The Incompleat Nifft (50 page)

"And how long will their jobs there last?" Costard snorted with contempt. "I alone have understood long-range trends in the sap market; I alone have seen the need for mine owners to amass large cushions of surplus capital against the harder times ahead! When the Superior is the only operating mine in the region, my workers will return in humble pilgrimage, upon their knees!"

"I see," murmured Barnar. "When you are the only operating mine in the region. . . ." In the following silence, once again we faintly heard the drumlike jostle of barrels being filled in the operation across the ridge.

Had we not come with the lucrative secret enterprise of the giants' pap already in hand, we would have left the doomed Superior Sap Mine then and there, Anhyldia's wrath be damned. This formidable woman was not to be lightly crossed, of course, but she was quite unlikely to cross paths with us. Anhyldia had been touched by a restlessness of middle life, a haunting sense of paths not taken, and two years ago she'd gone a-pirating. Since then she'd sent Barnar several enthusiastic epistles recounting the peace and joy she'd found in hewing heads and plundering merchantmen on the high seas.

But her attention to sap-mining had been wavering even before her setting-forth, and she'd bequeathed to her son a mine that drew from only one larval nursery chamber. Behemoth Nests are subject to what miners call "nest wander"; nursery chambers in use through four or five human generations will, in the mysterious tidal ebbs and fluxes of the Nest's life, be abruptly abandoned. A new nursery chamber is invariably established near the abandoned one, and usually still in range of the mine's "drilling field," its legally owned piece of mountain.

But sinking new gangways and pipelines to the new larval chamber required hard work at great expense, which Anhyldia had not cared to muster, and which her son had been unable to. And now that his own greed and folly had lost him his labor force, and pinched off the flow of his remaining profit, Costard's whole enterprise looked as good as dead.

Barnar and I, with our covert motives, must now do what we could to prolong the foundering mine's death throes. Through that long afternoon we lounged, gathering strength for the morrow, and suffering Costard to entertain us with his theories on global trade, his views on effective business management, with his opinions on every conceivable subject, in fact. Even the pleasant view of the mountains we enjoyed from his office balcony, and the abundant food and wine he served, could only partly palliate the torment of his monologue.

The urbane Bunt tried now and then to deflect the youth's pontifications into the more adult channels of congenial conversational exchange. At some reference to Behemoth, Bunt ventured, "One can't help but wonder, can one, about the giants' origins? Are they our natural allies, or our offspring? Are they our earth-born benefactors, evolved over time, or are they a living weapon wrought by our ancestors through a thaumaturgy that is now long lost to us? It's a question, I suppose, as old—"

"As all informed people agree," Costard announced, "Behemoths were fashioned by a wizard, of whose name not even an echo now survives." For Costard, the contrived perplexities and feigned bafflements by which polished folk set conversation going were plain and simple entreaties for instruction. Having made this pronouncement, he studied Bunt for any failure to agree; the young man seemed still vaguely nettled by Bunt's earlier acquiescence in the matter of the sap's price.

"Surely, esteemed Costard," Bunt answered, irked in spite of himself, "if it is to the sorcerous hypothesis that you incline, then its proponents generally agree that the great Hermaphrod was Behemoth's creator. His legendary words are often cited: `
Behold my Behemoths, my Watchdogs, Diners on Demonry
.' "

"Impossible." Costard shook his scabbed brow serenely from side to side. The helix of his cropped hair seemed, at this moment, to bring his head towards a point. "I have never heard this name anywhere."
³

I burst out laughing here, and had to struggle for self-command. I soothed the youth, "Perhaps, good Costard, this is because you have not yet learned all there is to know of the subject."

While scowling Costard struggled to digest this preposterous suggestion, Bunt regained his poise, and resumed the work of self-ingratiation. "Well, whatever those titans' provenance," he offered, searching for a distraction, "your place here in the very heartland of their domain is enviable, good Costard!" He waved an enthusiastic hand at the peaks around us, whose wrinkled barrenness the sun's decline had accentuated with shadows. "These very peaks seem to bulge and buckle with Behemoth's busy energies! Their—"

"We are far from the heartland of their domain," snapped the captious young man. "The great bulk of their Nests lie far below us. Only their highest and most protected chambers lie in reach of the peaks here."

Who is not aware that Behemoth Nests back their way up into the mountains? That their Nest-mouths open in the stony walls of the subworld, where the giants descend to forage and to feed on demonkind, and that their brood chambers and larval nurseries are recessed high into the peaks at the greatest possible remove from the demon realms they ravage? Costard's petulant pedantry at last conquered our efforts at adult discourse. We gave our attention to the wine and viands, and let the youth resume his monologue until we could decently retire.

I met a Titan in the earth
Where Mountain Queen gives endless birth,
And though so terribly She glowered,
Her helpless babe I half-devoured.
And then (I am afraid you'll laugh
!
)
I met what ate the other half.

WE ROSE well before the sun to make our elaborate and irksome preparations for our descent into the mine. While thus engaged, we questioned Costard closely for all he could tell us about working in the Nest. The young man had himself done a brief stint of tapping, back at the beginning of his "labor troubles," when he still had a few employees left to help him topside working the pumps. Naturally we were eager for the most circumstantial details he could give us about surviving down in the larval chamber.

But Costard proved evasive; specifically, he avoided direct answers about the abrasion on his head, which we felt almost certain he had suffered while he was tapping, and thus concerned us very closely. At last Barnar lost his temper.

"Out with it, Costard, at once! Tell us the circumstances, or we abandon you on the instant!" Costard stood blinking and gaping at his uncle's anger. At this point we were all standing at the very mouth of the gangway, which was the narrow, steeply inclined shaft down which we were to ride a wheeled bucket-car to the larval chamber.

Barnar and I were now fully outfitted for tapping, and were both feeling most keenly mortified by the personal indignities this outfitting had inflicted on us. We were near naked, clad only in stout buskins, leathern short-kilts, and bandoliers that bore our gear and weapons. And we were dyed. Our hair, skin, clothing, weapons—every square inch of us—was dyed a screaming-bright orange. We'd had to step into a tub of the tint, like plods into a tick-dip. We had known—who does not?—of this practice. It is only this strange "hole in the eyes" of Behemoth, the giants' perfect blindness to orange (or to the color that orange becomes in the bluish light of the Nest) that makes tapping possible in the first place, and potentiates the whole sap industry. This defect in Behemoth's vision has, time out of mind, profited humankind and their livestock the world over.

But knowing of the dyeing was nothing like suffering it—nothing like standing there at the gangway half naked and pumpkin-hued, gaudy as carnival clowns in the morning light that streamed through the rafters of the mine's main building. To stand thus chagrined and discomfitted, on the very point of being bucketed down a dark shaft to the mountain's bowel—to stand thus on the brink of our peril and still be denied by Costard the information we sought, was too infuriating.

"You will tell us," Barnar boomed, "precisely how you received those abrasions to your head, or we will now and forever leave your mine to its fate! You were picked up, were you not? Though dyed, you were seen, and seized by a Behemoth? Why did this occur?"

"I slipped," said the young man with frigid dignity, "in some larval excrement."

We shortly had the gist of it from the testy young man. Costard, after his little fall in some excreta, had neglected to wash his boots, whose movements then grew visible where the fecal stains obscured their dye. One of the ever-vigilant Nurses who feed and tend the larvae had rushed to devour him as a brood parasite, and Costard had burst his flask of brood scent (a precautionary measure every tapper goes equipped for) at the last possible instant. Doused with this aroma, an unlucky tapper is instantly perceived by a Behemoth as an infant of its own kind, and is tenderly reinstalled among the larval shoals. That Costard had received only such minor lacerations as he suffered was testament to the finesse of a Behemoth's giant jaws in the handling of so relatively minute a morsel as a man.

We found it most vexing that Costard would have allowed his personal vanity to deny us the useful lesson to be drawn from this incident: we must be alert to the danger of casual befoulments of our persons, for such besmirchings had power to make us fragmentarily visible to the titans we robbed.

Too soon arrived the moment when we must step down into the bucket-car, and divest ourselves of sky and sunlight, of winds and rains and stars. But before Barnar slid the hatch-cover over us, he could not forbear a final scolding of his nephew. "Look that you take full advantage of Bunt's generously offered help," he admonished. "We'll have our hands full getting the knack of it below—things must go smoothly up here." Costard's frigid nod was not reassuring. He still regarded Bunt with a look of unappeased distrust, as if the young ass sensed some dissembled opponency in the hive-master's unfailing affability and compliance.

"Look here, Costard," I put in. "Accept the help Bunt offers. You
need
help. Doesn't the failure of this once-great concern—" (and here I thrust an arm up from the bucket, and swept it at the empty building around us) "—suggest to you that perhaps you have shown some ineptness in your management of this mine?"

Costard stood apalled, thunderstruck, his wildest imaginings outdone by this grotesque suggestion.

"Enough!" boomed Barnar. "Let's be down and have done. Two weeks, no more, Nephew! Ready, Nifft?"

"I am," I sighed. Barnar pulled shut the gangway door. The pulleys fed us rattling down into the dark.

The stony sinus that swallowed us breathed a faint organic stench, a lair-smell that grew stronger the deeper we sank. Some years before, and some hundreds of leagues away, Barnar and I had made another trip together under Kairnish mountains (as recounted in
The Fishing of the Demon-Sea
) and it was an experience we were both remembering as we stood sinking into that creaking, rattling darkness.

But now it was decidedly not a demon aura we sank into. The Nest smell was a more vital fetor that breathed of fecundity and relentless energies. Our descent felt not like an infernal entombment, but rather like entering the domain of deities, where an elemental vitality surged and swarmed.

When we clanked to a stop we had long expected it, as the Nest-aura hummed ever more strongly around us, yet the actual jolt of arrival sent a pulse of fear through me.

There before us was a rectangle delicately outlined in faint blue light: the hatchway to the larval chamber. I groped, and found the latch, and thrust the hatchway open.

Only when I felt the pang of anticlimax did I learn the pitch of my expectancy. Here were no giants, but only an equipment-filled nook, a deep natural recess in what must be the wall of the nursery chamber. Here, in our operations center, were racks of tools, supply lockers, bales and boxes of provisions, a pair of hammocks. All were orange like ourselves—or rather, in the pale blue light of this place, were of a smoky, smouldery hue that matched our own.

"Come on then!" I blurted. We all but ran out into the chamber, in haste to front our fears, and have them faced.

Human constructions, even the greatest of wizard-raised manses, are utterly dwarfed by even one chamber of Behemoth's fashioning. A luminescent fungus marbled the walls and limned the chamber's vastness with its cyanic sheen.

Even empty, that great void of chewn-out stone would have stunned us by its scope alone. But filled with that larval trove. . . ? By Crack, Key, and Cauldron! Our hair stood up upon our bodies! Each pale grub was as big as a trading sloop, and shoals of them shimmered in that great lagoon of blue light, their obesities heaped in glossy hillocks, like seadogs sunning on rocks. In the rich gloom, barrel-ribbed and oily-bright, the numberless larvae looked to be exactly what they were: bulging casks of purest nutriment.

"An adult! A Nurse!" Barnar seized my arm and turned me. The Nurse's hugeness swam nearer through the larval sea. She was bigger than an ocean-crossing galleon, and yet so eerily swift and nimble! Her complex jaws—black, antler-like mandibles—were delicately scissoring, mincing some fleshy mass they held. She tenderfooted through the nurslings to a point not distant from us, and thrust the masticated mass down into the supplicant jaws of a grub. The meal would be demon-flesh, of course.

The grub fed greedily. Only the tapering head and tail ends of the grub were capable of moving very much; this one's tail wriggled in sympathy with her busy little black jaws at the other end.

We stood long, and again long, gazing at the Nurses coming and going, and at the Lickers, almost as large, that patrolled the chamber walls, and fed the luminous fungus with their saliva. There was an ebb and flux to the ministrations of these adults, who were at times few and far, while at other times scores of them swarmed at once in view, each feeding grubs by the dozens.

The torn demon fragments that these Nurses bore were received, we knew, out in the tunnels from the mighty Foragers who harvested the subworld far below. These piecemealed prey were sometimes still conscious, and gave voice, cackling and jabbering as they were borne to their doom in a larval gut. But, their infernal utterances apart, all this huge life moved in relative silence, with a whispery friction of chitinous abdomens, and a muffled click of tarsal claws on stone.