West of January (26 page)

“Blue as blue,” he admitted. “What’s wrong with him, Minemaster? He seems healthy enough.”

“Lost his spirit,” one of the ants growled. “Used to be a good worker. What’s he doing now, Hrarrh?”

“Two short last shift, sir,” my benefactor mumbled. Then he whined, “I think I can scratch more sense into him, if you’ll give me another chance, sir.”

“One more chance and you’d kill him!”

The discussion wandered around, and so did my wits. I was going! Freedom! Or at least another form of slavery. Nothing could be worse than the mine—
nothing!

“As Our Lady Sun is my witness,” the trader said. I remembered the words from my childhood, but this time it was me who had just been sold. The two men shook hands and one of them mentioned paper.

Hrarrh coughed deferentially. “Do you wish him hobbled, sir?”

The trader said, “What? Oh yes, please.” He went back to complaining about how difficult it was to find paper, because the only good paper came from Heaven, but he did happen to have…

─♦─

Hrarrh gave me a shove and pointed farther down the road, toward the horses. I stumbled off ahead of him. I was leaving. My life could start again. Whatever use traders had for wetlanders, whatever value wetlanders had for traders, nothing could be worse than the mine. Never again need I crawl down into that cramped dark hell…

“Here!” Hrarrh barked behind me, pulling my fluttering mind back to reality. We were almost down to the vegetable fields, standing between the pony corral and the tannery outside a big shack they called the machine shed. It was issuing loud clanging noises, as always. This was where the smiths worked.

“Master?”

He laughed and suddenly clapped a hard hand on my shoulder. “I’m not your master any longer, Knobil!”

“You’re my friend!” I said, trying to suppress sudden tears.

“Yes, I’m your friend. And you were mine also, when I needed one.”

“Hrarrh!” My voice cracked. “My friend! Hrarrh—”

“Calm down! It was my pleasure, Knobil, truly! Now, there’s one last thing to do…”

I choked, suddenly wary. “What?”

He grinned at my nervousness. “Traders don’t have cats to guard their slaves. They use fetters.”

He gestured to his panther to sit by the door, while his strong damp grip on my shoulder eased me into the shed—loud and impossibly hot despite the dim shade. Three or four ants were apparently trying to make as much noise as possible with hammers and rasps, raising dust. A grotesquely thick youth was grinding a plowshare on a treadle just inside the entrance. His shoulders were remarkable even by ant standards, burying his bald head in muscle up to the ears, making his beard protrude straight out from the top of his chest. In any other race he would have been regarded as deformed.

“The traders just bought this,” Hrarrh told him. “They want it hobbled.”

The smith looked me over without expression, wiping his forehead with a bushy arm. He nodded his head to indicate direction. “Put it on the anvil.”

“Lie down,” he said, out of the smith’s earshot, “and put your ankles up here. Don’t look so worried, Knobil! I’m not going to hurt you, promise!”

Still alternating wildly between hope and distrust, I lowered myself gingerly to the floor and lifted my feet, wincing at the pain in my thighs and wondering if the movement would tip pools of blood from my boots.

Hrarrh went around to the side of the anvil and took a firm grip on my ankles, adjusting my calves across it. “Can you flatten out?” he asked. “Raise your knees?”

I had no choice, for he was levering hard and also pulling. I curled myself until my shins were level and my buttocks high off the floor. Something sharp dug into my neck and shoulders. I pushed down with my hands to relieve the stress on my abdomen. My thighs stung where the muscles flexed, and if Hrarrh thought he was not hurting my lacerated calves…

He looked content then, smiling down at me fondly. I did not like that sleepy smile.

“I didn’t tell you, did I, Knobil, that I’m a father now?”

“Congratulations…” If he was going to put fetters on me, then why was he not removing my boots?

He nodded in satisfaction. “Minemaster Krarurh’s first grandson! After eight granddaughters! I’m a hero, Knobil!”

Suddenly I understood and was filled with terror. “So he gave you a present?”

Hrarrh nodded. “Certainly. I explained that I had a problem, and he understood at once. He said I could do whatever I wanted to correct the matter.”

My heart could hardly sink any more, not in that upside-down position. “And what did you decide?”

He grinned like a cat. “I was going to shuck you—but we do that for mere insolence, don’t we? I could have let Chuckles eat bits off you, but that’s commonplace. An offense like yours calls for something special.”

Pride! Long ago he had been too weak to refuse my aid, and I forced it on him. I was a constant reminder of that time of weakness. I insulted him by just being alive.

“And the traders are better?”

The gloating was back, quite openly. His eyes were shiny. He licked his lips. “Much better! Of course I won’t be there to see, but…a fitting end! Much better.”

He turned his head slightly, and I saw that the mountainous youth was standing beside me, impassively clutching a sledge.

“Which one, Hrarrh?” he asked.

“You said you weren’t going to hurt me!” I yelled.

Hrarrh sighed happily. “I’m not. He is.”

Screaming would not help me now. I howled, almost upside down, more utterly helpless than ever. “I did you a kindness!”

Hrarrh bared his teeth. “It was a humiliation, slag!”

“Which one?” the smith asked again, raising the hammer overhead.

Hrarrh looked at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to ask me to choose. What I saw in his eyes then taught me what true hatred really was. How had he managed to keep it bottled up for so long? I had driven him mad. Perhaps all ants must be insane, for they could not treat their slaves as they do if they believed that those slaves were people like themselves.

I have no doubts that Hrarrh was mad. Since adolescence, he had been waiting for this revenge, this chance to wipe out the memory of a kindness that was an insult, a debt owed to an inferior: a non-ant.

He heaved my feet back, so that my knees, not my shins, were on the anvil. I yelped with pain and surprise.

“Do them both!” he said.

Later he dragged me outside and draped me over a horse’s back like a blanket, and at last I fainted.

I do not remember leaving the ants’ nest.

—7—
THE TRADERS

T
HE TROUBLE WITH THE ANTS
, K
ETTLE SAID
, was that they did not understand pain.

I disagree.

This exchange took place in a room known only as “Cloud Nine.” No one knew where so absurd a name could have come from, and Kettle claimed to have seen it mentioned in very old records. It was the recreation nook for the cherubim, just big enough for five tables and a tangle of mismatched stools and chairs. Dark and stuffy, cramped and loud, Cloud Nine was where the apprentice angels gathered for relaxation. There was singing there and arguing and much drinking of a brew that was given the courtesy tide of “beer,” although its progenitors were fermented fungi, not grain. Storms might rage in the darkness outside and icy gales might shriek; damp furs might often stink in heaps by the doorway and snow might eddy in around ill-fitting antique casements; but within its smelly squalor there was warmth and laughter and the rambunctious fellowship of young men bound by a common dedication and a purpose shared. Angels scorned the place, having their own establishment—angels usually regarded themselves as beyond consorting with mere cherubim anyway—but sometimes a saint would drop in, and once in a while even one of the archangels, although a presence so august tended to dampen the joviality considerably.

Saint Kettle was a regular visitor. A true scholar, was Kettle. He had studied more of the arcane lore than anyone, even Gabriel, his nominal superior. He was a wonderful teacher and great company. Knowing ten times as much as the curriculum required him to teach, he tried to teach all the rest anyway. He liked nothing better, even after a long session of lecturing, than to join a group of us around a table in a snug and shadowed corner of Cloud Nine and let us ply him with foam-capped steins of ale. Then the conversation would range over all of Vernier and all the wisdom of the ancients, while the gleam of lanterns painted fresh young faces on the circling dark.

Kettle’s own round, seaman face would wax ruddier and ruddier, the girdle constricting his voluminous purple gown would strain tighter and tighter, and his laugh would roll louder and louder and louder from the shadows; but he would still be booming out triple-distilled wisdom when all his juvenile listeners were much too befuddled to understand a word of it. I knew how to switch steins unobtrusively in the gloom, although the smart ones eventually learned that beer seemed more potent when they sat next to me.

It was in Cloud Nine that Kettle and I argued about the ants. With Kettle argument was always permissible, and in Cloud Nine he blatantly provoked it.

There were six of us on that occasion, squashed in around the table beside him—Ginger, Dusty, the Fox, and me, plus two young newcomers known as Ham and Beef. None of them were ants. Indeed, I only ever knew two ants in Heaven and both were angels, so I never heard their original names.

By custom, no cherub ever addressed another cherub by his true name, either. Every cherub naturally expected to win his wheels eventually and be known thereafter only by a color scheme, so perhaps that preference for nicknames was not merely a juvenile aping of the angels, but also a sort of hopeful superstition. Moreover, a man’s real name was a reminder of his racial origin, and we were always careful not to reveal prejudices about those. All cherubim were equal, at least in theory. Of course in practice the subject was skirted often, in cautious teasing and careful testing. That was education also, for angels need to know the idiosyncrasies of all races, but in Cloud Nine I was neither Knobil nor Golden. Usually they called me the Old Man, which I did not mind, and sometimes Roo, which I did.

On this occasion, Kettle had challenged the racial matter head-on, stamping all over our usual taboo. He had been explaining why people differed—why herdfolk men were much larger than their women, but trader women larger than their men, or why seamen like himself had lungs like water butts—

And bellies like beer barrels, Ginger remarked dryly, and was sent for the next round in consequence.

Good times.

There were three reasons for races to differ, Kettle said. First was just culture, and he pointed out that a, say, wetlander raised in a, say, herdfolk tribe would think like a herdman because of his upbringing—not that herdmen thought much at all, of course. That was a calculated taunt, so I vowed violence upon him and anyone else seen smiling, as I was expected to.

“Second, of course,” he said, “is natural selection. Human beings are less susceptible than other species, because we can control our own environment, but obviously a seaman with a big chest is less likely to drown than a skinny one.”

Thereupon I raised my stein in a silent and solitary toast to a departed friend. In all the world, and all of Heaven, I had found no better man.

“And selection explains why ants have skulls like marble bowling-nuts, less likely to be damaged if banged into a tunnel roof—”

“Does it explain their big shoulders?” asked Ham, who was well endowed thereabouts himself.

Pleased by this posing of a new problem, Kettle pondered, then wobbled jowls in dissent. “I doubt it can be directly survival of the fittest, no. In a human culture, even a weaker man is rarely forced to starve. He can usually still reproduce. Sexual selection, perhaps—a woman may choose the mate best able to provide, and so pass on to her daughters a preference for husky men. But yet…a young man who found mining difficult would be more likely to leave the nest and seek other pursuits, wouldn’t he? Emigration of the unfit—if it was deliberate, I suppose that would be a uniquely human subcategory?”

Awed into silence, Ham nodded.

“Was that a yes or a no?” I asked.

“Certainly!” Kettle quaffed long, then wiped foam from his lips and chuckled. “Who can say?” Unlike some saints, he was never reluctant to admit ignorance. He taught us that the best questions have no answers.

“The third reason is the founder effect, as the texts call it. There were so few of the firstfolk to start with, and when they divided at the time of the Great Compact and then fragmented and later sub-fragmented into all the various tribes and peoples and races—some of those groups that seem so numerous now must be descended from a mere handful of men and women. And if even one of them had a conspicuous deformity—red hair, say—then it would not be unlikely…”

And Ginger, copper-haired man of the deserts, calmly promised violence upon him and anyone seen smiling.