CHAPTER ONE
DIVERGENT THEOLOGIES
The Woxen-Mollockle Grand Combined Spectacle and Pan-Universal Wonder Circus suffered perhaps the greatest setback of its career when the meteor hit it. Thud Mollockle, co-owner and one of the chief Spectacles, stood at the rim of the still-smoldering crater. “Well,” he observed, nodding his little round head and kicking at a stone that rolled clatteringly down the steep slope. “That’s certainly a big hole.”
Rykkla Woxen, his partner and not the least of the remaining Spectacles, could only agree with a kind of slack-jawed incredulity as she surveyed what had once been her livelihood and was now a quarter-mile-wide excavation. All that she could think to say to the huge man standing next to her was, “If it’s not one damn thing it’s another.”
And that was true, for there they were, circusless in Ibraila.
* * * * *
The Woxen-Mollockle Grand Combined Spectacle and Universal Wonder Circus had begun modestly enough, housed in two ex-military commissary wagons and a tent, all contributed generously as a gesture of kindness and farewell by an departing exlover of Princess Bronwyn Tedeschiiy, but the fame of Thud Mollockle, the strongest man in the world, whose tectonic powers could juggle anvils and macramé steel rails, and the talents, skills and beauty of Rykkla Woxen, as glossily graceful as a wet licorice whip in her snakey black costume, had attracted in no time at all a retinue of performers (long out of work during the recent Great Depression and Reign of Terror) that anyone would have shelled out a hundred treasured, meticulously-hoarded pfennigs to have seen individually, let alone together. After all, one could grow used to existing without food if one could occasionally live vicariously. Rykkla and Thud’s crosscountry meanderings before meeting Princess Bronwyn and helping her defeat the evil Payne Roelt and Company had already established for them a measure of fame, a foundation upon which they could, and did, build a show more substantial than the mere strongman-and-assistant act that had once sustained them.
By the time the new show had wandered up and down the length of Tamlaght, discovering how a devastated people can always eke out a few coppers to escape into the fantasies that the Grand Combined Spectacle offered, perhaps in direct proportion to their misery, and crossed over to Londeac and its lesser neighboring countries, it had grown to two main tents, numerous small ones, and a score of elaborately-illuminated wagons. There was a big main tent sheltering a single ring and bleachers almost always filled to their not inconsiderable capacity, a smaller tent housing the menagerie and another for the sideshow. All to say nothing, or at least as little as necessary, of the cook-tent, concession-tents, stable tents, tents for dressing rooms and trappings, and so forth, as well as wagons of various sizes for the wardrobe, office, refreshments and ticket sales. After months during which Thud and Rykkla had to bear the full burden of entertaining their audiences, they had eventually added a magician, followed by a family of tumblers; then, in increasingly rapid succession, a high-wire act, a horse trainer, a family of tumblers, a contortionist, a clown, a pigeon act, a trick bicyclist, musicians, a startling assortment of freaks, a sword swallower and fire eater . . . and with all of these additional people she was also forced to hire roustabouts, a cook and his assistants, stable hands, ticket takers and so on. Rykkla had also eventually hired an advance man who preceded the circus by anywhere from a week to a month, plastering every available vertical surface with posters and handbills heralding the imminent appearance of the Greatest Show on Earth. The almost immediate result of this idea was sell outs in advance at nearly every town and village.
Yet, for all of the improvements, for all of the undeniable quality and talent of the acts they had taken on, Thud and Rykkla were still the core, the main attraction, the irresistible attrahent that drew the crowds like moths to flames, stones to the ground or people with money to people who take money. There was something primal at work that neither Rykkla nor, certainly, Thud ever thought to analyze. Something primal and provocative, something exhilarating and piquant about watching the two perform, like watching lightning caressing a monolithic peak, like crackling lava savored by the ice-cold teeth of the ocean, like boa constrictor and ox wrestling to the death, though there was nothing mortal about this embrace, about the dance they performed: Rykkla’s comet caught in the complex orbits of Thud’s deep gravity. There was an elementality, as though their audiences were transported back to a time when all the universe could be reduced to the four primordial essences of earth, air, fire and water. Thud, the strong man, as solid and immovable as the earth itself, a man of stone, a steel and iron man forged from ores in their own turn forged in volcanoes and molded by grinding continental plates, as though the planet were but some giant mortar and pestle, chewing up mountains and spitting out giants; and Rykkla of fire and quicksilver, as sharp and liquid as lightning, as graceful as a falling thread or the curl of smoke from an extinguished candle; she coiled around his vasty landscape like a river languidly navigating its private planet.
Men would come ostensibly to admire and be awed by the strong man’s infinite strength, to present him with their home-grown challenges, as they were invited to do by the circus’s advance advertising, but never to collect the offered reward (so confidant was Rykkla of Thud’s abilities, that the reward did not, in fact, exist, and since it was nonexistant, Rykkla saw no reason to not make it extravagant). And they would be awed into stupidity by Thud’s colossal prowess, his high-tension potency, as he tied knots in two-inch steel bars, snapped battleship anchor chains like pretzels and hoisted wagonloads of pig iron with such a distracted expression that it maddened those whose sweating red faces nearly burst while hefting nothing massier than a carton of canned goods onto a cellar shelf. They came ostensibly to admire Thud, but Thud was too much; he could no more be admired than one could admire an earthquake or colliding meteors. One can only admire what one can reasonably aspire to emulate, but who could aspire to be a force of nature? He could only be looked on with a kind of awe, as one would look upon the tides, a tornado or a volcano spewing forth basaltic bombs the size of houses. But still the men would, for weeks, months and years, talk about Thud and his feats, they would compare notes and reports and rumors as they swilled their murky tavern beers, they would argue over what he could or couldn’t do, or had or hadn’t; they would endlessly discuss schemes that would finally defy and confound the giant’s great strength. They would look forward to the day the circus came, so that they could see for themselves how exaggerated was the advertising, how hyperbolic were their neighbor’s eyewitness accounts; they would gather outside the big tent an hour or more before the show began, laughing and joking still, but perhaps a little cowed, a little strained as they stood beneath the towering canvas portrait of Thud, lent an uncanny animation as it fluttered in the wind, that few suspected was life-sized.
Ostensibly they came to see Thud, but there was also a portrait of Rykkla outside the tent and there was the magnet, the fascinator, the center that every gaze drifted toward surreptitiously, every eye like a marble spinning toward the drain in an empty sink, when every individual owner of those becharmed eyes thought, always erroneously, that he was both unobserved and unique. The long canvas banner luffed in the breeze, lending the painted figure a lazily snakey life-likeness that was patently disturbing. Like Thud’s portrait, the likeness of Rykkla had been painted with great accuracy by an itinerant artist of no small ability or genius who had been painstaking in taking full advantage of her dark velocities. Her interminable legs were revealed past her long, narrow hips, revealed to her waist, by a black, spangled costume that clung to her sinuous torso as though it were the streamlined skin of an iridescent fish, as though her taut skin were itself sequined like the shimmering fish. These limbs were like the shining blades of a pair of shears, blades that stabbed these rough men to their hearts, snipping and scissoring those hard-boiled organs into doilies and strings of dancing paper-doll Rykklas. From behind, her buttocks were more than half revealed, as round and hard and smooth as a pair of cobblestones. Her long, bare brown arms looked like anacondas and the men gasped in anticipation of the breath being squeezed from their lungs in protracted, ecstatic sighs. And above all of these admirable appendages was a lean sorceress’s face of bottomless dark eyes, brows like black iron scythes, a nose as unimpeachable as a draftsman’s triangle and cheekbones like the magnificent chalk cliffs that overhung the Strait of Guesclin. Her hair was long and the color of graphite and when she performed it splashed in heavy waves like a spilled gallon of crude oil.
Once the men had surrendered their coins and entered the tent, perspiring from suspense and from the embarassment that their suspense might be obvious, which it was, the interior yeasty from the accumulated exhalations of too many effervescent and overcharged glands, they watched Thud’s strongman act with a kind of religious expectation. The things that he did were superhuman; Rykkla’s assistance and presence made them seem god-like.
Word about the Woxen-Mollockle Circus spread like news of the miracles of a prophet, and certainly with far less harm. Its fame rippled in ever-widening circles, and as the circles grew larger so did expectations. The further away the circus was geographically, the more it assumed the stature and otherworldliness of myth. Had there not been the meteorite, Thud may have ultimately been the nucleus of some pitiful little cult, with Rykkla its unknowing priest-goddess.
The invitation to tour Ibraila, coming as it did as a command from the Baudad Alcatode himself, was impossible to resist. For months Rykkla had been distributing posters with various phrases of which Performances by Royal Command Before All the Courts of Soccotara was a typical example of those which were more imaginative than accurate, and it was a rather welcome realization that these claims were to be no longer wholly fallacious.
Rykkla visited the Ibrailan consul in Toth where a contract and visa was awaiting her, along with a dizzying amount of cash as an advance on her subsidy. An itinerary was established that allowed them to cross unhindered the normally forbidden Ibrailan frontier, then to zigzag from village to village, a course that would finally end triumphantly in the capital, where a glorious performance would genuinely take place before one of the most resplendent and legendary courts of all Soccotara.
Ibraila, however, was a miserable country, its squalid villages scattered throughout its sandy wastes like the scant raisins a niggardly baker might apportion to his bread. Rykkla would certainly never have considered a tour there in fact let alone fancy, not without the underwriting of the Baudad and the proffered glamour of his court.
The worst of it was that the people of Ibraila were deeply, fundamentally religious, steeped in a form of Musrumism that was primitive and confining when Musrum Himself was but a stripling god, burping planets. Rykkla and her company had quickly learned not to erect the tantalizingly suggestive canvas portraits of herself nor of any of the other women, not even Blombula the Fat Lady and certainly not Teeny ‘n’ Weeny, the half-man half-woman; and had even grown warily circumspect about the depictions of some of the men. Costumes and acts were toned down to inoffensive and listless blandness. She had been forced to change her own costume and performed shapelessly clad from wrist to neck to ankle, and could still feel the cold, disapproving glare from the sparse audience, who themselves were present only because of the ratification of the revered Baudad. She could feel a palpable sense of sacrifice, as though the audience welcomed her circus as being an even more irritatingly worthy oblation than hairshirts and self-flagellation. The audience was there not for entertainment, but punishment for whatever sins they might have believed they had committed (Rykkla, cynically, if not inaccurately, thought that the church had probably convinced these miserable goatherders that having been born was their first sin and life had only gone downhill since). Shapelessly clad or not, they knew that there was a female body beneath that camouflage and disapproved of its existence. It had not taken many weeks for an evil pall to fall over the members of the company, and even the dullest roustabouts slung their weighty sledges with desultory glumness. The acts were performed by rote, succinctly and without enthusiasm, and the people of Ibraila seemed to pay no mind. They bore their punishment with stoic resolve.
Rykkla wondered often how much truth there could possibly be in the tales she had heard all her life: about the degenerate excesses of the Baudad and his capital. How could there be anything passionate or sensual in a place that withered souls so completely? She could feel her own becoming a kind of spiritual jerky.
Two more weeks would see the circus in Spondula and then on the fastest boat back to Londeac, or even Tamlaght if it came to that.
Rykkla and Thud had been purchasing dried fruit in the nearby hamlet of Squool-am-Batwoo when the shop had given a sudden, convulsive leap, like a sleeping mongrel that had just received an unexpected boottip in its ribs. It had returned to the earth a structural if not nervous wreck . . . certainly not the building it had been but moments before, but not necessarily unimproved. Thud, who of all people recognized an earthquake when he witnessed one, tucked Rykkla under his arm like a football and bolted from the now trapezoidal door while many of those remaining in the room were still airborne. The village had been transformed, looking like it had been dropped from a height, like a cowflop, with much the same flattening and sagging, but not nearly so fresh. Not more than half an hour earlier, Rykkla would have been reluctant to consider that Squool-am-batwoo could have been made to look more loathsomely pathetic than it normally did; circumstances certainly had proved her mistaken. Clouds of sallow dust were settling back to the yellow streets, from whence it had been thrown by the shock. The two or three score adobe huts looked squashed or burst, as though someone with god-like buttocks had just sat upon them. As startling and disturbing as this might have been otherwise, wholly distracting the eye was the fiery ball of flame boiling up from the desert in an incandescent mushroom. Something perverse in Rykkla’s mind instantly connected this incomprehensible disaster with her circus and the only thing that she could imagine was that the fire eater had done something very stupid.
Now she and Thud were standing at the brink of a vast, smoking crater. The desert looked as though Musrum had stricken the spot with a ball peen hammer the size of Slipoon Cathedral. She felt as though her universe had turned wrong-side-out, that her life had suffered a kind of inversion. The circus, which represented everything positive in her life, representing it both literally as well as figuratively or symbolically by way of the convexity of its bulging tents, bristling banner-tipped poles, towering, slab-sided wagons, even the bulbous, hay-inflated elephants, was now transformed into this great, singular, blatant negativity. The thought crossed her mind that Musrum must have scooped her life from the midst of the desert in a single swipe of His flaming hand, though for no discernable reason; it was an arbitrariness that pissed her off.
She watched as the stone that Thud had kicked bopped and skipped like an epileptic hamster for a hundred yards until it shattered itself against a larger fellow. Well, she thought, that certainly seems to succinctly symbolize my life. She glanced at the giant next to her and wondered, for a moment, what thoughts and speculations might or might not be circulating within the cramped space bound by his melon-sized skull. She was disinclined to underestimate the ex-Kobold, since clean living, good food, sunshine and regular exercise had gone so far in transforming him from his amazing old self into this perhaps even more amazing new self. What had once been a nearly formless mountain of flesh was now recognizably human. A very big human, granted, but this was something she did not hold against him by any means. She was not willing to admit that this transmogrification was necessarily limited to his physical person. What interesting convolutions were busily wrinkling his newly-awakened, freshly-appreciated, hitherto glossily smooth brain she was only just beginning to learn and respect.
Was Thud looking so pensive, she wondered, because something about this hugely unexpected excavation was stirring sentimental recollections?
“Too bad about the peanuts,” he finally said.
“What?”
“Too bad about the peanuts,” he repeated.
“What peanuts?”
“Ooly Spunkster’s peanuts. He made really good peanuts. I think I’ll miss them.”
“Forget the peanuts. What about Ooly Spunkster?”
“Oh, yeah.” Thud looked thoughtful.
What about them all? she wondered, with a frisson of horror vibrating her spine like a plucked mandolin string. What about the acrobats and roustabouts and Mr. Dreedny the ticket-taker; what about the horses and the trained pigeons, especially Jumpy, and absolutely everything that Thud and I had to our names? She glanced up to where a black cloud of vaporized circus was smearing itself across the once-blue sky, like a water stain on a freshly-plastered ceiling, and realized that a whole world had been reduced to that greasy-looking cumulus.
“Who’re they?” asked Thud, interrupting her incipient depression, pointing back toward the ruined town. Rykkla followed his gaze and saw that there was quite a disrespectable crowd approaching, about halfway between the ruined village and the raised rim of the crater. “I don’t know,” she replied, a certain foreboding tingeing her voice. Indeed, the temper of the mass of people was apparent even at this distance and it was unmistakably hostile.
“We’d better get away from here,” she suggested, but Thud answered with an entirely reasonable and realistic “Where?” Rykkla had to submit to the unanswerability of that question. Where, indeed? Behind them was a steaming bowl-shaped depression half a mile wide, filled with treacherous-looking pulverized rocks and boulders, and hundreds of feet deep. Surrounding this was an apparently illimitable expanse of unattractively evil desert; the nearest other village was no doubt no more hospitable than this one. The nearest (and only) real city was the capital, Spondula, and that must be a hundred miles away. There was little else to do but remain and face the vanguard of the villagers, who were just then clambering up the rubbly slope immediately below. By the time they reached the crater rim, their robes and baggy trousers were torn and filthier than ever. The mass of men were sullen and stupid-looking. The ones in front, however, while looking only a little more intelligent, had a kind of wild-eyed cunning that once again plucked Rykkla’s spine.
The first to speak was Thud. “Hello, there,” he greeted.
“Infidel dogs!” answered the foremost of the villagers, succinctly confirming Rykkla’s premonitory qualmishness. “Profane blasphemer!” he continued in the same vein. “Deviate devil-mongering whore of the Weedking! Heathen allotheistic demon-fornicating pagan witch-slut!”
The temper of the people who had gathered around the angry haranguer was clearly little better than his own, and his words were doing nothing to improve their mood. They shook their fists and grunted to express their solidarity.
“What are you talking about?” Rykkla asked, in as reasonable tone as she could, as the man paused to take a breath.
Her interlocutor seemed so taken aback, whether at the import of her question or that she had dared to speak at all, she couldn’t say, that he was unable to reply for a long moment. When he was able to regain his speech, his voice had risen an octave with indignity and outrage. Spittle mixed with the dust on his scraggly beard, making little balls of mud that were flung left and right.
“Bestial defiler!” he shrieked, reduced to sentence fragments, “Degenerate! Desecrator! Harlot! Polluter! Canker! Abomination!Pervert!Befoulmentcorruptiontaintevilloathsome, aghaghagh . . . ”
Reduced to incoherent spluttering, the man suddenly clutched at his chest, his face turning an attractive magenta. While he attempted to regain composure, breath and regular heartbeat, another stepped into the breech, pretty much picking up where the other had left off, but was, Rykkla was thankful, considerably more informative if no less abusive.
“Musrum has wiped your unclean monstrosity from the face of the desert, as He would flick a booger from His great nostril! like a blackhead squeezed from the purity of his infinite cheek! Your odious, vile, squalid exhibition of unspeakable obscenities has been purged! Those abominations of nature! Those bestial freaks! Women who displayed their bodies and men who were not men!”
“That may be so,” replied Rykkla, “But that’s really my problem, isn’t it, whatever your personal opinion may be? I mean, I’m the one left with the hole in the ground.”
“Hussy! Slut! Whore! Libertine! Strumpet! Trollop! Bitch, drab, trull, quean, harridan, adventuress!” screamed the first man, who had recovered himself with the vigor that only the truly fanatic possesses. “See what you and your unholy monster have brought down upon us? See how Musrum has punished us for allowing your filthy exhibitions within our peaceful, beautiful, Musrum-fearing city?”
“I don’t know what your problem is, you goat-eating blister. But it’s my circus that is gone and everything that I possessed with it. But your ‘beautiful city’, and if you insist upon calling it that, I’ll go along with you, but I can tell you that I’ve seen more attractive ant farms, your beautiful city is still there, more’s the pity. And so far as I can tell, it doesn’t look all that much worse than it did yesterday. In fact, if you’d like my personal opinion, it wasn’t my circus that Musrum was trying to cauterize. His aim was just a half-mile off.”
The first man purpled beautifully, falling backward into the arms of those behind him, or would have if they had expected his sudden collapse. Instead he tobagganed headfirst on his back down the rubbly slope in a welter of flying pebbles and clouds of yellow dust. The others watched until he came to a halt against the flat surface of a shattered, house-sized boulder. Satisfied that their friend was safely inert, they turned their hostile eyes back to the ex-circus owners.
“What do you want of us, anyway?” cried Rykkla, losing her patience, which allowed just a little too much of the rising fear beneath to show.
“Musrum wants His vengeance! His wrath is yet to be paid out! The uncleanness is still affronting Him!”
“So what?”
Rather than answer the girl, the man instead turned to his companions and screeched, “You’ve seen how Musrum abominates this obscenity we’ve allowed in our midst! This may only be a warning! What will He do if we allow these pagan dogs to remain alive as much as another second?”
The crowd shouted their agreement, as Rykkla had been afraid they would. “Thud?” she said, “Won’t you please get us out of here?”
The giant immediately bent to pick up a rock, but at the very moment that he pointed the crown of his head at the mob a well-launched stone bounced off the perfect target it presented, making an almost musical twock! It did not seem to do more than daze him, but it did make him suddenly sit down, a surprised look on his face. It did not take the villagers, who might be zealots but were not slow, more than a heartbeat to overwhelm him, as half a dozen others caught Rykkla by her arms and legs. They pummeled the big man with the clubs they had brought with them, and those that had come unarmed used blocks of stone as large and as substantial as their own heads. Rykkla screamed and struggled, but with four strong men at each of her limbs she was helpless. Something horrified within her realized that Thud had become perhaps too human; he was a strong man now, not an invulnerable Kobold. Soon, the mob backed away from Thud, who remained on the ground, a shapeless mound as large as any four of the others, as inert as a poleaxed ox.
“Come on!” cried the leader, “Get him up so we can get back to town!”
“We can’t, ak-Sloon,” replied one of the others, looking down at the ex-Kobold’s enormous bulk. “He must weigh a ton!”
“We can’t leave him here, not while he’s still alive!”
“Well, we can’t move him, either, so what do you suggest?”
“We could hold the trial here,” suggested one.
“Can’t do that! That’d be entirely irregular!” said another.
“So what?”
“Look what’s happened already! I think we’d better do things right and not press our luck.”
“He’s got a point, ak-Milf. Better get the priest here, I guess.”
“Father Spranbran would never make it! He must be a thousand years old! He’d fly into a hundred pieces before he got halfway here.”
“You’re treading pretty near the edge of blasphemy yourself, ak-Glool,” said ak-Sloon sternly. “You’d better watch your mouth, because if you don’t, there are others who will!”
This threat cowed all of them into a sullen, frightened silence, not a few stealing furtive glances toward the otherwise peacefully bland and, had they but known it, disinterested sky. “Since Musrum obviously believes in overkill,” suggested Rykkla, “I hope that he doesn’t decide to drop a mountain on that man.”
“Shut your feculent mouth, degenerate offal!” the ostensible leader cried, but with a fearful glance at the distant, still-quiet heavens. The others shuffled away from ak-Glool, who began to look frightened, as though he had suddenly discovered that he was nothing more than a gnat occupying the bulls-eye of a target belonging to transcendental superbeings accustomed to practicing their skills with whole lightning bolts.
“Come on, fellows!” ak-Glool whined. “I was only thinking of the Father’s health! You’ve got to admit that he’s getting along!”
“True enough,” admitted ak-Sloon. “But you better watch yourself, you’re getting a little outspoken of late. You’ve got to remember that there’s nothing to think of for yourself that Musrum hasn’t thought of for you already.”
“Not another word!” And from that moment Rykkla never again heard the man called ak-Glool speak and, in fact, he did not open his mouth to utter an articulate syllable for more than seven months, not until he saw ak-Sloon, who was the local blacksmith, accidentally drop an anvil on his foot and utter a red-hot obscenity. Ak-Glool cried a single “Aha!” before collapsing into such fits of laughter that he had a seizure from which he never quite entirely recovered. He was forced to live on the charity of his fellow villagers after that, surviving, as a consequence, only three or four days.
Rykkla was, of course, unaware of these forthcoming events and would have been disinterested in any case (though she certainly would have been amused to hear of ak-Sloon’s accident and was always keen to learn a fresh obscenity). Her own immediate future was sufficiently interesting to preoccupy her, especially in its present speculativeness. But what had they done to Thud? It wasn’t possible that they’d killed him, was it? Was it possible that Thud could be killed?
“Leave him alone!” she cried, “He’s not done you any harm!”
“I told you to shut up, vermin-spawn!” said ak-Sloon, striking her across the face. The back of his hand was horny and abraded her skin like coarse sandpaper. She worked up a gobbet of spit mixed with blood and spat it at him. He leaped as though an angry scorpion had landed on him. “Eeek!” he screamed shrilly, “Unclean! Unclean!” and began pulling at the sleeve of his costume, tearing away the place her spittle had spattered.
“You’re mad!” she shouted at him. “All of you are mad!”
“Get her into town!” ak-Sloon ordered, “We’ll deal with her there quickly enough!”
“But what about this thing?”
Ak-Sloon went over to where Thud lay motionless and cautiously prodded the inert body with his toe. When he got no reaction, he bravely gave Thud a hefty kick in the ribs. Little seismic waves rippled to and fro, as they might in a disturbed gelatine mold, but there was still no reaction. Rykkla screamed for them to let the big man alone, but she was ignored.
“It’s practically dead, now,” Ak-Sloon pronounced. “Push it into the crater, back into the pit from which it came.”
It took considerable effort, but the men managed to roll Thud to the edge of the precipice and, at a signal from ak-Sloon, pushed him over the brink. The last that Rykkla saw of Thud was a brief glimpse of a truncated pentagram of outstretched arms and legs pinwheeling out of sight.