In Yana, the Touch of Undying

by Michael Shea

  Then good sooth! ’Tis a dish I will eat!

  “Maybe,” Hex breathed to Sarf, “those things will fear something an ogre’s size, and keep away from the neighbourhood of his voice.”

  “Let’s hope we can get past him ourselves; let’s take a look.”

  They bellied up the bank, and gingerly spread peek-slits in the grass. The meadow they must cross was a broad shallow dish. The plods were scattered through it, grazing. The ogre and his wagon were near the farther, downslope edge. He was a prime individual, perhaps ten feet tall and half as broad. His shamadka lay by him in the grass and he was drinking from a fifty-gallon wine sack slung from the side of the wagon. This posture, and his unbuttoned doublet, displayed to advantage his rosy-skinned, tumescent throatbag—an impressive appendage, big enough to have made—with tailoring—a hammock for a mid-sized man. He wore the hairy breeches so widely affected by ogres they had given them the name, in many parts, of “shags”. Near the wineskin, a big crossbow leaned against the wagon. Just behind the ogre, a plod with blue ribbons tied round its earflaps stood hobbled to a stake. The pair watched for a long moment, then wormed back behind the hillock.

  “I’m beginning to think we’re still lucky, Sarf Immlé.”

  Almost smiling, his friend nodded. “Best keep in mind, though—he’s got to be good and busy before we break for it. That bow must shoot six-foot darts.”

  “At least we can assume those winged ones know about the darts too. As long as they don’t come around I’ll take my chances with the ogre.”

  A new flux of supple chords sprang from the shamadka—a melody of voluptuous brio.

  “Fine,” Sarf insisted. “The fact remains—ogres are said to have good eyes.”

  “Yes, but we can at least get out of his field of vision pretty quick. Let’s study the ground some more.”

  The ogre, who had started to sing again, was moving in a stately pavan-step circling the beribboned plod, which gazed moronically at the sky, waggling its ears. The ogre’s voice, though delicately shaded, thrust forth with a serpentine, persuasive vigour:

  All day in fragrant toil we’ve filled

  Our arms with flowers of every style.

  Now forbear to judge me bold

  If—pressing still our harvest goal—

  I beg: “Do not, do not withhold

  The choicest blossom of the field!”

  The shag straightened, tossed his shaggy head (only his tusks deprived his bearded profile of a truly patrician beauty), executed a reverse, and recommenced his pavan in the opposite direction.

  “This will be the refrain,” Hex breathed in Sarf’s ear. “It’s in the quadrone metre.” Just then he glanced overhead. Back whence they had come, a flake of blackness detached itself from the skyline. Hex jabbed Sarf. Both watched, frozen, as the ogre sang:

  Oh let it be now as I so long,

  So ardently have willed!

  Dispread thyself the grass upon

  And yield, yield, yield

  To me that chiefest blossom of the field!

  The black flake swam across the brilliant air, almost to the meadow’s skirt, its height alone affording hope to the two spies that it noted only the ogre and his herd. Still minutely high it wheeled, returned the way it came, re-merged with the hills. In Sarf’s eyes Hex saw his own dawning hope mirrored. Sarf pointed down the meadow’s rim.

  “Let’s curve out along there.”

  Hex nodded. They could not avoid following the meadow’s skirts without crossing hundreds of yards of rising and very open ground, whereas by skirting the herd they would still have distance from the ogre and could creep on ground low enough to escape his eye. The herdsman had paused to drink again before the second verse. He commenced it, bending a smouldering gaze upon the plod. The animal tossed its head, returning a look of unease, dubiety.

  Successive Flower Queens have crowned

  Thy hair, thy breasts—each was cast down

  By some more splendid potentate.

  A Zarl made Quimsy abdicate,

  Then fled thy brow, her honoured seat,

  Before still-reigning Fairy’s-gown.

  Again he performed his volte face and began recircling the plod, his movements more tremulous now, full of a restrained force.

  Depose her now, for she’s surpassed!

  Thine own bloom unconceal!

  Enthrone thyself upon the grass

  And yield, yield, yield

  To me that choicest blossom of the field!

  With the gesture of one discarding artifice, the ogre flung his instrument aside—indeed, his violence sent it entirely out of the meadow. He grasped the plod’s throatmuff, gazed into its eyes a moment. His throat bag swelled, empurpled. He uttered a great, inarticulate yodel, hurried round to the beast’s hindquarters, and dropped his hairy breeches to his ankles. Sarf and Hex swarmed over the hillock and rushed—almost on all fours—along the meadow’s edge.

  The violated plod bellowed and boomed its outrage, the ogre obliviously writhed astern and the pair, using the rest of the herd for cover, dodged past the uncouth tableau—but only just past it. For they had barely put the wagon between themselves and the lovers when the grass snagged Hex’s foot and he went down, tripping Sarf as well. They had not yet found their feet when a now familiar shape re-entered the sky. A second blackness followed it and both now swooped towards the herd.

  “The wagon!” Hex gasped. Both scurried for it. Had they already been seen? So vastly did the sky’s openness press on them, as though it were one huge, lidless eye, that Hex scarcely felt the smaller horror of the ogre’s nearness. Each hugged a wheel, and peered beneath the axle-tree.

  In the foreground were six legs, the rearmost shackled by shaggy pants, while beyond, the herd milled on the sward. For a moment the pair didn’t dare get under the wagon, which rode high and would reveal them to the ogre if he looked around. Then they saw a nervous ripple move through the herd. An instant later, a vast shadow skimmed across it. They got under the wagon.

  The ogre, unalerted, did not cease his labours, but the plod, with its top set eyes, began to bellow in a different key. Seeing its fellows begin to disperse, it broke its hobble with a kick and ran after them. The ogre held on, oblivious, yodelling with passion.

  “When they swoop they’ll be low enough to spot us,” Sarf said.

  “Let’s get in here till we see what happens.”

  There was a baggage rack, mostly empty, between the axle bed and the bottom of the wagon’s chassis. The pair crawled into it. It was open at both sides and if the melodious giant survived, they had just climbed into a coffin, but now it would hide them from the larger, faster-moving eyes they feared more.

  The ogre, still hugging his trotting paramour, lifted his head in a climactic ululation. Just then talons clutched his head, wings thundered, wrenched him from his obscene seat, and flung him sideways to the ground, where his song ended with the report of cracking bone.

  “Brilliant!” cried a great voice from above as the striker rose from view. “A dazzling lateral tournello!” The speaker streaked down in his turn and snatched the just-disburdened plod from sight. Another crack, and it sprawled back down upon the grass. Two shadows crisscrossed lazily on the meadow.

  “Two more then?”

  “No four. Gleeb’s belly grows no smaller with the years.”

  “Nor Squalla’s. But how to carry them?”

  “I have a way.”

  The plods were widely scattered now. The shadows fell away to the right and left. Like scimitars their black wingspans swung down above the stumbling beasts, a plod vanishing with each upsweep to be broken in the air and dropped, an instant later, on the heap near the wagon. As the last plod hit the pile a suspicion of what the raptor’s “way” was awoke in Hex’s stomach.

  “And now,” came the voice, “behold our quarry bag!”

  Gusts tossed the grass round the wagon, which quaked and shuddered while the hidden pair strained with feet and hands
against the ends of the rack to keep from spilling out. There was a splintering, and then the cart stood still and its roof crashed to the ground.

  “Now turn it turtle and pluck the wheels off.”

  There was no time for fear. The earth lurched out from under their bellies, gravity torqued their every muscle, and they were hammered down against their backs. Wood groaned and snapped, four times, and then the cart was flipped again. Hammered against their bellies this time they lay, both bleeding from the nose, watching the stars slowly clear from their eyes while something dropped into the wagon. Five further impacts followed.

  “So,” came the voice. “I’ll take the yoke-pole, you break two grips in the rear wall there.”

  “Here?”

  “More left, I think.”

  “Try it now.”

  The grass flattened out for fifty feet to either side of the wagon. It rose from the ground, hung, rocking slightly, steadied.

  “Perfect! Away!”

  With a skyward heave that crushed the stowaways’ lungs anew, the great wings fell into phase. The meadow below took a giddy drop, then sank away more smoothly. A wider and wider vista of green hills spread below.

  “By the powers, Sarf,” Hex murmured in his friend’s ear, “has even the greatest cartographer, in his wildest visions, seen such a map as this?”

  Though the creakings of the wind-torn wagon and the muted boom of the unseen wings above made this murmur safe, Sarf glared and would not answer. Hex looked back out his side of the rack.

  Below, tree-shaggy mountains marched beside the sea, thirty leagues of them—with their most hidden valleys—to be possessed at a single glance. They had re-passed Hismin, which they’d been three days working their way south of, in a quarter of an hour, and now, though it was still broad noon, all Slimshur was behind them, as well as three large cities—nameless to him—in these mountains. One scant inch of planking intervened between their little bodies and two miles of empty, wind-torn sky. Suspended in such perfect powerlessness, Hex felt oddly easy in his mind. So huge a leap northward—what but their luck could have snatched them up and hastened them on their way like this?

  “So it is. In love.” The great voice jarred him, reminding him this marvellous transport was not simply to be walked away from, once it set them down. Hex could hear the labour of the monsters’ wings in their broken phrasing.

  “How so? As with the ogre?”

  “Just so. One moment. At love’s peak.”

  “The next. Struck down!”

  “What good. To soar in spirit? Death. Mocks flight.”

  “And yet. Such song! To sing thus. Is to conquer. Death.”

  “But his song. Alerted us.”

  “All acts have. Echoes past reckoning. Should one do. Nothing. For fear of. Consequences?”

  This went unanswered. After a moment a rusty, lugubrious baritone sang reminiscingly:

  “Yield. Yield. Yield. To me…” and trailed off.

  Hex was falling, tumbling into the void, his tiny limbs clawing the emptiness that swallowed him. Splinters bit his cheek as he woke with a start. Had his convulsion been felt? They were banking, dropping inland, putting the sun—just beginning its seaward decline—behind them. They crossed a great bay whose hilly shore was fringed with beaches from which jutted literally dozens of piers. As their sloping descent argued a landing soon they eagerly studied that pier-bristled arc and, as they crossed them, the hills inland of it.

  Still inland they sank, till cave riddled ridges appeared ahead of them. When it was clear that one large cavern was their bearers’ particular goal, Sarf muttered:

  “I’d call it a day’s walk back to that bay. I saw a stream course I think we could follow.”

  Hex nodded, anxious as his friend to clutch firmly the notion of escape, now that their hour of peril was at hand. The cavemouth yawned with the scalp-tickling speed of their approach, but then the wagon rocked with the great wings’ braking, the black hole paused, and swallowed them far more slowly than it had threatened to do. The cart was set down, firm and square, with hardly a jolt.

  “Squalla! Gleeb!” their bearers cried. “A feast! Come see!”

  Somewhere deeper in that dark a clap of wings and a scrabble of talons woke. Suddenly, the wagon violently rocked, spilled on to its side, piling Sarf on top of Hex and dumping from the cart meaty masses on to the cave floor.

  “Watch out!” a huge voice boomed. “He’s still—” A foghorn scream and a wet noise of rent flesh-and-bone followed. A resounding bellow, throatbag-born, made one huge bell of the stony darkness, which then was filled with the smack-and-flap of panicked pinions.

  Hex felt his wiry friend twist, shove, and vanish from atop him. In his turn he writhed up out of the tilted rack, and fell free on to the floor of the cave. He found his feet, and sprinted for the ragged mouth of blue sky out of which Sarf was just then running—seeming, with his wide-flung limbs, to be executing a dancer’s leap.

  14

  A Riddle’s Painful Answer

  Banniple left the Boasting Hall of the Huffuff pier just as the sun’s edge touched the sea. As a passenger on a Huffuff craft (The Glide, sailing two days thence) he had been privileged to dine at the hall’s head table next to Huffuff Hardkeel, Shiplaw of the pier and head of the Huffuff clan. The Shiplaw had left him with some misgivings about the stroll he was embarking on now.

  Hardkeel was a massive man, tun-bellied, a prodigious (and gurgling) swallower of beer. Also laconic. Friendly grunts had been the sole conversation Banniple could elicit from him, until he had mentioned his wish to take an evening stroll on the beach. Even then Hardkeel’s remarks were vague enough.

  “Hum. Much better stay here, you know… Have a merry time… Some spirits, game of chance, eh?”

  It seemed he saw some risk in an evening walk on the beach. Unfortunately this wasn’t clear. The Huffuff ethic—and it was the ethic of all the other maritime clans whose piers thronged Score-and-Seven Bay—shunned any verbal emphasis of risk as an unmanly utterance. Pressed for clarity, Hardkeel got even vaguer, and his protests might have been mere graciousness, pressing continuance at the hall’s convivialities.

  But the uproar of these latter had, for Banniple, passed bearability, whence he now stood at the pier’s railing, contemplating the shore. Just beside him the great, barnlike hall literally shook—a low, buzzing vibration—with the pent activity of the Huffuffish mariners. They gambled round the pits between the beer casks, had food-fights and arm-wrestled at the tables, swore at and cheered the crab-fights staged in wooden pens along one wall, and had belching and farting contests wherever they found themselves so inclined. Since, with all this, the whole building shuddered contrapuntally at the velvety impact of the swell against the pilings underfoot, the sum effect was to make Banniple giddy. It reminded him—devoted landsman—of the creak and surge of a ship. Having already come four hundred leagues by sail from his native Erkish, and facing a voyage of some seven hundred leagues more, he decided that now he was going to stand on solid ground, if only for half an hour.

  So. He’d walk down to the Kraff pier. There it stood, just half a mile downshore. It was a corpse-pier now. Built in Score-and-Seven’s more thronging era, its clan, shrunk and subsidiary, had long since merged with the Huffuff clan. In its epic age the bay had grown, beyond its eponymous twenty-seven clans, to a full thirty-five. Its present shrinkage to eleven (one of these moribund, with only half a pier and a pair of ships) had given to the bay its predominantly skeletal look—decaying piers and flotsam-littered waters. The Kraff, for one—a stately spinal column of unequal pilings, slashed by crossbars and odd diagonal braces—stood rooted in the flexing, coppery sinew of the gilded sea, looking like a line of urgent but arcane script, engraved on lustrous sheet-metal; a cryptic warning. The slow surf grumbled with the sodden, multiple drumbeat of buoyant trash that choked it. The intervening beach—smooth-worn shingle of rounded stones—was heaped with storm-piled trash from the pier’s erosion. F
rom dunes of wave-stacked detritus jutted broken planks and timbers dangling frayed tendons of cable and flapping tatters of sail like bleached skin.

  It put Banniple in an elegiac mood. He raised a declamatory arm, partly in mockery of his own unheroic form, which was slight and a bit potbellied. He intoned to the briny desolation:

  Ah Marmion, who stood so tall, so nobly with thy towers took the sun!

  Has Time’s tooth devoured all, and left of thee but these poor paltry bones?

  A belch resounded at his back. He turned. Two women, having just emerged from the Boasting Hall, stood regarding him. Both wore coarse tunics, shortswords, sandals.

  The more thickset, and somewhat elder, had a staff as well. She leaned on it—grinning, nodding. Her flushed face reported more than one tankard of beer.

  “Quite right, my friend! Old Time gobbled it all up—all but a few paltry boneheads such as you’ll find in there.” And she jerked a thumb at the Boasting Hall.

  Uncomfortable, Banniple smiled. “You’ll excuse me from taking sides. You see I’m a—”

  “A foreigner, oh yes!” cut in the younger woman. “One can see that! You’re a lovely one too—smooth and pale! Isn’t he a lovely one?”

  “By the blackest Powers, he is!” declared the elder. “Damn me but he’s toothsome! We have a mind to eat you right up, little foreigner—and not leave even a bone of you either!”

  Both women laughed hugely, nudging and thwacking each other. Banniple, extremely uneasy now, managed a join-in-the-fun chuckle. The russet fleece of his hair, mirrored by the corolla of his beard, lent something flowerlike to his small, snub-featured face. Though he assumed himself to be unprepossessing, the estrangement of the sexes in Score-and-Seven made some erotic adventure just feasible and this, in arousing, unsettled him. But more unsettling was the likelier development: some boisterous satire, with himself as focus, which could only embarrass him with his hosts, should any hear it. For these women, in the bare fact of being on the pier, declared a self-assertive mood. Confronting the hostile clamour of the Boasting Hall to claim the right of the Women’s Draughts was a political, not a recreational act. The beer itself had been made on the women’s farms in the hills, and there—for them—was where it was most pleasurably consumed as well. But the men must be reminded, it seemed, how wholly they depended for most of the raw materials of life on the women’s landlocked productivity.