The Incompleat Nifft (63 page)

"So hear me now. If you speak a single word more—a single word!—I will set you afoot and let you walk back by yourself as best you can." Experimentally, he took his hand off Costard's mouth. At last, nothing came out.

We tied loops of line that the Bunts and Costard could sit in. For Niasynth we tied a more complex harness that she might lie in. Her eyes came open as we laid her in it.

She took Sha'Urley's tenderly proferred sips of wine. At the feel of terrestrial vintage in her throat, Niasynth's face convulsed as with a painful sweetness. At the taste of the wine, her wondering gaze seemed to remember earthly soil, and sky, and sun. Tears swelled and spilled from her eyes. "Oh sweet powers, what have I become in this Eternity? Have I not grown most loathsome to look on?"

Sha'Urley leaned near her smiling. In truth, that comely Dolmenite had a warm-hearted streak in her, whatever cross-grained tempers she might show.

"No, sweet Niasynth, you are lovely still. A lean and vulpine beauty's yours, as though you'd not passed thirty summers' age. Drink more. Thus. Now rest. You are with friends. You will go up and live under the sun once more. . . ."

I tied the men's two lines to the front of my belt, as Barnar did those of the women to his. I stood aside a moment to unbag Ostrogall, and though ill use and outrage flashed from his hundred dissimilar eyes, his speech was flutes and hautboys once again. "Ineffable ones! We now may equally rejoice, may we not? You to have the marvel I promised you, and I am to be re-planted in my natal soil—in some suitable little streambed not far from here, perhaps?"

"We do rejoice, estimable demonstump!" I answered. "And we regard you with the fondest gratitude. Up and away then, Barnar?"

"Up and away with a will," Barnar cried. We had begun learning how to stay aground by maintaining a half-conscious thought of doing so, a kind of mental anchor in the earth that yet let us turn our thoughts elsewhere. Now, with one swimming motion and a will to soar, we smoothly climbed up through the wine-red gloom. We flew along the ravine, at perhaps a half a furlong's altitude above it.

"Please note, my Masters," Ostrogall quaveringly ventured, "how I've served you. I've brought you here safe and enriched you, O my luminous benefactors! Surely you would not dream of denying me the simple, easy re-plantation I—"

"Peace, Oh Fractional One!" I answered. "The fact is, Ostrogall, now that it comes to the point of honoring our contract, we find an insuperable revulsion arising in our hearts at the bare notion of doing
anything
to prolong your execrable demon life for even one instant, now that we securely possess the Unguent we craved, and can find our own unaided way back to the Nest."

"It is a deep instinctual loathing," Barnar elaborated, "of human for demonkind. We find that we cannot, even with the best will in the world, withstand its atavistic ferocity."

"On the other hand," I added, "it seems unfair to inflict on you anything other than your true fate, the one we saved you from. Therefore, in a gesture of decency, and respectful acknowledgment of your honesty with us, we will bear the labor of carrying you back to the Nursery, and the jaws of your destined grub."

I will confess that Barnar and I were not entirely without a certain policy in saying what we did. The eye-studded demon seemed extremely upset. His vocal oboe had a cracked reed. "I must say, oh most effulgent Karkmahnite, most august Chilite—I must say, and of course I apologize most abjectly for doing so, I must say that you—and I say it in all cringing humility—that you take a really vile, verminous, villanous, odious, shameful and despicable advantage of my relative powerlessness in your hands. I say this with the profoundest and most reverent respect for yourselves, of course."

"Of course." I nodded as I swam, as though we were speaking face-to-face. I was growing quite used to conversations with this monstrous eye-crusted head that rode on my hip. "Nonetheless, I don't think I would be judged
over
-villainous by anyone who studiously reflects on this question: What could I rightfully be said to
owe
to the headpiece of a polyocular balloon of demonslime like yourself, whose pestilent life I plucked from death's jaws in the first place?"

A Forager hurtled above us, mad legs milling the air. Far ahead of us, two others plunged, describing long, flat parabolae toward the plain. Their smattering of the Unguent, acquired by climbing up 'Omphalodon's palm, dwindled in power, it seemed, with use. And indeed we ourselves could feel a diminution of the lift engendered by each stroke of our hands and feet. Though we carried a pair of adults apiece, and some fiftyweight of gems each, the work of flight had been at first easier than swimming. Already we felt that we breasted a more laborious medium, and were stroking harder for the same buoyancy.

"It would seem," Barnar offered, "that the Unguent is consumed proportionably to the weight it bears." And with this discovery, it panged me to the heart to think that we must surely dip into our precious store of the marvellous ointment to finish our present journey. But I can report with some well merited pride that I resisted the very powerful urge to set our companions afoot and thereby conserve our treasure. We toiled on—and more and more toilsome it grew—and at length we did indeed dip into our treasured hoards, and re-anoint our hands and feet.

Meanwhile Ostrogall had not fallen mute. "Only consider, venerated ones!" he urged, "how I have produced for you that which I promised! Have I not undeniably benefitted you? See how you fly! Consider what other treasures you now have power to take unscathed! How, therefore, can you not feel some shred of . . . let's not call it
honor
, let's call it simple
equity
? Eh?"

"We grant we are not unmindful of this perspective on the matter," Barnar answered him. "But Nifft and I, you see, are simply overborn by a native loathing for yourself—your very race of being! For instance, by way of illustration, I would venture to hazard that the cycle of your life thus far has been one unbroken sequence of the most appalling parasitisms and loathsome plunderings of other beings. Please correct me if I err in this."

"Well," said the demon impatiently, "how
else
would I have reached adulthood? The larval forms which bore my spores across the desert, these tunnel to the forebrains of their hosts, and their little eyes feast as directly upon their hosts' nightmares as do their little jaws upon their hosts' cerebral tissues. Then too, my cercarial shapes for aqueous transmission strip the host's spinal cord as they ascend it. The predators that devour the emptied husks of these hosts engulf as well my nymphal instars, and these eat those second hosts as well quite hollow, before we fly out like thistledown across the wind and light upon our rooting places.

"But what of this, gentlemen? Surely all things that live and breathe are entirely fed, shod, garbed and girded with the bodies of their many victims? What being lives, down here or in the over-world, whose blood is not the stolen sap of other lives?"

"I grant," I said, "you say no more than truth. But, you see, you offer mere reason to confute in us what is not reasoned, but is a brute, unarguable revulsion. And yet, do you know . . . ? It now occurs to me that this sullen and retrograde emotion of ours, though it can't be argued with, might be appeased, might be
bought off
so to speak, if you could think of some further service you could do that would increase our profit from our sojourn here below."

This produced, at last, a silence in my subworld side-piece. And indeed it scarcely needed further talk to assure us Ostrogall's guidance would be ours on our return to the Royal Chamber's awesome precincts.

Now the terrain rose towards the mountain roots. We turned to take our last look at 'Omphalodon's Talons. Even thus distant from them now we could see they swarmed, wholly furred with Foragers. The great claws struggled with awesome and undiminished vigor—clenching again and again, crushing hundreds with each grip then flailing side to side, smiting the plain with distant thunder. But though whole armies of Behemoths died at each stroke, their convergent tides neither slackened nor diminished.

"Have the Foragers ever before brought Tertiary meat back to the Nests?" Ha'Awley Bunt mused below us, with a note of something like fear. No one had an answer.

We turned a parting look to 'Omphalodon's Eye. Its ragged black pupillary hole seemed contracted in agony, while its glossy orb bled even more copious crimson rivulets across the seamed ceiling vault, and down to the stream-netted plains.

Then we turned our flight up to the mountain wall, and began to swim through the air with a will, gathering speed for the perils of re-entry.

What say we sally forth once more,
A-scouring the subworld floor
?
What say we cast our nets again,
And bring more shining riches in
?

OUR LARVAL CHAMBER—how homelike it seemed to us now, after the greater terrors we had tasted! Barnar saw to our companions' entertainment in the operations nook while I discreetly added our re-collected gems to our cache. We then wasted no time in coming to business.

"Here's how we reckon relative values," Barnar told them cheerily. "For two amphorae of giants' pap, we will require no more than the stipulated three hundredweight of gold specie, in consideration of your misfortunes with the Unguent. In addition, however, it seems only fair to require an annual tithe, in perpetuity, of all your earnings from the pap's use."

I think they literally gasped in unison, so equal were they in the little arts of haggling. We did not budge of course, and of course, ultimately, they had to agree. Nonetheless, they really made quite a convincing display of outrage and vexation, and, for all that we knew it was mere art, we could not help but find these remonstrations a bit offensive.

Their reckonings among themselves were fierce. We courteously abstained from eavesdropping, but it was clear from his half-muffled bleatings that the cashless Costard was inexorably squeezed down to yielding outright what we knew to be his only asset, the mine itself, in consideration of the Bunts' providing his share of the specie, which we, of course, required in advance.

It happened that the Bunts' Hivery had many casks of mead warehoused in Dry Hole, and these could be liquidated within a day or so. The requisite sum might reach our hands in a little more than three days, " . . . if we ride without sleeping," Sha'Urley concluded, rather stiffly.

"That is highly convenient," I told her warmly. "We don't mind waiting a bit for you to muster the gold, but we don't want to cool our heels down here any longer than necessary." In fact we had a further, far more lucrative enterprise in mind, and this was the real reason for our impatience.

As Costard and Ha'Awley Bunt trudged toward the gangway bucket, I gave Sha'Urley a tender little signal to draw her a bit aside. Her face inscrutable, she came a few paces away with me. "Oh beauteous Dolmenite," I smiled to her, "is it overbold of me to remember the joys we took together here, not so long ago?"

She gave me an indefinable look of shock, and stared a moment, emotion struggling in her face. Then she laughed—a little stridently, I thought.

"Dear Miser," she grinned at me. "Can you actually suggest lovemaking? Let me try somehow to express to you how little I am inclined to make love to you. Let me describe what I would
rather
do to you! Not beat your head repeatedly with a knout or cudgel, no—not actually crack your skull, I suppose. But let's say, tie you on your knees, and then take a good two-handed grip on the tail of a large, dead fish—a fish some two or three days dead—and then spend a leisurely half hour or so smacking your long, broken-nosed, greedy
face
with it."

"Forgive me. I've chosen an unpropitious moment."

"Come, please, and help me get Niasynth into the bucket with us. We'll be back with your gold as fast as we can."

Niasynth, the pallid sojourner-below, sat upright now, and her eyes saw us more steadily, less often lost in inner vistas of nightmare. Looking in Barnar's eyes, and mine, she said, her voice shaking slightly, "I am going to see the sunlight again." She gave us her hands. Cold and infinitely frail they seemed, those sun-starved hands of hers!

When they were gone, I wished I had gone with them. How I craved the sunlight, longed for the wide cerulean sky and its sweet, cool breath against my face, for the night's jewelled black, sailed by a slim-hulled moon. . . . But Barnar and I were agreed that our attunement to these subterranean realms was a precious asset, and that it would be folly to interrupt our acclimation here with a heady but disorienting sojourn in the upper world.

"Now for a good long sleep," Barnar enthused, readying his hammock.

"Yes, " I said, "I suppose I should feed the rest of this demon back to the grub I took it from."

Ostrogall, in what for him amounted to a transport of rage, had been absolutely silent since our return to the Nest. We had placed his stump in his usual nook where he could look about him, and he had sat there dead mute from that moment.

"You might as well," Barnar boredly assented. "Mind your hands putting him in—you might get them bitten off."

"Well bethought. I know! If I skewer him on a spearpoint, I can poke him in from a safe distance."

"Excellent idea."

I made a business of choosing my longest spear. Then I tucked Ostrogall in his holster on my hip, took up the spear, and strolled off down the nearest lane-way amid the larval shoals. At last Ostrogall broke the silence.

"In mere point of information, I must remind you that if you . . . consummate that larval meal you interrupted, then I will emerge in the form of minute eye-spores mingled with the grub's feces. I can then exist as an exiguous brood infection till some adult, or series of them, tracks me out again to the subworld's floor. In no more than a century I will be growing on the plain once more, greeting the Eye of 'Omphalodon with my gladsome gazes!"