Dave Duncan - West of January

The fat face scowled even more furiously, but for the first time he spoke to me as if what I thought might matter. “What do you want?”

“To kill Anubyl.”

He snorted with disgust. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Why?”

“He killed my father and my mother.”

“Your mother, maybe. But I’ve never seen a herdman with fair hair and blue eyes. Those features come from the wetlanders, mostly. Did any of your older brothers or sisters have your coloring?”

“No sir.” I had thought I was the only one in the world. Yet an ancient memory stirred…an angel with golden hair…

“Probably your real father was an angel. A herdmaster won’t let any other males near his women. Only angel sperm can cuckold a herdman. I’m surprised he kept you when he saw what had happened.”

I had never even considered that possibility, for I knew nothing about inheritance and precious little about sex.

The angel cursed under his breath. “But if he did, I suppose I can do no less. Get in.” He pointed.

Astonished, I never thought to question or disobey. He did not help me to rise, and he frowned impatiently at my snail progress. With every twitch of my right knee a red flame, I lurched over to the back of the chariot, trying not to sob with the agony, dreading that one little cry might reveal to the angel what a contemptible wastrel I really was. I scrambled up as quickly as I could. He stood and scowled, and he made no move at all to assist me.

“I’m out of my mind,” he muttered. “Brainless, ignorant, murderous little herdbrat!” He clambered heavily up behind me. “But spunky—crazy like an angel…”

I SUSPECT THAT WHAT I DID NEXT SAVED MY LIFE: I went to sleep.

An angel chariot is an incredibly versatile vehicle, able to go anywhere, but the price of that versatility is clutter. Even when neatly packed, the interior is a tight jam of spare sails and wheels and axles, of tools and supplies, of skis and yokes and horse collars and harnesses and ropes. Usually there are chests at the rear for medicines and weapons and personal effects. At one side of the mast is a winch for emergencies, and on the other a slung seat, of elastic weave to absorb some of the bumps and vibration.

An angel takes his name from the color code of his chariot; my new guardian angel’s name was Violet-indigo-red. Even after he mentioned that, much later, I never called him anything but “Sir.” Other angels would have addressed him as “Violet” or “Violet-indigo,” and he might have refused to acknowledge his original name, the one he was given at birth. He bore his colors on his sleeve, and they flew also at the masthead.

Violet’s chariot was not neatly packed. It was a midden pit, a jumbled confusion of wood carvings, sets of antlers, fur robes, and other souvenirs lying amid the normal equipment. I had little experience with material possessions, but I recognized that there were more of them here than my whole family owned, and I also sensed the shabbiness, a worn-out, spent look that somehow suited my fat and balding host.

“You go there!” he ordered, pointing to a heap of cloth and fur near the front. “And if you’re going to throw up, be sure you do it over the side.”

I clambered painfully forward and sat there where I had been told.

The angel unrolled his mainsail and raised the foresail. They both billowed satisfactorily, but nothing else happened. I guessed then why angels always stopped their chariots on hilltops, but this slope was too gentle and the wind too light. I know now that he would have tried to find a spot where the wind eddied off the valley wall. But if he did so then, the wind was not enough.

He cursed continuously to himself, trying various settings of the boom and the foresail. He hauled on ropes, and the back wheels swiveled obediently. He tried jumping up and down, his efforts rocking the whole chariot. His cursing grew louder. Then he took hold of one of the front wheels, whose upper edges protruded above the sides. He heaved, and that did it. Reluctantly the chariot began to roll down the slope, and then the wind could keep it moving—wind and a great deal of skill.

Soon we were bouncing and veering along in surges and hesitations, past the muddy shambles that had once been a water hole and a stand of trees. The axles squeaked. The load rattled and jostled. Chariot wheels are made of cross-laminated boards from the rubber trees that grow in Dusk, and they will absorb some of the buffeting, but not all. Violet’s concern about the steadiness of my stomach was understandable, but I proved to be immune to motion sickness—an inheritance, I suppose, from my true father.

I did not then appreciate the fact, but Violet was a superb charioteer. Much later, when I tried to do the same job myself, I came to understand the feat that his expertise had made seem so easy. To travel by wind power over rough country is the greatest test of an angel’s skills. We were close to the doldrums of High Summer. The sun was in the west of January, and we could have been no more than halfway across February. The sickly, fitful breezes would have totally immobilized nine out of ten drivers, and Violet was traveling away from the sun and hence upwind. That required an instinct for wind bordering on the uncanny, plus a fine ability to estimate slope and an eagle eye to avoid the boulders and gullies that infest the grasslands. I took it all for granted. I was much more impressed by what he had done to the tyrant.

Sitting on the angel’s bedding, with my throbbing legs stretched straight out, I could just see over the side. But I was physically and emotionally spent, so I lay down and turned my face away from the sun. I was accustomed to sleeping whenever I wanted, on the hard ground, in the midst of a noisy camp. Despite the noise, the shaking, and the strangeness of my new surroundings, I was too exhausted to stay awake. Youth is wonderful.

When I awoke, we were stationary, parked on the crest of a hill. The angel was standing up, holding a long tube to his eye, pointed at the horizon. Then he lowered it and saw me watching him.

“If you need to pee, do it over the side, herdbrat. Downwind!”

“Yes sir.” Did he think I was not tent-trained?

I sat down again in silence. Somehow he had driven his chariot back to high ground, but the country looked the same in all directions. Where was Anubyl now? How was I ever going to find him? I puzzled over that, and I fantasized how wonderful it would be to have one of the angels’ guns to kill Anubyl with.

Violet now hung a small board on the mast beside him, spread something on his face, and then scraped it off again with a knife, all the while studying the board closely—a procedure I found most curious.

Finally he wiped his face with the familiar filthy cloth. “There’s a herd ahead,” he said, “going south.”

Woollies smear one another’s dung, so it is not difficult to tell which way a herd has been moving. I did not know about telescopes.

“So I’m going visiting. More leathery burnt meat. More broiling my brains in the sun. Another stupid herdmaster who won’t listen to reason. Another bony, stinking woman.”

“Yes sir.”

“If the herdmaster sees you, you’re dead.”

I glanced around at the dry landscape. There was a very small tangle of shrubbery at the bottom of the hill. It looked quite withered, unlikely to contain any water. My right knee was as big as my head, and the left one little better. “Shall I get out, sir?”

He was tempted, regarding me with his usual sourness, but I had slept in his chariot. I suppose that had seemed like a great display of trust, and to turn me out there to die would have felt like a betrayal of that trust. I can only guess, but I think that it was my act of sleeping that saved me then. He must have known that my sleep had been brought on by exhaustion, not trust, but emotions are not always controlled by knowledge.