by Michael Shea
We surfaced. "Get well breathed, Ox," I said. "I'll hit the blisters the instant you touch the node and draw its arms out of the way. Breathe up."
Barnar nodded. He tied his sword to his floating pack. I wore mine for lurks, but Barnar was going to have both hands full. He emptied his lungs and filled them, each time more deeply. I did the same. We nodded our readiness, and went under.
We swam toward the polyp, dividing to hit it from opposite sides. I had to hang back till Barnar had drawn all its palps, and I watched as he swam in low and seized the node. All those bloodred palps whipped together and grabbed for him, faster than you'd believe anything could move under water. It bent like a bush that's suddenly lashed by a storm wind, and it had him by the neck, trunk and leg so suddenly that he could keep only one hand on the node and had to use the other to free his throat.
I went in. My contact with the thing was brief but still it made my skin crawl—for the thing was like stone that lived and moved. This toughness is what makes one's work so hard, for the things are unpierceable by any weapon. I pressed on either side of one of the blisters and the pearl popped out into the water like a seed squeezed from the ripe fruit. I tried to grasp it, but it kept squirting out of my fingers. Something hit me like a hammer between the shoulders. Catching the pearl with a lucky grab I crawfished madly through the mud, took two more bone-cracking blows on the shoulder, and was clear. I came up starving for air.
Barnar was still down there, a huge blur in the slit where the red arms were still striking like thresher's flails. I pocketed the pearl, took air, and went down. The two of them were deadlocked, because Barnar's one-hand grip on the node distracted just enough palps that he could bear, for a few moments, the assault of the rest. In the steppes he had taken a piece of rock-salt and crushed it in one hand—it was as big as a road-apple. But his lungs were surely fit to crack by now, while the polyp was not weakening. I swam in beside him and added both my hands to the node. It was just enough pain to loosen the rest of the thing's grip on my friend. We scrambled backwards. Something tore flesh from my face, and then I was free. Barnar boomed like a whale as he broke back into the air. We swam weakly to the mud bar and rested our upper bodies on it. I showed him the pearl. His face was torn in two places, the kind of raw, nasty wound one gets from rocks. My left cheek was a ruin. You see the scar of it here?
"Well," said Barnar, "high pay, hard work."
"True," I said. "Still, friend, this may be the hardest work I've ever done." And then we heard a movement, distinct, but perhaps a lagoon or two distant. We drew our swords and towed our bundles round into the adjoining pool. Some bushes atop the farther bar were still shaking. From the lagoon beyond came a flat striking sound, the tearing of water, and the grunts and panting of a man.
We swam to the bar and looked over. A smallish man was thrashing on the surface of the water, driving a spear beneath him against the bottom. Even as we watched his thrusts grew more methodical, and he calmed down. A thick fluid, denser than the water and green in color, was boiling up around him, mixed with bubbles.
I began to think I knew the man. He turned his spear round to prod something down there with its butt—the head showed green above his shoulder. Then he cursed, spat, and swam to the bar, where some bundles lay on the mud, and a sword hung in the bushes. I then remembered he had been at the trade fair at Shapur, where I had first learned of the pearl swamps. He had been in the room where a small group of friends of mine had been talking about poaching. He seemed not to have learned more of the matter than was spoken there, to judge by his spread-out gear. Your goods on a bank are like a promise to any archer squad that happens on them that you yourself are somewhere nearby, and they'll hound you out, even if you've managed to duck them first. As for the sword, even in the dull swamplight its sheath of chased bronze was as good as a signpost.
"I think I know him," I told Barnar. "Best join with him, eh? The work would be easier for three, and if he's not instructed he'll draw patrols into the area."
"All right," my friend said. "But he gets only a quarter share till he shapes up. Obvious amateur. I think he's just lost a partner."
He had indeed, as we saw as soon as we swam into his lagoon. We made gestures of peace. He turned his spearhead towards us and waited warily. Then we had eyes only for what lay under the water.
First, we saw that our polyp had been a small one. This pool was dominated by a nine-footer. Held in its palps was the body of another man, a big one. It was not the polyp, though, that had killed the man—and it was probably not his or his partner's inexperience either, but just bad luck. For a lurk as big as a mastiff also lay on the bottom, its fangs still hooked into the man's leg, its flat, eye-knobbed head broken and giving off a green cloud of body fluids. Lurks look just like spiders except the rear part of them isn't a fat, smooth sac—it's plated and ribbed, instead, like a beetle's body. Their poison balloons a man up a good one and a half times his size. Even allowing for that, the pale sausage of a man down there must have been big enough in life to make Barnar look normal.
Of the three things down there, only the polyp lived, and we learned something further in watching it as we swam past: the things have, amidst their palps, mouth parts for animal prey, and if left with a sufficiently inert body in their grip, they will devour it, though with a disgusting slowness. The polyp had the dead man's arm hugged tight in its arms and was working on the flesh with a slow rasping and plucking movement.
The little man's name was Kerkin. He remembered our meeting, and knew my name without being told, be it said with due modesty. He was no less impressed with the difficulties of this task than we were, and we reached partnership promptly. Kerkin's hopes would have been defeated without us, and he accepted a quarter share with humility. We gave him some cork and helped him remake his bundle.
"Look there!" he cried. The great polyp was thrashing convulsively. It had more purple in it to begin with than ours had—we were to learn that that was generally the color of the big ones. But now it was amazingly pale, almost white, and its rhythmic stiffening had a helpless, purposeless quality, as of sheer pain. In a short time, it slowed, and ceased to move at all.
"The lurk poison!" said Barnar. Of course that was it. The polyp's toughness would have laughed at the biggest lurk's direct assault. But the poison entered the creature handily through its tainted meal. The thing had four blisters, three of which had full sized pearls in them, the fourth a runt.
For a while we had a perfect poaching implement. We dragged the body of Kerkin's friend—his name had been Hasp—to several more lagoons. We found that if a polyp was jabbed forcibly in the node, it would attack and ultimately feed on the corpse we thrust into its arms. We took more than a dozen pearls this way, and then Hasp began to come to pieces—due not to the nibblings of the polyps, but to the lurk poison. The skeleton began to fragment and the skin to dissolve with terrible suddenness, filling the water with unwholesome, stringy clouds of corroded flesh. In a few moments the whole lagoon was transformed into a disgusting broth from which we swam with desperate haste, keeping our faces clear of the water. It killed two small polyps growing there, but we did not dive for their pearls.
The real labor re-commenced. While the takings were so easy Kerkin had begun to whine after all; Hasp was his partner, and we should share even thirds. Now that it was again a wrestling game he dropped this theme readily. We took three more pearls in the same time we had taken to make our first dozen. We climbed up onto a broad bar in the evening, too tired to eat the jerky in our packs. We worked our way into the bushes and lay like the dead—that is, Barnar and I. Kerkin had the first watch and in his excitement over the wealth we had already made, sleep was far from him. He would not even let me take mine. He showed his eagerness like an amateur, but I couldn't help seeing him with a friendly eye—he might have been a stupider version of myself at that age. So I talked with him awhile.
"Not a single flatboat did we see all day," he crowed. "So few peopl
e realize, Nifft, how clear it gets here for poaching at this season—of course if it got around they'd get poached so hard in the fall that they'd take action and the easy times would be over. But we are here now, that's the great thing!"
"You said its the Year King ceremony that caused it," I said. "So what's that all about then, friend Kerkin?"
Kerkin was eager to talk of this. In matters of the Queen's government his information far exceeded ours, and every man likes to be expert in something.
"The ceremony's called the god-making of the Year King. It means that the Queen ends his year's reign by immortalizing him, as they say." He paused and chuckled, and so I played along and asked:
"And how does she do that for him?"
"How else? She drains his body of every last drop of his blood, before the eyes of her assembled people. She's very thorough too, for she has to get all of it. If even a cup is lost to her, the charm of the blood is imperfect, and its magic fails."
"And what is its magic for her, Kerkin?"
"It erases from her body the entire year's aging! Of course like all great magic it carries a terrible penalty for failure in its execution. Starting from the sacred night, for every single night that she is in default of the Year King's blood, she will age an entire year. And this aging, if subsequently she repairs the charm, can never be erased; thereafter, the Year King's blood will restore her only to the age to which she advanced while in default. A month's default, you see, would then make a hag of her, and a hag she would stay ever after, with the charm reinstated."
Kerkin was a river of information, and I encouraged him to flow on—it does not hurt to gather what one can, when it's being offered free. The Queen's feeding was not confined to this yearly rite alone, though this was the bare minimum essential to her needs. She fed sporadically on random subjects—seldom fatally, to encourage her citizen's toleration. The natives of the swamp had received her as their ruler for over three hundred years now, because she had provided the necessary sorcery to expel the ghul, who are also originals of the swamp, and with whom the swampfolk have been immemorially at war.
Kerkin grew warm with his tale. We should kill a ghul, or take the lurk he'd killed, and go to Vulvula's palace to collect the bounty, he said. The great pyramid at the swamp's heart would be alive with folk. Think of the spectacle, and of the jest of being there with a fortune in poached pearls under our doublets! We could sneak a look at the doomed Year King in his chamber before the god-making, for the guards routinely granted a peek for a small bribe—it was almost a tradition. He rattled on, describing the labyrinthine interior of Vulvula's palace as if he knew it at first hand.
Poor Kerkin didn't live past noon of the next day. He fell behind us as we were seeking the day's second polyp. The first had taken all morning, nearly tired us to death and yielded only a runt. Kerkin didn't have our stamina, and swam in a tired daze. Having lost sight of us, he took a side-channel by mistake, and drifted off his guard into a pool he thought we had crossed ahead of him. The violent splashing he made in his misfortune brought us back. We were stunned by what we found. He had blundered into a very deep pool where grew a grandfather polyp so big it raised the hair of my nape—at least fifteen feet from root to palp-tips. And seemingly it hadn't waited provocation, but had seized Kerkin's dangling leg in palps thicker than his body. We got there just as it pulled him under. It enfolded his head between two immense palps and wrenched violently.
Kerkin's whole body spasmed as if lightning was going through it, then he hung from the thing's grip like a sodden log, and the polyp began to feed with a tearing and grinding that bared his armbone in a sickening few seconds. We did not even try to get the pearls off his body. We swam to a silt bar and crawled onto the mud.
We felt glum as a northern winter. Now our labors must increase, and we'd begun to appreciate the full range of accidents that could befall a man here. We counted our pearls again. We had enough to live well on for a year—enough to buy expensive magic from the best sorcerers; enough to buy women of the rarest accomplishments. But there was so much more all around us. You know the feeling. I was racked by it once before. I had just robbed the Earl of Manxlaw and was passing through his seraglio on my way out of his villa, in the dead of night. I was beckoned by a lovely thing. Reckless with success, I paused to serve her with a will. But as soon as I rose a half-dozen others had wakened, and they hotly persuaded me in whispers. I was profoundly moved. I felt filled with the power to stay there and serve them all. But I had a king's ransom in my bag, and left with a wrenching of the heart.
This was worse. The pearls are worth far more than gold by weight—a fortune of them is so marvelously portable for a man who lives on the move! Still, we stared at the dirty clouds and each of us waited for the other to be the first to suggest that we rest content with what we had.
"Well," I sighed, just to be saying something, "we have to thank the Queen for making this place as safe as it is. Think if we had ghuls here too!"
"At least they breathe air and have blood," Barnar growled. "They're not this nasty, mud-crawling kind of thing. Polyps, lurks, pah!" I was only half seeing him as he spoke, for at that moment a plan was being born in my mind. This plan was a thing of unspeakable beauty and finesse I was almost awed by my own ingenuity.
"By the Black Crack," I said quietly. "Barnar. I have an idea that will make us staggeringly rich. We must get that lurk Kerkin killed, and we must kill a ghul as well, and take them both to the pyramid of the Queen in time for the god-making of the Year King. Kerkin said that would be in five days. We can get there two days early at the least, and that will be perfect!"
III
You might pay me high and press me hard, but I couldn't say which was worse—killing a lurk in a lagoon with a seven-foot spear, or hunting a ghul in the black hills west of the swamps. We had to do both.
What? you'll say, we couldn't find that lagoon again? No, we found it fast enough. Our polyp had turned black, with half its palps fallen off. The lurk was there too. Unfortunately, its whole hind section had been eaten away. We were saved the trouble at least of hunting out another lurk, because it was another lurk that had eaten the dead one's body away, and it was still right there. I hope my fate never again puts such a sight as that before my eyes, black as the mud it crouched on, and looking half as big as the whole pond bottom. I was swimming lead because I was quicker with the spear, and that thing came straight up off its meal at me.
Now as to the spear, it was luck we'd met Kerkin and had it all, but two feet should have been sawn off its haft and the thing should have been rebalanced for aquatic use. The thing was too unwieldy, what with the water's drag. If I hadn't been carrying it head down under water, despite the way it slowed my swimming, I would have died right there. That lurk's fangs were as long as my forearms and before I could even react they were close enough to my thighs for me to count the thorny hairs they were covered with. I had time only to brace my arms—the lurk's own thrust carried him up and pushed the spearhead through the flat part of his body, amongst all those black, knobby eyes. I clung to that spear-haft like an ant to straw in a hurricane, and the buck of that big hell-spider lifted me so far out of the water that I was standing on top of it for an instant.
A handy thing about lurks is that all their hard parts are outside, and these by themselves are not very heavy. They will even moult like snakes, and when they do they leave entire perfect shells of themselves, light as straw. This lurk was a monster, big as a pony, but when we'd bled it we reduced it to half its weight. We milked the bulk of its poison out too—the bushes where it splattered yellowed and died before our eyes.
We towed the carcass out of the swamps to the foothills we had entered from the day before. We scrounged enough dead scrub to make a fire in an arroyo. We found that by slitting the abdomen and shoving coals and heated rocks inside, the rest of its guts could be liquefied and drained out. We worked over it the rest of the day and finally had reduced both parts of the body to
a bare husk, mere shells of a tough, flexible stuff that was too dark to reveal its hollowness. The whole thing now weighed no more than a small man, though it was unwieldy. We lashed it to the spear and carried it between us like game. We carried it all night, moving toward the hills in the west.
By dawn we had reached them. Here the ghuls have retreated, to lurk near the swamp, just outside the reach of Vulvula's sorcery. We hid the lurk in a gully and covered it with stones, even though nothing will eat a lurk but another lurk, and they seldom leave the water. We found a place to sleep nearby, well hidden though ghuls never come out in the day. They hunt at night, and we slept till then, for that's the time they must be hunted too.
The things can only be pierced through the sternum, which is narrow, while their backward-folding knees give them the quickness and dodging power of hares. You know me as a man who'll take your money at any kind of a javelin match, but for ghuls I ask a good clear set and a chance to launch before it knows I'm there.
We tried an unusual approach. It was Barnar's plan, and a lovely piece of wit it was. He spun it out of the well-known melancholy of ghuls. They frequently commit suicide by flinging themselves against Vulvula's barriers—one finds them, it's said, hanging dead in mid-air, snared in the Queen's invisible nets of power, and crawling with the blue worms which her spell engenders in its victims. Barnar reasoned that given this sad temperament, a ghul would believe a man claiming to have come to him seeking death.
