by Dave Duncan
“And now you, sir?”
I heard another, longer sigh. “Not yet. Try him again. He obviously needs a lot more practice.”
She looked at me with an inquiring and mischievous smile. I smiled back.
─♦─
Ullinila! How sweet she was!
How insatiable, how rewarding!
No man ever forgets the first time.
─♦─
I awoke when Violet nudged me in the ribs with his foot. I blinked around in alarm at the unfamiliar tent, remembering where I was and what I had been doing.
“Get dressed, herdman!”
I winced—too loud! The camp was still quiet beyond the tent walls. “Yes sir.” I sat up and fumbled awkwardly with my breeches, seeing now that Ullinila had vanished, and her garments, also. Even the memory of her was an excitement.
The angel grunted. “Don’t tell me you wanted more? She’s gone to warn the others—so they can warm up another batch of vomit to feed us.”
“Yes sir. Did you—I mean, she was good, wasn’t she?”
He growled angrily and turned away.
“Are they always as good as that, sir?”
“No, probably not… Get dressed!”
I was going as fast as I could. “Sir, did I do something wrong?”
“You were no damned help at all!”
“Sir?” I did not understand, but I was suddenly heartbroken and ashamed for having somehow failed him, he who had done so much for me. What more was I supposed to have done?
Violet ducked under the flap without explaining.
─♦─
The chariot squeaked to a halt. Violet cursed. We had not long left Agomish and the unforgettable Ullinila. I was stretched out on the bedding, facedown and bare to the sky. He had noticed in the tent that my fair skin was losing its pigmentation inside the angel clothes I wore. He was teaching me to sunbathe.
I knew that oaths at a halt meant that he had made a misjudgment. He would have to turn the chariot and run back downhill to try again. “May I do it for you, sir?” I asked.
“No.” He had risen and was scowling off to the north. I peered and saw woollies.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Not very, sir.”
“Amazing! Sleepy?”
“No.”
“Even more astonishing! We’ll have to visit them, though—they’ve seen us.”
His expression was foul, but his tone so unusually pleasant that I daringly asked, “Why?”
He shook his head at me. “They’re all terrified, Knobil. Didn’t you notice? Next time look at their eyes. An angel going by without stopping—that would be a great cruelty.” Then his usual acerbity returned. “If you’re not hungry or sleepy, then you’d rather stay in the chariot?”
My face must have been answer enough.
He sneered. “Herdboy glutton fancies another little woollie, does he?” He headed for the rear, to dismount and turn the chariot. “Very well… At least they can’t try to talk to me while you’re fornicating with them.”
─♦─
My second visit to a herdfolk camp was much like the first. I was less nervous of the herdmaster and much less interested in the food. I eyed the women openly, wondering which one the angel would choose. When the tent flap closed behind us, Violet wasted no time in teasing. He merely said, “You go first.”
I wasted no time, either. The first-time magic was missing, but I could tell that this was not a procedure that would soon pall on a man. This woman was taller and slimmer than Ullinila. I forget her name.
Again I awoke to find Violet and myself alone. I struggled into my pants and scrambled to my feet. I had just pulled on my tattered coat when I remembered his curious remark on the previous occasion.
“Was I more help this time, sir?”
I cringed, expecting a blow—his face flamed redder than I had ever seen it. He grabbed me with one hand and balled the other into a fist. Then he saw my bewilderment, and with an obvious effort he released me and patted my shoulder instead.
“You did fine, lad…a great performance! Very manly.”
Delighted, I puffed out my chest. “Thank you, sir.”
“But it won’t hurt if you speak to the girls in the future. They won’t tell their masters that you sound like a herdman.”
“What should I say, sir?”
He rolled his eyes and seemed to go even redder. “For Heaven’s sake! Tell her you’re glad I chose her…how much you want her…that she has mouthwatering tits… You can’t say you love her, but don’t treat her like an animal! I know you’re a beginner, but you’re humping like a herd-man. Make love—like an angel!”
“Sir? Teach me?”
He snorted incredulously and led the way outside to eat again.
─♦─
But at the next camp he took me at my word. He chose a woman who was slightly older, yet still more than worthy of a man’s attention: Kininia. Then he proceeded to instruct me—stroke here, kiss there…try this…try that. Kininia was at first astonished and then much amused. She soon joined in the game, with hints, criticism, and suggestions. She gave demonstrations of her own—coyness leading to enthusiasm, turning without warning to fierce resistance and then sudden wild collaboration. The two of them coached me, coaxed me, and teased me. They had a riotous time at my expense—but I was the one who journeyed in Paradise.
—4—
THE COUNTRY WAS CHANGING AGAIN, the slope becoming perceptible even to my uneducated eye. We journeyed now in a wide valley, flanked in the distance by ever-rising hills, but a dry riverbed careened back and forth across our path, making a straight route no more possible than before. By way of compensation, the winds were growing stronger and more dependable. Rarely, we saw clouds in the sky ahead, faint and remote and tantalizing.
Tributary valleys joined at intervals, bringing in stony gullies to bar our road and also bringing in more herds. Slimy little pools still held water among the rocks, and the camps were so numerous that it was almost possible to see from one to the other—not quite, though, for no herdmaster can ever tolerate a rival within his sight.
The valley grew wider as our descent continued, the hills more remote—higher, fainter. The many springs in this country were keeping the people alive, but the corpses of starved woollies lay everywhere. Roos and vultures and lesser scavengers went openly about their work. Death and despair patrolled the grasslands.
Again and again I listened as Violet tried to explain. Rarely, a herdmaster seemed to understand—a younger one usually. Again and again the angel tried to offer advice. It varied, because he knew he had no answer and was willing to try anything. He would try anything to make them try anything.
There were too many woollies. If the herds were to be culled, then a few might survive and buy time—but the herdmen would not hear of it.
If several herdmasters in an area were to cooperate—that was even less thinkable.
Take the women and horses, and abandon herd and children—not that either.
I was no longer afraid of the herdmasters, for they hardly seemed to care now, and the angel’s prestige protected me. I saw what Violet had meant about their eyes: they had a strange flat look to them, a hopeless deadness. All their lives these men had wandered empty plains without sign of other human life. Now, inexplicably, other herds were crowding in from all directions. The grass was dying, and there was no road out.
Old wives became rare, and even I could guess what was happening. Soon children became rare, also, especially boys.
Our routine was established now. Violet chose the youngest girl, insisting that I would sleep “in a corner of the tent.” Then he told me to go ahead, and I did. Sometimes he watched me; sometimes he just lay down and slept.
I learned not to look in their eyes. Since the lesson with Kininia I had developed some finesse, and very rarely I managed to rouse some excitement in my partner, also; but that was only in the first few camps. Later, the women�
��s eyes took on the same dead flatness as their menfolk’s, and they were incapable of anything except submission. I did not care.
Yet, on two or three occasions, after I had done with her, a woman tried to speak to Violet, denouncing her herdmaster for killing off her mother or her children by a previous owner, just as I had tried to denounce Anubyl to him. His answer was always very much the same: “That is not my business, woman. He is herdmaster and may do what he thinks fit. Now attend to your duties—the boy is being lazy again. See what your skills can do to perk him up.”
Madness hung over the grasslands like the stench of rotting meat.
I lost count. I remember my seventh, because my father had only owned six women. Of course, they had been his for repeated enjoyment, and I was merely sipping on the wing, but I impressed myself when I reached seven. Soon the names and faces blurred. Our journey was long, the stops many. Two dozen women…fifty…perhaps even more than that. What more could a growing boy want?
Poor Violet! His plan had failed abjectly. He had looked to me for inspiration and found instead only mocking confirmation of his own inadequacy. Of course, I did not understand. I was merely very puzzled that he would not indulge in such a superlatively enjoyable activity when it was freely available. Perhaps he did so, once or twice, after I had fallen into a satiated slumber, but I don’t believe he ever even tried.
He was aging, and he was grossly overweight in a murderously hot climate. Doubtless those things were the main cause of his trouble. But much later, in Heaven, I once heard a discussion between a couple of learned saints. Great mental strain, one of them maintained, can depress not only a man’s mind but his body also. It seems a strange idea, but it might explain Violet. The herdfolk were looking to him for aid, and he was impotent to help them. Perhaps that failure gnawed at his brain and thus sapped his physical health. He put me forward in his place, he encouraged my efforts in the hope of encouraging himself—or perhaps he thereby sought to punish himself. Perhaps my callous indifference held some sort of morbid fascination for him… I don’t know. He was more than a little crazy.
I knew none of this at the time. I took each woman as she came, with no thought that she was doomed to die with the rest, when the last woollie corpse had rotted away. Heedless of the darkening horror, of the very real danger that even we might not escape before famine and disease closed the trap, I ate and slept and pleasured to mad excess, relentlessly strengthening my resolve to become an angel.
─♦─
Then, without warning, our long descent through the grasslands ended. Vegetation vanished. The chariot hissed smoothly over hard sand. The hills became rocky and barren, and the rivers shrank into the ground. I know now that we had reached the farthest former extent of the March Ocean, which was already retreating before the hot caress of the approaching sun. At the time I was shocked. I had never seen terrain with no vegetation. Violet must have guessed that it was coming, for he had been begging gifts of water bottles in the last few camps. Now he put on all the speed he could, in a desperate race to reach the water’s edge before we died of thirst.
The heat in the lowlands was incredible, even to me who had never known cold. Light flared up from the sand in unkindly waves and silvery shimmers of mirage, roasting a man’s eyeballs. The wind alone could flay him. Teasing, useless clouds still hung far ahead of us, seaward, while the hills we had left were now elevated to the sky, transformed into pale blue ghosts of mountains—so far had we descended.
Far off on either hand, great spurs of highland flecked the sand. Our course lay toward the ocean, but also toward one of these barriers, the more southerly. That was our fastest route, Violet said, in that wind, and also a better chance for water. He spoke little; the silence was broken only by the hiss of our wheels and a keening of the wind in the rigging.
How long? I have no way of knowing how long we took to cross that desert. I slept three times, I think, but my sleep was fitful in the heat and thirst tortured my dreams, so perhaps my sleeps were short. Violet sat grimly by the mast, working the sails, steering with every speck of his great skill, losing not a moment. Red and bloated still, he somehow could yet look haggard, his face caked with dirt and a silvery growth of whiskers, his eyes almost hidden below the brim of his hat, screwed up against the glare. Our tongues felt huge and calloused in our mouths.
As the ordeal continued, I began to worry about him—I, who had cared nothing while a whole people died around me. I wondered if he would hand over the controls and give me my first lesson in driving a chariot. He might have done so had the way been flat, but the sand rolled in ridges. There were fields of deadly soft dunes and outcroppings of rock. A broken axle would have doomed us. So I remained on the bedding in the front and he stayed by the mast, and the chariot hurtled endlessly over the limitless plain like a frantic ant.
Then came a strange tang in the air, and an inexplicable sound. I looked to Violet and found there a smile for the first time in longer than I could recall, perhaps the first I had ever seen on his face.
“Breakers!” he said.
I watched the breakers in amazement. He had told me to imagine a big water hole, but my mind had never conceived an ocean. I wanted to drink all of it, until he explained about salt, and soon I could taste the salt on my lips. Breakers and unfamiliar white birds and interesting things being washed up in places—all these I could not tarry to investigate.
Now we must follow the shore, still southward, looking for fresh water. We were down to our last canteen when we found it. Where the sand ended and the hills sank gracefully into the sea, a tiny stream trickled from the rocks to die away into the back of a beach ridge. It was barely more than a lagoon—acrid, dead-tasting brackish stuff—but it was life for us. We plunged in bodily, soaking and drinking at the same time, as if we could absorb moisture through our skins. Yes, it was life to us, but it also meant death for the herdfolk, the steady draining of the last groundwater from the grasslands, emerging here to die in the ocean. We splashed and drank and laughed.
Then Violet went squelching back to the chariot, stretched out beneath it in the shade, and went to sleep.
─♦─
When I saw him sitting up, leaning against a wheel, I went marching over and knelt down to speak. During his long absence I had napped, eaten, napped again, tried archery, bathed many times, and discovered the fun of rollicking in surf. I had almost drowned in learning about undertow. I had killed a bird with my sling. I had even dug out the mirror and confirmed what my fingers had been telling me about a mustache, although it had a disappointingly accidental appearance.
“I thought you’d died,” I said. I had checked three times to make sure he had not, but I tried to sound as if I were joking.
He took a moment to reply. “No.” It was a sigh of regret.
“Can I bring you some food, sir?”
He shook his head and continued to stare at the faint smudge of hills that we had left behind us. He looked very old and spent—and limp, as if he had been blown against that wheel by the wind like a litter of leaves.
“Can you live by that now?”
I was holding my bow. Archery was not as simple as I had hoped. “Not yet, sir.”
“I’ll show you how to fish. There are lots of fish.”
That sounded as if he might be planning to abandon me. I was alarmed, but I did not question. When he spoke again, it was of other things. For the only time in our acquaintance, in this moment of defeat, he revealed a glimpse of his soul.
“They knew,” he said. “Heaven has known for a long time. The texts warned them. It always happens.”
“Sir?”
“It happens every cycle. But not so bad. Never as bad as this.”
“No sir?” But he was not really talking to me.
“Trouble was, not enough angels. Not enough men, not enough equipment…too many herdfolk. You got any idea how many descendants one woman can have in the ninth or tenth generation?”
“No sir.�
��
“About a million—and that’s not counting sons.”
He wiped his face with the usual rag and let his hand fall back to the sand with it. “They’ve been sending us out for…for a month. Your father must have been one of the first.”
A month is one of the twelve north-south strips that the angels use to define the world, but they also use the term to denote time, the time taken for the sun to cross one month. I was about a month old, more or less. But I did not understand all that then.
“Doesn’t work with herdfolk,” he went on. “They won’t spread the word around, like other peoples…won’t cooperate.” The wind lifted the rag from his hand and rolled it out into the sunlight and away across the sand. I jumped to retrieve it. When I returned, he was still talking.
“…at the north end. Let just enough woollies by to feed them. Kill off the rest and spare the grass—narrow, it is. And the rest of us were to send them up there, stop them going south. Should have stayed.”
“You did what you could, sir?”
He looked up at me blearily. “I went to save the herdfolk. Looks like I saved one. No, you’re half angel. So I saved half a herdman. Should have stayed.”
He fell silent, staring again at the distant hills where the people were dying. Suddenly I knew what was alarming me the most: his eyes. They had the same flat hopelessness that had haunted the eyes of the herdfolk—yet we had escaped, had we not?
Probably he had guessed what I only learned much later, from the saints. Heaven lost more angels on that herdfolk mission than it had ever lost before. Too many waited around too long and died alongside those they had come to save, snared by the doldrums of High Summer.
Then I asked the one question that I had been carefully trying not to consider: “My family, sir?”
His unwinking eyes crawled around to study mine. “What do you think?”
I nursed my agony for a while in silence. Violet had been running away, even then. He wouldn’t have been running if he’d thought he could do any good by staying. I shook my head.
