West of January

by Dave Duncan

  “You want it?”

  He nodded, so I nodded. “Likely you’ll get it, then.”

  He smiled briefly. “How’s the equipment situation?”

  “Same as usual,” I said. “Drivers’ll be your headache. There are four ant armies on the move just now.”

  Quetti made a lewd remark about ants and the impossibility of angels ever keeping them honest. “Who’s around?”

  I listed the angels presently in Heaven, starting with seamen and wetlanders; he nodded or pouted as I went along, rarely having to ask for details on one he didn’t know. I left out a few who were too old or sick, and I included Two-gray, whose broken leg was almost healed, and White-red-white, whom Quetti disliked.

  By the end, his face was grim indeed. “Seven? Only seven of us?”

  “You want rough-water sailors, them’s your choice.”

  He muttered an oath, his blue eyes staring bleakly past me at unseen horrors. I felt very, very glad that I was not in his place. Seven men could never warn all of the wetlanders in time. They would get caught by the flood, and more than likely that mean Scroll of Honor. Another disaster Heaven had failed to prevent!

  Blots, the scriptorium’s snortoise, had started slithering down a long slope. Saints muttered angrily as their light failed.

  Quetti turned that cold glare on me and cocked an eyebrow.

  “Fancy a little fieldwork for a change?”

  I suppressed a shiver. “Oh, I’d love to help you out. But Michael just can’t bring himself to give me my wheels.”

  My feeble attempt at humor was ignored. “I’m serious. This is going to be a bad one, Old Man.”

  “You’re crazy!” I said hastily. “I’m no rough-water sailor.”

  “I’ll cook breakfast while you’re learning.”

  I told him firmly that if he wanted angels just so he could drown them, then we had a plentiful supply better qualified than me.

  “Some may be seamen or wetlanders,” he said, “but you’re both! I know how fast you pick up things. Well, do this one for me—seven men and seven chariots for the mission. Double drivers to get them there faster. Three per cart coming back, naturally. How many to start?”

  Was this some sort of trick? “Twenty-eight men and fourteen chariots, of course.”

  His smile was almost lost in the gloom. “See? I tried to do that sort of sum all the way back from April, and I never came up with the same answer twice.”

  Gabriel had adjourned the meeting. Daylight had gone, and candles were not allowed in the scriptorium. A saint nipped out to raise the flag over the door, an appeal for dogsleds. Quetti and I told the others to go ahead, being happy to sit and talk angel talk. With cherubim I talked cherub talk, and seraph talk with seraphim. I had no group of my own.

  ─♦─

  We two were the last. We went out to the porch and began pulling on damp-smelling furs. Judging by the racket outside, Blots had found a thick grove of dead trees buried in the snow of the valley bottom. He was likely to remain there for a considerable time, until complete darkness and falling temperatures triggered his primitive reflexes. Then he would go looking for the sunset again.

  Without warning, Quetti said, “Roo? Why won’t you ask for your wheels? There’s so much to be done, and so few of us to do it!”

  “Ah! Three-blue, you are treading close to one of Heaven’s great mysteries, one of Cloud Nine’s favorite philosophical debates! Is it even worth doing everything you can, when it amounts to so little compared to what’s needed? I’ve noticed that eager young cherubim never doubt. ‘Of course!’ they say. But the rheumy old saints and retired angels—they usually shake their heads. Men even older than me, each one of them looking back on a whole lifetime of achievement and seeing that it doesn’t really amount to anything at all. None of us is going to change the course of history, Quetti, so why—”

  “Stop evading the question.”

  I hauled at legging laces, doubled over and unable to speak.

  “Knobil, you’d make a great angel,” Quetti said.

  I unbent slightly. “You know why Michael couldn’t give me my wheels, even if I asked for them. Everyone knows, so you must.”

  “That is plain idiocy!” Quetti said hotly. “You came to Heaven by pure accident. The Compact wasn’t designed to prevent accidents, it was designed to stop men setting up dynasties. Heavens, Roo, you’re not going to set yourself up as a king!”

  I went back to my lacing without commenting.

  “Have you asked him?” Quetti persisted.

  I did not have to answer that either, because a dogsled came yelping and jingling over the snow, following Blot’s wide track. Quetti held the door for me to go first, and I stepped out on the platform, reaching for the rail at the top of the ladder. Far to the east, the sky was black and twinkling with stars, the Other Worlds. Rail and platform were both slick with black ice. Without warning or understanding, I was airborne.

  Blots was one of the largest of the snortoises, a small mountain of unimaginable age. For scores of human lifetimes he had hauled his great bulk along, lubricated by snow, munching dead wood and fungus, heedless of anything except the direction of sunset. His roars were mere belching, not communication. He had no enemies, and if he had offspring, they were of no more interest to him than the scriptorium he bore on his back. In all my time in Heaven, I only once saw a snortoise mating, a procedure that demolished the paper mill and tilted the bakery almost vertical.

  On the way down I had time to reflect that, although this was far from being my first fall in Heaven, I had never fallen from the very top of a ladder before and had never had time to wonder what I was going to land on. Dead trees tend to break off in very nasty spikes. I wondered also about the resulting damage—broken hips seemed about the minimum for starters. The ladder was at the snortoises rear, of course, because the flippers can crush a man quite easily, and the snow there would be rock-hard after Blots had slid on it. Anything I hit would probably smash me to pieces.

  But no. With the sort of perfect timing a man could not repeat in three lifetimes, Blots saved me. What Heaven usually regarded as a rare but highly unpleasant threat proved to be my salvation, and I came down into an explosion of snortoiseshit.

  ─♦─

  Quetti and the seraph sled-boy dug me out, cleaned me up so I could breathe, and then rushed me over to Nightmare, which happened to be close. I woke up lying on my own bed, in the largest and most comfortable cubicle of the whole dormitory building, one I had appropriated long ago.

  “Just lie still,” Quetti said. “The kid’s gone for a medic.”

  What kid? Why did my ankle hurt? Then I began to remember and also to discover a whole world of additional bruises. Oddly enough, although I had been stunned, my head did not ache at all.

  “I think I survived,” I said. “What is that appalling stink?”

  “You stepped in something,” Quetti said. He was sitting close by my bunk, and even the flickering lamplight showed the concern on his face. I felt rather touched.

  “I’m okay, really.” I reached out to clap him on the shoulder and caught a glimpse of my arm. I suddenly understood my miraculously soft landing. “Oh hell! I won’t be okay when the cherubim come back here! The place will never be habitable again.”

  “The important thing is that you’re alive!” Quetti said. “It had to happen eventually, I suppose. Those gymnastics of yours give us all the willies. Your luck had to run out eventually.”

  “I’d say my luck did all right.”

  He nodded and swallowed and did not speak for a moment. I counted bruises and scrapes, moving limbs gently. Nothing too serious.

  “Knobil!”

  “Mmm?” I opened my eyes.

  “You’re drowsy! Stay awake till the medic comes.” Quetti looked even more concerned than before.

  “Minor concussion,” I said. “Talk to me.”

  “You talk to me. Tell me why you stay around here? A man with no knees shouldn’
t be running up and down ladders all day long.”

  “No wings.” I did feel sleepy, now that he’d mentioned it.

  “You’re getting older, Knobil. How much longer can you manage those ladders?”

  I wanted to drift away…without the stench if possible; with, if necessary. “Got no choice.”

  “Be an angel! You’d be much safer in a chariot than climbing ladders here in Heaven.”

  I shook my head, fighting to keep my eyes open, watching golden lamplight play over the crooked snortoiseshell ceiling.

  Quetti’s voice rose as if he were angry. “You mean Michael won’t let you? You’ve asked?”

  “Don’t want to be an angel. No good angel. Want to go home to the grasslands.”

  “Oh, of course!” Quetti said skeptically. “Nothing like the roo-eat-roo life of the grasslands. And I suppose Michael won’t even give you leave to do that?”

  I shook my head, my eyelids drooping in spite of all I could do.

  “What?” He sounded startled. “Seriously? You’re a prisoner?”

  “Can’t walk.”

  “Then why not just bum a ride with someone and go?”

  “Michael,” I mumbled. “Revenge.”

  That—if I have remembered the conversation correctly—was where the misunderstanding arose. I meant that I was certain Michael had guessed my secret dream and would feel bound by his angel vows to hunt me down and stop me at all costs.

  But Quetti said furiously that he was the best damned angel Heaven had, and Michael wouldn’t dare take any revenge on him, by Heaven, and the senile old bogmoth would likely be dead before he came back the next time anyway, and I could ship out quietly with him, Quetti, anytime I wanted.

  At that point sheer terror should have snapped me wide awake—the realization that I could escape from Heaven at last and go attend to my sinister purposes—but all I can remember saying is “Thank you.”

  —2—

  THE MEDICS KEPT ME FLAT on my back until my ankle healed and I grew bored. Then I told them to go eat a snortoise, and I got up. But the long rest had given me time to think. As my dizziness passed, I began to see what had happened, but I was not seriously worried. Quetti would need time to prepare his departure, and during that time I would find some opportunity to tell him I had changed my mind. Ladders or not, Heaven was a much safer place than the grasslands, so there was no chance that a coward like me would ever find the courage to accept Quetti’s offer of escape.

  Besides, I told myself sternly, to accept his help would be to abuse his friendship quite shamelessly. Like Michael, he was sworn to suppress violence. Like Michael, he would have to try to stop me if I moved to put my mad plans into effect.

  I almost told him so. He had come to visit and was ready to leave when I started to fumble out the words: “Three-blue, you know how the herdfolk live. If I go back to the grasslands to become a herdmaster, then I shall have to kill someone.”

  Quetti laughed. “Of course! But you’re a demon with a bow, Roo. I remember! You’ll own half the woollies on Vernier in no time.” Still chuckling, he stalked away. Obviously he had not believed me. He probably didn’t think I was man enough to kill in cold blood—and there I tended to agree with him, so why did it matter?

  And yet…even though I never expected to find the courage to go, as soon as I was mobile, I found myself laying in a supply of arrows. Surreptitiously I made myself a pagne. I already possessed one of the best bows in Heaven. Everyone else was much too busy helping Quetti to notice what I was up to.

  Only seven angels had rough-water sailing skill, and two refused the mission when they heard the odds. A couple of cherubim volunteered in their place. They were brothers, and fisherfolk, a scanty people who scrape out a narrow living on the rocky shores of the Ocean with the aid of trained birds. These two swore that they could handle sailboats in any weather. Uriel and I ran them through an abbreviated landside training, and Michael gave them their stripes. Seven it would be. They seemed very young to be so eager to die.

  I was shoeing a horse when Quetti appeared in shiny new buckskins. He pushed back his hat brim and said, “Ready?”

  My heart leapt into my throat, but my voice said “Sure!” before I could stop it.

  Somewhere inside of me, another voice said, “Now you’re done it!”

  I looked around for a seraph to finish the horseshoe I was working on. The smithy was deserted—which was odd. “Just a moment,” I said and quickly tidied up. Then I scribbled a note, threw the pony some hay, and lurched down the ramp to join Quetti.

  For once, Heaven was enjoying fine weather. The sun stood clear of the horizon; snow was melting and dribbling from skeleton branches. Open ground was slushy and the sky was actually blue.

  “I have to go by Nightmare and pick up a couple of things,” I said as I settled onto the sled.

  And this time it was Quetti who said, “Sure.” He was driving the sled himself, and I should have been suspicious right there. Still as innocent as a raw egg, I collected my bow and arrows, my tiny bundle of possessions. We went racing off again over the snow, with the bellows of snortoises rising among the trees on all sides.

  Leaving Heaven? I still did not believe I could be such an idiot. And I would vanish with no farewells and be long gone before Michael realized. Strange, I thought, how all my departures had been like that. My family on the grasslands, the seafolk, even my fellow slaves in the mine—each time I had just disappeared without a word of goodbye.

  “It wasn’t easy!” Quetti yelled in my ear.

  Enjoying the exhilaration of my last dogsled ride, I didn’t pay much attention at first. “What wasn’t?” I shouted over my shoulder.

  “Gabriel said you’re worth any six saints he’s got.”

  “He’s an idiot, and he always was,” I remarked absently.

  “Sariel said you’re the only man in Heaven who can get a fair deal from the traders.”

  Then I twisted around on the sled and stared up in horror at Quetti standing behind me, cracking his whip in high spirits. He was flushed by the wind and grinning. He had told Sariel?

  “And Uriel—Uriel insists that Heaven is now training angels in half the time it used to take, and all because of you. A cripple drives the cherubim to gibbering frenzy, he says.”

  “Quetti! You didn’t…”

  “And Raphael says much the same about the seraphim.”

  “Quetti! You didn’t—”

  But he had. Openmouthed with horror, I was swept into a wide and sunny clearing. In the center, in splendid isolation, stood a bright red chariot that I had never seen before, while the entire population of Heaven seemed to be assembled around the perimeter. Quetti drove the dogs at a fiendish pace all around, whirling his whip overhead and howling, while a ghastly, unbearable cheer arose from the crowd. I wanted to melt away like the icicles.

  The dogs came to a panting halt alongside a patch of bare mud, and there stood the five archangels, distinguishable by the colors of their furs.

  Quetti stepped down and held out a hand, grinning like a crocodile. I let him haul me to my feet. I was speechless, tongue-tied. What sort of joke was he playing?

  He waved a hand at the archangels. “They all agreed that nobody ever deserved his wheels more than you do.”

  “Michael?” I whispered.

  Quetti chuckled. “Together they can overrule him.”

  So he meant four archangels, not the one who was already tottering in my direction, unsteady on the muddy footing. He was tiny, even in his bulky white furs, and I could not remember when I had last seen him out of doors. He was carrying a buckskin jacket. There were ribbons on its sleeve.

  “But…you’ve ruined him!” I said, aghast. “Shamed him! They’ll turn on him now!”

  Quetti discarded the grin and dropped his voice. “About time! He’s too old, Roo—past it! You’ve been propping him up too long.”

  Me, propping…? Then Quetti tactfully strode off, heading for the other four. I
watched the handshakes and smiles of satisfaction. Uriel, Sariel, Gabriel, Raphael—they had voted me an angel, and now they would depose Michael for violating the Compact. Here was one conspiracy I had not been able to warn him of in time.

  Then Michael came to a halt in front of me, and the cheering and chattering died away as everyone waited for speeches. But he spoke too softly for any ears but mine, and the real message was the reproach and hurt in the watery blue-blue eyes.

  “You never told me you wanted to be an angel! You could have asked, couldn’t you? At least you might have asked!”

  “I don’t want that! Quetti misunderstood something I said.”

  He blinked in surprise, and then his familiar smile returned. He chuckled with relief. “Then how do we get out of this mess, son?”

  Why should he ask me? He was the wizard, wasn’t he? But I had not realized how he had aged. Maybe Quetti was right. Maybe I had been propping him up—advising, informing, troubleshooting. I was the loner, the all-rounder, the man nobody questioned.

  “I just wanted to go,” I said unhappily. “To slip away unseen.”

  He recoiled as if I had struck him. “Leave me?”

  “Go home to the grasslands.”

  He shook his head angrily “And who do I get to do my reading for me? Huh? Tell me that! Who can I trust when I want to talk out a problem?” He glared at me.

  I had no answer for him. The audience had gone very quiet, seeing that something was wrong, but not knowing what.

  Michael’s eyes narrowed. I could read him now. I saw the sly calculations underway. “You never did tell me why you wanted to go back there, son…?”

  “It’s my homeland.”

  He shook his head. “I think there’s more to it than that! I don’t remember you ever taking the oath, Knobil, do I?”

  I should have known he’d have a few tricks left. “No. I never did.”

  Scanty yellow teeth showed in a leer. “And they won’t let you be an angel unless you do! Probably they won’t even let you leave! What happens if I tell them that you haven’t taken the oath, huh?”