The Incompleat Nifft (32 page)

After that we rested, hid, and lay still for a time. It was perhaps a day or two, for our wounds had begun to scab, and the sharpest edges of their pain had dulled when we again proceeded. Just before we set out, we had an earnest talk with Wimfort. We were in a gully in a low hillside, and I pointed out to the plain before us.

"Do you see, Wimfort, yonder there, where those flatlands get so much paler?"

"I suppose so."

"Well, that's where we start running into the bog. It's a kind of swamp, teeming with men and women, you understand? With males and females. Tens of thousands of them, all of them . . . moving together." I paused, feeling that this sounded lame. "Listen Wimfort," I said, "don't be offended, but I must ask you. Do you know how babies are made?"

He gave me a look of enormous scorn. He looked up at the luminous murk that was our sky, as if to call witness to his trials at the hands of dolts. He disdained to answer.

I was relieved. He didn't know, then, or at least, knew only in a remote way. At his age the question is tricky, but I had read him as a prudish boy like many privately extravagant and ambitious types—no young tom-about-town he, fascinated by the flesh perhaps, but still feeling some compromise to his dignity in it. I handed him a cudgel I had whiffled him from a thorn root.

"Well," I said, "that's what the men and women and girls and boys and other assorted creatures in the bog are all doing—that, and variations of it. The danger is not really great, if you just remember not to be attracted
into
their activities. Anyone who's really trying can make his way through them, though it takes some hard struggling in the thickest places. Just remember that the fun is all on the surface there—if you let yourself be pulled deeper into the matter, you'll find yourself being swiftly destroyed. As before, momentum is everything. Don't pause, just drive forward, whacking away like a thousand devils."

It seems to me now that I hardly need to describe what ensued. When we reached it, we entered the swamp at a run, zigzagging among the mossy knolls and black, weed-slick pools where the small, outlying knots of nude humanity mingled with miscellaneous demonry in orgiastic combination.

And our momentum held even after the orgiasts grew in number, lay ever more profusely heaped till sweaty hills of them coalesced, and the muddy earth was blanketed by their lascivious coalition. A whinnying, jabbering clamor arose from that voluptuary fen, a vast, ragged oratorio of lust, with a muffled accompaniment of something else. We reached the thick of it, and it was time to clear ourselves a path with club-work.

Coming down, we'd lacked knouts and had used our spear-butts. On either trip our swords would have been the most efficient weapons, but it was humanly impossible to use them. It was horrible enough using the clubs, even on the men, and inexpressibly so on the women. To stir the arm for such an act—not once, but countless times—was dead contrary to what every fiber of my being wanted—nay,
demanded.
In a
certain way, that may have been the worst mauling I got on the entire journey—wading through the slippery shoals, hammering through the hot, coaxing embraces of urgent arms and pleading fingers. It was a violence to my soul. Each bruise I gave, my own nerves wore.

For the first long moments of this excruciating immersion, we kept a fair pace. Then the lad, who went between us, started lagging. He would fall behind me until Barnar would catch up to him and thrust him on. Ever more balkily he advanced. Then I looked back and saw his eyes, even as I watched them, grow rapt, his gaze become dangerously entangled in the carnal weave. Snap! He came to a full stop, dropped his club, and dove into the squirming heap.

The succeeding frenzy, just at its fullest pitch, caused me an eerily calm moment of remembrance. I had done fisher-work on the Ahnook trawlers when I was young, and there had been one late afternoon when we made a stupendous strike. Our greedy skipper plied the nets with epileptic ardor and buried our decks with a spill-over haul, in a mad race to ship every possible ounce before it grew dark. Half of us had to stand the decks with spars in our hands and club the fish like a devil with his arse afire. They were shadfinns, big as dogs with the fight of wild pigs. In the dimming light, on the heaving, slithering decks, walloping and dancing berserkly, I had for a short eternity fore-lived what I lived now.

The boy hadn't noticed anything below the upper layers, and kicked at us furiously as he wormed himself into the endless grapple. Instantly, he had a dozen allies aiding his immersion. I felt for a horrified time the certainty that we wouldn't get him out in time. For even in our distraction, we got many glimpses of the deeper action of the fiendish congress. Several layers down you saw a kissing mouth that suddenly grinned and sank its teeth in flesh. A hand with a thumb and four bleeding stumps was seen to pound helplessly against a massive thigh. A rib broke under a powerful knee. From down there you heard the smothered undercurrent of a different oratorio, one of horror covered by the chorus of lust.

Wimfort gave us great thumping kicks of painful authority. When we could spare a blow from the rest, we parried him and struck at his legs to stun them. He sank under the first layer of stroking hands and worshipful lips, and suddenly pain stamped his face, and he howled. He began to fight like mad to become free, but now his allies had become his captors.

In desperation I drew my sword. I lopped off a man's arm, another's foot. Mercifully, this sent a shock through the massed orgy—arms recoiled and torsos writhed away. This helped Barnar as much as it did Wimfort, for several thralls had gotten arm-locks on my friend's neck, and in the last instant before he was freed I saw his left ear bitten off flush with his head.

I must say that Wimfort, when he had his feet under him again and his club restored him, began to ply this weapon with a vigor that greatly sped our passage through and exit from that region. This performance had purchased him a measure of forgiveness from our hearts by the time we had sat down in a safe place to bind Barnar's wound.

But then Wimfort,
that prodigal youth, managed to squander all he had purchased in a few brief words. He was looking at us absentmindedly when suddenly his eyes narrowed, and a look of pleased discovery dawned on his features. He laughed triumphantly, in innocent enjoyment of his enemies' defects—for I must mention that, some years prior to this time, I had had the misfortune to lose most of my own left ear.

"Your ears!" Wimfort cried, and laughed again. "Now the two of you match!"

We gave ourselves another, shorter period of rest, until Barnar's wound had scabbed cleanly and stopped throbbing, and then, once again, we marched. Endlessly.

Long and long we marched. Unendingly we marched. We marched, and Wimfort nagged us.

The boy was unquestionably a great natural talent, if not an outright genius, in the art of complaint—tirelessly inventive, and completely shameless in the matter of interpreting his dissatisfactions as someone else's—
anyone
else's—criminal failures to content him.

And so we marched, and Wimfort, marching too, also nagged us, and at length the sheer influx of his voice, relentless as the surf's assault on the rock, began to expunge my mind, scour away any thought of my own that tried to sprout from my fast-eroding brain.

"STOP!" I bellowed. "Stop right here, sit down, shut up, and listen."

Wimfort skidded down the slick, pink knoll I had just descended, and obeyed three of my commands. Given the loathsome wetness of this spongy terrain, I didn't insist on his sitting down. I said to him, "Now. Your mouth will remain shut, and your ears open, until I'm finished; First: you are aware of the Life-Hooks in us which hind us to Charnall, who is in your father's power. Second: you were present—though you may not have been listening, since the discussion concerned persons other than yourself—when we asked Gildmirth to remove the hooks for us. He told us that, as the hook is a primitive, strongly talisman-linked spell, we stood a two-to-one chance of having our hearts ripped out if he removed the hooks from us without using the control-ring. Now here is the new bit of information I want you to have. A while ago Barnar and I had a lengthy conversation out of your hearing in which we pondered,
at length,
the relative merits of abandoning you, returning to the Privateer and taking our chances on the operation, so that we could win the freedom to escape this place without the burden of yourself encumbering our efforts. We weighed the merits of this course of action for a long time, Wimfort. Do you understand my meaning? I am in no manner joking."

We marched on. I knew my speechmaking had bought us only a morose and temporary silence from the boy. I was undefinably uneasy, aware of a peculiarly sharpened rancor toward the boy, and aware that my patience with him was dangerously frayed, while at the same time I acknowledged that, though intolerable, he had been no worse than usual lately. Moreover, I deeply disliked this zone we had recently entered, and yet so far it had been remarkably free of dangers and difficulties alike.

I couldn't discover what it was about the place that had my back up like this. It had quickly become clear that the impossibility of precisely retracing the path of our descent had resulted in the deeper penetration of an area which, evidently, we had encountered only peripherally before. And though this left the dangers of the leagues ahead an unknown factor, at least the unfamiliar territories were proving no more perilous than the remembered one had been. Here, for instance, in these wet, pillowy fields of rosy tissue, it was easy enough to fall, so ridged and seamed the stuff was, so scalloped, wrinkled and whorled—but then it was nearly impossible to suffer hurt from a fall on such moist, blubberous ground. The prospect was wide and unthreatening. Here and there from the twisted, velvety billows rose huge buttes and mesas of the whitest, smoothest stone we had ever seen. Out toward the limit of our vision the plains could be seen to grow smoother and paler, and to be thinly forested with some kind of growth.

We found that whiter zone to be sharply demarcated from the pink one. It was a wholly different material, tough and dry, and faintly resilient. And it was quite smooth, save for a system of shallow striations that printed on its surface vast, swirled patterns reminiscent of the wave lines the wind engraves on untrodden sands.

As for the treelike things that sprouted from it—quite sparsely at first—they were harmless things, but inexplicably repellent. Their substance—wet, purple twists of bundled fiber—resembled nothing so much as raw meat, thick strips of it all torqued and braided together in rubbery stalks and flaccid branchings. Pythons of translucent, silvery cord were complexly spliced throughout this tree-meat, and their network corruscated faintly, with a rhythm roughly matching that of the trees' movement. For all these growths stirred vaguely in the windless air, and faint, intricate shudders of torsion incessantly agitated their limber frames.

The ground began to rise. The trees grew ever denser and ever bigger. As the sticky forest closed in above and around us, my oppression of spirit grew almost crushing.

"Listen," Barnar said. "Do you hear something?" I shook my head angrily, and didn't answer. I
had
been hearing something, a slow-cadenced booming—vast, but also soft, diffuse. The grade got steeper. We wound through the carnal jungle up toward what promised to be a major ridge-crest.

When we topped that crest, I saw everything in an instant—my own stupidity first and clearest of all. The land fell away before us in a broad, shallow valley more thickly forested than the ridge, and with a different growth—with black hair, jungle-high. Erupting from the valley's basin at its farther end was an immense mountain. Its crest was lost in the phosphorescent gloom of the subworld's vaulted ceiling, but its smooth and tapered shape was immediately identifiable. One stark vein ran up across this mountain's face, and a swarm of aerial entities hovered near the vein at about its midway point

It was the mountain we had been hearing, and whose thunder now rolled unhindered across the shaggy lowlands—a thrumming, buzzing knell; a sound as of a million bowstrings simultaneously loosed. Wonderingly, Barnar said: "We've found—we are
in
—the giant Sazmazm." I nodded, still gazing. Then we jumped, our wits returning to us at the same moment. We whirled around. Wimfort was gone.

Though we failed to pick up his trail, there was at least no doubt about the direction the boy would be taking. He would be impossible to spot until he reached the clear ground at the mountain's foot, the very threshold of his lunatic desire. Seeking him en route in the giant's snarled pectoral pelt would be futility itself, giving the young idiot plenty of time to destroy himself—and thereby us—unhindered when he reached the perimeter protected by Sazmazm's tertiary slaves.

So down we went, and threw ourselves into the arduous, oily struggle, which was hard enough to let us hope that our greater strength would enable us to reach the mountain before the boy. Our bejungled approach denied us any chance to view the situation we were nearing. When at length we stepped onto clear ground again, we were in a scorched, war-torn zone, hideously heaped with the wreckage of war, and beyond these intervening dunes of dead, the visible part of the mountain bulked huge, fearsome in its nearness.

We stood numb awhile. Some high point had to be reached from which we could overlook this cyclopaean disorder.

"The best thing seems to be to look at what we're dealing with," Barnar said bleakly. "And then try to anticipate where he'll choose to make his rush."

I nodded, and another silence passed. I answered: "If he has formed a plan at all, and doesn't just rush in on a blind faith in his luck."

We sighed. All was speed now, but a melancholy languor was on us. Insistent despair, soliciting yet again our weary hearts, woke no more fight in us. We were almost emptied, and beginning at last to accept our destruction.

Glumly, with audible loathing, Barnar said, "That seems to be our only adequate vantage." He nodded toward the hirsute carcass of a gigantic slothlike beast that lay on a debris-hill of smaller corpses and their broken chariots of war. Somehow, we started walking toward it. "Yes," I said, "we can climb up that spike it has strapped to its head."