West of January

by Dave Duncan

  An exhausted peace settled over Heaven. It lasted about one sleep, and then all the duties that had been neglected had to be caught up. Only a few aging angels remained, but the cherubim were still anxious for promotion, and thus I found myself instructing in everything from chariot driving to herb lore—at least the little I had picked up from Misi.

  There was nobody heading out, to the grasslands or anywhere else, and without transportation, in Heaven I must remain. Of course, I could have stolen a couple of ponies and just vanished into a snowstorm, but that would have required a stouter heart than mine, for I knew I should find Loneliness out there waiting for me. Moreover, Michael could have sent angels to bring me back. Instead, I cravenly accepted the situation and settled down in Heaven for the time being.

  Some of the blame belonged to Kettle, who managed at last to open my eyes to knowledge. I discovered that herdmen, or at least herdmen half-breeds, were not too stupid to learn to read. My penmanship was better than most—thanks to Misi’s embroidery lessons, I suppose. Somehow I found myself absorbing all the history and geography and sociology and biology and the myriad other things that cherubim must learn.

  I had no real duties and no status. I taught cherubim. I exchanged lessons with angels—trader signals in return for navigation, for example. I copied archives for the saints, and I listened to their lectures. I played seraph at times, for I thereby learned skills I thought might be useful to me later. I sharpened knives, shoed horses, blended gunpowder, threw pots.

  I visited with Michael often, drinking his sickly wine, arguing and swapping stories. We shared jokes, skirted sensitive spots—quarreling, arguing, probing, testing, stalking around each other like suspicious dogs.

  Heaven was a seductive trap for a man who had a mission and a purpose elsewhere. It was safety after danger, and fellowship after loneliness. I had friends—even, I suppose, family.

  I had sung in my childhood, and with the seafolk. I had sung when I was with my darling Misi, and even sometimes on my long trek with Quetti—usually while lounging by a campfire, in the company of a pretty girl or two. And in Cloud Nine I sang along with the cherubim.

  ─♦─

  The war party returned, tails down, having found the mine long deserted. The tribe had formed itself into an ant army and vanished into the forest, undoubtedly heading for some better lode that their ancestral wisdom told them was due to emerge from the wetlands. Before leaving they had killed off many, or perhaps all, of their slaves. They may have taken the better ones with them or sold them to traders, although traders usually shun slaves in large numbers. Had Hrarrh sold me off to save me from enjoying a quick death?

  The angels had failed me again, and I was not surprised.

  Heaven settled back into its ages-old routine. Now angels were heading out on missions all the time, even if only on routine patrols of neglected niches. It was time for me to go. Heaven was a snare. I was procrastinating, thinking of a million excuses to put off my departure. I had learned much and there was much more I could learn still, but if I tried to learn everything, then I would die before finishing. I could feel my courage ebbing away. I had begun to tell myself that I was dreaming impossible dreams, that I had been mad when I had first thought up my plan and now was sane again. Nothing argues more convincingly than cowardice.

  I did ask. During one of our long chats, Michael started riding his hobbyhorse about herdfolk yet again, how he wanted to save the poor loners. This piece of hypocrisy always infuriated me. He wanted to use herdmen, but he secretly despised them. In his eyes they were merely muscular brutes. I suffered in silence for a while and then forced out the words: “It’s time for me to leave.”

  He straightened in his chair, bristling. “To go where?”

  “Home,” I said simply.

  He looked surprised, then pleased. “Well, you’d never get into a kayak, but that shouldn’t matter. Did you know I had four brothers? The wetlands must be teeming with your cousins, if you could ever find—”

  “Home to the grasslands.”

  “What?” He threw back his head and cackled.

  I glared in silence. I no longer needed to sit on the floor when visiting Michael. He had ordered a special chair made—solid, high enough to be easy for me, with a footrest. It was infuriatingly comfortable.

  “Rot!” he said. “Decay and putrefaction! Why would a civilized being like you want to go back to live among those animals?”

  “They’re my people. I don’t belong here nor in the wetlands. I want to go home. Everyone does in the end.”

  That was not quite true. Some angels, like Michael, elected to live out their life span in Heaven, but most headed off eventually in search of wife and hearth and children. Michael, having considered the matter, was now openly suspicious. “No, you’re no child-killer. Why? You’ve got something else in mind!”

  His insight stunned me, but of course, that was the key to his success at manipulating people. “No, I don’t! Will you let me go?”

  “Not until I know why!” We were both shouting.

  “I’ve told you!”

  “No you haven’t!”

  “Animals, are they?” I swung my feet down. “But the women perform satisfactorily?” I heaved myself upright.

  Michael switched moods, a common trick of his. He stayed in his pillowed chair and beamed up at me jocularly. “Now what vast confusion is churning inside that blond head of yours, son?”

  “Just that word: son! You took my mother like the loan of a blanket!”

  “You ought to be glad I did, surely?”

  “You made me a yellow-haired freak!”

  He sniggered. “Your complaint is paradoxical. You display an unthinking lack of gratitude. Your mother was very grateful.” I screamed at him.

  “Seriously!” he said blandly. “She told me she’d never realized it was supposed to be a pleasure.”

  “Liar! Filthy liar!”

  “No. And when I returned and found you…” He paused, eyeing me oddly. I was shaking with wild fury. “Lithion? That was her name, wasn’t it, Lithion?”

  “Yes.” I took a lurching step toward the door.

  “What happened to her? Did she have many more children after you? How many others?”

  “Damn you to dark hell! I don’t want to talk about her!” I stepped for the door again, just as the snortoise lurched. Caught off balance, I staggered, missed a grab at a chair, and pitched to the floor. That was not the first nor the last spill I took in Heaven, but it was one of the worst. Throne must have felt my skull hit his shell.

  The strange lights faded from my eyes. The building settled. I was lying on my back, listening to the rumbles of the world’s mightiest digestion. I struggled to sit up and discovered Michael was kneeling at my side, assisting me.

  “Easy!” he said. “You took a bad knock. Easy, son!”

  “Don’t call me that!” I flailed vainly.

  “But you are my son. Mine and Lithion’s.”

  “No!” I tried to shout but only groaned. Though my head was spinning, I knew I must go, and go at once. “I won’t talk about her. I killed her. Help me up—now!”

  “Easy!” He tightened his grip, with more strength than I would have believed he possessed in his withered little frame. To stand up I must first lie down, and he was supporting me. I floundered like a child. My frustration made me start to weep.

  “Tell me,” he whispered, hugging me tight. “Tell me what happened.”

  I blurted out the story of Anubyl, or some of it, anyway. I don’t know how much I told, because I wasn’t listening to what I said. At the end of it, I buried my face in the collar of Michael’s coarse white gown and sobbed like a baby. He clutched me firmly until at last I snuffled away into shamed silence.

  “Better now?”

  “Mmmph.” I felt like an imbecile. “Banged my head…better go lie down for a while.”

  “Listen first,” he said. “You were only a boy—and a very small boy by their sta
ndards, right?”

  I tried to protest and was stopped by a surge of nausea.

  “He was twice your size. He had a club, and a sword, too. Would the others have helped you if you’d called on them?”

  I grunted. Michael knew the answer as well as I did.

  “There was nothing you could do! If you’d so much as breathed a word, a single word, he would have cut you down. And then probably her also, for not teaching her son manners. You know that, Knobil!”

  “Let me up.”

  “Knobil—he’s dead! Long dead! Fewer than a third of the herdfolk got past the Ocean, and he’d be an old man by now. No herdmaster ever lives to be an old man. He’s long dead, Knobil.”

  “Gotta go to bed.” I began struggling again, and still he held me.

  “There’s nothing you can do about him now, Knobil. Even if he were alive, there’s no way to track down one man on the grasslands.”

  “Let me up!”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Knobil—what happened to Lithion wasn’t your fault.”

  “Shut up!” I screamed, knocking his hands away. “Don’t talk about her! She was my mother! My mother—do you understand? And to you she was just a couple of sweaty romps, that’s all! You used her like a spittoon, to catch some unwanted secretions!” I broke loose and rolled over on my belly, preparing to rise.

  “I offered to buy her. And you, too.”

  I stopped and then raised myself on my elbows. “You did what?”

  “I told her I could love her. I told her I would try to buy the two of you, and we could go to the wetlands together.”

  “Mad!” I whispered, appalled. “If my father had heard—”

  “I’m your father, not that hairy bull who owned her! We both knew that. So do you.” His voice softened. “Oh, Knobil! There we were, lying in each other’s arms. You were sitting in the corner sucking your thumb and scowling at me in very much the same way you’re scowling at me now—”

  “Idiocy! She wouldn’t have left the others.”

  He nodded sadly. “That was a problem—she wouldn’t leave her other children. And I suspect she didn’t trust me not to kill them if I took them, as well. She even said that… What was his name—the herdmaster?”

  “I don’t know.” I wrestled myself up on my feet at last, although I still felt limp and sick. “I never knew his name.”

  “Well, she said he’d likely kill you if I even hinted that you were mine and not his. He hadn’t thought of it, she said, and the women had never dared suggest it to him.”

  “He hadn’t thought of it?” I echoed, dusting myself off and trying to look dignified. “Hadn’t thought of it? Of course he’d thought of it! He knew perfectly well. He used to call me…” I choked over a sudden flash of long-lost memory, of being cuddled and tickled by that huge, shaggy man with the dread dark eyes, both of us slickly wet in the hot, dim tent—him cooing and chuckling, me I suppose giggling… I must have been very small. It could not have been long after the second visit by Green-two-blue. “He called me his dasher. His little pink dasher who ran into his tent! I wasn’t as brown as the others, you see.”

  Michael rose also, struggling up from his knees. “Indeed? How touching! I’m not sure it proves much.”

  I lurched toward the door. I was far too deeply enraged to want more conversation with this lecherous, filthy-minded old angel.

  “She was very dear to me,” he said. “I never made an offer to any of the others like that.”

  “Ha! And of course there were hundreds of others!”

  “Yes, there were. But you’re no shy virgin yourself, are you?”

  I hauled open the door without a word. My head was still ringing.

  Now he was shouting. “She wanted to come with me! She said so! It was just that she was frightened of…ah, her owner. That was the only reason! And why would your mother have lied to me?”

  I stopped, halfway through. “Well, perhaps…just for argument…you might consider the possibility that she loved him?” Him—my father, whatever his name had been. I turned, gripping the jamb fiercely. “He was three times the man you ever were, midget. She may not have found you so great a lover as you believed. Maybe she was being polite to the runt she had to serve so demeaningly? She may have expected to be beaten if she displeased you. She may just possibly have resented having to bear your child. It hurts them, you know.”

  As I rolled off down the corridor, I heard Michael shouting, “Come back here! Knobil! It wasn’t your fault!”

  He often babbled nonsense about guilt, did Michael. He was obsessed by guilt. From then on, I just refused to listen.

  ─♦─

  Time slipped by unseen. Heaven continued its unending journey, following the setting sun. Angels departed on their missions, singly or in groups. They returned, or they vanished into the unknown. Older men said their farewells and departed. Pilgrims arrived and became cherubim. Cherubim became angels—or not, as the case might be.

  Promotion was an ordeal. A senior cherub could usually be recognized by a distinctive jumpiness as his time of decision approached. Uriel kept track of every man’s progress, and he reported to Michael. Any cherub who was an obvious misfit would be weeded out early in training, but there were few of those, for the wilds of Vernier are an exacting test. Incompetent pilgrims do not arrive.

  No one ever told a cherub that he was ready for his wheels. The decision was his alone, the final test of his judgment. If he waited too long, he was assumed to be lacking in nerve or in ambition, and eventually he would be summoned to Michael’s presence to be offered a lesser position, as saint or seraph. The only alternative then was a knapsack of food and a good pair of boots.

  That was humiliation, and few waited for the dreaded call. Instead, a cherub would request an audience and go to ask for his wheels. He might be offered one of the lesser posts instead. Rarely he would be told to return later and try again. But if he had judged himself correctly, he would emerge from the ordeal with a shining face and three colored ribbons, heading for Cloud Nine and a celebration that usually waxed near to riot.

  Snake-who-had-been-Quetti was a determined young man. Older than most recruits when we arrived, he made up for that with very fast progress. He told no one he was going to visit Michael, and the first we knew of it was when he walked in with three blue stripes already sewn on his sleeve. Three of one color was a very unusual honor, perhaps given in his case to show that he bore no stain of suspicion over Red-yellow’s death. Cloud Nine was almost demolished by that party, and my hangover afterward was barely less bearable than the torments of slavery.

  So Snake became Three-blue, and almost at once he departed for late Friday to warn some seafolk who were in danger of being trapped by advancing ice. We had not been close friends, but his absence was a warning that my time might be running out, if I was ever to make anything of my life.

  I was not a cherub nor a seraph nor a saint, but I played all of those roles at times. My relationship to Michael must have been well known, but it was never mentioned. He seemed to make no secret of it, and he came more and more to use me as a confidant.

  Thus I learned about his petty political struggles and how he handled them. Those became easier as Uriel’s loyalty steadied. Later Raphael headed home to the tundra; his successor was more cooperative. I thought the changes that Michael was trying to make were all very trivial, but after nearly a thousand generations, Heaven is grimly resistant to any change at all.

  Time slipped by and I did not leave. I might be there yet, had I not fallen off a ladder.

  —12—

  THREE-RED

  WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT THREE-BLUE HAD RETURNED from yet another mission, I was disgusted to realize that it must have been his fifth, while I was still just frittering my life away in Heaven, achieving nothing. I found him in the scriptorium, in bright sunlight and the usual clutter, with Gabriel and half a dozen worried saints.

  Quetti was one of the senior angels now. His dimple ha
d become a cleft and scalp showed through the golden hair, but otherwise he was little changed. His grin of welcome was broad enough, but brief. I envied him his tan. Sunshine was one thing I missed badly. In Heaven, the sky is not only often cloudy and dull, but actually dark about half of the time, an unnatural and unwholesome condition that always reminded me of mine tunnels.

  “Roo?” Kettle’s voice boomed across the big room as I entered. “Now I know we have a problem—Roo’s here!”

  “Always glad to help out,” I agreed. They knew why I always turned up when there was a problem.

  Quetti had been dispatched far to the northwest, to where the Alps were emerging from Dawn’s ice sheets. As the sun crosses March in every cycle, meltwater builds up north of the range in a gigantic lake. The tundra drainage freezes off at just about the time the icecap clears the western end of the barrier. The result is the Great Flood, a catastrophe in the wetlands. It had been the height of the lake that Quetti had been sent to inspect.

  But angels’ field reports never quite agree with those from previous cycles, because the geography is always changing. The saints’ job was to turn Three-blue’s notes into maps, and maps into predictions.

  Kettle was leaning over the big table again, growling. “This is impossible! Blind wetlander! Michael should have sent a seaman!”

  “Three-blue’s a match for any seaman,” I said, winking at Quetti.

  Kettle just muttered, attending to the task at hand.

  Somewhat later—at about the time my stomach’s rumblings became louder than the snortoises—we had reached a consensus. Not only was the lake too high, but the ice was receding too fast. Moreover, the Great Flood had been coming earlier every cycle, and no one had noticed that trend. We made notes all over the current reports to warn the saints in the next cycle—but that didn’t solve the problem. The timing looked very bad.

  At length, Quetti left the learned men to their disputations and took me aside. He perched one hip on the edge of a desk, blithely upsetting carefully stacked papers. “I’ll get this one?”