The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  The lofty rampway became the focus of many a festive gathering of friends. Anvilians began to make a pastime of congregating on the acropolis or out on the field before the north wall to eat, drink, disport themselves with music and dancing—all the while rejoicing in that magical, miniaturized activity upon the peak which was so steadily and painlessly reducing the lethal menace that had for so many weeks overhung their rooftops.

  Therefore when, on the morning of the eleventh day, things went awry, it was before the complacent gaze of thousands of such happy spectators. The first panicked contingents of workmen reached the city with the news half an hour after the catastrophe had begun to develop, and even by this time the city at large had not yet grown alarmed. At the most, a certain hyperactivity on the part of the scarcely perceptible swarms of workmen had been here and there observed, and some people had thought they noted a faintly erratic quality enter the movements of the flock. By the time the disaster bad been reported throughout the city, its effects were just becoming visible. The rampway was beginning to sag and buckle, and little avalanches of loose earth had begun to stream down the neck of the mountain. An ever-growing efflux of panicked citizens began to swell the near-hysterical multitude thronging the meadow round the Flockwarden.

  The flock had run amok. They had not only abandoned their orderly feeding pattern round the outermost edges of the peak, but they had begun a restless, almost rhythmic milling about on the ramp which had already caused a vibrational break-up of its pilings. Worst of all, several dozen of the beasts had turned their ruinous appetites upon the naked metal of the already bent mountain spine itself. This last news almost caused the assembled Anvilians themselves to run amok.

  Dame Lybis had stepped within the hieratic screen to perform an emergency Solicitation of aid and enlightenment, and she had not yet emerged when the entire rampway was seen to collapse, and the monstrous peak itself bow down a farther heart-freezing three yards. The mutinous giants were already tumbling down the slopes when the roar of this ruin fell upon the ears of the multitude. Eternal moments unfolded during which the peak—universally, breathlessly regarded—settled no farther. Meanwhile, the indestructible behemoths, having ceased their uncontrolled plunge down the slope, began to extricate themselves from the jumbled jack-straws of the fallen timbers and sluggishly—unwillingly, one might have said—to assemble and descend the rest of the way to the city. It was then Dame Lybis emerged from her colloquy with the Flockwarden and proclaimed what she had learned. The Goddess, who for some days had exerted her control of the flock with ever-growing difficulty, had at last become exhausted with the effort, and the mammoth brutes had slipped her control. It was only through the most titanic efforts that she was now reasserting her government sufficiently to bring them back down to the plain.

  IX

  Sexton Minor, on every feature of whose face was stamped distaste for his mission, walked into the forge room of one of Anvil's larger foundries, which stood not far from the main gate in the north wall. He threaded his way through it, vainly shouting requests for attention from various of the thousand sweating devils producing the fire and brain-numbing clangor that made his efforts so futile. Each man moved like a single, task-concentrated muscle in the toiling body politic of the desperate city. The feeding-ramp had to be rebuilt around the peak, presuming the priestess' current efforts to secure some kind of aid from the Flockwarden produced a remedy for the flock's sudden recalcitrance. To ponder in the interval whether she would provide a remedy—indeed, to ponder whether the enfeebled arm of the mountain-hammer would hold long enough to permit remedy—was far more agonizing than even the most infernal labors, and every smith and furnaceman was demon-eyed with his absorption in his work upon the braces, bolts, collars, groinings and crossbeams the new ramp was going to require. Sexton Minor wove his way, glaring resentfully at every hiss of steel in tempering tub, every gasp of a down-draft forge—as at some intentional impertinence.

  In one corner he found a smith snatching a nap atop his anvil while his forge was a-heating. The man was curled peacefully on his side, his ankles neatly crossed upon the anvil's horn, his head on his palms. Minor could see that a forge-hammer leaned against the wall just beyond the man. He shook the smith awake. The man, balding and tuft-jowled, gaped glassily as Minor bellowed in his ear: "There has been a new oracle. Dame Lybis sends me here to get a forge-hammer. Give me your hammer!"

  Having shouted this, Minor stood tight-lipped in the inscrutable majesty of his office, trusting that the man's sleep-drugged amazement would procure him the hammer without the pain of further howling. The man rolled off the anvil and fetched him the hammer. Minor, mistaking the weight of the tool which the knotted arm tendered him by the handle-tip as one might a spoon, gave his arm a painful wrench in taking it.

  His eyes only lost the look of pain this put in them when he raised them, upon exiting the main gate, and viewed the Flockwarden's grotesque, jerry-built encasement. Scaffolding now enveloped the glass block. Lybis, still robed for the Solicitation, stood about two-thirds of the way up the vertical maze. She was attended not only by the detested acolyte Krekkit but by Aristarchs Pozzle, Hamp, and Smalling. The entire population spread upon the plain, though its flock-ward border stayed well withdrawn from those unpredictable beasts. The Sexton appeared to derive little pleasurable sense of consequence from this fact. Nifft received the hammer from him and passed it up to workers higher on the scaffold. He grasped Minor's shoulder encouragingly.

  "Be comforted, honest Minor. Can't you see, from the way she treats the Aristarchs, that there's no way to win if you argue with her eccentric demands: Confront it, friend—she enjoys rubbing your set's faces in your covert cynicism toward the Goddess all these years. I mean, it's an unlovely, vengeful act, but surely understandable in someone who's been dedicated to a covertly ridiculed mystery for years?"

  "There was simply no need to insist on a used forge-hammer, especially if one light blow is sufficient for the job," the Sexton sulked. But the Priestess now had the hammer, and despite his professed scorn, Minor seemed to catch some of that breath of apprehension which swept faintly through the entire multitude at that moment.

  In the manner—oddly, under the circumstances—of one who gives comfort, Nifft said: "Oh, I'm sure it will do the job, Minor. If she can trace the deepest mountain-bones from where she lies, she can surely find one faint seam of critical weakness in her own coffin? Come, come. The Goddess is about to be, in her own term, `divested.' Ye gods, Minor, wasn't that a rousing set of lines—I mean for their expressiveness, apart from its import to all of us."

  Nifft cocked his head back appreciatively, like one about to recite some admired verses. It was unlikely that the Sexton was going to hear him, for at this moment he watched fascinated as Lybis, with an address surprising in one of her diminutive stature, was hoisting the hammer above her shoulder, hefting for the swing. Nifft, instead of reciting, pointed to one of the copies of the latest oracle, which had already been posted throughout the city, scant hours after its delivery. He read aloud from it:

  Can shackled Mistress bind and rule her slave?

  Unsheathe my limbs, so long the air denied—

  (Lybis now carefully took a wide-legged stance, and calculatingly applied the hammer nose to the ribbon-circled spot of any impact's maximum disruptive effect upon the glass.)

  —Divest me, that my power, which never died

  Might flow undammed, as when, before the grave

  Did cover me, I governed in my pride!

  The priestess slowly drew back the hammer for a second time above her head, and swung the steel slug lustily to the marked spot. A dull, disappointingly flat whack echoed over the heads of the crowd. The people roared softly. The entire crystalline vitrolith had grown milky, utterly opaque. And then it collapsed—smoothly as dry, heaped sand, it rivered off the giant, alien frame.

  The scaffolding had been built rigid and close to the block, in order that it might catch and at least p
artially sustain the Flockwarden's pithless remains once their support should have fallen away. The precaution was needless. The Flockwarden did not fall. She stood springily upon her jointed legs, and her iridescent wings delicately essayed the air.

  The noise this raised from the crowd was such that it brought Nifft's head around in sudden, surprised appraisal. For the outcry was a curiously relief-tinged groan, as might greet a thing that has been all but foreknown. The Flockwarden's wind-spawning wings sped up. They were now scarcely visible, yet for all their power of vibration they did not even graze the narrowness of her enclosure. Smoothly vertical she rose, and cleared the box of scaffolding. Smoothly across the plain she moved, bearing the message of her mastery directly to her refractory herd.

  And as her assault commenced, her mastery proved never for a moment to be contested by the swinish giants. It seemed a strangely ritualistic scourging she gave them, too—not to all of them, but to perhaps a hundred individuals, one after the other. Over each of these she hovered, and bowed downward—dead contrary to her tapered abdomen's normal bent—her caudal prong. This she thrust into the beast beneath her, and thus linked, she did no more than hang in the air a moment, her body shuddering rhythmically. Then she unanchored herself and flew to another, seemingly randomly chosen member of her flock.

  When at length she returned from the scourging, the Goddess seemed dreadfully enfeebled. She wobbled in her flight, and in settling on the grass not far from her shattered coffin, her legs buckled under her on her left side, and her head drooped.

  It was soon learned from Lybis that the city's benefactress lay in grave weakness, and her life—that long-kept secret—was waning within mere hours after its last, long-prepared for vital service. It was not known how long she might survive, and the only assurance she could give the city was that the flock was, at least for now, subdued, and would return to work when the ramp was ready. Her beasts would in any case be showing a marked slowing down, as they were nearing their natural calving-season, but while they approached that period, they should at least obediently—if not energetically—pursue their task.

  At least, they should do so while the FIockwarden lived. Their possible behavior if she should die became a matter of terrified conjecture. A great pavilion was erected over the Goddess. Her moribund vastness was constantly visited by the piously solicitous townsfolk, and an outdoors shrine blazed with votive candles as the indoor one had never done. A further oracle was besought, and given.

  In her pronouncements, there were some dim foreshadowings of what aid the city might seek in the melancholy event of the Goddess' demise. These could be read on any street in town, as the posting of the oracles had become at this point an invariable procedure:

  My life doth gutter, darken toward its close.

  If death my governance of the flock o'erthrows,

  One there is, not far from here, whose name

  His ancient nearness to our city shows—

  Pastur. His tomb I'll teach you, should the flame

  Of my remaining life grow yet more dim.

  Before that time I nothing will disclose

  Lest some too greedy man uncover him

  And use the buried giant for selfish aim—

  Vain consequence and power—for among those

  I shared my world with, Pastur could dispose

  Their giant bulks to suit his lightest whim;

  He drove them as he listed, unopposed

  By me or mine, who cowered when he came.

  X

  The herd resumed its lofty pasturage, but in a manner that nourished among Anvilians gloomy speculations on the Goddess' diminishing strength. The flock's obedience was sluggish, balky, and its appetite was dull. Apart from the approach of its breeding season, some of this torpor seemed a plain token of its warden's wavering life-flame. No one could bring himself to seek the abatement of the beasts' remedial labors, nor could they allow themselves to contemplate the result of a second anarchic frenzy, should such again possess them. So throughout a two-week agony of ambivalence, the citizens stared themselves dizzy at the thronging rampway, and in that time saw the lapsed peak's bulk dwindle by inches to a mass that was still more than two-thirds what it had originally had—and this supported by a spine rather less than the same fraction of its original thickness.

  And then the flock abandoned its work en masse. The city woke one morning to find the peak deserted, and the plain outside the north wall again encamped with the motionless colossi.

  The populace had soon thronged the walls and the ground outside them to view the prodigious biological event that was occurring out on the plain. It had soon become evident that far more than half the flock were females. Perhaps four hundred of the mammoth livestock on the sward were seen, by noon, to be engaged in the generative process.

  The promised breeding was unquestionably in progress. Each female, after establishing a caudal link with the soil for at least an hour, inched her tail-tip up from the earth, hoisting its rubbery apical mouth from around what she had so laboriously, and with so many a shudder, been implanting: a shining, white, ribbed ellipsoid with a barbed peak—and, presumably, barbed tail, the which was snugly planted in the earth, and must have been what permitted the wobbling anchorage that each newly deposited egg exhibited as it rolled lazily with the assaults of the onshore winds that arose at dusk. Each of the giant cows produced a minimum of a dozen eggs, and several huge old cows produced more than fifty apiece.

  The egg-laying marked the beginning of an alarming decline in the Flockwarden's already diminished vitality. She had been lying with her legs half folded under her, her abdomen more tightly curved above her than it had been during her endless immurement in the glass. Her antennae were almost her only active part. They could he seen to move in feeble conference with the veiled priestess during the several non-oracular communions Lybis held with her, during which she acquainted the priestess with the state of her diminishing vigor. Now, however, the Flockwarden's great head hung forward, and her major antennae trailed almost touching the ground. They could be seen to stir now and again. The priestess, prevented by the Goddess' posture from a full and formal Solicitation, could do no more to ease the tormented hearts of her townsfellows than assure them that the Flockwarden, should death truly come for her, would rouse herself a last time on behalf of her human flock (as, said Lybis, the Goddess had come to regard the Anvilian's) and speak again, imparting to them the cue to their salvation—the means of raising the giant from the past to work their deliverance.

  During this suspension of the herd's activity—for though they milled restively from time to time, they were generally almost comatose, each cow standing stupidly, flanking her egg-cluster—the city agonized ceaselessly over the oracular implication that the beasts were indeed capable of a second anarchic outburst if the Goddess should die. An assault upon the city itself was not thought impossible. Within four days of the egg-laying the Aristarchs had dwelt so vociferously upon this topic that a plan was developed, in concert with Kandros and his staff, for the city's defense in the event this hair-raising possibility should eventuate.

  As the powerlessness of stone to oppose the advance of the flock was the original cause of worry, ramparts or other vertical barriers were discounted at the outset—they would go down too quickly, by mere pressure alone, unless the town should be given an unlikely amount of time for construction on a major scale. A great, straight-walled trench was deemed the best thing to slow them, and the digging was commenced by truly massive gangs of conscripted citizens, working side by side with the mercenaries and swelling their numbers to an extent that made it possible to finish the trench in less than a week. It ran almost a mile and a half, dividing the north wall from the little plain. It was more than a hundred feet broad, and as many deep, and from its inner, wallward lip a thick palisade of spike-tipped timbers projected at an angle above the pit, wherefrom the defenders could harrass the ascent of the besiegers. A short time after this impressive
feat of engineering was accomplished, while gangs of grimed Anvilians still lolled in the parks and squares of the city, numbly awaiting the next dreadful exigency that should come to rouse them to maniacal efforts, the priestess sent out a city-wide summons to a Solicitation—for the Flockwarden had lifted her antennae, and feebly besought the oracle's attendance. It appeared this might be the Goddess' last revelation for her human flock. There was the more reason for hasty attendance, the message added, in that the eggs of the flock were beginning to hatch, and the congregated giants showed signs of waking from their torpor—indeed, showed signs of advancing upon Anvil itself.

  When Lybis emerged from the Veil, her pallor, and the cold, impassioned determination on her face were such as to distract the populace for some moments from the dreadful organic unfoldings out on the plain, a short quarter mile beyond the just-completed trench.

  "The Goddess, The Flockwarden, is dead. Long live the Goddess! Long live the Flockwarden!"

  With a vast, low grumble, the multitude repeated her words—a hopeless outcry of shocked piety, for all now saw what, in their absorption flockward, they had missed: the Flockwarden's slack neck, her antennae like dead pythons on the grass.

  "We have done well to defend ourselves," Lybis said, gesturing toward the spike-rimmed ditch. "They will advance—they begin already, do you see? Those which are hatching now—soon they too will advance. Watch them. Give me your ears only while you watch them. View what threatens us—behold in all its meaning the calamity that descends on us, while I speak its remedy in your ears. And then upon your own heads let it be if, after hearing, you do not spur hell-bent directly and speedily to accomplish the great labor which must purchase that remedy."