by Michael Shea
It had been weeks since we had swallowed anything but our own spit. The first draught I took from the flask Gildmirth brought us was a shock close to pain. Sweet sensation raged like flame in my fossilized mouth and gullet. The second draught was uncompounded bliss. All in my vision wore new radiance, as if the wine had bathed my horror-scorched eyes. Speaking of the first thing I fixed on, I marveled inanely: "What beautiful instruments! Do you play them all?"
The wall to the left of the fireplace was hung with a great variety of them, their lacquered wood, silver strings, brazen keys all gleaming with magic in my eyes. The Privateer's glance at them was odd, perhaps ironic.
"Some of them. Not all are mine. Please finish that my friends, here is another—I know how pleasant it must taste. Shall we view our destination? We can see it from the end of the table. May I borrow a harpoon, Nifft?"
He led us to the edge of his island. "It's not too distant from here," he said, sinking the steel barb toward a point not quite half the map's length from the model of the manse. Barnar and I marveled anew at the little landscape as we shared the second flask. It seemed a wonderland, and ourselves lucky titans whom some enchantment would shortly enable to shrink and enter it, and there disport ourselves by probing the crests and gulfs of its barbaric grandeur. The bright barb hovered near a cluster of very sharply rising peaks.
"These four steep-sided mountains that you see here," Gildmirth said, "overtop the water. Their peaks form the islands that we'll be anchoring near. And this chasm half-circling the base of the mountain-cluster. The only feature of this map that is not to scale is the depth of this gulf. It's the Great Black Rifft, and its depth cannot be ascertained, for it goes all the way down to the Secondary Subworld. Its perimeter is a scene of intense demonic activity. And here, quite near, is a major bonshad territory, in fact the only large aggregation of them I've ever found."
We had drained the second flask. The factitious lustre and charm which the wine had shed on the whole grim project was so far from having worn off that it seemed to me I heard a faint, delicious music as my eyes roamed the miniature ocean floor.
"What light will we search by?" I heard Barnar ask. I still heard the music—a minute sound, it seemed properly scaled to belong to the miniature realm I was still peering into.
"Near the Rifft there is light in plenty. Few parts of the sea floor lack some kind of a poison glow to work by, but there—well, it is as you will see. We must prepare."
Gildmirth returned me my harpoon and turned away with an abruptness that would have startled me had not an unmistakably audible fragment of music already done so—one isolated, silvery arpeggio. It came from inside the manse, somewhere on this level, though from what point was hard to tell amid the hollow, many-chambered grieving of the sea against the walls.
Gildmirth jumped off the table's shallow end and waded toward the wall on the side of the fireplace opposite that on which the instruments hung. From the miscellany of gear displayed here he took down what looked like some fishing net tied in a bundle. This he tossed onto the table. "Gildmirth!" I cried. "Do you hear the music? Strings?"
The Privateer turned back to the wall and took down from it a monstrous broadsword—nine feet long at least, pommel to point. This too he laid on the table, ignoring me still.
By now I heard the music much less brokenly, finding its melodic line engraved more sharply now in the shapeless oceanic echoes. Lute music . . . no, shamadka. On each plangent string of it I could now discriminate individually the clustered notes sweetly ripening under the musician's provocative dexterity. Wanderingly, it wove nearer, meandering through lush elaborations while yet never lacking elan, a backbone of stark and resonant melancholy. Such music! With the shock you might feel to discover that one of your limbs—long unnoticed by yourself in any context—suppurates transfixed by a dirk already rusting in its lodgment. I realized that music's utter absence up till now had been a sharp and crippling part of the subworld's tormenting ugliness, a wound I'd lacked the mental leisure to note that I had, and bled from.
It was now clear Gildmirth heard the music, and willfully ignored both it and us. We watched him as impassively as we could, loath to seem we felt entitlement to anything he did not choose to offer. He approached the wall a third time, and took down a very small, dishlike craft, no more than one man might stand knee-deep in. It had no more than a slight flattening for a stern, and the gentlest tapering for a prow. On either side of the latter two indentations marked the vessel's rim. A moment's looking identified these as the edges of two eye-sockets, and the craft as a whole as a cranial dome sawn from some huge skull. Setting this on the water, Gildmirth made a shooing gesture; the skull-skiff slid round the table and nudged itself against the stern of our boat.
The music had grown distinct, directional; it poured—long rills of it now—into the hall through a wide doorway in the left-hand wall. Gildmirth remounted the table, his eyes blank to ours. Taking the bundle onto our boat he unbound and began anchoring it to the boom. It was a net. Through the left-hand doorway, a shamadka came gliding like a tiny ship—the polished bowl its bows, the silver strings its rigging—full to overflowing with its cargo of music.
The instrument was strangely festooned with what at first seemed a sea vine, shaggy purplish stalks draping both bowl and fretboard. But almost at once we realized their supple muscularity, and that it was their caress extracting these limpid euphonies from the shamadka. A voice began to sing, a soprano that was icy-sweet like children's temple choirs:
What man in wealth excels my lover's state?
He hath no cause to dread lest others find
Where all his mountained spoil doth fecundate,
His breeding gold that spawneth its own kind
And sprawleth uncomputed, unconfined!
The Privateer was still anchoring the netting to the boom, his eyes remotely overseeing his patient fingers. As the singing continued the shamadka coasted through a dreamy curve toward the table, disgorging treasures of polyphony under the intricate coercion of the things embracing it, tough, snake-muscled things despite their looking nerveless as drenched plumes, with the water swirling and billowing their silky shag.
For what argosies of argosies,
Though numberless they churned the seas,
And endlessly did gorge their holds
With loot from his lockless vaults of gold,
Could make him rue their paltry decrement?
His eyes these dunes of splendors desolate—
They've scorched his palate for emolument,
And they make him call `a tomb' his vast estate.
Gildmirth was methodically lashing the great broadsword and its harness beneath the portside gunwale. His eyes, still fixed on his task, looked as red as fresh blood. The water chuckled. We turned and looked our minstrel in the face.
It trailed astern of the instrument, where a flabby, tapered sack of skin ballooned along just under the surface. Near its peak this bruise-colored bag of flesh—bald as bone and blubber-soft—was puckered into a jagged-rimmed crater. Half cupped in this and half leaking into a maze of bays and channels branching from it, was the being's eye—a viscous, saffron puddle all starred within by black, pupillary nodes that burgeoned, coalesced, diminished or multiplied by fissure into smaller wholes, their evolution as incessant as the whole eye's melting flux within its mazy orbit.
A mouth the thing had as well, down near the juncture of the skin-sack with the tentacular fronds. It was an obese blossom of multiple lips like concentrically packed petals. All of them moved, and you couldn't pinpoint among them the exact source of their utterance.
A face you had to call it, though the stomach rebelled, and, for all the ambiguity of the features, it was a poisonously expressive face, always conveying something searching and sardonic in the way its pupillaries constellated. A veritable chorus of derisive smiles rippled across its lips as it sang on.
In beauties what man is my lover's peer?
For, as in gold, so is he rich in graces.
None hath a form so various and rare,
Nor charm that shineth from so many faces.
Gildmirth, still sedate and unattending, had stepped into the skull-bone skiff floating alongside the boat. He stood serenely as this bore him toward the wall of instruments. His whole manner had the absolute concentration of a veteran gladiator's moves in a close fight, and certainly this was a duel he had been fighting for many scores of years, his own sanity always the prize at stake. The little cyclops pursued its song, giving it an ever more voluptuous prolongation of tempo and articulation:
Mayhap another's eyes are stars—both clear
as diamonds are—still they are but a pair!
My love's as constellations blaze
Wherefrom a host of figures gaze
Whose features are so manifold
That tongue must leave them unextolled. . . .
But past this point, where the voice's honeyed languor deepened, mellowed toward diapason, the verses were lost to us, for a tenor squallpipe which Gildmirth had musingly taken from the wall here commenced a traditional South-Kolodrian jump-up. It was a vigorously impudent piece, even brisker than most of its ilk, the melody overlaid with irresistibly nimble and saucy fugal embellishments. The Privateer's fingering was consummate and his coloration, in a hundred different shades of irresponsible levity, was unerring. He had keyed his tune to the demon's, and while the phrasing of the two pieces was entirely incongruous, Gildmirth's had an accent whose stresses erratically coincided with the demon's, to produce a variety of emphatic discordances. Between these points of energetic collision, the jump-up's busy note-swarms ran amok in the roomy, pompous resonances of the Demon's lyrics, trampling his words past comprehension. They thronged through the shamadka's extravagant architecture of moods like a convivial mob of ne'er-do-wells who heedlessly affront refined environs by engaging in a perfect orgy of gaffes, crass conversation, accidental vase-breaking and crude personal habits.
Neither duellist faltered for an instant; each wove his half of the mismatch with unflawed continuity. Gildmirth seamlessly grafted a medley of other jump-ups onto his tune's conclusion as the demon prolonged the coda of its piece. The tumult of impacting notes was like swordplay, their relentless profusion chilling me with the thought that such a combat could be protracted to inhuman lengths, while we must wait however long it took the Privateer to fight his way out of danger.
And just then the music stopped. First the demon, and then Gildmirth swerved into ingeniously improvised resolutions, and stilled their instruments. For a moment none of us moved. We listened to the surfnoise as it repossessed the huge building. Slick as snail-bellies, the tentacles unwove from the shamadka till one plume only touched it. With this the demon pushed it underwater till its bowl filled, and it sank.
Then the demon lay almost inert. Its lax fronds, floating frontally extended, made slight, teasing undulations in Gildmirth's direction. At length it cocked its peak more upright. Its optic jelly regarded the Privateer, the honey-colored corpulence sagging and beginning to branch through its ragged socket. The steady sloth of this process put me in mind of a sand-clock's drainage. Pupillary buds began multiplying in the jelly's central depths, converging like glittery, dark hornets to torment the man with their scrutiny. Smiles and smirks of coquettish reprimand rippled out over the multifoliate mouth like water-rings fleeing a dropped stone.
"My precious pet!" it fluted. "Still so untidy? Oh gentlemen!"—the eye now swung to us, pupillaries scattering to read us separately—"My stubborn little plum-eyed poppet here, he will not tidy up! I tell him if he's going to stay somewhere, he ought to tidy up. He's supposed to be a man of consequence or was long ago at least. He's told me so at any rate. Just listen. What's your name? Are you still who you said yesterday you were?" The pupil-swarm recondensed, gnawed busily at the Privateer's impassive face.
"I am, oh Spaalgish weft, the man you well know me be. I am Gildmirth of Sordon-Head in southern Kolodria, also called the Privateer."
"Still this Gildmirth, today as well? What about tomorrow?"
"I am who I have been, and I'll remain so, while I live."
The Spaalg abandoned this seemingly ritual banter as abruptly as it had opened it. Plumes swirling, it whipped round in the water, and traveled squidlike, in head-first zig-zags to hang above the map of the seafloor. From here it resumed its fretful confidings to Barnar and myself:
"This exquisite map for instance, see how he leaves it sunken. How are all his guests and visitors to read it there? As it is, only he himself, when he swims out to play in other shapes, can consult it conveniently. And he has no need to do so. When the gorging lust has been on him he's gotten as intimately familiar with the seafloor as the well-known louse in the proverb got with the bumps on the drunkard's arse. I'm sure that in sum my precious pet has spent more years groping on alien feet across these hills and plains"—it let the tip of one languid plume sink, and drew it ticklingly across the facsimile terrain—"than any alleged Gildmirth ever spent in any such a place as this so called Sordon-Head that he clings to in his stubborn fantasy. My goodness though. . . ." Its voice deepened with musing to the sound of a well-seasoned old wood-horn, and the caressing plume scribbled graceful whimsies on the map. "Whatever the name of the man who made this map, what a swaggering little pup he must have been, don't you think? I mean, did he expect to finish it? And fit it all in this room? How callow! What a dwarfish conception! This is not genuine scholarship! Real research is a coming-to-grips with phenomena. This, as a transcription of the ocean's infinitely various text, is a fraud, an egregious counterfeit, which partly reduces the Primary Sea's endlessness to a cozy finitude, such as it pleased this puny entity to regard it, for he must have had but a feeble stomach for enterprise of a dark or difficult kind. Why indeed, behold! It was some dwarf, for is not this little city over here his former habitation?"
The Spaalg flashed through another turn, and hung buoyed above the Privateer's architectural micropolls. The fact that the creature was a Spaalg, when I learned it, had meant little to me beyond the fact that the breed was relatively insignificant in terms of the threat they posed as predators on humankind. The conventional expression "dimwebbers, meeps, and ropy spaalgs," connoting the whole class of minor demonry, told me this much. But now, watching that plumed slug—swift and graceful as a fine-muscled cloud of oil—pour one lithe tickler down into a little agora, and tease with its membraneously tufted tip the minutely fluted columns of a colonnade no higher than a gold kairnish half-nilling set on edge—watching the Spaalg doing this, I recalled another jot of information. Undle Nine-fingers refers to them somewhere as being "vermicles," which, in his nomenclature, designates the class of demons that are internally parasitic upon their prey. A cold squirming, originating from some point in the back of my head, made a fast, nasty trip down my back. Gildmirth's body was so solid—square and hale. Did his composure mask the deep gall of worm-work, neat, lethal tunnelings serving somehow as the pathways of this Spaalg's influence within him?
The Spaalg, keying up now to melodious contempt, continued. "How touching, in a way! Such diminutive presumption, such minuscule pomp! Such an imperious fellow too, this tit-bit tyrant. Things would be thus and so, done this way, that way, and this other way"—the plume flicked silkily among the toy rooftops—"in precisely that order, and immediately! How could such a proud-ling fail to deem his ambitious appetite too large for less than empire to sate? So innocent he was of the endless, orgiastic feast of exploration and discovery he was proposing for himself. The poor tot! He elbowed his way up to the table, and now he is surely gorging still, willy-nilly, on that stupendous repast. I'll wager his sides are splitting with the meal's abundance. And surely by now, through the ages of his engorgement with this—to him—alien universe, the bubble of whatever self he formerly had—so briefly and so long before—has burst, and is less to him now than the idlest imagining. Oh dear! Look! Oh, most horrible! De
facement unspeakable!"
The Spaalg's body-sausage folded, thrusting its eye from the water, the pupillaries cohering toward a painting across the room, one of Gildmirth's rather grandiose self-chroniclings in oils. "What has befallen my babekin now?" Its voice had a grieving crack in it, "His face! What obscene infections have obliterated it?"
The demon sped to the picture. Lifting and fanning out its plumes upon the canvas, it slid caressingly up its surface, holding its body arched upward to gaze pityingly at the encrusted canvas it climbed.
It might have chosen any of the other pictures, for in all of them the Privateer's face showed the same staining, erosion and motley overgrowth as marked the rest of the imagery. The scene the Spaalg unctuously ascended appeared to involve some wizardly ceremony of subjugation performed by Gildmirth upon a shadowy knot of manacled demons. A large, metallic gladiator's net enveloped the subworlders. There was a chain attached to the drawstring closing the net's mouth, and the figure of Gildmirth held its free end firmly with several bights wrapped round the wrist for surer purchase. It was all crazily dappled and blurred with tidal growths, but their obscuration didn't quite look like an impartial vegetable proliferation. To some extent it seemed to edit, to revise the painted forms. You could just make out how Gildmirth had made his face sternly judicial, brows threatening storm, while the netted crew had a crouched and huddled posture as a whole. But now, bright lichens highlighted and contorted his cheeks and brow while a diffuse smokiness of fine black moss darkened mouth, eyes and throat-hollow to a necrotic black. On his arms the oils themselves, crumbling and damp, suggested tomb-flesh. No longer the solemn arbiter, he now stood in horror and recoil, a mortally damaged moribund. The hand that had been painted as reaching magisterially toward a table stocked with some kind of instruments, or texts perhaps, was now plunged into a plane of indecipherable dark shapes, and shadow had erased his hand along with what it sought. Meanwhile the demons' net was half-dissolved and their postures, due to subtle re-emphases and re-delineations, glowered, and crouched more as if to spring than cringe. In the revised work, the chain seemed more Gildmirth's fetter than a leash he held.
