The Incompleat Nifft (71 page)

"Seems we have a distinctly military kind of commerce here," Barnar mused. "And at the same time not a few of the locals look to be taking up travelling." For mixed with the freighters were not a few other craft taking on passengers, while everywhere on the docks the dray wagons were interspersed with little knots of folk waiting to take ship, most of them caped for open sea breezes and hovering protectively round their little cargoes of baggage.

"Yes. Things are definitely a-boil," I answered. "
Bounty'
s well anchored outside this mess. If Bunt's in a pickle I'd best have the coin straight out of him, in case he's a-sinking. I'll try his manse first."

Barnar climbed up to the quay and took an outside table at the wineshop, beginning his watch on
Bounty
. With his Unguent strapped to his middle beneath his jerkin, he would not need the skiff, which I rowed cross-harbor, weaving easily amid the larger craft, and making better time than I would afoot through the crowds on the quay.

I tried to read Dolmen's situation as I oared my way. Whatever was going on up in the highlands, there was much of war and siege about it. An unbroken snake of traffic rippled up the switchbacks of both the main upland highways. The downcoming wagons were mostly empty, and those climbing bore baled torches and barrels of pitch and the like.

"Ho, lanky Karkmahnite! Sweet Nifft! Withstay thy sinewy arm a moment from thy toils, my lizardly darling!" This merry salutation, brazen as trumpets, blared down upon me. Looking up, I saw perched in the forecastle of one of Bunt's freighters, lissom Higaia—in arms, and looking quite dazzling so. She wore a snug pectoral plate of brass, molded to the ripe economy of her breasts, which it enshrined in lovely sculptures of themselves. She had a stout gaffing hook for cargo handling which she gripped two-handed, its shaft across the back of her neck—the way a resting trooper will wear his javelin like a yoke—but in the next instant her vessel's creaking cargo boom caught her attention. She whirled and brandished the gaff like a baton of office then: "Ease it there!
Slow
on that windlass! Easy down, Hoofa! Easy down!" Her freighter was one of the few taking on rather than discharging goods.

I tied up to the ladder she dropped me, and climbed it. We hugged each other with a will, Higaia and I, while over the crown of her raven-black head I saw a big flat packet of canvas lowered into her freighter's hold.

And her freighter it was, or half hers. She was cargomaster—boss of the freight and its handling, coequal, in Bunt's commercial fleet, to the vessel's captain. This was Radula, a nervous, friendly man with an unusually fair skin that ran heavily to freckles and sunburn, unfortunate skin for a sea-captain. He greeted me very civilly and then told Higaia, an odd quaver to his voice, "I'd like to be standing well away within the hour, my dear. Can you manage it?"

"With ease, Raddy, with ease. I'm going down now to see the comb secured. Come on, Nifft. Are you heading south? We're bound for the Minuskulons."

"As are we, and beyond them to the Ephesions. There rides our little carrack
Bounty
, yonder. We're just putting in to collect a fiftyweight Ha'Awley owes us."

Higaia paused at the hatchway, looked at
Bounty
, and then looked at me rather sharply, before she led me down the ladder into the hold. Its gloom was fragrant; aromas of brine and sweetness warred. Her voice echoed below me, "A fiftyweight's no trifle, I suppose . . . but you'll have to go up to the meadows for it."

"Do you imply that this is difficult, or dangerous?"

"Let me show you something."

Leading me over to the canvas balke that had just been laid upon a dozen like it—and the whole hold was stowed full of the same—she plucked from her belt a dagger honed sharp as a razor, and, crosswise down one corner of the packet, she slashed out a narrow flap perhaps a cubit long. Within it was honeycomb, half a cubit thick. Each cell could have coffered the head of a man. In the shadowy hold, the sheen of the wax dimly glimmered, and the liquid gold within it looked dark as amber. It made the scalp prickle with that flush of danger riches give you.

"It was for harvesting this," Higaia told me, "that I got my promotion from the bath-house. For you see, when they were producing comb on this scale, though huge, the bees could still fly, at least for short stretches, and they had begun attacking men and women. Bunt suddenly needed men-at-arms. For thrice the pay of the baths you may be sure I made my skills known to him."

"I knew you were a dancer. I don't wonder you're mistress of the dance of arms," I answered, distracted. I was picturing this monstrosity that had come to pass in Bunt's flower fields. "These giant bees," I prompted, "defended their comb, then, from the harvesting?"

"No. Their attacking seemed spontaneous, a kind of hunting. They had a week before devoured the last of the flowers right down to the roots—all the meadows are bald dirt now. The bees were evidently trying to eat their victims, but naturally their mouthparts were wrong for the work. It is of course as fatal to suffer an attempted eating, by an insect of that size, as it is to be eaten."

"You distinguished yourself, plainly, to be given this command."

"I did indeed, my dear. I'm quite an adept of both axe and cudgel, and though this was shield-and-torch work, I distinguished myself in many a battle. It has been Bunt's salvation that, with a bit of pitch flung on them, these monstrosities will burn so readily. When the pressure of battle declined, he was quick to redeploy us for shipping the harvest out—he needs to recoup the hemorrhage of gold he has suffered from this nightmarish metamorphosis."

"The battle has slackened off, then?"

"Not exactly. Rather, the defense needs somewhat fewer troops, for when the newer, bigger generation emerged from the hives—which are now great dug caverns in the earth, under where the hive houses stood before—when this flightless generation emerged from the earth, we found they could be barricaded; dammed up in their sluggish, lurching onslaught, and burnt by the score. Still, they come out of the earth in numbers that our decimations barely match."

"To what dimensions have they now attained?" I asked, a touch of frost upon my spine.

"Big as titanoplods, or near. Their legs do them little good anymore, but they have a slow, blundering power, lurching like grubs. At favorable points of terrain, our troops have grown adept at throwing up collapsible barricades across the bees' line of progress, and while the brutes are baffled, pitch and torch them."

"Do you tell me, then, that Bunt holds disaster at bay?"

"Seemingly. There are some grounds for anxiety. As I've said, the hives expanded, and the bees dug them underground as they grew. I have been down here this last two days but people have been telling me the earth in the uplands is unquiet. And more than one person has also said that the ground around the hives is swelling, rising, doming up, as at huge movement underneath. My dear—may I presume a bit?" Here Higaia reached up and affectionately touched my cheek. She had an air of soothing me as she spoke, as if I suffered from some fever. "You have a nice little carrack, sweet Nifft, and your moneybelt feels quite hefty when I hug you. Let go of this fiftyweight. For one thing, Bunt must be nigh paupered. His bees devoured
all
the flower fields, including those of the other Dolmen hiveries, and Bunt stands liable to enormous indemnities. And for another thing, I feel to my bones that the worst hasn't happened yet, and I'm glad to be gone from here myself inside the half hour. Quit this place when I do, Nifft! Run with us down across the Agon, and in a fortnight we'll be having some fine mulled tartle together at an inn I know in Quincipolis!"

Leave fiftyweight lying, and walk away? What was this madness that seemed to run like plague among my woman friends? There was something almost ominous about it, and I frankly gaped at her. There was a commotion of voices topside. Higaia sprang up the ladder, and I followed her.

A shouted conversation was in progress between a group of cargo handlers at the port rail, and some mercenaries on the dock below. These men-at-arms—the loudest their seeming captain, a gnarled man with a scarred face—seemed to be demanding something the handlers denied. Higaia came to the rail, silencing her crew, and greeted the captain, "Good morrow, Hob. What are you after?"

"We need half a dozen of your longshoremen, Higaia. We're short troops round the South Dandinnia."

"Come up and talk to me, Hob."

As the gnarled veteran came up the gangplank, Higaia explained, "The South Dandinnia is one of Bunt's hives. It's the one lying nearest the highway, just beyond that crest up there."

We led Hob to the forecastle for privacy after Higaia set her crew back to shipping the last bundles of giant comb. "Is it Bunt sends you?" she asked Hob. "When last he was down here he was most urgent this cargo should be shipped and away—he needs the capital."

"He needs a hundred more men round South Dandinnia, Higaia, whatever else he thinks he needs. I haven't seen him and there was no time to go asking. The ground is shaking and around the hive it's swollen into a hill! If a wave of even bigger bees comes out we'll need a big wall ready for them and torchmen enough to man it! Bunt's over in the central fields, on the barricades round the oldest hives. I'd be longer getting there and back than coming down here."

"Well, take them, if they'll go, though if any want to set sail with me I won't deny them passage." She and Hob locked eyes here a moment. The veteran's flinty gaze conceded something. "I might go with you myself," he said, "but I don't like leaving conflicts unresolved."

I had been listening with a sinking heart, as it grew plainer that Bunt, encircled by disaster, would probably be powerless to pay us our fiftyweight out of pocket. But then I was inspired with a solution. "Good Hob, might I follow you back up to the highlands, and be directed thence to where Bunt is?"

"How not? But let's make haste."

"One minute more I beg! Dear Higaia, if I came back with a fiftyweight draft signed by Bunt, could I not draw it in shares from the sale of your comb?"

"With a properly drawn instrument, my dear, greedy Nifft, how not?"

Hob took some little further time to recruit more men from another of Bunt's ships, and Higaia's freighter was already getting under way as we trotted single file up the first few switchbacks of the highway. As our line threaded its way up between wagons heaped with bales of torches and kegs of pitch, I could see tiny Higaia standing with Radula on the foredeck, conferring over something, their little features so plain in the limpid air I could make out the bright red of Radula's sunburned nose. Another ship—not one of Bunt's—was standing out across the harbor at about the same time. A knot of emigrants crowded amidships at the port rail, their heads turned in troubled unison toward the home they were leaving, some of them gazing upwards past us at the heights, whence ragged scarves and banners of smoke still blew, and the gusted noise of strenuous multitudes at work, or war, or both.

Hob had a good threescore men in tow. I'd noted at once that, however mixed their gear, these men had heavy leathers in common—jerkins or doublets above, trousers or chaps below. Each, moreover, had some kind of stout headpiece about his person, be it a half-casque, or just a skullcap with metal plates sewn on, and that all this varied head gear had in common a heavy leathern back flap to protect the neck—clearly standard issue provided by Bunt for hirelings he had drawn from varied sources over the recent weeks of his accelerating disaster.

At first I hung back in the line to hear scuttlebutt, though most of these fellows were short-spoken, seeming winded by the climb; between working on the "lines" up top, and as cargo handlers down on the docks, most of them had already pulled long shifts over the last few days. Only a worried-looking youth made me much answer to my sociable probings. "Master Bunt must be quick with a lictor to get such work from you fellows, eh?" I asked him.

"Why, I should think so! If it wasn't for payout every second sunset, and regular gold in my belt, I'd have shipped out a week ago! I mean didn't I see Tark get his head pulled off? See it with my own eyes. Tell me If I didn't see it, Weppel! Eh?" This last was addressed to the man jogging ahead of him, and punctuated with a poke of a finger.

Weppel shrugged off the touch, and snapped without turning, "So you saw it! We all did! Have done! That risk's past in any case. The monsters can't get airborne any more and pounce on us like that. Have done!"

"All I mean is," the youth nagged, "was having his head pulled off worth five lictors a shift and kip-and-commons? You think poor Tark thought it was worth it as that damned bee tugged his head off so . . . so
clumsily
?"

"Get off the road, then, you nanny's brat, if you don't like the wage!"

This riposte came not from Weppel but a teamster we jogged past, sweating his team up through a turn, his wagon overloaded with pyramided casks of pitch.

"Stow the jabber!" Hob barked from above. I would learn most from him in the end, so I worked my way toward the head of the line. We were now a quarter mile up the heights, and the swarming harbor looked small below. The perspective allowed me to notice anew how deep the little bay was, with a brief, grey ring of shallows round the dockside rim, then plunging steeply to blue-black, thousand-fathom depths. There was little
Bounty
riding on the deep water's edge.

"I gather then, Captain Hob," I ventured cheerily, coming up with him, "that Bunt keeps ample specie on hand, and pays his troops every two days."

He gave me little more than his dour, scarred profile in answering. "True. But how much he has left, and how much he'll pay you, are other questions."

"No doubt. His draft-in-hand will do if cash be short. What do you make of his chances of saving his enterprise—speaking soldier to soldier you understand, just between us."

I got Hob's whole face for a moment at that, and a glare of surprise. "You look a man of the world, sir," he growled, facing crestward again and redoubling his pace. "What do you think?" We were near the top now, and with the gusts of smoke, the scents of pitch and strange meat burning came wafting down more thickly, and the hubbub of men's voices had a shrill and desperate note.