The Incompleat Nifft (42 page)

The noise this raised from the crowd was such that it brought Nifft's head around in sudden, surprised appraisal. For the outcry was a curiously relief-tinged groan, as might greet a thing that has been all but foreknown. The Flockwarden's wind-spawning wings sped up. They were now scarcely visible, yet for all their power of vibration they did not even graze the narrowness of her enclosure. Smoothly vertical she rose, and cleared the box of scaffolding. Smoothly across the plain she moved, bearing the message of her mastery directly to her refractory herd.

And as her assault commenced, her mastery proved never for a moment to be contested by the swinish giants. It seemed a strangely ritualistic scourging she gave them, too—not to all of them, but to perhaps a hundred individuals, one after the other. Over each of these she hovered, and bowed downward—dead contrary to her tapered abdomen's normal bent—her caudal prong. This she thrust into the beast beneath her, and thus linked, she did no more than hang in the air a moment, her body shuddering rhythmically. Then she unanchored herself and flew to another, seemingly randomly chosen member of her flock.

When at length she returned from the scourging, the Goddess seemed dreadfully enfeebled. She wobbled in her flight, and in settling on the grass not far from her shattered coffin, her legs buckled under her on her left side, and her head drooped.

It was soon learned from Lybis that the city's benefactress lay in grave weakness, and her life—that long-kept secret—was waning within mere hours after its last, long-prepared for vital service. It was not known how long she might survive, and the only assurance she could give the city was that the flock was, at least for now, subdued, and would return to work when the ramp was ready. Her beasts would in any case be showing a marked slowing down, as they were nearing their natural calving-season, but while they approached that period, they should at least obediently—if not energetically—pursue their task.

At least, they should do so while the FIockwarden lived. Their possible behavior if she should die became a matter of terrified conjecture. A great pavilion was erected over the Goddess. Her moribund vastness was constantly visited by the piously solicitous townsfolk, and an outdoors shrine blazed with votive candles as the indoor one had never done. A further oracle was besought, and given.

In her pronouncements, there were some dim foreshadowings of what aid the city might seek in the melancholy event of the Goddess' demise. These could be read on any street in town, as the posting of the oracles had become at this point an invariable procedure:

My life doth gutter, darken toward its close.
 

If death my governance of the flock o'erthrows,
 

One there is, not far from here, whose name
 

His ancient nearness to our city shows—
 

Pastur. His tomb I'll teach you, should the flame
 

Of my remaining life grow yet more dim.
 

Before that time I nothing will disclose
 

Lest some too greedy man uncover him
 

And use the buried giant for selfish aim—
 

Vain consequence and power—for among those
 

I shared my world with, Pastur could dispose
 

Their giant bulks to suit his lightest whim;
 

He drove them as he listed, unopposed
 

By me or mine, who cowered when he came.
 

The herd resumed its lofty pasturage, but in a manner that nourished among Anvilians gloomy speculations on the Goddess' diminishing strength. The flock's obedience was sluggish, balky, and its appetite was dull. Apart from the approach of its breeding season, some of this torpor seemed a plain token of its warden's wavering life-flame. No one could bring himself to seek the abatement of the beasts' remedial labors, nor could they allow themselves to contemplate the result of a second anarchic frenzy, should such again possess them. So throughout a two-week agony of ambivalence, the citizens stared themselves dizzy at the thronging rampway, and in that time saw the lapsed peak's bulk dwindle by inches to a mass that was still more than two-thirds what it had originally had—and this supported by a spine rather less than the same fraction of
its
original thickness.

And then the flock abandoned its work en masse. The city woke one morning to find the peak deserted, and the plain outside the north wall again encamped with the motionless colossi.

The populace had soon thronged the walls and the ground outside them to view the prodigious biological event that was occurring out on the plain. It had soon become evident that far more than half the flock were females. Perhaps four hundred of the mammoth livestock on the sward were seen, by noon, to be engaged in the generative process.

The promised breeding was unquestionably in progress. Each female, after establishing a caudal link with the soil for at least an hour, inched her tail-tip up from the earth, hoisting its rubbery apical mouth from around what she had so laboriously, and with so many a shudder, been implanting: a shining, white, ribbed ellipsoid with a barbed peak—and, presumably, barbed tail, the which was snugly planted in the earth, and must have been what permitted the wobbling anchorage that each newly deposited egg exhibited as it rolled lazily with the assaults of the onshore winds that arose at dusk. Each of the giant cows produced a minimum of a dozen eggs, and several huge old cows produced more than fifty apiece.

The egg-laying marked the beginning of an alarming decline in the Flockwarden's already diminished vitality. She had been lying with her legs half folded under her, her abdomen more tightly curved above her than it had been during her endless immurement in the glass. Her antennae were almost her only active part. They could he seen to move in feeble conference with the veiled priestess during the several non-oracular communions Lybis held with her, during which she acquainted the priestess with the state of her diminishing vigor. Now, however, the Flockwarden's great head hung forward, and her major antennae trailed almost touching the ground. They could be seen to stir now and again. The priestess, prevented by the Goddess' posture from a full and formal Solicitation, could do no more to ease the tormented hearts of her townsfellows than assure them that the Flockwarden, should death truly come for her, would rouse herself a last time on behalf of her human flock (as, said Lybis, the Goddess had come to regard the Anvilian's) and speak again, imparting to them the cue to their salvation—the means of raising the giant from the past to work their deliverance.

During this suspension of the herd's activity—for though they milled restively from time to time, they were generally almost comatose, each cow standing stupidly, flanking her egg-cluster—the city agonized ceaselessly over the oracular implication that the beasts were indeed capable of a second anarchic outburst if the Goddess should die. An assault upon the city itself was not thought impossible. Within four days of the egg-laying the Aristarchs had dwelt so vociferously upon this topic that a plan was developed, in concert with Kandros and his staff, for the city's defense in the event this hair-raising possibility should eventuate.

As the powerlessness of stone to oppose the advance of the flock was the original cause of worry, ramparts or other vertical barriers were discounted at the outset—they would go down too quickly, by mere pressure alone, unless the town should be given an unlikely amount of time for construction on a major scale. A great, straight-walled trench was deemed the best thing to slow them, and the digging was commenced by truly massive gangs of conscripted citizens, working side by side with the mercenaries and swelling their numbers to an extent that made it possible to finish the trench in less than a week. It ran almost a mile and a half, dividing the north wall from the little plain. It was more than a hundred feet broad, and as many deep, and from its inner, wallward lip a thick palisade of spike-tipped timbers projected at an angle above the pit, wherefrom the defenders could harrass the ascent of the besiegers. A short time after this impressive feat of engineering was accomplished, while gangs of grimed Anvilians still lolled in the parks and squares of the city, numbly awaiting the next dreadful exigency that should come to rouse them to maniacal efforts, the priestess sent out a city-wide summons to a Solicitation—for the Flockwarden had lifted her antennae, and feebly besought the oracle's attendance. It appeared this might be the Goddess' last revelation for her human flock. There was the more reason for hasty attendance, the message added, in that the eggs of the flock were beginning to hatch, and the congregated giants showed signs of waking from their torpor—indeed, showed signs of advancing upon Anvil itself.

When Lybis emerged from the Veil, her pallor, and the cold, impassioned determination on her face were such as to distract the populace for some moments from the dreadful organic unfoldings out on the plain, a short quarter mile beyond the just-completed trench.

"The Goddess, The Flockwarden, is dead. Long live the Goddess! Long live the Flockwarden!"

With a vast, low grumble, the multitude repeated her words—a hopeless outcry of shocked piety, for all now saw what, in their absorption flockward, they had missed: the Flockwarden's slack neck, her antennae like dead pythons on the grass.

"We have done well to defend ourselves," Lybis said, gesturing toward the spike-rimmed ditch. "They will advance—they begin already, do you see? Those which are hatching now—soon they too will advance. Watch them. Give me your ears only while you watch them. View what threatens us—behold in all its meaning the calamity that descends on us, while I speak its remedy in your ears. And then upon your own heads let it be if, after hearing, you do not spur hell-bent directly and speedily to accomplish the great labor which must purchase that remedy."

And so she brought her tablet from her pouch, and read the Goddess' last oracle to the city. As she read, they watched the plain, whereupon there was much to be seen. For though all the flock's eggs were identical—each the size of a four-passenger coach, tapered top and bottom, identically ribbed and colored—two radically different kinds of creature were erupting from their rupturing husks.

The most numerous of these were clearly infants of the flock. Though their leg-clusters were rudimentary, scarcely more than blackish nubs, their overall conformation was that of their parents, in bud.

But there were some egg-clutches, perhaps a hundred of them, whence very different hatchlings dragged themselves out amidst these bona fide calves. These had spiny black barrels for bodies, leg-clusters that were much more developed and elaborately jointed and barbed, and jaws of an equally elaborate structure, entirely distinct from the rock-guzzling snoutlets of the more numerous calves.

Both breeds of hatchling began to feed instantaneously once their heads were free, even though the rest of their bodies had still to be dragged free of the shell. The calves fed upon the first bare rock they found beneath them. The black hatchlings began with equal speed to feed upon the calves.

It was a stunning, gaudy carnage, for the babes in question were on the general scale of a large battle-chariot with its team. The calves seemed to lack all awareness of, or powers of resistance to, the assaults of their carnivorous nestmates. They squirmed ineffectually, some even continued to devour the stone as they were flensed to blubbery fragments by their scissors-jawed siblings, and guzzled down. Meanwhile the parent beasts displayed no more reaction than did their victim offspring, but continued an inchoate, milling advance in the general direction of the watching city. Long after Lybis had finished reading the oracle, the multitude watched, and saw the pattern emerging in the flock's movement. The hatchling carnivores remained more or less stationary, usually surrounded by a blood-spattered mess of half-a-dozen calf carcasses, where they continued feeding methodically on their swiftly captured feasts. At the same time, the calves that had escaped their predation—never ceasing to graze—gradually completed their eclosions, and began following the movement of the adult beasts. These latter now made steadily, in an ominous unison of apparent intent, toward the recently completed trench.

Strangely, few of the townsfolk afterward found that they needed to read the posted copies of the Flockwarden's last oracle. Sunk in astonishment as they had been while gazing on that vast unearthly and disaster-pregnant spectacle, Lybis' voice seemed to have imprinted itself upon their minds, and most recalled both the burden, and the sweet, ambiguous music, of her message:

In Ossuaridon, where priest and seer
 

Seek insight, and in visionary gloom
 

Within the giant's bones themselves inhume,
 

And dwell in dark that they might see more clear,
 

There seek great Pastur's catastrophic bier.
 

Exhume him and return his remnants here.
 

For his bones—if from their accidental tomb
 

You take, and with them work his frame's repair—
 

Have might to master those that threaten doom,
 

Seek the magic of my murdered more-than-peer!
 

Haste to find him and convey him where
 

Great Anvil-town doth offer greatest room—
 

Oh, haste! Lest that should fall which now but looms!
 

And the flock my death leaves lawless, do not fear.
 

All things their hungry jaws have power to tear,
 

Save gold alone—this can they not consume.
 

Weigh then your wealth, and judge if it's more dear
 

To you than life. If not, your course is clear.
 

Dame Lybis, in the company of Kandros and Nifft (generally recognized now as being her chosen strategic counselors for the many emergency labors her position was imposing on her), went on the expedition sent to retrieve Pastur's bones. She stayed there long enough to see the work commenced, and then sped back to the city to oversee the last phases of its wall's "thickening."