Dave Duncan - West of January

“Better now?”

“Mmmph.” I felt like an imbecile. “Banged my head…better go lie down for a while.”

“Listen first,” he said. “You were only a boy—and a very small boy by their standards, right?”

I tried to protest and was stopped by a surge of nausea.

“He was twice your size. He had a club, and a sword, too. Would the others have helped you if you’d called on them?”

I grunted. Michael knew the answer as well as I did.

“There was nothing you could do! If you’d so much as breathed a word, a single word, he would have cut you down. And then probably her also, for not teaching her son manners. You know that, Knobil!”

“Let me up.”

“Knobil—he’s dead! Long dead! Fewer than a third of the herdfolk got past the Ocean, and he’d be an old man by now. No herdmaster ever lives to be an old man. He’s long dead, Knobil.”

“Gotta go to bed.” I began struggling again, and still he held me.

“There’s nothing you can do about him now, Knobil. Even if he were alive, there’s no way to track down one man on the grasslands.”

“Let me up!”

“It wasn’t your fault, Knobil—what happened to Lithion wasn’t your fault.”

“Shut up!” I screamed, knocking his hands away. “Don’t talk about her! She was my mother! My mother—do you understand? And to you she was just a couple of sweaty romps, that’s all! You used her like a spittoon, to catch some unwanted secretions!” I broke loose and rolled over on my belly, preparing to rise.

“I offered to buy her. And you, too.”

I stopped and then raised myself on my elbows. “You did what?”

“I told her I could love her. I told her I would try to buy the two of you, and we could go to the wetlands together.”

“Mad!” I whispered, appalled. “If my father had heard—”

“I’m your father, not that hairy bull who owned her! We both knew that. So do you.” His voice softened. “Oh, Knobil! There we were, lying in each other’s arms. You were sitting in the corner sucking your thumb and scowling at me in very much the same way you’re scowling at me now—”

“Idiocy! She wouldn’t have left the others.”

He nodded sadly. “That was a problem—she wouldn’t leave her other children. And I suspect she didn’t trust me not to kill them if I took them, as well. She even said that… What was his name—the herdmaster?”

“I don’t know.” I wrestled myself up on my feet at last, although I still felt limp and sick. “I never knew his name.”

“Well, she said he’d likely kill you if I even hinted that you were mine and not his. He hadn’t thought of it, she said, and the women had never dared suggest it to him.”

“He hadn’t thought of it?” I echoed, dusting myself off and trying to look dignified. “Hadn’t thought of it? Of course he’d thought of it! He knew perfectly well. He used to call me…” I choked over a sudden flash of long-lost memory, of being cuddled and tickled by that huge, shaggy man with the dread dark eyes, both of us slickly wet in the hot, dim tent—him cooing and chuckling, me I suppose giggling… I must have been very small. It could not have been long after the second visit by Green-two-blue. “He called me his dasher. His little pink dasher who ran into his tent! I wasn’t as brown as the others, you see.”

Michael rose also, struggling up from his knees. “Indeed? How touching! I’m not sure it proves much.”

I lurched toward the door. I was far too deeply enraged to want more conversation with this lecherous, filthy-minded old angel.

“She was very dear to me,” he said. “I never made an offer to any of the others like that.”

“Ha! And of course there were hundreds of others!”

“Yes, there were. But you’re no shy virgin yourself, are you?”

I hauled open the door without a word. My head was still ringing.

Now he was shouting. “She wanted to come with me! She said so! It was just that she was frightened of…ah, her owner. That was the only reason! And why would your mother have lied to me?”

I stopped, halfway through. “Well, perhaps…just for argument…you might consider the possibility that she loved him?” Him —my father, whatever his name had been. I turned, gripping the jamb fiercely. “He was three times the man you ever were, midget. She may not have found you so great a lover as you believed. Maybe she was being polite to the runt she had to serve so demeaningly? She may have expected to be beaten if she displeased you. She may just possibly have resented having to bear your child. It hurts them, you know.”

As I rolled off down the corridor, I heard Michael shouting, “Come back here! Knobil! It wasn’t your fault!”

He often babbled nonsense about guilt, did Michael. He was obsessed by guilt. From then on, I just refused to listen.

Time slipped by unseen. Heaven continued its unending journey, following the setting sun. Angels departed on their missions, singly or in groups. They returned, or they vanished into the unknown. Older men said their farewells and departed. Pilgrims arrived and became cherubim. Cherubim became angels—or not, as the case might be.

Promotion was an ordeal. A senior cherub could usually be recognized by a distinctive jumpiness as his time of decision approached. Uriel kept track of every man’s progress, and he reported to Michael. Any cherub who was an obvious misfit would be weeded out early in training, but there were few of those, for the wilds of Vernier are an exacting test. Incompetent pilgrims do not arrive.

No one ever told a cherub that he was ready for his wheels. The decision was his alone, the final test of his judgment. If he waited too long, he was assumed to be lacking in nerve or in ambition, and eventually he would be summoned to Michael’s presence to be offered a lesser position, as saint or seraph. The only alternative then was a knapsack of food and a good pair of boots.

That was humiliation, and few waited for the dreaded call. Instead, a cherub would request an audience and go to ask for his wheels. He might be offered one of the lesser posts instead. Rarely he would be told to return later and try again. But if he had judged himself correctly, he would emerge from the ordeal with a shining face and three colored ribbons, heading for Cloud Nine and a celebration that usually waxed near to riot.

Snake-who-had-been-Quetti was a determined young man. Older than most recruits when we arrived, he made up for that with very fast progress. He told no one he was going to visit Michael, and the first we knew of it was when he walked in with three blue stripes already sewn on his sleeve. Three of one color was a very unusual honor, perhaps given in his case to show that he bore no stain of suspicion over Red-yellow’s death. Cloud Nine was almost demolished by that party, and my hangover afterward was barely less bearable than the torments of slavery.

So Snake became Three-blue, and almost at once he departed for late Friday to warn some seafolk who were in danger of being trapped by advancing ice. We had not been close friends, but his absence was a warning that my time might be running out, if I was ever to make anything of my life.

I was not a cherub nor a seraph nor a saint, but I played all of those roles at times. My relationship to Michael must have been well known, but it was never mentioned. He seemed to make no secret of it, and he came more and more to use me as a confidant.

Thus I learned about his petty political struggles and how he handled them. Those became easier as Uriel’s loyalty steadied. Later Raphael headed home to the tundra; his successor was more cooperative. I thought the changes that Michael was trying to make were all very trivial, but after nearly a thousand generations, Heaven is grimly resistant to any change at all.