We made a delivery to some herb-haags in the Carnalin Mountains, not far upcoast from Lebanoi on the eastern shore of the Great Shallows, and it was from them that we obtained the commission for our Hagian delivery.
We delivered to the haags—with no small trouble up the crooked roads to their steep-perched little hamlet—a gryf-gryf, for the haags use these monsters' urine to catalyze many of their most efficacious infusions. When the delivery was accomplished, the senior haag had me in to her study—a plank table in the midst of one of their overwhelmingly odorous potting sheds.
"Gryf's got a biter broke," she observed sullenly, referring to a severe crack in one of our delivery's tusks.
"Yes," I said shortly, my mouth still puckered by the exceeding sour wine she had poured me. "Brute got his claws through the bars, broke that spoke on the clanker's wheel there." (We use the two-axle clanker for heavy deliveries, rather than the two-wheel quickshaw we much prefer.) "Two of my men—Raschle and Olombo there, had to club it near senseless to save the vehicle. That's how his biter got cracked."
This senior haag, Radax, had canines so outgrown they weren't unlike little tusks themselves. "Hard cargo," she conceded. She hefted a poke of Kolodrian lictors, our honorarium, in her soil-blackened paw, gimleting me with a sullen look that was meant, I thought, to convey a grave doubt of some kind—perhaps about proposing what she then, after paying me, proposed:
"Happen a near gossip of a dear clansister half removed of mine hath need on a crew o' Nuncers yourselfs-like, good Dame. Needs them down to North Hagia. Thrice pay to this here is proposed, as the wayfaring's to be done down in the spidergod's webby wolds an' what-all."
That the stipend was princely was not my first thought on hearing this proposed commission. Nor did I first note that the isle was a part of the world I had not yet seen, though this is a consideration that weighs with me, as a rule. What struck me at once, rather, was the geography of the proposition. With Hagia lying south-south east of this coast, and our course hence a diagonal down the length of the Great Shallows, we must, if we took this commission, pass hard by the raft cities of the Hydrobani Archipelago, in whose great hive of brothels and gaming dens my sole and precious son Persander had perversely apprenticed himself to acquire the most reverend arts of Gaming, to wit: shilling, sharping, dealing, duping, dicing, finessing and fleecing.
My beloved Persander, my precious but willful son whom I, in my helpless outrage, had denounced and forever banished from my sight! There was a poignant humor in this banishing of course, for since Persander grew to his young manhood, I scarcely saw him once in a year. But the break itself, and my own harsh, denouncing words to him—this was a galling pain in my heart, as it would be in any mother's. I can run mountain trail all day and night long with the toughest, but a woman in her full maturity knows that the years must be counted like precious coin, and that a broken love long unmended can quick enough turn to a broken love forever unmended.
How I had grieved in the two years since for my rash absoluteness! No day passed that I did not in my heart unspeak my spiteful petulance a dozen ways. Two years lost between us already! With every life uncertain enough but a Nuncio's doubly unsure . . . it had begun to seem possible that we would never meet again, my precious son and I.
And here now offered itself this irreproachably fortuitous turning of my professional fortunes, that would allow me to seek out Persander at last—to tell him without deceit that chance had brought me near him, and that my grieving heart had taken me the final steps, and here I was to unsay my hard words, and embrace my precious child again.
"Well, who might this client be precisely," I inquired blandly, "and what would she have conveyed, and whither?"
"Seemly a dame lately widowed and wanting her mate's remainders took acrosst country to be tombed in that particular one of the spidergod's temples as he was whelped and raised nigh. Seemly he was pious in the Arakishite warshup and rittles an such-lot, while this widow dame, to hear my clan-sister tell it, is quite the agnosticator and unbeliever—as indeed 'tis noised that most Hagish folk are, beyond the formalities."
"The husband is already deceased?" I asked carefully.
"Yes indeed."
"And . . . embalmed, or the like?"
"Boxed and 'balmed. Him in his coffin just need wheeling cross-country and tucking in one of them temple nooches."
"She's . . . sent word rather far abroad, hasn't she, and will have been waiting quite some time before we could possibly arrive to—"
"Well she trusts this gossip of hers that's clan-sister of mine, now doesn't she? And on our side, as she trusts a clan-sister, we want her to have a first-water Nuncio, don't we, as the Arakish wolds don't lack in danger now and again, do they?"
Though it seemed an odd sort of commission, I accepted it pending my crew's approval, which I straightway received. My crew—Shinn and Bantril (our pullers on the quickshaw, and our plod drovers on this clanker) and Olombo and Raschle (our men-at-arms)—were as much taken with the stipend as I, and, as crack nuncials tend to be, were unwilling to acknowledge any uneasiness about a risky destination, so they promptly ratified my acceptance. Radax at once presented us with ship money to Hagia, and half the stipend, of which Pompilla—the widow commissioning us—would pay us the rest on our arrival at Big Quay.
I could not help reflecting that Radax had just laid out a very substantial sum from her own pocket, on this distant widow's behalf. For how could this Pompilla have forwarded her own funds to Radax at this stage of her inquiries? I let the thought go. I had mainly my son on my mind, and this commission created the pretext for seeing him again.
We went down to Lebanoi on the coast, and among that great milltown's thronging wharves, found a caravel cargoed with casks and tuns of pickled polyp and marinaded bi-vulves, bound to Hagia by way of the Hydrobani Archipelago, at whose raft towns stopovers by out-bound bottoms are common. Shipmasters have found that a hard go at drinking and gambling settles a crew down for long hauls, the more if they have been on picked clean and put doubly in need of their pay. We made Glamara, grandest of all the Hydrobani's floating shearing pens, by nightfall, when its colored lights dapple the soft swells it rides, and its timbers reverb like a vast complex drum with the clamors and capers of fevered fools vying to be fleeced. Glamara, when last I'd heard, was where my Persander had 'prenticed himself.
Our shipmaster, Plectt, who struck me as rather a cynic and dandy—though polished enough—suggested the glyfrig and runeriddle parlors. "A young blade carving a niche, Nuncio—if I may express it so?—if he is bold and sharp-witted, works the glyfs or the runes, where they'll give him a pit of his own and a cut of the table to lure in the talent."
I was supping some wine, a practice I'm little given to, but I intended it as a precaution to maintain affability. To betray my contempt for this place would be to assure my inquiries met only rebuff, and the mere sight of those gaudy-lanterned laneways where the raucous toppers reeled tipsily from den to den, made me grit my teeth in scorn. My crew seemed annoyingly inclined to hang about me, meanwhile, making mellowness hard to maintain.
"Won't you all go and . . . game or whatever?" I burst out at them. "Leave me to concentrate! If you spot him, come and tell me—I'll be working straight west down yon largest promenade, the glyfrabble and runewreckers lairs first. What do you need that for, Raschle?!" I noticed that Raschle had wrapped a cubit of log-chain round his forearm and covered it with his sleeve. I'd just previously seen Olombo tuck an ironwood short-knout in his breech-waist, and a brass knuckle-frame in his pocket. The two of them traded a quick, hooded glance, and shrugged. My wiry pullers, Bantril and Shinn, glum, short-spoken men of the tundra stock, turned away when I looked at them. Had Bantril there strapped something to his ribs beneath his doublet? "Will you all leave me to collect myself, please?" I cried. "To concentrate?"
I watched them go. They seemed to confer before diverging in pairs to either side of the boulevard, and leaving my view.
I quaffed one more goblet of wine. I sighed. Unclenched my hands. I practiced some affable smiles, which I hoped would facilitate my inquiries in this city of scoundrels. Then I set forth.
The boulevard was an endless procession of lounges and parlors and lairs all tiaraed and spangled in lamps—their mere monikers galled me: The Gilded Palm, Odds Bodikins, Pelf's Paradise, The Portly Poke, The Deck and Die. Smiling affably, I asked passers-by which were the glyf-trick and rune-swindle dens, and was answered with japes and affronts.
Stepping in this place and that, I amiably conferred with various greeters and doorkeepers: with pomaded panders, mustachioed shills, rouged catamites in khol and ringlets, powdered ponces, and leering ganymedes—for whose facetious impertinences I thanked them, smiling affably.
At length I learned to decry—through street windows—the red felt tables for rune play, and the racked arrays of glass statuettes that were glyfs. Now, speaking less, I hunted through the dens themselves, overstepping here the vomitus of a gamester overtaken by surfeit, sidestepping there the blind assault of a gamester in fury, or ducking under the wild, begging embrace of a gamester just ruined.
Until, wonderfully, there he was, my son, at a rune table, suavely directing the coins his ring of bettors vied to place. My dear, grave Persander, look at him: coolth itself amid chaos he was, his shoulders at last their full breadth now (my father's shoulder's, as I had foreseen, not his father's)—his brows' brooding jut in place too now, giving his eyes the shadowed private look I'd long seen they'd grow to. And his ears! The last of that dear, boyish blatancy was gone now. They hugged his head sleekly, a man's, my precious little boy's no more!
He saw me, stood staring, then signaled a colleague to stand in for him, and came over to me. His face stayed impassive (already a gambler's) but he walked straight to me and hugged me without hesitation.
I hugged him hard. "My precious son! I've intruded! No! I've inexcusably thrust in, interrupted, embarrassed you. . . ."
"Mother! I rejoice to see you. I'm completely delighted!"
And then I could see that I had embarrassed him, though he was covering very smoothly. How could this not embarrass him? I asked myself, but even so it stung me. He mustn't be pawed by his mother here where he worked his profession! Oh heavens forbid! I stood a bit away and smiled as if he were a dear friend. It felt false and I felt miserable, but also a mite irritated now. "We are commissioned to North Hagia, our carrack put in here. I had to see you and to . . . show you my affection."
"North Hagia? Big Quay?" He seemed to disapprove. It irked me, seemed mere contrariety. Belatedly I saw it was the A'rak, the danger he minded. It made me glad. I was starting to reassure him when a big, ruddy fop in wide fleecy muttonchops and a toga of silver fur placed a proprietary palm on my son's shoulder. "Riddler! I have coin here, Sirrah, riding on your felt! I'm engaged and I'm not having riddlers switched on me, do you think me an infant? That I don't know it's bad luck? If you are indeed employed here, come get thee back to work!"
"Sir," said Persander cooly, gracefully lifting the man's hand from his shoulder with one twist of his wrist, "you are incorrect, and impo—"
"Impolite," he was undoubtedly going to say. I afterwards recalled in perfect detail that moment when I interrupted, and did the unforgivable for a mother—stepped in to defend my son, as if he couldn't do it himself! I tried to stand still, stay silent, and almost managed, but when my son addressed this flatulent money-sack as "Sir," my outrage wouldn't stay down.
I cut Persander off, stepping up to the gamester: "How could he think you to be an infant?" I asked him as loudly as possible, "A big, oily, odorous rump of roast such as yourself? If you are so desperate to disgorge your coin, go and dump it in the jakes, man! You look doubtful but trust me—the notion's just new to you. Try it, and you'll love it! You're moron enough to love gaming, are you not?"
"How dare you, you abusive bitch! I won't stand for this!" The cry was the cue for the oaf's retainers, no less than three hefty knout-and-dirk veterans, and they trotted forth.
At this point things converged, and the situation instantly bloomed into a disaster. Persander, dropping suavity, shouted, "Stand them down!" and cleared the hilts of his shortsword, discreetly strapped crosswise against the small of his back. Too late, for here out of nowhere—how did they happen to be here?—were Raschle and Olombo convergent on the knoutsmen, and Bantril and Shinn emerging miraculously from somewhere behind me, closing on them as well. The den's own thumpers, meanwhile, were closing round us almost as quickly.
Thanks to the tranquillizing effects of sudden collision, the brawl was resolved well short of blades. The sum of it was that the gamester's retainers had between them, at a guess, a round dozen broken ribs, their toga-ed rump roast had a lovely plump purple face I'd fisted him, and, unfortunately, Raschle had a broken arm. Our nuncial status spared us detention for damages. Enough that we were marched under arms back to Plectt's ship, which set sail under compulsion a few hours after. What ensued for Persander I knew would be severe professional embarrassment at the very least. The fracas divided us and we had no further moment together.
We set Raschle down at Kadastra in the Aristoz Chain, the western boundary of the Shallows—saw him lodged and leeched till we came back for him. In Hagia we must hire a spear to be at strength for our commission. We crossed the eastern Agon in a tennight, and my bitter self-reproach and sadness made it a dreary crossing for me.
Shipping bound up the Haagsford River lies at anchor near her estuary and waits till sunrise brings the prevailing onshore breezes that offer easy conveyance inland to Big Quay. When our caravel hoisted sail we made part of a pretty little flotilla of vessels moored before the rivermouth—the gamut of Southern Agon merchantmen we seemed: aft of us, a brace of little Samadrian caiques, big-ruddered with lateens of bossed hide, running leather goods, likely; off our bows a great wallowing galliot, high-castled fore and aft, an Ingens bulk freighter shipping—who knew?—anything suited to warehousing till a rise in prices; the high-riding schooner at point of the pack, with her tall tiers of swollen sail, had likely traversed the open Agon (whose crazed gales she was rigged for) and if from Kairnheim, her cured beeves were likely discharged back in the Ephesions, and she came to Big Quay to fill her hold with something warehoused there; in the main, the smaller fry—a half dozen frigillae, yare as water-skaters; a triad of Pythnian curvottes, their bowsprits carven in the nefrits, spaalgs and djoons of traditional Astrygal icongraphy—carried, as our own grocer did, consumables to bustling Big Quay's populace. The grander craft came on business from half the world away, and great fortunes in a dozen nations rode with them.
The river, abloom with our sail, swept in long, stately reaches all gilded with morning, and the country was piled up in lovely, green-brocaded hills on either bank. Beneath all this beauty, though, I was already feeling a stirring and twitching—like a venomous something you suddenly sense shares the bedclothes you've just snuggled under.
I chided myself I had known Hagia's history, as most do. Why was I suddenly fastidious? Is not a Nuncio unlike all others in having particularly sworn ". . . to honor the custom, the canon, the creed of all peoples whose soil I tread upon . . ."?
Portly shipmaster Plectt—whose oiled ringlets and groomed, perfumed chinlet of beard had delayed me but briefly from developing quite an affection for—slouched at the port rail beside me. "Your teeth are on edge, my dear Nuncio."
"What?"
"Those two little knots of muscle declare your jaw to be politely but definitely clenched."
"Well, I'm . . . anxious perhaps. . . ."
"Dear Lagademe. You are the most upright, excellent, and intransigent of women! The bare thought of this nation's gods revolts you. But wait and watch. You have not yet begun to abhor. Just past this next bend here. . . ."
Big Quay's name was, for most of its history, a gross overstatement, of course. Time out of mind it had been a rural backwater, the terminus of three convergent inland highways, where the gleets-wool from a number of Hagia's countless inland valleys naturally concentrated before shipment abroad—and not far abroad—to the neighboring Astrygals, mainly. Ambitious locals had built a few "warehouses," big sheds of plank and shingle, no more. These shed owners, a bumpkin elite, dabbled in buying the shearings they stored, and brokering lots off-season, but they seldom did more than break even at best. Now we rounded that bend, and I confronted what those plank sheds, and little docking piers on crooked pilings, had grown to.
A tumult of looming structures it was, an extravagant abundance architecture. The effect was heightened by the strict niche the city's civic core nested in, for Big Quay was backed by a wall of crags, and stood snugly bracketed between these and the river, as thronged with masts and sail as the city was with steeples and domes, pylons and porticoes, pinnacles, turrets and towers. Their density gave all those grand and individually impressive buildings an air of competitive jostling, of standing on their toes to be seen. The quay, two miles long, was a rampart of massive, seamlessly masoned ashlar, fronted by a phalanx of imposing warehouses of the same costly stone. This quay—a Big Quay in truth today—was like a second river of sailors and teamsters and navvies and merchants and factors and freightwagons and cargo cranes . . . for all I could see of its length, every foot of the grand wharfside swarmed.
Big Quay was rightly enough named now, past a doubt, now in its Age of Gold, its Age of A'rak.
Plectt espied his grocers' factor; the man flourished two signal flags bearing the house's blazon (a loaf and sausage, en gardant), to mark the berth secured us, whence another carrack—riding high and unladen—was just then being towed out to open water by the little galleys—abristle with oars—locally known as dockers.
In this last little interval before I set foot in the metropolis, I found I could imagine quite clearly that little, early-days Big Quay, all weeds and weathered wood. How had it been on that fateful day near two centuries ago, when that monstrous being had first revealed himself, and proposed his epochal Covenant to those rustics with their few sheds of wool? Just how had that awesome colloquy come upon them, those homely entrepreneurs in fleeces and jerked mutton? Spiderthought is directly known, not heard; it comes rippling right up one's spine. Had Grandfather A'rak crept near in the night, crouched watching and weighing them a while . . . ? Spied on them counting their stock, securing their flimsy doors against night . . . ?
It now seems clear that from the first the A'rak had been bargaining for security in the long term. Sly puppeteer, from the outset he'd seen how to conjure a populous nation from a sleepy pastoral people—how to swell the size of his flock, generation after generation. Gentlemen . . . Gentlemen, do not be alarmed. I am A'rak, a visitor to your lovely hills. Did you know that beneath them, I have found many rich veins of purest gold . . . ?
The widow Pompilla was to meet us on the Quay in front of the Maritime Museum, and here Plectt, when his crew had his cargo's offloading well in hand, conducted us. We, with our quickshaw in tow, would be known to our client before she to us, and accordingly we made ourselves visible, but a half hour's self display amid the morning throng produced no Dame Pompilla in widow's weeds. For a twenty-night running she had engaged to be standing the watch here on the morning's dockings, the herb-haag had told us, and we were here within three days of term.
"Leave your men here, Lagademe. I'll show you the Fane," offered Plectt. This seemed needful, some sense of the cult our commission involved us with. I did not wish our point of delivery to be the first A'rak-temple I'd ever stepped into. The temple here of course was the grandest of all of them, and the one where we were to lodge the deceased was an outlying, more rural shrine, but all the fanes had in common the occasional presence of the A'rak, or of one of his numberless spawn, and I felt the need to have some sense of what that meant.
The way to the A'rak Fane lay up towards the foot of the crags, the city's civic and fiscal core. The broad boulevard we followed was fronted with shops whose opulence ascended with the slope, while the grand homes of prospering merchants yielded to the manses of magnates and the Count Houses and 'Changes with their pillastered and friezeworked facades and their traffic of phaetons jockeyed by liveried lackeys, disgorging—amidst flurries of footmen—perruked financiers.
The A'rak-Fane seemed more stronghold than temple, a mighty octagon in plan, a faceted dome of massy stone—except for great eight-sided windows of dark-tinted glass, set high in each facet of the walls. Its entry yawned between huge pylons, the massy doors—bas-reliefed brass—standing open. Plectt stopped just short of the doors, and embraced me farewell. "I'm back to the Shallows this same noontide."
"You won't show me inside?"
He glanced at the yawning doors with a grimace of loathing. "I'm ignorant of the cult, by choice. What they call the altar, you know . . . it's a pit. The mouth of a shaft." He gave a comic shudder. "The god, you see, or one of his many spawn, can actually attend his service—could emerge, don't you see, should he choose. It's not done, of course, as a rule . . . but I never go in, the bare idea repels me. Goodbye my dear, upright Lagademe, noblest of Nuncios!"
Seen from inside, those grand windows were wheels of murky red, black, and amber; they filled the great domed space with a sanguinary gloom, complicated by diaphanous silken hangings that made a labyrinth of the interior; though transparent, the silks lent a wavery, visionary ambiguity to the sanctum, whose great wheel of pews gently vortexed down to a raised dais at its hub. From the atrium just within the brazen doors, my eyes were just level with the top of that dais, where some half-dozen priestly figures (their common feature of costume a white silken shawl fringed with dangling silken braids) stood symetrically arrayed round the platform's rim. All of them faced the center of the dais, while one standing foremost—in leathern headgear octagonally tiara-ed—intoned incomprehensible liturgy. Their gazes were bent, and their chief's intonations were directed, downwards, towards the stone they stood on, where I could now envision what I could not see from my vantage, the "altar" that was the mouth of a shaft.
The pews were mostly empty. There were perhaps some hundred folk scattered among them. It occurred to my that this murky, webby interior was meant to soften an emptiness that was probably more the rule than the exception here. The ceremony didn't lack impressiveness. The chief priest's intonations were blurred by echoes, but the echoes could be heard falling away deep underground where the gods laired, and this lent the liturgy a most somber gravity.
I began to step down a little deeper into the pews, and just as I did so the priest's voice seemed to falter, and his posture, for several heartbeats, seemed paralyzed. A quietly dramatic moment, I found it, and when his voice resumed there was a quaver in it that seemed to say something had changed in this vast vaulted interior. Indeed, was there not a most subtle tingle of presence now, in the air around me? Weren't the sparse congregation faintly stirring, sensing the same?
In the end, I could not be sure, and a moment more saw the service concluded. The little troop of priests filed down the stairs off the dais, and thence up the aisle, their passage sending a gentle swell, like soft breathing, up through the gauzy silk dangling around them and caressing their shoulders. I retired to a coign of the atrium, out of the way of the dispersing worshippers (prosperous looking burghers, in the main) to watch the priests pass nearer at hand.
It was thus I chanced to witness something that piqued my curiosity extremely. The chief priest stationed himself near the great doors, and urbanely murmured to those of his congregation who paused to murmur some parting exchange. I thought the atrium vacant when, at last, the priest turned away toward a corridor that appeared to lead to an annex of sacerdotal apartments. But just as the priest vanished into this corridor, a tall, lean figure of decidedly undevout appearance stepped soft-footed out from behind a pillar: bony-face, broken-nosed, black hair clubbed in thongs down his back (up from which peeked a sword-pommel—a three-quarters blade, no doubt, hid in his doublet), this lanky shape lithely and soundlessly followed the priest into the corridor, out of my sight.
The more keenly my curiosity gnawed at me—and I stood there unable to move for the longest time—the more sternly did my Nuncial duty upbraid me. Our commission, half paid in advance, commanded my fullest energies on the instant. If a Nuncio is anything, she is someone who does not step aside from appointed paths—someone whom the seduction of branchings and by-ways can never beguile. Sternly remembering myself, then, I went to rejoin my crew.
| Title: | The A'Rak |
| Author: | Michael Shea |
| ISBN: | 0-671-31947-7 |
| Copyright: | © 2000 by Michael Shea |
| Publisher: | Baen Books |