Hylozoic (25 page)

“More wine for the fretful dwarf,” said Lubbert, limping across the courtyard, carrying the cask beneath one flabby arm. He had a round, woebegone face. His skin was crimson, peeling, spotted with pustules. He had but two remaining digits on each hand. A pair of lobster claws.

While Lubbert was filling Jayjay's huge bowl, his bad leg gave way, and he tumbled onto Hugo, who snarled at him like a rabid dog. Lubbert wallowed around until he could lean his back against Jayjay's. All the while he kept tight control of his cask.

Thuy kept right on sleeping. The other beggars drifted in and out of the firelight. Lubbert and Jayjay sat back-to-back, drinking their wine. Jayjay was somehow too tired to nod off. Or maybe he was too drunk. Or too hungry.

That stale half loaf of brown bread had made it around the circle nearly intact, and Jayjay started chewing on it, softening it by dipping it into the kettle's broth. Although the bread tasted moldy and fungal, Jayjay ate most of the loaf.

He had a few minutes of extreme mental clarity, analyzing why it was they'd ended up so far into the past. But then he began feeling—very strange. Trippy. Dosed. His fingers were tingling; he was seeing trails behind moving objects.

He was so wasted that he relaxed into the trip without even questioning it. Setting aside the wine bowl and the thoughts of math and physics, he stared at the fire like the other goners, savoring the patterns, mechanically gnawing on the bread, becoming more and more convinced that the fire was filled with intelligent silps even though he couldn't teep them. Nature was alive from the start, even without lazy eight.

The sun peeped over the misty horizon and a shaft of light hit Jayjay in the eyes. With the light came a flashback to the pre-Singularity days when he and Sonic had been using chemicals instead of the Net to get high. They'd had a brief fad for the vintage psychedelic LSD, and had learned that acid's organic precursor is ergot, a type of fungus that grows on rye grain in certain years.

With a growing sense of agitation, Jayjay recalled that ergot contains a witches' brew of other alkaloids besides lysergic acid, eldritch chemicals which act as poisons with cumulative effects.

Abruptly he began hallucinating a chicken standing on a ladder reciting ergot facts. The chicken—who was wearing an academic gown and a tiny mortarboard—said that the first kicker about ergot poisoning was that nobody in the Middle Ages had ever realized that the affliction, which they called St. Anthony's fire, was caused by the bad grain in their bread. They'd thought the syndrome was brought on by sinfulness; and that the hallucinations were a form of demonic possession.

The second kicker, continued the chicken, was that if you consumed ergot for months or years, you'd get a blistery red rash on your skin, and your fingers would drop off, and in due time you'd lose your limbs—like Maarten, Hugo, and Lubbert.

Jayjay thought to drop his crust.

Lobster Lubbert lay sprawled behind him, seemingly unconscious. Jayjay lay down, too, letting the rising sun play on
his eyelids, goofing on the colored patterns spawned by the light.

He might have slept, but now Thuy let out a whine. Sly Lubbert had snaked his arm over to her; he was tugging at her clothes, wanting to fondle her unblemished bare skin.

Utterly knackered by the cumulative insults to his brain, Jayjay struggled to his feet—and kicked Lubbert in the ass. Weeping with chagrin, Lubbert reeled over to the fire and picked up a burning coal, using a rag to hold it. He lunged at Jayjay, meaning to brand him. The coal seemed to be talking to Jayjay, mesmerizing him with its whispery voice.

“Run!” Thuy yelled, prodding her husband into motion.

 

 

The two of them escaped down the same main street as last night, although now it was luminous in the misty dawn, shaded with a continuous range of pastel colors. Hooves and wooden wheels clattered on the cobbles, bringing wagonloads of goods to town: cheese and milk, turnips and cabbages, chickens and rabbits. Market day. Two sweaty men rolled a barrel of beer; a woman balanced a tower of linens on her head. Noticing the little Lobraners, a soldier yelled.

Rounding another corner, Thuy and Jayjay suddenly found themselves inside a large cloth sack—as if subjected to some weird mathematical procedure involving the inversion of transfinite space to the interior of a sphere. The sack's mouth pinched shut, someone lifted them with a grunt, and they thumped into a wheelbarrow. Jayjay and Thuy were squeezed into the sack spoon-style, with Thuy nestled into Jayjay's lap.

“Maybe I really should whistle for the Hrull,” said Thuy. “I wonder if any of them can hear us over here?”

“Please don't do that,” said Jayjay intensely.

“Are we ever going to be normal again?” said Thuy, her voice breaking.

“Quiet!” said a voice in English, as sternly if they were two cats in a bag. “I'm taking you to the harbor.” For drowning?

Church bells chimed as they trundled through the marketplace. A smith hammered an anvil. Geese honked, pigs squealed, children yelled, and everywhere people were talking Dutch, really quite a cozy tongue—almost like English.

The wheelbarrow bumped down a slope. Jayjay heard the slap of small waves and the hollow knocking of boats. With another grunt, their captor slung them into the ribbed bottom of a skiff. Jayjay's heartbeat rose to a crescendo.

The sack opened and a face peered in: a Hibrane youth with intelligent brown eyes on either side of a tomahawk nose. His long hair was tied into a topknot. He was smiling at them.

“Azaroth!” cried Jayjay, giddy with relief. “You ended up here, too? Can you help us get back to the Lobrane?”

Originally Azaroth had lived in the Hibrane equivalent of twenty-first century San Francisco. He'd been making regular trips to the Lobrane to poach cuttlefish, but then he'd gotten involved with Jayjay and Thuy's struggle to save Lobrane Earth from the rogue nanomachine nants. Thuy had stolen the magic harp from Azaroth's aunt and Jayjay had played a Lost Chord that solved the nant problem by converting all of Earth's natural processes into intelligent minds: the silps.

The last time they'd seen Azaroth was when the Hibraner had come to repossess the harp and take it home. Azaroth had been in a hurry, as his fellow Hibraners had just then been working to disrupt the hyperjump route from the Lobrane to the twenty-first century Hibrane. Apparently the disruption was now sending incoming traffic to the Hibrane's fifteenth century.

“You can come out of the sack now,” said the Hibraner. “I'm glad to see you two. Maybe we can help each other.”

They were in a harbor where several 's-Hertogenbosch canals converged. Most of the harbor was within the city wall, which marched right through the basin. The scene was alive with large and small boats, everything mirrored in the undulating water. A fish market sat on a dock against the city wall, complete with a crane lifting crates from a scow. Azaroth's boat was moored on the inner side of the harbor, beside the cobble streets and wooden homes.

“Good old Azaroth,” said Thuy. “I was hoping it was you. Are we safe?”

“Nobody will bother you if you're with me,” said Azaroth. Always the flashy dresser, he wore a puffy muslin blouse and striped red and white tights. “I've convinced them I'm from the Garden of Eden. They think it's a real place, somewhere in the Caribbean or South America. These people have such a strange view of the world.”

“Garden of Eden!” said Jayjay. “Don't tell me that Hibraners believe the whole Christian storybook?”

“
These
guys do,” said Azaroth, with a gesture at the town. “Here in the fifteenth century, heaven and hell are the main thing they care about. Facts to remember if you don't want to be burned at the stake: Hibrane Christianity was founded by Jude Christ, not Jesus Christ; He died nailed to a wooden triangle, not a cross; His symbol is the cuttlefish, not the lamb. Our Lord Jude was a cuttlefisherman like me!” Azaroth laughed. “I can't believe we're in the Lowlands of 1496. I love it!”

As he talked, he was unmooring his boat and laying out his fishing gear. A few passersby had stopped to stare and point at Thuy and Jayjay. Quickly Azaroth maneuvered his skiff away from the shore.

“I was thinking about the time-slip this morning,” said Jayjay, standing in the boat, his head level with the gunwale. “It's
because you guys bent the Lobrane's timeline away from the Hibrane's time. Look.” He swept his hands up through the air, sketching a pair of imaginary timelines, keenly sensitive to the trails. The lines started out parallel, but then one line drooped over to the side like an ergot-stricken stalk of wheat. “If you jump from the tip of droopy timeline, your path hits the other line down low. Time travel.”

“What year would we hit if we hopped back to the Lobrane?” wondered Azaroth.

“Hard to predict,” said Jayjay. “Maybe we'd be in the twenty-first century like before. Or maybe in 1200
B.C
. But could be we'll never find out, because—”

“Oh, relax, Jayjay,” said Thuy. “You sound like Ond Lutter. Like a numberskull nerd. I'm sick of worrying. Let's just enjoy this for now. The last gasp of the Middle Ages.”

“It's fun here,” agreed Azaroth. “I live in a tavern that's a bathhouse and a brothel. The Muddy Eel. I've got a thing going with one of the women. Anja.” He smiled as he said her name. “I tell everyone I rode back from the New World on Columbus's ships. They're only just now getting the word about his voyages. You guys can be my cousins: tiny, doll-perfect pygmies from the Garden of Eden. Practically angels.” He bent his back, rowing across the harbor toward the city wall.

Jayjay stretched his arms and breathed in the cool air, trying to relax, ignoring the faint sewer smell. Unfortunately, the ergot was still in play. All the boats looked like faces. Even the canal looked like a face.

“I guess that hillbilly pitchfork sent you after us?” Thuy asked Azaroth.

“Groovy,” said the Hibraner. “He's friends with the harp. Those two are—”

“Look out!” interrupted Jayjay, pointing at what he saw as
a huge demonic cat skull rising from the water, jaws wide-open, with a corpse-worm peeping from a monstrous hollow eye socket.

“That's just a water gate, Jayjay,” said Azaroth calmly. “An arch with a portcullis, and a burgher taking tolls. We're going fishing. That's how I earn my keep. I catch these big coarse fish with hook and line. They look like cod. I hook a few eels, too. And sometimes I net herring.”

“Why—why are you taking us fishing?” asked Jayjay, feeling desperately adrift. He still hadn't had a chance to tell Thuy about his ergot poisoning. Talking was so much more work than telepathy.

“Obviously you need a rest,” said Azaroth, gliding up to the water gate. “And if the locals see us together, they might accept your arrival. They're all gossiping about you.”

The pop-eyed, white-bristled guardian of the gate was indeed curious about the two little doll-people who'd been running around all night. He quizzed them for several minutes. They calmed him by answering in colloquial Brabantian Dutch, slowing down their voices to be readily comprehensible. The guard said the soldiers had been worried the dwarves might be demons or, worse, spies from Gelderland. But he was perfectly willing to believe they were Azaroth's Dutch-speaking pygmy cousins from the Garden of Eden in the New World—especially after Azaroth gave him a silver coin.

“What's Gelderland?” Thuy asked Azaroth as they paddled into the confluence of the two rivers that flanked the town.

“The province just north of here. Gelderland's been fighting the Duchy of Brabant for twenty years. Our team torched a Gelder village just last night.”

Azaroth rowed them up the Dommel River, following along the outside of the town wall. From the boat, Jayjay could see the town as a triangle, squeezed between the two rivers and
bounded on the third side by a canal. The town consisted of thatched wooden houses and brick monasteries, also a cathedral and half a dozen churches. Each spire was topped with a tip-down isosceles triangle to memorialize Jude Christ's death.

People were ambling toward the town along a dirt road by the river: peasant youths and maids; a bearded man in a red cape and a top hat; a woman dressed in motley and carrying juggler's rings; a peddler with pots and pans fastened all over his body; an unshaven bagpiper with his wind-sack slung slack across his back. The marketplace was visible at the town's crest: a triangular plaza alive with humans and livestock. The massed sound drifted down, like a single, intricately articulated voice.

“It's a special market,” said Azaroth. “Not just the usual weekend thing. Tomorrow they have the big annual Procession of the Virgin Mary.”

“Can we help you catch some fish?” Thuy asked him.

“Yeah,” said Azaroth, gesturing at some simple wooden rods in the bottom of the boat. “Throw in a couple of lines while I row to my favorite spot.”