The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  We left the path for a cluster of boulders, where there were smooth surfaces and pockets of sunwarmed sand. When we had stripped, it appeared how muscled and honed Pandagon kept himself, and I knew I had read him aright, for his body declared his ambition. Minim looked askance at my advancing to the water still wearing my back-rigged baby broadsword.

  "Is the weapon wise?"

  "Oh, no harm, thank you. Sheath's packed with brazzwax and skanx oil."

  "I mean, it will cumber you."

  "Not at all, thanks. Discomfort will be slight, beside the comfort of having it handy."

  "I assure you, where we swim it's wide and deep, and there's nothing dangerous. Out in the estuary are concentrated the only dangerous flora or fauna in our—"

  "Forgive me, Minim. Bluntly, I am obligated by a private vow to myself, never to find myself swordless where a need might arise. I don't intend any insult to your river. Allow an anxious traveller his odd charms and rites."

  "Nimmy lay off our friend!" cried Pandagon. "Manners! Let's hit the water, lads! In!"

  How like a schoolboy he still was, this head priest of all North Hagia! Yet the river was indeed glorious. Its wide flux was all hammered pewter, sunpricked with sapphire and silver, and diving into the broad, smooth surge of its flowing coolth felt like having ten years of age skinned off me in a single slash. We porpoised up new-fleshed into the morning light.

  "We ride downstream just a ways," called Paanja Pandagon, "then we steady-stoke against the current, then when we're breathed and limbered, we swim back upstream."

  Slice it however, I disliked swimming naked in dark water in the spidergod's country. I was a while forgetting the tickle of nasty possibilities against my footsoles.

  But at length, forget I did. Hagia, heaped green and bosomy to either side of the wide, silver waterway—she was fair for all her failings! Never again do I expect to see such lush beauty made the theater of such an ugly Death as was soon to hold sway here.

  This sustained, methodical swimming against the current was an inspired means of turning brute exercise into recreation. We were all working away, well spread, each privately savoring his task, when Minim surprised me by declaiming quite impressively, spacing their rhythm to his labor's, a quatrain of the pennysheet verses I'd just sold to Paanja.

  "Let the A'Rak's . . . web be woven . . . that ghost web he . . . was wont to weave . . . of souls torn from . . . bodies cloven . . . by his fangs that . . . all things cleave!"

  "Did you know it already . . . that ballad, good Minim?"

  "I'm just a quick study. . . . but what could it mean?. . . . Does it mean anything? . . . No offense."

  "None taken!. . . . Of course you doubt! . . . I approached you . . . for profit! . . . But I didn't write it! . . . I don't know what it means . . . It sounds very much . . . like a threat though . . ."

  We swam then in silence. Never could I have believed I could find such physical pleasure in the waters of a land so deeply wormholed and blighted with horror beneath its fair surfaces! When we climbed out at last, we were laughing like youths at inane jollities, merely glad at our strength and refreshment and the glory of the sun on the green hills around us. We each found a big, comfy, sunwarmed boulder to lie on. The sun lavished light on us like a largess of gold coin. I felt the happy moment was, distinctly, an omen. If I survived, my enterprise here was meant to bathe me in gold.

  But at length our silence grew tenser with unspoken thoughts of the problems at hand, until at last Paanja said, "Speak it out for us, Nimmy. Let us hear the lines again."

  And Minim recited them without preamble. Just at the first, it seemed he wanted to put a burlesque solemnity in his rendering, to parody the lines, but his voice soon turned grave:

  Let the A'Rak's web be woven

  that ghostweb he was wont to weave

  of souls torn from bodies cloven

  by his fangs that all things cleave!

  Let him stab and slay and tear them,

  souls alive from bodies slain.

  Let him weave those ghosts and wear them—

  for one doth come to work him pain.

  Heap the smoking meat thou'st plundered!

  Weave, oh A'Rak! Weave it strong!

  for such web can scarce be sundered,

  And thou'lt need its shield ere long!

  When thou'rt clothed in Slaughter's garment.

  Wilt thou not be bravely clad?

  Staunch the fabric spun from torment,

  And bright the dyes by victims bled!

  But 'ware that thou be not the garment. . . ."

  * * *

  Our after-silence rang with one question: The garment of whom? The poetic fragment was as obscure to me as to them, whatever gleanings of legend and vague conjectures I might bring to bear upon the lines.

  "It would be madness," Minim flatly declared, "to share these verses with the deity tonight—to associate yourself in any way with verses which embody an unmistakable threat to him."

  "I won't pretend, Nimmy, that I yet know what I am going to do. It all hangs upon what he's called me up to the Stadium for. It has occurred to me that if rumors are abroad, and the god has winded them, then it might be dangerous to conceal these verses from him. I must weigh this a while."

  No doubt he must. For me, it was time to arrange my lodging and begin finding my way about. I rose, and shrugged into my doublet. "You have shown me such hospitality," I told them. "This swim has been pure delight, and it seems ill bred to take short leave. But you two must take counsel, and I have planned a tourist's amble about your lovely countryside. May I come see you in two or three days, and perhaps learn what you have learned of the, ah, deity's communications—barring impropriety, of course?"

  "You will be welcome, and warmly, Nifft," beamed Paanja Pandagon. Fursten Minim bowed graciously, though his look was much more reserved. The Ecclesiarch produced a vellum chit. "Convey this card of mine . . . to the Weskitt and Fobb, an elegant hostelry near 'Change Row. You will be entertained as my guest."

  Minim's handclasp was politely firm. His eyes were still distrusting, though they perhaps looked less sure of what they doubted in me.

  In sum, I set out feeling content with my new acquaintance, and in general, well launched. It was already midday. Now I would bathe and dine at the Weskitt and Fobb. Early on the morrow would be soon enough to commence my reconnaissance of the nearby Monastia, whose renowned architecture I was keen to contemplate.

  |

  LAGADEME II

  Still musing over the curious bit of stalking I had been witness to in the A'Rak Fane, I returned to find my crew, criss-crossing as I went the route by which Plectt had led me to the place. If I was sniffing for anything particular, it was for some sign from these citizens of any such repugnance and unease as troubled me. How could they so casually tread ground that was subterraneously trafficked by such a god as theirs, and his spawn? I suppose my naive thought was that surely some passer or shopkeep, thinking themselves unseen, would let slip a shudder, or that I might spy here or there two cronies guardedly sharing a treasonous murmur of loathing.

  But I glimpsed no such thing, not a jot of it. Even thus, they say, in cities near demon-vents, do people walk blandly about their business. My own obligation was plain enough in any case: to take a new grip on my Nuncial dispassion. So resolved, I returned to the quayside fronting the Maritime Museum.

  Here were my pullers with the 'shaw, but Olombo was absent. Bantril, fractionally less laconic than Shinn, informed me, "Widow took him that way, said follow with you."

  Off we set downquay, the pair threading the high-wheeled 'shaw amidst rattling freight wagons rushing empty from warehouse to waterside for new loads, dodging among the sedans and palanquins of substantial travellers being reverentially conveyed to 'Change Row to wield their fortunes, steering round thickets of stevedores resting where they could best obstruct traffic, darting between maids and housewives a-streaming all parcelled and basketed to and from early m
arket.

  "Describe her, our commissioner!" I prompted Bantril as we jog-trotted. "What was she like?"

  "Short. All veiled."

  "Veils of mourning?"

  "Black veils, to the ground."

  We neared the Quay's southern end, where the city tapered to a spur as the crags angled to meet the riverside. The last stretch of quay here was a shabby, less trafficked precinct of straggly, unprosperous establishments: weathered plank storage sheds in fenced compounds, that rented lockups for the bags and impedimenta of sailors on shore between berths outbound; bottoms yards where small rental craft were docked: skiffs, yawls, wherries, and caiques; those chandlers' shops for the humbler mariner not above buying used cable or casks, elderly hardbiscuit and jerky, or rusty hoists and tackle already gone to sea; and the sort of little grog sheds where the oldest salts loaf and half-mites of beer are poured and each third grog is free.

  My pullers halted at the gate of a bottoms yard. The gate, which opened onto the plankway the rentals were moored to, was locked, and bore the sign:

  CLUMMOCKS DOCKING AND BOTTUMS

  OURLY TO WEEKLY RAITS.

  Through the gate we saw, out at the plankway's end, Olombo standing with a very short-statured figure in black, and with a towering obese figure in a tarry tunic, the eponymous Clummock, I guessed. The small black figure—inevitably our widow Pompilla—exhibited intense agitation, even at a distance. As she addressed the bottoms man, her hands ceaselessly worried and twisted a voluminous black handkerchief whose flutterings seemed a very signal flag of distress—and indeed, the liquidity of the black gauze that so profusely shrouded her likewise semaphored with its bulgings and ripplings that she was passionately imploring, or possibly vilifying, the obese, immobile Clummock. I called out and signalled, and called again before Olombo, who seemed bemused, woke to us, and hastened to let us in. Leading us back down the plankway, he murmured, "In a great dither, the widow. Our coffin's there . . . moored on that raft? She won't have it lashed on the 'shaw, though. She says it has to be rafted upriver before we take to the highway. The raft it's on's rented—brought the casket to town on it, seemingly, from the embalmer. Odd she didn't have him 'balmed here in his hometown, no? Anyway she wants this Clummock to let her take the raft farther upstream on credit, seems she's out of coin. Be calm with her now, Lag, she's a moaner and wailer for sure."

  With a smiling salute, I soothed, "Honored Dame! Rest utterly assured, Dear Pom—-"

  "Dear Heavens! Dear Nuncio! Oh Horrors! Oh help! You must save us, must solve this disastrous impasse, speak to this fellow, make him see how cruel and stiffnecked and obdurate of him it is to stand fast on such trifles." Sobs clutched her voice. Her face, a vague oval only in the veils, seemed tear-streaked. I shut up and nodded and murmured awhile as she went on thus—she was plainly one of those women who must be allowed to erupt, to explode, an overflowing kind of little woman altogether, even in the superabundant scent of her sachet—nellopilla, lillorish—just those cloying aromatics one associates with a particular breed of over-wrought muddled dame overindulged all her life by a husband who has long stopped listening to her. Our Dame's scent was strong even for her type, faintly dizzying, indeed.

  Patiently I endured her effusion of words and aromatics. When a shortage of funds seemed to be her theme, I gently asked if it was the rest of our stipend she lacked. The question seemed to stun her to softness. "Why no," she breathed in wonderment. "Here's your fee here, Dear Nuncio. Take it at once." The money belt paid us in full. I passed it among my crew and we parted it on the spot.

  A few careful questions more, one or two outbursts, and clarity at last was achieved, and Dame Pompilla, delivered, stood quietly weeping. The stern-paddle raft bearing the deceased's coffin—an imposing great casket of onyxwood, richly carven—had been hired only as far as its return to its moorage here. But the widow was urgently insistent on loading our crew and 'shaw on it and taking us a further ten leagues upriver of Big Quay aboard it, before setting coffin and crew ashore to commence the overland journey of delivery. The gist was that Clummock must have three gold octals additional rent on the raft for the twenty leagues extra, while the Widow's whole funeral capital was exhausted by the remittance of the balance of our stipend, which iron nuncial protocol, of course, requires in advance, given the danger of many commissions.

  But Hagia had fine, broad smooth-flagged highways in abundance. It might be that going upriver would save some few miles of overland travel, but what did such a trifle matter? We were well paid and glad to run the whole way—to load 'shaw and cross town on the instant, and be miles up the northeast highway by noontide.

  Alas, ambiguity and ambivalences haunted the A'Rak's cult. Though entombment in one's native fane was orthodox rite, it was rarely practiced, and more tolerated than fostered by the deity. "I didn't share my lamented Glabron's piety, dear Nuncio," grieved the Dame. "The rituals are all but unknown to me—to many of us here, in truth. Master Clummock, you're as vague on the matter as I, didn't you tell me?"

  The huge bottoms man hawked phlegm and spat in the water. "The funeral thing, Dame, I don't know a bit of. I do the required. I went up to the stadium, stood for a Choosing six years back . . . I deem that's enough cult for me, thankee."

  "Yes," said the Dame. "But whatever the rules, Dear Nuncio, the heart of it is a long funeral procession like that my beloved Glabrum wished is . . . disliked by the gods as morbid spectacle, don't you see. Coffins passing through villages with the A'Rak's icons engraved on them . . . they arouse somber thoughts. Now, water acts to muffle the A'Rak's otherwise keen sensitivity to whatever treads upon his earth. Only when the wheels of your quickshaw touch earth here will the a'rakspawn clearly sense your sad burden's presence. I'm most anxious to shorten the term of that contact and its irritation to the deity. Indeed, dear Nuncio, I can't pass this topic without emphasizing to you most strongly—" here she leaned near to grip my arm, and a gust of her cachet discomfited me; her grip was surprisingly steely, as her voice seemed so as well, just then. "—most strongly stress that you must never allow the casket to fall or even touch the ground directly. Such a grave impiety could bring a visit from one of the deities. . . ."

  I disengaged my arm as civilly as I could, but my tone could not hide my sense of affront. "As the cost of our hire might have hinted to you, Dame Pompilla, a Nuncial crew of our calibre are not in the habit of dropping their consignments."

  "Oh, certainly not my dear, certainly not!" she quavered, once more a-fluttering, so that we all hastened to soothe her, and ask how to solve our impasse.

  Clummock still stood firm on his fee. Timidly, then, the widow ventured a possible solution. She revealed that she had just concluded arranging a little commercial transaction in the countryside a half day distant. "I'm to doctor a friend's gleets and be paid with the gravid ewes of the flock; two dozen and more are close to yeaning. With your crew helping, Nuncio, we could have them here mid-morrow, when good Clummock might take some in pay for the raft, and then my lamented husband could be launched, and well forward by nightfall en route to his rest."

  "Hap they be thick-fleeced and fat enough, I would," allowed Clummock, regarding the offered ewes.

  That a Nuncial crew should go shepherding was ludicrous, of course, an indignity. But, trading looks with my crew, I found grudging assent—eagerness in any case to shorten this humiliating haggle, with our turbulent client working up to a lather at every turn. Our stipend was princely in truth. Let us endure a brief irregularity, then, if it just got us shut of this odorous, clamorous woman, and put highway under our feet at last. This was a commission I wished to put briskly behind us.

  All warbling cheer at my acceptance now, the widow led Clummock aside, with some last points to show him about the casket left on his raft. She said something close to his ear to which he nodded. He sat on the casket. The widow led us away, babbling of our journey, led us out Clummock's gate and locked it behind us. Glancing back as we left I saw Clummock still qu
ietly seated on the coffin, as if he meant to repose there a while longer.

  * * *

  The North Highway swept us smoothly out through the metropolis' purlieus, where the monumental profile of the city subsided to a sprawl of more modest residences, while the crags swung inland and merged with the green, easy-rolling hills.

  The widow Pompilla marched in the lead, a short, peaked heap of black gauze in billowy, unabated motion. I was denied a view of her precise locomotive style, but, short as her legs had to be, her pace and stamina were astonishing. Here, I would have thought, one saw the energy squandered by her emotional eruptions being channeled to useful effort—were it not that as she strode tirelessly forth, she held forth just as tirelessly, practically ranted in fact, about the countryside we crossed.

  "Hay-farming!" (This at the first shocks of hay we passed.) "I was a farm girl before I was wed! Helping dear Daddum bind wickers with withes my third year! Milking the gentle eyed momiles, squeezing the gleets' silken teats. The warm milk asteam in the chill of morn! The precious perfumes! The barnyard's pungencies!" And so on.

  From raptures about her Hagish childhood, she passed to raptures about Hagish culture. She laid her nativity here on so thick, that under any other circumstances I would have suspected her for the fraud she was, and though I now understand how I was duped, I still cringe with shame to think how I swallowed it all. "Now that—look! Look there!" (This was occasioned at the sight of the first rat-rick we passed, whatever that was.) "That is a rat-rick of the true Hagish style, the original, native Hagish style of the first Hagish rat-rick riggers! Note the plain, solid capstyle, tented on teepeed poles fanned out to rafter the eaves! In that humble but heartfelt capstyle is Hagish virtue in essence, Hagish—" And so on.

  But however much she punished our ears, the solid honorarium in our pokes made us patient with this undeniably grotesque little detour, as did the fact that it gave us a taste of the territory while we were still unyoked to our duty. This highway, for one thing, presaged a swift delivery if all the roads—as they in fact proved to be—were equally well engineered: wide and seamlessly flagged, it attacked slopes in graceful sweeps that eased upgrades and downgrades alike. We soon learned as well the pronounced rhythm of Hagian terrain, whose pattern we grasped when, near noontide, we emerged from the Rattlespate River Valley, crested the ridgeline, and began our descent into the Ebonflux River Valley. Hagia is in fact one vast network of grassy ridgelines—sun-warmed and sparsely treed—and, webbed in the net, a host of lush river valleys thick-forested along their floors.