Still musing over the curious bit of stalking I had been witness to in the A'rak Fane, I returned to find my crew, criss-crossing as I went the route by which Plectt had led me to the place. If I was sniffing for anything particular, it was for some sign from these citizens of any such repugnance and unease as troubled me. How could they so casually tread ground that was subterraneously trafficked by such a god as theirs, and his spawn? I suppose my naive thought was that surely some passer or shopkeep, thinking themselves unseen, would let slip a shudder, or that might spy here or there two cronies guardedly sharing a treasonous murmur of loathing.
But I glimpsed no such thing, not a jot of it. Even thus, they say, in cities near demon-vents, do people walk blandly about their business. My own obligation was plain enough in any case: to take a new grip on my Nuncial dispassion. So resolved, I returned to the quayside fronting the Maritime Museum.
Here were my pullers with the 'shaw, but Olombo was absent. Bantril, fractionally less laconic than Shinn, informed me, "Widow took him that way, said follow with you."
Off we set downquay, the pair threading the high-wheeled 'shaw amidst rattling freight wagons rushing empty from warehouse to waterside for new loads, dodging among the sedans and palanquins of substantial travellers being reverrentially conveyed to 'Change Row to wield their fortunes, steering round thickets of stevedores resting where they could best obstruct traffic, darting between maids and housewives a-streaming all parcelled and basketed to and from early market.
"Describe her, our commissioner!" I prompted Bantril as we jog-trotted. "What was she like?"
"Short. All veiled."
"Veils of mourning?"
"Black veils, to the ground."
We neared the Quay's southern end, where the city tapered to a spur as the crags angled to meet the riverside. The last stretch of quay here was a shabby, less trafficked precinct of straggly, unprosperous establishments: weathered plank storage sheds in fenced compounds, that rented lockups for the bags and impedimenta of sailors on shore between berths outbound; bottoms yards where small rental craft were docked: skiffs, yawls, wherries, and caiques; those chandlers' shops for the humbler mariner not above buying used cable or casks, elderly hardbiscuit and jerky, or rusty hoists and tackle already gone to sea; and the sort of little grog sheds where the oldest salts loaf and half-mites of beer are poured and each third grog is free.
My pullers halted at the gate of a bottoms yard. The gate, which opened onto the plankway the rentals were moored to, was locked, and bore the sign:
CLUMMOCKS DOCKING AND BOTTUMS
OURLY TO WEEKLY RAITS.
Through the gate we saw, out at the plankway's end, Olombo standing with a very short-statured figure in black, and with a towering obese figure in a tarry tunic, the eponymous Clummock, I guessed. The small black figure—inevitably our widow Pompilla—exhibited intense agitation, even at a distance. As she addressed the bottoms man, her hands ceaselessly worried and twisted a voluminous black handkerchief whose flutterings seemed a very signal flag of distress—and indeed, the liquidity of the black gauze that so profusely shrouded her likewise semaphored with its bulgings and ripplings that she was passionately imploring, or possibly villifying, the obese, immobile Clummock. I called out and signalled, and called again before Olombo, who seemed bemused, woke to us, and hastened to let us in. Leading us back down the plankway, he murmured, "In a great dither, the widow. Our coffin's there . . . moored on that raft? She won't have it lashed on the 'shaw, though. She says it has to be rafted upriver before we take to the highway. The raft it's on's rented—brought the casket to town on it, seemingly, from the embalmer. Odd she didn't have him 'balmed here in his hometown, no? Anyway she wants this Clummock to let her take the raft farther upstream on credit, seems she's out of coin. Be calm with her now, Lag, she's a moaner and wailer for sure."
With a smiling salute, I soothed, "Honored Dame! Rest utterly assured, Dear Pom—-"
"Dear Heavens! Dear Nuncio! Oh Horrors! Oh help! You must save us, must solve this disastrous impasse, speak to this fellow, make him see how cruel and stiffnecked and obdurate of him it is to stand fast on such trifles." Sobs clutched her voice. Her face, a vague oval only in the veils, seemed tear-streaked. I shut up and nodded and murmured awhile as she went on thus—she was plainly one of those women who must be allowed to erupt, to explode, an overflowing kind of little woman altogether, even in the superabundant scent of her sachet—nellopilla, lillorish—just those cloying aromatics one associates with a particular breed of over-wrought muddled dame overindulged all her life by a husband who has long stopped listening to her. Our Dame's scent was strong even for her type, faintly dizzying, indeed.
Patiently I endured her effusion of words and aromatics. When a shortage of funds seemed to be her theme, I gently asked if it was the rest of our stipend she lacked. The question seemed to stun her to softness. "Why no," she breathed in wonderment. "Here's your fee here, Dear Nuncio. Take it at once." The money belt paid us in full. I passed it among my crew and we parted it on the spot.
A few careful questions more, one or two outbursts, and clarity at last was achieved, and Dame Pompilla, delivered, stood quietly weeping. The stern-paddle raft bearing the deceased's coffin—an imposing great casket of onyxwood, richly carven—had been hired only as far as its return to its moorage here. But the widow was urgently insistent on loading our crew and 'shaw on it and taking us a further ten leagues upriver of Big Quay aboard it, before setting coffin and crew ashore to commence the overland journey of delivery. The gist was that Clummock must have three gold octals additional rent on the raft for the twenty leagues extra, while the Widow's whole funeral capital was exhausted by the remittance of the balance of our stipend, which iron nuncial protocol, of course, requires in advance, given the danger of many commissions.
But Hagia had fine, broad smooth-flagged highways in abundance. It might be that going upriver would save some few miles of overland travel, but what did such a trifle matter? We were well paid and glad to run the whole way—to load shaw and cross town on the instant, and be miles up the northeast highway by noontide.
Alas, ambiguity and ambivalences haunted the A'rak's cult. Though entombment in one's native fane was orthodox rite, it was rarely practiced, and more tolerated than fostered by the deity. "I didn't share my lamented Glabron's piety, dear Nuncio," grieved the Dame. "The rituals are all but unknown to me—to many of us here, in truth. Master Clummock, you're as vague on the matter as I, didn't you tell me?"
The huge bottoms man hawked phlegm and spat in the water. "The funeral thing, Dame, I don't know a bit of. I do the required. I went up to the stadium, stood for a Choosing six years back . . . I deem that's enough cult for me, thankee."
"Yes," said the Dame. "But whatever the rules, Dear Nuncio, the heart of it is a long funeral procession like that my beloved Glabrum wished is . . . disliked by the gods as morbid spectacle, don't you see. Coffins passing through villages with the A'rak's icons engraved on them . . . they arouse somber thoughts. Now, water acts to muffle the A'rak's otherwise keen sensitivity to whatever treads upon his earth. Only when the wheels of your quickshaw touch earth here will the A'rakspawn clearly sense your sad burden's presence. I'm most anxious to shorten the term of that contact and its irritation to the deity. Indeed, dear Nuncio, I can't pass this topic without emphasizing to you most strongly—" here she leaned near to grip my arm, and a gust of her cachet discomfited me; her grip was surprisingly steely, as her voice seemed as well, just then. "—most strongly stress that you must never allow the casket to fall or even touch the ground directly. Such a grave impiety could bring a visit from one of the deities. . . ."
I disengaged my arm as civilly as I could, but my tone could not hide my sense of affront. "As the cost of our hire might have hinted to you, Dame Pompilla, a Nuncial crew of our calibre are not in the habit of dropping their consignments."
"Oh, certainly not my dear, certainly not!" she quavered, once more a-fluttering, so that we all hastened to soothe her, and ask how to solve our impasse.
Clummock still stood firm on his fee. Timidly, then, the widow ventured a possible solution. She revealed that she had just concluded arranging a little commercial transaction in the countryside a half day distant. "I'm to doctor a friend's gleets and be paid with the gravid ewes of the flock; two dozen and more are close to yeaning. With your crew helping, Nuncio, we could have them here mid-morrow, when good Clummock might take some in pay for the raft, and then my lamented husband could be launched, and well forward by nightfall en route to his rest."
"Hap they be thick-fleeced and fat enough, I would," allowed Clummock, regarding the offered ewes.
That a Nuncial crew should go shepherding was ludicrous, of course, an indignity. But, trading looks with my crew, I found grudging assent—eagerness in any case to shorten this humiliating haggle, with our turbulent client working up to a lather at every turn. Our stipend was princely in truth. Let us endure a brief irregularity, then, if it just got us shut of this odorous, clamorous woman, and put highway under our feet at last. This was a commission I wished to put briskly behind us.
All warbling cheer at my acceptance now, the widow led Clummock aside, with some last points to show him about the casket left on his raft. She said something close to his ear to which he nooded. He sat on the casket. The widow led us away, babbling of our journey, led us out Clummock's gate and locked it behind us. Glancing back as we left I saw Clummock still quietly seated on the coffin, as if he meant to repose there a while longer.
* * *
The North Highway swept us smoothly out through the metropolis' purlieus, where the monumental profile of the city subsided to a sprawl of more modest residences, while the crags swung inland and merged with the green, easy-rolling hills.
The widow Pompilla marched in the lead, a short, peaked heap of black gauze in billowy, unabated motion. I was denied a view of her precise locomotive style, but, short as her legs had to be, her pace and stamina were astonishing. Here, I would have thought, one saw the energy squandered by her emotional eruptions being channeled to useful effort—were it not that as she strode tirelessly forth, she held forth just as tirelessly, practically ranted in fact, about the countryside we crossed.
"Hay-farming!" (This at the first shocks of hay we passed.) "I was a farm girl before I was wed! Helping dear Daddum bind wickers with withes my third year! Milking the gentle eyed momiles, squeezing the gleets' silken teats. The warm milk asteam in the chill of morn! The precious perfumes! The barnyard's pungencies!" And so on.
From raptures about her Hagish childhood, she passed to raptures about Hagish culture. She laid her nativity here on so thick, that under any other circumstances I would have suspected her for the fraud she was, and though I now understand how I was duped, I still cringe with shame to think how I swallowed it all. "Now that—look! Look there!" (This was occasioned at the sight of the first rat-rick we passed, whatever that was.) "That is a rat-rick of the true Hagish style, the original, native Hagish style of the first Hagish rat-rick riggers! Note the plain, solid capstyle, tented on teepeed poles fanned out to rafter the eaves! In that humble but heartfelt capstyle is Hagish virtue in essence, Hagish—" And so on.
But however much she punished our ears, the solid honorarium in our pokes made us patient with this undeniably grotesque little detour, as did the fact that it gave us a taste of the territory while we were still unyoked to our duty. This highway, for one thing, presaged a swift delivery if all the roads—as they in fact proved to be—were equally well engineered: wide and seamlessly flagged, it attacked slopes in graceful sweeps that eased upgrades and downgrades alike. We soon learned as well the pronounced rhythm of Hagian terrain, whose pattern we grasped when, near noontide, we emerged from the Rattlespate River Valley, crested the ridgeline, and began our descent into the Ebonflux River Valley. Hagia is in fact one vast network of grassy ridgelines—sun-warmed and sparsely treed—and, webbed in the net, a host of lush river valleys thick-forested along their floors.
As with the Rattlespate's, the Ebonflux Valley's upper slopes were nearly all meadows, thicketed here and there with flowering shrubs. Rainy Hagia—we were there in its sole short dry season—is profuse in blossoms: scarlet gleetsbane with pistils like saffron stilletos, the lavender flagons of gnats-nest, the ranked bells of amber carrilion with indigo anthers a-dangle like tongues.
Midway down into the valley, where the slope gentled, the farmsteads began, looking pretty and prosperous, their furrows straight as comb-strokes. From the gables it was the fashion to hang wind-chimes like clouds of butterflies or flights of birds, and fanciful weather vanes were another custom—sheet-copper in artful silhouettes: a milkmaid in windblown dress by a gleet with windblown fleece, a shepherd chasing a tumbling hat, two children struggling to pitch a tent with a wind-tugged blanket.
It came to me then that we had been some hours in progress and that actual children had been little in evidence the whole time. As we at length neared the wooded valley floor, I understood it. The Ebonflux, much broader than the Rattlespate, was flanked by a much denser forest, and entering its fringe we grasped how a Hagian valley's floor could be a world away from its slopes or its ridgelines. Widow Pompilla actually fell silent. As the green gloom roofed us, the prisoning trees crowded closer, and the woven vines shackled our eyes and ears in whispery shadow and the restless ambiguity of leaf, blade, and frond. We sensed a stir of stealthy habitation coming awake on every side. But of course. These valley-floor woods would be the very heartland of the Covenant. Here could the A'rakspawn walk above-ground almost invisibly. And children throughout the valleys would, in consequence, be close-kept.
As we crossed the Ebonflux on the Cobblestone Bridge, from mid-span I glimpsed pathetic confirmation of my inferences down in the Cobblestone Township, which occupied both banks of the river below. There were modest docks, where shallowdraft gondolas offloaded kegged dairy goods at the Cheese Cooperative, or baled fleeces at the high-beamed Weavery echoing with the clatter and twang of the looms. And down on those docks if glimpsed some schoolmistresses guiding a gaggle of nursery aged children, showing them the shopwindows and the folk a-working. Aged three or four summers, the children were precious, as all such wee pups are the world over, with their solemn wee flowerpetal lips and great, grave eyes. It was only at second look I saw it: bright woolen cords bound these tinies wrist to wrist. They scarce perceived these friendly shackles they wore, such being their custom since cradle-days no doubt, like Ma and Da's countless cautionings never to stray from the path to the undergrowth, as pups like themselves had got vanished forever and ever that way. . . .
We were glad to climb out of the woods, and rise ridgeward again. Our veiled Dame marched in the van quite mute now, and stayed so, till I grew still uneasier about her. Her odd ardors, her sharp alterations! I conceived an irrational anxiety to see her face, as if that by itself could help me decide: was she, quite simply, a plausible madwoman, and her errand with that coffin of hers a lunatic's wild conception?
As the day was declining we branched to a lesser road just short of the ridgecrest, and only then did she speak again. "Now my friend Widow Bozzm, mark you" (as before she still marched as she spoke, though now she faced forward) "is herself new-widowed, lost her dear Haggardham Bozzm, a cheese-meister, but a year gone, and she and her two girls are hard put running the dairy he left them on Buttercrock Creek. In some work, like milking the momiles and gleets, they're marvels, and the cheesing and churning, but they're all too stout for the shepherding uphill and down. In consequence, their gleets go half-tended, and have now caught the shank-rot. I'll watch the night leeching them, and for my services, my fee shall be the ewes that are gravid with kid. Help me barn them tonight, and drive my ewes home tomorrow, and we shall have the rent of good Clummock's paddleraft to start you aright on you commission. As for tonight, take your ease, and enjoy the Buttercrock dames'incomparable culinary confections."
| Title: | The A'Rak |
| Author: | Michael Shea |
| ISBN: | 0-671-31947-7 |
| Copyright: | © 2000 by Michael Shea |
| Publisher: | Baen Books |