by Michael Shea
"Not one soul all afternoon!" cried Klaskat. "This is rare indeed, Honor Nifft."
"And do you know," Klopp added, "it's been a few days since we saw anyone passing up at the mine. The boys at the Lucky Gasket remarked on it too, I think."
We retired up a sandy wash to pass the night. I sat my watch under the stars, savoring the sight of them now and then, but more and more wondering at the unbroken emptiness of this broad, smooth, moonlit highway. If we once attained Dry Hole, we would be within a day and a half's dash of the coast, where four hundred lictors could buy us a slender carrack of Minuskulon make. But why came there no trafic from Dry Hole? That city thronged with mountain trade. The vacant highway grew ever more ominous.
Our wagon was rolling at first light, and before dawn we met, at last, another vehicle—a freight wagon of sap-barrels, returning with its load undelivered. We were sure now of trouble, even before speaking with the driver, a red-bearded lout in ill humor. "The causeway's collapsed! A league and more above the city! The span across Dead Plod Arroyo is fallen, and as far as I could see beyond it, all the stretches on pilings are fallen to rubble in the canyon-bottoms! They don't pay me enough to haul these barrels into town on my back, thank you!"
The incurious fellow had only a shrug for our anxious questions. Who knew the why of it? Not he. Full of his choler and his refusal of further responsibility, he geed up and sped on, rehearsing some choice things to say when his barrel-boss reproached him for his undelivered load.
* * *
Hurrying now to know the worst, we pushed on. A panicky notion took root in my mind that our huge wealth cried aloud through its canvas shrouds. The sheer mass of it called danger down upon us, summoned perils of commensurate size. Some grave disaster lay ahead and it seemed fitting, even inevitable that a prize such as ours must challenge Misfortune's mightiest manifestations. I almost cringed from this silent outcry I felt emanating from those canvas bundles, as though it would call something out of the sky any moment now.
Further enlightenment came just after sunrise, when there approached us a creaky wain of the high-gated style that hauls hay. This one was heaped with furniture, and textiles, and caged fowls squawking. There were even suckling pigs, in makeshift cages of house shutters, befouling one corner of the van. In hammocks strung between the heavier pieces of furniture, three tousled and haggard children snored the throaty sleep of infantile exhaustion. A compact little bald man with sinewy hands was driving. A mound of blankets in the box beside him was probably an exhausted wife. Hanging from the box at his right hand, a belt of joiner's tools had equal place with an old shortsword that looked long out of use.
Klaskat hailed him excitedly. "You're the Wainwright Brattle, down on Cloven Lane, are you not?"
"Aye, I was he!" So loud and brassy did the man shout, we wondered that none of his family was wakened. His face looked drained and fatigued, but his body was taut and trembly, and a kind of madness simmered in his eyes.
"What news of 'Hole, sir?" Klaskat urged him. "We've met a drayman says the highway down into 'Hole is all collapsed."
"Collapsed it is. Oh, yes indeedy! Not a span or a piling but is all collapsed!" Brattle smiled, his mad eyes almost merry. "It's in ruins full three miles up into the mountains from 'Hole. It was wiped out in the first great stampede, a week ago now! We left the next day. I've been five days dragging what's left of our livelihood up dry gulches and down narrow old prospector's trails. I just reached the highway last night! I mean to make time, now that I can, and put god-cursed Dry Hole, befouled past remedy, far far behind us! Somewhere a new life awaits me and my family, and by the Crack and all that crawls from it, we'll find it! Stand away!" He'd talked himself into a bellowing wrath. He stood up and made his whip crack like lightning; his quartet of plods, weary but strong, surged ahead—Barnar had to pull our wagon smartly aside.
We let Klaskat and Klopp ride foremost, more schooled in the roadway. They set a quick pace, fearing now for kinfolk and family property. I tried to imagine what disaster might produce a "god-cursed Dry Hole, befouled past remedy."
I became aware of a buzzing noise and a wafting stench; a moment after, we reached Dead Plod Arroyo. The bridge that had spanned it was now two stumps of stonework; the dry ravine yawning between them a hundred feet deep.
"What is that smell! Is it manure? Are those flies I hear?"
"He spoke of a stampede. . . ."
"What can we do as a packtrain through these last few miles?" Barnar asked Klaskat.
"We could do it. The terrain can be managed."
"We will pack the beasts," I told him. "You two scout our trail through this ravine and see what you can beyond it."
When they were well down into the arroyo we remade our bundles. Our string of nine beasts bore less than four hundredweight each, a heavy load, but not cruelly so. In the re-packing, our subworld loot flashed luridly; in sunlight it had a corrupt and somehow shameful brilliance. From the unseen terrain beyond the arroyo wafted the scent of shite and the noise of myriad flies, sensations mundane enough, yet sinister, that teased us as we worked. Just as we finished we heard the amazed cries of Klaskat and Klopp, who had ascended the arroyo's far wall, and now viewed beyond it.
"Key, Cauldron and Calipers!" Klopp distantly bellowed. "It's . . . it's a hornbow! It's as big as a whale!"
They came back and met us down in the arroyo to help us lead the packtrain across. They prepared us for what we would see, but this did not lessen the impact of it when we saw it for ourselves. Down in the next gulch, amid the tumbled arches of the viaduct, the stupendous ruminant lay rotting. Farther down the ravine another bovine colossus putrefied. Not this alone set the fog of flies dancing (thicker than the bees in the flowerfields of Dolmen!) but also little hills of bovine ordure beckoned them to their buzzing bacchanal.
More of these giant cattle littered the canyons filled by the toppled highway's rubble. They were hornbow, crucicorn, palomanes—every common breed lay in the gulches and gullies amid the shattered stonework, whose ruin their combined weight had clearly caused. Their corpses looked hale enough, if a bit obese, even discounting for their ripeness. Their nostrils, big as doorways, had spewed white froth in death. Twice, where the vast carcasses spanned difficult ground, we used them for bridges, though our skinnies were uneasy at such footing. Barnar and I exchanged just one look that said all. Costard's little venture with his share of the giants' pap was now revealed to us. We did not share our insight with our employees.
At length, a last ravine opened out ahead, and Dry Hole was revealed, spread below us.
XXV
Oh lead thy kine to Cattle Town,
But feed them not too full!
Lest Cattle Town should rattle down
And break upon thy skull.
I REMEMBERED this vista as it had appeared not many weeks before, all Dry Hole's handsomely carpentered homes sweeping downslope to the distant river, their rooftiles burnished by the setting sun. Upon this lovely panorama blight and ruin had fallen. A blanket of flies buzzed and boiled above it; the quiltwork of its rooftops was cratered with shattered structures and strewn debris, and heaped with dung in mounds so copious as to bury entire buildings. Klaskat and Klopp groaned aloud.
"Out on the plain beyond the river—what are those heaps, and those black clouds of things above them?" Barnar asked. "They're thick as flies, but at this distance must be something much bigger—carrion birds, perhaps? Feeding on more carcasses?" But Klaskat and Klopp had eyes only for their own sectors of the city. To prevent their outright defection from our employ, we had to agree to seek out their families and learn their state. They agreed they would continue in our service if they possibly could. In truth their company was dangerous, for they could link us with Costard whose name, if known, must be purest poison here; at the same time, two natives could best steer us through this stricken city.
Bound kerchiefs excluded the flies from our mouths and nostrils, but they bombarded every other inch of ou
r bodies, bumping into us like carnival revelers reeling with surfeit. We followed a maze of undamaged streets where the only hindrances were the flies and the crush of traffic. Dray wagons hauling dung and broken buildings slowed our progress to a crawl, and had we not been able to thread our beasts single file, we might have been stopped altogether. At one pause to let debris wagons pass, Klopp hailed a man, an unhoused grocer by the look of the barrels and sacks and crated foodstuffs in his buckboard. "Ho, Roddle! What happened? Is your shop destroyed?"
"The ground floor's intact! But my top floor was bitten off! The accursed brutes grazed all through the town before they went mad! They crunched up thatched roofs and shingles and stone slates alike, munched wooden walls like jackstraw!"
"But what happened? Where did they come from?"
"Some pestiferous square-head, some outlander, some sap miner came down and leased the pasturage in Sparse Meadow Vale just out of town. He bought a few head here and there—bought some of your uncle's hornbow I think, said he wanted to experiment with a small herd of mixed breeds. The fool had some boughten wizardry it seems. His cattle came wandering out of the valley a week ago, and stayed near the river at first, drinking and drinking. How we all went and gawked! You could almost see them growing, one hour to the next! I must be off—your uncle's stables survived; talk to him!"
The pulse of civic energy was strong in Dry Hole. All was clearance and repair, improvisation, shared resources. It took two hours to reach Klopp's Uncle Hebneb's stables, a place still well up in the foothills, and whence, through the clouds of flies, the seethe of activity down on the plain was not much more visible, save that the huge mounds around which the activity boiled became unmistakably identifiable as more of the giant cattle carcasses.
Bald, bulky Hebneb and three of his sons were unharnessing a dung-wagon's sweating team, and mustering fresh plods to the traces. He greeted his nephew with a sharp look, and came out to us.
"Your employer, Klopp! Bragg came down from the Lucky Gasket and told us you'd hired out to that fool, that Costard, that's just managed the Superior Mine to ruin! Guarding the mine for him, was it? So the idiot could come down and do this!"
"Yes, but Uncle, I . . . how could we . . . I never had any idea that . . . I mean we just guarded his mine, Uncle Hebneb! We work for these men here, now, Uncle—they work for Costard too!"
"We did indeed," I affably affirmed, "work for young Costard. We tapped for him, and when he proved—most infuriatingly, I assure you—unable to pay us, we agreed to take payment in larval aromatics. We've only now come above-ground. I promise you we never dreamed he had anything to do with cattle-raising. We thought him a respectable sap miner, at least till we tried to get paid."
"Oh that pompous little milksop!" The stabler's thick neck corded with anger. "I actually sold him twenty head of hornbow from our own pasture down-river! Our own kine, raised by our own hands, to have them come crush our houses and befoul our streets! Your father sold him some too, Klaskat—you'll find him down by Third Bridge where they're curing the meat. The fool went to see everyone and bought a few head from a dozen different cattlemen, making a big display of secrecy about marvels he was working! The callow dolt! How could we have guessed he had real power of any kind? Oh, we had a good laugh about him down at the Dusty Hoof. `I'm dabbling in carniculture,' he tells me! Carniculture! `I wish to assess the, ah, responsiveness and potentialities of all the common breeds,' he tells me! Who could have guessed the ninny's power to harm? He came down to the taverns to sup through the first week or so, fairly swollen with mysterious importance, hinting wonders. Why weren't we more curious? If only someone had gone up to Sparse Meadow for a look early on! But no, we must wait till ten days ago, when a crucicorn the size of a rich man's house walks out of the hills! We went up to him then, quick enough, but what could be done with him? He threw a hay wagon at us!"
"What!?" Barnar cried.
"He—hold there! Harv! Give them the dapples! The debris wagons need the heavies!"
Hebneb rushed back to work, as two more dray-wagons pulled into his yard, one still heaped with its load of dung and bringing a veritable blizzard of flies with it. We huddled in their battering onslaught while Klopp secured his uncle's assurance that he could be spared to serve us, as his wage would be useful in the hard times ahead.
The hardy, stoic Dry Holers, working furiously, gave questions short shrift, but we pieced together most of the tale as we wound our way down to the river. By the time the crowd of citizens roused by advent of the giant crucicorn had gone halfway up to Sparse Meadow Valley, full three or four score more cattle of equal size had come ambling down the hills, grazing on trees, which they munched down to stumps, and on various cottages and ranchers' domiciles, whose wooden walls and shingles they seemed to find acceptable as fodder. Men who had set out as a confused committee of inquiry arrived at Sparse Meadow as an outraged mob. "We were ready to hang that pipe-neck shorthorn," a saddler told us. "We found his whole range a sea of flops raging with flies, the forest clean gone—just stumps—halfway up the hills all around. The ranch house was burst open like an egg, and that Costard, as big as a house, had his arms round the barn and was struggling to sit himself up. The sight fair paralyzed us where we stood! `Help!' he blubbers. He looks like a giant baby, all fat and hideous naked, for he's split his clothes long past. `Help me! I ate some by accident! I didn't wash my hands!' His very words, if you can find sense in them. The madness of it! Some men who'd lost property began to shout at him and shake their fists and threaten him—to what end, I ask you? But we were all in shock. His eyes went mad then—we were to see it in his cattle later. He frothed and bellowed and flung a hay wagon clear up the hill at us!"
No more was to be learned of Costard. Dry Hole's defense immediately absorbed her citizens. The giants were drawn first to the river, where they lingered a day or so, drinking prodigiously. They were vague and torpid—even for cattle—and utterly indifferent to what they trod upon, and they continued to grow, almost visibly. While they hugged the river, crossbows and torches and catapults were tried on them; it was learned that assault elicited most unbovine behavior—they seized attackers in their jaws and chewed them. Then the giants began slowly dispersing to graze—most out on the plain, destroying corrals and feedlots and scattering herds—and a hundred or so up into the city, eating buildings. The salvation of property was now the city's sole labor. "There were some wild rescues of moveable goods," the saddler told us, "for the brutes would only step on you by accident. Remember Klaagi, the smith? He'd got a whole wagon of his gear, even loaded his littler forge, and made his break up Cedril Street, flogging the team. He got almost clear, and flop—poor Klaagi, his wagon, his team, were buried alive by a patty—and his smithy was spared in the end, unscathed!"
Then came the morning when a madness struck the giants, all of them almost simultaneously, it seemed. Bellowing, frothing, glassy-eyed, they ran in ponderous stampede—scattering, re-converging, trying to escape some inner agony. Some fled up the highway into the mountains; its great supports sustained them for a while until the massed vibrations of their tread shattered several miles of it at once. If the fall killed these, it took but little life from them, for all the other giants out on the plain had dropped dead by that day's close.
The grit and resolution of Dry Hole's citizens were not fully known to us till we reached the highway by the river and saw how the townsfolk had turned the huge carcasses that littered the plain into a meat quarry. Kites and krawks and guzzlars thronged the sky, indignant at this human thievery of their alloted feast. Men with every butcher's tool, with saws and swords to boot, swarmed scaffolding upon the giant dead. Hide was being stripped and tanned in sections big as mainsails. Vast shavings from the marbled walls of meat were being smoked above beds of coals on frames improvised from broken corral posts. The highway thronged with wagons from the south bearing barrels, and salt, and pickling brine, and charcoal for the curing fires. And equal traffic ran the other way, b
earing smoked meat and hides back to KairnGate Harbor, whence it would be shipped south to help recoup Dry Hole's civic losses.
Klaskat found his father receiving these shipments in one of his stockyards, collecting bills of lading, sending his assistants off with the teamsters to guide them to their points of delivery out on the swarming plain. This Clyster was a big, peremptory man with an aura of status and property, and a probing, glittery eye.
"Worked for Costard, did you? Well, I can't well blame you when my son's made the same mistake. Yes, I'll rent you a wagon—he can bring us back barrels and salt. You say Costard paid you in `aromatic scrapings'? I've never heard of these."
"Nor had we, though of course we were novices at tapping. He assured us the waxen scrapings from larval hides are quite valuable to perfumers of the Ephesion Isles." My heart hammering, I strove to look simple, a man imposed on, now touched by doubt. "Surely he would not have told us . . . an untruth?"
Clyster shrugged; it suited him to send a wagon south with us for his son to bring back laden, and earn a wage as well. "No doubt he knew more about sap mines than cattle. Mayhap you'll meet him—it's said he's dragging himself south through the hills. If so, you can tell him we intend to teach him, by demonstration upon his person, some of the fundamentals of cattle-raising, to wit, notching, branding, castrating, flaying, and butchering—not necessarily in that order. Inform him his instruction commences the instant we can find the time for it."
* * *
The highway snaked silvery across the tawny grass, rolling into and out of gentle valleys. Soon it would reach the steep cliffs of the coast, and turn to run along them where they sloped down to KairnGate Harbor. Before nightfall we would have our wealth in a trim little carrack, and anchored safe offshore.
At last there ahead lay the sweeping turn the highway made to follow the coastal cliffs. But just at this turning, we beheld a crowd of travellers and their vehicles clustered at the roadside. They were looking down into a narrow valley whose farther slope levelled to clifftop, with the empty air and the shining sea beyond.
