by Michael Shea
Near dark, in a small cove, he found a little cave in the sand-bluff that walled it. Curling himself up on the cold sand of the cave floor, he felt like a pauper testing a cheap grave for tenancy. He clenched his teeth against a surge of hopelessness. Tomorrow, he would turn back. His stomach, given only springwater and scant watercress all day, gurgled. Would he even be able to sleep? A moment later, he was unconscious.
The steel-grey light of dawn pried his eyelids apart—unless it was the sand that had invaded them, and every other inch of his flesh besides. Or perhaps it was the noise of his teeth chattering that woke him, along with the growling—vigorous now—of his belly. He rose to a squat to reduce his body’s contact with his burrow’s frigid floor. Cautioning himself to collect his wits before leaving his covert, he crouched there, bleakly ticking off a mental list of his discomforts. He heard, from just outside, a minute tittering.
He listened, frozen, till the sound returned—minuscule but quite distinct. Inch by inch, he emerged—crept to a rock that half-concealed the cavemouth and peeped around it with excruciating care. He had company in the cove. A small, one-masted sloop lay beached not twelve strides off.
Its owner was not in view. Shadowy bales, a heap of rope, and some small casks lay by the craft on the livid sand. The tiny giggling came again, clearly from somewhere in this little pile of stowage. Some merry but negligible vermin, then. The boatmaster must have gone inland for a warmer, drier shelter than the foggy shore afforded—a decision Hex envied him, whoever he was. He stood up from behind the rock, and just then something small moved amid the baggage—detached itself and wobbled a short way out across the sand. It was a leathern pouch.
After a second’s immobility, the poke’s drawstring mouth opened, like an unfolding blossom. Hex would have judged the pouch just large enough to accommodate his hands, clasped together, up to the wrists. But now a man’s foot and leg up to the knee thrust out of the sack’s open mouth. Another foot and leg followed, then the hindquarters and torso of a man perhaps five feet tall backed out of the bag. The head and arms still remained inside, but did not make the pouch look fuller than a handful of walnuts might have made it; there was further tittering within the bag, and a sound of scuffling.
Then the man drew the rest of himself out. He was bald, with a wispy, pale beard. Chuckling fondly he drew the strings of the bag tight, and tied it to his belt. Then he set about stowing his goods, and in another moment, Hex could see, would be righting his sloop.
Hex had hidden himself again, but indecision racked him. The old man had some sort of wizard’s power, and to expose oneself would be to stand the target of that power if malign. And yet his appearance was unthreatening, and Hex realized that he did not really fear him. Might this not be a further stroke of that remarkable luck that had so far cancelled his misfortunes even as they had arisen? In so small a boat the old man would be coasting, and thus bound north or south. Let Hex step forward, ask passage, and take the man’s destination as his own—invite fate once more to solve his dilemma. He rose and came forward.
“Sir! Good morning. You must forgive my sandiness, but you see I—”
The little man whirled, his face not startled, but surprised. “Forgive your sandiness?” he asked with amazement. “Why, right heartily sir. You are forgiven. No, no! Don’t brush it off—I insist! Haven’t I told you I’m not offended? Please! It makes you look quite splendid, actually, like an enormous sugared loaf! May I offer you breakfast, since the topic arises? A great, stout man like yourself—even if you’ve already eaten, why, I’m sure you’d be glad to eat again!”
“You’re very kind,” Hex said a trifle frigidly.“In fact, I’ve eaten nothing for some time.”
“Wonderful! Come along. Take that keg for a seat. I have some morning wine and crumble. No, no! Don’t brush it off, I insist!”
After an initial, gluttonous silence, the old man introduced himself as Kabrow. Hex gulping, supplied his name and followed it, irresistibly, with “infra-magus”. After some further wordless guzzling, Kabrow leaned forward with a confiding smile.
“Friend Hex, I take it that you do not reside on this beach. Would you be en route somewhere—specifically, to the south?”
“It’s interesting that you ask, good Kabrow, for I was just debating between north and south. You are bound to the south?”
“To Ungullion,” Kabrow nodded. “And I have a post to offer you if you should choose your destination in that direction.”
Hex’s heart leapt. Gone were his fearful temporizings of last night. Filled with happy fear, but trying not to seem eager, he nodded.
“What would be the wage?”
“Seven lictors, for one long day of nearly nonexistent duties. You see, below Wibbles Jut the coast swings so sharply west that this westerly weather sweeps you right along almost parallel to the shore. I’ll lash the tiller at a slight angle and we’ll hold a southwesterly course with almost no steering involved. For that’s what I’d have you do, you see—sit the tiller while I, ah, retired.”
“Kabrow, you have been generous to a stranger, and I accept your offer. For in fact, one place is as good as another to a footloose man like me—erstwhile scholar, present vagabond!”
“This is remarkable luck then,” beamed Kabrow. “You will not regret taking the post. I’ll bring us to Wibbles Jut before retiring, and you’ll be free to rest and sun yourself. Now. Let’s stow these casks under that stern thwart there… No, no! Please! Don’t brush it off!”
7
An Encounter Involving Harsh Language—Bramt Hex Enters The Tree-Slums of Ungullion
Kabrow brought the sloop past Wibbles Jut in the forenoon. The town seemed little more than a pale lichen patch on the headland’s great knee of rock. Below that promontory the coast swept southwest in a vast arc. In the stiff westerly breeze, Hex could see that a slight southerly set of the rudder would carry them smoothly parallel to the shore.
“What with the wind, the helpful current,” Kabrow said, lashing the tiller, “I’ve often risked… retiring even when I’ve had no one to watch the course. You’ll have practically nothing to do. There’s the food locker, there the wine. Just don’t let us get too much less than a mile off the coast. Let me know, of course, if there are any, ah, little difficulties.”
The old man placed his pouch on a cushion beside him and opened its drawstrings. In the manner of a man pulling one stocking on to both feet, he thrust himself knee-deep into the poke. With a second pull he hitched it up to his armpits, while causing it to look no fuller than before. He stretched both arms over his head and wriggled the rest of the way in, hooking the drawstrings inside after him and pulling them tight. The poke lay lax and unswollen on the cushion. There came a series of minute exclamations, pitter-patterings of pursuit, and amorous scufflings.
Hex undressed, washed himself with scooped-up handfuls of seawater, and dressed again. With a pile of netting he made a couch amidships, from which he could view coast, sky, and sea in comfort.
The green brocade of forests, velvet of meadows on the coastal hills, stretched league on league, impossibly distinct in the wine-clear air. His freedom was the world itself, spread unknowably wide before his choosing. Now he thought of the skin-farms, to a degree of detail which his horrorstruck mind had not previously permitted itself to imagine. He saw the gathering-leeches hanging from his body, tatters of black flesh swelling, plucked, replaced; the sweating-torches and buckets of the monthly salt collection; the tears-and-saliva taps, with their dangling copper coils.
Then the thought of Zelt and her colleagues came to him, like a funeral barge pulling up alongside the sloop, laden with melancholy ghosts. A faecal stench, laced with the odours of sulphur and scorched meat, wormed its way to him through the wash of the brilliant air. They now lived agonies quite as soul-wrenching as those he had escaped; and he had known them! He had fired his very seed into how many of them?!
He felt a grief and guilt which might have overwhelmed him had he
been sitting in a small room. Out here, gliding through the gigantic fact of his liberty, he shook them off fairly soon. He had been as much a fool as a criminal. They had been property, and would have been used as such with or without his intervention. Hex laid back his head and shut his eyes against the sun. After all, he mused, would Antil have intervened so strenuously on the behalf of a worthless man, assuming the wizard to be as benevolent as he seemed? The Marketditch whores, of course, might not have deemed him benevolent… but who was Hex to plumb the motives of wizards? A rare thing, Antil had forecast for him. What was rarer than immortality, which had not gone unmentioned by the magician? Hesitating between these imponderables, bathed by the sun, Hex let his thoughts disperse, and dozed.
He awoke near noon, thinking he had heard a splash. Looking anxiously to starboard, he found them on course, the shore a mile off. There was one major difference, though. The sea’s blackish-green had lightened to turquoise and its swell, though still regular, was radically reduced. For they were now gliding over a vast, uniform shallows, a coral plateau submerged beneath scarcely two fathoms of limpid water. Looking to port, he could see, just fifty feet off, the dark line where this plateau ended and the depths resumed, a line which the sloop’s course paralleled.
He noted something else as well. For there, bobbing in the deep water at the shallows’ brink and peering towards him, was an enormous head.
This head was barnacle-crusted, roughly pyramidal, with a single, opalescent eye set near its apex, like a beacon. For a nose, it had two nostril slits that opened and closed like wet shutters. A weedy, limpet-scabbed pair of lips some ten feet wide spanned its base. The whole loomed half again as tall as the sloop was from waterline to mast-top. Its mouth peeled open, and emitted a voice like glaciers calving.
“You! Come here! Quick!”
Hex seized the poke. He meant to shake it in his panic, and wrenched his shoulder as he discovered it was too heavy to lift. His attempt brought Kabrow’s dishevelled head from within. The old man’s wispy hair had been tied in love-knots, and small flowers had been plaited into his goatish beard. Hex pointed to the giant off the port, just as its avalanche of a voice again rolled towards them:
“Come here! Right now! I kill you quick!”
As the sloop’s pace hadn’t slackened, and the giant was still with them, Hex realized the giant too had been moving along the edge of the shallows. It occurred to him the monster had to stay in deep water. He was turning , for the tiller, to steer them farther into the shallows, when Kabrow wriggled out of the pouch and grabbed it himself.
“Sit there!” snapped the old man, unlashing the tiller and steering them—not from, but to the giant. Hex sat, horrified, and watched as Kabrow, bringing the craft some twenty feet nearer the monster, shook his fist at it and shrilled out:
“Heap of faeces! Your mother was a jakes! Your tongue is a turd! Are you one-eyed from squinting up bungholes?”
Hex’s hair stood on his nape. They had again turned parallel to the deep water, but were now so close Hex could see small crabs scuttling from barnacle to barnacle on the monster’s jowls as it worked its lips in rubbery, quaking rage, booming wordlessly in its sunken throat.
“Fiery hells!” Hex cried at Kabrow. “Are you mad, old man? You enrage it!”
“Of course I do, fool! Aid me! Do likewise, or we’re lost!” Again Kabrow turned to the giant. “Mountain of scum! Monolith of living garbage! For a thousand lictors I will piss in your nose, but not for a lictor less!”
The giant twisted its hill of a head from side to side, groaning with inarticulate wrath. Feeling he dreamed, Hex raised his own faint voice:
“Fool! Rascal! May you get your just deserts!”
“No, no!” Kabrow hissed at him. “Much stronger, thus: Bowel movement that moves! Putrid pile! You were got on the Goddess of Stench by the God of Decay!”
The head shook, its anger an earthquake, and then a second titanic head erupted dripping and bellowing beside it—its twin in every feature. Kabrow gave a little dance of eagerness.
“Help me with a will now, Hex—safety’s in sight!” He shook both fists at the cyclopean pair and jumped up and down till their mast swung with his taunts like a wagging finger:
“Cloaca with eyes! Sewage that sees! You do not live, you but putresce!”
“Scoundrels!” Hex quavered in his turn. “Cads! I have no respect for you!”
The giants still kept pace with them, leaving an ever more turgid wake along the shallows’ brink with the shaking of their submerged shoulders.
“Immense twin haemorrhoids!” howled Kabrow. “Sacks of slag!”
The giants uttered a simultaneous shriek. They sank—so sharply it seemed they had been pulled under. A milk-white turbulence developed in the water where they went down. This was stained a murkier colour as it dropped astern of the still gliding sloop. Kabrow uttered a huge sigh and sat down on the steersman’s thwart. His garlanded and tufted hair made him seem, with the smile he now wore, some benign sprite, such as might preside at orgies and revelling.
“You see, Bramt Hex, you must never give a Megalops time to think. They are stupid and lazy and their first impulse is always to call their prey over to them. Give them time to think, and they’ll realize that they can climb on to the shoals and wade after you. If they do that, my friend, your case is closed, and your goose is cooked.
“Never flee, then—no! Distract their thoughts by getting close, and work on getting them mad. When they get mad enough, they always pull both heads out of the water, and forget to look where they’re going as they wade along the shelf. And then it’s only a matter of time before they blunder into the jaws of an Oscule.”
“An Oscule?”
“Yes, a species exclusively indigenous to the steep flanks of these shoals. Fortunately, it is sessile. But now you must be at ease, my dear Hex. Such encounters are rare. The odds against two in one trip are overwhelming. Until this evening!” Having re-lashed the tiller as he spoke, Kabrow crawled back into the pouch. Under the noon’s blue dome Hex quickly shook off his fear. And as the boat continued to glide across the coral shallows, he found himself enjoying a delightful illusion of flight. The sunken green plains sped under the keel, and their watery atmosphere’s twists of pallid light suggested wisps of cloud. Schools of Quicksilvers and lone Rays flew with him over the seamed topography, where crabs among the hairy sponges and Lung-corals looked like Ogres crouched in hillside thickets.
And he was flying in fact, was he not? On his luck? His freedom? Suppose that his hopes exaggerated his destiny, that immortality was not his prophesied distinction? Wasn’t the whole, wide, mapless world his in a briefer but still intoxicating fashion?
His, perhaps, to map?
The idea’s rightness stunned him. Years of inadvertent preparation for such a work lay behind him, for along with legendaries and sagas, cartographers’ folios had formed his staple reading. He knew as much about the Great West Shore where Glorak and Ungullion stood as the most learned of his fellow citizens did.
This was but little in itself, of course, but still, even the greatest centres of learning could offer no more than a skeletal picture of the West Shore. As to the East Shore—or, indeed, the territories more than three hundred leagues inland from the West—these vast tracts were a blank, fitfully limned by such ignes fatui as the uncollated, contradictory reports of traders, mercenaries and pilgrims offered to the scholar.
But a mobile scholar, diligently compiling all he saw and heard? And suppose that scholar’s first goal did happen to be a place called Yana? He could amass as much new data travelling in that direction as any other, no doubt. And then, if he reached it, what territory anywhere would long remain unknown to a man with a world of time to find and study it? Think! A comprehensive portrait of the world, given freely to the world—forever ensuring the giver’s world-wide renown.
When, at sunset, Kabrow hauled himself from the pouch, he found Hex in an exalted, mysterious mood—smili
ng crazily at the sea and sky, clapping him on the shoulder in a greeting of unaccountable ebullience. The old man took scant notice of this. He was hollow-eyed, his temples sweat-plastered. He re-tied the poke to his belt, dragged out the food-locker, and gorged himself for half an hour, his jaw working ferociously under the glazed fixity of his stare.
Replete, the old man sighed. He motioned Hex to his couch of netting, hooked one arm over the tiller, and fell instantly asleep. His portly passenger lay amidships, long unsleeping, murmuring and chuckling to himself, and staring tirelessly up at the stars.
Eventually, Bramt Hex dozed. At least, the busy hum of his new, ambitious fantasies seemed to sink only briefly under the thinnest blanket of oblivion. Nonetheless, when he reopened his eyes, the sun was three hours high, and they were gliding into the harbour of Ungullion.
Like Glorak Harbour, Ungullion rose from a level shoreside zone to inland hills, though here the range was not curved, but formed a straight crest. The offshore view presented three sharply colour-contrastive strata. The hills, lavishly studded with marble architecture, were white, thinly veined with the green of parks and alamedas. Below this, the flat shoreside was a solid green of massed treetops, and this in turn was fringed with the harbour’s curve of pilings, wharves, and warehouses, all in the browns and mouse-greys of weathered wood. The harbour waters themselves, like a second, leafless forest, bristled with the masts of merchant vessels. The verdure of the dense forest-slum crowded right up to the verge of the wharfside zone.
“Don’t they dare clear even the harbour’s fringe?” Hex asked. Kabrow shook his head.
“The last bit of major axe-wielding they tried here woke the trees to a riot that killed eleven thousand souls. That was nearly a century ago. The slum-dwellers have long considered the trees’ incidental outbursts to be quite a sufficient misery.” The old man steered the sloop towards a small-craft pier whereon stood a clearing depot.
