Speaking in a low voice, as the candles guttered and the chimes stilled and the last of the smoke of the incense settled like mist into the hollows of mattress and coverlet, I told Kinbel about my winter alone, and my shameful, as it seemed to me now, congress with that retinue of hobs. And all the time I spoke, the pressure of Kinbel's hand against my own remained unchanged. Only when I had finished, and I feared that my own eyes were shining as much as hers, did she lean forward. I felt the strange press of her lips against my face.
“Have you not heard,” her voice murmured into my ear, “that no human congress is considered worthy of the name without the assistance of a few hobs in fashionable circles in Yoha and Halu? In Jasih Noish, apparently, many use them as beds. And everyone knows the stories of gangmasters, and no one ever thinks less of them for it, or even cares. It's not, I confess, a variety of love for which...” I heard a click in her throat. “Something for which I previously felt any strong attraction. But now that you have told me I would be happy and proud to summon as many hobs as you desire. Indeed, they could be trained in such arts. I would willingly submit—”
Something broke within me. Flapping angrily at pillows and fabrics, I pulled away from Kinbel's hold. “I don't want you to submit to anything! I don't want you to drag some army of hobs into this dreary cage of silks. I don't love hobs. I don't even desire them—or at least not now. It was just some childhood fancy that lingered for too long in some lost part of my brain. A taste I briefly acquired and then discarded. All I care about now is knowledge. All I want to find are ways of understanding the world. Why can't you understand that, Kinbel—and then, by all those ridiculous Gods that you seem to hold so dear, just leave me alone!”
* * * *
The next morning, and after a night undisturbed by further entreaties, I woke up to find that I had slept alone. Kinbel had left word at my breakfast table that she would reside for the time being in her father's temple-house in Dhiol. I felt a twinge of guilty delight as I read the papyrus. Without Kinbel, and with my father dead, and my mother gone to the warmer south, and but for the presence of a few gangmasters, I finally had my homestead entirely to myself. Walking the battlements in the breezy Sunshine, I decided that seeing to the maintenance of this place would be the task to which I would apply myself from now on.
It's not that I ceased being a merchant, but there was something about the needs of my homestead that inspired me in a way that the mere business of buying and selling had never done on its own. I found bargaining was far more to my liking if, instead of taking money and promises of goods, I asked for labor and skills, or even plain advice. Other businessmen were surprisingly happy to lend me their roofing or drainage hobs once they had overcome their incredulity that this was something I was genuinely prepared to accept. It didn't take long for me to enhance my already growing reputation for eccentricity as I drew deals based on recovered slates and sacks of mortar. Let people stare, I thought. Let them say that I have lost all sense. Let them call me a fool and—yes, even then—a lover of hobs.
I believe that particular phrase came from several sources. It probably began with my endless questioning of gangmasters. Word may also have seeped out from my bedtime confession to Kinbel. Not, I remain certain, that Kinbel herself would have deliberately spread such a slur, but she was probably innocent enough to imagine that the confessional with a priest was sacrosanct, even if that priest happened to be her father. In any case, hob lover is a common enough term of abuse in some lands. I didn't care—or at least not so very much.
My gangmasters were required to have daily meetings. There, we discussed not just the quickest and easiest ways of getting their individual duties performed, but how we all might benefit the smooth running of the homestead. When the owners of other homesteads were complaining about the poor summers and the vicious winters, I was doing better than ever. I had no time now for the fripperies of planting and ornamentation that my mother had encouraged. Even within the house itself, I was more than happy to see some of the staterooms being used for storage or as hob workshops rather than being left waiting for the grand dances and ceremonies that I had no desire to hold. I think I convinced a few doubters, although those who came to visit generally returned to Dhiol with stories of the increasing roughness of my dwelling, and the Godless way in which I went about my work. That, and my apparent kindness to all creatures of my homestead, which of course included hobs. It seemed self-evident to me that persuasion and reward worked better than punishment, and that it was better to keep and cherish something rather than to let it die of neglect or sacrifice. But stories began to circulate as a result, although most of them were false. Threats were made. The priests of Dhiol grew restless. But I was content. Now that I had my homestead in a state of productivity and order that exceeded all of my neighbors', I was free to investigate all the many things which continued to puzzle me about this world.
I discovered that domestic pigs and the wild boars of the forest can be mated, and that they produce an offspring that has good, strongly flavored meat, and can be left to forage out of doors. I learned that milk, if turned over in a machine of my own design, separates into different, and entirely useful, parts. I also found out that most of my hob gangmasters, my old educator Karik included, had a poor knowledge of the more detailed aspects of hob signing, and used the stick or the whip too easily when they failed to get things properly done.
I set out to learn more about communicating directly with the hobs. There was a quietness and a sense of withdrawing as, crouched inside the low walls of their crude and stinking dwellings, and often without even the company of a gangmaster, I watched and prodded and questioned and cajoled. Hobs are generally uncomfortable in human presence, and they grew all the more so when they realized I had grown capable of telling individuals apart merely from their facial features, and then that I had worked out the grunts and gestures of some of their names. Disputes arose. I believe deaths occurred. The world of hobs is, in many ways, as savage as our own. They perform upon themselves the common mutilations that we require, choose nominations for sacrifice, and are fierce in securing what we humans would consider to be laughably small distinctions in status, although I was unable to find any proof of the common slur that hob mothers routinely eat their own young.
But I was pleased by what I learned. Knowing hobbish to an extent that now made my gangmasters redundant, I came to understand hobs’ tribal rivalries and separations, and set about issuing my own instructions to the lead hob of each freshly organized gang. I was certain that the drains were being cut more efficiently, and fields better hoed, as a result. I developed ever greater plans. Even as the forests of Severland died and produce shrank in the markets of Dhiol, I was convinced that every homestead in this northerly land could remain fertile and productive if only it were better run.
I was stripped to the waist in a ditch with some hobs one morning and demonstrating how they should install some new ceramic pipework when I looked up and saw a figure outlined against the grey sky above. So unused was I to any other kind of company that I'd grunted and signed in hobbish before I realized that the figure was human, and female, and then that it was my wife.
* * * *
Kinbel smiled away my apologies as I climbed out. After all, she was plainly dressed, and had come alone without warning, or retinue.
“I've been hearing so many tales. I thought it was time that I found out.” She looked around her. The fields that we had once thought might belong to both of us shone with new growth. “And I can see that you're doing well.”
“I think I am.” Signaling for a towel from the gang of hobs, I wiped myself down. “I believe that this place will one day be seen as a way forward.”
Kinbel chuckled. The sound had lost none of its beauty. Neither had she, plainly dressed, unadorned and alone though she was. “All I hear in Dhiol is that you live with the hobs, and that you treat the Gods as if they do not exist.”
I shrugged. We were standing
on a muddy pathway. The whole aspect of the landscape that surrounded us had lost the posturing grandeur that it had once possessed, but it seemed to me to be yet more beautiful in its simplicity and efficiency. All the more so now that Kinbel was here.
“This place.” She turned around, and I saw the sky and the fields mirrored in her eyes. “It's nothing like I imagined. Yet I think that you are wrong to tell yourself this is not the work of the Gods. The Gods work through people as well, you know. I imagine that they even work through simple hobs. But tell me, that structure over there...?”
I was delighted by her interest. No longer the innocent, she had grown and changed. She was particularly amused when I described how merchants squabbled over a single crumb of gold, then yielded at the suggestion that they give me a drainage screw that, with a few repairs, was worth far more.
“You must see us as wasteful,” she said as I showed her the beasts of the stable, and the stinking lake of effluent that would feed next year's fields.
“Us?”
“I mean people. Humans.”
A silence fell between us as we walked on.
“Your mother sends her regards,” she told me as she stood at the homestead gates. It was starting to rain. “She wants you to be reassured that many sacrifices have been made in the most holy of sites on your behalf.”
“You don't still think that your Gods are so stupid and angry as to be appeased by hob blood, do you, Kinbel?”
Kinbel looked at me in that dauntingly composed way she had. “What you believe does not alter the punishment the Gods are inflicting upon our world.”
There was no doubt, by now, that our summers were shortening and our winters were growing more harsh. The white blaze of the Roof of the World had spread, and the growth of its glaciers threatened to destroy many family tombs. Even in the sacred homelands in the south to which my mother had retreated, the nights were apparently showing teeth of frost, and the inundations of the God River threatened the temples of Ulan Dor. The processes of my agricultural research were long-winded and often frustrating, but I was certain that my discoveries would soon be crucial. I tried to tell her more, but she held up a hand to make me stop.
“What you've done here, and what you are doing is—well, it's everything you say. But there are things you don't understand. People in Dhiol are saying bad things about you—”
“They've been doing so for years.” I gave a dismissive wave even as I felt a flush come into my cheeks.
“That may be so, but it has gone far above mere personal abuse. You probably know better than anyone that times are hard. But when times are hard, people look around for something to blame. Or, better still, someone.”
“No one can be so stupid as to hold me responsible for the weather!”
I still expected her to laugh and shake her head, but she looked at me gravely, and nodded. “Exactly so. It is even spoken of amongst us priests.”
“Can't you do anything about it?”
“Can't you?”
“What?”
“If you acknowledged the Gods a little, and talked less to your hobs, that might be a start. But you must do so quickly. Otherwise, I fear that it will be too late.”
“And so?”
“Then, if you do not listen, all that you have done and stand for will go to waste.”
I blustered in reply, shouting that she was being ridiculous, that it was the fault of her kind—her and all the others—but already she was turning, walking off through the rain.
They came on a winter's night. By then, I had long been expecting them. I had even considered reinstating my homestead into the fortress it had once been, but its walls were enfeebled despite the fine cliff-face it presented to the river, and the waste of such an enterprise appalled me even more than the prospect of what was to come.
It was an impressive sight that I looked down on from the battlements along which I had once debated the number of petals in a flower and the shining of the stars. This was certainly no random mob. It was a river of light, and of chanting, and of bells. Some of the priests rode on elephants. Others were transported by oxen on glinting wagons of sapphire and gold. The landowners came with their gangmasters, and the merchants with their suppliers and storeholders, and all around them dripped flaming sconces, and everywhere there was a humming and a clashing of gongs. The crowd was huge, and it was organized in a way that was reminiscent of the great southern ceremonies which are said to sustain the workings of the Sun, the God River and the Moon. And, like any other human crowd, it consisted mostly of hobs. They steered and goaded the elephants and oxen, and scooped up the ordure left behind. They carried huge braziers, which shone like giant coals, to keep the procession warm. They bore the tall poles and vast banners that would provide shade or shelter should there be rain or snow or Sun. They carried many of the lazier and fatter members of the general population in sedan chairs, or rolled and writhed to support their bodies in muscled engines of livery and tattoo. And it seemed to me, as the chants and the voices rose up to me, that even the accusations of my being a godless renegade, a devil-worshiper, a non-human, a lover of hobs, came mostly in the distinctive rhythm and grunt of the voices of hobs themselves.
I looked at my small gang of hobs that stood behind me in the flickering light that was thrown up through the chill darkness. They kept the same distance from me they always kept, as if still awaiting orders. They still behaved, the thought struck me, like any other retinue, even my mother's, although they were somewhat more roughly clothed. But I could tell them apart well enough to understand that they felt emotions almost as a human might, and that they were far more afraid than I was. I had already relinquished the rest of my establishment of hobs, either through selling them in markets distant from my tainted reputation in Dhiol, or by simply releasing them, and signing them to ford the river and head north, where I believed they stood a better chance of surviving than we humans did in this increasingly hostile world.
What do you want of us now? The lead hob, who, in a fit of nostalgia, I had chosen to call Gog Two, signed to me, and I looked back at him, and for the first time in my recollection, he met my gaze without turning away. He was a sturdy creature, beetle-browed and heavy-set, with particularly large and agile hands. How he disciplined his colleagues was in many ways harsher than any gangmaster, but it was always directed toward getting the job done. I thought of him as fair-minded, and I liked to imagine he thought of me in a similar way.
Nothing. I made the simple signal of reply that any human might make when they have no immediate need of their hobs. But instead of simply remaining where they were and waiting for their next command, he and the rest turned from me and began to walk away, moving with that characteristic gait that hobs have. Then, without any obvious exchange of grunt or signal, they broke into a run.
I watched them vanish along the battlements, and down the steps, scurrying out of sight across the darkness of the homestead's muddied fields that had once been a delicate checkerboard of gardens, heading toward the gates I had left open on the far side. Then I turned back toward the procession, which now lapped in a glittering tide beneath my homestead's walls. I clambered up onto the lip of the battlements. I raised my arms, and felt stillness shiver out beneath me as the chanting ceased, and with it the rhythm of bells, as light trembled on ten thousand upturned faces. I almost threw myself down at that moment into the fine, living carpet of both human and hob that lay spread beneath me; perhaps that was even what was expected. But I drew back, even though I often wish that I had leapt.
* * * *
After the initial beatings and cursings when I was blindfolded and chained and taken into Dhiol, I was treated well enough. I was imprisoned in rooms in a high tower of the Temples of the Moon, which looked down on the many courtyards, balconied gardens, ziggurats, and raised terraces where the priests regularly performed their exulted work. Beyond that, glowering through clouds or blazing white in the light of the Sun or the Moon, lay the ever-migh
tier peaks of the Roof of the World. In many ways, my lodgings reminded me of the tower where I had dwelt as a child. If anything, the furnishings and decorations were more sumptuous, although, by priestly standards, they probably seemed rough.
For many Moons, I was left to fend for myself. My only visitors were a daily attendance of hobs, who were not only mute and castrated, but rendered deaf and sightless as well. These strange, sad creatures moved by touch alone, although they seemed able to sense my presence by what I eventually decided was body heat, and skirted around me with the slow caution of a chameleon stalking its prey along a branch. When I tried touching their scarred and naked bodies, they scuttled back with alarming speed across the walls and floors. But they left me food and water, and a few buckets and crude implements that, once I had finished using them, they took away again. After my initial nightmares about the ingenuity of the tortures that the priests, of all people, were capable of devising, I decided that this was to be my punishment: to have to do the things which no self-respecting human would ever expect to have to do unaided and alone.
If that was the punishment that had been intended, it was a failure. I remained fascinated by life's processes, even those that ended up in a bucket. I soon realized, for example, that a huge source of extra fertility went to waste by our peevish refusal to feed the land with human manure. And I found comfort in the simple preparation of food. Peeling an apple or a raw carrot can be an eminently enjoyable task, and the dissection of a slab of meat always carried the promise that I might find out something new about the structure of animal musculature. And I enjoyed shaving as well, the careful craft of steering a soaped blade across my jaw, which was something I had never thought to do myself.
Outside the window, and despite the glories of the architecture, the scene was less elevating. These priests of the Moon seemed to have little else to do with their time other than perform sacrifices. As the silver sphere that they worshipped processed and re-processed across the sky in its changing quadrants, I heard the cries and screams of many of my own hobs. They soon even reduced the resourceful and resilient Gog Two to a whimpering mess of bared flesh and bone. I supposed it was inevitable that the hobs that I had released into the wild would soon be caught. After all, the only life they had ever known was one of servitude and captivity. But it struck me as perverse that the priests should also track down, and then presumably re-purchase, the many other hundreds of hobs that I had legitimately sold. No doubt, they thought it was a fine spectacle, to kill the beasts that I had supposedly loved on specially raised platforms within my earshot and sight, and by methods that were even more ingenious than I had feared, and which were often almost impossibly slow.
Asimov's SF, June 2008 Page 18
