The Incompleat Nifft (49 page)

"Enough, Nifft! Stop it. Do you not realize, my friend, that you and I are at that point in years where, if a great thing lie in hand, then we must do it, then and there? We are not made of immortal stuff, old waybrother. If we are still to manage deeds that shine, then we must be straight about them when they offer. And this dream of the Witches' Seed I have held so long, it is not a thing I will set by for any other venture, now that it has come at last within my reach . . . or almost in my reach."

"Use reason, Barnar! If we possessed the Gantlets, Cowl and Buskins of Pelfer the Peerless, then we could shortly make ourselves so rich we could reforest all of Chilia, make even her stoniest ridges green with skorse, have the great trees growing thick as grass even in the high barrens of Magnass-Dryan."

That last shaft made him startle just a bit, for in the high barrens still dwelt Marnya-Dryan, whom Barnar had loved since boyhood; Marnya was the daughter of a proud but tree-poor clan. How might she not be wooed with Witches' Seed, and the forestation of her natal highlands? He repossessed himself, however, and smiled wanly. "Look at us, jarring over the spending of phantom gold!" He hauled his bags of gold up onto his shoulder and, before trudging off to his hammock, he thwacked my shoulder in his old friendly manner. But I knew him; though he was carefully concealing it in his well-bred way, he was hurt and resentful.

I lingered at the rail, bitterly resenting my friend's stubbornness. I was so vexed it ended by surprising me. I struggled for composure.

And I could admit, after a while, to feeling this same sad, mortal urgency Barnar had confessed to. While I'd trudged around Dolmen's shore this morning, shivering from the briny bath that left us still smelling of glabrous blood, this same bony finger of Time had indeed touched my own heart, and the Specter had murmured with lean lips at my ear that I was a vagabond who had achieved nothing, and now, never would.

But by the Crack, Key and Cauldron, under it all, I did indeed feel . . . lucky. Strange fortune had come to us, and was still coming. I looked north, to our future's unfolding. There, unveiled by the moon's decline, the blaze of stars brightened above the dark line of the Kairnish mainland. Those stars swarmed as thickly as I imagined Behemoths might swarm, down the subworld walls, and across the subworld plain, a-hunting the fleeing hosts of demons. . . .

With beverage that giants sip
Fill up my beaker to the lip
But how to tap that brew Below
I cannot tell. I do not know.
 

WE DOCKED at KairnGate Harbor in the first light, and by the time of the sun's rising, our barouche had already whirled a league out of town up a north-trending highway. The highway was a fine, smooth-flagged thoroughfare that thrived with commerce.

Across the river-knit southern plains of Latter Kairnlaw, Bunt cracked the whip above his thoroughbred skinnies and set us racing through the honeyed spill of morning light. He kept the wheels rattling, and the wind ruckusing in our ears, perhaps to forestall the questions he sensed in us.

But I insisted on a sit-down at an ale house we glimpsed in a riverside hamlet, one that Bunt would have galloped past had we let him. The establishment had a pleasant garden fenced with proom trees and rumkin vines. We chose our table in a nook amidst these fragrant growths, and decanted a delicious honey-wine, a drink as golden as the grassy prairies that unrolled across the river from us.

"I believe this is our own vintage," Bunt murmured, tonguing a sup of the wine judiciously.

"May we speak of other beverages?" Barnar prompted. "This giants' pap for instance. Must we, as it were, milk a Queen Behemoth for it? Kindly share with us now what you know of this thing you send us after."

"I may not share my sources," Bunt gravely answered. "This would—forgive me—give away too much to those who might wish to emulate my venture. But the gist of it I will give you, though it is admittedly slight. Adult Behemoth workers, all castes of them, nurse in an unspecified manner at the flanks of the Queen. They do it occasionally, you understand, but they all do it. They drink from Her.

"From a documentary source unknown even to the erudite, I have learned that, in all likelihood, each Behemoth by this nursing imbibes an ichor specific to her caste and form of body. The exudate, it seems, prompts and sustains the several shapes and orders of the Queen's progeny. The specific ichor I would have you obtain is that particular pap consumed by the Forager caste, far and away the giants of all workers, and the scourges of demonkind. The precise How of the obtaining, I'm afraid, is completely unknown to me."

"Would it be fair to infer," I ventured after a silence, "that this giants' pap is believed specifically to promote the Foragers' hugeness? And might I further guess that it is specifically this giantizing property of the sap which you crave it for?"

"This much I will admit, if you will be so kind as not to press for any further particulars."

"Well and good, Bunt. Still, assuming this pap to be what you think it is, what virtue would it necessarily have outside the Nest?"

"Well," smiled Bunt cooly. "That would be the question, wouldn't it?"

The highway, swinging northwestward, cut a course to intersect the north-trending line of the Broken Axle Mountains. This was a low, pale mountain range, the peaks blunt and knuckly, a bony old range rounded down by a million winters.

Yet I seemed to sense a movement, an unrest in their eroded eminences. These old mountains were alive within, were the swarming wombs of uncounted Behemoth Nests, each Nest itself uncountably aswarm. As we drew towards our night's rest in the city of Dry Hole, which lies half in the plain and half in the foothills of the Broken Axle Range itself, it seemed I could almost feel the faint vibration of this activity. We lodged in a hostel in the city's upland half, and here, perched on the mountain's very flanks, I fancied I felt the faintest tremoring through the floor underfoot, and almost heard the sleepless giants rivering through the mountain-bone.

Dry Hole (named for a sap mine that went bust in the days before the place thrived as a cattle town and crossroads of commerce) is a comely city, especially when viewed from the heights. From our hostel we could enjoy the sweep of Dry Hole's rooftops down to the plain, where the Broken Axle River, issuing from the mountains just to the north, stitches its silver thread through the city's outskirts. Most of the feedlots, corrals, tanning yards and slaughterhouses lie along the river, and thus up in the hills we were spared the smell of dung and stale blood, and the flies, that haunt all cattle towns. Not that even up in the hills a certain carnal perfume was lacking, for I nosed a waft of raw hides, of salt meat and new barrels at the picklers' yards, of hay, and the dry scent of dust raised by ten thousand hooves.

We watched the sun sink past the vast, straight prairie horizon, watched the plain's sea of golden grasses blaze fiery copper, then turn amber, then silver, while the window lamps freckled alight all down the slopes, and the lamps on the bridges over the Broken Axle River sparked white above the sword-steel thread of the water.

Then I went to my bed with a will. On the boat last night my brain so blazed with golden ambition I had but a fitful sleep of it, what with the sea, too, restless under me. I lay listening for a while. No sense is more doubtful than the hearing, wherein the thought so imperceptibly becomes the sensation, but I could have sworn the mountain under me faintly hummed. Then I slipped snug into oblivion, like a sheathed sword.

High in the peaks She hides the treasure troves
That nest Her newborn spawn as rife as stars,
As numberless as shingles on earth's shores.
Down in the deeps Her warlike daughters rove
Where demons flee them in their bleeding droves,
But high in the peaks,
Her sleeping young ones are. . . .

WE SET OUT into the mountains at first light. A viaduct plunged up into the range not far from our hostel; it ran, where needed, on piers or arched bridges, and made a smooth, safe climb of it for our carriage. We rolled amid slopes thinly wooded with black skorse and dwarf-cone: the arid, thin-soiled old mountains were balding, as it were, the peaks and ridgelines bare, polished by steady winds.

Sap-mines were nestled everywhere on the flanks of the heights. They were rather plain, sprawly installations of bleached wood, and conformed to a basic pattern. Typically, they comprised a large central building—which housed the drill site, the pumps, and the barrelling operation—and an array of smaller structures that housed the offices and the miners' dormitories.

They were, on the whole, shabby structures, but their numbers testified to Behemoth's multitudes at work within the peaks. At nightfall, we withdrew from the highway into a ravine to take our rest. I lay in my blanket on the soft sand listening for the thrum of Behemoth's vast business deep in the mountain-bone.

Next day at midmorning we reached Barrelful Heights. This was a nexus of ridgelines and saddles, in whose canyoned and arroyoed flanks half a dozen sap mines flourished. No one knew how many separate Nests sustained these mines. Though more than a mile separated even the closest mines, it was still quite possible that at least some of them fed off a single Nest; any one Nest has dozens of the larval nurseries that are sap's source.

The Superior Sap Mine did not flourish. It stood utterly silent. We walked our team into the main building, and the click of their hooves and the rattle of their harness echoed from the lofty rafters. The building's rear wall was the bare flank of the living mountain, and inset into it were huge brass petcocks, designed to pour the pumped sap into three brazen vats, big as houses. Regiments of casks stood ranked below the vats.

But no one was barrelling. No one was here. The whole plant was void of humanity. In its echoey silence we could hear a faint, drumlike rumor, and after a moment, we were able to identify it: it was the noise of the barrel chutes over in the nearest neighboring mine, a thriving place clear on the other side of the ridge from us.

"Difficulties with his crew," Barnar rumbled bitterly. This was how Costard's letter had described his dilemma to his mother, Barnar's formidable elder sister. She, Anhyldia, with doting faith in her sole issue's every word, had enjoined her brother to supply that youthful paragon with the "fortnight's help or so" that was plainly all Costard needed to have things "running right as rain again." "Difficulties with his crew," Barnar repeated, his exasperation mounting.

"Dear old Uncle Barnar! Oh, this is a joy!" And in ran the young man in question, hurling himself against my huge friend and hugging him. I had to smile at seeing, in the grizzled granite of Barnar's weathered cheekbones, the crinkling of a smile despite his vexation. Perhaps he was remembering Costard as a loud little boy coaxing him for presents, or demanding a shoulder-ride. Indeed, Costard looked small enough hugging his uncle. He was a trim young man just a handsbreadth less than tall, and just a ten-weight or so more than slight. His hair was short, and shaved in a spiral pattern that was locally modish. Crossing his forehead diagonally was the recent scar of a sizeable laceration. The injury was garish rather than severe, pebbly now with old scab about to flake away. He made his courtesies to me, and we introduced Bunt as a trail-met merchant out shopping for sap.

"Knowing your difficulties," Barnar added, "we told good Bunt here that you might perhaps give him a slightly discounted rate if he would tarry here to be your first customer, once we've gone down and started tapping."

"Absolutely not!" Costard's refusal had startling resonance in the vaulted emptiness. "It's plainly and simply unthinkable that the yield of a mine like the Superior should sell for less that ninety lictors to the ghyll!" Costard uttered this with a level stare, his brows raised, as at a suggested outrage. One sensed that the young man had rehearsed this response for use in any discussion of price. Apparently, Costard favored a very strict Manner and Method when doing business.

The embarrassed Bunt sought only a pretext to abide here until Barnar and I had been underground long enough to execute his secret errand. With five other mines at hand to fill Bunt's sap order without delay, his patience in waiting around here would not seem plausible without some slight bargain on the price. But now the hive-master bleated hastily, "Of course! I have certainly heard the high quality of the Superior's sap most feelingly reported, and will gladly wait for it at your stated price!"

Costard nodded, baffled—even piqued—by this prompt and unconditional compliance. Apparently he yearned to employ some more Manner and Method on this lone petitioner for the product of his paralyzed mine.

"Well," he said, re-collecting himself after a moment. "Let's go to my quarters now for some refreshment!"

The main building of the mine had been thin-walled and drafty, and the deserted barracks which had housed the miners looked still more weathered and ramshackle, but Costard's residence was lavishly carpeted, tapestried, and furnished with very cushiony divans and lounges. He served us delicacies from a gilded salver, describing his labor troubles with rising fervor.

"How did Mama
handle
this crew? I've asked myself a hundred times. They were all such greedy idiots! I tried to make them understand that a wage reduction was an absolute necessity! The current sag in sap prices
demanded
austerities—Another pickled quiffle, Uncle? They're quite delicious, imported from Kolodria!—
demanded
that we suck in our stomachs and tighten our belts, so to speak."

"So the crew decamped in a body, all of them, just like that?" Barnar asked. "Where did they
go
?"

"They actually had the gall to threaten me! To say they'd go work for my competitors!"

"And that's what they did? They are all now employed at other mines?" Barnar's voice was fainter; the extent of his nephew's folly was beginning at last to dawn on all of us.