The Incompleat Nifft (36 page)

But whatever one's views on these matters, and on the proper apportionment of blame between those who resolve to make war and those who, by supplying the needs of the former, effectuate their sanguinary ambitions, I hope there are few who would dissent from calling one historical consequence of Anvil Pastures' fate a good one. Shortly after Anvil's catastrophe, the trade war between Hallam and Baskin-Sharpz ceased, and the belligerents achieved a composition of their differences that has endured until the day of this writing, and produced a number of cooperative ventures that promise to usher in a new era of collaboration between the two cities' economic spheres.

If it is anything, the story of Anvil's disaster is a poignant illustration of the tragic insularity of consciousness that mankind is so much a prey to. The extant information about Anvil Pastures' remote past, while not abundant, is such that any man who spent a few weeks researching the matter in the proper places would be sufficiently informed that he would have found many of Dame Lybis's oracular directives to her townsfellows most alarming, and would have deemed their
fulfillment
of those directives to be downright astonishing. Moreover, my own compilation of these data, of which Nifft carried an abstract on his errand for me, was and is not the only such scholarly treatment of the matter available in the world, if one but seeks diligently for other scholiasts' productions.

The geography of Lúlumë's Southern spur, where Anvil Pastures is located, is worthy of notice. The highly metal-rich composition of that great massif has been noted by many writers. The troubled waters of the sea of Agon, for all the ceaseless power of their erosive assaults, manage only to emphasize the obdurate imperviousness to weathering of the Spur's majestic cliffs. These, as our nameless author tells us, are very little worn, for all the millennia of their endurance, and oppose an almost flawlessly vertical wall of more than five hundred miles' breadth to the ocean's futile siege. Several authors, the Learned Quall most reliable among them, report an ancient tradition that the Spur is not of earthly substance; that it is the remnant of a fireball which, in some immemorial era, fell from the stars upon Lúlumë's southern rim. There is at least a poetic felicity in this conception, for when, later, on Anvil's site that legendary foundry of star-vessels was built, it was said that the starry visitants seeking the services of the forge rained down upon the place in meteoric showers, lighting the night-buried ocean bright as day for hundreds of leagues in every direction. Fitting, that those cosmic mariners should have been refurbishing their craft with materials native to those trans-stellar gulfs it was their task—and triumph—to navigate.

—Shag Margold

WHEN THE THIEF Nifft, of Karkmahn-Ra was near thirty (which side of it is not known), he had achieved the first plateau of mastery in his art. That is, his style had been defined but he still lacked certainty about the proper canvases for his efforts. He knocked around more than he worked.

And one summer when he was hunting hill-pig with Barnar Ox-back in the highlands of Chilia, a letter reached him from his friend Shag Margold, the Karkmahnite cartographer and historian. Margold, knowing that Nifft meant to strike out westward across the Sea of Agon when he left Chilia, entreated his friend to stop in Anvil Pastures on the Southern Spur of Lúlumë on his way out. Margold had an important treatise in hand, to which information on that city's primary religious cult would be highly pertinent, and he had enclosed a packet in inquiries he wished Nifft to give the oracle of the Flockwarden's shrine.

The most current news in the scholar's quarter of the world was that the city had for more than a year been enjoying a period of astonishing prosperity, resulting from a revelation made to the citizens by the Goddess through her Oracle. The city was supposed to have benefited throughout its history from similar benevolent theophanies on the part of the Flockwarden, and the present boom period in Anvil Pastures seemed an excellent time to make some respectful investigations of this matter.

So from Chilia Nifft took ship, some two weeks later, for Anvil Pastures. He had already been aware of its prosperity. Anvil's weaponry had dominated the Great Shallows markets for decades, and quite strikingly so during the last nine months. Blades, body-armor, arbalests, seige-machinery—everything from byrnies to scabbard-chapes, and all of a superlative quality of steel both impossibly flexible and all but unbreakable, had been pouring from its foundries and forges at such modest prices that all competition on both sides of the Sea of Agon was overwhelmed. Nifft expected no trouble finding ships bound for that port.

But it did surprise him that the most convenient option that he found was a big Gelidorian troop-shuttle bound for the city with no less than seven hundred mercenaries requisitioned by the Aristarchs of Anvil Pastures. These troops included a large contingent of pioneers and field-engineers. None of these troops knew the city's object in retaining them, but they had other news for him. Anvil Pastures' luck had just recently taken a very nasty turn. One of the huge, contorted mountains flanking the city had suffered an uncanny form of collapse. Its peak had been fractured and the entire mass of it had for some weeks lain poised on the brink of a collapse that must utterly obliterate the city beneath it. The Aristarchs—the body of commercial oligarchs which governed the city—had beseeched the Oracle of the Flockwarden for some remedy to the civic anguish. The Goddess-in-Glass—for this she was called as often as Flockwarden by the mercenaries—had, through the oracle, declared that her aid in this crisis could be procured, but first the Aristarchs must, in pledge of earnest allegiance on their part, procure for the Goddess this sizable expeditionary force of first-quality professionals.

At the evening mess Nifft sought a seat by the First Captain of Pioneers, a man named Kandros, whom he had found the most concise and enlightening of his informants about Anvil Pastures' dilemma. By the time the grog ration went round the two men had exchanged a variety of anecdotes and philosophical perspectives, and had found that they rather liked each other. Kandros was a slight, leathery man, not quite forty, but with the eye-wrinkles of a desert tortoise, the wrinkles of eyes that had studied two eventful decades' worth of encampments, fortifications, seigeworks and battles. The hands that hung from his wiry arms were great knobbed and tendoned pincers. These big, hammer-knuckled paws which he seemed to move so seldom were uncommonly direct and neat in the movements they did make. Nifft sipped his aqua vitae and said:

"Kandros. Am I right in feeling that this company of yours presents an unusually strong component of engineers and sappers and the like, given the number of combat forces?"

"Quite right. We've conjectured no end what place we might be hired to besiege, but we are too few to attack any city of real consequence. Besides this, it's hard to see what help for Anvil Pastures there'd be in the capture of some fortress or town."

"Though the Aristarkion has engaged you, I gather that august body is as much in the dark about your precise commission as you are."

"So I conceive it. The Aristarkion is not always piously prompt to fulfill a directive of the Flockwarden. For instance, more than a year ago, the Goddess announced through her oracle that her flock had returned to the world of the sun, and that—I quote exactly now—she must have them by her, every one, for it's long and long that they have been gone. The oracle asked, in the Goddess' behalf, for an expedition to bring her flock back to her from somewhere on the southeast coast of Kairnheim, where apparently they had reemerged from some long burial under the earth. And the Aristarchs, after mature consideration, declined to undertake so great an expense for so vague a behest."

"It would seem that the Goddess is forgiving. It must have been shortly after that refusal that she pointed the city the way to its recent bonanza."

A certain watchfulness had entered Nifft's manner, as if Kandros' last remarks had a connotative undertone that he was not quite catching. The captain's reply was in a meditative voice.

"In religious matters, my understanding is that the city-fathers are somewhat inconsistent. When the Goddess gives them oracles that hint of profit, they are piously convinced of the deity's potency. There resides in her corpse a strange attunement to the earth, its deep and secret structures, and the oracles have preserved the secret of interpreting the Flockwarden's revelations, though their mysteries remain inviolate. You're right about the Goddess' generosity. Her revelation to the Aristarkion followed its rejection of her demand by little more than a week."

Nifft was smiling absently at his cup. "I get the feeling," he said, "that there is a certain irony in the city's state of affairs which you have yet to reveal to me."

Kandros nodded, conceding. "To someone not intimately affected by the situation it might be amusing that it was the Aristarkion's intemperate haste to capitalize on the bonanza the Goddess revealed to them which, through an unforseeable fluke, created the deadly flaw in the structure of the mountain which now threatens the city."

Nifft and Kandros stood by the rail amidships. "You know," Nifft said, "no matter how I tried to imagine it, it all sounded preposterous." Gazing at the mountains surrounding the bay into which they sailed, and smiling, Nifft shook his head. Kandros nodded.

"Descriptions never convey it."

"What is that jetty made of?"

"Steel, or something like it. It's called Pastures' Staff. It is a relic of the age of the Flockwarden."

"Pastures' Staff . . . And how remote was that age?"

Kandros shrugged. "It was when this bay was formed, and these mountains gnawed from the coastal massif. It was when these mountains were almost twice as high as you see them now, and far more terrible in their form."

The Staff, jutting a quarter mile into the bay, was the spine of the harbor's system of docks. The gentle slope of the bay-floor submerged its seaward end, so that its full length was not determinable. Though entirely caged within the skeleton of masonry and timber that crowned and branched from it, the cyclopean axis immediately engrossed the eye, as though all that encumbered it—not quite as real as its immemorial metal—lacked the necessary solidity to obscure it. It drew the viewer's gaze shoreward, to its inland end, which the city's architects had incorporated in the foundation of one of the towers of the imposing city-wall. But once there, the eye again neglected the nobly-proportioned masonry of Anvil Pastures, and was drawn upward to the mountains that embowered the city.

Kandros was not given to fanciful turns of speech, and he had called the mountains no more than what they were—terrible in form. The Southern Spur as a whole was essentially one vast block of extremely metal-rich stone two hundred leagues in length, opposing huge, blunt cliffs to the Sea of Agon's troublous waters. Erosion had flawed and featured those cliffs, but nowhere really breached the general smoothness of their mighty wall. But at the site of Anvil Pastures something more powerful than the wind and tides had torn into it—had gouged the deep embayment that was the harbor, hewn the rocky niche that was the city's seat, and chewed the continental buttress into mountains stark as a rack of bones, and stretching sixty miles inland in all directions. They reared up two miles and more with fearful steepness from the sea's threshold. They were gaunt, disjointed peaks. Something in their contorted multitude suggested pain and calamity.

Nifft said, "I remember a certain battlefield I saw some years ago. The war had moved on from it two weeks before, and many cavalry had died in that engagement. It was a fiercely hot mid-summer. I remember those acres of sun-hardened, leathery carcasses, their crooked legs sticking up from the earth at every angle."

Kandros made a mouth of wry assent, and nodded at the peaks. "Imagine them twice this stature, their carving not yet softened by eons of rain and wind."

The two men lounged on the rail absently watching the harbor as they approached their berth in it. They passed a pair of warships which, while ignoring in-bound craft, appeared to be stopping and boarding every outbound vessel, once it had cast off and pulled into the bay.

"Hallamese," Kandros said in answer to Nifft's look of inquiry. "Rather an amusing matter. Hallam is at war with Baskin-Sharpz, near the equator upcoast here on Lúlumë. I suppose you've heard of the conflict?"

"Yes. Hallam's on Moira, the next isle east of Chilia. A trade war, no?"

"Correct. You'd think the Sea of Agon big enough to share between them. Anyway, it turns out they only
went
to war because both had discreetly sent diplomats to Anvil Pastures and both sets of diplomats negotiated what they thought were exclusively advantageous arms contracts with the Aristarkion. So they find themselves at each others' throats, and each finds the other twice as well-armed as he had been gambling on. If their war wasn't going so hot and heavy the discovery would've made a truce between them and they'd have joined forces to enslave Anvil here, despite her mighty walls. Even as it is, this harbor is now a zone of truce for both belligerents. In a few days two Baskinon warships will probably arrive here to relieve these Hallamese vessels. There are to be no emigrants from Anvil, you see. They intend that the inhabitants of the Pastures will stay here to fulfill those arms contracts they so doubly sold. Naturally both belligerents have staffs of diplomats obligatorily hosted by the Aristarchs in the comfort of their own homes, and these diplomats keep a daily roll-count of all the city's rich and powerful men and of their liquid assets, to ensure that both remain at home. It's the only reason that splendid metropolis there isn't a ghost town."

They regarded the ramparts under which they were now docking. Wealth and power radiantly incarnate—such were the hugeness and the resplendent masonry of the walls, as well as of the great buildings which, farther upslope within the city, overtopped them. Nifft, musingly, said, "Pastures' Staff. Is that the name of that thing in the water, precisely? I mean, I have the impression I've heard it referred to, but pronounced differently."