Dave Duncan - West of January

I wasted no time, either. The first-time magic was missing, but I could tell that this was not a procedure that would soon pall on a man. This woman was taller and slimmer than Ullinila. I forget her name.

Again I awoke to find Violet and myself alone. I struggled into my pants and scrambled to my feet. I had just pulled on my tattered coat when I remembered his curious remark on the previous occasion.

“Was I more help this time, sir?”

I cringed, expecting a blow—his face flamed redder than I had ever seen it. He grabbed me with one hand and balled the other into a fist. Then he saw my bewilderment, and with an obvious effort he released me and patted my shoulder instead.

“You did fine, lad…a great performance! Very manly.”

Delighted, I puffed out my chest. “Thank you, sir.”

“But it won’t hurt if you speak to the girls in the future. They won’t tell their masters that you sound like a herdman.”

“What should I say, sir?”

He rolled his eyes and seemed to go even redder. “For Heaven’s sake! Tell her you’re glad I chose her…how much you want her…that she has mouthwatering tits… You can’t say you love her, but don’t treat her like an animal! I know you’re a beginner, but you’re humping like a herd-man. Make love—like an angel!”

“Sir? Teach me?”

He snorted incredulously and led the way outside to eat again.

But at the next camp he took me at my word. He chose a woman who was slightly older, yet still more than worthy of a man’s attention: Kininia. Then he proceeded to instruct me—stroke here, kiss there…try this…try that. Kininia was at first astonished and then much amused. She soon joined in the game, with hints, criticism, and suggestions. She gave demonstrations of her own—coyness leading to enthusiasm, turning without warning to fierce resistance and then sudden wild collaboration. The two of them coached me, coaxed me, and teased me. They had a riotous time at my expense—but I was the one who journeyed in Paradise.

THE COUNTRY WAS CHANGING AGAIN, the slope becoming perceptible even to my uneducated eye. We journeyed now in a wide valley, flanked in the distance by ever-rising hills, but a dry riverbed careened back and forth across our path, making a straight route no more possible than before. By way of compensation, the winds were growing stronger and more dependable. Rarely, we saw clouds in the sky ahead, faint and remote and tantalizing.

Tributary valleys joined at intervals, bringing in stony gullies to bar our road and also bringing in more herds. Slimy little pools still held water among the rocks, and the camps were so numerous that it was almost possible to see from one to the other—not quite, though, for no herdmaster can ever tolerate a rival within his sight.

The valley grew wider as our descent continued, the hills more remote—higher, fainter. The many springs in this country were keeping the people alive, but the corpses of starved woollies lay everywhere. Roos and vultures and lesser scavengers went openly about their work. Death and despair patrolled the grasslands.

Again and again I listened as Violet tried to explain. Rarely, a herdmaster seemed to understand—a younger one usually. Again and again the angel tried to offer advice. It varied, because he knew he had no answer and was willing to try anything. He would try anything to make them try anything.

There were too many woollies. If the herds were to be culled, then a few might survive and buy time—but the herdmen would not hear of it.

If several herdmasters in an area were to cooperate—that was even less thinkable.

Take the women and horses, and abandon herd and children—not that either.

I was no longer afraid of the herdmasters, for they hardly seemed to care now, and the angel’s prestige protected me. I saw what Violet had meant about their eyes: they had a strange flat look to them, a hopeless deadness. All their lives these men had wandered empty plains without sign of other human life. Now, inexplicably, other herds were crowding in from all directions. The grass was dying, and there was no road out.

Old wives became rare, and even I could guess what was happening. Soon children became rare, also, especially boys.

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.