The Incompleat Nifft (45 page)

First there was visible a slight, sharp tugging-together of the skeleton, a magnetically simultaneous tightening that rippled through the whole immense fossil. This was followed, an instant later, by the noise: like that made by a vast, well-drilled army performing a turning movement, it resembled the oiled rattle of a hundred thousand shields, spears, and swordbelts. This washed down to the stunned multitude. And then the orbits of the recumbent skull filled with saffron pools of light, and sent two towering, powerful beams of illumination into the sky. The right hand gently closed upon the workmen perched on it.

A new cry was arising, overtopping even the uproar this had kindled. For the legion of new Flockwardens was taking wing. In the next instant the herd had renewed its assault on the walls, and the staggering force of their impacts was such as made their prior efforts seem a curiously restrained performance. In the anarchy of mind that engulfed everyone for the next few moments, the approach to the north gate by a large aerial form went unnoticed. And then this apparition swept down and hovered just above the Aristarchs, to add to their already multifaceted astonishment. Astride the back of the creature—it was a new-hatched Flockwarden—sat Dame Lybis and, behind her, Nifft the Karkhmanite. The Shrine-mistress cried out: "Aristarchs! Townsfellows! Hark you, all my venal devotees, my greedy congregation—harken all ye dear, doubting, ducat-minded delvers into Pastur's rightful wealth and realm! I bring you the last sacral Pronouncement of my priesthood, indeed, of my cult itself. First, behold, if you will, Great Pastur!"

The injunction was ironic. All saw the giant sit up, saw it, with a curiously delicate gesture both deft and dismissive, reach down from the plateau to liberate the workmen he had captured amid the empty buildings below. They saw him, with quick, finicking movements of his fingers, brush from himself like cobwebs the scaffolding encumbering him. The weighty shards rang as they rained on the rooftops of the buildings below the acropolis, and the queer, delayed musicality of this was, in the crowd's stupor, as enrapturing as any of the more prodigious things they witnessed. For then, the giant stepped down from the plateau, spread his hands upon the plaza where he had just lain, and leaned there, his eye beams playing, as if musingly, upon his recent bed.

"And then, if you will—" Lybis let her voice echo and create a listening silence, then repeated herself, voice resonant: "And then, if you will, behold Pastur's
Anvil,
whereon he will work again as he once worked, and this time he will
fashion, not the star-vessels of others, but his own, for he has wearied of our world, my erstwhile parishioners! Exceedingly and abundantly is he weary of it. The Wardens will now marshall his flock, to whom gold is no real obstacle, to the swift and—if you choose it—peaceable dismantling of the city's walls. A squad of the goddesses now guards the harbor, and others patrol the other walls. You will work for Pastur, and you will work surpassing hard, and long though your toil will be, you'll suffer no harm from him if you obey him, and serve his forges. And now I bid you a farewell that is not untinctured by a sour satisfaction with your fate. Since I was sixteen, I have served an unthanked shrine where you regularly came scavenging whenever the Goddess chose to throw you the lucrative offal you craved. I have known the proverbial aloneness of the dedicated artist. I will grant that my solitary tenure was not unleavened by laughter, and I have had the further incomparable compensation that the flock, and the Goddess' unfettered will, were resurgent during my humble term of service. Of these circumstances I have taken unflinching advantage, and am grateful that the honor of doing so has fallen to me, out of so many thousands who have served here. And now, Sexton Minor, you are to accompany me. Step forth!"

The Aristarchs recoiled from the Warden's smooth approach, which accompanied these words. Minor began to retire in equal confusion.

"What?" boomed the priestess. "Do you think you would survive residence in this vast slave camp, now that your complicity with me is thus widely published? Climb aboard or die here, it's as simple as that. Pastur has greater work in hand than the guarding of one miserable life."

The Sexton's passionate denials died in his throat. Gaping, he climbed up via one of the Warden's spiny legs. The Goddess bore them upward, and Lybis shouted: "Now, farewell. Your new master will be setting to work now, and he will need his tools. You near the gate would do well to clear the wall when he comes for his hammer!"

Pastur swept his hands across his anviltop. This one brief gesture cleared it of all that crowned it. The Aristarkion mingled with the temple in the general wreckage he sent cascading down. Then, setting his feet with titanic delicacy upon the broadest open places amid the buildings, very few of which he crushed in his progress, he walked down to the harbor. He reached over the sea for his staff. His hand slipped into the same waters from which it had so recently been raised, and with a great tearing and sucking noise the rod came uprooted from the harbor-floor and towered in the starlight, shedding in fragments the dockworks that encrusted it. Its upper end, immemorially masked by the waters, was arched like a shepherd's crosier. A dozen of the Flock-wardens swarmed upward and perched atop the crook of the staff. The giant turned the beacons of his eyes upon the north wall of the city, and gestured toward it. The Wardens sped thither, and commenced clearing it of the astonished Anvilians, while Pastur advanced to take up his hammer, so long laid down.

"And so none of them had ever read that ancient variant of their city's name? Nor of Pastur himself? How very curious."

"Hm! I'll tell you, Shag, it's
always been an exceedingly curious thing to me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little island of time and place in the world."

"Yes. If the cult was guilty of systematically obscuring its own origins and traditions, it was at least not hiding anything that anyone was inquiring into very energetically. Indeed, the scholarly community at large has been none too vigorous in recording that temple's history. . . . Well! You've come well out of it at least. You understand of course that there's absolutely no question of my accepting a gift of that size." The scholar sternly indicated a little stack of gold bullion on the floor in one corner of the study. "The way you spend money, you're going to need that yourself before long."

"Well, if you're going to be stonefaced about it, you're just going to have to get rid of it yourself. Those bricks are
heavy.
I recommend that you only carry them out of here one at a time, and at long intervals. And anyway, what about this new treatise—has the Academy gotten richer, or aren't you going to have to help subsidize the printing of this excellent work, wherein my own humble name appears repeatedly, in ample footnotes?"

Margold glowered mulishly at his square, rather battered-looking hands. After a while, glancing up at Nifft's eyes and finding them both sarcastic and resolute, the historian sighed.

"And so. Where is Dame Lybis now?"

"Somewhere in the Aristoz Chain."

The scholar nodded, impressed. "I see. She sounds like one who will go far with that caliber of thaumaturgic training."

Nifft's assent to this was accompanied by marked restiveness. He got up and went to the window as he answered. "Absolutely my own opinion. It's caused me some worries, too, I'll confess to you. I love Dame Lybis dearly—I have the highest admiration for her person, her pluck and her artistry. But then too, she doesn't lack cynicism. Power she'll surely gain. She has the love of achievement, and the will to drive herself. If she will remain benign as she grows in power, that's the question I can't confidently answer."

Margold guffawed. His thick grey hair was wispy in a flame-like way, and for a moment his sea-weathered face seemed to corruscate with his enjoyment of Nifft's remark.
"Remain
benign, you say? By the Crack and all that crawls out of it—by Anvil Staff and Hammer! I like that! I truly do. Remain benign. When I tell that to my colleagues, I'll have to get it just right, the earnest way you said that!" The cartographer sat chuckling. Nifft arched a brow at his nails. Presently he chuckled a bit himself.

"I don't deny it was a grim game. Though they didn't suffer the death they marketed abroad so blithely, some of them at least might have learned what it was like to wish they would." The pair enjoyed this sally equally, and at some length.

"You know," Margold said at last, "your description of the giant, his bones' lightness . . . it is an odd thought, but perhaps those bones of his never did have flesh on them. Perhaps he was
himself
. . . the product of a forge, some distant foundry far vaster even than his own?"

"You mean, that he was some kind of vast . . . automaton?"

The historian nodded. "Remember, if we may trust the tradition, how he was destroyed. It is said that the landslide created by his ambushers did not . . . kill him—that he'd worked both hand and staff clear of the rubble, and would have used that formidable weapon to free himself in a short time more, had not their amputation of his hand broken his bodily integrity, and therewith his life. Care was taken to remove the hand far from the body, and cast it in the sea. A man who loses a hand does not necessarily die of it. But a clock with even one spring removed ceases to work, and will start up again should the spring be restored to the rest of the mechanism."

Nifft looked dreamily from the window. "So that all his work was for yet greater masters on a greater world? Why not? A slave himself? But a terrible and beautiful creation all the same, Shag. I recall the last look I had of him—like some of those engravings you showed me of scenes from Parple's
Pan-Demonion—
whose were they again?"

"You mean Rotto Starv's woodcuts."

"Starv's. The same. Anyway, a day before we set sail, Kandros and I took Minor and Krekkit up on a Flockwarden just after sunset, to take a sort of good-bye look at the city, I suppose—as much for ourselves as for the old man and Minor, both of whom we'd come to like. At any rate, we flew up over the peaks to the south of town, and hung there looking at it as the light faded. It was something to fill you with awe, Shag, the armies of them, their desperate unison.

"The townspeople, I mean. They thronged the streets, and moved in that steady, always-changing-yet-the-same way a stream has. They served the same forges and foundries the town has always served—but they
all
served them. The flocks were off working a distant mountain, quite near Ossuaridon, in fact. Half the Flockwardens were with the flock, and the other half were patrolling the streets and the perimeter where the rubble of the walls was heaped. They were scarcely needed. Pastur's sole presence commanded every man and woman of them. He was resting from his labors. His anvil still hummed with the recent blows of his hammer, and glowing crumbs of metal were strewn atop it. He sat back on the hillside, his huge arms draped over his knees, the hammer held casually in his right hand. He was watching the city as a sightseer might watch a view. The chimneys smoked and the firestacks flamed as I, nor anyone else, had never seen them do before. His eyebeams played across the rooftops and the crowded streets, and from time to time, he raised them toward the stars."

After a silence, Margold murmured: "He had the flock working where he was buried with their ancestors? Perhaps even then he was beginning his preparations to return home."

"Yes. One wonders what he will find there, after so long an absence. He seemed to be wondering too."

For Linda, sweet Beloved!
For Della and Jake, so dear to us.

MY OLD FRIEND, NIFFT, with a perhaps unintentional candor, has displayed a personal flaw or two in this narrative. I honor his memory none the less for it. The good of Nifft always overbalanced the ill, and just so here where, whatever slight moral shortcomings may appear in our narrator, he gives us in his tale the most vivid and enlightening natural history of the Behemoth's life-cycle yet put on record.

Hadaska Broode, a Minusk historian, has penned the following tetrameters in homage to Behemoth. While I cannot pretend the lines are accomplished poetry, they are at least heartfelt:

What dread Being dares to farm
 

where every breed of demon swarms?
 

Who dares till there? Who shall go
 

and scythe the harvest row on row?
 

Who in that sunless gulf of harms
 

could drive the plow? Would dare to sow?
 

Behemoth's jaws alone the share
 

to carve the flinty furrow there.
 

Behemoth's strength the reaper's blade,
 

her bowels the barn where harvest's laid.
 

To hers, what husbandry compares,
 

that has half demonkind unmade?
 

Broode's ardor for Behemoth is understandable in one of his nation. His native Minuskulons, though the smallest of the major island chains, loom large in the Behemoth sap trade, for they are the only landfall the Sea of Agon affords between southern Kairnheim, where sap is mined, and the sap's two greatest overseas markets: the Ephesion Chain to the south, and the Great Shallows to the east. The sap in its cake form is of course excellent fodder for kine and draybeasts the world over. In the Ephesions—on my native Pardash, for example—it is also used in its fluid state; a dilution is sprayed on our fields to enrich our somewhat lean soils. Meanwhile the Great Shallows' many sea-dwelling races use sap cake to mulch their mariculture and nourish their polyp patches, whelk beds, crab pastures, bivalve grottoes, and every kind of raft garden. The Minusk mariners who have flourished in this sap trade all know Broode's little poem by heart.

Given Behemoth's incredible utility to men—both in the havoc she wreaks on the demon race, and in the boon of her stolen sap—it is not surprising she inspires such paeans. The work of Kairnish scholars (theirs another race especially in her debt) abounds with similar encomiums. Both these schools of Behemoth's most ardent admirers share a further accord. On the question of Behemoth's origins, Minusk and Kairnish authorities alike aver that the Mountain Mother was born of some now forgotten human sorcery.