The Incompleat Nifft (72 page)

And here, in further answer, came an empty wagon clattering down from the crest, the driver wild-eyed, flogging his team and bellowing. He came at once in collision with an up-bound wain of field-rations, pulled by heavy plods among which his team entangled themselves.

Hob, with a roar, led us pelting up the highway. He grabbed the panicked teamster from his seat before the man's wild shouts had grown coherent and, masking the movement skilfully, clubbed him senseless as he brought him to the ground. Hob then smartly set his men to disengaging the tangled teams, and bringing the vehicle out of the highway, and once the way was clear he roared them to press on double-time up to the crest. Traffic, after a ripple of hesitation, flowed smoothly again. A pulse of panic had been masterfully damped out by the canny old veteran captain. Now we topped the first tier of the heights, and a broad reach of the bee-pastures stretched before us.

I was the more appalled by what I saw because my last view of this prospect, some months earlier in Ha'Awley Bunt's phaeton, had so smitten me with its polychromatic glory. A rainbow blaze of blossoms, like the wing of some impossible, gigantic blutterfly, had lain draped across the hills. These rolling meadows had glowed crimson, saffron, sapphire, rose and violet, all drenched in wind-cleansed sunlight purely gold as honey! Now stenchful smokes tumbled across torn, naked dirt, and wherever the wind briefly jerked aside the black and smutty curtains, it was to display the litter and wreckage of war: Huge, charred carcasses smouldered amidst the wreckage of barricades; smudged, scorched troops limped to or from new battlements which scores of wagons served with casks of pitch and torches. At one place the smoke parted and, for an instant, framed a huge ballista which launched a blazing dart, before the fumes re-engulfed it from my view.

Into this confusion Hob plunged with his men at a gallop, and I must needs follow, or lose his directions to Ha'Awley Bunt. But at the crest of a hilltop I paused, instinctively, for a last view down upon the harbor, and saw something that froze me where I stood.

Out in the open channel, just a bowshot outside the mouth of the harbor, a huge pallid shape slid up from the blue-black deeps. It was Costard.

In the brief interval since we'd parted he had grown in bulk, and in deformity. His limbs, sunk in his sleek obesity, had shortened, broadened. His jaw jutted hugely, and if humanity remained in his contorted eyes, it was the fleeting, fitful consciousness of the lunatic that flickered there. And then I saw that he was pursued. Huge black haggards, a whole hunting pack of them, dogged his suety flanks, and one nipped a little red bite from his buttock. Costard's blood clouded the water and inflamed the pack with hunger.

But the wound galvanized the bloated metamorph as well; he blew a wrathful geyser of spray, and wheeled in the water, and plied his haggletooth jaws, biting the haggards in twain. Their blood in the water woke him to a hunger that eclipsed his initial wrath, and he fell to devouring his fragmented attackers.

The whole spectacle transpired in moments. Costard searched fretfully for further victuals, and then seemed to grow aware of the harbor before him and its swarm of ships.

It was at this precise juncture that a mighty cry went up from the fields behind me, and a great, dense wall of smoke whelmed against my back, engulfed me, swallowed breath and sight at once, even as the earth shook under me, and I heard, above a thousand frightened cries, an earthquake noise, the sodden groan of a hillside breaking open.

Thus benighted, I experienced the tearing of an inner veil from my greed-ensorcelled understanding. We should not be in this place, convulsed with dangers as it was. We should never have brought our precious
Bounty
within a league of it!

I plunged, blind and choking, back the way I had come, praying to feel the highway underfoot, finding it, and pelting down it.

I dodged between the wagons. The draybeasts screamed as the teamsters fought to turn them. I vaulted the backs of beast and man, overleapt tilting vehicles caught up and toppling in the turmoil of retreat. Below me, the pale leviathan that had been Costard—red gobbets of haggard eddying about him—nosed zig and zag, tentatively into the harbor-mouth, the traffic of ships still unaware of him, most eyes bent dockwards, though I thought in the tiny multitudes I saw faces turning up towards me, tiny arms pointing. Above and behind me the hilltop thundered with a heaving hugeness whose tremors I felt through my footsoles. Though I fought my way down, down through the switchbacks, still these concussions drew closer, while screaming voices came avalanching down behind me, fleeing troops in whose shrill outcry recurred the word
queen
like a refrain.

Will my folly be believed? Can such utter abdication of my faculties be credited? I, veteran of a thousand near collisions with calamity, to prove so fuddled with the jostle and uproar. I leapt most acrobatically—twice, straight down across the switchback at a leap, landing once most catlike on the hub of a toppled wagon's wheel after a vault of full two rods and more! My eye danced bayward, gauging monstrous Costard's quickening advance into the harbor, then shot crestward, seeing a great wall of smoke billow out from the meadow, as if the approach of something huge were thrusting the fumes ahead of it. I actually tried to judge the distance I might run before either impending disaster fell, and if I would be in earshot of Barnar (who surely must be looking crestwards soon, as the tiny multitude were beginning to do) in time for him to anoint his hands and feet, fly out to
Bounty
, cut her hawsers and drag her out to open sea . . .

And then, of course, it smote me—what I should have done the
instant
I knew of Doom's advance. I thrust my hand within my jerkin, and anointed my
own
hands and feet, and leapt into the air!

And as I did so, the smoke bulged again from the crest, and the wind plucked it away in streamers, and a Queen Bee rolled out onto the very brink of the highlands.

By the Crack, and by all that crawls out of it! Ten times as big as a Forager she was! Though of a tiny race, it seemed Her Royalty had taken disproportionate impetus from an ichor brewed by a not wholly alien species.

But Her Royalty was defaced in her deformity. The amber fur that ermined her black, armored head and thorax, blazed glorious gold in the sun, it is true, but her stumplike wings and spindly legs were nigh powerless to move her swollen hugeness. On her abdomen's ballooned distension the black-and-gold armor that sheathed it had separated, the sclerae stretched apart, like polished warshields on a white wall. Her inexorable advance was achieved by a convulsive larval wriggle. I could not turn my face away from her poised immensity. I swam backwards down the air, as one who tilted back and fell. Thus my bellow was aimed at the sky:

"Barnar! Cast off the
Bounty
, Barnaaaar!"

I was still too high to be heard in any case, yet there he was when I craned back to see, swimming through the lower air from the dockside toward our
Bounty
, and there was the crowd in two waves rolling back along the docks and quays, recoiling from the path of the Queen, should she fall.

She towered and teetered there, as the shifting winds scoured her bright in the blaze of noon, as the sun struck a royal largesse of gold from her fur, and painted splashes of rainbow across her great faceted eyes.

I heard it an instant before my eye could tell: "Here she comes!" someone bellowed above me. But already I swam furiously down toward the bay. Tilting immensely forward, the Queen Bee fell, tumbling across the sun, flinging down shadow where I flew.

I plunged toward the
Bounty
, where even now Barnar, Old Biter high, swept at the hawser of her stern anchor. The Queen tumbled majestically through the brilliant air, her stunted wings buzzing futilely, flashing like a thousand swords. Halfway down she smote the mountain flank, thundering, vaulting out again adown the air.

I swooped down to Barnar as he cut the hawser with one mighty axe-stroke—and as Costard's dripping hugeness surged up from the water at
Bounty's
stern.

The hapless leviathan meant, I think, a greeting, a familial embrace. Costard's huge, addled eye noting Barnar aloft at his axe work, and recognizing him. But so close he came up that Barnar leapt aloft, and I with him, recoiling wildly, as Costard's eye saw something else above him, and blinked with awe, and Barnar and I swam wildly upwards as darkness leapt down at us and struck the sea.

Our terror put us well aloft, and we looked down from high on that awful sinking. In a towering explosion of foam the Queen snatched under a dozen vessels, our dear, doomed little
Bounty
dead smack in their midst. She snatched them down brusquely, in the way a gambler's hand might sweep his take off of the board. In a great cloudy fist of bubbles those ships, and Costard with them, were snatched below, sliding down the steep flank of the drowned peak, a seething whiteness dwindling, dwindling, dwindling in the blue-black deeps, then swallowed by the thousand-fathom dark.

We hung there seeing that descent long after it had ceased to be visible. We imagined her down there, the Queen, furrowing the steep mud slope like a great ploughshare, and planting in that furrow our poor beloved
Bounty
. All of our immense treasure was dwindled to a little golden seed entombed where sunlight would never touch it in a million years.

Where wild winds shepherd their cloudy kine,
Where lightnings unborn sleep sheathed in
the blue,
That's the bright country that I would call mine,
And there would I do what the winged ones do
!

ALL BUNT'S QUEENS had imbibed his fateful potation. Their eruption from the earth, almost simultaneously throughout the fields, was a final frenzy heralding death, much as with Costard's cattle. The drowned Queen's demise preceeded her sisters' by less than an hour.

Dolmen's highlands now lay utterly desolate of apian life, a vast scab of scorched dirt. Dazed-looking troops came down, and helped at harborside, where dazed Dolmen Harbor worked to mend the hole torn through its body.

A big section of dockside, and an inn or two, had been snatched down to the deeps by the sinking Queen. Her hesitation up on the precipice had been just long enough to warn the multitudes below. The Royal Death had plucked but a few score human lives down with it. Barnar and I joined the general reconstruction. From barges and wherries we gaffed in debris from the harbor, retrieved the dead (where we could), set new pilings and planking, looked after the bereaved and the ruined.

To Ha'Awley Bunt's credit, he came down and worked with the rest, perhaps more dazed than anyone, save Barnar and myself. A curious zone of respect enveloped the hive-master in the midst of his townfellows, that little bubble of silence and averted eyes that surrounds the sacrifice, Disaster's Chosen One.

I do not think his precise agency in this disaster was widely understood, but this was not from any secrecy of his own in the matter, at least not now that all was destroyed. On that first eve of the tragedy we found ourselves sitting at table with him in the same mead hall where we had met. Scores of men did as we did that night, sat numbly drinking, till we laid our heads upon our arms and slept thus through the night.

How vividly I see Bunt still as he was that evening, his tired head drooping as low as his flagon, his faint, far-off voice marvelling, as if he spoke his protests to some invisible tribunal in the air beyond us: "I put so little in their little jaws! I wet a pinhead in the pap, and touched
lightly
!
Lightly
I touched it to their tiny mouths! That one time only! Weeks ago! I still have practically the whole jar of the treacherous, insidious ichor!"

"Perhaps in itself, in its own sphere," I dully chided, "it is neither insidious nor treacherous, but needs active cupidity to make it so."

He looked at me, his eyes bleak beyond riposte. Still, his amazement was strongest in him. "So little, Nifft! As if but the
scent
of Behemoth's Queen breathed on them, as if she but whispered to then, and on that hint, that rumor only, they grew gigantic and devoured me whole! Such potency! At least, with the pap, I shall recoup some capital. No power so dangerous that someone will not crave it."

Even numbed Barnar shuddered at that. "Where will you sell it then, oh honest merchant? We would know where to stand clear of."

"As yet I do not know. Do you reproach me, gentlemen? I am a man of business—what would you have? You may be sure that when my fortune is but part-repaired, I'll pay indemnities aplenty here, and mend what can be mended of what's marred. . . ."

I did not doubt him then, and do not now. I did not care. All light had left my life, all hope my heart. I stolidly drank my head heavy enough to sink, and sink, and sink until I slept.

We rose in the early morning. I have never felt graver or grimmer, and yet at the same time I felt unaccountably refreshed, freed of some chronic weariness I had not known I suffered. We had already determined how we would proceed. At a ship chandler's we bought two of the votive wreaths which sailors cast out in open-ocean burials.

We set out walking along the southern rim of the harbor. On the south it narrowed to a sharp little spit of rock with the sea on both sides of it; we had come round this spit on foot when we first arrived here, still wet from the maw of the glabrous, and we remembered the solitude of the place. When we reached it we found that the wind of the open channel there erased the noise of the distant docks, still swarming with repair.

We stripped down to bathe in the sea. As I laid my arms on the rock, and then my gear and my garb, I greeted each article as a part of myself, comprising, in the aggregate, my All, my Fortune. Videlicet: old, battered, handy Ready Jack with his chipped pommel-stone, and the ghul-skin sheath I bought in Cuneate Bay; my stout jerkin that keeps me so warm in keen mountain winds and is tough enough to turn a knife blade too, with a little luck; my old moneybelt here, provisioned heftily enough now (save when I thought what had been lost!); my buskins stout and supple; tough, trusty leg armor that yet lets me sprint, withal; and my leathern amphora of the Unguent of Flight.