The Incompleat Nifft (44 page)

Aristarch Smalling, a slight, dapper man, laid a soothing—and preventive—hand upon Pozzle's arm. "It is not difficult to observe, Sexton," he said, smoothly in his turn, "from the north promontory—" he pointed toward the giant's skull, its orbits aimed skyward "—that the wall under attack is now deeply buckled in several places, and that even the most extreme counter-bracing measures will not hold some of those ruptures for more than a few days longer. Is it certain the hand does not lie somewhere in the same stone as contained the rest of the remains? If need be, we'll tear the entire escarpment to rubble to find the thing, and damn the expense."

Pozzle emitted a low moan of impotent anger here, and the square-faced Hamp looked distinctly greenish at the corners. Minor shook his head, his brows rising in a regretful shrug. "That's the heart of the trouble, gentlemen, but, like so much else in this affair, it's also going to be our salvation. You see, Dame Lybis was assured of the hand's separation from the rest of the giant's body when she remembered a part of her instruction as a tyro that mentioned Pastur's loss of it—indeed, it was so obscurely referred to that it took our failure to find the hand to recall it to her at all. But do you not see? Once she has found the textual foundation of that tradition in the archives, she will also find therewith, in all likelihood, a description of the place where the hand may be found."

"If it has survived to
be
found at all." Pozzle murmured this almost to himself, looking a trifle feverishly up at the great work above him.

And, toward the end of that day, as the sun neared its setting, that work was essentially one of final adjustments. By that time, all of Pastur's bones thus far exhumed had been put in place—and this comprised the entire skeleton except for the right hand. Throughout the day Aristarchs in various combinations had come, stood outside the temple, stepped into it and out of it again, and departed. Now, as the skeleton's shadow reached its maximum elongation across the rooftops of the eastern half of town, and lay upon them like a cage of vast and alien design, a large number of these dignitaries had collected before those—hopefully—pregnant doors.

The doors burst open. Out of them, and halfway down the steps, the Shrine-mistress stormed, brandishing a scrap of parchment. Her tiny figure too cast a long shadow, and the swarm of notables condensed close to her. Her voice, a small but strident sound audible from afar though indistinct, wandered through the forested acres of stone, weaving itself into the cathedralled ossuary. The rapt flock of other miniatures stood paralyzed, and close to her. Then her voice changed key, her arms moved expressively and, shortly, the swarm of Aristarchs dispersed, as if exploded by some verbal bomb. Nifft turned to Kandros, with whom he shared a seat upon a length of scaffold draped across the crest of the giant's high-arching ribs. Nifft's eyes, which had lazily abandoned the scene directly below them, had risen toward the wall on the northern side of the city. "Do you notice, Kandros, beyond the parts of the wall not directly assaulted by the flock, there still seems to be a kind of assault-like activity, but one carried on by small, shadowy forms?" He handed to the captain the wineflask they were sharing. Kandros applied himself comfortably to this before he answered:

"Yes. Men, I make them out to be. One wonders what they're after. Perhaps some of that gold smeared all over the wall. They're certainly drawing a lot of fire from the archers."

Nifft nodded with the solemn, enlightened expression of one who hears a very ingenious theorem propounded. "Thieves. Of course. They've probably been swarming here from every city on the coast since the word went out about the gilding." He was returned the flask, and paused to utilize it. "You know, Kandros, in the spirit of the great friendship I bear you, I must declare something to you. I am myself not unacquainted with the workings of thieves."

Kandros nodded in his turn, receiving the flask. "No man who is acquainted with the world at large, is unacquainted with the workings of thieves," he said. He utilized the flask.

By the time full dark was settling on the city, a large party of belanterned wagons was speeding from the base of the acropolis, down to the harbor. There, with that day's end, was the beginning of new labor.

By dawn, a big raft was launched from the dockside. It supported a massive crane, whose boom overreached its side. Heavy pontoons of welded metal casks gave it counter-support for its work. This work, which began with the first rays of the sun, was the retrieval, assisted by divers, of a series of large, weed-bearded, shell-crusted blocks, the longest of them some eighteen feet in length. A considerable heap of them soon accumulated on the dock. All were found in one narrow zone quite near the Staff, about midway out along it. Indeed, half of these objects were winched out from under the Staff, whose underlying sand and muck had to be laboriously sucked away with bellows-driven pumps supported by several auxiliary rafts, and serviced by dozens of additional divers and mechanics. Once deposited on the dock each piece was scraped by crews of men with saws and scaling-axes used by fishermen on the larger marine reptiles. The cleansed products that ended up loaded on wagons to make their way through the harbor gate were rather remarkably identifiable as bones; so undamaged were they, beneath the ocean's encrustation, that once cleansed, they were to be seen even by a man innocent of anatomy as the building blocks of a gigantic hand.

As night drew on again, most of the city was massed on the walls, expectantly attending the results of the completion of Pastur's skeleton, for this would be accomplished, all were informed, within the hour. Pozzle and Smalling stood in the privileged spot near the pylons of the north gate, an area reserved for the Aristarchs as one of the best posts for observation, and one of the rampart's strongest parts.

"Where
is
the little weasel?" Pozzle rasped, squinting toward the fossil-encumbered plateau. Smalling, who did likewise, answered: "I believe that temple landau just coming down from the acropolis bears toward us the unctuous little eel. Seems to be making remarkably fast time too. I wonder what it was he was so mysterious about `investigating.' "

A murmur of concern swept along the wall. Someone down the line reported seeing one of the hummocks containing the dormant carnivorous hatchlings stir, and tremble where it lay. For an indeterminate, unbreathing time, everyone watched the plain. The hillocks marking the self-inhumed monsters seemed universally unmoving. The thunderous impacts of the flock against the wall, never having ceased, returned to the general awareness. Missiles and hot oil resumed their rain—all but ineffectual except in a temporary way—upon the assailants. Pozzle and Smalling returned their gaze to the route the landau must be following to reach them, and when it came into view they found it to be remarkably far advanced toward them.

"Why such haste?" muttered Pozzle. "Some
new
catastrophe?"

"Here he is."

Breathless, Sexton Minor pitched from the landau and floundered up the causeway to the gate-side battlements. His manner, once he appeared, was of extravagantly elaborate discretion, and this drew all eyes upon him as he ushered the waiting pair over to a corner.

"A dreadful catastrophe has befallen us," he moaned. "Dame Lybis, in her excitement, didn't find the
whole
passage. I had a feeling about it. I went into the Archives . . . and I found the rest of it, right near where she had stopped looking when she discovered the first page. Look. Read."

Smalling seized the document. He held it so that he and Pozzle could read it together. When they had done so, both went to the posted copy of what Lybis had discovered in the archives the night before. They reread this, and then reread what Minor had just handed them. Taken from the beginning, the entire passage ran:

By foes disarmed, in death unhanded,
 

Though all disjoint, still Pastur clutches
 

The staff that he, in life, commanded,
 

And still with moveless fingers touches
 

That which shall make all harm be ended.
 

(Here the published fragment ended, and the Sexton's supplement began.)

For once each bone to each attaches
 

Thereby is his death rescinded—
 

Thus both his mind and might are mended,
 

And 'ware ye then, lest down he reaches—
 

What he pursues, great Pastur catches.
 

When they had finished their perusal, the two Aristarchs looked dazedly at Minor. The crowd of their fellows was now curiously following their actions.

"Where's Lybis?" Pozzle asked in a small and distant voice, his shock as yet embryonic, not fully born in his mind. "She must be shown—"

"Listen!" Smalling said. So closely did the pair have their fellows attending to them that his command was obeyed by the entire company of Aristarchs. Their heads rose, ears tilting inquisitively. From all along the wall a blurred roar of consternation welled. And nothing crosscut the sound. It was distinct from the most distant points of the wall—because the flock's crashing assault had ceased utterly. The Aristarchs surged to the battlements, whence the rest of the city already gaped upon the universally quiescent behemoths below. Even the dogged parties of thieves engaged in stripping the gold from the wall paused, astonished, in their shelters where they melted down their peelings. Somewhere a cry arose, and here and there it was taken up in accents of hoarse terror:

"Out on the field! Look out on the field!"

The hillocks holding the self-encoffined carnivores were trembling and heaving. Loose soil drizzled from shining sarcophagi of black plates which were beginning to split open even as they wrenched themselves from their shallow socketings in the earth. The one most advanced in its struggles lay also among the nearest to the trench. The sun was just down—there were no more shadows on the earth, and the light was red-gold. Clearly the populace saw the encasement split lengthwise, and clearly too saw what dragged itself forth and gigantically unfolded itself, beginning to winnow dry its wide, membranous wings as it stood fully revealed before them. It was a Flockwarden, and relatively small though the secondary egg had been, it stood a third as large as the Goddess herself, whose pavillioned corpse, lying not far off, had carried for so long the undying seed from which it had sprung.

By the time the light had faded, a legion of her kind had risen from the plain—and by that time, they had stood long enough, and their restive wings had so gained in dry resilience and eye-eluding speed of oscillation, that nothing appeared to hinder them from taking flight. But grounded they stood, vibrating with readiness, while their flock, separated from them by the chewn-down trench, shared their paralysis.

Once it was grasped that a heaven-sent hiatus (some obscure feature of these breeds' biological cycles, no doubt) was to be granted the beleaguered city, the multitude turned and bent its gaze on the acropolis, where the repair of Pastur's ancient amputation was being prosecuted energetically.

It was a dramatic vision that greeted the throng, and wrung a hopeful cry from it, a shout of excited discussion—for the crane erected for the hand's assembly, working from a platform built on the edge of the giant's pelvic bone, was at that moment but one step from finishing its task—raising what appeared to be the last joint of the last finger, and dangling it some few yards from its point of juncture with the condyle of the next-to-last phalanx. Though the light was fast dimming, the sketch of lanterns and torches in which the scaffolding ensheathed the skeleton starkly displayed its form. It was more anthropoid than not, but with certain striking exaggerations or diminutions of the human scale in some of its features.

Its arms and hands were almost simianly massive and elongate, but withal the fingers were extremely prehensile-looking, the fingers being four-knuckled, and the thumb connected by an exceptionally mobile-seeming joint to the metacarpal. The rib cage bespoke a stupendous chest of topheavy outline, with most of its mass displaced in an upward bulge. This was an arrangement that doubtless gave the arms a basis for the exertion of truly enormous leverage. Waistwards, the giant slimmed and his legs, though strong and shapely, were comparatively small. As to the skull, while in sum it was more bulky than human make, it had its excess of bulk exclusively in the cranial bulge, whose ampleness seemed divisible into four distinct lobes of bone. Toward the tiny, delicate jaw the lower skull shrank radically. The giant's face must have been eerily, gnomishly small under the swelling of its brainpan. As for the delicate tapering design that marked every aspect of Pastur's hugeness, it was evidenced even in this final phalanx now being lowered to its assembly-crowning lodgment. For the bone was scarce four feet long, spare and graceful, completing a digit identical to its fellows in its limber strength of design.

But just then, perversely, the movement of the crane suffered a hitch, then paused abruptly. The bone, light though it was, had been faultily wrapped with the cable, and its sudden slippage in its noose brought the crane up short. The phalanx was swung back again to the platform and lowered to be reslung. On the wall the people groaned, and shuffled like a herd growing nervous to the verge of stampede.

Alone among the crowd a group of three men standing near the gate showed a doubtful, retrograde cant of body in their gazing up at the skeleton. The million leaned toward it, as if from a distance to impart their own strength to the effort of the crane-crew upon that culminatory bone. But Smalling, Pozzle, and Minor, through each moment that they regarded it, cringed anew from what they saw, or from something they were thinking of as they watched.

The crane rose again, and swung the now perfectly balanced fraction of the giant across the cerulean, torch-lit sky. The crowd yearned, in a movement as multiple and unanimous as phototropism in a variegated garden, toward that elevated spectacle. The phalanx drifted across and down. Two workmen were poised on catwalks to either side of the near-finished finger. They received it in the air and guided it downward, applying its condyle with delicacy—almost tenderness—in its proper orientation to that of the penultimate bone. The piece rocked into place, making a gentle, solid crack of impact, belatedly but crisply audible across the deserted city. A much vaster noise succeeded this one.