by Michael Shea
And so she brought her tablet from her pouch, and read the Goddess' last oracle to the city. As she read, they watched the plain, whereupon there was much to be seen. For though all the flock's eggs were identical—each the size of a four-passenger coach, tapered top and bottom, identically ribbed and colored—two radically different kinds of creature were erupting from their rupturing husks.
The most numerous of these were clearly infants of the flock. Though their leg-clusters were rudimentary, scarcely more than blackish nubs, their overall conformation was that of their parents, in bud.
But there were some egg-clutches, perhaps a hundred of them, whence very different hatchlings dragged themselves out amidst these bona fide calves. These had spiny black barrels for bodies, leg-clusters that were much more developed and elaborately jointed and barbed, and jaws of an equally elaborate structure, entirely distinct from the rock-guzzling snoutlets of the more numerous calves.
Both breeds of hatchling began to feed instantaneously once their heads were free, even though the rest of their bodies had still to be dragged free of the shell. The calves fed upon the first bare rock they found beneath them. The black hatchlings began with equal speed to feed upon the calves.
It was a stunning, gaudy carnage, for the babes in question were on the general scale of a large battle-chariot with its team. The calves seemed to lack all awareness of, or powers of resistance to, the assaults of their carnivorous nestmates. They squirmed ineffectually, some even continued to devour the stone as they were flensed to blubbery fragments by their scissors-jawed siblings, and guzzled down. Meanwhile the parent beasts displayed no more reaction than did their victim offspring, but continued an inchoate, milling advance in the general direction of the watching city. Long after Lybis had finished reading the oracle, the multitude watched, and saw the pattern emerging in the flock's movement. The hatchling carnivores remained more or less stationary, usually surrounded by a blood-spattered mess of half-a-dozen calf carcasses, where they continued feeding methodically on their swiftly captured feasts. At the same time, the calves that had escaped their predation—never ceasing to graze—gradually completed their eclosions, and began following the movement of the adult beasts. These latter now made steadily, in an ominous unison of apparent intent, toward the recently completed trench.
Strangely, few of the townsfolk afterward found that they needed to read the posted copies of the Flockwarden's last oracle. Sunk in astonishment as they had been while gazing on that vast unearthly and disaster-pregnant spectacle, Lybis' voice seemed to have imprinted itself upon their minds, and most recalled both the burden, and the sweet, ambiguous music, of her message:
In Ossuaridon, where priest and seer
Seek insight, and in visionary gloom
Within the giant's bones themselves inhume,
And dwell in dark that they might see more clear,
There seek great Pastur's catastrophic bier.
Exhume him and return his remnants here.
For his bones—if from their accidental tomb
You take, and with them work his frame's repair—
Have might to master those that threaten doom,
Seek the magic of my murdered more-than-peer!
Haste to find him and convey him where
Great Anvil-town doth offer greatest room—
Oh, haste! Lest that should fall which now but looms!
And the flock my death leaves lawless, do not fear.
All things their hungry jaws have power to tear,
Save gold alone—this can they not consume.
Weigh then your wealth, and judge if it's more dear
To you than life. If not, your course is clear.
XI
Dame Lybis, in the company of Kandros and Nifft (generally recognized now as being her chosen strategic counselors for the many emergency labors her position was imposing on her), went on the expedition sent to retrieve Pastur's bones. She stayed there long enough to see the work commenced, and then sped back to the city to oversee the last phases of its wall's "thickening."
If she had made a special effort to rouse an energetic responsiveness in her fellow citizens, her success was striking. A sort of de facto communalism had developed. The city's material stores were disbursed city-wide on a strict basis of need according with amount and importance of work done, and people of every class joined in a wholehearted furtherance of whichever aspect of the city's need they were assigned to assist. At work on the wall, or on the arduous convoy of hugely laden wagons bearing back Pastur's bones from Ossuaridon, or on the work-gangs frenziedly constructing the wagon train's roadway (and working a scant league ahead of the vanguard's rumbling advance) the townsfolk struggled shoulder-to-shoulder with the mercenary squads, distinguishable from them only by a peculiar, taut-faced singlemindedness, a rapt concentration that was almost glassy-eyed, like the look of a desperately driven slave.
By far the most herculean labor fell to those sent to exhume the bones. Ossuaridon—until now no more than the name of an obscure hamlet of religious fanatics to most Anvilians—was a mere five days' journey inland through the mountains fencing Anvil-Pastures against the sea. But this was the time that a mobile expedition of foot with lightly laden wagons took to traverse that distance. Their return necessitated the highway already referred to, and even this it took the burdened wains more than eight days to traverse. The hamlet, built against the flank of a sheer, glacially carved escarpment, was founded upon the giant's bones themselves, in both an architectural and cultural sense. Its inhabitants all had in common, despite the diversity of their origins, a shamanistic turn of mind. The age of ice which had seemingly intervened between the era of Pastur's death, and the historical past, had sheared away most of the rock that encased his bones. These had been even more fully exposed by subsequent erosion, and many of them thrust gigantically from the escarpment. In particular the skull had been frontally exposed to an extent that made it possible for the mystic devotees to enter either of the orbits of the eyes and, within these bony caves, enjoy the dream-producing vigils which had for centuries drawn others like themselves to the place and, effectually, created Ossuaridon. And yet, though all the meagre structures of this religious outpost clung variously for support to the ribs and femurs of the broken titan, their inhabitants never offered the slightest opposition to what amounted to the complete (and swift) dismantling of their habitations, nor to the extraction and removal of the object of their cult.
Once the mining-out of the skeleton was well begun, and the first of the great wains were laden and on their way back to the city on the still embryonic highway, Lybis led Nifft and Kandros, along with a small group of mercenary officers, back toward Anvil on horseback. Just as she was setting out she abruptly turned her mount aside, and rode to the shamans' encampment. They had quietly removed their belongings out on the plain to some tents provided them at the oracle's orders. A man was standing in front of the nearest of these, and she reined up on reaching him. His eyes, which were flat and flinty black, were old, though he did not seem particularly aged in the rest of his lean, raggedly garbed person.
Lybis leaned forward in the saddle. "You are content that this—" she swept her arm toward the sprawling, scaffold-decorated exhumation "—should be?"
"I am content, Mistress."
"May I ask you why?"
The man's mouth smiled, an operation that did not involve the rest of his sun-blackened face (Ossuarionites' days-long vigils were not restricted to the cult-object's skull). "Are you not restoring him? Would this, in us, be thanks for his infinite, history-spanning insights, to obstruct his resurrection?" Lybis smiled, and nodded as if to herself. Then, delicately, she cleared her throat, and said, "I am glad and grateful. I am especially glad you do not mingle with our workmen, trouble their labors. . . ."
"Nor speak to them either, about anything at all, Mistress," the man nodded calmly, not even his mouth smiling now. "And that is as we shall keep matters. We do not w
ish to obstruct your labors in any way."
"Bless you, shaman."
"Equally to you, oracle."
When she had rejoined her companions and they had been some moments on their road, Nifft murmured wonderingly: "Marvelous, those caves of his eyes. Did you go inside, Kandros?"
"No. Somehow I didn't get the chance."
Nifft glanced a smile at his friend, then resumed his musing. "So warm it was in there! And once they'd broken out some of the overhanging rock that shadowed the interiors, you know what we saw? The back of the left socket is cracked—there's a hole in its rear wall—and you could see just a bit of a huge metal sphere, imbedded in the bone where the brain would be. I'll tell you, my friend, that's going to be the heaviest piece of all."
Back in the city they found the civil defense project well in progress. It had not been initiated without the most anguished and repetitive deliberations up in the Aristarkion. The agonized Aristarchs, from whose pockets must come the bulk of the protective gold, pointed out that it was a futile defense, as the flocks, however effectively a layer of gold might repel their destructive appetites from the wall itself, could always simply tunnel under any gilded bulwark that opposed them, and bring it down by collapse, as sappers do.
As the days of debate lengthened, the flock advanced. They and their greedy, ever-growing calves, appearing to dread a precipitous fall into the trench (though many of the adults had survived a far more dizzy plunge when the ramp had collapsed under them) had eaten their way down into it at an oblique angle. And then, once down in it, they had begun to eat their way out again, creating a second oblique rampway, and proving impervious to all the missiles hurled down on them by the troops on the log palisade. As this rampart began caving in and had to be abandoned, and as the time before the beasts should regain ground-level outside the wall shortened, the urgency of the citizenry for concerted action grew so ardent and demonstrative that the dilatory Aristarchs yielded. Huge bellows-powered pumps were constructed. These fed off of melting-vats into which, with pathetically evident reluctance, the Aristarchs fed their hoarded bullion, along with all the specie they had cached in the several banks of the city. When Lybis returned, the first quarter of the wall had already been gilded with the finest lamination of gold the Aristarchs had been able to procure from their closely overseen staff of engineers. Lybis quickly put the rest of the task in the hands of Kandros and his staff, with Nifft assisting their efforts. It was a labor to which the workers engaged in it welcomed any additional support, as the flock had already eaten more than half their way up from the pit, and those constrained to work the bellows and the melting-vats did so in the most urgent anxiety. Nifft and Kandros ordained some alterations in procedure, and the gilding of the walls moved ahead apace. Pastur's bones began to reach the city.
The relative lightness of these bones was the one fortunate circumstance the gangs of laborers on the caravan had encountered. Those citizens at all conversant with such matters vowed that the cyclopean remains had to be less than a third the weight which normal animal bones of similar size would have possessed. The acropolis was still crowned with the derricks that had facilitated the Flockwarden's abandonment of it, and as that great square was the only place in the city that appeared adequate to accommodate a skeleton of the size they were dealing with, these machines were once more enlisted in the city's salvation, hoisting up Pastur's fossil as fast as its pieces could make their progress through the city from its eastern gate. Further demolitions, which largely or completely destroyed some thirty-seven buildings, were required to create the necessary passageway for the broken skeleton's approach to the base of the great eminence, and before the work of reassembly up in the plaza had progressed very far, it was evident that supplementary support must be created for the huge memento mori. A gigantic platform was extended from the broad end of the elevation. When, about two weeks after Lybis' return, the skull arrived, it was, with vast effort and exquisite care, laid upon that north-projecting horn of the acropolis from which Nifft and his friends had formerly viewed the flock out on the plain. With the spine largely completed, and the legs and feet assembled on the platform at the eminence's opposite end, it became evident that Pastur, when he lived, had stood about eighty stories high.
At this point the Aristarchs brought in to Dame Lybis a very shrilly voiced complaint against her generalship of the city's defenses, most particularly as regarded the wall-gilding project. Their mathematicians had scrupulously worked out a volumetric equivalence of unit gold per area of wall coverage, based on the desired thickness of application per square foot, and the wall, now all but covered, had consumed more than one and a half times the gold computed as adequate for its surfacing. Nifft's and Kandros' crews pursued their labors even as their rectitude was being subjected to these lofty (and heated) examinations up in the Aristarkion. It was well this was so, for long before the Aristarchs, under the moderation of Dame Lybis, had brought their deliberations to any conclusion, the wall had been completely gilded and, in the same hour, the ravening columns of the besiegers had swarmed out of the trench and attacked it. The citizens fled within the gates, and crowded anxiously atop the walls, manning the defenses there and breathlessly watching for the first decisive contact of the flock with their now priceless defenses. The giants crowded to the wall like pigs to a trough, applied to it their all-destroying snouts, and recoiled.
Their will to assault the citadel never flagged in the tense days that followed this first rebuff. The flock, recoiling sullenly and undamaged from the projectiles and boiling oil the defenders poured down upon them, tirelessly returned to their attack, but this never involved the use of their dreaded jaws, which indeed the golds appeared to inhibit their use of. Instead, they reared as high as their short legs permitted, and butted thunderously against the barrier. This was far from a futile ploy. As the days passed, there were several points in the wall where cracks began to develop, and even inward bucklings of an ominous appearance. The herd could fairly be numbered at around two thousand now—the calves had speedily swelled in size, and at present had half their parents' bulk and most of their adult bodily features. An army of these proportions, which never ceased its ramming, was bound, eventually, to break down an even more considerable bulwark than that of Anvil Pastures. The citizens toiled unremittingly, manning the battlements or shoring the wall from within wherever it showed signs of weakening.
Two small mercies were discerned in the situation by some of the more optimistic Anvilians. First, the herd never seemed moved to resort to the under-tunneling tactic which the Aristarchs had dreaded, and which would surely have brought the walls down in swift and utter ruin in half the time that had thus far elapsed since the flock's onset. And second, the menacingly carnivorous cohatchlings of the calves had, far from showing any disposition to join in the siege, shown a reassuringly passive temperament. All of them, shortly before the battle was joined round the wall, had burrowed themselves halfway into the ground and lain perfectly dormant. In the course of the first few days following this occurrence, observers from the wall noted that the beasts' exposed upper bodies had developed an opaque ensheathment of tough, dark material. A kind of second eggshell, it seemed, was enveloping them. Now, after more than ten days had passed, they showed no sign of further life, and their new encapsulations had grown quite rigid-looking.
Meanwhile, the bones of the city's savior-to-be passed one by one through its eastern gate and, amid the shouts of men, the grunts of dray-beasts, and the rattle and groan of massive tackle, inched their way up the vertiginous side of the acropolis to join the steadily growing framework of the recumbent titan that crowned it. The work never faltered, even at night, when the great plateau was draped with torch-swarms, and seemed, once again, to shed cascades of sparks.
XII
Late in the afternoon, Aristarchs Pozzle, Hamp and Smalling stood outside the temple, talking gravely with Sexton Minor. To stand where they did, or indeed, anywhere on the acropolis, was to st
and under a monstruous, stark forest of megalithic shafts and arches, one where swarms of men on ramps and crane arms were—not timbering—but supplementing, multiplying its growth. If this overlooming industry caused the Aristarchs to cringe somewhat, to crouch resentfully, it seemed to add something to Minor's stature. Perhaps this was due to a certain unconscious pride he was beginning to take in this stupendous productiveness of his hitherto disregarded temple. Power, in his understanding, was clearly taking on a broader definition than he had formerly accorded the term. His posture lacked the deferential tilt it normally exhibited when he was in the company of the power-elite, and he looked particularly fresh and spruce. This trio of the elite, on the other hand, looked gravely worn, almost shabby, as though mired by the exhausting defrayal of endless costs.
"I am very sorry, gentlemen," Minor was saying smoothly. "Dame Lybis is at this very moment searching the repository of sacred texts for some clue. We can do no more than wait. Believe me, I regret the anguish this subjects you to. But try to be comforted. Hasn't the temple proved to be the source of an astonishing variety of powers and insights, just in these past few months alone? I must confess to you, gentlemen, that I feel an irrepressible optimism myself, however grim things are in a general way. After all, every danger the Goddess and her cult have gotten us into, they've gotten us out of again—try to be encouraged by that."
Pozzle regarded the Sexton with a just-barely repressed bale. Members of the power-elite tend to keep a close accounting of all the little taxes of deference and flattery they levy from their subordinates, and the Aristarch looked particularly incensed at being short-changed in this regard by the Sexton—and short-changed with an impunity bestowed by the very cult which had so deeply involved his finances in the general ruin. In a thick voice, but managing an even tone, he said: "To have done so much, Sexton Minor—" he gestured overhead "—and then to find the skeleton imperfect in so relatively small a way, and its power entirely unavailable as a result, and when it's so incomprehensible in the first place how simply reassembling a skeleton is going to help us in any way against those monsters outside—it is all exasperating in the highest degree. It is infuriating in fact—"
