World Enough, and Time

by James Kahn

  “Where do you think he’ll go to ground?” Joshua mused when lunch was over.

  “There is a Forest of Accidents some hundred miles east and south,” said Beauty, “but I doubt the thing can last that far. Best just to stalk and corner.” He paused. “I only hope we catch it before it dies, so we can question it.”

  Joshua nodded. “We need more information if we’re ever going to trace the others.”

  “If it is slave trade this concerns T know two places to nose about. One is a brothel, half a day from here. The Accident may head there, in any event.”

  Joshua smiled grimly. “I remember. We went there once, fifteen years ago.”

  “It is not so nice a place now, I am told.” They shared a brief, painful thought: their loved ones, sold in chains, to pirates or worse.

  “And the other place?” Josh asked.

  “A pirate camp, on the coast south of Newport. I have friends there, as well, who may help.”

  “Pirates?”

  “Now, yes. Once they fought with King Jarl’s Elite Guard.” Jarl was the Bear-King, and his Elite Guard Service—the JEGS—had won many battles against the Humans in the Race War.

  Joshua remembered them well. “But then if this isn’t slave trade, if this is war again …”

  Beauty left the question unanswered. It lay between them for a moment, then blew away like the ashes of yesterday’s fire. “We are brothers in deep ways now. They cannot make us hunt each other again.”

  Joshua felt the truth of this. “Rose read my eyes yesterday,” he said.

  “What did she see?” Beauty asked quickly. He didn’t always believe in Rose’s predictions, but they held special import now, if only as tokens of his beloved.

  “She told me I lost something.” They looked at each other with sad hindsight. “She said there’d be a long hunt, though, and that I’d find it again.” He put the force of promise in his voice.

  “What else?” Beauty insisted, buoyed by the vision.

  Joshua chuckled. “The rest needed translation, and we didn’t have time. She said I was going to drown—but that I’d live again.”

  Beauty laughed too. “Better not tell that to the Pope’s men. They would drown you for blasphemy, and if you lived again they would drown you doubly for double blasphemy and insolence.”

  They both laughed long and heartily, the more so for the relief that they could still laugh at all.

  They were about to set off again, when Beauty twitched his ears to the side and said, “What was that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” said Josh.

  “Shh.”

  They both listened. The wind, a cricket, the leaves. And then, a subtle sound, almost not a sound at all, barely a disturbance in the air.

  They crept silently toward the noise, through tall grass and shallow puddles. It grew indistinctly louder, and seemed to be coming from behind a large rock formation. It made the sound a hand makes passing through spiderwebs.

  Beauty stood clear of the rocks and strung an arrow. Josh took out his blade and sidled around through increasingly muddy wash to the far side of the stones. Knife in hand, he crouched a moment behind the largest piece of granite, then leapt over it blindly to the other side.

  He was ankle-deep in mud. Before him was a pool, five yards across—a tar pit, covered with a quarter inch of water. And at the edge of the pit, just beginning to sink, was a brightly colored butterfly, its four-foot wings beating wildly to try to pull itself into flight, out of the tar.

  Josh smiled sympathetically. He reached out, grabbed the terrified creature by its dark furry body, and lifted it gently out of the mire. It shivered violently.

  He carried it back to where Beauty was standing, bow drawn. “Just a Flutterby. Trying to drink the water off a tar pit,” Joshua explained. The animal was quivering now, its delicate red-and-gold wings straight up in frightened attention. Josh carried it back to the pond and began to wash the tar off the large insect’s belly with sand and lemon juice from a nearby tree’s fallen fruits. Beauty put up his bow and walked over.

  “Poor thing,” the Centaur shook his head. “They are beautiful, but not, I think, the smartest of creatures.”

  “Lovable, though.” Josh finished washing the Flutterby’s body clean, then placed it on some dry grass in the sun. “There you go, big girl, you’ll dry off soon enough.”

  It sat there timidly. Its ebony body was glistening wet; its flower-thin wings rose and fell slowly, tentatively, with each respiration. Its heart continued to palpitate so quickly that the sides of its dark slender body seemed almost to vibrate. It looked at Joshua, and its scared, warm face smiled.

  “It will be safe here,” said Beauty. “It will fly within the hour.” He looked at the sun. “We should be gone.”

  Josh grunted agreement.

  They started off, but didn’t get fifty paces before Josh stopped. “Wait a minute. Be right back.” He ran over to the pond, broke open an orange, and laid several juicy slices on the ground in front of the Flutterby. Shyly, the animal lowered its eyes.

  Josh ran back to where Beauty was waiting. “Let’s go,” he said, and they continued south at a trot.

  Not only the contour of the western coastline, but the terrain itself had undergone considerable alteration following the quakes of Fire and Rain, and then once more after the Great Quake, the Change, which seemed to mark the beginning, some six score years earlier, of the steady southward creeping, from the Pole, of the Big Ice.

  A temperate band of hills and wood extended from Monterey down to past Port Fresno, but there the land quickly became subtropical. Newport, in fact, was carved out of and surrounded by rain forest, and no one civilized had ever been much south of that since no one knew when.

  The marshland over which Josh and Beauty were trekking was itself highly variable in character. Areas of bogs, fens, and marshes were interspersed throughout, sometimes in great density; on the other hand, great spans of grassy plain extended sometimes for miles. It was hilly in places, rocky elsewhere, and there were even scattered acres of trees.

  It made tracking difficult. The wounded creature had gone over stony flats that held not a print, through foul mire that absorbed all smell. Josh and Beauty kept on the trail, but they had to slow down. At one point they even missed a turning, and had to backtrack a mile before they picked up the true scent.

  The sun was still high when they came to the shore of the Venus River. The Venus was a long water that ran from inside Mount Venus in the east, all the way to the sea. It was fairly calm where it cut through the marshlands, but a hundred yards wide, and too deep to tell how deep.

  They were both good swimmers, but Josh was hesitant, water-shy, remembering Rose’s vision. Beauty admonished him, though, and assured him Rose had been speaking in metaphors. They stood at the muddy edge for a few minutes, watching the slow, implacable current move, like time, toward them and then past them. Leaves bobbed on the surface, and rotting logs and dragonfly wings. A flower floated by, and as it came even with them it paused, on an eddy or undercurrent, and for a moment the whole world was still for Joshua. The moment passed.

  Josh and Beauty exchanged a glance, jumped in at the same time, and raced to the other side. On the other side, there was no trail.

  “Most likely let the current take him downstream,” said Joshua. “We’ll do best to walk west along the bank, pick him up where he came out.”

  “So it would want us to think.” The Man-stallion tightened his eyes and shook himself dry. “But a strong Accident can swim upstream. And its home-forest is yet east of here.”

  “The brothel’s west,” suggested Josh. They both thought in silence for a time, considered alternatives. “We could split up,” Josh added. He didn’t want to: Beauty was all he had left.

  Beauty placed this thought precisely, between his temples, behind his eyes, and examined it from all sides. “No,” he said.

  Josh quietly approved. Then: “We’ll walk east, upstream for
a mile or two, and if we don’t pick up the trail, we’ll turn back and follow the river west. He couldn’t have swum upstream more than two miles.”

  In a measured voice, Beauty replied: “Yes.” This was the Human way, to try to cover all the possibilities. Such an approach had its merits, Beauty conceded to himself, when Horse-sense failed.

  It was a standing joke between them, Beauty’s economy of words. Quiet Josh was positively garrulous next to his equine companion, and frequently teased the Centaur about his dour, parsimonious speech. Beauty, in his turn, would accuse Josh of logorrhea, of being a Scribe just to scribble, of meaningless chatter. And so it went.

  Josh looked at his friend now, after the two monosyllabic retorts, and said, “Tell you what, stamp your foot once for Yes, twice for No. Okay?” It was his great joy in life to tease his golden friend.

  Beauty looked down his nose distantly at Josh, raised his right front hoof, and tapped the young man backward into the river. Joshua splashed and spluttered momentarily, then pulled himself out.

  “Like that?” beamed the Centaur angelically.

  With a gleeful whoop, Joshua jumped on top of Beauty’s back, leaned his full weight to one side, his hands in the Horse-man’s mane, and wrestled the Centaur to the ground. They rolled around the mud, horseplaying for a full minute before Josh looked up to realize they were completely surrounded by a party of hostile creatures.

  He stood up slowly, hands away from his knives. Beauty jumped up in a single motion, then stood perfectly still, waiting.

  There were five of them, all with weapons drawn, forming a semicircle around Josh and Beauty at the riverside. Silent savages.

  One was a big fellow, hair covering most of his face. He aimed a crossbow directly at Joshua’s middle. Beside him stood a gaunt, toothless woman holding a zip gun—these primitive firearms exploded as often as not, but one never knew. Next to her was a muscular man with no arms and the head of a large black bird, and at his side a gorilla smiled, opening and closing its fists. And finally, the one who seemed to be the leader: a tall naked woman with a saber in her hand and a black cloth hood over her head, her brilliant green eyes staring out through the two holes cut in the cloth. On her right shoulder was branded an upright trident.

  For a full minute nobody moved. It was an animal thing. Each was sniffing the air, reading the wind. Josh felt a droplet of sweat congeal under his arm and creep down his side, precipitating out of the hot afternoon sun, the tension in the air. Finally the woman in the hood spoke, in a low willful monotone.

  “Are you believers?” she said.

  Josh tightened. The question identified the interlopers as BASS—Born Again ‘Seidon Soldiers—and although they looked pretty scruffy, they were known to be among the best infighters. Furthermore, they considered themselves highly moral, and Joshua knew this meant they were labile and dangerous.

  “Our journey is a moral one,” Josh spoke to the hooded woman.

  “We are tied to no King,” explained Beauty.

  “Nor the Pope,” added Josh. BASS were under the command of the Doge of Venice, and though the Doge was aligned with the Pope, there were factional hostilities. The BASS worshiped Poseidon or Neptune, God of the Sea. Their religion prophesied that someday the sea would reclaim the land, and then Neptune would rule the whole watery world.

  “Are you believers?” repeated the hood-woman.

  “Our mission is Venge-right,” tried Josh. “Vampires have killed our people.”

  “Perhaps they had right,” said the hooded woman. The Bird-man made a raucous noise in his throat, like the sound of a ratchet being turned, and then was silent again.

  Josh noted Beauty’s hind legs flex slightly, ready to spring. “They had no right,” growled Beauty. The hairs on his mane stood semierect.

  “Nonbelievers lie for their own ends,” said the hooded woman. Her eyes were on Beauty; her hand tensed on her saber.

  “Our journey is moral,” repeated Joshua. He felt the situation was deteriorating quickly; something had to be done. His fight was not with these people. He wanted only to show them that neither was their fight with him. So he decided to gamble. “Our power comes from the water,” he intoned. He saw them all stiffen. Beauty looked at him skeptically, questioningly. Josh knew these people had a complex, mystical, baptismal relationship with the sea, and he suspected they would react strongly to his statement. He was right; the atmosphere was suddenly electric.

  “Water is sacred …” warned the hooded woman. The Gorilla stopped smiling. The Bird-man opened his beak wide, almost as if he were silently screaming.

  “The water gives us our power,” Josh pronounced. “I can make fire from water.”

  The man with the hirsute face violently shook his head back and forth. Beauty looked ready to leap.

  Josh walked away from the bank with slow, deliberate movements. He gathered up a handful of dried grass and bark, then brought it back down to the river and set it on the shore. The crossbow and the zip gun followed him like afterthoughts.

  He picked a long blade of green grass and tied a little loop in it, too small to let a berry pass through. Then he dipped the entire blade of grass in the river, and when he pulled it out, there was a bead of water jiggling and balanced delicately in the loop. The others watched these mysterious manipulations in fascination.

  Holding one end of the blade, he positioned the loop about six inches over his pile of dry grass, the hot postmeridian sun glaring through the refractive bead of water. He moved the liquid lens up and down a few inches until the focal point fell directly into the center of the kindling, and then he simply sat, motionless.

  They all watched him. The ritual had obviously impressed them, as did all water-rituals. Beauty held his breath. No one spoke.

  In a few minutes smoke began to rise from under the tiny glare of the water-filled, grass-loop. Joshua blew lightly on it. The smoke disappeared, then floated up heavier, and then the grass erupted in soft yellow flame.

  The creatures backed off; except for the hooded woman. She stood, unmoving.

  “Your power is from the water,” she said finally.

  She made a sign to the others, and they all ran off into the forest that lined the south side of the river.

  Beauty was amazed. “Where did you learn that?” he demanded.

  “In a book,” shrugged Josh.

  “Scribes,” Beauty shook his head tolerantly. “You are lucky you were not hanged for a sorcerer.”

  “Words make the strongest magic sometimes.”

  “Silence is stronger,” said the Centaur.

  “I’m talking about written words.”

  “Then why did you not just scribble something in the sand for the BASS to read? Or show them a book?” Beauty did not share his friend’s feelings about the power of the written word.

  “I didn’t have a book here. Besides, BASS don’t trust people who read or write.” He spoke with the tolerant condescension of one who knows himself to be right, but appreciates the ignorance of others.

  Beauty became suddenly thoughtful. “They are far north for BASS.”

  “Raiding party, maybe,” agreed Joshua.

  Just then there was a soft humming noise behind them. They turned quickly. Sitting on the bank was the Flutterby, its red-and-gold wings moving slowly up and down, a hopeful expectant smile on its black little face.

  “She followed us!” exclaimed Josh.

  “Go back, little one,” Beauty spoke calmly to the timid creature. The face remained upturned at Josh.

  “You can’t come with us,” explained Josh. “We’re hunters.” The frequency of the soft humming rose as the little heart beat faster.

  “She cannot keep up,” concluded Beauty. “Come.”

  Josh and Beauty turned and started trotting east upriver, looking for signs of their prey. The Flutterby’s face fell, but she lifted herself airward and floated patiently, high above her new friends.

  There was no trace of the Accident ups
tream, so the hunters returned west. They found evidence of the wounded creature’s exodus, around sundown, and followed the trail out of the river, into the woods, and finally across clear, open fields.

  It was near midnight when they saw the red light in the distance, the creature’s foul footprints leading directly toward it. They looked at each other and started walking in the same direction.

  It was the old brothel they were approaching, and the creature was there.

  CHAPTER 3: In Which It Is Seen That Life Is A River Of Pain

  TORCHES filled the cave with grimy light. Close to ninety Humans cowered at one end, herded into the corner by a dozen Accidents, as the vile creatures exchanged harsh mutterings in their guttural language. At the other end of the cave a flock of Vampires mingled. Many slept among a cluster of empty tumbrils. Some were talking, some seemed to be making plans. Two were feeding off the white dying body of a man named Moor.

  The smoke from the torches twisted, like so many wraiths, to the ceiling, where it hid in the recesses, breathlessly still. The Accidents chose a few of their group to stand guard, while the rest went to sleep in whatever stagnant pools they could find. Accidents loved to repose in the thin slime of moldy caverns. It was near midnight.

  Though it was near midnight, none of the Humans slept.

  “What will they do with us?” Dicey asked Rose for the twentieth time. They huddled near the center of the confined area, surrounded by the terrified faces of their fellow prisoners. “Are we going to die?” she pressed, begging for reassurance.

  Rose stroked her young friend tenderly. “They won’t kill us, child; don’t fret. If they were going to, they’d have done by now.” She almost believed this herself. In any event, her words eased Dicey’s mind. Each time Rose spoke like this, the young girl’s face became visibly soothed. Ollie wasn’t so fortunate. He’d remained mute and staring ever since the ordeal at the cabin. He sat in Rose’s lap now like a too-real doll.

  “If I only had something to write with,” Dicey went on whispering, “I know I could get us out of here.”