The Incompleat Nifft (41 page)

Though she within her ancient death be pent,
 

Deliver her—herself, her hearse—beside
 

Those on whom her former life was spent,
 

To the nursery of those tender innocents
 

Bear her so that they, of Knowing void
 

May with fruit of her Great Knowing be supplied,
 

And fully may conceive of her intent.
 

What though in death her frame stand vitrified?
 

You know her Knowing part doth yet abide—
 

More nearly let it work their government!
 

With unwonted tenderness the Priestess tucked the tablet into her apron pouch. Her stylus she did not put away, but turned slowly in her fingers as she gazed at it, and began to speak. Her voice was a supple, compelling current of calm ardor:

"Ye gods, gentlemen! If our interest didn't lie in fulfilling her desire, how could our hearts resist doing so? I've often been moved by the Goddess, in touching the living flow of her emotion, her immemorially ancient knowledge and desire. But this time . . ." Now her eyes flashed upon the mute congregation. "I tell you, it's almost as if she were
alive
!
The soulful urgency of her will to be near her children, as she seems to call them—yes! She seems almost to feel toward them as a mother to her children. So deep must her care-taker's bond have been with the flock! I promise you that I haven't managed to translate even a tithe of the emotional resonance, the motherly passion there was in her wordless behest!

"And I can understand this gentlemen, though there be no blood kinship between her and those beasts! Have I not known the service of an alien being, known a devotion to the excellence and beauty of an entity foreign to my kind, and known this devotion to achieve a degree of joy and proud commitment that's like love itself!? I make bold to detain you with these personal sentiments, but I tell you I rejoice that the Goddess will at last enjoy in death that nearness to her beloved charges which was once so central to her life.

"For she must have what she wants, of course. It's a tricky bit of surgery she's going to be doing with those brainless giants of hers and her hand must be set as firmly upon the scalpel as possible, that's mere common sense. . . . It's obvious her glass-muffled emanations will benefit from all the amplification they can get. The sweet maternal propinquity she craves, honest Aristarchs, is also our greatest security. It's also obvious she will not command them to our salvation until she has the conditions she specifies, and so it is scarcely a matter of choice. What remains to be done is clear. . . ."

The Goddess' multitudinously attended procession out of the city was a stately one. It took four days and, despite the most cunning devisement of its route, necessitated the partial or complete dismantling of nine sizable buildings to make passage for the cyclopean corpse. Before this laborious pilgrimage could even be undertaken, the Goddess' equally arduous descent from the acropolis had to be accomplished. The vitreous megalith was lowered with an immense block-and-tackle from a boom of unheard-of proportions, whose skeleton the city's forges had finished and assembled in less than forty-eight hours of cacophonous, febrile toil. It was just before dawn when her hugeness inched down from the blocky plateau's beak-like promontory. The catwalks built up against the plateau's sheer wall swarmed with torches of workmen attending her descent, and the plaza was also teeming with lights, so that a shower of sparks seemed to be spilling down from the great mesa as the Goddess deserted it for the first time in recorded history.

At length the great crystalline block had ground its way—rollered on the countless trees which its vast bulk devoured by the hundreds in its progress—out through the main gate. That giant portal admitted its exit by scant inches only. The sun had been down for an hour by the time it had been positioned in the field where the flock was gathered, and cordoned round with a screen of temple tapestries draped from pole-strung cables to designate the periphery of sacerdotal privilege, into which lay-folk must not penetrate. Dame Lybis, already half-veiled by the deepening shadows, entered this screen under the silent gaze of the townsfolk, whose torches washed the field with unsteady orange light, and made the immobile herd seem to stir and shift restlessly. And indeed, before ever she reappeared from her sequestration with the Flockwarden, a shock went through the crowd as those nearest the beasts leapt and cried out in startlement. The flock had begun a shambling progress toward the mountains.

Darkness masked their ascent of the slopes and occupation of Kandros' monumental feeding ramp, but both proceeded in flawless order, as the contingent of mercenaries sent up to observe the beasts reported during the first lightless hours of their watch. Sunrise revealed them to the city already well at work.

For the next ten days, the spectacle was tirelessly observed by Anvil's citizens. The beasts' huge forms were plainly visible even at that remove; less so was the small army of men endlessly clearing the rampway of the giants' waste products and—since these consisted of various pure metals and tons of furnace-nourishing fecal coal—conveying them down the slopes to the city. In this period the mass of the great natural hammer that threatened the city was substantially reduced—by as much as a fifth to a quarter, according to the best estimates of Kandros and his staff.

The lofty rampway became the focus of many a festive gathering of friends. Anvilians began to make a pastime of congregating on the acropolis or out on the field before the north wall to eat, drink, disport themselves with music and dancing—all the while rejoicing in that magical, miniaturized activity upon the peak which was so steadily and painlessly reducing the lethal menace that had for so many weeks overhung their rooftops.

Therefore when, on the morning of the eleventh day, things went awry, it was before the complacent gaze of thousands of such happy spectators. The first panicked contingents of workmen reached the city with the news half an hour after the catastrophe had begun to develop, and even by this time the city at large had not yet grown alarmed. At the most, a certain hyperactivity on the part of the scarcely perceptible swarms of workmen had been here and there observed, and some people had thought they noted a faintly erratic quality enter the movements of the flock. By the time the disaster bad been reported throughout the city, its effects were just becoming visible. The rampway was beginning to sag and buckle, and little avalanches of loose earth had begun to stream down the neck of the mountain. An ever-growing efflux of panicked citizens began to swell the near-hysterical multitude thronging the meadow round the Flockwarden.

The flock had run amok. They had not only abandoned their orderly feeding pattern round the outermost edges of the peak, but they had begun a restless, almost rhythmic milling about on the ramp which had already caused a vibrational break-up of its pilings. Worst of all, several dozen of the beasts had turned their ruinous appetites upon the naked metal of the already bent mountain spine itself. This last news almost caused the assembled Anvilians themselves to run amok.

Dame Lybis had stepped within the hieratic screen to perform an emergency Solicitation of aid and enlightenment, and she had not yet emerged when the entire rampway was seen to collapse, and the monstrous peak itself bow down a farther heart-freezing three yards. The mutinous giants were already tumbling down the slopes when the roar of this ruin fell upon the ears of the multitude. Eternal moments unfolded during which the peak—universally, breathlessly regarded—settled no farther. Meanwhile, the indestructible behemoths, having ceased their uncontrolled plunge down the slope, began to extricate themselves from the jumbled jack-straws of the fallen timbers and sluggishly—unwillingly, one might have said—to assemble and descend the rest of the way to the city. It was then Dame Lybis emerged from her colloquy with the Flockwarden and proclaimed what she had learned. The Goddess, who for some days had exerted her control of the flock with ever-growing difficulty, had at last become exhausted with the effort, and the mammoth brutes had slipped her control. It was only through the most titanic efforts that she was now reasserting her government sufficiently to bring them back down to the plain.

Sexton Minor, on every feature of whose face was stamped distaste for his mission, walked into the forge room of one of Anvil's larger foundries, which stood not far from the main gate in the north wall. He threaded his way through it, vainly shouting requests for attention from various of the thousand sweating devils producing the fire and brain-numbing clangor that made his efforts so futile. Each man moved like a single, task-concentrated muscle in the toiling body politic of the desperate city. The feeding-ramp had to be rebuilt around the peak, presuming the priestess' current efforts to secure some kind of aid from the Flockwarden produced a remedy for the flock's sudden recalcitrance. To ponder in the interval whether she
would
provide a remedy—indeed, to ponder whether the enfeebled arm of the mountain-hammer would hold long enough to
permit
remedy—was far more agonizing than even the most infernal labors, and every smith and furnaceman was demon-eyed with his absorption in his work upon the braces, bolts, collars, groinings and crossbeams the new ramp was going to require. Sexton Minor wove his way, glaring resentfully at every hiss of steel in tempering tub, every gasp of a down-draft forge—as at some intentional impertinence.

In one corner he found a smith snatching a nap atop his anvil while his forge was a-heating. The man was curled peacefully on his side, his ankles neatly crossed upon the anvil's horn, his head on his palms. Minor could see that a forge-hammer leaned against the wall just beyond the man. He shook the smith awake. The man, balding and tuft-jowled, gaped glassily as Minor bellowed in his ear: "There has been a new oracle. Dame Lybis sends me here to get a forge-hammer. Give me
your
hammer!"

Having shouted this, Minor stood tight-lipped in the inscrutable majesty of his office, trusting that the man's sleep-drugged amazement would procure him the hammer without the pain of further howling. The man rolled off the anvil and fetched him the hammer. Minor, mistaking the weight of the tool which the knotted arm tendered him by the handle-tip as one might a spoon, gave his arm a painful wrench in taking it.

His eyes only lost the look of pain this put in them when he raised them, upon exiting the main gate, and viewed the Flockwarden's grotesque, jerry-built encasement. Scaffolding now enveloped the glass block. Lybis, still robed for the Solicitation, stood about two-thirds of the way up the vertical maze. She was attended not only by the detested acolyte Krekkit but by Aristarchs Pozzle, Hamp, and Smalling. The entire population spread upon the plain, though its flock-ward border stayed well withdrawn from those unpredictable beasts. The Sexton appeared to derive little pleasurable sense of consequence from this fact. Nifft received the hammer from him and passed it up to workers higher on the scaffold. He grasped Minor's shoulder encouragingly.

"Be comforted, honest Minor. Can't you see, from the way she treats the Aristarchs, that there's no way to win if you argue with her eccentric demands: Confront it, friend—she enjoys rubbing your set's faces in your covert cynicism toward the Goddess all these years. I mean, it's an unlovely, vengeful act, but surely understandable in someone who's been dedicated to a covertly ridiculed mystery for years?"

"There was simply no need to insist on a used forge-hammer, especially if one light blow
is
sufficient for the job," the Sexton sulked. But the Priestess now had the hammer, and despite his professed scorn, Minor seemed to catch some of that breath of apprehension which swept faintly through the entire multitude at that moment.

In the manner—oddly, under the circumstances—of one who gives comfort, Nifft said: "Oh, I'm sure it will do the job, Minor. If she can trace the deepest mountain-bones from where she lies, she can surely find one faint seam of critical weakness in her own coffin? Come, come. The Goddess is about to be, in her own term, `divested.' Ye gods, Minor, wasn't that a rousing set of lines—I mean for their expressiveness, apart from its import to all of us."

Nifft cocked his head back appreciatively, like one about to recite some admired verses. It was unlikely that the Sexton was going to hear him, for at this moment he watched fascinated as Lybis, with an address surprising in one of her diminutive stature, was hoisting the hammer above her shoulder, hefting for the swing. Nifft, instead of reciting, pointed to one of the copies of the latest oracle, which had already been posted throughout the city, scant hours after its delivery. He read aloud from it:

Can shackled Mistress bind and rule her slave?
 

Unsheathe my limbs, so long the air denied—
 

(Lybis now carefully took a wide-legged stance, and calculatingly applied the hammer nose to the ribbon-circled spot of any impact's maximum disruptive effect upon the glass.)

—Divest me, that my power, which never died
 

Might flow undammed, as when, before the grave
 

Did cover me, I governed in my pride!
 

The priestess slowly drew back the hammer for a second time above her head, and swung the steel slug lustily to the marked spot. A dull, disappointingly flat
whack
echoed over the heads of the crowd. The people roared softly. The entire crystalline vitrolith had grown milky, utterly opaque. And then it collapsed—smoothly as dry, heaped sand, it rivered off the giant, alien frame.

The scaffolding had been built rigid and close to the block, in order that it might catch and at least partially sustain the Flockwarden's pithless remains once their support should have fallen away. The precaution was needless. The Flockwarden did not fall. She stood springily upon her jointed legs, and her iridescent wings delicately essayed the air.