Shadow's End (55 page)

“Why so?” asked the older woman. “A behemoth is a great beast, isn't it? An old word for some kind of hugeness that lived a long time ago?”

Lutha nodded. “It's an old word, yes.”

It was a word I'd heard somewhere. “Is it a real word? I mean, does it mean something real?”

Lutha nodded. “It isn't what it means so much as what it denotes. It means beasts, actually. Plural. But it conveys something more than a mere animal. The connotations are of intractable mightiness, of inexorability and fatefulness.”

Poracious nodded slowly as she slumped, the heavy lines of her body seeming to me inexpressibly weary and dejected.

“Fatefulness,” she said. “I said the same to the old Proc while the world shook around us. That was after we'd had the vision, you see.”

Lutha's eyes came back to us. She raised her eyebrows.

“I say vision, though maybe it was only old minds playing tricks on old bodies. The old Proc and me, we'd stopped a bit, to rest. He was gray, holding his arm across him as though it hurt. We'd found this place where we could sit…. So, we were looking out to sea, and suddenly there was an ark, a great primitive sort of boat, rocking against a wrack of cloud, rain slanting across it like a curtain, wind driving it. It was made out of wood, don't you know. We could see the marks of tools on the sides, and it was loaded with animals…. Well, you know the old story, only this was real! And one of the animals put back its head and howled words! ‘Beware,' it cried. ‘Was it not commanded that each kind should be saved?'”

Leelson had been listening. Now he frowned down his nose at Poracious, slowly shaking his head. Thus did Fastigats reject the fanciful. Poracious took no notice of him.

Jiacare, on the other hand, was intrigued. “The ark story is from an ancient literature, isn't it? What was the book called?”

“It was called, simply, the Book,” Leelson said in his usual didactic manner. “It was supplanted by the doctrines of Firstism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries of the predisperion era.”

He rose, brushed himself off, then went to join Mitigan at the cave entrance.

The ex-king nudged Poracious. “Did you see anything else in your vision?”

She shook her head. “Leelson thinks I am hallucinating, but I did see it, and I heard the voice so very clearly.” She sighed, dropping her head once more. “Of course, I hadn't eaten for a long time, and we'd been walking endlessly. I know people who are very hungry and tired can see things….”

Her voice trailed off as though she'd lost the strength to speak.

Snark said, “Suppose Firsters are wrong. Suppose the universe was made for all kinds of creatures.” She took Lutha's hand and gripped it. “Suppose, Lutha!”

“I don't know,” Lutha murmured. “Instinctively, it seems to me Firstism is illogical, but even now it's hard for me to imagine living with creatures. There are no creatures on Central. In my whole life I've only seen two or three other kinds of creatures. Gaufers. And the cats …”

“You must have seen birds in Simidi-ala,” I said. “And we had cornrats in the hive. And little fishes in the streams. You must have seen them!”

“Perhaps I did. I don't remember. Of course, I've seen Kachis and shaggies and Rottens. Are they animals?”

Poracious sighed. “Isn't everything alive either a plant,
a human, or an animal?” She rubbed at her head, dragging her hair up in dirty spikes. “When I was a child, there were still a few animals on my home planet. I remember horses. I remember—”

“Horses,” said Jiacare Lostre. “Oh, weren't horses wonderful? So shiny, so majestic, the way their necks arched, the way they pranced, high and proud. I remember seeing one running across a pasture, tail high, with her little one running beside her. Oh, on Kamir, we still had horses in my father's time. And dogs. We used to ride….”

His voice faded into nostalgic silence. Poracious Luv drew her blanket more tightly around her, extending one hand from this cocoon to stroke the jar Snark had brought down from her cave. She followed the design with her fingers, asking, “Who are these?”

She was pointing at curvilinear patterns that seemed to make eyes and noses and mouths.

Snark replied, “Father Endless and Mother Darkness. And the carriers of souls.”

“They have not human faces,” Poracious commented. “Why is that?”

“They are mother and father of all things,” I whispered. “Why should they have human faces?”

“Did your tempter have a human face?” Poracious asked Snark.

Snark cast a look over her shoulder, to be sure Leelson and Mitigan were still some distance away, before saying, “The songfathers claimed the Gracious One was male and had a human face and a male … body. Considering how the songfathers lied about other stuff, maybe it's just a story they made up.”

Poracious moved slightly, looking at the jar from another angle. “Most gods of most worlds have human faces.”

“Because men make them in their image,” Lutha remarked, somewhat bitterly. “To grant mankind license to
do what we would do anyway.” Her eyes went back to the entrance and she gasped abruptly.

Snark followed her gaze. The two cats had somehow sneaked by the watchmen. They stood well inside the chamber, crying at us as they rubbed themselves against the stones. Whatever we might have expected, it was not cats. Snark went at once to find a food packet among the store she and Mitigan had lowered from above, and while she opened it the animals arched their backs and wound in and out between her legs. Mitigan and Leelson joined us by the stove, and we all watched while the animals ate. From Leelson's expression, I think he was expecting the cats to speak or go up in a puff of smoke. No one said anything at all until they had finished and departed.

Mitigan snarled, “Maybe they're spies. For whatever's out there.” He stalked back to the entry.

Leelson joined him, saying, “What
is
out there? And what's it waiting for?”

“Poracious says it's Behemoth,” said Snark. “Whatever it is, it's more like the cats than it's like us.”

“How?” Poracious demanded. “How like.”

“It's part of something,” Snark replied.

“So are we!” Mitigan asserted angrily.

She shook her head at him. “No. Not on any homo-normed world. On Central, we didn't depend on anything, and nothing depended on us! We didn't respect anything, and nothing respected us. On natural worlds, life makes a loop. Birth and life and death are all parts of it, and all the parts respect one another. There's no top or bottom. There's just this … honorable dependency. But on homo-normed worlds, no flesh lives but man-flesh.”

“Because we don't need animals!” Leelson asserted angrily.

“You say we don't,” Lutha protested. “But one could argue they need themselves. One could argue that their creator may have purposes for them.”

“Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?” He waved a forefinger in her face. “We can be their creator. We have specifications for every species stored away. They can be reanimated anytime.”

Snark jeered, “Stored away? Like old chairs, in a cellar somewheres? Would that satisfy you, Leelson Famber? Or you, Mitigan. Not living, not breathing, not moving. Just a pattern, in storage. Suppose before they did it to you, they told you, ‘Don't worry. We can reanimate you anytime.' How'd you feel about that?”

“Humans are not animals,” Mitigan said angrily. “You can't compare them. The universe was made for man.”

“So you say,” Snark crowed, with an outrageous snicker. “Now maybe whatever's out there is remaking the universe. Repopulating it, anyhow.”

“Snark …” Lutha murmured warningly.

Mitigan's hands twitched toward his weapons; his eyes were hard and slitted. Snark wasn't noticing, or she didn't care.

“Well, yeah, but look! Look at this world. Look how it's set up. Doesn't it look like a nursery? Some place all clean and ready to multiply life on, and lots of it?”

“You're saying the world is
it
-normed?” asked Leelson, incredulously. “Shaggy-normed. Rotten-normed.” He was almost as angry as Mitigan.

“That's it!” she crowed, a rapscallion, happily infuriating larger and quite dangerous opponents. “Maybe this world is Ularian-normed! Wouldn't that be a joke on us?”

Mitigan and Leelson were not amused. Before she could say anything else, the ex-king put his hand on Snark's shoulder, calming her, drawing her away. There was enough danger, his eyes said, without causing more among ourselves.

I sat down beside Lutha and Leely. The boy was busy drawing in the sand, and she watched him, her thoughts written on her face. They were old thoughts, ones she had spoken of: love warring with pain, pain warring with love.
Leely was uncanny, a changeling, yet flesh of her flesh, fruit of her love for Leelson—which was perhaps something else, not love at all. Leely smiled meltingly up at her. She reached out, and he crawled into her lap to curl up there, playing with her hair. His mouth made silent words. He was trying names for things, silently working them out.

Poracious reached over and tapped me. “Look,” she said, pointing out toward the sky. It took me a moment to realize that day had come and the sun shone in vast emptiness. The night before, the sky had been full of shaggies. Now there were none.

“Where'd they go?” Snark demanded.

We went to the cavern opening and looked out. No shaggies. No Rottens.

“The sea!” Leelson exclaimed.

It was alive with swimming things. Great fishy creatures, huge as houses. Monstrous shelled things. Eels that squirmed among the rocks along the shore. Various and multiple, fecund and furious, life beat upon the shores of Perdur Alas. We were so awestruck we did not even see the enormous tentacle that reared out of the water and lashed toward us, missing us by a finger!

We scrambled back, getting out of the way. I had felt this same emotion at the Nodders, when I had known they were capable of killing us easily and quickly, with no one to see or mourn or care. So, too, this great welter of living things could drag us down and drown us, leaving no trace. We were not masters here! This world was not made for man!

“Eagles,” said Poracious.

We craned our necks to watch eagles for a while. They were as unexpected and marvelous as the other creatures, soaring in splendid spirals against the cloudless sky. Poracious stuttered and muttered, trying to attach a name to every living thing she saw, but Lutha said not a word.

“Where did they come from?” Leelson cried.

“The shaggies went,” said the ex-king. “The animals came.”

I turned to Lutha, the question in my face.

She shrugged. “I agree with him. The shaggies bred all kinds of creatures. This life is mutable. It will be what its maker wills.”

“What the hell is ‘its maker' playing at!” demanded Leelson, outraged.

We felt the earth shake, just a little, like a heavy footstep nearby. Poracious put her head on her knees and shuddered. Leelson pointed out into the sea, far, far, where the sky came down on the horizon. An island there, which had not been there before. It became larger while we watched.

“What's it doing?” demanded Mitigan in a tone almost as furious as Leelson's had been.

Lutha remarked. “Why so offended, Mitigan? You weren't this offended by the shaggies or by the Rottens.”

“Animals,” he said. “Why bother being offended at animals?”

“So what's coming out there isn't an animal?”

He scalded her with a look, before turning back to watch the blob grow larger. It had horns on top. Even at this great distance it was ineluctable, numinous, but familiar!

Lutha had the same idea. “Did you see Nodders on your way to Tahs-uppi?” she asked Mitigan.

“We climbed around them,” he grated. “Such things have no right to be.”

The ex-king smiled. In some terrible, fatalistic way, he was enjoying himself. “Perhaps this creature feels it has every right to be alive and moving. Perhaps it has judged our storage vaults and found them wanting. Perhaps it has some more immediate destiny to attend to.”

“We will soon know,” said I, from my position atop a boulder. “It's coming nearer.”

It was very tall. The head was massive. The horns on
top showed clearly. This was the reality of which the Nodders were only a symbol. This, whatever this was—had the same proportion of height to horned top, to the great bulk of the nodding head. I had no time to consider the effect, for sound changed, the world shuddered, a peculiarly dreamy sensation overtook me, as though all happenings were inevitable and I did not greatly care.

Leely pushed past me and went out of the cavern. He plopped down on a shelf of wave-rounded pebbles and stared outward, his lips making silent words.

“By all that's holy,” breathed Poracious. “Look, low down, against the water.”

We saw. Light. Shadow on one side, shadow on the other, shadow above, and light under, between.

“Legs,” I told them in my dreamy, languorous voice. “We only saw its upper part before. Now we are seeing between its legs.”

The Nodders had been only busts, then? Only heads and necks of Behemoth? There was more to the creature than that? Well, yes, my dreaming mind assented. Well, yes. Time went on. Eventually we saw its wings, which had until then been folded along its back. Eventually we saw its marvelous face, its wondrous eyes, its great adamantine teeth.

It stopped when the ocean was no deeper than its knees. Whales leapt around its legs. Gyring eagles made its aureole, and the wind of its breath pushed us to and fro, like little flags.

“I've seen it before,” whispered Poracious. “Somewhere.”

“Ancient earth,” Lutha replied. “Was it Babylon? Was it Ur? Mighty winged creatures were carved upon its walls.”