Elizabeth handed Aiken a simple circlet of black glass. He nodded to her and set it himself upon his springy dark-red hair.
Another sound swelled from the crowd: perhaps an indrawn breath, or one let out, or a sigh of relief, or a sob suppressed. Elizabeth bent over Aiken, speaking to his mind alone. Again he nodded, and Elizabeth disappeared. Where she had stood were now sixteen Tanu—and Mercy.
“I present to you your new High Table,” Aiken said. His physical voice was quiet, but even the most distant bareneck heard his words.
“First, my Queen and Lady Creator, co-ruler of my city of Goriah: Mercy-Rosmar.” She knelt before Aiken and received from him a green circlet. He took her hand and led her to the two marble thrones. They ascended. One by one, the High Table candidates approached, touching their torcs as their minds pledged silent fealty.
“The President of the Guild of Farsensors, the Venerable Lady Morna-Ia Kingmaker . . . the President of the Guild of Redactors, Culluket the Interrogator . . . the Deputy Lord Psychokinetic, Bleyn the Champion . . . the Second Lord Psychokinetic, Kuhal Earthshaker . . . the Second Lord Creator and Lord of Calamosk, Aluteyn Craftsmaster . . . the Second Lady Farsensor, Sibel Longtress . . . the Second Lord Coercer and Lord of Amalizan, Artigonn . . . the Lord and Lady of Rocilan, Alberonn Mindeater and Eadnar . . . the Lord of Afaliah, Celadeyr . . . the Lady of Bardelask, Armida the Formidable . . . the Lord of Sasaran, Neyal the Younger . . . the Lord of Tarasiah, Thufan Thunderhead . . . the Lord of Geroniah, Diarmet . . . the Lord of Sayzorask, Lomnovel Brainburner . . . the Lord of Roniah, Condateyr the Fulminator.”
Aiken surveyed the newly accoladed Great Ones. “I myself assume the presidency of the Guild of Coercers and the Guild of Psychokinetics. The post of Second Redactor is left temporarily vacant. Since neither Lady Estella-Sirone of Darask nor Moreyn Glasscrafter, city-lord of Var-Mesk, are here at this conclave, I withhold naming them to the High Table until they personally offer oaths of fealty.”
He rose from his throne and stood silently for a moment looking over the throng of exotics and humans and hybrids. His solemn manner softened and the old jesting smile appeared as he tapped the blazon on his glass breastplate. It was so stylized and encrusted with yellow gemstones that the digitus impudicus was hardly recognizable.
“And what about the rest of you? Do you accept me wholeheartedly as King of this Many-Colored Land?”
“Slonshal!” thundered the minds and voices of his subjects “Slonshal King Aiken-Lugonn! SLONSHAL!”
The Firvulag said nothing. By the time anybody thought lo look for them, they had ndden away on the trail to Nionel.
The End Of Part Two
PART III
The Gigantomachy
1
IN HIS SLEEP HE CALLED OUT TO HER: MERCY! ONLY TO AWAKE again to the grotto of living rock surrounding him, impervious to any telepathic impulse.
Mercy! his mind screamed, but the sound that emerged from his lips was barely audible. As always, he tried to rise. As always, he could move only the muscles of his face and neck. A warm wind, laden with the scent of the blooming maquis, stole along the cavern wall. He was very thirsty. Turning his head, he concentrated his will on the good arm, commanding it to move, to reach out to the nearby flask of water. The arm remained limp. He was helpless.
Goddess, let me die, he pleaded. Let me die before Isak Henning and Huldah come back.
A fly settled on his face, crept maddeningly about his cracked lips. He called down vain anathemas upon the miserable creature. The hot wind skipped about, lifting dust and dropping it onto him. His skin was now exquisitely sensitive. He could feel every irregularity in the cave floor beneath his fur mattress, the damp hairs of the furs themselves. As the sun sank, its strong beams shone directly upon him for a brief time, making him break out in sweat. The thirst was appalling.
The fly on his mouth flew away. But then came his most dangerous insect enemy, a kind of large black-and-white warble fly that pierced the skin with a needlelike ovipositor and laid its egg in living flesh. Terror and loathing welled up in him at the sight of it. He flung his coercion at the filthy thing, strove to push it away with his PK.
It settled onto his belly.
He uttered a strangled shriek. A long shadow thrust down the cave’s length and the wind brought a familiar smell of musk. He grunted with desperate urgency and she came running, dashing the warble fly off him with her bare hand just as it began to prick.
“There!” she cried, stamping it into the dust with her horny feet. “There, it’s dead. the devilish thing!” She bathed the defiled spot in cool water and gave him to drink, then cradled his head against her breasts, crooning. Grandpa came in with rabbits from the snare and gave them a derisive look. Huldah paid no attention..
“Are you all right now?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“No other bites? No pebbles hurting you?”
“No. Just give water.” She let him drink again, then brought the ceramic bedpan. While she cleaned him up, Isak skinned the rabbits and spitted them. The smell of roasting meat was mouth-watering.
He could chew and swallow with ease now. Huldah had been very hurt when he adamantly refused the lip-to-lip feeding, but now he was able to close his jaw tightly against her, and so she no longer importuned him.
“There’s going to be a lovely moon tonight,” she announced. “Nice and full. Would you like to go outside? You and I could sleep on the grass and Grandpa in the cave.”
“No,” he said flatly. “Stay here.”
“All right. But tonight is special. Grandpa says so.” Her eyes were shining and she tossed her stringy flaxen hair. “After supper, there’ll be a surprise!”
His heart went cold. A full moon in spring warmth? “What month?” he asked.
She bent over him, listening, and he repeated, “What month . . . is this?”
The evil old man heard and came back to stand over him.
“We call it May, Lord God! You call it the time of Grand Loving. Loving! And didn’t you used to have a fine time— you Tanu and your bloody fertility rites? But no more! Your people are gone, Lord God. All washed away in the avenging Flood. The Flying Hunt hasn’t come from Muriah since ’way last fall. It’ll never come to Kersic again.”
“I told you that, Grandpa,” said Huldah placidly. “But you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Just because you’re nothing but a half-witted slut,” Isak Henning muttered. “But you were right about that.”
“And I was right about my God waking.” She stared at her grandfather with peculiar intensity. “Someday soon, he’ll be all well.”
The shabby ancient skipped over to the cooking fire. “When he is, he can use his PK to move his wooden hand!” The old man chuckled maliciously. “And scratch his own lice, and wipe his own ass Hee hee hee!”
“Stop it. Grandpa!”
The old man scowled at her, defiant and half-fearful. “Just a joke. Damn cow, no sense of humor.”
They ate. The dusk was long in coming. Outside, the birds began to sing and Huldah announced she was going to the waterfall to bathe. “And when I come back, I don’t want to find you here, Grandpa. Take your things to the cork-oak grove. It’ll be nice there. If you try to spy tonight, you’ll be sorry.”
Isak watched her go, mouthing impotent curses. He gathered up his sleeping robe and tossed into it fire-making tools, a water bottle, a broken chunk of ash-bread, and his set of three vitredur woodcarving knives. Then he shuffled to the rear of the cave, bundle over his shoulder, and stood over the supine invalid.
“You’re in for it tonight, Lord God. The May madness has our Huldah in thrall!” He laughed until he fell into a fit of coughing, hawked, and spat. The foul gobbet landed only a few centimeters from the God’s beautiful face.
With great effort, he spoke “Who is Huldah? What . . . is she?”
“Aha! Ha ha ha,” the old man exulted. “Want to know what ground your by-blow’s sprouted in, do you? Well,
Lord God, her grandmother was one of you! Almost. When I was a new-transported bareneck slavey in the plantations of the Dragon Range on Aven, they sent me to thin the antelope herds. I found a baby exposed there on the mountainside. I didn’t know it, but it was a changeling. A Firvulag half-blood that some poor human trull of yours had given birth to, the way it happens sometimes. In more civilized parts, I understand the Firvulag babies are turned over to the Little Folks. But on Aven, where no Firvulag live . . .Well, I found the mite and look her to my hut. I had a pet antelope with a kid, so there was milk. In the beginning I was just experimenting, you see. The changeling could shift shapes even when it was tiny, and sort of read my mind as well. It knew I was lonesome, and it found I liked its human-looking body best. It grew up fast, anxious to please.”
Isak hunkered down beside the motionless figure. The God said “Huldah?”
“No, no, not yet. What happened, this changeling was a kind of a pet at first, and then a friend and servant, and then . . . well, the way you Tanu bastards don’t give us bareneck men hardly any women, when the changeling was big enough to screw, I screwed it. It liked me. I named it Borghild after a girl I knew back in the Milieu. We were happy out there in the mountains, me doing my stupid herding job and the changeling doing her best to look pretty, just like the other Borghild. Then one day, another guy found out about her and wanted his share. When I beat him up, he told the overseer. But by the time the gray-torc troopers came, me and Borghild were way to hell and gone over the Dragon Range, and we made a skin boat with a little sail and came to Kersic. And then she had a baby, and then she died.”
“Baby Huldah?”
“Not yet, dammit. I named the baby Karin. She grew up fast, too, and we lived in a Lowlife settlement we found here on the island. Karin was enough of a Firvulag to scare off the other guys in the village. They were afraid of her and afraid of me. We did pretty good in those days. And then Karin had a baby, and this time it was Huldah. One night a Flying Hunt came from Muriah. They used Kersic now and then when the outlaw human population built up. Everybody in the village was slaughtered except me and little Huldah. We got away and found this place. It was a long time ago.”
The God’s slow voice said, “And when Huldah grew, you took her.”
Isak started back as if struck tripping over his bundle and falling to the cave floor. “I didn’t! I didn’t!” Breathing thickly, he groped in the tangled furs. A sapphire blade gleamed in the meager firelight and approached the God’s neck, trembling above the ornate knobbed catch of his golden torc.
“Alien bastard,” the old man hissed. “For years I’ve dreamed of doing this.”
“Do it,” said the God.
Isak Henning grasped the handle of the knife in both scrawny hands and raised it high. “Hate you, hate you! You wrecked it, our chance for a new world! Now you’re finished, too! We’re all—” The aged body shook uncontrollably, arched in sudden spasm. Isak dropped the glass knife, covered his face with his hands, and began to sob.
Huldah came—tall, shining clean, naked, and wreathed with wild orange blossoms. “Silly Grandpa. I told you to go.” She smiled at her God. “Grandpa tried to hurt me only once, when I was a little girl. I taught him better. Show the God, Grandpa.”
The old man. still weeping, pulled aside his loincloth to show what an unwilling girl with Firvulag genes could do to one who tried to force her.
“Now go away. Leave us alone. Grandpa.”
The old man crept off and Huldah went briefly to the back of the cave, then returned to begin dressing her God. She handled him as easily as a doll. Lost in horror, he paid little attention.
Firvulag! She was Firvulag. He who had aspired so high had violated the greatest taboo between the two races. Firvulag! It explained her great stature and strength, her coarse vitality. And once, that mutilated wreck of a father–grandfather had been a brawny human male.
“Tonight will be the best full moon of all, since you’re finally awake,” she said. And after a little while, “You’ll kill him for me, won’t you? As soon as you’re able?”
He could not reply. He realized now what garments she had put upon him—gambeson and trews of membranous bubbles caught in a mesh web, the padding for his glass armor. And now the pieces themselves being strapped on, encasing legs and arms (except for the missing right gauntlet), thighs and shoulders. She held up the breast-plate with its sun-face blazon all embossed in gold and rose-colored stones, then eased it on. Last came the helmet, with its fierce glittering spikes and heraldic crest of a crouching, unearthly sun-bird. She left the visor open, and tucked wads of fur here and there beneath his head so that the awkward weight would not turn him awry.
He was in an agony of discomfort in spite of the padding. The harness pressed into his supersensitive body like some fitted bed of nails. Humiliation, guilt, and hatred for her rose in him like a surge of magma.
The armor began to glow.
“Oh, wonderful!” she cried. “My wonderful God! God of Light and Beauty and Joy!”
She knelt, drawing aside the skirt of tassets, and began the act of worship. Her body was a soft mass of peach-colored luminosity and ebony shadows, and in spite of himself, he was coming alive to her.
“No!” For the first time, he heard his voice echo in the cavern’s vault. He strained to lift his arms, to thrust away that adoring face. His muscles were lead. The radiance grew.
“God of the Sun!”she sang. “O my own God!” She mounted him, easily straddling the armor, a huge compelling softness devouring him. He was lost, and she was crying out in the sweet avalanche of blinding light, quenching the sun, blotting him out.
She fell away, senseless, and he hung in a scarlet void. I am dead, he thought, and damned.
He opened his eyes. The blood-colored glow dazzled him. It was coming from his own body. The glass armor flamed with it. An infinitude of tiny pain-impulses assaulted his skin and became a tingling that pulsed in rhythm to his thudding heart.
His left hand was on his breast. He raised it. And then the right, with even the wood suffused with brilliance and the crudely carved fingers flexing. He rolled away from the body of the woman, braced himself against the cave wall, and rose. The storm-sunrise light of him poured into every cranny of the cave. He saw a slight movement near the dark entrance and strode up to it.
It was the old man, cowering behind a rock. He had come back to spy after all.
Nodonn plucked Isak Henning up by the scruff and held him dangling. The laughter of triumphant Apollo was like the hurricane’s roar. And then the gaunt shape was flung toward the rear of the cavern and crashed to the rock floor beside Huldah. The old bones snapped and there were piteous screams. The woman stirred, lifted her head. looked with stupid astonishment at the broken huddle—and then at him. She raised an arm to shield her eyes from his aura.
Nodonn came back to the two of them, his. armor chiming with every step. He picked up Isak in his gauntleted left hand and poised the glaring wooden one, like a flaming claw. before me contorted old face.
“Now you will die,” said the Battlemaster. “Both of you.”
The old man began to laugh.
The claw affixed itself to the dome of his bald skull and began to twist. The laughter ascended to a shriek. “Kill her! Kill her! But before you do, took inside! Look . . .”
The high-pitched croak merged with other sounds. Nodonn wrung the head from its body and tossed both aside. Wide-eyed, Huldah watched. There was no fear in her.
Look inside?
She sprawled in gory dust, a few smashed orange blossoms tangled in her hair. Nodonn exerted his deep farsense. Hidden within that capacious Firvulag abdomen was a twelve-week fetus, half the length of his little finger. Perfect and strong. A male.
“A son,” he breathed. “At last.”
But how? How. beneath this pitiless star’s sublethal radiation that had mocked him for eight hundred years? He was the almighty Battlemaster, and yet he had begotten only poor
weak things, of which only a few languid daughters still survived.
He looked up at the shielding rock. He looked down to the placid woman with her forbidden genes. His race had resisted this mating to the brink of the Nightfall War in the remote Duat Galaxy But Gomnol, promoting his eugenic schemes, had also urged miscegenation . . . as a short-cut to operancy.
Could it be?
His redactive faculty reached gingerly into the tiny brain. But the fetus was too unformed, and he too clumsy. He would have to wait.
“You will stay here.” he told the woman, “and when my son is born, rear him with the utmost care until I come for him.”
“You will go away now?” Huldah whispered, stricken.
“Yes.”
Tears sprang from her eyes She slumped, shivering. Nodonn picked up the rumpled fur coverlet and laid it over her shoulders. She touched the hard, smooth glass of his gauntlet.
“In the back of the cave.” she said dully. “Your weapon.”
His cry was jubilant. It was the Sword and its pack! Inoperable, he discovered by flicking a stud: but he would find a way to repair it. He fastened its harness. “And now farewell,” he said to the woman. “The child’s name will be Thagdal. Remember that.”
“Dagdal,” she said, weeping “Little Dag. O God.”
He emerged from the cave and exerted his farsight. It was ominously dim, but he discerned a high promontory on the western shore that would suit his purpose, and he set out briskly. Before he had gone more than a kilometer or two he slowed, then found himself staggering. His convalescent mind and body were weakening rapidly from the tremendous earlier effort. It was to be expected. He would have to be prudent.
His creativity, which in former days had called down lightning and moved mountains, now barely sufficed to cut a stout wooden staff for him to lean upon. The mighty PK faculty that once levitated fifty knights and their battle-chargers strained to augment his faltering leg muscles as he climbed the cliff.