The
Mines of Behemoth The
Mines of Behemoth
WE TOOK SHIP not long after dark. There was the bustle of boarding, and getting under way, and then Bunt retired at once to his hammock, and lay snoring within moments of our casting off. It was true he had partaken liberally of mead and viands at table, but his haste to bed down smacked of evasion too, for we had discreetly urged on him our wish to know more of our errand to the Royal Chamber in the Behemoth's nest.
Barnar and I stood at the rail of the creaky craft, an old pirates' caravel re-decked to ferry beasts and carriages like our own to and from the Kairnish coast. The half moon, zenithed in the early dark, made spectral statuary of the bare-masted vessels in the harbor. These fell astern of us, and the bright-windowed houses of the harbor dwindled to a little crescent-shaped constellation on the moon-silvered sea, as the wind took us out in the open channel. We leaned at the rail, enjoying the rickety dance of the old tub on the smoothly rolling waters.
"Well," Barnar ventured. "`giants' pap'. . . . Have you ever heard of it before?"
"I've heard Behemoth workers nurse or feed in some way at the flanks of the Queen, but I have also heard that same notion mocked as myth."
"It smacks of myth to me," Barnar said. "Who's ever been in a Royal Brood Chamber and seen a Queen? If it's been done, I've not heard of it."
"Well, we'll get what else we can out of Bunt. The rest, I suppose, we'll learn first hand in the attempt. . . ."
We stood at the rail through a long silence, our separate dreams wide awake in us, roaming through our minds. The night wind chased us, and set our scow creaking and lumbering through the easy swells. Above the shadow of the Kairnish coast ahead were thick-strewn stars only a little dimmed by the high half moon, and blazing as if they were coals that the wind blew to life.
"Barnar," I said, "I'm feeling lucky. I'm getting a feeling that luck is gathering itself under us like a great wave. Like a rising tide. I should have known it this morning, even before we came by this gold, for are not men who are swallowed by a glabrous, and emerge alive, among the world's luckiest imaginable?
"Let me tell you a story, old friend," I went on, "about a man we both know, a man who is dear as a brother to my heart. This man has nine living uncles and seven living aunts, and cousins uncountable, and thirteen brothers and sisters of his own"—Barnar made to interrupt me but I thrust up my palm—"and all four of his grandparents living and great aunts and great uncles at least half a score, and no less than four of his great grandparents still stepping most lively on the skorse-scented, needle-carpeted mountain slopes of his native valley, Ham-Hadryan Vale, the immemorial holding of the Ham-Hadryan clan. Can any doubt remain that the man I speak of is Barnar Ham-Hadryan, called, only half facetiously, Barnar Hammer-Hand, and Barnar Ox-Back? Don't answer! Hear me.
"This Barnar, whose beloved kin thrive near as thick on his natal slopes as does the timber that is their livelihood, is an earth-loving man, who wielded an axe from his earliest youth, who winched the howling blades of his family's sawmill since he was a stripling, and who, long before he came a man, had by his own sweat and skill done his part to set many a straight-keeled ship afloat, many a stout-walled home a-standing, many a strong-axled wagon a-rolling.
"And, when the Kragfasst clan of the Lulumean Highlands began its depredations in the Great Shallows, and thrust its blade of conquest down half the length of Ham-Hadryan Vale, who exchanged a tree-jack's axe for a battle-axe with half the furious will that this our Barnar did? Nine years of war transformed him from a fresh youth to a seasoned veteran, tough as an axe-haft of ironwood, but still with the same tender heart for his kin and his homeland beating in his formidable body.
"But when the invaders were repulsed at last, they left a clear-cut waste, and these shorn slopes were a torment to the eye of this same Barnar Hammer-Hand who, having fought for his valley till its deliverance, turned away from it when he had helped to win it back. He went abroad a-thieving over the earth, too grieved by his hearth-land's despoliation to long abide in it.
"In the decades since, he has lavished the better part of all his takings on his kin, refurbishing their faltering saws, replenishing their teams of plods, and generally nourishing along their laborious husbandry of the trees remaining to them.
"How can we not think, then—we who love and honor this same Barnar Ham-Hadryan—that his eyes may have grown . . . too fixed upon the earth? Of course it will most infallibly come to pass, that Barnar Hammer-Hand will drive home the Witches' Seed in the flanks of his native hills. Most surely he will do this, and call up his homeland's vanished hosts of skorse to stand tall again out of the soil! This will come to pass! But if, beforehand, an incalculable enrichment may be had—if, first, this Barnar—"
"Enough, Nifft! Stop it. Do you not realize, my friend, that you and I are at that point in years where, if a great thing lie in hand, then we must do it, then and there? We are not made of immortal stuff, old waybrother. If we are still to manage deeds that shine, then we must be straight about them when they offer. And this dream of the Witches' Seed I have held so long, it is not a thing I will set by for any other venture, now that it has come at last within my reach . . . or almost in my reach."
"Use reason, Barnar! If we possessed the Gantlets, Cowl and Buskins of Pelfer the Peerless, then we could shortly make ourselves so rich we could reforest all of Chilia, make even her stoniest ridges green with skorse, have the great trees growing thick as grass even in the high barrens of Magnass-Dryan."
That last shaft made him startle just a bit, for in the high barrens still dwelt Marnya-Dryan, whom Barnar had loved since boyhood; Marnya was the daughter of a proud but tree-poor clan. How might she not be wooed with Witches' Seed, and the forestation of her natal highlands? He repossessed himself, however, and smiled wanly. "Look at us, jarring over the spending of phantom gold!" He hauled his bags of gold up onto his shoulder and, before trudging off to his hammock, he thwacked my shoulder in his old friendly manner. But I knew him; though he was carefully concealing it in his well-bred way, he was hurt and resentful.
I lingered at the rail, bitterly resenting my friend's stubbornness. I was so vexed it ended by surprising me. I struggled for composure.
And I could admit, after a while, to feeling this same sad, mortal urgency Barnar had confessed to. While I'd trudged around Dolmen's shore this morning, shivering from the briny bath that left us still smelling of glabrous blood, this same bony finger of Time had indeed touched my own heart, and the Specter had murmured with lean lips at my ear that I was a vagabond who had achieved nothing, and now, never would.
But by the Crack, Key and Cauldron, under it all, I did indeed feel . . . lucky. Strange fortune had come to us, and was still coming. I looked north, to our future's unfolding. There, unveiled by the moon's decline, the blaze of stars brightened above the dark line of the Kairnish mainland. Those stars swarmed as thickly as I imagined Behemoths might swarm, down the subworld walls, and across the subworld plain, a-hunting the fleeing hosts of demons. . . .