfort," I said at last, "I speak this with all gravity—without malice or ill will. But may all the nameless dwellers in the Black Crack itself prevent you from ever accomplishing your desire. I swear that we will always do our utmost to thwart your efforts in that direction. And now we must march. We crave the sun, Barnar and I, and the wind and the stars. Our souls are perishing to take up the thread of our proper lives. And so would yours be too, if you were not the young idiot you are."

The essence of nightmare lies less in the simple experience of horrors than in the unpreventable fruition of horrors foreknown. And when we turned inland from the sea, we entered our ordeal's most nightmarish phase.

We knew, in large part, what awaited us, and consequently we advanced armed with strategies—bleak-hearted, but murderously determined to dispense more damage than we endured, and to endure far less than our coming hither had caused us. In such a spirit, I say, we advanced. We advanced to encounter a perfect series of disasters—to meet each of our wisely prepared-for enemies with collision force, and come off twice as scathed as our first encounters with them had left us. The reason? The reason, in a word, was Master Wimfort, Rod-Master-apparent of the city of Kine Gather.

To evoke that train of extravagant missteps in any detail is a task from which my hand rebels. Calamity struck us with such ruthless regularity that those hours of fevered scrambling achieved—for me—the quality of Damnation itself, of entrapment beneath the Wheel of Woe where it grinds out its eternal reiterations of misery and peril.

The boy lost no time hitting his stride. The salt dunes' only predators were big-jawed beings which laired like ant-lions in plainly visible funnels whose avoidance was easy. Then we hit the first rough spot, announced by greasy black smoke which overlay and stained the dunes for miles in advance of its actual frontier. And the roaring of it outreached its smoke, for it was a place of furious conflagration. Flesh was the universal material of that jumbled terrain, knit of welded bodies both human and demonic, and all that flesh was toweringly aflame. Crazed, veering winds raised the flame into peaks and harvested it, tearing it up by its sizzling roots of skin and blowing flesh and flame alike to rags and tatters that came driving at you like a blizzard. The living fuel sundered, body fragments wheeled before the gale till they were re-welded by impact against the first feature of that landscape that intercepted their flight, while roaring within the roaring of the fire were these victims' million voices, which rose in grieving unison, intact above their molten, broken bodies.

Our tactic here was to run shoulder to shoulder ahead of the boy, the two of us forming a kind of prow to cleave the wind, while the fire-clots splashed off our joined shields. Wimfort ran close behind in the lee we made him. The wind's shifting had us staggering and stumbling. We had to run as much as possible against the wind in order to keep our shields between us and the burning flesh. This, when it struck us, clung to us—sometimes in the most literal way when hands, claws or entire limbs of it hit us and tried to wrestle the shields from our grips, and wherever that flesh touched ours, ours came away.

We were well across this zone, and were keeping the bulk of the fiery carnage off our charge, when a few bits of flame began to get round to him on a back-draft—negligible bits, no more than we were constantly being singed with all over our bodies, but they caused Wimfort such a lively sense of discomfort that he panicked, and bolted from our cover. He began a lateral drive which he almost immediately aborted at the onslaught of a big fragment—a whole blazing torso, in fact, which spun toward him, its arms spread to wrap him in a crackling hug. Barnar had turned and reached out his free arm to pull the boy back to cover, and when Wimfort ducked, the burning body sailed over him and smashed into my friend's embrace. The boy, mindful only of his own stinging flesh now that we no longer covered him, seized my shield and tried to wrestle it from me while I
was helping Barnar peel the pyro-nomad from his chain mail, which was already cherry-red with the heat. Whole steaks of our skin came off in that grisly grappling, while the boy's wild assaults endlessly frustrated my efforts to use my sword as a prybar on Barnar's tormentor without killing my friend in the process. When pain and desperation grew too much, I knocked Wimfort senseless, and then I was able to help Barnar to a quick disentanglement. I tossed the boy across my shoulder and we fled.

The fields of fire gave place to orchard country—squat trees of leatherlike, veiny foliage studded with wrinkled blue fruit that gave off a delicious fragrance. We had no unguents, and our burns were an agony beneath our armor. With scant ceremony we told Wimfort that he was not to pluck or even touch this fruit—that we were going to make a brisk, direct march through this territory, that he was going to hold the position we assigned him throughout, and that there was no more to the affair than that.

Naturally, there proved to be a great deal more to it than that. We'd cut Wimfort a staff for the trek, and he expressed his resentment of things in general by prodding curiously with it at this fruit or that whenever our eyes were not on him. We learned he was doing this because, inevitably, one of his idle, resentful little pokes brought the fruit down. That which we had been too weary and curt to describe to him came to pass—with the first fruit, every other one on the tree dropped off. The leaves came with them, for these were the wings of those plump little monsters, all of whose bodies split open in fang-rimmed mouths as they converged in a ravenous swarm upon the three of us.

For this particular eventuality we had formulated a very clear strategy, and Barnar communicated this to Wimfort: "Run for your life!" he bellowed, and he and I set the boy an example which, at that moment, we didn't really care whether he followed or not. But in fact, he outstripped us, and nearly knocked me off my feet in so doing.

By the Crack, how that lad could run! He was, in all seriousness, an unusually gifted runner—just how gifted we had yet, to our sorrow, to learn, though we were beginning to realize it. He was long-legged and, though not quite yet at his full frame-size, already deep-lunged. In him, we saw the image of our own plight ahead of us during that long sprint beneath those trees all fat and gravid with the clustered swarms of razor-fanged hungers. Given even the briefest contact, they clipped a bite of skin off you as big as an Astrygal twenty-gelding piece. They taxed us sorely, though we swatted them with our shields, which grew heavier with their fig-soft, impact-flattened bodies, and dragged at our flight. When near at hand, the loathsome things smelt putrescent, and as they swooped at us they hissed feverish little curses, and derogatory personal remarks. Even when we had thinned them out till they posed no further danger, it remained a pleasure—indeed, a vindictive obsession—to smash them, and when we were at last outside the frontier of the orchard-land, we shed our gear, arranged ourselves back to back, and proceeded, methodically, to hammer every last one of the stubborn little abominations flat. We stood thus—our arms, cheeks, shins all spotted with red bites, our eyes insanely bright—and feasted on their annihilation. Wimfort, finding himself similarly beset with hangers-on, ran back to us and howled at us to kill his too, and so enthralled were we by the task, that we actually did this for him.