The fat one grunted something and another figure appeared from behind her bulk. This one was as lean and dried as the rawhide that constricted Bandar's throat, with a face that was collapsed in on itself and wrinkled up like dried fruit, framed by thin, white hair clotted together by rancid oils. She poked a wisp of wool into the grease lamp to make a second wick then lifted the skullcap and crossed the cave to hold it before Bandar's face.
She peered at him from rheumy eyes, toothless gums working and lips smacking loudly. Then the hand that was not encumbered by the lamp reached under his parka and worked its way into his leggings. She seized parts of Bandar that he would have rather she had left untouched, weighing them in her dry, hard palm. Then she made a noise in her throat that expressed disappointment coupled to resignation and spoke to the unseen strangler behind him.
"Ready him."
The noose about his throat loosened but before Bandar could gain enough breath to sing the thran a hood of grimy leather descended over his head. The noose was slipped up over the ill-smelling hide until it came level with his mouth. Then it was cinched tight again, gagging him. He tried to intone the thran but could not produce enough volume. Meanwhile, his hands were bound together behind him.
There were eye holes in the hood and a slit where his nose protruded, allowing him to breathe. He felt a weight on his head and realized that the headgear supported a pair of antlers.
The strong one who had held him from behind now stepped into view and he saw that she too was female, though young and muscular, with a mane of tawny hair and a face that mingled beauty with brute power.
She moved lithely to hitch a hide curtain to a wooden frame around the cave's mouth, closing out the light and the cold air that flowed in like liquid from the tundra. The old one was dipping more wicks of what was probably mammoth wool into the grease lamp, creating a yellowy glow on the walls while the fat one began to strip off her furs and leathers.
It was an ancient maxim at the Institute that a little learning made a perilous possession. Bandar realized that aphorism defined his predicament. He had been brought to this Location once before, but barely long enough to fix the place in his memory. He had misjudged its category.
When they had briefly visited an adjacent cave the tutor's sole concern had been to display the nodes that coincided there. He had not explained the Location's nature and when Bandar had looked out at the tundra he had thought that they were briefly passing through a mere Landscape; instead, it was now clear that this was a Situation.
In the dawntime, there had been an archetypal tale of three women—one young, one old, one in the prime of life—living in some remote spot. Questers came to them, seeking wisdom, and always paying an uncomfortable price. In later ages the Situation had evolved into bawdy jokes about farmers' daughters or poetic tropes about dancing graces. But here was the raw base, rooted deep in humankind's darkest earth. Bandar had no doubt that the final outcome of this Situation, as with so many others, was blood and death.
The grease fire was warming the cave as the crone and the girl efficiently rendered Bandar naked. The matron, now also uncovered, grunted and sprawled back on the pile of furs, giving Bandar more than an inkling of the first installment of the price he must pay.
The young one took a gobbet of the grease that fed the lamp and warmed it between her hands before applying it to the part of Bandar that the crone had weighed and found merely adequate. Despite Bandar's disinclination to participate, her ministrations began to have an effect.
Bandar realized that he was in danger of being pulled into this Situation, deeply and perhaps irrevocably. The longer one stayed in a particular place and interacted with its elements, the more its "reality" grew and the more integrated with it the sojourner could become. The speed of the effect was heightened if the noönaut abstained from intoning thrans or if he adopted a passive attitude.
The old hag was shaking a bone rattle and grunting a salacious chant about a stag and a doe. Meanwhile, the young one had finished greasing him and was surveying the result with a critical eye. Bandar looked down and saw that his virtual body was behaving as if it were real flesh. It was a worrisome sign.
Act, do not react was the rule in such a predicament. But outnumbered, bound and gagged, he had few options for setting the agenda. He mentally cast about for inspiration and found it in the expression on the face of the youngest of the three cave dwellers. She was regarding what was now Bandar's most prominent feature in a manner that more than hinted at disappointment.
Her look gave the noönaut a desperate idea: If it was possible to grow winter clothing and to create a staff from nothing, might he likewise be able to change the proportions of his own shape? His tutors had never spoken of such a thing, but necessity was a sharp spur. If it was possible for Bandar to increase the dimensions of his most intimate equipment, he might improve his position.
While the young one reapplied herself to his lubrication, Bandar employed the adept's exercises that had protected him against sleet and slippery footing, although now with a more personal focus. After a few moments he heard the rattle and chant stop. The crone was staring, open mouthed, and the tawny-haired one was blinking with surprise. Bandar looked down and saw that his efforts had been more successful than intended. What had before been merely presentable was now grown prodigious.
"That will need more grease," the old woman cackled. The young one agreed and scooped up a double handful.
When he was thoroughly lubricated, they manhandled him over to where the fat one lay in expectation. He was forced first to kneel between her enormous splayed thighs then to lie prone upon the mountainous belly. The crone took hold of his new-grown immensity and guided him until connections were established, which brought first a grunt of surprise from the matron then other noises as the young one placed a cold, calloused foot on Bandar's buttocks and rhythmically impelled him to his labors.
The woman beneath him began to thrash about, making sounds that put Bandar in mind of a large musical owl. For his part, he concentrated on mental exercises that placed a certain distance between his awareness and his virtual body, lest he become too involved in the activity and find himself on a slippery slope into full absorption.
Seize the process or be seized by it, he remembered a tutor saying. The Commons was an arena rife with conflict, where will was paramount. To control his place in a Location, the uninsulated noönaut must be the dominant actor, not one of the supporting cast. How can I amplify my impact? he asked himself, rejecting any further increase in size—he might damage the matron.
The idea, when it came, seemed unlikely to succeed. Still, he had heard that women could grow fond of certain devices used for intimate achievements. Bandar summoned his conviction and focused his attention on effecting the change. Within seconds a new sound rose above the matron's musical hoots: a deep thrumming and throbbing which he could clearly hear despite the fact that its source was buried in the mounds of flesh beneath him.
The matron now began to issue throaty moans with a counterpoint of high-pitched keening. She thrashed about with an energy that might have propelled Bandar from her if the young one hadn't continued to press down with her pumping foot. At last the heaves and flings culminated in a final paroxysm and Bandar heard a long and satiated sigh, followed almost at once by a rumbling snore.
Immediately, the other two hauled the noönaut from the matron's crevice and flung him down on his back, the vibrating immensity buzzing and humming above his belly. There was a brief tussle between youth and old age, quickly decided by the former's strength despite the latter's viciousness and guile.
The tawny-haired woman straddled Bandar and seized his conspicuous attribute. As she lowered herself onto it her eyes and mouth widened and tremors afflicted her belly and the long muscles of her thighs. Then she leaned forward, placed her palms on his shoulders and set to work.
Bandar saw the crone peering over the young one's shoulder with an expression that sent a chill
of apprehension through him. Ritual slaughter might not be the worst fate he would suffer. He resolved to exert himself.
He reasoned that the same exercises that had enlarged some parts of him must make others shrink. While the young female lathered herself to a fine foaming frenzy above him, Bandar focused his attention on his still bound hands. In a moment he felt them dwindle until they were the size of a doll's. The rawhide thongs slipped off.
The young woman was quicker to reach the heights than her older cavemate but stayed there longer. Bandar bided his time. Finally, she emitted a long and thoughtful moan and collapsed onto the noönaut's chest. The old woman wasted no time but avidly seized the incumbent at hip and shoulder and rolled her free of Bandar. She stepped over him and prepared to impale herself.
Bandar bent himself at knee and hip to put his feet in the crone's belly, then launched her up and away. As she squawked in pain and outrage, he sprang to his feet and made straight for the hide that hid the exit.
His tiny hands gave him trouble, but when a glance behind showed his two conquests sitting up and the hag reaching for a long, black shard of razor-edged flint he put an arm between wood and leather and tore the covering away.
The sleet slashed at him. The bare ledge was slick with freezing rain. There was another cave a short dash along the ledge—it looked to be the right one—and he half-ran, half-slid toward it, the antler-topped mask bobbing on his head and his still enormous and buzzing bowsprit pointing the way.
As he went he tried to loosen the cord that pressed the mask into his mouth, but his puny hands hindered him. Yet he must free himself of the mask to chant the thran that opened the gate in the next cave or be caught by the pursuing women.
He decided to shrink his head. There was no time for refinement and he did not try to specify the degree to which his skull must diminish; he could put things to rights later.
As he ran he felt the mask loosen, then the cord dropped loose around his neck as the dimensions of his jaw diminished. He tossed his chin up and the antlered hood flew backward. From behind him he heard a grunt and a curse and a clatter. Someone had tripped over it and they had all fallen.
Bandar did not look back but threw himself into the new cave, which he was relieved to see was empty. He recognized it now, though he could not recall whether the gate he sought was to left or right.
If he had time, his memory or his noönaut's acquired sense of direction would tell him which to choose. But there was no time. He could not even intone the four-and-two thran and remove himself from his pursuers' purview: having spent so long uncloaked in this Situation and so closely involved with its idiomats, he could not hide himself completely.
The moment he entered the cave he chanted the opening thran. Nothing happened. Then the cave darkened as the doorway behind him filled with murderous females. Bandar had no time to work out why the thran had not succeeded. Fortunately, the answer came before full panic set in: he had sung the notes through vocal equipment that was markedly smaller than his regular issue; just as a miniature horn plays a higher note, his shrunken larynx and throat had thrust the thran into a higher register. Thrans had to be exactly the right pitch.
Bandar adjusted for scale and sang the notes again, and was rewarded with two ripples in the air. Arbitrarily he chose the one to his left and leapt through as the young cavewoman's nails sank into his shoulder.
He emerged into Heaven. All was perfection: verdant meadows with grass soft as velvet and dotted with flowers of exquisite filigree; groves of stately trees, each impeccable in composition and form; skies as clear and blue as an infant's gaze; and air as sweet as a goddess's breath.
The rift through which he had come closed behind him and Bandar stood a moment, a tiny hand to his breast as his fear ebbed away. At once he knew that he had taken the wrong gate—he should now be alone on a mountaintop from which he could have segued to the destination island.
He could retrace his route. The cavewomen's Situation would soon recycle. But first he should restore his body parts to their proper proportions and reclothe himself. He needed to make tones of the right pitch, and it would not do to encounter the Senior Tutor while stark naked and presenting the humming enormity that dominated his ventral view.
He looked carefully around. He was standing under some trees. There were no idiomatic entities in view and Heaven was usually a tranquil Location. But just to be safe he decided to move deeper into cover. He ducked to pass under the lower branches of a flawless flowering tree, the perfume of its blossoms at close range making his head swim. With each step the touch of the grass against his bare feet was a caress.
A very sensuous Heaven, he thought, and resolved to explore it more thoroughly when he was received into the Institute as a full fellow. Perhaps he would make a special study of such Locations; it would be pleasant work.
Secluded among the scent-laden trees, he concentrated on a mental image of his own head and performed the appropriate exercises for what he judged to be sufficient time. But when he raised his miniature hands to examine the results he discovered that his skull had remained tiny while his ears and nose had grown far beyond normal; indeed they were now as out of harmony with nature as the buzzing, vibrating tower that rose from his lower belly.
If I could see what I am doing, it would make the work much easier, Bandar reasoned. The setting seemed too Arcadian for an actual mirror, but the noönaut heard the gentle tinkling of water nearby. A still pool would do, he thought.
He followed the sound deeper into the grove and came to a clearing where a bubbling spring welled up to form a pool of limpid clarity. He knelt and gazed into the gently rippling water. The image of his shrunken face, albeit now centered by a trunklike proboscis and framed by a pair of sail-like ears, looked back at him with grave concern. He began the exercises anew.
"Bless you," said a mellow voice behind him. Bandar swung around to find a sprightly old man with the face of a cherub beaming down on him from under a high and ornate miter that was surrounded by a disk of golden light. The saint was dressed in ecclesiastical robes of brilliant white with arcane symbols woven in gold and silver thread. In his hand was a stout staff topped by a great faceted jewel.
"Thank you," said Bandar. "I'll be but a moment."
But as he spoke he saw the man's beatific expression mutate sharply to a look of horror succeeded by a mask of righteous outrage. Faster than Bandar would have credited, the jewel-topped staff rotated in the hierophant's hand so that it could be thrust against the noönaut's chest, and he was toppled into the crystal water.
"Glub," said Bandar as he passed below the surface. When he struggled back to the air he saw the old man looming over him, the staff set to do fresh mayhem. He had time to hear the idiomat cry out, "Enemy! An enemy is here!" before the gem struck Bandar solidly on his tiny cranium and drove him under again.
Bandar wondered if it was possible to drown in the Commons. He elected not to find out and kicked off toward the other side of the pool, swimming under the surface.
The throbbing queller of cavewomen was not diminished by the cold water. Indeed it tended to dig into the soft bottom of the pool so that he had to swim closer to the surface. But his action took him out of range of the staff and in moments he had hauled himself free of the water. The idiomatic saint was circling the pool, clearly intent on doing more damage, all the while bellowing alarms.
Bandar fled for the trees, but as he ran he heard the rush of very large wings. Casting a look over his shoulder, he saw a vast and shining figure passing through the air above the grove. The long bladed sword in its grasp was wreathed in flame and the look on its perfectly formed features bespoke holy violence.
Bandar fell to his knees and opened his mouth. The four-and-two would not work here, he was sure. And he doubted the nine-and-three would be efficacious. Given how his fortunes had fared today, it would be the three threes. This was the most difficult sequence of tones, even when the chanter was not possessed of mouse-sized v
ocal equipment absurdly coupled to an elephantine nasal amplification box, while distracted by vibrations from below and the threat of incineration from above.
His alternatives rapidly dwindling, the noönaut frantically adjusted his vocalizations to find the exact pitch. At least the giant ears assisted in letting him hear exactly how he sounded. The sight of the descending winged avenger lent urgency to his efforts and in moments he struck the right tones. He sang the three threes and saw the terrible beauty of the angel's face lose its intensity of focus. The wings spread wide to check its ascent; it wheeled and flew off, its flaming sword hissing.
The staff-wielding hierophant stood on the other side of the bubbling pool, scratching his head and wearing an expression like that of a man who has walked into a room and cannot remember what he came for. Then he turned and went back the way he had come.
The Gist Hunter Page 17
