The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  "What are they looking at?" I foreknew, with dread, the question's answer even as I asked it.

  Costard, almost as big as a whale, his ghastly nudity besmeared with earth and crushed foliage, had crawled halfway up the valley's seaward slope. It seemed, by the quiverings of his blubbery limbs, that he still struggled to reach the clifftop, but could muster no further propulsion. Barnar reined up and the rest of us dismounted. We stood and stared—how could we do otherwise?

  Then Costard's glassy gaze, roving desperately between earth and sky, lit on the crowd above him, and grew sharper. "Uncle Barnar! Nifft!" he boomed. "Help me!" How huge his voice was! The crowd looked at us oddly. Never have I known such mortification!

  "But how can we help you!?" Barnar despairingly bellowed back.

  "I can make it up with just the slightest pull, and then I can roll the rest of the way! Oh hurry, before I grow bigger! I must reach the sea! I can't breathe! I must float! I'm crushing myself!"

  A freight hauler, his load of rock salt and charcoal bespeaking his Dry Hole destination, geed his heavy team and drew his wagon next to ours. "He seems to be kin of yours. I'll be glad to assist you, no charge, if you'd kindly help him drown himself, like he wants." And he held up several coils of heavy hauling cable.

  We eased our wagons off the highway, and out along the grassy rim of the cliff. Twenty strides to our right, white-bearded ocean grumbled at the precipice four hundred feet straight down. And here now was the great pallid face of Costard directly below us, a moon of dirt-daubed anguish, sweating to rise. His vast legs churned sluggishly; he rose fractionally up the slope, then slithered back again. "By all the powers," groaned Barnar, "you headlong young idiot, what have you done?"

  "It was an accident, Uncle! I failed to wash my hands of the ichor, and it impregnated some bread and pickled quiffles that I ate . . . Oh hurry, please hurry, if I get heavier I'll never reach the sea."

  Costard's gross, ballooning nudity was a powerful added inducement of an aesthetic kind to dump him into the sea as soon as possible, and hide him from sight. The hauler, a red-haired man who did not mask his bitter amusement as he worked, rigged his cables in a "Y" whose branches he anchored to the axle trees of our wagons.

  "Your mother, my sister Anhyldia," Barnar told the youth mournfully, "will kill me for this. I mean that quite literally. I dare not face her again in this life!"

  "Now look you, Costard," I told him quite urgently as we prepared to give him his end of the cable. "You must release this cable before you tilt over the cliff—you must." He nodded, but his mooncalf eyes looked blank of comprehension. He gripped the cable and wrapped several bights around his wrist. Klaskat and Klopp, with rope from their pommels to the yoke-tree, prepared to add their pull to our team's efforts, but I rode free. I drew Ready Jack, and tested his edge. We turned the wagons to run along the clifftop, and geed up, giving Costard a diagonal pull slantwise up the last bit of slope to the cliff.

  Our beasts strained, every thew etched. Costard's frantic feet and fingers churned the grassy loam of the hillside. Perhaps our jot of help made the difference, or perhaps it merely woke some last reserve of the bloated young wretch's will, but up he heaved, floundering and quivering, his free hand gaining the level clifftop. He heaved again, and he slithered his middle up.

  "Let go of the cable!" I bellowed. He heard me not, or cared not. He thrust both hands towards the brink of the precipice, and his effort jerked the wagons after, the teams screeching and stumbling.

  My whole career of thieving rose before my eyes in that instant, when I saw our wagon dancing backward toward the cliff. Every great prize in a long career, every failure, whipped past my eyes like wind-driven phantoms, and all were as nothing to the colossal fortune in that lurching buckboard with Barnar reeling helpless at the reins.

  I spurred my mount forward. Costard reached again, and this time got a grip on the brink, wrenching the wagons yet nearer the abyss. I charged the cable, which was taut as bowstring, and I sheared through it with one mighty sweep of Ready Jack. In the same instant Costard heaved himself outwards, off the precipice.

  It seemed he hung forever in the air, slowly, slowly falling with an indescribable fatty shimmy all over his hugeness, fleetingly putting me in mind of Behemoth larvae wriggling in the brood-mass.

  "Will he float, do you think?" Klaskat awedly asked, just before Costard smote the ocean with a burst of foam and sank like a stone, his wobbly pallor dwindling to a glimmer in the blue-black deeps, and vanishing.

  XXVI

  Oh, let me and my fortune ride the sea,

  On Ocean's bosom know—at last!—repose!

  There nor flame nor thief need dreaded be,

  And lapping swells lull weary lids to close. . . .

  KAIRNGATE HARBOR will forever wear the friendly luster of a safe haven to my eyes, for the way it looked at that day's end. The water wore the setting sun, and the little bay was a single coin of gold. At a shipyard, whose master we caught just locking his gate to leave, we found a yare little caravel he'd just refitted, with a stout four-oar skiff aboard her. We let him wangle a fiveweight for her in our craving for the peace it would give us to have our treasure shipped and safe offshore at last.

  Klaskat and Klopp we sent off with two hundred lictors each. We might not have spared so much, but in our impatience to be loaded we let them help us lay our bales aboard, and they, as they worked, allowed their looks to display their doubt that what we shipped was truly larval scrapings. They handled the bundles roughly enough to make them chink metallically. Hence the handsomeness of our stipend. Even so they drove off laggingly, with wistful backward gazes.4

  We named our caravel Bounty, and by the rising of the gibbous moon, we had sailed her out and anchored her in an untrafficked reach of the harbor. She rode in plain sight of the balconied dockside refectory where we proposed to sup. With our Unguent strapped to our middles beneath our jerkins, and our beloved Bounty never out of our gaze, we could be aboard her in mere seconds at the first sign of threat.

  We rowed ashore in silence, in silence took our table on the crowded balcony, bespoke our meal, awaited it and ate it in silence. Our treasure was won, and was shipped. Now came the having, the spending. Now, whenever Barnar and I faced each other, we faced the gulf that yawned between us. And so we avoided one another's eyes.

  Down in our little Bounty there, sitting on moonlit water as still as hammered pewter, lay a cargo of wonders. And contained within that wealth, as the progeny lies in the womb, were deeds to make our names ring down through the ages in the annals of thievery.

  And these yet unborn marvels tormented me. I saw my hands, in Pelfer's gantlets, touch the iron gates of Mhurdaal's Manse (all hung with corpses of unsuccessful thieves, still fresh and bleeding though long centuries slain); I heard the gates groan, and gape asunder. I saw Mhurdaal's Library, labyrinth of lore, saw plague-touched cities full of folk a-sweating out pure gold. . . .

  And here sat Barnar, also gazing on the Bounty, and seeing forests of skorse, stubbornly dreaming of stands of timber, himself as thick and rooted as a tree in his infuriating willfulness. It did not matter what our halves of this fortune might do. Entire, our fortune was a bridge to glory, to immortal exploit. Half a bridge leads but to an abyss. Barnar had sworn to the exploit, and I could not, would not let it go. So we sat there, the silence between us like a spectral Third at the table.

  Until Barnar said, "That woman at the railing . . . do we know her?"

  "Is that not Niasynth?"

  "Yes, I think it is!" The young-ancient woman looked travel-ready in a shortcape, tunic, boots and shortsword. She sat gazing at the moon and sea. A rapture, a zone of privacy long centuries deep, enveloped her, and we made no move to rupture it. We watched her, and our own memories of the subworld's eternity seemed to enfold us, so that we jumped when a woman's voice greeted us from close at hand.

  "This is well-met, good thieves!" Sha'Urley stood at our table. "Let's have a hug and a kiss,
oh thou miserly, greedy, tight-bungholed Nifft!" I embraced her, though I could have wished her ebullience more seemly-spoken. She sat, and took wine with us. Her accoutrement was like Niasynth's, towards whom her smiling eyes continually slanted as she spoke with us.

  "What a delight to meet you like this!" I told her. "Perhaps we can settle that fiftyweight of gold still owed us here and now. Then we need make no stop in Dolmen Harbor."

  "Alas, there you must stop, I'm afraid, and deal with Ha'Awley. I've ceded to my brother all my interest in his enterprise of the giants' pap. He is the repository of any and all revenues it may have drawn. The only coin I bear is needed for our travels, Niasynth's and mine."

  "Travelling?" I asked, but we understood, I think, even before she explained.

  "She has a new world to learn," Sha'Urley said. "And as I tried to tell her about this world, I discovered how little I knew it myself. I found that I have the same world to learn as she does. The pair of you too had a part in rousing me. The places you will go on a venture! You are both no less than inspirational!"

  "There's no finer thing than setting out to see what you can see!" I told her. I was envying her a bit for some reason, as if I weren't as footloose as she. "We congratulate you. But, dearest Sha'Urley, forgive our closer inquiry into your brother's affairs. He does indeed have our fiftyweight of specie, does he not?"

  Sha'Urley laughed. "Whatever his other difficulties, lack of specie is not one of them. Bunt Hivery remains one of the foremost in the Angalheim chain."

  "I beg your leave to press a bit," Barnar told her. "How does his enterprise with the ichor fare?"

  "To be honest, good Barnar, that is precisely what I am studiously trying not to know. This is as far south as we came with him, and we have not seen him for near a month. We have toured southern Kairnheim while Niasynth regained her strength. We are here only to set sail with the morning tide for the Minuskulons. I have avoided even news of Dolmen, lest it ensnare me. `Who means to fly, takes wing at once.'"

  "Dearest Sha'Urley," I put in. "Believe me, I appreciate the perilous poise of spirit you have come to, and we do not wish to jar you, but—"

  Smiling, she raised a preventing palm. "Peace, sweet thief. I know why you have grounds for fear. Costard's doings, and his fate, have reached us here."

  "Even his final attainment of the sea?"

  "No. We knew he crawled coastward, no more."

  When she had heard from us the details of Costard's recent plunge into the deep, which we strove to render vividly, she covered her face a moment, concealing some emotion which caused a slight tremor of her shoulders.

  "Well," she said at length, with a solemn face, "I can tell you only that poor Costard's . . . abandon is not a flaw my brother shares. If profit can be had from this ichor outside its ordained sphere, Ha'Awley will extract it, both methodically and cautiously." A shadow touched her eyes here. "It has been impossible not to gather that some kind of unrest lies on Dolmen in recent days. And looking across the channel this morning, I noticed in the oblique light of sunrise some shadowy suggestion of airborne turmoil above my homeland's heights. More I cannot say, and will not know. Indeed, we're going to board our ship within the hour, and lie safe from hearing further news before we sail."

  I could not help but sigh. "Well, it is a nuisance to have to put in at a troubled port! Still, a fiftyweight of specie is no trifling sum."

  "Forgive me if I smile," Sha'Urley said. "Forgive me if I'm wrong in thinking you have ten thousand times that value even now in hand, perhaps down in that caravel anchored there, that your eyes seldom leave for long."

  "Even as yours seldom leave Niasynth for long?"

  She grinned at this. "Yes. Even so. And I hope your obsession will make your hearts soar as high as mine does, every time I look at my dear Niasynth. But just consider, friends: why don't you let that fiftyweight go? Not for my brother's sake, but in a spirit of libation, of a little thanks-offering to Luck? The way you've been squeezing and grabbing pelf down in the underworlds, madly fanatic as demons yourselves . . . I'm saying you need to unclench, to ease out of avarice's frenzy. Forget the fifty as a purely moral exercise."

  Plainly, Sha'Urley's heart being light, her reason too had slipped its tether. I forgave this grotesque suggestion as the mere ebullition of a fevered fancy.

  We lingered drinking with her a while, and then parted with great affection—and before Niasynth had yet come away from her revery at the railing. She seemed to sit in a space still too far from this world for our voices to reach her. Surely a speech that was more than words was all her mind could really hear as yet, a speech such as Sha'Urley must use with her.

  XXVII

  Come golden sweetness! Overbrim each cell

  Of Fortune's labyrinthine honeycomb.

  Swell! Gather to one shining drop, and fall,

  Delicious sphere, upon my tongue, thy tomb!

  THE SUMMER NORTHERLIES were done. A southwest breeze with a nip of autumn in it arose some hours before dawn, and we hoisted sail and tacked for Dolmen. Sunrise found us scudding smartly, keel kicking spray from the chop. Our little Bounty's friskiness seemed to coax me to sail straight out for the open sea. Forget Dolmen, forget further complication. Drive straight to the open Agon; make landfall in the Minuskulons in a twenty-night, make Pardash and Karkmahn-Ra in the same again. Perhaps the morning wind whispered the same to Barnar.

  But then I asked myself: What sane man could leave a fiftyweight of gold lying by when he might have it for three or four steps out of his path? Was it not blind foolishness not to take one's own? And no doubt Barnar asked himself the same.

  The wind dropped as Dolmen's peaks loomed bigger, but the channel current pulled us steadily along. Dolmen was mantled in some thin cloud and haze, and we had drawn quite near when the noon sun thawed the sky and raised the winds again, and blew the island jewel clear. There was indeed a fretful turmoil in the air above the highlands; bursts of smoke roiled up into the winds, and were snatched to tatters. There was a scent, too, on the breeze, a taunting whiff that was and yet was not like burning flesh. . . . And was there not a fierce music as well, that came to us fitfully on the wind? A humming, buzzing ground-note, and the shrill voices of men, as at war?

  "Smoke. What next?" I said bitterly. "Will we never have done with obstacles and complications?"

  "Look how the harbor swarms!"

  Taking in canvas, we slipped round the harbor's northern spur. We peered a long tense moment at the bustle of ships, the throngs on the quays, the laden wagons jostling on the upland highways, before determining, with relief, that this was a swarming more of business than disaster.

  Nonetheless we anchored our Bounty well outside the thick of the traffic, then lowered our skiff and oared in toward the docks. "Shall we make for that wine shop?" Barnar suggested. "The outside tables should give a good view of her."

  All the moored ships loomed big above us, and not a few of them were Bunt Hivery's freighters, big but graceful vessels, castled fore and aft, with Bunt's escutcheon on the foresail, and more of these appeared to be offloading than taking cargo on. Teamsters held their dray wagons steady to take on packets of heavy lumber, kegs of pitch and bales of torches, stacks of hinged, folded timbers that might be collapsible derricks or siege weapons, and packets I could not at first identify, but which proved with closer looking to be bundled darts for a large ballista, each missile near big as a man.

  "Seems we have a distinctly military kind of commerce here," Barnar mused. "And at the same time not a few of the locals look to be taking up travelling." For mixed with the freighters were not a few other craft taking on passengers, while everywhere on the docks the dray wagons were interspersed with little knots of folk waiting to take ship, most of them caped for open sea breezes and hovering protectively round their little cargoes of baggage.

  "Yes. Things are definitely a-boil," I answered. "Bounty's well anchored outside this mess. If Bunt's in a pickle I'd best have the coin straight o
ut of him, in case he's a-sinking. I'll try his manse first."

  Barnar climbed up to the quay and took an outside table at the wineshop, beginning his watch on Bounty. With his Unguent strapped to his middle beneath his jerkin, he would not need the skiff, which I rowed cross-harbor, weaving easily amid the larger craft, and making better time than I would afoot through the crowds on the quay.

  I tried to read Dolmen's situation as I oared my way. Whatever was going on up in the highlands, there was much of war and siege about it. An unbroken snake of traffic rippled up the switchbacks of both the main upland highways. The downcoming wagons were mostly empty, and those climbing bore baled torches and barrels of pitch and the like.

  "Ho, lanky Karkmahnite! Sweet Nifft! Withstay thy sinewy arm a moment from thy toils, my lizardly darling!" This merry salutation, brazen as trumpets, blared down upon me. Looking up, I saw perched in the forecastle of one of Bunt's freighters, lissom Higaia—in arms, and looking quite dazzling so. She wore a snug pectoral plate of brass, molded to the ripe economy of her breasts, which it enshrined in lovely sculptures of themselves. She had a stout gaffing hook for cargo handling which she gripped two-handed, its shaft across the back of her neck—the way a resting trooper will wear his javelin like a yoke—but in the next instant her vessel's creaking cargo boom caught her attention. She whirled and brandished the gaff like a baton of office then: "Ease it there! Slow on that windlass! Easy down, Hoofa! Easy down!" Her freighter was one of the few taking on rather than discharging goods.

  I tied up to the ladder she dropped me, and climbed it. We hugged each other with a will, Higaia and I, while over the crown of her raven-black head I saw a big flat packet of canvas lowered into her freighter's hold.