by Michael Shea
“But you’re so prominent, aren’t you?” Hex goaded. “Your friend says you stand on the wall with the band and stand even higher than they! You survey the whole slope like lords as the big worms come toiling up, and you can be seen by the town as well.”
“But the beasts come to the fodder in any case! The music’s not essential, it just hastens them, and of the music only the instruments are really heard. Snolp’ll be paying for the harvest and he won’t need Umber to get it.”
“The fodder, you say?” Sarf, never ceasing to march them ahead, let his mockery drift back. “By that term, do you mean the prisoners from Pil’s satrapies?”
“Well, certainly. The felons and—”
“It’s true, isn’t it”—now Hex thrust from behind—“that in this fodder there are many individuals who were condemned for such atrocities as left-handed nosepicking and mispronouncing someone’s honorific?”
A silence here. For the first time a hesitancy entered Oberg’s compliant stride. Probing for sources of indignation, the crusaders had let show their moral opposition. And if they were more than simple kidnappers, then how much more were they?
“That is true.” His voice sounded almost absent, with his unspoken fears. “But then, they’re as good as dead, of course, aren’t they? If they couldn’t be sold, they’d infallibly be killed in the satrapies.”
“If someone besides you bought them,” Sarf retorted, “they might at least survive as slaves.”
“Some people just run out of luck!” Oberg cried, a little frantic because he did not understand what they were probing for.
“That’s true enough,” riposted Hex. This, with its grim undertone, hung in the air between them for a moment. And then Oberg balked.
“Wait. Please,” he said when Hex shoved him. “I’ve lied about the money I have—nearly three thousand dhroons. And there’s something else too I can give you, a vital secret, which is the location of the Place of the Touch. Just let Umber go here and I’ll tell you where to look for the money, so you can deliver me and tell your friends I’m all you found.”
Sarf gave a rough pull to his chain which, in dragging Umber forward, made Oberg stumble after for a step. But only a step, for Hex, ignoring his friend, stood fast and brought Oberg up short.
“What do you mean, exactly, by the Place of the Touch?”
“It is where endless life is to be obtained. It is also called Yana.”
Sarf stared outrage at Hex for violating their unity of command, but held still lest he should emphasize the rift. For a moment Hex couldn’t regain his poise—he felt himself still gaping, saw Oberg still reeling from the excitement he’d betrayed. Then he heard his own voice delivering a smooth and solemn lie:
“I know of Yana, and I take your offer very seriously. If your information is new to us, and sounds genuine, we’ll be willing to believe you about the money.” He looked at Sarf, trying somehow to ask for complicity. His friend astonished him.
“Just ahead,” Sarf told Oberg, “there is a gully off the road that angles back towards town. If my friend is satisfied with what you tell him, we’ll take you both down it. We’ll unchain Umber there and you can tell us how to find your money.”
The First Encourager’s quick, pale eyes flicked between their faces. “Yana is near the mines of Kurl, on the West Shore.”
“The West Shore?” Hex asked doubtfully. Had the bathcrone’s pointed ambiguity not been a hint? Or had perhaps his misdirected ocean crossing merely been the necessary payment that bought the luck of this next and genuine clue? “Who told you this? I had indications it lay on the East Shore.”
“A man of the satrapies told me, one of the fodder.” (He emphasized the last word.) “I was passing through the pens on a harvest eve and he reached through the bars and seized my robe, and offered, for his release, to guide me to where I could gain immortality. I was distracted with my own business, unimpressed, and to inflame my interest he told me it was the Place of the Touch, called Yana, near the Mines of Kurl. I turned away from him but next morning, after he was gone, I got the shipping roster for his batch, and it showed his crime to have been theft of a map from a wealthy collector of curios. Seeing his capture imminent, he’d been so furiously stubborn as to eat the map, boasting that no one else would have the treasure he saw he was going to die for. In the year since, I’ve asked here and there about the place, and I regret what I then refused.”
“But where are these Mines of Kurl, then? Are they north of here?”
“I’ve never heard of them. And since I’ve started asking of them, I’ve found no one who has. Now then. Will you keep faith?”
Hex nodded. Sarf said, “Quick now. Before our colleagues catch us up. The gully is just past that bend.”
Now Oberg helped hustle Umber along with a will. They practically jogged round the bend. Umber lost his footing on the gully’s seamed and crumbly slopes and tumbled them all into a dusty slide down to its floor. This brought at a run the first pair of crusaders stationed there.
“Quick!” Hex called, motioning them to strike. They wielded their padded clubs—not expertly, as these were their first subjects, but numbingly enough after two or three blows per Encourager. Hex watched, suspended. They’d made no outcry—it was the recriminations he’d wanted silenced in advance. The pair were unlinked. Hex and Sarf shared Umber, the others Oberg, and they hastened down the gully, other sentinels passing them to fill the point position. In five minutes the killing-slope opened before them.
Its stone was darker than the walls which marched beside it down to where the ebony ocean swelled and sighed. Yet the moonlight gave the slope a lustre that the wall lacked; its mottled silver had a scoured sheen, lovingly polished, like treasured plate. They carried their burdens out on to the head of the slope, which was somewhat more level than the rest, and where grew a little meadow of manacles anchored to eyelets and staples of iron sunk fast in the rock. Here they planted Umber and Oberg, relinking them and tethering them together to their fate. The latter was awake already, though his eyes were still dazed. Hex and Sad withdrew, divorced from them now that they had been stationed for their new role in the harvest. Two club-men stood by them, guarding their silence. Hunched in their chains, they were silhouetted by the pale wall just beyond them. On its crest, not far downslope, Hex could see the platform, and smaller dais raised on that, where the captives had stood to sing for other harvests. He and Sarf stood talking with a pair of colleagues, waiting to enter the gully for carrying duty when the rest of the fodder should start coming, but his eye lingered on their late charges. Umber had waked now and, seeing their destiny, was crying. He was not very loud, and was struggling to control it, but their guards menaced, and so Oberg hugged his friend from behind, clamping his hand over his mouth, while Umber’s tears made shiny snailtracks across his lover’s fingers.
11
Men into Peel, and a Remarkable Change of Plan
At dawn, as the dark ebbed from the slope, and the ebony ocean turned steel-grey, an offshore breeze sprang up. This smeared and tore the smokepot fumes hanging above the thicket of chained men. Groggy struggles flared here and there, and muzzled guards moved through the meadow with clubs, while other crusaders formed windbreaks of their bodies. All Polypolis’s harvesting gear had been handed over the wall in relay lines and now, near the thicket, the flensing knives and sectioning shares were being sharpened on treadle grindstones. These licked them sharp with spattering tongues of sparks. Fully thirty men were strung atop the wall with crank-load crossbows and baskets of darts. Others guarded the hills’ approaches.
As the breeze freshened, more murmurs of woe washed through the field of shackled men. Beyond the wall the town could be heard wakening—the faint clap of a shutter thrown open, an isolated rattle of wheels on cobblestones. Soon the archers, who did not conceal themselves, would be noted, and the town roused. Glides rivered more thickly above the surf-line. Colour bled into things—the captives’ clothes, the feathers of the
archers’ darts, the mosses on the offshore rocks. Crusaders clustered near the grindstones to receive their tools, or wandered on the slope with them, hefting them or pantomiming their use for each other.
Things grew livelier in town. Beyond the wall shouts of inquiry—blurred to the outsiders—were flung up at the archers. Faces showed at windows overlooking the wall, twisted with shock, and ducked from sight shrilling the news. Within its closure, Polypolis seethed with the realization that half itself now lay enchained on the wrong side of its bulwarks. Now the crusaders spoke more carelessly, traded shouts at need. The smokepots were carried off, for wakeful fodder best seduced the shlubbups, and pellucid saffron flooded half the sky, paling the moon now half sunk in the sea.
Truly sunrise was at hand. Though still in the hill-shadow, the meadow had bloomed, and now the braveries of the victims’ night dress—crimson, purple, orange—gave that congeries a festive air. Within the wall, a stew of noises boiled, shrill with juvenile and female voices, and the cracked ones of age. Random missiles arced feebly up at the archers, whose bows hummed, spicing the brew with piquant darts. The arrows slanted down from sight, each raising a separate splash of screams. The field crew’s shares, crosscuts and flensers looked as fine-edged as the setting moon as they now began to drift en masse away from the wall and across the slope. Loosely though they deployed themselves, none took up a station less than two hundred yards from the wall, courteously allowing the marine monsters a wide berth whenever they should come. Already the hilltops seemed afire. The crusaders watched the sea, for the first sun to strike the bay.
Farther out—four miles—Snolp’s fleet waited. Perhaps the crusaders felt curiously exposed on that vast rock stage—bizarrely open to the very ships they were in the act of robbing. At that distance, of course, one harvest looked much like another. There would be fewer people on the walls this time. On the other hand the fodder had totalled a surprising seventy-four men. An unusual number of shlubbups would be drawn ashore by the wrigglings of so much enticement, and the peelers would be too busy drooling over the size of the harvest to think of its spectators.
And of course by now the crusaders’ third ship—bigger than the first two, but as shallow-draughted—would be in the harbour beyond the landspit. This ship bore Kratsk and Benarius and an auxiliary troop of mercenaries. Should the peelers send any boats ashore it would intercept them. Far likelier, though, that Snolp’s captains would be alarmed too late to act. They would watch the peel made, hammered, stripped, and loaded on to the town’s barges. The barges would unfurl their sails, head seaward—and then tack round the landspit and into the harbour. Then the captains would send boats in to make inquiries. These would scarcely have arrived before all three of the Cause’s ships—with their peel and their forces aboard—swept out of the harbour, fat-sailed with the offshore breeze, and ran them down, with oar strokes hammering their bodies into the sea.
The crusaders’ fleet would fly upcoast, hugging it miles nearer than Snolp’s could dare to do. For transoceanic cargo ships they were quite shallow-draughted. In Slimshur this merely meant they rode high enough to get within barge distance of most of the cities of that high-shelved shore. Scaled as they were for four- and five-city loads, they dared not get near the crusaders’ fleet for a hundred leagues, long before which the latter would have gained the protected port whence the excellent Kratsk and Benarius had just now returned, having arranged harbourage, and the peel’s sale. A shaft of sun smeared amber coruscations on the bay. An awed mutter, like a growl of readiness, rose from the slope.
“You know,” Hex told Sarf, “somehow I’d be very reassured right now if I could see past that wall and be sure the third ship’s here.”
Sarf laughed, picked up a pebble and worked at his flenser’s edge. “Those self-important bungholes! I think they’re capable of any arrant cheat. But since this is the payoff, they’ll be here, oh yes indeedy! Must one be half rat to fight the Reigning Rat? Those two have made me wonder.”
“Look!” Hex said. A frost swept down his nape, and he shuddered as it thawed again. Voices upslope were shouting “Water broken!” A hundred yards offshore the gilt swell was torn upon a snag. Two snarls of foam clung to a rock that had not been there before. Then, from that black lump, two stalks extruded, and waggled wetly in the morning air. They twiddled shoreward, agile as the fingers of a lutanist—as if, instead of being eyes, they were a pair of palps that needed separately to touch each detail of the scene before them. A second fleshy crag marred the molten gold, and branched with eyes, and then behind this, simultaneously, a third and fourth.
Upslope the victims, motes of colour, swarmed with panic. Their chains stretched in parallel lines as they recoiled to the limit of their fetters. They seemed a bed of seaflowers or polyps whose stems the rush of an incoming wave pulls taut. As if the proliferating eyestalks had been striving—by their busy fingering—to achieve just this effect, the glossy armada began to move shoreward, even as other black turrets surfaced behind and to both sides.
These bifurcate but otherwise featureless heads drifted forward at the rate of a striding man. Behind the foremost there began to rise the dorsal hummocks of their colossal bodies. These lengthened into tarry, wrinkled islands as they advanced. By the time the first of them rode sloshing through the surf, they had slowed to the pace of a man crawling on all fours.
The shlubbup’s form had the terrible simplicity of an immense slug’s. It was a thirty-foot oblong, tapered more smoothly at the tail than at the head, upon whose club like thickening the writhing eyes talks were the sale articulation.
Their undersides were more complex, and the smoothness of their forward glide was in eerie contrast with the turbulent labour of their locomotion. They moved on scores of interleaving pads which, in their rippling toil, trod frenzies of white lather against the unsupporting rock. This sudsy slime was the colour of seafoam, and was produced with a clamour like that of the surf shouldering against a reef. As if each monster, in climbing, drew after it a tongue of the ocean.
Now guards stepped lively amid the fodder, clubs swooping to abort their attempts to give each other the undeserved mercy of a strangling. An even dozen of the giants came ashore. The fodder’s wails raised a dismal cheer of agony within the wall. From windows that overlooked it came the voices of those wives and parents who, though the archers kept them crouching out of view, wailed out the names of those they were losing down below—and were answered hoarsely from the meadow. At the very last, one guard who stayed too late keeping the fodder alive was caught and pinioned by his arms and legs—dragged by the chained ones into the shlubbups’ acid maws.
The sun was well above the hills when the ad hoc harvesters formed a line across the head of the slope, all hefting wooden mallets. Below them the last of the giants were just then gliding into the surf, and their scum-highway was already drying a yellow-brown behind them.
The chaining-meadow was completely dry. The pliant overlay showed—in bas relief—the snaky ridges of chains, a rib or a jawbone here and there—no more. A few rings and coins there would also be. This metal-studded stuff would be ripped up with shredding claws and sold for mattress stuffing. The hammering line, given its signal, moved downslope, beating the already leathery carpet, pounding into firm adhesion its two piles, the coming and the going layers.
Hex sank his mind gratefully into this labour. Finding his shortsword chafed him, he re-belted it under his doublet and leggings, snugging it to his thigh. Sarf laughed at this, as most of the other workers had laid their swords in heaps to one side of the peel swath.
“Well and good,” Hex told him, “but I’m not about to risk this good weapon. Someone would switch it on me for sure.”
“Bramt Hex, swordsman-connoisseur,” Sarf chuckled.
The morning warmed. That downhill march, smiting the velvety substrate, was an almost voluptuous kind of work. The cutting and stripping proved tougher. The barges anchored close offshore. From windlass-operated drums
they paid off cable, which crews of men hauled between them upslope. At the head of the slope they were hooked to the shares, round which the crews then clustered, steering them straight as the bargemen winched the cables back down. Hex, leaning beside Sarf on one of a share’s handles and guiding its bite to one of the chalk lines a survey crew had just drawn down the peel, wondered if, after all, his friend might be willing to travel the course he had set for himself.
In Ungullion, when Hex had urged his news of Yana on his friend—indeed, solicited a joint search for it once the Cause’s work was done—Sarf had demurred. At further urging he had grown sarcastic on the subject. It was some time since Hex, not to be mocked outright, had stopped discussing the matter with him. But surely Oberg’s wholly unlooked-for confirmation of the place’s existence had impressed Sarf; his quick assistance of Hex’s play for information seemed proof of this.
The cuts were finished. The cables were run back upslope, and fastened this time to hooks set in each peel-strip’s upper edge. The drums cranked and ten yards of peel were stripped from each cut. The sections were flensed through and dragged on to the barges. Then the cables were run back upslope and the hooks reset. In this phase, Hex and Sarf ran cable. In a rest, while a segment was stripped, Hex ventured:
“So now what about it, eh? About Yana? You were struck—I know you were!”
Sarf gave him a cool smile. “You know, Bramt Hex, if Yana really exists, then I know more about it than you do. You’ve never heard of the Mines of Kurl, correct?”
“And you have? Come on, speak up!”
“Ah, the cable’s free! Duty first—it’ll keep.”
Newly excited, Hex let him have his humour. In a way, he didn’t mind waiting for this next revelation—from Sarf now, no less! Yana! The way this rumour, having so suddenly possessed his imagination, grew and took on feature with such readiness began to alarm him a little. Was he, after all, the gull at the fair? Was he being shilled and cozened? Was some wizardly trap being laid for him? Perhaps the demon buyer of Poon’s whorehouse had found a way to steer him, through others, to his doom.
