The Incompleat Nifft (37 page)

"No, Pastures' Staff is what I've always heard it called."

"Well. Shall we share a maxim of wine while we're waiting to go to the temple?"

"I'll take you to the Hammerside Inn, but I insist on the privilege of buying the maxim."

"That is kindly spoken, and gladly accepted."

The wiry captain was to join the rest of the mercenary commanders when they reported to the oracle of the Flockwarden to learn their commssion. Kandros was of the opinion that Nifft's interview with the oracle stood a better chance of success if she first met him in company with the military gentlemen whose services her Goddess had enjoined her to procure, and Nifft thought this very likely.

"We probably have time for another of these before we must leave," Kandros said, hefting the empty maxim. He signaled the ostler of the Hammerside.

"Only if it comes from my purse this time," Nifft said.

"Absolutely not. If you are obssessed with repaying me, you can do so on some other occasion."

Nifft smiled thoughtfully. "Very well. On some other occasion."

"Your eye dwells on the fireplace," Kandros said a bit after the fresh wine had been brought.

"Its odd to see one whose inner wall is of iron rather than brick." Indeed, the wall glowed with the heat of the blaze. Kandros nodded with the satisfied smile of one who has achieved a calculated effect. "It is in fact a far larger piece of iron than the little fragment of it visible there. That whole wall of the inn is built against it."

"The Hammerside Inn. . . ."

"I will show you when we go out."

"So be it, oh thou military man of mystery."

A large, sleek man in a fur-hemmed robe came into the common-room, his manner one of dignity in haste. He stood in the entryway, simultaneously clapping to summon the ostler, and scanning the room for him. The ostler was not overly quick to terminate his conversation with some patrons at a corner table, and when he came, exhibited only a perfunctory deference. Kandros nudged his friend and said, "I think this fellow is from the temple." Indeed, the ostler directed the stranger's eyes to their table. The smooth-faced could be seen to consider summoning them to him from their table, but something in their aspect decided the stranger to approach their table.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. Which of you is Captain Kandros?"

"That's me. And you are Sexton Minor, are you not?"

The man nodded, looking both pleased and vaguely miffed, as if announcing his identity were one of his habitual pleasures. "The shrine-mistress would have her interview with you a trifle earlier than she indicated. I told your fellow officers of this, and they asked me to bring you to the shrine. My conveyance waits outside."

"Will you have a glass with us?" Nifft asked. "It seems shameful to waste so much good wine."

The Sexton's oily black eyes, resting on the maxim, plainly agreed. "Dame Lybis bade me hurry. . . ." He hesitated. His own words decided him. "Bah! I'm her Sexton, not her lackey. Thank you, gentlemen." He took a chair and signaled the ostler for a cup. With evident relish he decanted and sampled the wine. Kandros said, "I heard from one of the other captains, friend Minor, that your shrine-mistress is an irascible sort. I hope she doesn't make the honor of your office a burdensome one."

This sally visibly warmed the Sexton. He grimaced confidingly and leaned nearer his hosts, regaling them more liberally with the scent of his pomade.

"The honor, as you so graciously term it, is positively
onerous.
I thank the stars that I'm a near connection of Aristarch Hamp—through whom I have the sextonship—and that I can make some modest claim to civic position and consequence without it. My first cousin, in point of fact—"

"Indeed I have heard a great deal about you, Master Minor, and I'm pleased I have a chance to benefit from your knowledge of the situation here. I've passed through your city several times, but have to confess I have no deep understanding of Anvil's affairs."

The Sexton nodded sympathetically, a great depth of understanding shining in his large, black eyes. Nifft refilled all three cups.

"One puzzlement of mine has never been resolved," Kandros went on. "Dame Lybis, for all her eccentricity, must be a priestess of genuine power, for is not the Goddess she serves, and speaks for, dead?"

"How could the Flockwarden not be dead?" asked Minor. "Have you seen her?"

Kandros nodded. "Precisely. And how then does Dame Lybis obtain her insights from the divine corpse? How do the dead, though they be gods, communicate anything at all?"

Minor smiled indulgently at his glass, and drained it with gusto. "You must forgive my amusement, Captain, but your talk of divinity—though we call the Flockwarden a goddess—strikes me as naive. What is a god or goddess? The notion is so vague! Surely you are aware that the consensus of enlightened opinion holds these beings popularly called gods to be visitors to our world from the stars? Their alien attributes, their powers so incommensurate with our own, are the source of the mysteriousness which the cults make so much of. The Flockwarden while she lived was not unique, but one of many others of her breed. Her body has by chance survived the holocaust that killed the rest of her fellow-colonists on our world. Whatever faculties her kind possessed for reading deep into the structures of stone and earth are preserved in her body, and through some means the shrine-mistresses over the generations have kept secret, the dead alien's eyes—so to speak—can still be looked through, and some of her powers of geologic insight can, erratically, be tapped. You noticed that the Goddess' antennae extend forward, and their tips reach to a point quite near the surface of the glass block?"

"Indeed, it was as you say."

"Well, the oracle's mode of communion with the Goddess is not known, since the operation is veiled, but it is generally believed that it involves placing her hands against the glass at just the aforementioned place. This action, by the way, is called the Solicitation of the Goddess. What passes between Dame Lybis and the Flockwarden is not known outside the guild of the shrine-keepers. You may be sure that many an Anvilian entrepreneur has put his hands to the glass in the small hours of the morning, when the temple is empty, and strained to feel some million-lictor clue of the Goddess' posthumous knowledge—" Here the Sexton raised his eyebrows in an expression of ironic self-communion. "—but to no avail. But is this
divinity
we are dealing with here? Surely it is technique, historical knowledge—mysterious to most of us, surely, but mere technique, in essence, nonetheless."

Nifft had refilled their glasses, and Minor paused to empty his at a breath, before concluding: "Well, my friends, shall we go? Dame Lybis will be quite harsh if we are
too
late. . . ."

As they left the inn, Kandros raised a hand to detain the Sexton, who was opening the door of their landau. "A moment more, if you please," he said. "I want Nifft to see the Hammer."

The pair had approached the inn from the direction opposite that in which Kandros now led Nifft. They rounded the corner of the tall, old building and Nifft saw that it adjoined a major gate in the city-wall. The wall was ninety feet high, and the gateposts more than forty feet higher still, supporting battlemented towers designed for the gate's defense against siege. But, while the left post's entire bulk was of massive stonework, the right post as well as much of the tower that topped it, was of a single piece, an immense block of iron, roughly rectangular in profile, which stood on one of its narrow ends. It was starkly distinct from the stonework that embraced it, and made the inn that abutted it—grand and venerable though that structure was, seem an inconsequential thing, hastily made, and destined to be dust when that immense ferrolith still stood unaltered by milllennia of storm and sun.

And a hammer it plainly was, for from a point somewhat less than halfway up its height there sprouted a horizontal bar of iron which ran for more than half the distance to the wall's sea-ward turning—incorporated in the wall, yet seeming rather to pierce and destroy it than to contribute to its substance.

"And that," said Nifft after he had gazed a moment, "is Pastures' Hammer?"

"It is indeed," Kandros replied, his own eyes dwelling on it with fresh awe and appreciation that contradicted his cicerone's role in this revelation. Nifft nodded, and looked to Sexton Minor, who had followed them round the corner, and who was not so nervous at this delay as he was gratified by Nifft's query: "Forgive my troubling you with what must be a boring question, good Sexton, but I am not a well-schooled man, though your city fascinates me. This is called Pastures' Hammer, as who should say, the hammer of the Pastures?"

"That is perfectly correct, my friend, in every detail." The Sexton smiled at the wit of his reply, and blandly awaited further droll questions. But the one which Nifft murmured a moment later, gazing at the mountains, appeared at first to baffle, and then to irritate him: "It is hard to imagine terrain that looks less like pastureland than this, don't you think?"

Minor shrugged, frowned. "No doubt, in the usual sense. Naturally, the city's name refers to the historical facts. The Flockwardens' herds were lithivores. Their grazings carved the bay and made these mountains where before there were only great cliffs of metaliferous stone. The flocks' excreta provided purified metal for the Flockwardens' industry, as well as a kind of coal to fuel their forges. These
are
pastures, though not such as born-bow or jabóbos graze on. Please, gentlemen—we really should be on our way."

Near its inland border, the city rose toward a central eminence, a great table-topped monolith crowned with its most august edifices. These surrounded a vast, colonnade-bordered plaza, in which Minor's landau discharged its three passengers. Minor turned to guide the other two toward a huge, blunt-terraced building, the acropolis' second-largest structure. Nifft, however, set out rather dreamily in the opposite direction, walking a ways out toward the center of the square, and stopping at the tip of a jagged blade of shadow that lay upon the flagstones. This was the greatest salience of a vast wedge of shadow which the noonday sun printed upon the plaza, darkening more than half of its upland side. Minor lifted his arm and began to call some remonstration, when he and Kandros saw the gaunt Karkmahnite lift his gaze from the shadow's tip toward the megalith that cast it. The Sexton's arm fell, and for a moment the three stood looking silently up at the hammer of ill fate that overhung the prosperous city.

The half-destroyed—and potentially all-destroying—mountain was so like its grotesque fellows that its condition endowed them all with added menace. They would not have lacked this quality in any case. The noon sunlight blazoned forth the dynamic of their making, showing well over half their material to be disparate metallic veins, wildly torqued and twisted together, as if the varied metals had once been molten in one cauldron together, and stirred there by some cosmic ladle. This structure was the source of the mountains' tormented and skeletal shapes, for it had been gnawed into prominence by millennia of "peeling"—spiral quarrying of various individual veins, as well as of the rock between the veins. This latter material was not so variegated as the metals which it interleaved. Most of it was a dense, fine-textured stone of brownish black—the fecal coal, in fact, which Minor had mentioned. This had been as heavily quarried as any of the metals were.

The damaged peak resembled many others in having been so deeply scored that the intact veins supporting the mass of its higher parts were clearly discernible. At a place perhaps four-fifths up the mountain, just about where its "neck" might be said to be, a large landslide had exposed the scrawny spinal veins holding up the massive, gnarled summit. The three twisted shafts of metal ore that did this looked surprisingly slight for the task, and indeed, had buckled under it—had bent to an angle halfway between the vertical and the horizontal, bowing titanically in the city's direction. Raggedly surrounding the point of breakage, a system of wood-and-steel buttresses had been built—colossal enough on the human scale, but pathetically inadequate to sustain the mass they encircled.

Nifft turned and rejoined his companions. As Minor led them toward the temple, Nifft murmured: "Those supports. They must have been undertaken more as a psychological palliative than a seriously-believed-in preventive measure?"

Minor nodded sourly. Nifft went on: "How big is it, in terms of the city? I mean, if it hit the city—or say, if it were just
set down
on the city—would it cover it?"

Minor gave Nifft a look of wide-eyed irony. "Heavens no! It's been carefully computed, you understand. Look out there, down near the harbor. Do you see that little bit of shanty-town by that farthest corner of the wall?"

"That little brownish-grey patch, like huts of weathered wood?"

"Precisely! Well, if that—" (he pointed at the peak without needing to look toward it) "were set down here—" (he spread his arms to indicate the city around them) "then that—" (he again indicated the little harborside zone) "would be entirely uncovered. As for the rest . . ." Minor shrugged, as who should say that one couldn't have everything.

The pair waited by the temple's entry while the Sexton stepped within and conferred with one of the shrine's attendants. He came back out to report.

"The other officers are already within. Shrine-mistress Lybis is just now conferring with the Aristarchs. If you'll join the party inside she will be with you quite soon."

Kandros nodded, but Nifft laid a hand on his arm and said, "I wonder if Kandros here might be prevailed upon to indulge a bumpkin's curiosity and give me a brief tour of this magnificent acropolis of yours while we're waiting for the oracle's arrival."

"Very well. Please be conscious of the time. The attendant just within will direct you to the Warden-shrine when you get back."

When Minor had gone inside Nifft said, "Is not the Aristarkion one of these buildings?"