Whatever it was was huge, moving, and dead as Belham himself!
I didn’t scream, but I gasped in a fetid stench, pulled away, and ran. With ten steps my foot caught something, and I fell, rolling in leaves—and heard its foot fall on the earth behind me, loud and large as my whole body. Pushing to my knees, I hurled myself on in the dark, while it breathed, hoarsely, wetly, above me.
I ran, stumbling, scraping myself, hitting myself, hurting my ankle on a rock, my hand on a tree; somehow I tore into that starlit meadow. But with five running steps among the ghostly brush, I heard a thundering behind me loud as a tree crashing down through leaves and branches. Then, over the length of an indrawn breath, the starlight on the bushes and ground wiped away, as something huge and cold moved above me and under the night—as I crashed into the trees.
I tripped. I fell on some small slope that would never have felled me in daylight. I practically crawled over some large log. Then, again, I ran. My eyes, blinking and tearing open, filled with firelight as I crashed through more leaves—
Terek looked up from the flame, frowned at me—then scrambled to his feet in a crouch, snatching his spear up over his shoulder with one hand, pulling loose his sword with the other. Arly looked around, then levered up on his crutch in a motion, beginning to take small, hopping steps back.
I looked over my shoulder at the branches quivering in firelight. A breeze had come from somewhere. The forest shook, and the camp-fire burned high within it. Turning around before the fireplace, I backed away from the trees.
My own shadow grew huge on the shaking leaves.
Still crouching, Terek asked: ‘Is it bandits…?’
Arly whispered: ‘Some animal…?’
Terek stepped forward now, hefting his spear threateningly. Without looking at me, he said: ‘Is it slavers out there…?’
I could only gasp for breath and shake my head. But as they glanced over at my scraped and dirty face, my bleeding hands and legs, they too began to realize it was no natural thing I’d come on in the leaf-canopied and star-prickled night. For I had met some monster god who roamed our borders, preventing such defections as I had foolishly hoped for. Nameless? Certainly not. But I suspect from what I’ve learned in my travels since that I was fortunate not to have previously encountered some local witch or shaman who might have told me the entity’s name. For had I called it to me by its proper appellation as it stalked the forest night, hearing me it simply would have devoured me in its immense, rotten mouth.
I wouldn’t let Terek put out the fire that night—not that he really wanted to after I blurted my first protest. Soon we were all sitting practically with our buttocks against the hot stones and our shoulders by one another’s. Now and again one or the other of us would get up for a new piece of wood, till the wood within sight was pretty much gone. Once Terek proposed arranging an organized watch, but somehow we never got to it. (There would have been no point against that deity.) Later, I suddenly came awake when one or the other of them fell, asleep at last, against me, and I blinked, surprised, with stifled breath and only the coals’ glow behind me for light. Then, morning sun was flaking among the branches, falling on my scratched knees, as first Terek, then I, and at last Arly pushed to our feet, stiff, chill, and all of us feeling as though we’d had no sleep at all.
The cart cover was undisturbed over the provisions wagon. Save for a few more fallen leaves, our camp was as it had been before darkness.
We had been spared.
And so, as I had done many mornings before, I reached over the cart’s side, slipped my hand, despite its scratches, down between the wood and the money sack, till I could finger up the scroll of goatskin. I unrolled it—the edges were truly frayed now—to examine the confusion of lines and marks and corrections.
A lapwing called shrilly through the morning twitter and warble, over the nearby river’s hiss and whisper.
‘I guess,’ I said, as Arly turned on his crutch to listen and Terek paused in wiping his sword blade free of speckling dew, ‘we’ve seen just about everything we can of Belham. I’ve visited the place he died. We’ve been to the place he was born. And I’ve looked at just about every spot he worked at in between. I have more than enough information for anything I might want to do with it. And I’ve been traveling a long time now. What’s proper at this point would be to return to Kolhari.’
So we swung the cart to the north, riding or walking through the morning, till, by mutual consent, we stopped beneath a protective overhang hard by a cliff wall, took out blankets, and slept a few hours to make up for the sleep in the night we’d missed.
After that we fed the mules and ate.
Then we walked on beside the wagon several hours through the rest of the day till, toward sundown, we made camp once more.
Monsters are real.
9.821 What are the SF (or fantasy) models for this enterprise—which is, after all, not SF but sword-and-sorcery? Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, Russ’s Female Man, Malzberg’s Galaxies, Disch’s ‘334,’ Ellison’s ‘Death-bird’…
In what sense are their problems the same as mine?
More important, in what specific ways are they different?
And how much, right at this moment, do I believe in the monstrous specificity of my own solutions…?
9.83 The Bridge of Lost Desire is not my favorite city passage, the Master explained. It’s libidinous atmosphere does not make me comfortable. Several libidinous friends have suggested that what disturbs me about it is its too-great sense of life, its suggestion of control always a breath away from animal abandon.
That’s nonsense.
I feel life when man and woman, together or apart, labor and ponder to nurture, console, or entertain a child, a friend, or some aged body. But there’s no particular vital excess where a vicious, bored, fifteen-year-old and undernourished barbarian sells herself for a quarter of an hour to some forty-year-old warehouse loader with enough beer in his belly so that he will remember neither her face nor her name when he ambles by on his next day off—the girl having rushed away moments after their over-quick exchange to swab between her legs with volatile, noxious liquids, while fear of conception nags nevertheless over the twenty-eight days between moons.
Still, at carnival time that feeling of distress, so intense on the bridge (life? Isn’t it, rather, high frustration? It’s certainly not rampant satisfaction that gives the place its air), is dispersed throughout the several celebrant neighborhoods. At the same time, the bridge becomes more populous with people who never go there normally, so that the air of life, frustration, or whatever (why not call it lust?) is somewhat mitigated, and its crowded flags seem like any other city thoroughfare, for all the high spirits passing across it.
I passed across.
Flares burned along both sides. Now and again, I overheard in this conversation or that: the Liberator and his entourage had ridden over only a bit before I came by.
As I made my way between raucous revelers still thronging the Old Market of the Spur, I thought about that boyhood trip, and I wondered, as I had, many times since (and many times upon the trip itself): suppose, in the same way as I had sought Belham, someone else came along, seeking me—oh, not the whole of my life, certainly, pieced out some impossible hundred years hence. But suppose somebody, today, hearing of my journey with all the inaccuracies entailed—the interview with my parents, and such—decided to reconstruct only that year’s wandering, setting out to find only what that journey had meant for me. What traces of it would be left?
Suppose they did not ask me, but—however honestly—only researched the monster?
Suppose they asked my uncle?
He could tell approximately when I left and when I returned—though several times of late I note he’s mistaken the year.
What would some of my relatives say at whose great houses we stopped? What of my visit would they remember?
What would some of the peasants who aided us recall of my passing?
Wh
at of my big, bald steward?
What of my little redheaded one?
What tale would the soldiers who deserted me tell?
What about Arly and Terek?
What of the princess or the peasant widow?
Ten years ago I got a partial chance to find out.
The school, you see, had finished its first year successfully. At the beginning of the second, I declared a six-week spring recess so that the students could return home awhile. And I took the same time to visit a friend in a town a day’s cart-ride west of Kolhari, which had recently made much economic progress; as well, it had begun to support its own barbarian community as some of those southern-born workers grew disgruntled with the big port city and moved on.
I had been at my friend’s house three days and, on the first truly hot afternoon of the year, had tried to take a nap as the rest of the family did; but a restlessness came over me, and so I went out to walk in the warm streets and explore a little.
Ambling along a sun-filled alley, I suddenly saw a powerfully built barbarian with one leg, helping himself along with a single crutch.
Such severe and singular infirmities are rare in Nevèrÿon; I thought of Arly immediately. I stopped, but he didn’t seem to notice me and went into a daubed building through a crooked door frame with no hanging. On impulse I hurried after him, stepping into a shadowed storeroom. From chinks and outright holes in the roof a dozen beams of sunlight lanced through floating dust.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but you’re not…?’
In one of these beams, the man on the crutch turned, frowning. (Wasn’t he both too short and too thick to be my old barbarian friend?) What I first saw were all the differences in that barbaric face from Arly’s: the broader cheeks, the slacker lips, the receding hair at the forehead—while the hair on the chest was far heavier than I remembered, with half of it grizzled white. Then, suddenly, the frown became a grin. And the face simply…transformed into Arly’s! ‘You…!’ he said. ‘You? No! What are you doing here? Is it my young nobleman? No…! But why have you come? After all these years! What has happened with you? Why in the world do you come to see me like this? Here? Now? No! But it’s really you!’ Arly came forward, grinning, to clap a broad hand to my shoulder while, with a grin as large, I shook him happily by both of his, so that he swayed on his barkbound stick; and I thought, after all, if I’d changed as little as he, the more than twice-seven years since we’d seen each other had indeed been generous to us both.
Arly now worked swabbing resin over the insides of barrels, he told me. His hands were foul with the stuff all the way to his elbows, and his bare foot was stained with it to the knee. Oh, he’d been in this town for years, he explained. He’d just stopped off in the storage building here to pick up a sack of something he had to take to someone else. But come along with him. Yes, come along! I must visit his home and sit with him—if I would so honor him—and we would drink and talk of the old days. That is, if I could spare the time for an old friend…? If I could pass an hour with a cripple such as he…? If I could see my way to talk with a poor, one-legged barbarian…?
He got his sack, hoisted it around over his shoulder—the bag still twice as heavy, I’m sure, as any I could carry—and I followed him out into the street. He bent a little more and went a little slower than I remember, under such burdens. But three streets away he left his load with an old, taciturn oil-seller, and we started off through the town in a direction I’d never been, till we were among some thatched shacks that brought back to me nothing so much as that clutch of mountain hovels where Belham (may have) died.
These, at least, were sunlit and dry.
Before one a woman with dark, sweaty hair worked at a stone washtub, with two near-grown girls helping her and three or four youngsters crawling naked in the spilled water that made mud about the trough.
Arty went up to her, calling out: ‘Hey, you must see who I’ve brought!’ As he put his arm around her shoulder, the woman looked up, surprised and shy—she had a harelip, wouldn’t you know. Hopping on his crutch, Arly herded her toward me while the big children blinked and the little ones ignored all, and the woman looked down at her dripping arms and shriveled hands. I smiled, spoke to her, thinking she must be Arly’s woman. Certainly some of the children looked as though they might have been his. But she knew who I was, Arly prompted. She knew all about me! Hadn’t Arly told her the story of our travels together, years ago? Didn’t she remember? Of course she did! I was the nobleman who had given him the money to come here! He’d told her that. Yes, of course she knew of me.
Whether she did or not, I don’t know. But I was struck with a memory absent for years. When we’d reached Kolhari, I’d paid Arly a servant’s wages for the three or four months he’d traveled with me—no great amount, but more than the young barbarian had ever held at one time before. Three days later, he’d disappeared from the servants’ quarters of my uncle’s home. For a few weeks, I recall, I’d wondered if he had come to harm in the city, for he’d never turned up again. Could he have caught some market wagon directly here and settled down, to live all those intervening years?
But now he released her to lead me on further among the huts. His woman? No, she was only a good friend. A fine figure in the neighborhood. She’d helped him many times—as she’d helped many others here; he’d wanted her to meet his noble visitor. For, he explained, she was as good and fine a person of her class as I was of mine.
Several huts away, he pointed out his. It was smaller and in worse repair than most of those around it, and on the very edge of the enclave, with scattered branches and bits of refuse lying about: a split-log bench with two legs broken off so no one could sit on it, the wheel from some sort of wagon, its rim cracked.
We didn’t even go inside.
I was thankful, for the whole neighborhood had that smell I’ve always assumed comes from continually cooking in pots never thoroughly washed. What that would become within the shack I didn’t want to imagine.
Arly sat me on a firm, overturned basket near his door, ducked within the ragged hanging, then came out, the handles of two un-glazed clay cups hooked on the stained fingers of one hand and a jar in the crook of his arm. He lowered himself by his crutch to a rock to sit before me, then let the crutch fall to the worn grass. Leaning forward he poured out a liquid clear as water. Then he sat back, the jar held up at his right shoulder in both hands, waiting for me to taste mine before he poured his own—the way, indeed, I’d instructed him to pour at table so many years before!
As we grinned at each other, I picked the cup up from the ground and sipped: it was not water. It was sharp and went along the throat with all the aspects of fire save heat. At the same time, there was a strong feeling that, had it gone at only a slightly different angle, it would have slid in as coolly as a mountain ice chip. What he’d served me, I realized, was one of the strong Avila rums.
I said once that Arly had the unearned reputation of a drunkard in the tiny barbarian village where we’d found him. Well, I began to realize, over the years he’d hobbled a few steps along toward earning it.
There are many who claim the drink is poisonous.
But I will say, after he had poured his own, and I had taken several sips more, it lent a warmth of spirit to the already hot day. And I was not about to judge my old traveling companion in what was after all only his hospitality toward me.
As we talked of this and that, his life, mine, then, now, and the time between, I asked him: ‘Tell me, Arly, what did you think of that whole trip? What’s the part you remember best?’
He look at me slyly. ‘You know which part I remember.’ He jabbed a stained finger at me with a complicitous grin.
‘I know which parts I remember,’ I told him. ‘But you must tell me for yourself.’
‘That time,’ he prompted me, ‘you know. In the castle. Of one of your cousins.’
I smiled, nodding, thinking he meant his first visit to a royal house with me, when he’d got
ten lost and I’d had to go searching for him. Indeed, I’d told that story with numerous embellishments, many times since. But Arly went on:
‘You know. The one where your noble cousin had killed himself.’
I frowned, suddenly lost.
‘You remember,’ Arly insisted. ‘We took the wagon through all those broad, endless orchards of fruit trees. And finally, when we came up to the stone gate, the woman you told me later was a slave, though she wore her iron collar under a jeweled neck-piece, said to us that the baron was dead—they had found him only that morning in the gardens, where he had eaten many, many of the small, poisonous petals of the white ini flower…?’
I must have still frowned, though a memory was beginning to flicker; because Arly frowned a moment at me, before he went on:
‘When we went inside, the whole castle was in confusion. They could only give us a single room to stay in for the night—’
‘Of course!’ I exclaimed. ‘The Baron Inige!’ I didn’t remember the orchards. But now I began to picture a servant (slave?) standing at a half-opened gateway between two high, stone newels, telling me that we could not be received within because there had been a great tragedy in the house. The baron was dead, and by his own hand. ‘But we didn’t go in,’ I protested. ‘Did we?’ The whole incident would never have come up in any spontaneous account from me. As it was, I could only recall that moment at the entrance. ‘Certainly we went on somewhere else. Arly. We wouldn’t have gone inside after that.’
‘Oh, yes!’ Arly nodded. ‘We did! I was very frightened, and I didn’t want to. That soldier with us—what was his name?’
‘Terek.’
‘Yes, that soldier stood by me, while we waited behind the wagon. He knew I was frightened, too. He nudged me with his arm. I was so frightened—and he thought it was funny! You were at the gate, talking with the slave. Oh, so gently and persuasively, with such smiles, you went on—you told her just how you and the dead man were related, and how terrible it must be for all in the castle, and that perhaps we could be of some help, and that you understood how upset everyone must be, and, no, you wouldn’t think of intruding, but we had traveled so far, your guard and your servant were so tired, and we would not be any trouble, so that perhaps if they could find rooms for us simply for a night and—’