Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (16 page)

The score was now one guy behind me, five guys in front of me, along with the magic user, and the three freakaloids.

I could not face the crowd and turn my back to a man behind me, despite that he had tripped and was now on his knees, so I stepped on the dying man, and drove the spear at him.

This guy — let’s call him Butterfoot Joe — he had not dropped his shield. It was held by a strap over his shoulder. Even from his kneeling position he was able to get it in my way and block my thrust. The shield was made of wicker or some lightweight substance, so my lance head penetrated it; but Joe just shrugged and dropped the shield, and my spear now had a four-foot tall surfboard attached to it.

Shouting, I shoved at him, spear and shield and all, but my spear had a fat knot of hair just below the spearhead, so nothing happened but me pushing at Butterfoot Joe like a bulldozer while he tried to leap to his feet. I mentioned these guys were all shrimpy little fellows, and he was off balance anyway, so he went stumbling back. I twisted the spear sideways, and the shield got wedged across the passage between an ornamental gnome and a pair of pipes. The shield was wedged in tightly enough that it did not drop when I let go of the spearhaft to stoop and pick up both the flashlight and my grandfather’s katana. The shield did not block Joe from coming back at me, but it made him hesitate, because he now had to decide whether to jump over or duck under, or take a moment to wrestle the little barrier out of the way.

As I straightened, I flicked on the flashlight in Joe’s eyes. The light was brighter than their wooden illumination, so it blinded him a moment. He backed up, but there was not much of a place to back up to, since he had to go around the corner, and now was on the lower part of the ramp sloping up. At that point, Butterfoot Joe just decided to run. I heard his footsteps clanging along with the footsteps of the first three guys: they had not been gone that long. They were still within earshot.

Something hit me in the back pretty hard, and then it hit me a second time. Thwack! Thwack!

Two arrows were sticking out of my jacket. My bulletproof jacket. The arrowheads had not penetrated, but, even if they had, so what? I was in this magical freaky nightmare land where I could be hurt, but not killed.

My chest wound was still sucking in air and spurting blood, and it hurt like the hottest part of Hell, but pain-fueled rage and adrenaline were rushing through my body and enflaming my brain.

Now I turned. No one from behind had charged. Two soldiers standing turned sideways in the cramped space, with bows in their hands and scared looks on their faces. Not scared like you are in combat. I am sure they’d seen plenty of that. Scared like they were seeing a ghost. A dead man who stood up after being stabbed and plucked out the javelin and gutted your team-mate with it.

I'm not sure why they decided to shoot me rather than rush me. Maybe no one charged me because they did not want to step on the dying guy. He was now behind me, between me and them, rolling on the ground. No one was stooping to try to help him, which struck me as rather cold. He was right in the middle of the puddle I had bled out or vomited up, blood mixed with Uncreation Oobleck, which was slithering like sticky worms from one side of the floor to the other. The dog-faced man-thing was still twitching, but he looked really dead, and he was slumped against the dying guy in the pool of Oobleck.

The soldiers were either really well trained, because they did not attack me until ordered, or really poorly trained, because they just stood there paralyzed with panic.

Maybe they did not want to step in the goop. I could see from the looks on their faces that they knew what the stuff was.

And maybe the place was too narrow to attack me easily. With two bowmen standing in front (call them Mutt and Jeff), they were blocking the way of the others behind them. I thought about rushing forward to see if I could decapitate one or both bowmen, but the two spearmen crowded up behind (or Frick and Frack, if you will), had their spears in their hands. Now they had recovered from the surprise of having people fall on their heads, so they were in position with their footing set right.

Sure, I was bigger than them, but then, a horse is bigger than a pikeman, which doesn’t do the horse any good during a cavalry charge. More mass and more muscle just means the horse can hurt itself worse by pushing the pointy end in deeper when they collide.

I hesitated a half-second, and that was too long: Mutt and Jeff, the two bowmen, knelt and raised their shields, making a little wall that Frick and Frack, the two spearmen, could thrust over to get at me. And I could not get at them.

Behind these four in the front were the two dog-headed hairless wonders. I’ve said before that they looked like baboons, but they were as tall as men, even if thinner. Call them Lassie and Rintintin. Next behind them, where the narrow aisle turned a corner was the third spearman. He was older, and had more plumes on his helm, and he got to stand back away from the danger, so let’s call him the Squad Leader wimp. Next to him was the magic user in the tall black cylindrical hat. I saw no sign of the phosphorescent blind guy in the black cloak. Maybe he was on the ramp leading down.

Mom did not like that I used to watch scary horror movies as a child. Boy, was she wrong about that. I had already seen so many fake gaping wounds and spurting gushes of blood in my TV life, that I did not freak out. I think I mentioned the real thing is less dramatic looking than the exaggerated close-ups. The smell was no worse than when you kill a buck, except that when a human being loses control of his bowels, our droppings smell really rank.

They all looked scared of me, except the magic user, who seemed bored. He had a narrow face, narrow eyes, a thin little moustache barely clinging to the corners of his mouth, and a sneer. He had this little shining toy in his hand, that looked like a compass or a pocketwatch, and he looked down at it, and pushed its golden dial with his thumbs. It was as if he was checking the time.

I raised the katana in a salute. “My name is Ilya McLeod of Clan McLeod!
There can only be one
!”

Mutt and Jeff relaxed, looking startled, and behind them Frick and Frack exchanged glances. They did not lower their spearpoints, but the tension went out of their shoulders.

They were acting as if they understood what I said.

The Squad Leader wimp said in a voice of awe, “What occult monster is he?”

I felt this weird sensation in my ears and in my brain. Because I had understood him before I realized that I should not understand him.

I heard the words the squad leader spoke with my ears:
umamu i-idtadum su
.

Somehow, I knew the first word
umamu
meant
beast
or
monster
. The third word
su
at the end was a masculine singular pronoun, but it was not grammatically necessary. It was for emphasis only: not “what occult monster is he?” but “what occult monster is
he
?”

I also knew that the second word
idu
meant
to be unknown
and the letter ‘i’ at the beginning made it third person masculine singular, and the letter ‘m’ at the end made it accusative. The
ta
in the second position put the verb in the imperfect tense: being unknown was an ongoing act. There is no English equivalent to
idtadum
: “He unknowns” or “he unknownings” or even “he unknownizes.”

The word also meant strange in the sense of being a stranger, that is, unknown because it comes from outside. Our word
occult
when it refers to being something hidden or unearthly captures a hint of this.

Literally, then, the sentence was, “Monster, he being occult, (what is) he?” With the ‘what is’ just sort of implied.

I was not hearing it literally, you see. It's like this. I have a friend with the strange name of Foster Hidden. It's unusual, but I don’t really think of his last name meaning anything. When I hear it, my brain just interprets it to be his name.

If you said “Hidden” to me in reference to Foster, I would hear it as his name. But if I heard the word in a different context, my brain would remember the word had other meanings.

It was not as if I were an amnesiac who spoke French and then someone talked to me in French and I was surprised I could understand him. I could not speak the language. It was not like telepathy. I was understanding what he was saying, but I was also understanding the words and the grammar as if I already understood them. It was not like having a babelfish in your ear or a Star Trek universal translator, or something that gives you comical word-for-word translations.

I understood both the literal and the figurative meanings of the words: I was getting the connotations and implications of his language, including nuances with no parallel in English.

He said it again, “
Umamu i-idtadum su
,
Bel Ersu Samavasipur
?”

Turns out, the guy in the tall black hat whom the squad leader addressed actually was a magic user, or, at least an Astrologer. His name, or title, meant
Lord Astute Starmage
.

Samava
, their word for star, literally meant
va
, living being, of the
sama
, celestial or middle heaven. You could translate the word samavasipur as
astrologer
rather than
mage
, but that might give a misleading impression. We are not talking about a guy who writes a newspaper column telling you vague things you want to hear.

Ersu
meant
Astute
, but it was also a proper name, a title. It was not what his mother called him, it was what his masters ordered his slaves to call him during office hours. Now, keep in mind that I was not sitting there analyzing all these little nuances, I simply
knew
them. The knowledge appeared in my head like little firecrackers going off, the moment I heard the words.

The Starmage answered in a voice as cold as ice, nodding toward me:

Again, I heard the words with my ear: “
Rabeserti, i-Lalilummutillut
”

And I also heard them in my brain: “Decurion, he is of the Undying.”

Rabeserti
was a title rather than a name:
rab
meant chief, and
eser
was ten. I had guessed right. Squad Leader. Hurrah for me: I was Sherlock freaking Holmes.

The
Undying
is not a great translation for
Lalilummutillut
, nor was
Immortal
or
Imperishable
or
Indestructible
. Even if
Self-Indestructible
were a word, that was still not quite right.

The name he gave me meant something darker than that.

The name was made up of three word elements, going back to front,
illutu
, was a word-ending indicating a host, tribe, nation, clan or band: Undyingling, Undyingite, Undyingishman. Second, the middle word,
Mut
, meant
death
. But third, the prefix was a jammed-together phrase:
La lil u
which meant
hopeless yearning
or
to seek in vain
.

We have a word in English for those who seek glory in vain: Vainglorious. We do not have one for those who seek death in vain.

So a better way of rendering what I heard the Starmage say would be this: “Captain-of-Ten, he is of that host who seek death but do not find it; and who desire to die, but death flees from them.”

And I will not tell you how it angered and frightened me that
he
knew exactly what I was, and had a name for my species or race or club or whatever, but I was a big question mark to myself, just an empty blank.

It crashed in on me that all my brothers’ cruel jokes about how weird I looked, and that I was adopted, were true. I was not of my family. I was not even from Earth. How could I be? Every living organism on Earth is mortal. So who was I? What was I? What occult monster was I?

Lord Ersu the Starmage knew more than that. His next words:

“His blood is not called MacLeod, which means
Son of the Ugly One
. His blood is called Muromets, which means his fathers dwelt in
Murom
, which means the city of the land-people. He is called Ilya, which means
the Lord is Yahweh
.”

At that moment, the ship we were in shifted in its mooring, or maybe we were on land and this was a small earthquake. The deck swayed only enough to make everyone nervous and seasick for a second, not enough to throw anyone from his feet or do anything useful.

But they looked as startled as I felt, so I pointed my katana at the Starmage in back. “That was but the smallest sample of my power!”

Pretty good speech, I think. Reading all those comic books in my youth was not wasted. The guys in the front looked nervous.

I flourished the katana and struck a pose. “Get back, you
Mortals
! Everyone here who can get stabbed through the chest and live, raise your hands!”

But Lord Starmage must have read comic books too, because what he said sounded pretty impressive. “I have read the constellations and worked the calculations, and destined things both large and small. I know and foreknow, see and foresee.”

“Oh, yeah?” I shouted back, “Did you foresee that I was going to chop up Fido and gut your thugboy like a fish?”

The Starmage smiled thinly, and the men all laughed that fearless kind of laughter that makes you feel like a fool. They
had
known. The fact that I would ask the question at all made them roll their eyes.

The Starmage Ersu called out, “Fate is fated! Barbaran-izbu and Akalshir-redu were told this day held their hour, and they met doom with proper resignation. None of mine more will find their hour this day.”

Like I said, I understood not just the literal meaning, but what the turns of phrase and euphemisms meant. He meant he had cast horoscopes of his men: and none of them were going to die. The two names were of the two I had killed.
Izbu
meant a deformed beast or abomination.
Redu
meant private soldier. These were placed after their names the way we put “Mister” or “Miss” or “Doctor” or “Captain” in front of ours.
Barbaran-izbu
and
Akalshir-redu
were the names of the wolf-thing and the spearman I’d killed.