The Incompleat Nifft (48 page)

"Mine too!" Barnar chortled, "With Kairnish quadroons mixed in!" I had to laugh to see my friend looking so like a child with his basket of sweets at an Ephesion harvest-fest (although so, I daresay, did I). Barnar's eyes are the dense, smoky grey of the always-rainy skies of his native Chilia, and the glow of our gold brought out the flecks of green in them too, like the forest green that clothes that same great isle of his nativity. His broad, flat, not unbattered nose seemed like a bull's who snuffs excitement in the morning air. Barnar is a man with great laughter in him, though his stolid face is seldom seen to brim with it, as it did now. "Do you know, old waybrother," I told him, "in this fine, ruddy heat, I feel that the gold and we ourselves could melt together, refashioning us into utterly new, shining beings, lustrous and immortal."

"The words," Barnar beamed, "of a perfect lunatic. I too am quite mad, you know, to find myself so rich. So very rich, in fact, Nifft, that . . ." His look turned graver; he was about to broach some serious matter, but I cut him off, such excitement did my own sudden thought bring me.

"Do you realize, Barnar, that now we can do that great deed we have been sworn to these five years past and more?" The look he gave me was so blank, I faltered. "Can you fail to understand me? The Buskins and Gantlets and Cowl of Pelfer the Peerless! To be had by storming his tomb and subduing its deathless guardians.
²
Surely you see that now, once we have the remaining three hundredweight, we can actually hire six good ships and a hundred first-class mercenaries. We could be fighting our way across the steppes before autumn was half out, if we're done in your nephew's mine in a fortnight or so."

Barnar's brow, to my bafflement, had taken on an injured look. "You may be right to reproach my memory, Nifft, for forgetting your ardor to have the great Pelfer's accoutrements of power. But I think I have even better reason to reproach your memory in turn. For did we not, two years ago, at the Pickpockets' Ball in Karkmahn-Ra, most solemnly vow that if ever we could afford the Witches' Seed to do it, we would infallibly go forth to Chilia and there reforest the Ham-Hadryan Vale, so long in the holding of my family's line, and so cruelly despoiled during its long captivity?"

I all but snapped at him,
What, will you hold me to drunken promises
? For I remembered the occasion the instant he reminded me of it; a bit too much wine had made me vow with sentimental fervor that I would regard the reforestation of Barnar's native valley as my solemn duty, as soon as circumstances warranted the exploit. And of course I was indeed bound to help my friend in an enterprise so near to him as the rejuvenation of his homeland and his clan, and I had every intention of doing so, at a more convenient time. "Old friend," I urged him, "when Gildmirth's path crossed ours a second time, and when that great mage put in our possession the whereabouts of Pelfer's fabled tomb—was this not five years and more ago? Did not the vow we swore to one another to seek his tomb as soon as we had wealth enough to mount the effort—well, did not this vow antedate our vow to reforest your family's valley? And look you! With Pelfer's Gantlets, Cowl, and Buskins in our possession, we would shortly be the richest thieves on earth! The reforesting of the Ham-Hadryan Vale with Witches' Seed would be childsplay to us then!"

For answer Barnar gave me a steady, mournful look. He felt himself ill treated—there was no getting around it. On my part, I felt a keen resentment of my friend which it was hopeless to conceal from myself. How could Barnar allow this golden moment of ours to run aground on this shoal of his stubbornness?

"Look you," he sighed at length. "The other three hundredweight is not yet ours, is it? Indeed, can this ichor of Bunt's be so easy in the taking that we can be wholly sure of managing it? Would he have offered such a huge sum outright for something that was lightly had? Let's go bathe, and put away dissension. Let's enjoy what we have, and the moment we have it in."

"Fairly spoken!"

As soon as we emerged from the sweat room, our bags once again on our shoulders, three bath attendants materialized—the slender one who had first ushered us in, and two others as gauzily clad and shapely as herself. These second two swiftly persuaded Barnar to undergo a massage which began with the pair of them walking up and down on him, treading the length of his recumbent bulk with their bare, scented feet. The first, a sloe-eyed woman with a wise, wicked smile, conducted me to a pool a bit apart. "Oh sinewy traveller," she teased (her voice was slow, gritty honey), "you seem to be entirely made of tendon and tight, snaky muscles! You will need a thorough soaping, and a most meticulous scrubbing, to get all the creases and ridges of you clean. . . ."

I replied, my voice cracking only slightly, that I would be deeply grateful for any such hygienic assistance as she would be pleased to lend me.

A rapturous interval ensued.

Her name was Higaia. We were chortling like children when at length we rinsed each other off. She told me she had freelanced in bath houses and dancing troupes three decades now on both sides of the Sea of Agon, and clearly she had seen the world and drawn sweet wisdom from it. Knowing we could not meet again before our setting out tonight, I asked if she meant to stay on Dolmen a while. "Well," she said, "the wanderlust is coming on me again, and I'm thinking of seeing the Minuskulons. I suppose I might stay here another fortnight or so."

"Then I have good hope of finding you here again. Perhaps we might travel together for a time."

So little did I forsee how our present venture would detain us under the earth.

Bunt's balconied dining room, four floors up, opened onto an unobstructed view of the harbor and the channel beyond. We viewed the windlicked waters all purple in the dusk, and dined sumptuously. Bunt proposed that we present him to Costard as a chance-met traveller, a man in the market for sap whom we'd brought along so Costard could sell him some. Bunt needn't hide he was a Hive-Master. Hiveries used plods, skinnies, and other draybeasts for mulching and transporting mead and the like, and were always buying sap as bulk fodder. Meanwhile Costard's financial straits might make him open to partnership. Bunt, by investment, might secure a stable source of the ichor he sought—the substance, that is, we were to obtain for him from a Queen, and which he also referred to as "giants' pap."

I listened patiently, toeing my gold beneath the table, feeling the shifty coin within its leather swaddling. This morning, I was waist-deep in blood in the stenchful glabrous' maw; this afternoon, I was in a dazzling world of breeze-licked flowers; this evening, there was Higaia in the baths, this rich food, and wealth. I had to be on guard at moments, to stop myself from breaking out into a stupid grin of delight and disbelief.

But then my glance kept meeting Barnar's, as if by some odd synchrony in our inner musings. And each time our eyes met, I felt pass between us that little chill of mutual disappointment that had first struck us in the sweat-room's warmth. Our difference would not leave us, but was an icy spark our eyes struck off each time they met. I knew that Barnar's will still clasped as stubbornly his pet ambition, as mine clung to my own.

"The opulence of your entertainment," Barnar told Bunt jocularly, "somewhat troubles me as I reflect on it. We must affirm that your stipend is princely. Yet I find myself asking key questions too late. How dangerous must it be to penetrate the Royal Brood Chamber of a Behemoth nest? Let alone to gather some sort of exudate from the Queen's own body? I have never heard such an exploit even conceived of, much less undertaken. Nifft and I naturally regard ourselves as bound," (I bowed here my assent) "but for all we know of what we've undertaken, even six hundredweight might be too little payment."

Just at this juncture, a tall, robust young woman marched into the room, caped against the dusk winds outside, her back-swept pompadour of brazen hair still charmingly mussed by those same winds.

"Sha'Urley! Dearest!" cried Bunt. "My sister, Sha'Urley, gentlemen! Please dine with us, my dear!" There was a grit of irritation in his voice that all his attempt at honey could not quite candy over. Bunt presented us to her as a pair of wayfaring fellows who had agreed to guide him on a ramble into Kairnheim. For he was feeling stale with work, he told her, and we were to be his breath of fresh air. Sha'Urley did not uncloak, but she sat to take a brief, amiable chalice of wine with us.

"You look quite fit and . . . trail-wise, gentlemen," she told us. Her pale eyes smiled at us with a frosty little light of irony in them. "My brother is well met with you. And how richly he deserves a stroll abroad! He is too much at business. It is a business which our mother left to our joint direction, but which Ha'Awley dreads to burden me withal, and so he strives to manage it almost single-handed. Dear brother! You fret to spare me burdens, yet you treat your own health villainously. Look how fat you have grown! But nothing I say makes the least bit of difference to you, does it?" Already she was rising, and kissing her brother good-bye, at which Bunt wore a look both nettled and relieved.

She paused at the door before stepping out. "I am lucky at least," she said, "that Ha'Awley would not dream of making any major investment without my prior and full involvement in the decision. With this certainty I rest content. It was a pleasure to meet you, gentlemen. Good night, all!"

If we are still to manage deeds that shine,
We must be up and doing them. First, mine
!

WE TOOK SHIP not long after dark. There was the bustle of boarding, and getting under way, and then Bunt retired at once to his hammock, and lay snoring within moments of our casting off. It was true he had partaken liberally of mead and viands at table, but his haste to bed down smacked of evasion too, for we had discreetly urged on him our wish to know more of our errand to the Royal Chamber in the Behemoth's nest.

Barnar and I stood at the rail of the creaky craft, an old pirates' caravel re-decked to ferry beasts and carriages like our own to and from the Kairnish coast. The half moon, zenithed in the early dark, made spectral statuary of the bare-masted vessels in the harbor. These fell astern of us, and the bright-windowed houses of the harbor dwindled to a little crescent-shaped constellation on the moon-silvered sea, as the wind took us out in the open channel. We leaned at the rail, enjoying the rickety dance of the old tub on the smoothly rolling waters.

"Well," Barnar ventured. " `giants' pap'. . . . Have you ever heard of it before?"

"I've heard Behemoth workers nurse or feed in some way at the flanks of the Queen, but I have also heard that same notion mocked as myth."

"It smacks of myth to me," Barnar said. "Who's ever been in a Royal Brood Chamber and seen a Queen? If it's been done, I've not heard of it."

"Well, we'll get what else we can out of Bunt. The rest, I suppose, we'll learn first hand in the attempt. . . ."

We stood at the rail through a long silence, our separate dreams wide awake in us, roaming through our minds. The night wind chased us, and set our scow creaking and lumbering through the easy swells. Above the shadow of the Kairnish coast ahead were thick-strewn stars only a little dimmed by the high half moon, and blazing as if they were coals that the wind blew to life.

"Barnar," I said, "I'm feeling lucky. I'm getting a feeling that luck is gathering itself under us like a great wave. Like a rising tide. I should have known it this morning, even before we came by this gold, for are not men who are swallowed by a glabrous, and emerge alive, among the world's luckiest imaginable?

"Let me tell you a story, old friend," I went on, "about a man we both know, a man who is dear as a brother to my heart. This man has nine living uncles and seven living aunts, and cousins uncountable, and thirteen brothers and sisters of his own"—Barnar made to interrupt me but I thrust up my palm—"and all four of his grandparents living and great aunts and great uncles at least half a score, and no less than four of his great grandparents still stepping most lively on the skorse-scented, needle-carpeted mountain slopes of his native valley, Ham-Hadryan Vale, the immemorial holding of the Ham-Hadryan clan. Can any doubt remain that the man I speak of is Barnar Ham-Hadryan, called, only half facetiously, Barnar Hammer-Hand, and Barnar Ox-back? Don't answer! Hear me.

"This Barnar, whose beloved kin thrive near as thick on his natal slopes as does the timber that is their livelihood, is an earth-loving man, who wielded an axe from his earliest youth, who winched the howling blades of his family's sawmill since he was a stripling, and who, long before he came a man, had by his own sweat and skill done his part to set many a straight-keeled ship afloat, many a stout-walled home a-standing, many a strong-axled wagon a-rolling.

"And, when the Kragfasst clan of the Lulumean Highlands began its depredations in the Great Shallows, and thrust its blade of conquest down half the length of Ham-Hadryan Vale, who exchanged a tree-jack's axe for a battle-axe with half the furious will that this our Barnar did? Nine years of war transformed him from a fresh youth to a seasoned veteran, tough as an axe-haft of ironwood, but still with the same tender heart for his kin and his homeland beating in his formidable body.

"But when the invaders were repulsed at last, they left a clear-cut waste, and these shorn slopes were a torment to the eye of this same Barnar Hammer-hand who, having fought for his valley till its deliverance, turned away from it when he had helped to win it back. He went abroad a-thieving over the earth, too grieved by his hearth-land's despoliation to long abide in it.

"In the decades since, he has lavished the better part of all his takings on his kin, refurbishing their faltering saws, replenishing their teams of plods, and generally nourishing along their laborious husbandry of the trees remaining to them.

"How can we not think, then—we who love and honor this same Barnar Ham-Hadryan—that his eyes may have grown . . . too fixed upon the earth? Of course it will most infallibly come to pass, that Barnar Hammer-hand will drive home the Witches' Seed in the flanks of his native hills. Most surely he will do this, and call up his homeland's vanished hosts of skorse to stand tall again out of the soil! This will come to pass! But if, beforehand, an incalculable enrichment may be had—if, first, this Barnar—"