The
Mines of Behemoth The
Mines of Behemoth
Shag Margolds's Introduction toMY OLD FRIEND, NIFFT, with a perhaps unintentional candor, has displayed a personal flaw or two in this narrative. I honor his memory none the less for it. The good of Nifft always overbalanced the ill, and just so here where, whatever slight moral shortcomings may appear in our narrator, he gives us in his tale the most vivid and enlightening natural history of the Behemoth's life-cycle yet put on record.
Hadaska Broode, a Minusk historian, has penned the following tetrameters in homage to Behemoth. While I cannot pretend the lines are accomplished poetry, they are at least heartfelt:
What dread Being dares to farm
where every breed of demon swarms?
Who dares till there? Who shall go
and scythe the harvest row on row?
Who in that sunless gulf of harms
could drive the plow? Would dare to sow?Behemoth's jaws alone the share
to carve the flinty furrow there.
Behemoth's strength the reaper's blade,
her bowels the barn where harvest's laid.
To hers, what husbandry compares,
that has half demonkind unmade?
Broode's ardor for Behemoth is understandable in one of his nation. His native Minuskulons, though the smallest of the major island chains, loom large in the Behemoth sap trade, for they are the only landfall the Sea of Agon affords between southern Kairnheim, where sap is mined, and the sap's two greatest overseas markets: the Ephesion Chain to the south, and the Great Shallows to the east. The sap in its cake form is of course excellent fodder for kine and draybeasts the world over. In the Ephesions—on my native Pardash, for example—it is also used in its fluid state; a dilution is sprayed on our fields to enrich our somewhat lean soils. Meanwhile the Great Shallows' many sea-dwelling races use sap cake to mulch their mariculture and nourish their polyp patches, whelk beds, crab pastures, bivalve grottoes, and every kind of raft garden. The Minusk mariners who have flourished in this sap trade all know Broode's little poem by heart.
Given Behemoth's incredible utility to men—both in the havoc she wreaks on the demon race, and in the boon of her stolen sap—it is not surprising she inspires such paeans. The work of Kairnish scholars (theirs another race especially in her debt) abounds with similar encomiums. Both these schools of Behemoth's most ardent admirers share a further accord. On the question of Behemoth's origins, Minusk and Kairnish authorities alike aver that the Mountain Mother was born of some now forgotten human sorcery.
I will perhaps be forgiven a smile at this. If Behemoth be the scion of some thaumaturgic science man once wielded, then how much less at fault we must feel to play the vampire in her nests, even as she scours the subworld of our demon foes? For if the Mountain Mother be the fruit of philanthropic wizardry, where's the flaw in getting double good of her? Is it denied a man to use his own wagon or draybeast to his profit?
Kairnish folk might have the most need of this balm to guilt; in the northern reaches of their continent (as I have noted in my preface to The Fishing of the Demon Sea) the subworld preys upon the overworld all too vigorously, and men there fall in great numbers to demonic predation. Meanwhile in southern Kairnheim, where Behemoth nests under the Broken Axle Mountains, the demon nation still reels under a millenial defeat at the jaws of the Mountain Mother's legions, even while the southern Kairns most vigorously steal her sap from her nests.
Yet those of the opposing mind, who argue that Behemoth was born naturally of the Earth, point to her form which, in all but the scale of it, is so common through the natural world. Many scholars of unimpeachable erudition take this side of the controversy. Etiolatus the Praiseworthy notes, "How can those who go open minded on the earth, feeling the heart of the planet murmuring against their footsoles, ever think that Queen Earth in her Robe of Stars could fail to breed of herself the cure for any ill that blights her? Demons infested her; she gave birth to Behemoth."
For my part, though I have profound respect for the Earth's powers of invention, I think the answer is unknowable. My awe and love for the beasts, in any case, is great. I find cause for rejoicing in the fact that the sinking of a new sap-mine is the difficult and costly task that it is. The lithivorous ferrecks used to dowse for larval chambers, and then used to sink the first shafts down to those larval chambers, are creatures akin to certain brood parasites within Behemoth nests, and are both fierce and highly dangerous to manage. In consequence, these ferrecks have been almost entirely preempted by the sorcerous sisterhoods of the Astrygals, who have the means to command the beasts' angry energies. The ferrecks then being hard and costly to procure from the witches, the proliferation of new sap-mines throughout the Broken Axle Mountains has slowed almost to the rate of replacement for old mines fallen defunct through the phenomenon of "nest wander." Perhaps the sorcerers of the Astrygals intentionally sustain this equilibrium. In any case, our rapacity is shackled, and we plunder Behemoth less gravely than we might.
All that lives is flux, and a question Nifft raises disturbs me: might Demonkind grow to engulf Behemoth? The black yeast of demon vitality cooks unsleeping in its planetary cloaca; its vapors of infection float up fine as finest soot, soundlessly, steadily blackening, blackening what they blanket. Its patient twisting tendrils imperceptibly find purchase. . . . The reader will perhaps—when the fate of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine is learned, and Nifft's fears thereat—share my own unease.
Having touched on the question of human rapacity, I cannot close without confessing that it is with some misgiving I make public Nifft's account of the so-called "giants' pap" produced by Behemoth Queens, and of its apparent powers. Two considerations have persuaded me it is safe to expose this powerful substance to the greedy attention of entrepreneurs. In the first place, Nifft's narrative must tend to discourage exploitation. In the second, who but Nifft and Barnar, endowed as they were with rarest luck, could contrive to milk a Queen?
While I naturally shrink from burdening my dear friend's narrative (and the present manuscript is unmistakably of Nifft's own composition) with an excess of commentary or exegesis, I cannot leave certain lacunae unglossed. But since a prefatory voice must fade from memory as the history unfolds, the best procedure seems to be to deploy a brief Interjection or two within the narrative. Thus commentary can lie nearer what it touches.