The Incompleat Nifft (40 page)

They had tough, laquered-looking bodies, plated so that they appeared staved or planked, and they were shaped like the overturned hulls of ships. They hauled themselves along on clusters of crooked, relatively dwarfish legs, and swinishly pushed their black, four-lobed mouthparts—when closed together, they resembled tulips—against the nourishing bones of the earth.

Both armies were Prior Kairns, natives of the continent's lush, cattle rich southern half, competing for the enrichment of two rival provinces. This was learned from the survivors of the besieging army who, while the mercenaries encamped to debate their approach to the siege, attacked them. They had been alert for the arrival of a relief force expected by their enemies, and in the dense jungle had not recognized that they were engaging—not the small contingent their spies had described—but a force larger as well as more seasoned than their own.

The mercenaries now found their tactical problems simplified. The next morning they advanced to the rampart. There they compelled the surrender of the skeleton force the besiegers had left to mask their withdrawal from the defenders, and prevent a sortie and assault on their rear. Menodon then called on the defenders to make a peaceful withdrawal, as his force represented the claims of the flock's lawful owner. This suggestion was rudely declined by the army upon the ramparts.

With this eventuality in view, Kandros had already commenced the construction of a single, slender siege-tower. This was brought within some hundred yards of the wall, and Lybis mounted it, Menodon and Nifft accompanying her and covering her with their shields. She identified herself as the viceroy of the flock's rightful owner, and repeated the request for her property's surrender. Being scornfully invited to come get them, she replied with a smile that this would not be necessary. She stretched her hands, palms out, toward the herd.

The beasts showed a swift unanimity frightening in things so huge and slothful. They turned their backs upon their meal and proceeded thunderously in Lybis' direction. The considerable number of soldiers who were too stunned to abandon the rampart in time were crushed along with it.

Though the expedition did not have to grope for its route back to the coast, the bulk of the five hundred colossi they now had in train compelled them to weave one that was often extravagantly serpentine. Detours were maddening, but failing to find them was worse. Many steeply pitched and densely overgrown ridges were so lubricated by topsoil and wet foliage that even the fearsome, rock-splitting traction the beasts' queer little louse's legs could exert was powerless against the instantaneous obedience of their huge, mud-buttered masses to gravity's imperatives. And all too often a squad of lead-beasts had to set to gnawing through muck into base-rock, and eating a slow-rising trench of rough stone up to the crest, along which the rest of the flock could be channeled.

They returned, at last, to find that the detachment of pioneers Kandros had left with the ships had completed the structures necessary to overcome the difficulties of the flock's embarkation. The greatest of these was getting at least one of the beasts into each hold, as the urgency of hastening their delivery compelled the expedition to make it in only two crossings. For this, a huge, arched ramp stretched from the beach, out along a line of offshore rocks, to deep water a hundred yards offshore—a half-bridge, from whose bowed terminus a giant crane thrust out over the water.

For the binding of the herd into flotillas of a half-dozen that could be towed astern, thirty-five corrals of six-whale capacity (the overall bulk of the beasts had been accurately expressed in terms of whales) had been built on the intertidal sands. Made of thirty-foot posts, their seaward walls were hinged to swing out, gate-wise. When each corral's huddle of tenants had been lashed together and hung with floats by teams working at low tide, high tide would be awaited by the fleet—their holds all loaded previously—at which time they could tow out their stern-cargo simultaneously, and make full sail to convey to Anvil Pastures her deliverance.

The flock marched with clockwork obedience through every phase of the loading operation, and their perfect inertia once in the holds or tied astern gave everyone involved a sense of vast power in total, uncanny vassalage to a governing will that was, after all, thousands of miles distant. Indeed, the Goddess now enjoyed, with only the open ocean separating them, unobstructed governance of the flock's will, and could, Lybis said, perceive the beasts' environment unambiguously, and dictate to them the behavior necessary for their defense against whatever beset them from the inlands. So the half of the flock that could not be taken with the first convoy were left to wait, with a substantial garrison, the fleet's return, and Lybis went back to Anvil Pastures with the first half.

En route, about two days out of Anvil Pastures, the convoy encountered a fleet of Baskinon men-of-war. Their pilot-vessel hailed Lybis' flagship, and a boarding was requested politely enough, given the belligerents' customary brusqueness with the citizens of their shared arsenal. Lybis' strident cordiality scarcely required the hailing-trumpet she used to invite them aboard. The visiting admiral, sufficiently nonplused by what he saw astern of the Anvilian craft, was even more disconcerted by the inspection of the hold to which his blithely garrulous hostess exhorted him. Afterward she invited him to a glass of spirits in her cabin. By this time the man—a stolid, scar-faced great-uncle, doubtless a merchant in peacetime, according to the pattern in Baskin-Sharpz—had caught the idiom of her insolence and begun to warm toward her. Draining his second glass, and rising to go, he reached forward without the slightest hint of awkwardness, and patted her arm.

"You've got seven devils-full of nerve in you, Priestess, and you're so small! I hope you come out of what you're doing all right. You know, I half believe that if your city is destroyed, we could end up at armistice with Hallam. And I must tell you, my dear, that there's many a place in this world where your city-saving efforts are talked of, and not cheered on. I'm sorry, but that's the truth."

Lybis smiled at him with a strange glee: "But my
city
cheers me on, Admiral."

Back in the city, Lybis left Kandros with instructions to build a system of ramps encircling the peak just below its breakage, and to incorporate the existing shoring in its foundation—a function for which the latter was adequate, laughably insufficient though it was for its original purpose. Both going and returning, Lybis kept Nifft on her ship, and occasionally would drink with him in her cabin. At such times she would question him about his life, and she found much to laugh at in his answers.

The morning after the expedition's return to Anvil-Pastures, Nifft, Kandros, and Minor strolled across the plaza of the acropolis toward its major salience, whence they would have an excellent view of the flock, assembled on the little plain outside the city's main gate. Meanwhile they did not lack for spectacle, for up on the mountain, on the rampway collaring its broken neck, a swarm of tiny figures sent down to them a minuscule, belated noise of construction.

"They'll be off it by noon," said Minor, squinting impassively up against the sky's brightness, "and we'll see if it'll hold the brutes."

"If the brutes will be on it by then," Nifft said. His friends looked at him, and he smiled. "I have a feeling there's to be another Solicitation." He nodded toward the temple, across the square behind him. A procession of coaches was pulling up in front of it, and already several of the Aristarchs were stepping down.

"Damn the woman!" the Sexton cried. "I'm the first functionary on her staff! She told me nothing! She insists on baiting me and slighting me."

Nifft clapped him on the shoulder. "I hope it doesn't make it worse that Kandros and I were told to expect it. The priestess has a feeling, you see, that the Goddess is going to want something that will require my friend's engineering skills again. Come on—let's go on and take our view. We've got almost half an hour."

As they proceeded, Minor continued to grumble, until Kandros burst out: "Can her hostility surprise you, Sexton Minor? Does she love the Aristarchs? Your connection with them, your debt to their influence for your very position, is a major point of pride with you. You're frankly skeptical of the Flockwarden's divinity; indeed, that's putting it mildly. Meanwhile, the Dame herself is nothing but devout toward—"

"Ah
-ha
!
You see
there
you're misled!" It was a point on which the Sexton seemed prepared, fervently ready, with an answer. They had reached the balustrade facing the north-most tip of the plaza at the terminus of its slender projection in that direction, and he gave it a slap for emphasis. "View it objectively. There is an object, the corpse of the so-called Goddess, which emanates undeniable power. Like a heated poker, its power beams forth from it, shines out in rays, long after the death of the fire that endowed it with this radiant power. Heat we all know how to use. But suppose it's a
power
that there's a
trick
to using, to tapping? You are in a hereditary guild that bequeaths you this trick, in exchange for lip-service to some divine cant that legitimizes your exclusive possession of that vital trick. What would
you
profess then? Yet it remains raw, residual power in an accidentally preserved alien body, and no more than that. Would a
goddess,
who could beam her will across the ocean, be unable to send it curving through a bit of rough terrain to reach her servant's minds? Is such laughable limitation a divine potency? Ha! But a simple beam of power, like a poker's heat and glow,
that
might well need reflecting, focusing, as a mirror might reflect and aim the poker's glow around a corner."

"But there's a
sentience
in this reflected power," Nifft said. The amusement in his eyes was lazy, remote, perhaps, from the precise question at issue. "There's directive consciousness in it."

"But who knows what energies these beings from the stars glowed with?" cried the Sexton. "It's still a brute, mechanical thing, and Dame Lybis is as callous and realistic in her manipulation of it as the most cynical unbeliever."

"Well, well," sighed Nifft. "Who's to say your description, in its main outlines, is wrong?"

All three fell to gazing where their eyes had dwelt for some time—upon the Flockwarden's cattle. Seen from this vantage, the flock might have been a little town built just outside the city wall—a bizarre settlement of loaf-shaped buildings, perhaps just such an alien-looking town as might be found on other worlds. Its background of tortured, carcass-gaunt peaks, wherein strands of a half-dozen bright metallic colors—silver, copper, bronze, brass—were twisted inextricably with black ribbons of the flock's age-old fecal coal, did nothing to dispel the illusion. Indeed, it was the mighty, walled city of pale stone, Anvil-Pastures itself, which struck all three witnesses as the least "real," most ephemeral fraction of that panorama.

" `By Anvil, Staff and Hammer,' " murmured Nifft. "Where's the Anvil, Minor?"

"Eh? What do you mean? What Anvil?"

"The Anvil that goes with the Staff in yon bay, and the Hammer in yon wall. `Anvil, Staff, and Hammer.' Your mistress is always saying it."

"Oh!" The Sexton chuckled. "There isn't any. There in the harbor is Anvil's Staff. There, in the wall, is Anvil's Hammer. There before you, you have Anvil's Staff and Hammer." He seemed quite pleased with the neatness of this, and Nifft laughed in his turn, catching a look from Kandros.

"I see. Silly of me. You know, huge though the Goddess is, one wonders how she, or even all her race together, wielded such tools."

Minor snorted, but his answer was not as immediate as before. Finally with a shrug he said, "A curious thought. I suppose they were a kind of statuary, memorial landmarks—perhaps together they formed a sort of signboard identifying the town to its airborne customers as they flew near!" The Sexton was pleased anew by this explanation. Nifft nodded. "Now that's ingenious," he muttered, smiling still.

They returned to the temple. As they mounted the steps to its entry, it was the elderly acolyte already encountered by Nifft who ushered them through the door, and on seeing him, the Sexton flew into a rage.

"Krekkit! You senile weasel—I suspended you for two weeks!"

"Rig a noose and suspend yourself from a rafter beam," the old man answered, still leading them onward. Minor seized his shoulder, detaining him in the sanctum's doorway where, in the same instant, Dame Lybis appeared.

"Unhand my acolyte!" she blazed.

Minor obeyed before he protested: "I disciplined him! I caught him peeking through the Veil at the Goddess' . . ."

"At the
Goddess'
what?"

"Her private zone, her
veiled
part which only yourself . . . I mean, does it not clearly say in the protocol that—"

"Be still! Is there one shrine-servant out of the whole two score of you who
hasn't
peeked there? Including yourself?
And
put their hands, experimentally, to her . . .
private parts
?
"
Lybis grinned wickedly. "I tell you, oh Sexton Minor, acolyte Krekkit came here after working forty years in the forges, and volunteered his services out of piety, and has served here since then for twelve of the fourteen years I've served. You understand? It was out of respect for
her
power—" (the priestess pointed toward the sanctum) "—and not the Aristarchs'. And if anyone is going to be peeking at the Flockwarden's privates, I'd rather it were Krekkit than you, given the nasty, acquisitive frame of mind I'm sure you
do
it in. Now you're to attend to the Solicitation and stop making trouble. I have a feeling that today's oracle is going to leave us all with much new business."

In singing tones, the Shrinemistress—raising from time to time enraptured eyes from her tablet—read out the oracle:

Oh, bear the brood-nurse to her hatchlings' side!