by John Shirley
For a moment, he was quite exultant—until he glanced at the right-hand side of the ridge, and saw the Voormis.
His first impulse was to curse his luck, realizing that if the furry ape-men had only come down the slope a little was further around the mountain they might indeed have run into the humans coming up, and his lovely dream of soaring body-parts and jetting blood might actually have come to pass—but his diehard optimism told him that all was not yet lost for that particular dream, even though the ridge was now between the humans and the Voormis and neither party could presently see the other.
On the other hand, he was obliged to take note of the fact that, whether or not they were able to see and recognize the rope wound around his waist, the Voormis were now giving chase, and were highly unlikely to treat him any more gently than the villagers, if they caught him.
He had, at any rate, no alternative but to run, as fast and as far as he could. That is what he did, hurtling down the mountain on what seemed, at times, uncomfortably like the top of a fence or the edge of a jutting sword-blade.
The simplicity of the action gave him a little time to think again, and he recalled once having heard a story—obviously false, since it was one of those stories that, if true, could never have been told, because its protagonist ended up dead—about a certain Ralibar Vooz, who had allegedly visited the cavern where the strangely insubstantial archetypes of Earthly species lived a curious semi-existence. Clearly, Durul Nariban thought, surprised at the keenness of his own logic, that peculiar underworld must also contain the “raw” archetypal unsubstance of creatures yet to emerge on the surface of the Earth: new creatures, new monsters.
Evidently, the last of the Voormi sorcerers, faced with the probable imminent extinction of his race, had made a desperate attempt to turn the tide of destiny by somehow conjuring up a quotient of that raw archetypal unsubstance—a nascent archetype—in the hope of forging some kind of hideous predator or parasitic plague capable of driving humankind to extinction, instead. Alas for the Voormis, and perhaps for the nascent archetype too, that wasn’t the way things worked. The nascent archetype could not be forced to take a particular misty shape, nor could it make a final choice for itself, although it evidently had some capacity for reflexive provisional materialization, having gone astray in the material world.
“Have I got that right?” he asked the rope around his waist, certain that, even though he had not voiced his thoughts, his passenger would know exactly where his conjectures had led him.
“We would be more accurate,” was the reply that formed behind his navel. Presumably, the rope was crediting itself with having inspired his insight—and who was he to argue, given that it had never entered his head before to employ a phrase like reflexive provisional materialization?
“So what do you expect to happen to you if, by some miracle, I can get you out of this?” asked Durul Nariban.
“I wish I knew,” was the reply. “Does a tadpole know how to become a toad, or a nymph a dragonfly? The one thing I do know is that I’m not immortal—no nascent archetype has any god-given right to assume form and give birth to substance. I can be destroyed by brutal means. And once again, it’s we who’ll be doing the getting me out of this, if it turns out to be possible. Do you really believe that you’re as sure-footed as this, without the kind of help that I can give you?”
Like all natural optimists, Durul Nariban was not starved of self-regard, and really had believed, up to that point, that the magnificent grace and speed of his flight along the narrow, steep and often treacherous ridge of rock had been due to his natural agility and athleticism, but once the doubt had been planted in his mind he had to concede that the temporary rope might not be wrong. He really was doing amazingly well, leaving Yziug Imnuv’s men further behind with ever soaring stride he took, and the Voormis too.
Indeed, in spite of the fact that the Voormis were mountain-dwellers, he seemed to be leaving them even further behind than the villagers, perhaps because their giant size required stouter legs, which were undoubtedly sturdy but not exactly nimble.
Durul Nariban would, of course, have preferred the humans and the Voormis been able to keep pace with one another, thus facilitating a collision of agendas when the ridge finally petered out and allowed the two sets of pursuers to perceive one another, but he tried to be philosophical about it.
In fact, when the ridge did peter out, the two groups of pursuers would probably still have been unable to see one another, even at relatively close range, because it did not disappear until it had plunged into the conifer forest below the tree-line. There, the going became much easier, because the forest floor was strewn with a centuries-old layer of dead pine-needles and there was little or no undergrowth. Nor was it any easier for either party of pursuers to see their quarry than it was for them to see one another. Durul Nariban still had to keep moving, though; no hiding place he could possibly find could be reckoned safe, especially in broad daylight. If he paused, he would be lost.
Unfortunately, whatever help the temporary rope could offer him in terms of agility, it could do nothing for his weary muscles and overtaxed lungs. Now that the slope was less steep he could no longer summon up the illusion that he was half-flying, and he was very conscious indeed of his own seemingly leaden weight and the ebbing of his strength.
Now, he felt that he was staggering rather than running, and knew that he could not possibly be gaining ground any longer, even if many of his human pursuers must be just as tired as he was. It required all his reserves of optimism even to tell himself that at least Yziug Imnuv, who was possessed of a fine priestly pot-belly, could not possibly be getting any closer, and that perhaps his pursuers would be so strung out by now that their chances of falling upon him as a mob were distinctly limited.
“You have to keep going,” the unvoice urged him, with an edge of desperation in its atonality.
“What happened to we?” Durul Nariban gasped. “How about turning yourself into something that could carry me for a while?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” the temporary rope reminded him, bleakly.
“Mysterious processes,” said Durul Nariban, sadly. “As mysterious, I suppose, as the ways of the human heart.”
“It wasn’t your heart that got you into this mess,” the unvoice told him, cynically. Evidently, it felt that there was nothing very mysterious about the ways of human lust, and their ability to override common sense and rational calculation.
“I’m just a poor material print stamped from the archetypal mold,” Durul Nariban assured his passenger, even though he no longer had enough breath to make any actual sound as he formed the words. “Blame the archetype, not the victim.” It occurred to him that the word mold had more than one meaning, but the pun did not amuse him. Puns never did. Nor did much else. Human life, as Hyperborea waited patiently and gloomily for the long-prophesied ice to devour and doom it, did not seem to be a laughing matter.
“You have to keep going,” the unvoice insisted, evidently aware of the fact that he would soon be incapable of taking another step.
The forest was becoming mixed now, birches mingling with the pines, and even the occasional secular oak. The ground was leveling out. Soon, the cultivated fields forming a band around the mountain side, nourished by its various springs, would come into view…if he could keep going that far. There was at least a possibility that he might be able to find temporary shelter and food in some woodcutter’s cottage or farmer’s barn, where the news that he had been declared outcast might not have reached, as yet.
The rope was right. He had to keep going.
Summoning up his last reserves of strength, screwing up his eyes with the effort, he rounded a thicket and staggered into a clearing—and was met by a fist in the face that laid him out flat.
He had not been knocked unconscious, but that hardly mattered. The simple fact was that he was utterly incapable of getting up again. He was finished—and it really would not have mattered overmuch h
ow many faces he could see peering down at him, although he could not help his heart sinking even further when the silhouetted head of the man who had punched him was joined by three others, and then by the shaggy head of Kokol the Mighty himself.
Kokol Ammunix certainly had a mighty voice, and proved it by roaring—partly in triumph, but mainly to inform any and all other searchers that the runaway had been found and caught.
Obviously, when daylight had come, Kokol Ammunix had summoned the entire village to join the hunt for the alleged heretic, and, while Durul Nariban had been running down the mountain ahead of Yziug Imnuv’s acolytes, a much larger company of searchers had been painstakingly making their way up it, strung out in a line in imitation of the mesh of a inexorable net.
“Shall we take him back to the village?” someone asked,
“No,” said Kokol the Mighty. “We’ll kill him here.”
“Shall I cut his throat?” asked another villager, eager to please.
“No,” said Kokol the Mighty. “I want to watch the great lover dance. We’ll hang him from yonder tree with that rope around his waist and watch him choke.”
Still helpless, Durul Nariban felt obliging hands fumbling at his waist. For a moment or two he thought that the fingers would be unable to grip the nascent archetype, as his had been, so that their inability to detach it would at least offer one last petty frustration to his would-be murderers, but the entity seemed to have acquired more semblance of substance while in contact with his flesh, and the members of the murderous mob were able to uncoil it as if it really had been a mere length of rope.
“Thanks a lot,” was the last thing Durul Nariban said into it before losing contact altogether. There was no time for a reply.
The villagers seemed slightly surprised, because he had spoken aloud and they assumed that the words were addressed to them, but none of them said: “You’re welcome.”
Eager hands immediately set about fashioning the rope into a noose. It made not the slightest attempt to resist or to lash out on behalf of its former protector.
Ingrate, thought Durul Nariban, silently.
Left to his own resources, and on the edge of desperation, Durul Nariban made an effort to sit up, but Kokol Ammunix planted a heavy boot on his chest and forced him to remain supine.
“Not yet, my frisky friend,” the headman growled. “We’ll wait for a few more souls to gather, in order that you’ll have a proper audience for our dance. Don’t worry; I won’t wait for the entire village to gather—but Yziuf Imnuv really ought to be here, to send you to the afterlife with Yhoundeh’s curse upon your head, as befits a filthy worshiper of Tsathoggua.”
“And I’ll depart visiting Tsathoggua’s curse upon every witness to my passing,” Durul Nariban articulated, hoarsely, although he knew that the gesture of defiance was pointless. Anyone idiot enough to believe that Tsathoggua’s curse had any power to injure him was also probably idiot enough to believe that Yhoundeh’s blessing had the power to protect him.
While the rope that was intended to hang him was secured to the branch of an oak, and Kokol the Mighty selected two other strong men to help him lift his victim up to place the noose around his head, Durul Nariban observed from the corners of his eyes that approximately thirty villages had now gathered in the clearing, including two women and half a dozen children. That was considerably less than half the community’s total population, but enough to spread a tale far and wide in no time at all.
Then Yziuf Imnuv arrived, accompanied by three of the men who had followed him in the initial chase, and Durul Nariban knew that his time had come.
He felt strangely naked without the rope around his waist, and strangely alone. He wished that he had at least been able to put his trousers on. There was something essentially undignified about being hanged in a nightshirt.
Kokol Ammunix was not a man for undue ceremony, and certainly not a man to make speeches. Durul Nariban felt himself picked up and hoisted upwards. One villager climbed on to another’s shoulders in order to place the noose around his neck. All in all, it was an absurdly awkward process, carried out in a stupidly ungainly manner, but it did the job. Durul Nariban was released, left to dangle on the end of the rope with a three-foot margin between his heels and the comfortable ground.
But he did not choke, and he did not dance. The noose—not such an ingrate after all, and perhaps a clever tactician—refused to tighten. Instead, the nascent archetype contrived, this time, actually to reach inside his flesh, seeming to fuse with his muscle and his bone, thus able to sustain him without constricting his windpipe.
Not knowing what else to do––and well aware that it could only be a temporary reprieve, while the villagers had so many knives, sickles and sword with which to hack him to pieces––Durul Nariban began to do as he had threatened, and improvised a curse in the name of the forbidden toad-god Tsathoggua.
Although he had no experience at all in such matters, being entirely innocent of the heresy charge leveled against him, it had the sound of a fine and hideous curse, perhaps because he was not improvising it unaided. The fact that he was hanging there, neither choking nor dancing, probably added an edge of plausibility to it that it would not otherwise have had. At any rate, the watching crowd not only failed to run forward to hack him to pieces with their miscellaneous blades, but actually recoiled in superstitious dread.
When he had finished the curse, Durul Nariban improvised a smile. It was certainly not a smile of triumph, because he was convinced that he only had a few seconds to live, nor was it a smile of amusement, because he really could not find much in the situation to amuse him, but it was a smile nevertheless, and the assembled villagers—who must now have numbered forty—all saw it, and sensed that there must be some malicious meaning in it.
Whether he was mighty in imagination or not, Kokol Ammunix was not a man to be intimidated by so slender a foe, even in bizarre circumstances, and he raised his own blade—a brightly polished sword—in order to take the lead, as was only his right, in the orgy of vengeance. As he took one step forward, however, to make up the ground that his involuntary recoil had conceded, the rope slowly drew Durul Nariban upwards toward the sustaining branch, still without exerting any fatal pressure on his throat.
Again Kokol Ammunix hesitated—but the idea that his prey might be lifted far enough to grasp the branch with his hands and swing himself out of reach into the crown of the tree cut the hesitation short. Roaring with wrath, he leapt forward, clearly intending to cut the dangling Durul Nariban in half, if he had strength enough.
Then the Voormis arrived—all six of them, including a sorcerer at the extreme of desperation.
The rational thing for the humans and Voormis to do would have been to join forces in order to secure their common prey, divide it up and go their separate ways, but that was not the way things worked in Hyperborea. Instinct trumped rationality, and the Voormis attacked the humans, probably without even being consciously aware that they were blocking the path to the nascent archetype.
Now the blades came into action—all except one of them directed at the furry attackers. The one exception was Kokol Ammunix’s blade, which still directed the headman’s ire against the seducer of his sixth and youngest wife, of whose lack of satisfaction he was all too well aware. Had he had time to take another step forward, the blow might well have been fatal, but the arrival of the Voormis had prompted him to strike too soon. Durul Nariban was able to reach up and grasp the branch, and swing his lower body out of the sword’s reach, with an acrobatic twist as graceful as it was effective. Then Durul Nariban was able to swing forwards again, pendulum fashion, and kick Kokol Ammunix in the face as the big man’s momentum carried him forward. He delivered the kick with all the power he could muster.
Under other circumstances, the kick would not have damaged anyone overmuch, but in the midst of a brawl with six frenzied Voormis, it certainly did the headman no favors.
Durul Nariban swung himself up onto the branch,
and then sat on it to watch the carnage. In a way, it was disappointing; there were not nearly as many severed heads and limbs flying through the air as he had earlier imagined, and the blood-flow was more a matter of trickles than fountains, but, all things considered, he could not complain overmuch about the final body-count.
When it was over, all six Voormis lay dead, not exactly hacked to pieces, but very extensively stabbed, and seventeen villagers lay dead with them, many of them mangled is a satisfactorily hideous manner, including Kokol Ammunix and Yziuf Imnuv.
“Now that,” said Durul Nariban, as he unwound the helpful rope from around his shoulders and draped it over the branch of the tree, “is what I call a good curse. Anyone else want to try his luck against the power of Tsathoggua?”
Unsurprisingly, no one did. There is nothing like a massacre, especially one involving monsters and a dead high priest, to summon up belief in the efficacy of curses where none existed before. When Durul Nariban let himself down from the branch and dropped to the ground, the surviving villagers literally cowered before him.
The village clearly needed a new headman, but the issue was not put to a democratic vote; there were no challengers when Durul Nariban asserted his right to the title by conquest. Only he knew that, strictly speaking, he had not really earned it. He maintained that position for many years, in spite of the difficulty of keeping all six of his wives satisfied, thanks to the awe inspired by the legend that grew up around him as the tale of his exploit grew in the repeated telling.
Durul Nariban’s only regret, after that marvelous day, was that he had not wound the rope around his waist before dropping from the tree, and that when he looked up at the place where he had draped it, it was no longer there.
Privately, he always assumed that, in saving him from the fatal dance, it had somehow found its true vocation, and had undergone a metamorphosis that had taken it back to its own half-world, as the misty archetype of a new species of snake, or a new kind of flower—but he never risked telling anyone else about that, lest it cheapen his personal mystique. He died without ever having confessed the secret of his adventure to anyone.
