The Wind Through The Keyhole (23 page)

’Ware you don’t wake yon fire-maiden,
Tim thought.
She’s apt to rise up and crisp you just to stop the noise.

But what choice did he have?

The next time those living underwater boats came charging at him, the boy clapped his hands as well as shouted. He would have pounded on a hollow log if he’d had a log to pound on, and Na’ar take the dragon. Tim thought that, should it come to the push, her burning death would be more merciful than what he would suffer in the jaws of the swimming things. Certainly it would be quicker.

He wondered if the Covenant Man was somewhere close, watching this and enjoying it. Tim decided that was half-right. Watching, yes, but the Covenant Man wouldn’t dirty his boots in this stinking swamp. He was somewhere dry and pleasant, watching the show in his silver basin with Armaneeta circling close. Perhaps even sitting on his shoulder, her chin propped on her tiny hands.

By the time a dirty dawnlight
began to creep through the overhanging trees (gnarled, moss-hung monstrosities of a sort Tim had never seen before), his tussock was surrounded by two dozen of the circling shapes. The shortest looked to be about ten feet in length, but most were far longer. Shouting and clapping no longer drove them away. They were going to come for him.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there was now enough light coming through the greenroof for him to see that his death and ingestion would have an audience. It wasn’t yet bright enough for him to make out the faces of the watchers, and for this Tim was miserably glad. Their slumped, semihuman shapes were bad enough. They stood on the nearest bank, seventy or eighty yards away. He could make out half a dozen, but thought there were more. The dim and misty light made it hard to tell for sure. Their shoulders were rounded, their shaggy heads thrust forward. The tatters hanging from their indistinct bodies might have been remnants of clothing or ribbons of moss like those hanging from the branches. To Tim they looked like a small tribe of mudmen who had risen from the watery floor of the swamp just to watch the swimmers first tease and then take their prey.

What does it matter? I’m a goner whether they watch or not.

One of the circling reptiles broke from the pack and drove at the tussock, tail lashing the water, prehistoric head raised, jaws split in a grin that looked longer than Tim’s whole body. It struck below the place where Tim stood, and hard enough to make the tussock shiver like jelly. On the bank, several of the watching mudmen hooted. Tim thought they were like spectators at a Saturday-afternoon Points match.

The idea was so infuriating that it drove his fear out. What rushed in to fill the place where it had been was fury. Would the water-beasts have him? He saw no way they would not. Yet if the four-shot the Widow had given him hadn’t taken too much of a wetting, he might be able to make at least one of them pay for its breakfast.

And if it doesn’t fire, I’ll turn it around and club the beast with the butt end until it tears my arm off my shoulder.

The thing was crawling out of the water now, the claws at the ends of its stubby front legs tearing away clumps of reed and weed, leaving black gashes that quickly filled up with water. Its tail—blackish-green on top, white as a dead man’s belly beneath—drove it ever forward and upward, slapping at the water and throwing fans of muddy filth in all directions. Above its snout was a nest of eyes that pulsed and bulged, pulsed and bulged. They never left Tim’s face. The long jaws gnashed; the teeth sounded like stones driven together.

On the shore—seventy yards or a thousand wheels, it made no difference—the mudmen called again, seeming to cheer the monster on.

Tim opened the cotton sack. His hands were steady and his fingers sure, although the thing had hauled half its length onto the little island and there was now only three feet between Tim’s sodden boots and those clicking teeth.

He pulled back one of the hammers as the Widow had shown him, curled his finger around the trigger, and dropped to one knee. Now he and the approaching horror were on the same level. Tim could smell its rich carrion breath and see deep into its pulsing pink gullet. Yet Tim was smiling. He felt it stretching his lips, and he was glad. It was good to smile in one’s final moments, so it was. He only wished it was the barony tax collector crawling up the bank, with his treacherous green familiar on his shoulder.

“Let’s see how’ee like this, cully,” Tim murmured, and pulled the trigger.

There was such a huge bang that Tim at first believed the four-shot had exploded in his hand. Yet it wasn’t the gun that exploded, but the reptile’s hideous nest of eyes. They splattered blackish-red ichor. The creature uttered an agonized roar and curled backward on its tail. Its short forelegs pawed the air. It fell into the water, thrashed, then rolled over, displaying its belly. A red cloud began to grow around its partially submerged head. Its hungry ancient grin had become a death rictus. In the trees, rudely awakened birds flapped and chattered and screamed down abuse.

Still wrapped in that coldness (and still smiling, although he wasn’t aware of it), Tim broke open the four-shot and removed the spent casing. It was smoking and warm to the touch. He grabbed the half-loaf, stuck the bread-plug in his mouth, and thumbed one of the spare loads into the empty chamber. He snapped the pistol closed, then spat out the plug, which now had an oily taste.

“Come on!”
he shouted to the reptiles that were now swimming back and forth in agitated fashion (the hump marking the top of the submerged dragon had disappeared).
“Come have some more!”

Nor was this bravado. Tim discovered he actually
wanted
them to come. Nothing—not even his father’s ax, which he still carried in his belt—had ever felt so divinely right to him as did the heavy weight of the four-shot in his left hand.

From the shore came a sound Tim could not at first identify, not because it was strange but because it ran counter to all the assumptions he had made about those watching. The mudmen were clapping.

When he turned to face them, the smoking gun still in his hand, they dropped to their knees, fisted their foreheads, and spoke the only word of which they seemed capable. That word was
hile,
one of the few which is exactly the same in both low and high speech, the one the Manni called fin-Gan, or the first word; the one that set the world spinning.

Is it possible . . .

Tim Ross, son of Jack, looked from the kneeling mudmen on the bank to the antique (but very effective) weapon he still held.

Is it possible they think . . .

It
was
possible. More than possible, in fact.

These people of the Fagonard believed he was a gunslinger.

For several moments he was too stunned
to move. He stared at them from the tussock where he had fought for his life (and might yet lose it); they knelt in high green reeds and oozy mud seventy yards away, fisted hands to their shaggy heads, and stared back.

Finally some semblance of reason began to reassert itself, and Tim understood that he must use their belief while he still could. He groped for the stories his mama and his da’ had told him, and those the Widow Smack had read to her pupils from her precious books. Nothing quite seemed to fit the situation, however, until he recalled a fragment of an old story he’d heard from Splinter Harry, one of the codgers who worked part-time at the sawmill. Half-foolish was Old Splint, apt to point a finger-gun at you and pretend to pull the trigger, also prone to babbling nonsense in what he claimed was the high speech. He loved nothing better than talking about the men from Gilead who carried the big irons and went forth on quests.

Oh, Harry, I only hope it was ka that put me in earshot on that particular noonrest.

“Hile, bondsmen!” he cried to the mudmen on the bank. “I see you very well! Rise in love and service!”

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then they rose and stood staring at him from deep-socketed and fundamentally exhausted eyes. Their sloping jaws hung almost to their breastbones in identical expressions of wonder. Tim saw that some carried primitive bows; others had bludgeons strapped to their sunken chests with woven vines.

What do I say now?

Sometimes, Tim thought, only the bald truth would do.

“Get me off this fucking island!”
he shouted.

At first the mudmen only gaped
at him. Then they drew together and palavered in a mixture of grunts, clicks, and unsettling growls. Just when Tim was beginning to believe the conference would go on forever, several of the tribesmen turned and sprinted off. Another, the tallest, turned to Tim and held out both of his hands. They
were
hands, although there were too many fingers on them and the palms were green with some mossy substance. The gesture they made was clear and emphatic:
Stay put.

Tim nodded, then sat down on the tussock (
like Sma’ Lady Muffin on her tuffin,
he thought) and began munching the rest of his bread. He cocked an eye for the wakes of returning swimmers as he ate, and kept the four-shot in one hand. Flies and small bugs settled on his skin long enough to sip his sweat before flying off again. Tim thought that if something didn’t happen soon, he’d have to jump in the water just to get away from the irritating things, which were too quick to catch with a slap. Only who knew what else might be hiding in that murk, or creeping along the bottom?

As he swallowed the last bite of bread, a rhythmic thudding began to pulse across the morning-misty swamp, startling more birds into flight. Some of these were surprisingly large, with pink plumage and long, thin legs that paddled the water as they fought their way into the air. They made high, ululating cries that sounded to Tim like the laughter of children who had lost their minds.

Someone’s beating on the hollow log I wished for, not so long ago.
The thought raised a tired grin.

The pounding went on for five minutes or so, then ceased. The cullies on the bank were staring in the direction from which Tim had come—a much younger Tim that had been, foolishly laughing and following a bad fairy named Armaneeta. The mudmen shaded their eyes against the sun, now shining fiercely through the overhanging foliage and burning off the mist. It was shaping to be another unnaturally hot day.

Tim heard splashing, and it was not long before a queer, misshapen boat emerged from the unraveling mists. It had been cobbled together of wood-scraps gleaned from gods knew where and rode low in the water, trailing long tangles of moss and waterweed. There was a mast but no sail; at the top, acting as lookout, was a boar’s head surrounded by a shifting skein of flies. Four of the swamp-dwellers rowed with paddles of some orange wood Tim did not recognize. A fifth stood at the prow, wearing a black silk top hat decorated with a red ribbon that trailed down over one bare shoulder. He peered ahead, sometimes waving left, sometimes right. The oarsmen followed his wigwagging with the efficiency of long practice, the boat swooping neatly between the tussocks that had led Tim into his present difficulty.

When the boat approached the black stretch of still water where the dragon had been, the helmsman bent, then stood up with a grunt of effort. In his arms he held a dripping chunk of carcass that Tim assumed had not long ago been attached to the head decorating the mast. The helmsman cradled it, never minding the blood that smeared his shaggy chest and arms, peering down into the water. He uttered a sharp, hooting cry, followed by several rapid clicks. The crew shipped their oars. The boat maintained a little headway toward the tussock where Tim waited, but Helmsman paid no attention; he was still peering raptly into the water.

With a quiet more shocking than the noisiest splash, a giant claw rose up, the talons half-clenched. Sai Helmsman laid the bloody chunk of boar into that demanding palm as gently as a mother lays her sleeping babe into its crib. The talons closed around the meat, squeezing out droplets of blood that pattered into the water. Then, as quietly as it had come, the claw disappeared, bearing its tribute.

Now you know how to appease a dragon,
Tim thought. It occurred to him that he was amassing a wonderful store of tales, ones that would hold not just Old Splint but the whole village of Tree in thrall. He wondered if he would ever live to tell them.

The scow bumped the tussock.
The oarsmen bent their heads and fisted their brows. Helmsman did the same. When he gestured to Tim from the boat, indicating that he should board, long strands of green and brown swung back and forth from his scrawny arm. More of this growth hung on his cheeks and straggled from his chin. Even his nostrils seemed plugged with vegetable matter, so that he had to breathe through his mouth.

Not mudmen at all,
Tim thought as he climbed into the boat.
They’re plantmen. Muties who are becoming a part of the swamp they live in.

“I say thankee,” Tim told Helmsman, and touched the side of his fist to his own forehead.

“Hile!” Helmsman replied. His lips spread in a grin. The few teeth thus revealed were green, but the grin was no less charming for that.

“We are well-met,” Tim said.

“Hile,” Helmsman repeated, and then they all took it up, making the swamp ring:
Hile! Hile! Hile!

Onshore
(if ground that trembled and oozed at every step could be called shore), the tribe gathered around Tim. Their smell was earthy and enormous. Tim kept the four-shot in his hand, not because he intended to shoot or even threaten them with it, but because they so clearly wanted to see it. If any had reached out to actually touch it, he would have put it back in the bag, but none did. They grunted, they gestured, they made those chittering bird cries, but none of them spoke a word other than
hile
that Tim could understand. Yet when Tim spoke to them, he had no doubt that
he
was understood.