Dave Duncan - West of January

“I’m not sure. There were a couple of blond cherubim—younger than me. I think one of them may have looked rather like you. He might have won his wheels just after I left the first time.” He stared at my face as though he had not seen it before. “An angel baby! A real angel baby!” Then he snorted and handed me back my token. “Well, now you have two of them. Get back in the chariot, angelbrat.”

Again a reprieve… I did not understand. I hesitated. He pushed me and I staggered, with a yelp of pain.

He shouted. “We’re not supposed to know! Of course angels make bastards! I must have some, too, here and there, but they’re not obvious because I don’t have blue eyes.”

I looked at his eyes. They were brown and bloodshot with the dust of travel. They were also strangely moist, a point I had not noticed before.

“Get in! And stay downwind from me. You herdfolk all stink—it’s that woollie meat that does it.”

He could have been eating little else himself lately, I thought. But I made haste to obey.

Yet when he followed me up into the chariot, he did not immediately set sail again. He threw open a chest and began rummaging through the contents, all the way to the bottom.

“Here!” he snapped at last. “If you’re going to travel as an angel, you’d better look like one.”

He wadded a bundle and threw it at me—leather breeches and a fringed leather shirt. The clothes were badly worn, with holes in the knees and elbows. They smelled of rot, like a bad water hole, but I hastened to discard my pagne and don these unexpected gifts. They must have been his before he swelled so much around the middle. They were still huge on my stringy frame, but I was not about to complain.

Yet even a flexible youngster will have trouble pulling on breeches if he has never done so before and cannot bend his legs. With difficulty, with much straining and puffing, I at last succeeded.

Greatly pleased with myself, I looked to the angel for approval. He was watching me with an unpleasant yellow-toothed leer.

“You’re older than I thought,” he said. “Well, perhaps you can be of some use to me after all, angelspawn.”

“Sir?”

He cackled at some private joke. “You’ll see.”

As I said, he was more than a little crazy.

WE TRAVELED MOSTLY WITHOUT SPEAKING, for the chariot was noisy. The country gradually became more rugged, but the wind less fitful, and my angel was a master navigator. Breeches or not, when he stopped at camps he left me in the chariot as before, and of course we had little time for conversation at those stops.

Between the camps, he would halt once in a while for a brief break—to eat, for respite from the constant bouncing and noise, or, rarely, to sleep. For sleeping he had a leather cover he could fasten over the chariot, making it into a low, uncomfortable tent. It grew incredibly hot and smelly under the burning sun. We both sweated lakefuls and felt limp and dizzy when we awoke, but he told me that roos might attack a chariot, so he needed the protection. Here was one way a companion could have been of assistance, and I offered to stay awake, as guard. He refused my offer. I think he did not trust me to control my own eyelids, and probably he was wise, for I had never needed to stay awake at will and so had never learned how.

When we camped in this fashion, he slept on the pile of cloth and furs. I had to make do with a rug over the oars, spars, and spare axles.

When we did see roo packs, Violet would give chase if the wind was favorable. Twice he managed to draw close, and then our ride became wilder than ever as he tried to run down the crouching, fleeing roos and at the same time fire his gun over the side. He felled a few with the gun, and I watched carefully how that marvelous weapon was used, but he never managed to crush any with the chariot. He almost wrecked it on boulders, instead. Violet did not like roos, and he left the bodies where they lay. To me that seemed like a shocking waste of good leather.

We did have a few conversations during halts. I discovered what shaving did and what the strange board was that he hung on the mast. I asked to try it, and so I viewed my own face clearly for the first time in my life. Until then I had seen my reflection only in the water, which was usually muddy. The near-white eyebrows were a shock, as were the unwholesome blue eyes. They brought back my hazy image of the angel with my mother—or did they lead me to invent that flimsy scrap of memory?

He had other miracles, too—his telescope, which he let me try, and a jug of rough red pottery, all marbled with white lime. That was the greatest wonder of all, for water left awhile in it would emerge cool—that was the only cool water I had ever tasted.

Violet had accepted me as a passenger. He made no more threats to evict me, but his contemptuous attitude did not mellow. Herdfolk, he said, were the most ignorant, stupid, barbarous people on all of Vernier. I could not argue, not having known that there were other types to compare. I was willing to put up with his jeers if they were the price of the ride. My knees were healing, and I would need those knees in good shape when he did at last turn me out.

Once I dared ask where we were going, for I had noticed that he avoided herds and camps whenever he could do so unobserved, and so concluded that he must have some other objective.

“I’m going back to Heaven,” he said. “You… Well, we’ll see when your leg is healed.”

“Sir? Who is Heaven?”

“Not who, stupid— what. It’s a camp…where the angels live.”

I tried to imagine a camp with more than one man in it. “And if I take that token you gave me…”

He spat, his sign of special disapproval. “If a young man wants to be an angel, then he has to go to Heaven with a token. He’s called a pilgrim. If they think he’s any good, they’ll let him be a cherub and teach him what an angel needs to know. After that, if they still think he’ll do, then they’ll make him an angel—give him a chariot and send him out to help people.”

A chariot! With a chariot I could find my way back to Anubyl. With an angel’s gun I could kill him, as the angel had killed the tyrant. Violet did not wait for me to speak.

“Forget it, herdbrat! You don’t know enough. Herdmen never make angels. They’re too ignorant. And stupid.”

But at another stop I brought up the subject again. “Where is Heaven, sir?”

He pointed east. “Under the stars.”

I had never heard of stars. We were going almost due west.

He read my face. “The sun is that way, dummy. High Summer—it would boil your lungs. No man can live in High Summer, and not much else can, either.”

I must have still looked doubtful.

“I’m going to the March Ocean,” he said grumpily. “It’s faster. Think of a very big water hole. Then I shall sail along the Great River—oh, forget it!”

“I should like to be an angel like you, sir, and help people.”

He laughed derisively, showing his yellow teeth. “A herdman help other men?”

“I should have died without your help, sir.”

“You damn well would have.”

“Will you take me back to Heaven with you?”

“No! That’s very much against the rules. Every man has to find Heaven for himself. It’s a test. They’d ask you if an angel had given you a ride. We’re going the wrong way now, so this wouldn’t count.”

Well, I had to go back east to settle with Anubyl. I decided I would find Heaven first and make my main task easier by getting a chariot. I had no conception of the size of the world.

Gradually my knees healed. Gradually the country changed. Sixteen or twenty camps had gone by, and now we were seeing woollie corpses rotting on the grasslands, and solitary wandering woollies, abandoned as the grass became too scarce to support the herds. We passed human skeletons, perhaps loners. Some of them looked old, some not.