Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (47 page)

But he was not going to run away from his masters, not going to breathe the air of freedom.

Qall said, “I hear they take scalps as neckerchiefs, and the more they get, bigger they look in each other’s eyes, so their chiefs have whole coats of man hair. Only the night-eyed Albanians be safe of them, on account of being born egg-bald.”

I turned my face away from him, glad I did not know his name, or his background, or anything. I did not want him to seem real to me, and if you know someone’s name, he seems real.

I walked over to the Blemmyae’s cell and looked down. Qall did not follow me, not willing to come so close. “Master!” Qall said urgently, “This is a monster! An abomination! No matter what he promises, he is not true of tongue, as we Ur-folk must be, and he will speak crookedly! Do not believe him!”

“I don’t believe him, so I am not going to ask him. I am going to believe
in
him. That is a different thing.”

The Blemmyae, Kaqqudu Nakasu, sat looking up at me with a sardonic expression on his chest. His eyeballs in his pectoral muscles were as large as softballs, and even with his lids at a sneering half-mast, they caught and reflected more light than a cat’s eye. So it looked like two half-moons shining in the gloom of the hellish little hole.

He farted a few words in his blowhole-noise language.

“What is he saying?” I asked.

“He wonders whether to cook you or eat you raw. He says you are a skullbag, and so the volume of your brains are smaller than his, which fill his chest.”

That distracted me. “Then where does he keep his lungs?”

“In his stomach, right behind his mouth.”

“Then where does he keep his—oh, never mind. Ask him whether he’s ever heard of the foreverborn.”

“You need not ask him, master: We are warned against them every seven days during Moon Goddess Day assembly, and there are songs and posters and brightly colored papers and everything. The foreverborn water changes your nature, and makes you unnatural. Everyone has heard of them.”

“In that case, tell him I am going to release him, and we are going to have a talk.”

I did not wait for an answer, but stopped and worked the lock and flung open the grate. It fell open with a noise like the clash of cymbals, echoing and clanging, while Qall was repeating my words.

The monster rose and stretched, and even standing hip-deep in the cell, he seemed gigantic, and his arms like pillars. He twisted left and right, cracking his knuckles and flexing his spine.

In one pounce he was up on the catwalk with me, taller than I was, despite having no head.

He reached his massive hand for my throat.

I gritted my teeth in a teensy smile, because this time the lummox was not grabbing me from behind. Bigger than me or not, I was not taken by surprise, so I politely ducked under his foot-long hand, rapping the back of his wrist just hard enough with the staff of my flail so that his grip went past my cheek by an inch and missed me.

Knack Ace You had a puzzled look on his chest, like when you are sure you swatted a fly and you still see it buzzing. He was bigger and tougher than me, but I was betting he did not have a dad who made him do four hours PT a day since age eight.

He reached out again, but I stepped back, moved to one side, and struck him on the shoulder with my free hand, hard enough to send him stumbling. The catwalk, you see, was too narrow for a big guy like him, and walking on top of barrels covered with grates or uncovered was not the best footing for a melee. Besides, he had not set his feet right. Being cramped in a little space like that had not left him in shape to put up a real fight.

So he hopped, his huge arms windmilling widely, and fell to one knee, and the noise of the clatter was deafening. He had fallen in such a way as to give himself a poke in his chest-eye with his own kneecap when he stumbled. He had no eyebrows to raise, but he could crook his shoulders in the same sort of expression. With a gesture that looked like a man brushing his shirt, he wiped his eyes.

Knack hooted at me.

Qall said, “He says that he will kill you quickly, unlike the Dark Tower, who will kill you slowly.”

I laughed a laugh of pure joy and pure mockery.

Knack twitched in surprise. No doubt this was not the reaction he expected from someone he considered to be lunchmeat.

I said, “Tell him I cannot be killed. If he ate my flesh, my flesh would grow and gather together, ripping out of his guts to come back to me. I am
Lalilummutillut.
”

He understood that last word. The look on the vast face was now one of mingled wonder and fear, as if I had just taken off a mask to reveal something dizzyingly abnormal seething underneath.

I squatted down on the catwalk, elbows on my knees, and stared at his monster-sized eyeballs, wondering if there was a heart behind and between them.

Prompted by an intuition, I said to Qall, “Ask him what that tattoo on his spine means.”

Knack stood up slowly, spread his huge arms, turned his back to me, and now he spoke in a deeper voice, something like a human language, and the words boomed from the immense mouth in his stomach.

I swear he said the word
Uhuru
, which is a word that means
Freedom
in Swahili, which is where Gene Roddenberry picked the name for the radio operator on the starship
Enterprise
. See how much useful information you can pick up from reading Star Trek books?

Qall said, “His people speak of small things through their noses, and of great things through their mouths.”

“So what great things is he saying?”

Qall shuddered. “Greatly evil! It is a bad story.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“After the world-flood, Ut-Napishtim came down from Mount Nisir where the great vessel had lodged fast. He sacrificed a sheep and offered incense at a ziggurat where he placed fourteen sacrificial vessels and poured reeds, cedar, and myrtle into the fire. There was a feast.”

“That does not sound so bad,” I commented.

“After the festival, his first son, whom the stars call Ngushur but mortal men call Am or Ham, gave him the first wine of the reborn world and made him to become drunk, and he saw his father unclothed. The first son mocked the father and boasted, and told what he had seen to his brothers with much scorn, saying he was above his father, therefore above all living things. Ut-Napishtim was commanded by sun and wind and star to punish Am and reduce him from the kingship to servitude, that Am would serve his brothers rather than rule over them, and his children after.

“But Ut-Napishtim in his shame defied sun and wind and star, and refused to curse his son.

“The blessing that grants to Man a godlike form and likeness was therefore withdrawn, and the children of Am were cast out from the law which orders that each shall bear after his own kind: for this reason, many prodigies and monstrous races were born among the children of Am. As human nature departed, they obtained the custom of tearing the flesh of men, like beasts do.

“Am begat Cush begat Sabtah begat Ab-Tuat. Ab-Tuat of Kish coupled with the goddess Menhit of the Massacres one day when she appeared to him as a lioness: and she consumed him. But as blood price, she brought forth a get of monsters mightier than the others. This race arose and slew the other monsters, and trampled the whole-born men into servitude.

“To this day, the tradition is kept among the Blemmyae, in honor of the crime that made their race strong enough to conquer the wholesome men, and they eat man-flesh like the lioness their mother. It is said among them that human necks are for collars, and heads for beheading, and so free men do not have need of them. The rules of chastity that bind other men, the sons of Ab-Tuat do not follow: and they call this unnatural disorder by the names freedom and liberation. In this, they follow the Mossynoeci, who tattoo themselves likewise, and couple in the street without shame, like swine.”

“Wow. Is there any world out there that is not totally sick? Hold it! Don’t translate that!”

Too late. Qall repeated my words to Knack, who smiled and boomed out a short answer from his neck-nose.

Qall said, “He says that many worlds are sick with evil. There is one he has heard of where the mothers, countless in number, kill their own young in the womb.”

My first impulse was to point out that I was not old enough to vote, and whatever my world did, I was not responsible for. Of course, I suppose the same might be true of him and his world.

Instead I said only, “Tell him that all men are sinners, all worlds are fallen. You are proud that you are free born, but the Dark Tower tells you what you will do tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Do you know the death-dates of your children not yet born? How are you free?”

The Blemmyae spoke a few booming words in his chest-language. Qall said, “He says it is nature. Things must be as they must be. It is law.”

“Tell him there is a nature above nature, and a law above law. Tell him the wickedness of the Dark Tower shall also be punished, and most terribly, and at a time as unforeseen as all that has happened to him this day.”

The Blemmyae stared at me and got a weird look on his chest, like he’d seen a ghost.

I said, “Tell him nothing gives the Dark Tower the right to enslave us, no matter what we have done. Ask him if he is proud of his ancestors defying the gods? If he is proud, ask him if he will defy the Dark Tower? Or if he is ashamed, shall he atone for it?”

Qall translated the comment. The Blemmyae stood up at that point, and I stood up too. We were about eye level with each other, which meant his shoulders were as tall as the lintel of a door to me, and the slab of his body was as broad. But I stared him in the pectorals, and did not blink.

“He says no one can defy the Dark Tower. No one escapes the gaze of the stargazers. They know all things.”

I did not answer that, but merely smiled and spread my hands, gesturing to the empty and unpolice-filled, jailor-less, and soldier-free area around us with a gesture like Vanna White showing off a newly-purchased vowel.

The oversized chest-eyes of the Blemmyae turned left and right, roving over the walls of the chamber. A look of doubt began to wrinkle his stomach.

I pressed on. “Tell him I was rescued by a foreverborn, and I stand in the shadow of a deed the stars cannot see. If ever I do evil, I will step out of that shadow, and be seen again, and the Astrologers will know my deeds and doings. But if I do what is right, even if what is right seems insane, then no one can predict how it will turn out.

“Now I have freed him and he is in my shadow.

“I predict he wants to kill me and eat me, because he blames me for being here. If I can predict that, what can the Astrologers do? For him to forgive me would be a good thing, and insane, and unpredictable.

“When a pebble strikes a pool, the rings go out, larger and larger. If he frees others, and they do only what is right, and don’t give in to their natural and darker impulses, the ripple of freedom will produce more ripples. The earthquake that will topple this Tower will start with a ripple as small as a pebble makes.

“Even without becoming foreverborn himself, tell him that he can do good, and hide from the stars in the shadow I cast, as I am hidden by a greater shadow cast by she who rescued me; as he must henceforth do to others.

“Can you translate all that to him?” I finished.

“Say it all again, slowly, master,” said Qall. There was a note of awe in his voice.

And as he repeated what I had said, something dark and angry and hopeless very slowly, as if it left one drop at a time, fell away from the huge and slablike face of the Blemmyae, and did not return.

The monster stood looking very thoughtful. For the first time, I realized that he had no visible ears.

I saw him turn his gaze—and he had to rotate his whole body to turn his gaze—toward the poor Abarimon, who was still lying in a lump, dull-eyed, like a puppet with his strings cut, without even the spirit needed to climb to his backward-pointing feet and get out of here.

The monster put his hands on my shoulders and boomed out a word or two, so loudly I could feel his hot breath against my midriff.

Qall said, “He says he will come with you.”

“No, no!” I said. “He’s not coming with me! Whatever gave him that idea?”

“He knows where you are going, and you are like a helpless child in this world, who cannot tell his food-eating hand from his anus-wiping hand. It will be his first unexpected good deed!”

“Gnu? Duh? Who?”

“He sees from the look on your skullbag that the deed is unforeseen.”

“Tell him thanks but no thanks…”

But Qall raised his voice and talked over me. “I wish the both of you luck on your journey, sir and master. May the stars shine brightly on your fate! Or—well I suppose I am not to say that any more … Fare you well! May your strange gods, whatever they are, who can blind the stars grant you your desired death, or whatever strange blessings you seek!”

“Qall! Get back here! The monster has to go with you, to the gypsies and freedom or wherever!”

“You cannot be killed by being eaten, master, but I can. His mood will wear thin.”

“But—but— But I cannot
talk
to him!”

Even though his feet were on frontwise, and he was not as fast as a jaguar, Qall got out of the jail chamber pretty fast.

I would have followed him, but right at that moment, Kaqqudu Nakasu the headless man dropped his catcher’s mitt-sized hand from my shoulder to my palm, where I was still holding the cylinder seal, twisted my thumb with a finger the size of a bratwurst, and snatched up the little brass tube.

He lumbered in four huge steps carefully (it was not easy walking on top of half-buried barrels) over to the wall, pushed the cylinder seal into a decoration, twisted it, and opened a secret panel, a different one from the one Qall and I had entered by.

Kaqqudu Nakasu bowed slightly from the waist, which narrowed his mouth into a sardonic line thinner than a leather belt, raised one collarbone in much the same way Spock would raise an eyebrow, and pointed toward the opening with his ungainly arm. He raised his arm high enough that I saw a small hole just below his armpit, which I realized must be his ear.