Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (43 page)

I realized I was treading on dangerous ground, but I was getting angry, and his self-satisfaction at being a member of an all-conquering race grated on me. “Is that really what this war is about? Even though you never met them, and even though they have nothing to do with you, you just can’t stand that there are free people out there somewhere? Just the fact that they
exist
bugs you?”

“It is not natural for men to be apart. All men are brothers. All serve the Dark Tower.”

I looked carefully at the joints of his helmet, wondering how hard they would be to rip out.

Pally spread his hands yet again. “It won’t be long! But soon we’ll all be together, and you barbarians can be cleaned up and given your places and fates. The Dark Tower can always add another thousand feet! Plenty of work to do!”

I blurted out: “Maybe the people of Earth have their own work they want to do! We never did anything to you!”

He spoke with a note of surprise in his voice. “What do you mean ‘we’? You are not from there.”

I choked.

This was it. I was caught.

I tried to play it nonchalant. “Not from where?”

“Whatever you called it. Dirt. Earth. The aeon of Albion out of Ariphi of Thoebel. Never occurred to me you might
like
whatever mudhole of fate-blindness you lived in. Gee, ah, sort of rough luck for you. Sorry, punk. You, ah — must not like this much. But don’t worry none! It means the end of war and crime, and people not knowing about their lot in life. All that fear and worry — I don’t know how you can stand it. But it will be over soon.”

Look, I wanted to yank his helmet off his head and break his teeth to shut him up, but you got to realize, in his own way, he was trying to be nice.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “I just assumed you knew where you are from. I assumed you knew that whoever taught you your gooble-gooble talk were not your folks. Never occurred to me you’d have
feelings
for them! Everyone says your world got no emotions but hate. You seem nice enough, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering where you are from.”

“I’m from Earth. Albion.”

“No, I mean your
real
home.”

Ever had that feeling that your universe had just had its main structural supporting members eaten by termites so that it imploded and collapsed into the basement?

“How—How do you know I — ?”

“Well, it’s obvious as soon as you open your mouth.”

“W-what?”

“The Sons of Albion are technomancers. They speak English. Where is your flying rocketpack, night-seeing lenses, listening machines, your chemical-gunpowder fire-arm, all your toys? Sons of Albion always carry toys.”

I stood there with a dumb look on my face, thinking about all the high-tech gear my Dad carried with him on his business trips.

Pally said, “You are a
Lalilummutillut
. Here you are walking around with scars from deadly wounds, but not dead, and no rare-breath armor. Your real parents come from an antediluvian hell-world from before the confusion of tongues, an aeon called Cainem, and they speak Ursprache, the One Speech.”

At that moment, the Third Blemmyae whose name I could not pronounce, Knack Ace You (if I may use a more polite version of his name), reached up to thump me roughly on the back of my head to get my attention. Or he tried to. What really happened was that I turned and blocked the blow with my arm, grabbing him by the wrist and throwing him with a hip throw. Or I tried to. He slammed me to the deck. So what really, really happened was that I found myself on the floor, sitting on my butt, dazed. It felt like my tailbone was broken and my spine was cracked.

Knack Ace You was strong as an ape, and he had just shaken off my hold the way you’d shake off a pushy ten-year old.

He slurped and snorted at me, making what you would call whale-song sounds, if you were in a good mood, or farting noises, if you were not.

Pally said, “Time to go. No horseplay. He’s freeborn. Doesn’t matter if he has a head or not, brains or not. Rational creatures all serve the Dark Tower, and whoever is above us, is above. Remember what I said about wiping and eating hands, eh? Time to get aboard your Raising Vessel.” That was his name for the blue glass rowboat. “Your Wayship is due to pass.”

So I spent what seemed an hour folded up in a cramped little bottle that was designed to seat men shorter than me, and skinnier than Knack, with a headless monster much stronger than me, who thought I was lunch.

But I laughed and smiled most of that time, because Pally had unintentionally told me that Enmeduranki had fooled me. The Dark Lord who never lies had lied, or at least tried to mislead me. He did not
know
who I was or who my parents were. He had heard me talk, and made a guess about my origins, just like Abanshaddi had, just like Pallishabdu had.

(And I also laughed, wondering whether my dad actually really and truly owned a
jetpack
. That would be totally awesome.)

Suppose Enmeduranki had been misleading me about other things? I wondered if the Dark Tower had even broken through to Earth, or managed to connect with a working Moebius coil to transport in soldiers and supplies, or establish a beachhead. Pally had not mentioned troops mobilizing to go there. Earth might not be conquered. It might not even be a battleground.

And I thought about my mother in a twilight-poisoned world called Sabtechadur, buried in a walled garden city called Agarththa. And I wondered about a world called Raamah where a man named Kai Khosrow slept in a place called Shazand.

And Earth. I wondered about the aeon called Albion. I wondered what would happen there, what the outcomes of these three worlds of battle would be.

It was dispiriting to think that everyone who read the papers in the Dark Tower already knew those answers. And had known, years and years beforehand.

After being stuffed together in the same Raising Vessel, a volume not much bigger than a coffin, and sniffing each others’ sweat, and sliding down a sheer drop like the neverending first slope of a roller coaster, so that we had the worst parts of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, Knack Ace You and I reached a landing somewhere far lower, where the air was warm and normal, and I saw a throng of people, mostly Persian-looking fellows in square beards and brass armor, crowding the docks.

Knack kicked open the Raising Vessel lid with a grunt of distaste. I could see he hated me from the look on his chest, as I gave him a cheery three-fingered Boy Scout salute, and climbed from the car.

I should have taken off like a jackrabbit. I stopped and gawked for a moment.

That turned out to be a mistake.

In addition to soldiers and officers in togas, kirtles, and cloaks, from various sword-and-sandal films, were men in mail byries from King Arthur flicks, figures in shawls and hoods and headscarves from the Arabian Nights tales complete with forked beards and crooked swords, and painted cannibals in grass skirts armed with bamboo javelins on spearthrowers carved from mastodon-tusk ivory carried at the shoulder. All of them ignored me.

There were also women old and young, some in many-layered gowns adorned with feathers being escorted by slaves holding parasols adorned with bells; other women wore saris or kimonos or feathered headdresses like showgirls; others wore sleek, satin, and long-skirted versions of the uniforms of their men, pips of their husband’s rank on their shoulders.

There was a pecking order. The ones dressed in rough leather got out of the way of the ones dressed in silk; and the ones dressed in burlap tunics belted with rope got out of the way of the ones dressed in rough leather. Everyone got out of the way of any lady with a bell-tinkling parasol, including soldiers and officers. Even among parasol-shaded dames there was a hierarchy. Matrons and noblewomen dressed with birds and feather designs deferred to royalty dressed in designs of stars and constellations.

It was not hard to guess what all the bustle meant. Several golden wayships longer than freight trains were being loaded with troops, and the families highborn and low had gathered to see them off.

The otherworldlies and nonhumans being marched into the cattle cars from a fenced-off section of the wharf also had their women and young ones with them: I saw savage-looking bowmen and slingers from some race whose feet and legs were put on backward wearing peaked caps and cloaks of bright red adorned with spirals of gold, hairy human scalps as bibs or scarves; I stared at even more savage-looking fellows dressed in bearskins and blue grease; I squinted at the freakishly big-eared midgets I had seen before; I grimaced at wolf-headed hominids loping and gamboling; and looming above all were creatures shaped like serpents larger than crocodiles from the waist downward, and which from the waist upward wore the panoply of Hellenic Hoplites, heavy shields round as the moon and lances longer than a human-sized soldier could carry. These serpent-men were resplendent in brass chestplates and shining Corinthian helmets adorned with crests, their faces half-unseen and skull-like beneath the Y-shaped eye-and-mouth openings.

Each inhuman race of men had their womenfolk saying tearful farewells or stern: sharp-featured women in caps as tall as miniature towers, with nicely-combed scalps (no doubt severed from enemy skulls) worn as scarves or boas, and their backward-pointing feet in delicate, decorated sandals; doe-eyed cavewomen dressed in doe-skin leather; slender, dark girls wrapped from neck to knee in their own ears, the outside flaps of which were adorned by hundreds of beads in rippling sand-painting patterns and mandalas.

But the most striking of all were the she-cobras, snake from the curvaceous hips down, but gorgeous from the wasp-waists up, with hourglass figures and generous bosoms, and all glittering with silver and sapphire and ruby and emerald, with scores of bracelets on each wrist, armlets at the elbow, nose rings piercing the nose, earrings the ears, buttons of diamond piercing the belly button, not to mention necklaces and sinuous waist-belts of fine gold chain. The snake women glittered like glass when they moved, coiling and uncoiling, for they had adorned the Cobra-patterns of the scales of their hips and tails with additional geometries and swirls of embedded gems and polished stones.

I was staring at all this when Knack the headless monster grabbed me from behind.

The Blemmyae reached out with a hand twice the size of mine, and the flesh of the hand had little bristles growing out of it, like the hair of an elephant. I wonder if he had used his left hand to grab me for a reason, because there seemed to be a stink coming from his fingers.

He took my mantle by the back of the neck and heaved up his arm and dangled me by one hand over the side of the wharf, so I was both choking and kicking, my feet in midair above an infinite drop.

Faces in the crowd were turning toward us, for even among the bustle and commotion of the embarking, a murder is always a spectacle.

I still had the gold-and-ruby flail in my hands, so I slung the weapon back and forth, first over one shoulder, then the other. A flexible weapon is a perfectly good tool with which to clobber an enemy behind you. If he had had a skull, it would have been crushed. As it is, I hope I at least managed to break a collarbone.

A corporal in a plumed helmet stamped over, armor ringing, “What is all this, under-creatures? You cannot do your brawling and messy business here! There are gentle-born present!”

Knack heaved me overhead, and cast me down onto the clanging metal surface of the aerial wharf, knocking the wind and half my wits out of me. The flail went sliding across the deck, sliding toward the drop, but the corporal put his foot on it, catching it neatly. He looked down at the gorgeous, gold-plated and ruby-adorned weapon, and his eyes narrowed in recognition, surprise, alarm.

The Blemmyae snorted and coughed at the officer in his whale-song language. The corporal gestured, and two of his men pounced on me, getting me by the shoulders and arms before I could gather my wits or get my legs under me.

They hauled me upright, and the one on my left drove the butt of his short spear deep into my sternum just for good measure. The scene spun like a drunken ballerina, and I threw up part of the fish stew, my only full meal in recent memory.

The man in the plumed helmet looked down at me. “I am the corporal of the watch for this district. Kaqqudu Nakasu of the Host of the Sternophthalmoi, who gaze from their chests, is freeborn, a rational animal in service to the Tower. He says you are a slave absent from his master without leave, moving without papers, and you seek to enter a forbidden and holy place in Officer’s Country. He wants to eat you, and claims your meat as his reward.”

He paused to let that sink in, or perhaps to give me a chance to speak. I did not chance it.

“Have you any reason why I should not feed you to him feetfirst, here and now, to amuse the loyal troops and their lady wives, who serve the Tower better than you?”

Several women in the crowd nearby applauded, cheered and giggled, and called out
Blood! Blood! Red blood!
It was not very ladylike, in my opinion.

“I serve Lord Ersu the Wise,” I said over the commotion of bloodthirsty cheerleaders. “He gave me his wand as proof of it. I was ordered to take it to him. My papers were stolen by a wolf named Rimanis-izbu, an abomination of the retinue of Ersu. The wolf just wanted to get me in trouble.”

The Blemmyae spoke again, crossing his arms over his chest, so that his eyes were just above his thumbs, and the corners of his scowl just below his elbows. Several people in the crowd laughed and murmured.

The corporal said, “Kaqqudu Nakasu says you think us fools, because we are driven mad by the star-lore, and our nurses do not dare to wipe a baby’s nose without consulting a star-chart for the proper time. Because no one gets away with anything here, so no one tries, and no one is on the lookout for crooked folk: but he is from a crooked world, and knows you speak crookedly.”