Hard to Be a God (5 page)

The Hiccup Forest was full of dark secrets. During the day, wagons of processed ore trundled south along the road, and at night the road was empty, because few men were brave enough to walk it by starlight. It was said that at night, the Sioux bird—a bird that has never been seen and cannot be seen, since it is no ordinary bird—cried out from the Father-Tree. It was said that huge hairy spiders jumped out of the branches onto the necks of horses and instantly gnawed through their veins, drowning in blood. It was said that the ancient beast Pekh roamed the forest—a creature, covered in scales, that sired offspring every twelve years and dragged behind him twelve tails oozing poisonous sweat. And someone had seen
the naked boar Y, cursed by the Holy Míca, crossing the road in broad daylight, grumbling plaintively—a ferocious animal, invulnerable to iron but easily pierced by bone.

Here you could also meet a runaway slave with a tar brand between his shoulder blades—silent and ruthless, like the hairy bloodsucking spider. Or a stooped warlock, collecting secret mushrooms for his magic potions, which could be used to become invisible, turn into various animals, or acquire a second shadow. The night sentries of the fearsome Waga the Wheel also walked this road, as did the fugitives from the silver mines with their black hands and white, transparent faces. Medicine men gathered here for their nightly vigils, and Baron Pampa's rowdy huntsmen would skewer stolen oxen and roast them whole in the scattered clearings.

In the depths of the forest, a mile away from the road, beneath an enormous tree that had dried up of old age, stood a lopsided hut made out of enormous logs, surrounded by a blackened picket fence. It had been here since the beginning of time, its door was always shut, and there were crooked idols carved from whole tree trunks around its rotting porch. This hut was the most dangerous place in the Hiccup Forest. It was said that this was the very place to which the ancient Pekh would come every twelve years to deliver his offspring, after which he would immediately crawl beneath the hut and expire, so the hut's entire cellar was filled with black poison. And when the poison seeped out—that's when the end would come. It was said that on stormy nights, the idols dug themselves out of the ground, came out onto the road, and signaled to passersby. And it was also said that sometimes the windows shone with unnatural light, sounds resounded through the forest, and a column of smoke reached up from the chimney to the sky.

Not long ago, Irma Kukish, a sober simpleton from the farmstead of Plenitude (in common parlance, Stinkfield) foolishly wandered by the hut at night and peered into the windows. He came home completely incoherent, and after he recovered a little, said that the hut was full of bright light and that a man with his feet on the bench sat behind a crude table and guzzled from a barrel held in one hand. The man's face hung all the way down to his waist and was spotted all over. It was obvious that this was the Holy Míca himself, before his conversion to the faith, a polygamist, drunkard, and blasphemer. To look at him was to be afraid. A sickly sweet smell wafted out the window, and shadows moved across the trees. People gathered from all over to hear the idiot's story. And it all ended when the storm troopers came, bent his elbows to his shoulder blades, and hustled him off to the city of Arkanar. But people still talked about the hut, and it was now called nothing but the Drunken Lair.

Rumata made his way through the thicket of giant ferns, dismounted by the Drunken Lair's porch, and wound his reins around one of the idols. The hut was fully lit, the door open and hanging by a hinge, and Father Cabani was sitting behind the table in a state of utter dejection. The room was filled with a powerful odor of spirits, and a huge stein towered on the table between the gnawed bones and pieces of boiled turnips.

“Good evening, Father Cabani,” Rumata said, stepping over the threshold.

“Greetings,” Father Cabani answered, in a raspy voice that sounded like a battle horn.

Rumata came up to the table, spurs jingling. He threw his gloves on the bench and took another look at Father Cabani. Father Cabani was motionless, supporting his drooping face
with his hand. His shaggy, graying eyebrows hung down over his cheeks like dry grass over a cliff. With every breath, the nostrils of his coarsely pored nose whistled out air saturated with undigested alcohol.

“I invented it myself!” he said suddenly, raising his right eyebrow with effort and turning a puffy eye toward Rumata. “I did it myself! Why did I do it?” He extracted his right hand from underneath his cheek and shook a hairy finger. “But it's not my fault. I invented it … and it's not my fault, eh! That's right—not my fault. Anyway, we don't invent a thing, that's all nonsense!”

Rumata unbuckled his belt and pulled his swords off over his head. “Now, now,” he said.

“The box!” barked Father Cabani and stayed silent for a long time, making strange motions with his cheeks.

Rumata, without taking his eyes off him, threw his dusty-booted feet over the bench and sat, putting his swords down nearby.

“The box …” Father Cabani repeated in a deflated voice. “We only say we invent things. Actually, it was all invented a long time ago. A long time ago, someone invented it all, stuck it in a box, made a hole in the lid, and left. Left to go to sleep … then what? Father Cabani comes in, closes his eyes, sh-shoves his hand into the hole.” Father Cabani looked at his hand. “He g-grabs it! Aha! An invention! This thing here is my invention, he says! And if you don't believe it, you're a fool. I shove my hand in—th-that's one! What is it? Barbed wire! What's it for? Protecting farmyards from the wolves … I shove my hand in—th-that's two! What is it? The handiest thing—a meat grinder. What's it for? Tender minced meat … good job! I shove my hand in—that's three! What is it? F-Flammable water! What's it for? Kindling damp wood … eh!”

Father Cabani went quiet and began to slump, as if someone had grabbed his neck and was pushing him forward. Rumata picked up the stein, looked inside, then poured a few drops onto the back of his hand. The drops were purple and smelled of fusel oil. Rumata carefully wiped his hand with a lace handkerchief. Oil stains appeared on it. Father Cabani's shaggy head touched the table and immediately jerked up.

“The man who put it in the box—he knew what it was all for. Barbed wire for the wolves? How silly of me—for the wolves. The
mines,
the mines should be ringed with this wire … so state criminals can't escape! But I don't want that! I'm a state criminal myself! Did they ask me? Sure they did! Barbed wire, they said? Barbed wire. For the wolves, they said? For the wolves. Well done, they said, good job! We'll use it to ring the mines … Don Reba did it himself. And he took my meat grinder. Good job, he said! What a mind you've got, he said! So now the Merry Tower makes tender minced meat … very effective, they say.”

I know, thought Rumata. I know about all this. And how you yelled in Don Reba's office, how you begged and groveled at his feet: “Give it back, don't do it!” It was too late. Your meat grinder had started turning.

Father Cabani grabbed the stein and put it to his hairy maw. Gulping down the poisonous brew, he roared like the boar Y, then he shoved the stein onto the table and started to chew on a piece of turnip. Tears crept down his cheeks.

“Flammable water!” he finally announced in a strangled voice. “For kindling fires and merry magic tricks. What does it matter that it's flammable if you can drink it? Mix it with beer—what a beer you get! I won't allow it! I'll drink it myself … and I drink it. All day long I drink it. All night long. I'm all swollen. I fall down all the time. The other day,
Don Rumata, you won't believe it, I was near a mirror— and I got scared. I look—Lord help me!—where's Father Cabani? A sea creature like an octopus—with colored spots all over. First red spots. Then blue spots. That's what comes of inventing water for magic tricks.”

Father Cabani tried to spit on the floor but hit the table instead, then shuffled his feet beneath the bench out of habit, as if rubbing it into the dirt. He suddenly asked, “What day is it today?”

“The eve of Cata the Pious,” said Rumata.

“And why is there no sun?”

“Because it's night.”

“Night again,” Father Cabani said dejectedly, and fell face-first into the table scraps.

Rumata looked at him for a while, whistling through his teeth. Then he stood up from the table and went into the pantry. There, between the heap of turnips and the heap of sawdust, gleamed the glass tubes of Father Cabani's massive brewing apparatus—an amazing creation of a born engineer, natural chemist, and master glassblower. Rumata circled the “infernal machine” twice, then felt for a crowbar in the dark and swung hard at it, aiming nowhere in particular. Clanking, jingling, gurgling sounds filled the pantry. The nauseating smell of sour home brew assaulted his nostrils.

Broken glass crunching beneath his heels, Rumata made his way into a far corner and turned on an electric lamp. There, underneath a pile of trash, was the compact field synthesizer Midas in its strong silicate safe. Rumata cleared away the trash, entered in the code, and lifted the lid of the safe. Even in the white electric light, the synthesizer looked peculiar in the midst of the scattered junk. Rumata dumped a few shovels of sawdust into the receiving funnel, and the
synthesizer began to hum quietly, its display panel turning on automatically. Rumata shoved a rusty bucket underneath the output chute with the toe of his boot. And immediately—
clink, clink, clink!—gold
disks with the aristocratic profile of Pitz the Sixth, King of Arkanar, started pouring onto its battered tin bottom.

Rumata carried Father Cabani to a squeaky bunk, pulled his shoes off, and covered him with the hairless hide of some long-extinct animal. During this process, Father Cabani woke up for a minute. He could neither move nor think. He merely sang a couple of verses from the forbidden love song “I'm Like a Scarlet Flower in Your Little Hand,” after which he started snoring loudly.

Rumata cleared the table, swept the floor, and cleaned the glass in the only window, which had turned black from dirt and the chemical experiments Father Cabani was performing on the windowsill. He found a full barrel of alcohol behind the rusty stove and emptied it into a rat hole. Then he watered the Hamaharian stallion, poured him some oats from his saddlebag, washed up, and sat down to wait, gazing at the oil lamp's smoking flame. He had lived this strange double life for five years and thought he was completely used to it, but from time to time, like right now, for example, it would suddenly occur to him that there was no organized brutality and approaching gray threat, only a performance of a bizarre theatrical production with him, Rumata, in the lead. That at any moment now, after a particularly felicitous line, there would be a burst of applause, and fans from the Institute of Experimental History would shout admiringly from
their boxes, “Not bad, Anton! Not bad! Good job, Toshka!” He even looked around to check—but there was no crowded hall, only blackened mossy walls made from bare logs and caked in layers of soot.

In the yard, the Hamaharian stallion neighed quietly and beat his hooves against the ground. Rumata heard a steady low hum, achingly familiar but here utterly improbable. He listened hard, his mouth half-open. The hum stopped, and the flame above the lamp flickered then shone brighter. Rumata started to get up, and at that moment a man stepped into the room out of the darkness of the night: Don Condor, Chief Justice and Keeper of the Great Seals of the Mercantile Republic of Soan, Vice President of the Conference of the Twelve Merchants, and Knight of the Imperial Order of the Hand of Mercy.

Rumata jumped up, nearly knocking over the bench. He was ready to rush toward him, hug him, kiss him on both cheeks—but his legs observed the proper etiquette in spite of himself and bent at the knees. His spurs jingled solemnly, his right hand swept out an arc starting at his heart and ending at his side, and his head bent down so that his chin sank into the foamy lace ruff. Don Condor ripped off his plumed velvet beret, hastily waved it in Rumata's direction, as if he were chasing off mosquitoes, flung it on the table, and undid the clasps of his cloak at his neck with both hands. His cloak was still slowly falling behind his back and he was already sitting on the bench with legs apart, his left hand on his hip and his right hand grasping the hilt of a gilded sword that he had stuck into the rotten floorboards. He was small and skinny, with large protuberant eyes in a pale, narrow face. He wore his black hair the same way as Rumata—gathered by a massive gold circlet with a large green stone above the bridge of his nose.

“Are you alone, Don Rumata?” he asked curtly.

“Yes, noble don,” Rumata answered sadly.

Father Cabani suddenly said loudly and soberly, “Noble Don Reba! You're a hyena, that's all.”

Don Condor didn't turn around. “I flew here,” he said.