The Incompleat Nifft (15 page)

On the next night we stood by the dais in the center of the Audience Chamber. It had cost us our runt pearl from the ghul to buy this place from one of the chamber guards. Those near us had paid as much. The whole vast hall was packed with folk, hot and close, from wall to wall. We had taken our place hours early, and heard the tale of the "puppet-show upstairs" passed among the folk around us, variously distorted. People enjoyed it hugely. A new jocose tradition might have gotten started, had we not spoiled the humor of the idea for the Queen a short time later.

She appeared in the great doorway at midnight. Lines of guards held clear a broad aisle from the doorway to the dais, where the altar stood, and she remained in the doorway at the end of this aisle, not moving for a long time. She wore a coarse white robe that covered her entire body. Her long black hair was unbound, and her face had a terrible beauty, meaning both those words. It was a northron face—nose large and strong, eyes set both shadowy deep and wide apart, a marvellous wide mouth with lips of infinite expression.

There was a weight and power in the way she stood, a
realness
that made that whole human multitude seem a shadowy and passing thing. She stood in her straightness and silence and six hundred years of life—for she was ancient when she came to this place—and all of our thousands surrounding her seemed brief, fugitive, whispering—like a host of dead leaves. Truly my friends, aren't our lives as quick in their passing as a thief's shadow across a wall? Queen Vulvula's hand moved to her throat, and her robe fell from her nakedness. She moved forth down the aisle.

She had a body to stir and stiffen you: big guava breasts, hanging-ripe; thighs round and strong; hips like a bulging vase for milk or scented oil. But as she drew near the dais, we saw it was an autumnal body. The breasts were frost-nipped, beginning to dwindle from within as apples will. Her thighs moved with a chilled slowness, and the veins were beginning to map themselves out on the backs of her hands. And as she mounted toward the altar we saw that at the corners of her plump and flexible mouth dark nets of wintery erosion were spreading out across her jaw.

As she stood on the dais I felt her presence fully, like a gust from the icy gulf of her heart. She looked over us as a harvester looks over a great stubborn field which he has made to yield him fruit. She knew her alienness in her people's minds; their unspoken horror and the danger she lived in because of it. And she relished it. The risk and care of empire gratified her centuries-deep mind. She smiled very slightly. Looking at her mouth, you knew that it would have a small, frosty atmosphere all its own around it, and that its kiss would suck your soul out in the fire. She moved to the head of the altar.

Literally its head, for the altar was a big statue of a man in a wrestler's bridge, that is, supporting himself on his feet and hands but face upwards, so that his thighs, stomach and chest formed a long level surface. The Queen spoke some words in a language I have never heard. Her voice was mellower than you expected, soft at the edges. Effortlessly it filled the whole hall. As she spoke she pointed overhead, then to the altar, and then floorward, meaning the catacombs below, no doubt. Then she spoke for our understanding:

"Your sons have fattened in my rule.
 

Your rafts go laden with peaceful trade.
 

There's no man's wife need fear the ghul.
 

Your pearls are spared the poacher's raid—
 

They're farmed by laws that spread their worth,
 

And keep ensheathed war's wasteful blade.
 

You've had what Good men get on earth—
 

Now grant your Queen does nothing cruel
 

Who, dead with craving, ends her dearth.
 

Her year-long lord, with year-long Heaven paid,
 

Comes now to her to see her thirst allayed."
 

The King appeared in the doorway, borne on a litter by two bearers. He slouched, still strengthless, in the seat, but the set of his head showed his wits more awake than before. He wore a sacrificial fillet of graven bronze round his brow, and as they carried him forward, you could see his eyes moving restlessly under its line.

The bearers set the litter before the altar. They were powerful men, of Barnar's type. One grasped the King's wrists and the other his ankles. The Queen spoke again, and there was a tenderness in her voice:

"Rise to me now, my love, a king,
 

And descend from me as a God.
 

You will sit in Eternity with your line,
 

And rule the ever-after-living hosts.
 

You will wield the scepter of the shadow-kind,
 

You will be judge and shepherd of the ghosts.
 

Rise to me, now, my love, a king,
 

And descend from me as a God."
 

When she had said this they lifted the King onto the altar. He looked to this side and that as they pressed his legs against the stone legs, his back against the stone chest, his arms and shoulders against the arms and shoulders of stone. And as he looked here and there, I thought for a moment that he looked at me, and smiled, ever so faintly. I don't insist on this—I half think it was a dream myself—the air was so charged, and the silence crawled all over the skin of the multitude like a swarm of ants. But do you suppose he understood what had been done, and took some last small comfort, some revenge in the thought?

She knelt beside him, and her face was taut, refined by a tension of icy love, made younger before our eyes by her passionate anticipation. She lowered her face—worshipfully, kissing—to the muscled juncture of his neck and shoulder. And then there was a crisp, liquid sound of horrible distinctness, her hands clutched his shoulders, and the King's body rose and convulsed upon the stone with the raw, coiling power of a speared eel.

The two giants holding him grunted with strain, and the Queen's head rode with the youth's surging body as if it were a part of it. He hammered the rock like a beached dolphin pounds the wet sand, slowing with suffocation, and as he stilled, the Queen clutched and nuzzled with a weasel's self-forgetting lust. Her shoulders worked like pumps as she sucked and her hands kneaded his torso as if it were a great udder of blood. She almost drowned herself in her hunger, and had to tear her face up from its feeding to breathe with all the desperate speed of a diver breaking the surface. She reared her crazed, glass-eyed face before the crowd—her lips smeared, her chin drizzling red. Her breasts were actually fuller now—they jutted youthfully, and I saw a thin thread of blood-red leakage from both her nipples. She leaned and drank again. The King barely moved. His skin tightened over the muscles, while the muscles themselves seemed to be slowly dissolving.

She grew calmer, methodical. She drank from both his wrists next, and then from inside of both his thighs, to empty him efficiently. She licked her mouth clean, then cupped and lifted her breasts and licked her nipples clean. A priestess ascended the dais with a silver laver in which she washed herself a second time, and then drank off the water. Another priestess brought her a robe of scarlet. She put it on and, flanked by the priestesses, stepped down. It was done.

When she had exited the littermen laid the King's husk on the litter and bore it from the hall. The Queen would spend the night above, in the King's cell where the priestesses would install for her a large mirror framed in gold. The King would go to the catacombs, where other priestesses waited with the sacred taxidermy tools.

The next morning, on the western quay, we waited for the expected to befall. We had hired a taxiraft, and had it standing by. Then the commotion came boiling out of the palace, born by scores of hurrying folk. The Queen had been heard to waken, rise and, a moment later, scream.

We boarded at once. An hour later we had reached a certain great mudbar near the fringe of the swamp—one so large it amounted to an island. Here we waited, sending the pilot back well paid and at double speed with a small scroll for the Queen. We'd chosen a shrewd man who would have the savvy to get himself into the Queen's hearing in an uproar like the one you would expect in the pyramid. The scroll's marking would help. We had written on the outside; "Concerning the Year King's Missing Blood." A glance at this added vigor to his plying of the stern oar, and he was soon out of sight.

This was the most ticklish step of all. Having two thousand prime swamp pearls put into our hands was going to be a simple matter now. But remaining alive for even an instant after the King's blood was back in the Queen's control—this was going to strain both wit and nerve to accomplish.

Barnar's interview with the swamp witch was made with this difficulty in mind. If you're going to guarantee your safety with sorcerers—and the Vampire Queen was a very great one—you've got to get them to protect you with their own thaumaturgy. The trick is to make them give you magic which they cannot themselves afterward over-pass. You've got to ask for the best thing in their repertory.

The swamp witch was no Vulvula. But it was worthwhile having her professional opinion as to what is the fastest thing that wizardry can call to the aid of man. I would have guessed, all by myself and without paying a pearl, the answer that she gave my friend. Still, it was something to have a confirmation. She told Barnar that the fastest being, in the upper world and the subworlds alike, is a basiliscus. I see you nodding wisely, Taramat. Read on a bit.

So we demanded, along with the pearls, a ring charmed to command the service of a basiliscus. Then we sat down, had a bit of jerky and wine, and waited.

The priestess of the Queen came almost impossibly soon. When we saw she had two archers on the raft with her, I quickly waded into the water. The King's blood had dried into a greyish biscuit, full of little holes like lava-rock. I held it up and called out:

"Throw your bows in the water—double quick! Otherwise the Queen is going to have to drink this whole swamp to save her youth!"

The bows went overboard. The men kept their spears but this was fair, as we had one, and we couldn't expect them to risk our robbing them. The raft came up to the islet. We gestured the soldiers back. The priestess stepped ashore with two leathern bags, and stood staring at us, rage in her eyes, her mouth impassive. I stayed in the water, as the soldiers were so near. Barnar said:

"Time is short, woman. Give us the ring. We'll make the exchange when we're on the creature's back." She nodded wordlessly, and tossed him a small silver ring. Barnar put it on his smallest finger and raised his hands. The spell the witch had taught him was brief. He intoned it with great verve and authority. First there was a long silence.

Then the earth began to wrinkle and crack, like pottery glaze, along a thirty-foot seam that crossed the width of the islet. The cracks darkened and grew, the fragmented clay began to buckle, and even I, standing in the water, felt a giant mass jerking and slithering underfoot. A lizard-foot that could have held me like a doll reached out of the tormented mire. A second followed, as a polished, scaly snout appeared. The seam bulged and gaped and the vast reptile heaved clear, hurling blocks of clay to all sides, and raising waves from which I was barely quick enough to save the blood-cake. With imperial self-absorption the basiliscus hauled itself into the water on the other side of the islet, and unfolded its wings to bathe them. They were no bigger, fanned out, than the raft the soldiers stood on—curiously stunted-looking given the body's bulk. In its own good time it crawled back into the islet and aimed its obsidian eye, big as a target-shield, attentively at Barnar.

The basiliscus isn't a true demon because it can barely use speech at all, but it falls under the compulsions of the Great Age of Thaumaturgy, and is part of our inheritance of power from our forebears. You tell it where you want to go. It takes you there and you feed it the ring in payment, allowing it to return to the subworlds. And you'd better feed it the ring, and ask for no further trips. Magic compels it just so far, and then its nature asserts itself. Into its ragged pit of an earhole, Barnar whispered the name of our destination, then mounted its back. I jumped from the water and vaulted on behind him, keeping the blood-cake poised for a throw at the lagoon.

The priestess approached and opened the mouths of both bags for our inspection. I don't know which felt more unreal, to be sitting on the back of that lizard or to be looking at the oily lustre of two thousand perfect swamp pearls. The priestess stepped nearer, the bags in one hand, the other extended for the blood. I made the exchange with pickpocket deftness, hugged the bags to me, and Barnar shouted: "Away!"

A slow gale of breath entered the cavelike chest under us. For a moment nothing happened, and fleetingly it bothered me that in that time, neither the priestess nor the soldiers stirred. They didn't make a move, and yet had time enough, if they were good, so spear us both from our mount. Then we were fifty yards away.

The basiliscus's scales were big as flagstones and smooth as wax. Luckily there was room in their interstices for you to sink half your hand in, because its back was far too broad to grip with your legs. It took exactly three running leaps, crossing lakelets like puddles and using big mudbars as stepping-stones. Its wings hammered once, twice, and then suddenly they were winnowing cottony fog, and there was no swamp to be seen.

We swam thundering up through clouds and mist for several moments, knuckles cracking with the strain of our climbing speed, and then we were in clear sky, with the clouds a level white broth below, hemmed in a bowl-like rim of ragged peaks. Beyond the hills, where we were headed, the salt steppes lay parching under the hot blue emptiness. Then, through the rush of wind and the creaking, leathery toil of the vast wings, we heard a whine far to our rear.