Jim Baens Universe-Vol 1 Num 6

by Eric Flint

  Even with surprise on their side, the Tavrid guards were outnumbered. The northerners recovered from their hesitation and met Tavrid ranks with bristling spears and a solid wall of shields.

  The shadows by the fires paused and realigned in a single file. Shai noticed it just as his soldiers entered the melee. The battle was chaotic, and the initial formation fell apart. Everywhere Shai looked, the northerners and the guards were locked in hand-to-hand combat.

  He ducked a spear thrust and heard the air sigh above his head. He straightened, wedging his sword between the attacker's chest and his shield, and pushed away the man's spear arm.

  Another spear whistled past his head, and Shai spun. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the fires burned brighter, and the clouds of foul smoke had now enveloped many of the fighting men. A twisting tendril of smoke wrapped about Shai's throat, and he coughed at the thick, acrid smell. His hand felt weak and useless, and his fingers released their grip on the hilt.

  The smoke did not seem to affect the northerners, but Shai's men coughed and thrashed in the grip of the multitentacled, writhing cloud.

  A sharp stab set Shai's shoulder afire. He watched as the tall northerner, stout and golden-faced, hefted his short spear.

  The screeching of the giant bird on the wall distracted the soldier, and he turned.

  The bird cry was so terrible, so full of ancient, mindless, unarticulated fury, that even the spell-casters paused. Even the foul smoke they had conjured seemed to shrink, lightening its grip on the victims.

  Shai fell to his knees and felt around for his blade. His hand closed around the familiar hilt and he thrust upward, cutting through the northerner's belly. Only then did he look at the wall.

  The bird, fully feathered in sparkling emerald and gold, flapped its wings as it had been doing for days. Its cries grew stronger, until the very city wall shook and crumbled, large fragments of sandstone and brick falling away from it. Nepheli was nowhere to be seen, and Shai guessed that his absence had caused the bird's distress. Or perhaps it smelled blood.

  The bird strained now, its wings whipping up a storm of such strength that the cloud suffocating Shai's men flattened and fell apart, slithering away in thin wisps hugging the ground. With the next wing beat, the bird lifted off the wall.

  Its wings were wide and long enough to cast a shadow over the fighting men; the wind they raised extinguished the fires. Shai felt the warm gust of air hit him in the face and almost knock him over. He braced against the wind.

  The northerners froze at the sight of the giant bird flying low, barreling down on them. It targeted the shadows first, and they scattered away from their dying fires, keeping low to the ground.

  "Men, attack!" Shai called out. He intended to use the enemy's surprise to his advantage.

  The guards picked up their weapons and charged the northerners closest to them. As the bird chased and tore at the shadows, Shai and his soldiers turned on the enemy. The northerners, horrified by the attacking bird and the loss of their magical allies, fought furiously but without conviction.

  The bird circled, its feathers flashing in the sun like emeralds set in gold. It swooped down, the tip of its wing brushing against the top of Shai's head. It was then that he saw Nepheli.

  The warlock's skin had the color of tallow, and the green light shining out of both his eyes gave his gaunt features a ghostly look. He sat astride the bird's neck, his clawlike hands gripping at the green feathers. The air surrounding them crackled and shimmered, and Shai thought of the dying campfires all around them. Nepheli's fire was dying as well.

  The earth shook; Shai lost his footing and fell. He lifted his head and looked around, at the dying men on the ground, at the backs of the running northerners. Then at the city. A part of the wall had fallen, and where the town gates used to be there opened a swirling, shimmering portal, green as grass. Shai's heart pounded, and a wave of frustration washed over him. Just as the enemy had been turned away, another danger was about to claim the city.

  "Nepheli," he yelled. "Close it! Now!"

  The bird, which was chasing after the running soldiers, turned. Its wings beat faster as it approached the wall. Shai thought that to the bird the poisonous green light was not a threat but a sight of home. Before he could cry out again, warning Nepheli of the danger, the bird entered the portal and disappeared within, taking Nepheli with it.

  The rift closed, and only the crumbling wall remained. The crackling of the air and the smell of approaching thunder were gone. The weeping and moaning of the wounded remained the only sound.

  Shai stood and sheathed his cutlass. He surveyed the battlefield. Pitifully few of his men had survived—perhaps two-thirds of the original thousand were still standing, and many bled.

  The captain approached him. "Looks like the battle is ours, Mayor." Blood streamed from his torn flank, but he grinned.

  Shai shrugged and cringed at the jolt of pain that seized his left arm and shoulder. "Let's go get help. We have wounded here."

  The two of them walked through the breach that used to be the city gates. Shai did not speak, but thought of the green world he had glimpsed through the portal. It was beautiful, and Shai hoped that Nepheli had survived the journey. He also thought of the last words his sister had said to him.

  "I'm leaving." The words fell from her bloodless lips like hailstones, freezing Shai's heart. "There's no place here for me."

  "Where would you go?" Shai said, too devastated for tears.

  "There are many worlds out there." She smiled a little. "Nepheli says, maybe in other worlds things work out better. Maybe there I can have him again."

  Shai hoped that she was right. For his own sake.

  * * *

  E. Sedia is the author of several short stories.

  The Gnarly Man

  Written by L. Sprague de Camp

  Illustrated by Alexandra Dawe

  Dr. Matilda Saddler first saw the gnarly man on the evening of June 14th , 1956, at Coney Island. The spring meeting of the Eastern Section of the American Anthropological Association had broken up, and Dr. Saddler had had dinner with two of her professional colleagues, Blue of Columbia and Jeffcott of Yale. She mentioned that she had never visited Coney and meant to go there that evening. She urged Blue and Jeffcott to come along, but they begged off.

  Watching Dr. Saddler's retreating back, Blue of Columbia crackled: "The Wild Woman from Wichita. Wonder if she's hunting another husband?" He was a thin man with a small gray beard and a who-the-Hell-are-you-Sir expression.

  "How many has she had?" asked Jeffcott of Yale.

  "Three to date. Don't know why anthropologists lead the most disorderly private lives of any scientists. Must be that they study the customs and morals of all these different peoples, and asked themselves, 'If the Eskimos can do it why can't we?' I'm old enough to be safe, thank God."

  "I'm not afraid of her," said Jeffcott. He was in his early forties and looked like a farmer uneasy in store-bought clothes. "I'm so very thoroughly married."

  "Yeah? Ought to have been at Stanford a few years ago, when she was there. It wasn't safe to walk across the campus, with Tuthill chasing all the females and Saddler all the males."

  * * *

  Dr. Saddler had to fight her way off the subway train, as the adolescents who infest the platform of the B.M.T.'s Stillwell Avenue Station are probably the worst-mannered people on earth, possibly excepting the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. She didn't much mind. She was a tall, strongly built woman in her late thirties, who had been kept in trim by the outdoor rigors of her profession. Besides, some of the inane remarks in Swift's paper on occulturation among the Arapaho Indians had gotten her fighting blood up.

  Walking down Surf Avenue toward Brighton Beach, she looked at the concessions without trying them, preferring to watch the human types that did and the other human types that took their money. She did try a shooting gallery, but found knocking tin owls off their perch with a .22 too easy to be m
uch fun. Long-range work with an army rifle was her idea of shooting.

  The concession next to the shooting gallery would have been called a sideshow if there had been a main show for it to be a sideshow to. The usual lurid banner proclaimed the uniqueness of the two-headed calf, the bearded woman, Arachne the spider-girl, and other marvels. The piece de resistance was Ungo-Bungo the ferocious ape-man, captured in the Congo at a cost of twenty-seven lives. The picture showed an enormous Ungo-Bungo squeezing a hapless Negro in each hand, while others sought to throw a net over him.

  Although Dr. Saddler knew perfectly well that the ferocious ape-man would turn out to be an ordinary Caucasian with false hair on his chest, a streak of whimsicality impelled her to go in. Perhaps, she thought, she could have some fun with her colleagues about it.

  The spieler went through his leather-lunged harangue. Dr. Saddler guessed from his expression that his feet hurt. The tattooed lady didn't interest her, as her decorations obviously had no cultural significance, as they have among the Polynesians. As for the ancient Mayan, Dr. Saddler thought it in questionable taste to exhibit a poor microcephalic idiot that way. Professor Yogi's legerdemain and fire-eating weren't bad.

  A curtain hung in front of Ungo-Bungo's cage. At the appropriate moment there were growls and the sound of a length of chain being slapped against a metal plate. The spieler wound up on a high note: ". . . ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Ungo-Bungo!" The curtain dropped.

  The ape-man was squatting at the back of his cage. He dropped his chain, got up, and shuffled forward. He grasped two of the bars and shook them. They were appropriately loose and rattled alarmingly. Ungo-Bungo snarled at the patrons, showing his even yellow teeth.

  Dr. Saddler stared hard. This was something new in the ape-man line. Ungo-Bungo was about five feet three, but very massive, with enormous hunched shoulders. Above and below his blue swimming trunks, thick grizzled hair covered him from crown to ankle. His short stout-muscled arms ended in big hands with thick gnarled fingers. His neck projected slightly forward, so that from the front he seemed to have little neck at all.

  His face—Well, thought Dr. Saddler, she knew all the living races of men, and all the types of freaks brought about by glandular maladjustment, and none of them had a face like that. It was deeply lined. The forehead between the short scalp hair and the brows on the huge supraorbital ridges receded sharply. The nose, though wide, was not apelike; it was a shortened version of the thick hooked Armenoid or "Jewish" nose. The face ended in a long upper lip and a retreating chin. And the yellowish skin apparently belonged to Ungo-Bungo.

  The curtain was whisked up again.

  Dr. Saddler went out with the others, but paid another dime, and soon was back inside. She paid no attention to the spieler, but got a good position in front of Ungo-Bungo's cage before the rest of the crowd arrived.

  Ungo-Bungo repeated his performance with mechanical precision. Dr. Saddler noticed that he limped a little as he came forward to rattle the bars, and that the skin under his mat of hair bore several big whitish scars. The last joint of his left ring finger was missing. She noted certain things about the proportions of his shin and thigh, of his forearm and upper arm, and his big splay feet.

  Dr. Saddler paid a third dime. An idea was knocking at her mind somewhere, trying to get in; either she was crazy or physical anthropology was haywire or—something. But she knew that if she did the sensible thing, which was to go home, the idea would plague her from now on.

  After the third performance she spoke to the spieler. "I think your Mr. Ungo-Bungo used to be a friend of mine. Could you arrange for me to see him after he finishes?"

  The spieler checked his sarcasm. His questioner was so obviously not a—not the sort of dame who asks to see guys after they finish.

  "Oh, him," he said. "Calls himself Gaffney—Clarence Aloysius Gaffney. That the guy you want?"

  "Why, yes."

  "Guess you can." He looked at his watch. "He's got four more turns to do before we close. I'll have to asked the boss." He popped through a curtain and called, "Hey, Morrie!" Then he was back. "It's okay. Morrie says you can wait in his office. Foist door to the right."

  Morrie was stout, bald, and hospitable. "Sure, sure," he said, waving his cigar. "Glad to be of soivice, Miss Saddler. Chust a min while I talk to Gaffney's manager." He stuck his head out. "Hey, Pappas! Lady wants to talk to your ape-man later. I meant lady. Okay." He returned to orate on the difficulties besetting the freak business. "You take this Gaffney, now. He's the best damn ape-man in the business; all that hair really grows outa him. And the poor guy really has a face like that. But do people believe it? No! I hear 'em going out, saying about how the hair is pasted on, and the whole thing is a fake. It's mortifying." He cocked his head, listening. "That rumble wasn't no rolly-coaster; it's gonna rain. Hope it's over by tomorrow. You wouldn't believe the way a rain can knock ya receipts off. If you drew a coive, it would be like this." He drew his finger horizontally through space, jerking it down sharply to indicate the effect of rain. "But as I said, people don't appreciate what you try to do for 'em. It's not just the money; I think of myself as an ottist. A creative ottist. A show like this got to have balance and proportion, like any other ott—"

  It must have been an hour later when a slow, deep voice at the door said, "Did somebody want to see me?"

  The gnarly man was in the doorway. In street clothes, with the collar of his raincoat turned up and his hat brim pulled down, he looked more or less human, though the coat fitted his great sloping shoulders badly. He had a thick knobby walking stick with a leather loop near the end. A small dark man fidgeted behind him.

  "Yeah," said Morrie, interrupting his lecture. "Clarence, this is Miss Saddler, Miss Saddler, this is our Mister Gaffney, one of our outstanding creative ottists."

  "Pleased to meetcha," said the gnarly man. "This is my manager, Mr. Pappas."

  Dr. Saddler explained, and said she'd like to talk to Mr. Gaffney if she might. She was tactful; you had to be to pry into the private affairs of Naga headhunters, for instance. The gnarly man said he'd be glad to have a cup of coffee with Miss Saddler; there was a place around the corner that they could reach without getting wet.

  As they started out, Pappas followed, fidgeting more and more. The gnarly man said, "Oh, go home to bed, John. Don't worry about me." He grinned at Dr. Saddler. The effect would have been unnerving to anyone but an anthropologist. "Every time he sees me talking to anybody, he thinks it's some other manager trying to steal me." He spoke General American, with a suggestion of Irish brogue in the lowering of the vowels in words like "man" and "talk." "I made the lawyer who drew up our contract fix it so it can be ended on short notice."

  Pappas departed, still looking suspicious. The rain had practically ceased. The gnarly man stepped along smartly despite his limp. A woman passed with a fox terrier on a leash. The dog sniffed in the direction of the gnarly man, and then to all appearances went crazy, yelping and slavering. The gnarly man shifted his grip on the massive stick and said quietly, "Better hang on to him, ma'am." The woman departed hastily. "They just don't like me," commented Gaffney. "Dogs, that is."

  They found a table and ordered their coffee. When the gnarly man took off his raincoat, Dr. Saddler became aware of a strong smell of cheap perfume. He got out a pipe with a big knobbly bowl. It suited him, just as the walking stick did. Dr. Saddler noticed that the deep-sunk eyes under the beetling arches were light hazel.

  "Well?" he said in his rumbling drawl.

  She began her questions.

  "My parents were Irish," he answered. "But I was born in South Boston—let's see—forty-six years ago. I can get you a copy of my birth certificate. Clarence Aloysius Gaffney, May 2, 1910." He seemed to get some secret amusement out of that statement.

  "Were either of your parents of your somewhat unusual physical type?"

  He paused before answering. He always did, it seemed. "Uh-huh. Both of 'em. Glands, I suppose."

  "W
ere they both born in Ireland?"

  "Yep. County Sligo." Again that mysterious twinkle.

  She paused. "Mr. Gaffney, you wouldn't mind having some photographs and measurements made, would you? You could use the photographs in your business."

  "Maybe." He took a sip. "Ouch! Gazooks, that's hot!"

  "What?"

  "I said the coffee's hot."

  "I mean, before that."

  The gnarly man looked a little embarrassed. "Oh, you mean the 'gazooks'? Well, I—uh—once knew a man who used to say that."

  "Mr. Gaffney, I'm a scientist, and I'm not trying to get anything out of you for my own sake. You can be frank with me."

  There was something remote and impersonal in his stare that gave her a slight spinal chill. "Meaning that I haven't been so far?"