West of January (10 page)

“No sir.”

“You don’t know anything, do you? An angel is supposed to enjoy a woman once and never go back to her. If he visits the same tribe, he should choose another woman. Your father must have gone back to your camp, or he could not have known about you…and he certainly could not have passed her this unless they were alone in her tent again.”

Now I was recalling a vague image of a yellow-haired man with no clothes on, playing romp with my mother. I could just remember it, I thought. Or remember being able to remember it once. Or was I making it up? I said nothing.

“It’s supposed to be a mark of approval!” The angel’s face was turning redder than ever. “How old…big…could you have been when he met you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Green-two-blue?” he repeated. Violet spoke to himself a lot. He was a bitter, sour old man and more than a little crazy, which is not uncommon among angels.

“Do you…know my…father…sir?”

“I’m not sure. There were a couple of blond cherubim—younger than me. I think one of them may have looked rather like you. He might have won his wheels just after I left the first time.” He stared at my face as though he had not seen it before. “An angel baby! A real angel baby!” Then he snorted and handed me back my token. “Well, now you have two of them. Get back in the chariot, angelbrat.”

Again a reprieve… I did not understand. I hesitated. He pushed me and I staggered, with a yelp of pain.

He shouted. “We’re not supposed to know! Of course angels make bastards! I must have some, too, here and there, but they’re not obvious because I don’t have blue eyes.”

I looked at his eyes. They were brown and bloodshot with the dust of travel. They were also strangely moist, a point I had not noticed before.

“Get in! And stay downwind from me. You herdfolk all stink—it’s that woollie meat that does it.”

He could have been eating little else himself lately, I thought. But I made haste to obey.

Yet when he followed me up into the chariot, he did not immediately set sail again. He threw open a chest and began rummaging through the contents, all the way to the bottom.

“Here!” he snapped at last. “If you’re going to travel as an angel, you’d better look like one.”

He wadded a bundle and threw it at me—leather breeches and a fringed leather shirt. The clothes were badly worn, with holes in the knees and elbows. They smelled of rot, like a bad water hole, but I hastened to discard my pagne and don these unexpected gifts. They must have been his before he swelled so much around the middle. They were still huge on my stringy frame, but I was not about to complain.

Yet even a flexible youngster will have trouble pulling on breeches if he has never done so before and cannot bend his legs. With difficulty, with much straining and puffing, I at last succeeded.

Greatly pleased with myself, I looked to the angel for approval. He was watching me with an unpleasant yellow-toothed leer.

“You’re older than I thought,” he said. “Well, perhaps you can be of some use to me after all, angelspawn.”

“Sir?”

He cackled at some private joke. “You’ll see.”

As I said, he was more than a little crazy.

—2—

W
E TRAVELED MOSTLY WITHOUT SPEAKING
, for the chariot was noisy. The country gradually became more rugged, but the wind less fitful, and my angel was a master navigator. Breeches or not, when he stopped at camps he left me in the chariot as before, and of course we had little time for conversation at those stops.

Between the camps, he would halt once in a while for a brief break—to eat, for respite from the constant bouncing and noise, or, rarely, to sleep. For sleeping he had a leather cover he could fasten over the chariot, making it into a low, uncomfortable tent. It grew incredibly hot and smelly under the burning sun. We both sweated lakefuls and felt limp and dizzy when we awoke, but he told me that roos might attack a chariot, so he needed the protection. Here was one way a companion could have been of assistance, and I offered to stay awake, as guard. He refused my offer. I think he did not trust me to control my own eyelids, and probably he was wise, for I had never needed to stay awake at will and so had never learned how.

When we camped in this fashion, he slept on the pile of cloth and furs. I had to make do with a rug over the oars, spars, and spare axles.

When we did see roo packs, Violet would give chase if the wind was favorable. Twice he managed to draw close, and then our ride became wilder than ever as he tried to run down the crouching, fleeing roos and at the same time fire his gun over the side. He felled a few with the gun, and I watched carefully how that marvelous weapon was used, but he never managed to crush any with the chariot. He almost wrecked it on boulders, instead. Violet did not like roos, and he left the bodies where they lay. To me that seemed like a shocking waste of good leather.

We did have a few conversations during halts. I discovered what shaving did and what the strange board was that he hung on the mast. I asked to try it, and so I viewed my own face clearly for the first time in my life. Until then I had seen my reflection only in the water, which was usually muddy. The near-white eyebrows were a shock, as were the unwholesome blue eyes. They brought back my hazy image of the angel with my mother—or did they lead me to invent that flimsy scrap of memory?

He had other miracles, too—his telescope, which he let me try, and a jug of rough red pottery, all marbled with white lime. That was the greatest wonder of all, for water left awhile in it would emerge cool—that was the only cool water I had ever tasted.

Violet had accepted me as a passenger. He made no more threats to evict me, but his contemptuous attitude did not mellow. Herdfolk, he said, were the most ignorant, stupid, barbarous people on all of Vernier. I could not argue, not having known that there were other types to compare. I was willing to put up with his jeers if they were the price of the ride. My knees were healing, and I would need those knees in good shape when he did at last turn me out.

Once I dared ask where we were going, for I had noticed that he avoided herds and camps whenever he could do so unobserved, and so concluded that he must have some other objective.

“I’m going back to Heaven,” he said. “You… Well, we’ll see when your leg is healed.”

“Sir? Who is Heaven?”

“Not
who,
stupid—
what.
It’s a camp…where the angels live.”

I tried to imagine a camp with more than one man in it. “And if I take that token you gave me…”

He spat, his sign of special disapproval. “If a young man wants to be an angel, then he has to go to Heaven with a token. He’s called a pilgrim. If they think he’s any good, they’ll let him be a cherub and teach him what an angel needs to know. After that, if they still think he’ll do, then they’ll make him an angel—give him a chariot and send him out to help people.”

A chariot! With a chariot I could find my way back to Anubyl. With an angel’s gun I could kill him, as the angel had killed the tyrant. Violet did not wait for me to speak.

“Forget it, herdbrat! You don’t know enough. Herdmen never make angels. They’re too ignorant. And stupid.”

But at another stop I brought up the subject again. “Where is Heaven, sir?”

He pointed east. “Under the stars.”

I had never heard of stars. We were going almost due west.

He read my face. “The sun is that way, dummy. High Summer—it would boil your lungs. No man can live in High Summer, and not much else can, either.”

I must have still looked doubtful.

“I’m going to the March Ocean,” he said grumpily. “It’s faster. Think of a very big water hole. Then I shall sail along the Great River—oh, forget it!”

“I should like to be an angel like you, sir, and help people.”

He laughed derisively, showing his yellow teeth. “A herdman help other men?”

“I should have died without your help, sir.”

“You damn well would have.”

“Will you take me back to Heaven with you?”

“No! That’s very much against the rules. Every man has to find Heaven for himself. It’s a test. They’d ask you if an angel had given you a ride. We’re going the wrong way now, so this wouldn’t count.”

Well, I had to go back east to settle with Anubyl. I decided I would find Heaven first and make my main task easier by getting a chariot. I had no conception of the size of the world.

─♦─

Gradually my knees healed. Gradually the country changed. Sixteen or twenty camps had gone by, and now we were seeing woollie corpses rotting on the grasslands, and solitary wandering woollies, abandoned as the grass became too scarce to support the herds. We passed human skeletons, perhaps loners. Some of them looked old, some not.

The herds were becoming enormous as they packed in closer against the ocean, for when two herds meet, one herdmaster will inevitably kill the other and so own both. My angel came back from his visits looking grimmer every time. Eight women he’d been offered, he would say, or even ten.

Then he decided that I could walk well enough for his purposes.

—3—

“I
HAVE NEVER KNOWN ANGELS
to travel in pairs,” Herdmaster Agomish rumbled in the deepest voice I had ever heard.

I could not see his face, for I had been told to keep my eyes lowered. I could see the end of his black beard, however, and it hung below his belt. I could see his boots and breeches, and two giant hairy hands, either of which could have snapped my neck without calling for help from the other. I had not known that most herdfolk males were made on the same scale as my father. That rock-smasher voice seemed to fall from the sky.

Violet had ordered me not to speak, for he had said that I spoke like a herdman, not like an angel. I doubt that my dry throat would have put out intelligent sound, anyway. I stood at his side with my eyes down and my mouth shut. I stared at the herdmaster’s enormous boots and fervently wished I was safely hidden in the chariot as usual.

But this time Violet had decreed that I would accompany him, without saying why. He had also told me not to believe anything he said about me. Herdfolk were too dumb to see through a few lies, he had said.

“Even angels have to be trained, Herdmaster,” he now replied cheerfully. “He is merely here to learn and will remain silent in the presence of his elders, as children should.”

The hint was taken. My fair complexion deceived the herdman, as it had earlier deceived both Anubyl and Violet.

“The boy is as welcome as you are, sir,” Agomish retorted. “I offer you whatever hospitality I have to give. Come, then!”

I limped painfully behind my guardian angel as he accompanied the giant herdman down the slope toward camp. I had observed the tents earlier, nine of them. The colors and designs looked wrong to me, and there were many more than nine women fussing around the fire, so Agomish had several old wives in his family. There were strangely few children, yet woollies without number swarmed everywhere, in all directions. Perhaps the children were out herding, yet the herd was straggling badly. I disapproved.

As we drew near, though, the familiar bustle and the familiar smells of a herdfolk camp sang softly to me of my lost childhood, and a lump grew hard in my throat. A girl laughed like Rilana. I saw a boy so like Todish that I almost called out to him.

Cushions had been spread on rugs before the tents. Angel and herd-master sat down together. Still favoring my right knee, I lowered myself to the ground behind Violet, keeping my face turned as far away from Agomish as I thought I decently could. I was no angel but a herdman, within sight of his women. If he as much as suspected that, how long would the truce last? As long as one breath—my last.

The unexpected appearance of a second visitor had caused some confusion among the women. There was a brief delay. Agomish clapped his hands angrily, with impacts like ax blows, and then two bowls of water were rushed over to us. One of them was held before my downcast eyes. A woman…
a woman
…was kneeling on the other side of it. I admired the pattern of her skirt furiously, to avoid seeing anything above her waist. Copying the angel’s actions, I splashed water over my face, laved my hands, and accepted a towel.

But the savory scent of cooking was making my young mouth water. Dried and smoked meat had been my diet for too long. Now I could smell hot fresh meat and juicy delicacies…roo brains…roast dasher! Another dress appeared before me. Two slim hands laid a piled dish alongside my outstretched legs. The woman vanished, and I set to work to make the feast do the same.

“Think of a tall tree, Herdmaster,” Violet was saying, with his mouth full. “If you stand close, you have to bend your head back very far to see the top of it—is that not so? While, if you are far away, then you can look straight at it. Well, the sun is very high, but the same is true of the sun. Is it not higher—closer—than you remember it as a child?”

The herdman growled. “I had not noticed, sir.”

“Think back to when you were a herder. Remember your shadow?”

I paid little attention as Violet went patiently on, trying to persuade his host that the sun did move, although so slowly that a man would not notice. Woollies did not like to be too far from the sun, he said—they became sluggish. But they could not live too close to it, either, for the heat dried up all the grass and also the water holes that the herders needed. So the herdfolk always lived about the same distance from the sun, moving slowly westward as it advanced…in a crescent shape…

Agomish insisted that he had been a herdmaster long enough to sire twenty-eight live daughters and he had not moved westward more than in any other direction. Always he had gone to the best water and the best grazing.

As the conversation dragged on, as my appetite died of its own success, I began to gain an inkling of Violet’s repeated insistence that herd-folk were stupid. It was obvious to me, but not to the mighty thunder-voiced Agomish. I felt rather smug once I understood that, but of course, I had heard this explanation before and had had much time to think about it. And I had enjoyed an angel’s-eye overview on a long journey through a grossly over-grazed, overstocked countryside.