West of January (12 page)

Our routine was established now. Violet chose the youngest girl, insisting that I would sleep “in a corner of the tent.” Then he told me to go ahead, and I did. Sometimes he watched me; sometimes he just lay down and slept.

I learned not to look in their eyes. Since the lesson with Kininia I had developed some finesse, and very rarely I managed to rouse some excitement in my partner, also; but that was only in the first few camps. Later, the women’s eyes took on the same dead flatness as their menfolk’s, and they were incapable of anything except submission. I did not care.

Yet, on two or three occasions, after I had done with her, a woman tried to speak to Violet, denouncing her herdmaster for killing off her mother or her children by a previous owner, just as I had tried to denounce Anubyl to him. His answer was always very much the same: “That is not my business, woman. He is herdmaster and may do what he thinks fit. Now attend to your duties—the boy is being lazy again. See what your skills can do to perk him up.”

Madness hung over the grasslands like the stench of rotting meat.

I lost count. I remember my seventh, because my father had only owned six women. Of course, they had been his for repeated enjoyment, and I was merely sipping on the wing, but I impressed myself when I reached seven. Soon the names and faces blurred. Our journey was long, the stops many. Two dozen women…fifty…perhaps even more than that. What more could a growing boy want?

Poor Violet! His plan had failed abjectly. He had looked to me for inspiration and found instead only mocking confirmation of his own inadequacy. Of course, I did not understand. I was merely very puzzled that he would not indulge in such a superlatively enjoyable activity when it was freely available. Perhaps he did so, once or twice, after I had fallen into a satiated slumber, but I don’t believe he ever even tried.

He was aging, and he was grossly overweight in a murderously hot climate. Doubtless those things were the main cause of his trouble. But much later, in Heaven, I once heard a discussion between a couple of learned saints. Great mental strain, one of them maintained, can depress not only a man’s mind but his body also. It seems a strange idea, but it might explain Violet. The herdfolk were looking to him for aid, and he was impotent to help them. Perhaps that failure gnawed at his brain and thus sapped his physical health. He put me forward in his place, he encouraged my efforts in the hope of encouraging himself—or perhaps he thereby sought to punish himself. Perhaps my callous indifference held some sort of morbid fascination for him… I don’t know. He was more than a little crazy.

I knew none of this at the time. I took each woman as she came, with no thought that she was doomed to die with the rest, when the last woollie corpse had rotted away. Heedless of the darkening horror, of the very real danger that even we might not escape before famine and disease closed the trap, I ate and slept and pleasured to mad excess, relentlessly strengthening my resolve to become an angel.

─♦─

Then, without warning, our long descent through the grasslands ended. Vegetation vanished. The chariot hissed smoothly over hard sand. The hills became rocky and barren, and the rivers shrank into the ground. I know now that we had reached the farthest former extent of the March Ocean, which was already retreating before the hot caress of the approaching sun. At the time I was shocked. I had never seen terrain with no vegetation. Violet must have guessed that it was coming, for he had been begging gifts of water bottles in the last few camps. Now he put on all the speed he could, in a desperate race to reach the water’s edge before we died of thirst.

The heat in the lowlands was incredible, even to me who had never known cold. Light flared up from the sand in unkindly waves and silvery shimmers of mirage, roasting a man’s eyeballs. The wind alone could flay him. Teasing, useless clouds still hung far ahead of us, seaward, while the hills we had left were now elevated to the sky, transformed into pale blue ghosts of mountains—so far had we descended.

Far off on either hand, great spurs of highland flecked the sand. Our course lay toward the ocean, but also toward one of these barriers, the more southerly. That was our fastest route, Violet said, in that wind, and also a better chance for water. He spoke little; the silence was broken only by the hiss of our wheels and a keening of the wind in the rigging.

How long? I have no way of knowing how long we took to cross that desert. I slept three times, I think, but my sleep was fitful in the heat and thirst tortured my dreams, so perhaps my sleeps were short. Violet sat grimly by the mast, working the sails, steering with every speck of his great skill, losing not a moment. Red and bloated still, he somehow could yet look haggard, his face caked with dirt and a silvery growth of whiskers, his eyes almost hidden below the brim of his hat, screwed up against the glare. Our tongues felt huge and calloused in our mouths.

As the ordeal continued, I began to worry about him—I, who had cared nothing while a whole people died around me. I wondered if he would hand over the controls and give me my first lesson in driving a chariot. He might have done so had the way been flat, but the sand rolled in ridges. There were fields of deadly soft dunes and outcroppings of rock. A broken axle would have doomed us. So I remained on the bedding in the front and he stayed by the mast, and the chariot hurtled endlessly over the limitless plain like a frantic ant.

Then came a strange tang in the air, and an inexplicable sound. I looked to Violet and found there a smile for the first time in longer than I could recall, perhaps the first I had ever seen on his face.

“Breakers!” he said.

I watched the breakers in amazement. He had told me to imagine a big water hole, but my mind had never conceived an ocean. I wanted to drink all of it, until he explained about salt, and soon I could taste the salt on my lips. Breakers and unfamiliar white birds and interesting things being washed up in places—all these I could not tarry to investigate.

Now we must follow the shore, still southward, looking for fresh water. We were down to our last canteen when we found it. Where the sand ended and the hills sank gracefully into the sea, a tiny stream trickled from the rocks to die away into the back of a beach ridge. It was barely more than a lagoon—acrid, dead-tasting brackish stuff—but it was life for us. We plunged in bodily, soaking and drinking at the same time, as if we could absorb moisture through our skins. Yes, it was life to us, but it also meant death for the herdfolk, the steady draining of the last groundwater from the grasslands, emerging here to die in the ocean. We splashed and drank and laughed.

Then Violet went squelching back to the chariot, stretched out beneath it in the shade, and went to sleep.

─♦─

When I saw him sitting up, leaning against a wheel, I went marching over and knelt down to speak. During his long absence I had napped, eaten, napped again, tried archery, bathed many times, and discovered the fun of rollicking in surf. I had almost drowned in learning about undertow. I had killed a bird with my sling. I had even dug out the mirror and confirmed what my fingers had been telling me about a mustache, although it had a disappointingly accidental appearance.

“I thought you’d died,” I said. I had checked three times to make sure he had not, but I tried to sound as if I were joking.

He took a moment to reply. “No.” It was a sigh of regret.

“Can I bring you some food, sir?”

He shook his head and continued to stare at the faint smudge of hills that we had left behind us. He looked very old and spent—and limp, as if he had been blown against that wheel by the wind like a litter of leaves.

“Can you live by that now?”

I was holding my bow. Archery was not as simple as I had hoped. “Not yet, sir.”

“I’ll show you how to fish. There are lots of fish.”

That sounded as if he might be planning to abandon me. I was alarmed, but I did not question. When he spoke again, it was of other things. For the only time in our acquaintance, in this moment of defeat, he revealed a glimpse of his soul.

“They knew,” he said. “Heaven has known for a long time. The texts warned them. It always happens.”

“Sir?”

“It happens every cycle. But not so bad. Never as bad as this.”

“No sir?” But he was not really talking to me.

“Trouble was, not enough angels. Not enough men, not enough equipment…too many herdfolk. You got any idea how many descendants one woman can have in the ninth or tenth generation?”

“No sir.”

“About a million—and that’s not counting sons.”

He wiped his face with the usual rag and let his hand fall back to the sand with it. “They’ve been sending us out for…for a month. Your father must have been one of the first.”

A
month
is one of the twelve north-south strips that the angels use to define the world, but they also use the term to denote time, the time taken for the sun to cross one month. I was about a month old, more or less. But I did not understand all that then.

“Doesn’t work with herdfolk,” he went on. “They won’t spread the word around, like other peoples…won’t cooperate.” The wind lifted the rag from his hand and rolled it out into the sunlight and away across the sand. I jumped to retrieve it. When I returned, he was still talking.

“…at the north end. Let just enough woollies by to feed them. Kill off the rest and spare the grass—narrow, it is. And the rest of us were to send them up there, stop them going south. Should have stayed.”

“You did what you could, sir?”

He looked up at me blearily. “I went to save the herdfolk. Looks like I saved one. No, you’re half angel. So I saved half a herdman. Should have stayed.”

He fell silent, staring again at the distant hills where the people were dying. Suddenly I knew what was alarming me the most: his eyes. They had the same flat hopelessness that had haunted the eyes of the herdfolk—yet we had escaped, had we not?

Probably he had guessed what I only learned much later, from the saints. Heaven lost more angels on that herdfolk mission than it had ever lost before. Too many waited around too long and died alongside those they had come to save, snared by the doldrums of High Summer.

Then I asked the one question that I had been carefully trying not to consider: “My family, sir?”

His unwinking eyes crawled around to study mine. “What do you think?”

I nursed my agony for a while in silence. Violet had been running away, even then. He wouldn’t have been running if he’d thought he could do any good by staying. I shook my head.

“It’s not quite hopeless,” Violet said, but he didn’t fool me. He didn’t mean to—he was just being gentle. I wanted Anubyl to have saved my family. I wanted him to have escaped, so I could find him and kill him myself. But I knew he could not have reached the sea before he starved.

Vengeance was denied me.

“What do we do now, sir?”

“You go south. Eat fish. There’s lots of fish in the surf. There will be springs, along the edge of the sea.”

I looked out over the barren windswept sand, the rocky hills, and the misty islands. I shivered.

“Go south, lad. Then west. The ocean will be shrinking. By the time you’ve got your growth, you’ll be on the west shore. The herds will be coming in from the north. You can make your kill then—little woollies of your own, little blue-eyed herdbabies.”

“Sir, I want to be an angel.”

He sighed and reached for the canteen that I had laid beside him when he first went to sleep. The drink seemed to revive him slightly, and he sat up, wiping his mouth.

“No. They’d never take a herdman.”

“I shall go and ask, anyway.”

“Then you still go south. Turn east at the Great River.”

I was already on my knees. For the first time I begged. “Sir—take me with you! Please?”

He stared at me glassily and said, “Not where I’m going.”

So he knew.

─♦─

He unloaded his chariot and caulked the seams where the planks had dried out. Then he repacked it in seaworthy fashion, as he had been taught when he was a cherub.

He showed me surf fishing and clam digging, and there are few easier ways of gaining a living than those. He told me how to approach strangers, and he explained about doing work to earn charity and how to behave toward women. He talked of Heaven, but he still advised me to go west.

I helped him, and I practiced archery. I cooked our meals, doing what I could to be useful. We ate and slept and worked some more, while the sun glared murder from the sky, while the wind blew sand, while the whitecaps rolled unceasingly. In a sense he gave me a lecture as my father would have done, although he told of other things and it went on much longer.

Then he left me standing on the shore, wearing a pagne, as I had worn when he snatched me from the teeth of the tyrant. He had given me what I needed to survive—a rod and much line, bow and arrows, a hat, two water bottles. And a purpose. He turned his dead eyes away from me as he said, “Good luck, son!” I was the taller now.

“I’ll see you in Heaven!” I said, hoping my lip was not trembling too much. “That’s a promise.”

He nodded and shook my hand, and sailed away.

I watched him until I could not be sure of his sails among the waves. Then I turned to the south and began to walk, already beginning to hear the mocking whispers of Loneliness in the rush of waves and the sighing of the wind.

But in his last words to me, Violet had not called me “herdbrat.”

From the joyful moment of joining until the final tears of farewell, most men have only one father to give them life and show them their place in the world.

I had three.

—4—
THE SEAFOLK

T
HE GREAT ONES SAW ME FIRST
,
AN EMACIATED WILD MAN
, burnt almost black by the sun. My long hair was bleached white; my beard hung halfway down my chest. I was without bow or rod or clothes, and I must have been very close to death.