West of January

“LET’S BE SURE I’VE GOT THIS RIGHT,” said Black-white-red. “He opened a sack and stuck his head in it, and there was a python in there. It wanted to loop around his neck…so he let it?” He drummed long black fingers on the table.

“More or less,” I said.

“How much more? How much less?” His head was against the bloody glow of the window, his eyes almost invisible, and only the silhouette of his woolly hair was distinctive. He was coldly furious—with some justification, I suppose.

I sighed. “No more, no less. Yes, it sounds crazy when you put it in those words. But he was exhausted, remember. Neither of us was watching…maybe he tripped and fell on top of it. Accidents happen.”

“Accidents can be made to happen!”

I faked a little anger. “You’re accusing us of murder! What possible motive could either of us have had to harm him?”

“You’d both been imprinted, and he had killed your women.”

“If we had slain him, why would we have come here, to Heaven?”

Black-white growled low in his long throat and drummed his fingers faster. At my side, Quetti sat in silence, his right shin balanced on his left knee, impassively studying a thumbnail. Of course we had murdered Red-yellow, but if neither of us confessed, there was nothing the angels could do about it, certainly not after so long a time…or was there?

Sensing the anger around me, I was suddenly uncertain.

The room was very small and it was rapidly becoming stuffy. The walls and the low ceiling were curiously irregular, made of variegated slabs of snortoiseshell that creaked whenever the building moved. Features were hard to make out, for the only lighting came from a foggy casement directly behind Black and the two men flanking him.

Beyond that rattling window lay the nightmare landscape of Dusk—scabby hills tangled with dead trees and monstrous bloated fungi in bilious yellows and mauves, all lit by a baleful red twilight along the horizon. The clearings were buried deep in snow, drifted by icy winds that ran wailing under a dark sky. The snortoise browsed with monotonous crunching, and in the distance many others issued their weird roaring bellows. This was Heaven, but it was much closer to what I should have expected of Hell.

Since our meeting at the spinster’s lair, Black-white had gained promotion. In place of angel buckskins he wore a heavy green robe. The others addressed him as Uriel or Archangel.

On his right sat a leather-clad angel, a fairish man with tawny hair and yellow eyes. His stripes identified him as Two-green-red.

The man on Uriel’s left was older, portly, and swathed in a purple robe. He sported a coronet of snow-white curls and a friendly sort of face. This was, of course, Saint Kettle, of whom I have spoken earlier. He was there to represent his superior, Archangel Gabriel. Gabriel had a cold. Colds are common in Heaven.

There was a sixth man present also, sitting in silence in the corner behind Quetti and me, so we could not see him without turning. Uriel kept shooting him glances, but so far he had not spoken at all.

The snortoise roared deafeningly beyond the window and took a mighty lurch forward, rocking the building.

Kettle coughed.

“Yes, Saint?” Uriel asked.

“I’m curious to know how they escaped the forest.” Kettle shuffled through his notes on the table. I had been wondering what sort of game he was playing, having never seen writing done before. “Even with the spinster dead, wetlanders are precious goods in those parts, but these two evaded recapture. They somehow managed to sail that chariot, by land and river, out of the forest, and that in itself is no mean feat. They must have gained hospitality from the inhabitants or else lived off the land.”

He paused, thinking. “No. They must have done both, so they’re good hunters and damned good diplomats, too! They made their way north across the cold desert, then east through the dying lands to Heaven, but without any formal navigation, I assume. They evaded predators, two-eyed and three-eyed. All in all,” he added, rubbing a plump chin or two, “those are astonishing accomplishments for a couple of beginners, and one of them a cripple!”

Black—Uriel—nodded rather reluctantly. “I agree, but it’s taken them long enough. Heavens, I’ve been up to Sunday since then and over to February. How long is it?”

How long was what? I wondered.

“It’s been about three years” Kettle said.

I wondered what that meant, growing angry at such gibberish being spoken over my head. If they were discussing time, then it had been long enough for Quetti to grow from fuzzy-faced boy to a hard-faced young man with a heavy growth of golden stubble. That stubble—and my own—had been annoying Uriel since he first set eyes on us.

“Long enough that they must have talked themselves into every pretty girl’s bed from Friday to Tuesday,” he said crossly. “Shaving, masquerading as angels!” He fired one of his angry glances at the sixth man in the corner.

“No!” Quetti looked hurt. “Not just the pretty ones!”

Uriel growled again; it was obviously a habit of his. I could have told him that Quetti had never needed the angel disguise—he had an astonishing ability to make girls want to mother him. That wasn’t true of me, though, so I stayed silent, hoping someone would change the subject.

It was Two-green who spoke into the silence. “I doubt that they could have done otherwise, Uriel. Who else drives a chariot but angels? They had to pretend to be angels or else abandon the chariot—and one of them can’t walk.”

“I can so!” I retorted. “But…but not that far, I guess.”

Uriel dismissed me with a shrug and looked to Quetti. “How did you manage?”

Quetti scratched his chin loudly with a knuckle. “I didn’t.”

Then he flashed me a sly grin out of the corner of his eye, and I saw what was coming. I cursed under my breath and glared back warningly. Quetti and I had been good companions on our long trek together, but never close. If fires burned within Quetti, he kept them well banked; no man could ever warm himself on Quetti’s friendship. He was self-contained and taciturn. Usually. But now, I could tell, he was winding up to make a speech that he had promised me he wouldn’t. Admittedly I had twisted his arm very hard to get that promise. I had almost dislocated his shoulder.

Quetti turned his grin on Uriel. “It was Knobil, all Knobil. I collapsed. I was a useless heap, crazy. He worked out how to sail the chariot. He brewed up some sort of dye from tree bark and colored us both brown, just in case. He did it all.”

“That’s not true!” I said quickly.

Idiot! Once he had recovered his health, Quetti had also recovered his ambition to become an angel, for his only real alternative was to head home with FAILURE written on his heart.

My case was different. I had my revenge planned in detail now, and all I needed from Heaven was a ride back to the grasslands. I had hoped to earn that favor by returning the lost chariot. Once we had arrived north of the desert, I could have dropped Quetti off to walk and then turned my course westward, but that would have been unkind, so I had agreed to sail to Heaven. Besides, the chariot was in bad disrepair by then. In any event, we had been intercepted by an astonished angel, White-gray-orange, and brought in under guard as murder suspects.

“It’s true!” Quetti said. “He repaired the wheels more than once—and the ropes, and the sails. He made traps and caught game. He’s a devil of a fine cook, too! He worked out where we were and which way we should go. I went right out of my mind and—”

“He’s out of his mind now!” I howled. “Don’t believe all this.” Yes, Quetti had been sick for a while in the forest—that was hardly surprising after what he had been through. I had warned him not to mention that, but he was not to be stopped…

“Knobil knew how the gun worked. He once held off three men in a canoe with it. He was bringing down birds on the wing by the time we ran out of those tube things you put in it.”

The snortoise roared, drowning out both my protests and Quetti’s tales, but he didn’t even pause for breath.

“…fished me out one-handed and brained the brute with an oar at the same time. And after that he kept me tied up until I got my head back. He fed me like a baby! He treated my wounds with herbs. He found out how—”

“Oh stop it!” I yelled. “This is nonsense! Quetti caught a fever—” What the angels thought of me was of no importance. I would not care if they believed I had been helpless dead weight on our journey. Quetti was the one who wanted to stay in Heaven, and by talking like this he was steadily ruining his own chances—but he was determined to spare me not a single blush.

“…grabbed its head in a way that paralyzed it, and I ran for the ax. So we ate snake until…”

I had never suspected that his cool, sane exterior hid this outrageous juvenile hero worship. I wanted to scream.

“…in trade for the snake’s skin, and used it to haul the chariot through the swamp. He knows all about horses, and later he sold it off to some sandmen. I tell you, Knobil could talk an anteater out of his sandals!”

“Quetti!” I yelled. “You needn’t go into all this!” It was intolerable.

“…treemen and hawkers and beekeepers…mends clothes—”

“I do birdsong imitations too!”

“…best shot with a bow I have ever—”

“You sound like Jat Lon selling a horse!”

“…catch fish without—”

“I also sing and dance!” I shouted. “Now will you shut up!”

“He’s the finest, bravest man I’ve ever met!” With that final outrageous untruth, Quetti stopped and sat back to leer at me.

Silence followed, broken by another roar from the snortoise.

“Obviously one of you is lying,” Uriel said acidly. “And I know Knobil is an expert at that, at least.”

Everyone else laughed. I choked between several angry retorts and eventually used none of them.

“Where did you learn all this?” Kettle asked me.

I shrugged grumpily. “I’d seen Violet-indigo-red drive a chariot on land and Red-yellow do it in the water. I’d watched Violet use a gun. Brown-yellow-white taught me a little about maps, so I could use Red’s. Black, here, told me about geography, and I had a few trader tricks. Quetti knew that Heaven was somewhere in Dusk, north of the deserts. As for the rest… Well, I’ve been a herdman, a seaman, a miner, an all-purpose slave, a trader—I just picked it up here and there.”

The three men opposite me all looked up as the watcher in the corner chuckled wryly. He spoke up for the first time. “I always told you gentlemen that wetlanders make the best angels.”

Two of the three laughed enthusiastically, and I twisted around to stare at this cryptic onlooker. He was a small, slight man, well muffled in a white gown. He was sitting at an angle to the light and had pulled his hood forward to conceal his face, although I was sure he had been watching us earlier.

“Quetti’s a wetlander,” I said. “I’m a herdman.”

“I can tell.” He was old, his voice thin as a lark’s ankle. He did not turn toward me.

“The purpose of this meeting…” Uriel’s voice had fallen into yet a lower, sadder range, and I was uneasily aware that the proceedings were not the forgone formality I had been expecting. “…is to investigate the death of Red-yellow-green. Obviously we should have questioned these two vagabonds separately Does anyone believe their nonsensical tale about a snake? Kettle?”

“Certainly!” the plump man said. “I vote for acquittal.”

“What?” Outraged, Uriel turned to the angel on his other side. “Two-green? I can rely on you, surely?”

Two-green avoided his eye, glancing unhappily at the cryptic onlooker in white. Getting crosswise between two archangels was a Heavenly nightmare, but in this case one of the two was Michael, and that made his decision easy. “I lean toward acquittal also, Uriel,” he said miserably.

Kettle beamed. “Then shall I record the death as due to snake attack?”

Uriel uttered a growl that was almost a roar. “Michael! Red was a friend of yours! He was murdered!”

“It’s your inquiry. But I think you’re outvoted.”

Uriel sprang up, tall and black against the window, and also furious. “Do it, then, Saint! And may your ink freeze!” He leaned big fists on the table and stared menacingly down at Quetti and me. “We can discuss your future at a later time—”

“Let’s do that now,” said the quiet voice from behind my shoulder. The man in the white gown rose and walked around to the far side of the table. The angel jumped off his chair, and he ended up without one as Michael took the middle spot and Uriel angrily settled where Two-green had been, leaving him to lean back against the wall, fold his arms, and glower. The face of the little man in white—Michael, of course—was now against the light and no more visible than it had been earlier.

He looked up at Uriel. “Well? There are two pilgrims here. Have you no questions to ask the candidates?”

I was about to interject that I was no pilgrim. I might even have been rash enough to spit out a few of my opinions about angels in general as hypocritical, lecherous posers and of Heaven itself as callous and ineffectual, but I needed transportation back to the grasslands, so I would probably have managed to restrain myself. As it was, I caught sight of Michael’s hands on the table, and my thoughts suddenly began to jump in all other directions like a pack of roos.

Uriel was furious, his fists so tightly clenched that pale spots showed on the big black knuckles. “Very well, Holiness, although I’ve had no chance to interview them in private, as is the custom.”

“It is hardly the custom for pilgrims to arrive in their own chariot.” Michael was making no effort to soothe the tall man; indeed, he seemed to be trying to provoke him.

Five archangels rule Heaven. Gabriel tends the records and the ancient lore. Uriel trains the cherubim. Raphael builds and maintains the chariots and all the other equipment the angels need. Sariel attends to the housekeeping of Heaven itself—the feeding and housing of so many people, the welfare of the dog teams and the snortoises. Michael gives orders to angels.

The hierarchy is clearly defined. At the bottom are the seraphim, who do manual labor for Sariel and Raphael. They are mostly youngsters of the twilight ghoulfolk, who work off their adolescence in Heaven and then head home with a farewell gift of Heaven’s unique manufactures, such as nails and steel blades and certain medicines. With those, they can buy first-class wives.

Above the seraphim come the cherubim, future angels, followed by the learned saints who report to Gabriel—at least in theory they do; some saints have been lost in obscure research for so long that they have forgotten their own names, let alone his.

Above the saints come the angels, and the five archangels.

All archangels are former angels, accustomed to obeying Michael, and Michael appoints other archangels whenever there is a vacancy. In Heaven’s long history, there have been few instances of a Michael who could not get his own way in the Council of Five.

There was no question that pilgrims seeking admission as cherubim must be first approved by Uriel. The former Black-white-red was new to the post. He had not interviewed many candidates before Quetti and I arrived, but it was certainly his privilege to do so. His anger at Michael’s intervention was understandable, even if Michael’s own motives were not. And my own mind was already reeling at what it was beginning to suspect.

“How do you feel about the spinster now, pilgrim?” Uriel asked.

“I worship her memory,” Quetti said very quietly. “Could she be restored to life, I would gladly pasture silkworms for her until nothing remained but my bones. Not for anyone else by choice, though.”

Uriel shuddered. “You claimed you had a token…?”

I was still staring at the shrouded figure of Michael and especially at those small pale hands. Wetlander hands. His face was a pale blur within cowled shadow.

“I had one,” Quetti said. “But I left the spinster’s web with nothing, not even a whole skin, as you know. Knobil had three!”

“Three?” Two archangels, one saint, and one angel all echoed the word in astonishment, or perhaps disbelief.

“Three! But he lost them in an ants’ nest.”

“Very convenient,” said Uriel.

Michael intervened sharply. “Tokens are not important! They are not necessary for admission and they do not guarantee it. Tokens help in recruiting, but they are mostly of value to us as a means of learning where the donors were. The marks on the back of a token back tell us that. If an angel is lost, we like to know how far he got… That’s all. What counts is not the token, but the man who brings it.”

“Nevertheless,” Uriel insisted, “I am going to ask. Tell us about yours, Pilgrim Quetti.”

“I was quite small,” Quetti said cheerfully, “paddling along in my kayak. I chanced upon an angel about to be eaten by a pack of ice frogs. He seemed to appreciate my help.”

“His name?” Uriel queried suspiciously.

“Orange-lime-orange.”

“I have his report here, Archangels.” Kettle was fumbling with his papers. “He has just returned from the Thursday venture, so we can easily call him in as a witness if you wish. He described the incident as ‘terrifying’ and an ‘extremely narrow escape’.”

Quetti returned Uriel’s glare with a smirk. “You gotta know where to hit ’em, that’s all.”

Uriel grunted, as if impressed despite himself. “Michael, this man is obviously a survivor. I recommend that we accept Candidate Quetti.”

“Agreed. Welcome, Cherub.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“As I said,” Michael continued, “I believe that wetlanders make the finest angels of all. We are loners by nature, yet our background has taught us to cooperate. We are not frightened by open spaces. Is this not so?” He laughed quietly, in an old man’s dry, cynical chuckle. “And we also have a streak of ruthlessness that can be very convenient at times—true?”

“Er…yes sir,” Quetti said, turning red.

I thumped him on the shoulder. “Congratulations!”

Uriel said, “The other candidate—”

“I am not a candidate, Archangel.”

Quetti spun around on his chair. “Knobil!”

Uriel sighed. “Then I am saved the duty of refusing you. You are about twice the age we require, and a cripple. And a herdman!” He hesitated. “But I admit I would like to hear how a man collects three tokens in one lifetime.”

I saw Michael’s hands clench.

“Violet-indigo-red gave me one…” For a moment I recalled my old, old dream of marching triumphantly into Heaven, and of Violet coming forth to welcome me and declare me a cherub. Nothing remained of that dream, nothing at all.

“Why?”

“He saw me running from a tyrant—perhaps it was a reward for intelligence? He was a little crazy. The second I got from Brown-yellow-white, because I rode a great one up the Great River. But hundreds of others did the same right after. The third…the third was only a promise, not an actual token. From Orange-brown-white—”

Quetti shot me a startled glance but said nothing. Michael’s fingers unfolded slowly.

“Orange-brown-white?” Saint Kettle sat up eagerly. “Where? How long ago? Why only a promise?”

“A promise because he had no tokens to give me. He had nothing left but his skin, and not as much of that as feels good. He promised me a token if we escaped. It was humor—not very funny humor, but then we had very little to laugh about.”

The audience exchanged glances, and Uriel leaned across the table as if he wanted to bite me. “Orange was a slave? You are saying that those ants had the audacity to enslave an angel?”

“Is that worse than enslaving a herdman?”

“Well, if—no, I suppose not.” He obviously thought that it was, though. “We shall need a detailed report. He’s dead now?”

“Very.” I outlined how Orange had died soon after my capture, long, long ago. It had been about then that I had lost all hope that Heaven would ever, or could ever, do anything about the ants, but now suddenly I realized that in this case they might at least try, inspired by my tale of the captured angel. My mouth began to water at the thought of Hrarrh dying at my feet, slowly and painfully.

Uriel looked over Michael’s head at Kettle. “Is there a mine recorded near the Gates of the Andes?”

The fat man nodded. “I believe so. I’d have to check, but it seems to me it is one of the poor ones, not exploited in every cycle.”

The snortoise took another giant lurch forward. The room rocked and creaked. Then came the bellow.

When silence returned, Michael was already speaking, or thinking aloud. “…a Friday Freeze due, but latest word is that the seafolk are already on the move… I could free up more men there, at least until the ice actually closes… The Thursday party’s back—Have we the equipment, though? That’s the problem!” He rose and the others followed, the angel straightening up from the wall.

I was astonished by the little man’s authority, by the way he could make larger men than he behave like herdwomen around their master. How did he do that? I saw that there might yet be things I could learn in Heaven—things that would assist me in my planned revenge. Even if nothing came of this proposed attack on the ants’ nest, I might want to stay around for a while and observe.

Michael was not done yet. “Kettle, tell Gabriel I want a full report on that location. Two-green, you get one from Raphael on ordnance—and check it yourself. Uriel, you’ll administer the oath to Cherub Quetti? I want to hear more details from Knobil.”

The others scuttled around like beetles. I stayed safely in my chair, not yet trusting my balance on so uncertain a flooring.

As the door closed behind the others, the tiny man in the bulky white robe came around the table and turned to face me. By coincidence, the clouds were clearing on the skyline, and a smoky yellow light began to brighten the casement. Michael threw back his hood, and for a while the two of us just stared at each other.

His hair was silver, yet thick for his age. He was not as pale as Quetti had become in the spinster’s lair, but still unusually light, his skin roughened by long weathering. And his eyes were brilliant flecks of sky.

Then he smiled. “The promise from Orange made four,” he said, stepping close. “There was already a third token.”

I just nodded, gazing stupidly at him. Could I really remember? He was certainly much smaller than I would have imagined.

He held out two hands, as if expecting me to take them. “I never dreamed! They told me two wetlanders. When I heard your dialect, I knew you were never from Dawn… Then I realized that I had heard your name before… Knobil! After all this time!” He blinked rapidly.

“I remember you.”

“You do? I find that hard to believe. You were very small.”

“But you frightened me. I was not accustomed to seeing my mother used so.”

The offered hands were withdrawn. Michael studied me now with a hard blue stare. Then he hooked a chair to him and sat down, his feet between my outstretched legs. I am sure that my own gaze was no softer than his.

“It was an accident,” he said. “I’d been sent to tell the wetlanders that it was safe to move south again. I was told to go by the grasslands and estimate the herdfolk population. On my way home, by mere chance, I arrived at a camp I had visited on the way out.”

“And you broke your own rules by tumbling the same woman again.”

He pursed his ancient lips, thin lips, turning them white. “I really wanted to play with you, but you wouldn’t come near me. Do you know why angels have that rule?”

He reminded me a little of Jat Lon—a smarter man than me, seeking to mold me to his own purposes, and certainly very devious. I wanted a favor, a ride to the grasslands, and now I knew who made decisions in Heaven.

“I don’t think I care. Nothing could so justify the demeaning manner in which angels use women.”

“Indeed? So Uriel was wrong when he surmised that two imposters had been accepting that sort of hospitality?”

I dropped my gaze to the hummocky, whorled floor of scuffed snortoiseshell. “Mostly I left that part to Quetti,” I muttered.

“But not always, surely? Some resolutions are harder to keep than others… You must certainly have been invited.”

I nodded in bitter silence.

“And you had to stay in character for an angel.”

“Damn you! Yes—I did what they asked! And yes, I enjoyed it.”

“But yet you feel guilty? How curious.” Michael considered me for a moment in silence. “Few would. Well, so I bent the Compact. I gave your mother a token for you. I doubted that she would even remember it when the time came, and I certainly had no real expectation that it would ever reach Heaven. Even hope died a long time ago.”

“I did not exactly come by the fastest route.”

“Obviously! I want to hear your story, all your story—son!” He laughed. “How strange to say that word! I am very grateful that you did not speak of the token.”

“You’re not supposed to make angelbrats, are you?” I was recalling Violet then.

“We’re not supposed to recognize angelbrats!” Michael said. “The more we make, the better. But they’ll guess soon enough. I don’t usually condone my lads dying in mysterious circumstances. I saved your life just now, you know?”

“No.”

“I did. Uriel was going to take you both out and shoot you.”

I started to protest and he waved a thin pale hand, like a dead child’s. “Don’t be any stupider than you must. You and the other one killed Red—it’s quite obvious. I twisted Uriel’s neck to get that acquittal. They’ll gossip. They’ll guess. We have records. I was the only wetlander on the grasslands two months ago. Longer ago, maybe? Anyway, there are records, so they’ll know. I can offer you hospitality, son, but no more than that. The Great Compact…but let’s leave it to the saints. You can’t be an angel, obviously.”

The only reason I had not asked to be a cherub, as Quetti had, was that I did not want to be a cherub. Yet now I felt an irrational spasm of annoyance. So I would have been refused? Did he think that my disability disqualified me? I had already proved that I could do anything an angel could do, in chariot or elsewhere. Still, the last thing I wanted was to be an angel.

I had been staring absently at the dusty, sun-gilded casement. I turned a wary eye on the shrewd little spidery man before me, hunched in his white robe, gently rubbing his tiny hands as he watched my thoughts roll. If I antagonized this long-lost father of mine, I would not be able to collect on the debts he owed me.

“You look tired, and I expect you are hungry,” Michael said. “We’ll have to put you in with the cherubim, for we have no guest rooms. The food is plain, but plentiful.” He stopped, frowning. “But I forgot. You won’t be able to manage the ladders.”

“I can! I did! I may be slow on them, but I can manage.”

“You came up. Going down may be harder. If you fall, you’ll snap your pelvis for certain.”

“I’ll manage.”

Michael was not accustomed to argument. Anger flared in his wan cheeks. “Ice can build up on those rungs at any time, with no warning. Cherubim fall all the time, and angels, too. Broken legs are one thing, but a broken back—”

“I’ll manage,” I said flatly.

He scowled testily. “It’s your pelvis! But I don’t suppose you’ll be here long… When you’ve rested, we’ll talk again. You’re going to have many eager audiences during your stay, Knobil. And you will be very useful to one of my little campaigns…” He rose then. Chairs are difficult for me, but I eventually restored myself to vertical without having to ask for help.

“Angels cross the grasslands often,” Michael was saying while I struggled, “as you might guess. I’ve been trying to persuade them to hand out tokens there. They do it everywhere else! All those loners—such a waste! I could use them here. They’d certainly have enough heft to make good wood-chopping seraphim, even if their brains are too woolly for angels.”

I stared down at him in silence.

Despite his pale skin, he did not blush. He chuckled instead. “Ah! You see? Even I do it!” He reached up and squeezed my shoulder. “Accept my apologies, Knobil. Please? Then go and show my lads that herdmen are human, too.”

I trusted him even less when he tried to be charming.

—2—

MICHAEL LIVED AND WORKED in a building borne by a snortoise named Throne, which happened to be one of the smallest and therefore a fortunate choice for my first attempt at descending a ladder. While I was still wrestling with my borrowed furs on the porch, peering out at twilight fading before a gathering snowstorm, and wondering how I could find a bed, I heard a chorus of barking and shouting. Three dogsleds came into view, racing through the trees. Four young men scrambled up the steps and burst in upon me, armed with ropes and pulleys.

Two-green-red had sent them, they announced breathlessly, to lower a cripple down to ground level.

I rejected that offer with a few corrosive expressions I had learned in the ants’ nest, which earned their instant approval. Then I went outside, lay down on the platform, and prepared to break my back on the ladder or the jagged tree stumps below it. I didn’t, and by the time the cherubim were tucking me in on a dogsled, they were already addressing me as Old Man. They had been too considerate to offer sympathy, but they had granted me patience, which was all I wanted. They must have spread the word afterward, I suppose, and it must have become an immediate tradition, for thereafter the cherubim always behaved that way toward me.

We set off then on a hair-raising twilight ride through fungus jungle and dead trees, through looming rocks and flying snow. Snortoises bellowed unseen all around, dogs yowled, and young men yelled insults. I just sat with my eyes closed and a fixed smile on my face until we arrived at the cherubim feeding trough, a room invariably referred to by the name of its snortoise, Cloud Nine.

There I found Quetti already boxed in a corner, being plied with beer and questions by a dozen or so cherubim and a few angels. Forced from his usual reticence, he seemed mainly to be telling more lies about me. As soon as I had taken the edge off my hunger and thirst, therefore, I began to relate some of Quetti’s own exploits. His prowess with women was noteworthy, as I have said, but I raised it now to the status of legend, making the younger cherubim in the audience wide-eyed and their more discerning elders purse-lipped. Quetti’s less salacious tales were soon finding few listeners and no believers.

In one hundred cycles Heaven has seen almost anything possible, but imposter angels were new. The audience varied as men came and went, and the two of us were kept there talking until we were both ready to fall off our chairs. I felt as if I had recounted my whole life story three times before we were at last released and escorted over to Nightmare, the snortoise that bore the cherubim’s dormitory.

Heavenly beer is not especially potent. Quetti and I had learned during our long trek to accept hospitality with moderation, so I am certain we had both been discreet when describing the death of Red-yellow-green. Yet before that long meeting ended, the cherubim, with deadly intuition, were addressing Quetti as “Snake.” He accepted the name with placid amusement, as if it were a compliment, and Snake he remained until he became an angel.

I was the Old Man. Some time later, while learning to use snow-shoes, I earned a second name. Snowshoes are tricky even for a man with real knees. Although I eventually became proficient on them, my early attempts caused me to thoroughly lose my temper. One of the spectators, a young swampman named Tiny, grew intolerably raucous over my tangled efforts to walk.

“Faster than the wind,” he exclaimed, “it moves over the grasslands in mighty bounds!”

I swung at him, missed, and fell headlong. Thereafter I was still the Old Man, but I was also known as Roo.

Then there was Kettle. Right after a long first sleep and a hearty second meal, Quetti and I were taken in hand by the saints. I think Quetti was given his first reading lesson, but Gabriel was howling for information on the ants’ nest, so I was cross-examined by a team of six. They came at me in relays, hurling questions until my head spun. It seemed to take half a lifetime.

That was in the scriptorium, an unusually large and bright room, well outfitted with windows and drippy skylights, but always so crowded with chests and desks that there was barely room to move. There the saints fought an unending battle to copy out ancient records before the damp of Dusk rotted them all away. The air reeked of mold, and there were insects. Young men with good eyesight struggled alongside old men with experience, striving to decipher crumbling paper or sodden leather. The most valuable texts have been transcribed onto gold-plated shell slabs, but there is a limit to the weight the snortoises can transport.

Weight has always been Heaven’s problem, as Kettle explained to me soon after the questioning had ended.

He took me off to his own cell, a nook of highly irregular shape that was even more cluttered than the scriptorium. Bundles of old manuscript were mixed in with discarded garments, and there was barely room to stand, let alone sit. The bed itself was heaped with books and a laptop desk and brass instruments for observing the stars. I was never to see it in any other state, and I eventually concluded that Saint Kettle, if he slept at all, must sleep standing up. He cleared a place for me on the end of the bed and squeezed his portly form onto one corner of a chest. And beamed at me.

“Where do you want to start?” he asked.

“Where do I want to start what?”

He looked surprised and waved a hand at the chaos. “Learning.”

“Is a herdman capable of learning?”

“That depends on what sort of herdman!” Chuckling, he bent over to scrabble through a heap of things on the floor, rising red-faced with a relatively neat and respectable ledger. He found the page he wanted and held the book out to me. I took it, surprised at its weight, and stared in incomprehension at the thousands of tiny, close-packed squiggles and at one large and unsightly ink blot.

“What does this mean?” I asked crossly. I had only a very hazy idea of writing, even then. “What use is this? Someone has been very careless.”

“Yes, that happens,” Kettle sighed. “It’s quite impossible to read what was written underneath. That page tells on an expedition sent out a long time ago…before you were born, certainly. Four chariots went across the grasslands to Dawn, to the wetlands. Purple-white-blue, Green-red-orange, Indigo-two-black…and now the fourth name can’t be made out at all! Not that it really matters, of course.”

He was prying, wanting to see my reaction, and I in turn was studding his baggy brown face. He was still smiling, and I did not detect a threat, which have must been one possibility. “You ought to report that blot to Michael.”

Kettle shook his head, swinging jowls. “Michael needn’t worry about such details. Nobody else need, either, in my opinion.”

“So who’s the enemy?”

His eyes twinkled. “Gabriel and Raphael. They don’t like some of the innovations that Michael is trying to make.” He explained about the five archangels and their unending rivalries.

“So why antagonize Uriel?”

“Uriel is one of Michael’s—this present Michael’s—own appointees, and he’s starting to waver, so it’s said. The meetings are private, of course, but the story is that he sided with the opposition in the last vote.”

“So why antagonize him?” I asked again.

Kettle chuckled. “Michael doesn’t need to bribe. He rewards or punishes. You watch him! He’s a master.”

Yes, I thought, I might well learn a thing or two by watching Michael.

I dropped my eyes to the book, to tales of things that had happened before I was born, to the deeds of men who might be dead by now. The tiny script seemed to dance before my eyes like midges. I thought of Misi’s delicate embroidery. I had never managed to match her at it…but I had learned to sew, after a fashion. I thought of the heaped documents I had been shown, full of the voices of the long-dead, full of wonderful things. I shivered at the thought of being able to hear those voices and see those things.

But reading would be of no use to me back on the grasslands.

I closed the book. “Tell me about the Great Compact.”

Kettle looked disappointed. “The Compact? Then I must speak first of the firstfolk…and therefore of time. How much do you know of time?”

The answer, we soon discovered, was “not much,” so Kettle set to work to teach me about time, and that took much time in itself.

At rare moments, when there are large hills to the west and the sky is clear, the inhabitants of Heaven can glimpse the stars, the Other Worlds, shining in the sky. There are millions of them, and they are terrifyingly beautiful. Which one is First World and how the firstfolk drove their great chariots through all those shining worlds, even the saints do not know. But the Other Worlds turn about Vernier in a predictable path. Were a man to observe the sky when he lay with a woman and she then made a baby, he would see the same pattern repeated when she was delivered of the child. The saints call this amount of time a turn.

At our first meeting, I had heard Kettle refer to another measure of time, one that the firstfolk used, the year. The year is about one and one-third turns. Heaven keeps its records in years, but—as everyone admits—it is a very impractical unit and is preserved only because it is sanctified by age and custom.

More convenient is the month, which is almost sixteen years, or twenty-two turns. I was two and a bit months old, Kettle informed me smugly. He expected me to ask how he knew, but he’d already told me that, so I didn’t. Almost a month had passed since the seafolk’s great migration, and much of that month I had spent in the ants’ nest. One month makes a baby an adult. A man can hope to live for four months, and a very few make five…and so on. Time is handiest in months. Twelve months makes a cycle, when High Summer returns to the same place. A cycle is three old men’s lives end to end, seven or eight generations, two hundred years.

The firstfolk came to Vernier almost a hundred cycles ago.

“Copies!” Kettle would exclaim sometimes, when he became annoyed with the old texts. “Copies of copies of copies! Reports of rumors of commentaries on critiques of analyses! Bah!” Sometimes he used an even stronger word than “bah!”

Despite the efforts of generations of scribes, and of the many heavy-laden snortoises who bear Heavens library, there are lamentable gaps in the old learning: much has been lost. What, for example, were the “goods” whose loss the firstfolk lamented? Kettle thought they must have been like the sorts of things that Heaven guards so carefully—the smithy, the pottery, the toolmaker’s shop—and most likely the legend of many goods being lost means that they were swallowed up by Nightside. Other saints disagreed. Goods, they maintained, had been in some way related to gods, and their loss was somehow tied in to the way the gods had scattered all across Vernier. Every group has its own god, they pointed out, and some have several, all lost to Heaven. Kettle made very rude sounds at this idea. The various gods had come much later, he insisted.

And why, if the firstfolk could move themselves and their goods through the Other Worlds, could they not also keep these goods moving when they came to Vernier? Kettle had a theory that—but then, every saint had theories.

In that first lesson, he did little more than confuse me on the subject of time, but at least I learned the words of the Great Compact. In Heaven, everyone is required to know it by heart. Long ago, Kettle said, all of Vernier did. Then he began to quote, almost chanting:

We, the people of Vernier, in order to preserve the wisdom of our ancestors from the dark of ignorance, our goods from the dark of night, our liberties from the dark of tyranny, our minds from the dark of superstition, and our children from the darknesses of inequality and intolerance, violence and oppression, do hereby enter into Compact together, for ourselves and our descendants forever.

He paused, looking reverent, which was not easy with a face so much better suited to registering mirth.

“That’s it?”

“That’s just the beginning. It goes on to describe ‘the college,’ which is Heaven, and ‘the instructors,’ which we now call angels—”

“Why? Why change the names?”

“I have no idea!” The solemnity slipped slightly, and his eyes twinkled. “There is an old tradition that it started as a joke. A heaven is a place where a god lives, and the Great Compact bans all gods from Heaven. Let me tell you the rest of it…”

And so he did. But then and later, he left many questions unanswered and many hints unexplained, and in time he had me begging for reading lessons so that I could find out for myself, which is probably what he had intended from the start. Probably I wanted to show that herdmen and reading were not incompatible…and Quetti was learning too, of course.

After that first session with Kettle, though, I returned to Cloud Nine with my head full of wonders and my belly empty. I discovered a near riot in progress because the seraph cook had been removed to attend to more urgent business. The cherubim were solving the problem with beer and loud indignation. Feeling too hungry for such behavior, I headed for the kitchen to set to work on my specialty, an all-inclusive stew.

My news of an angel slave had rocked Heaven as if all the snortoises had taken up dancing. Michael was planning a force of forty men, which meant at least fourteen chariots, and no such effort had been mounted since the mission to the herdfolk, back in my childhood. Everyone became involved. I was to see learned saints wielding paintbrushes and archangels sewing sails. The seraphim were run to exhaustion.

Technically I was only a guest, but I did not escape the preparations. Angels were too busy now to instruct, while senior cherubim were frantic to win their wheels before the war party departed. Quetti’s stories must have found gullible ears. A blushing cherub asked if I would give him some tips in archery. Then it was marksmanship, although I had not shot a gun since I ran out of ammunition in the crocodile swamp. Then horses. Soon I was as insanely overworked as everyone else, and mostly I was training angels, which I found ironic. In exchange, I demanded lessons in dogsledding and snowshoeing, so I could make my own way around Heaven without needing help all the time.

Then Sariel invited me along to meet some traders, and I found myself haggling on Heaven’s behalf. The traders did not appreciate my intervention. Sariel was appalled at the difference it made.

But I am getting ahead of my story… About the second or third time I was playing cook in Cloud Nine, Michael sent a seraph to fetch me. He wanted only to chat, but Michael’s whim was Heaven’s law.

I refused the seraphs dogsled and set off on my own snowshoe-shod feet. The sky was black, with a murderous cold wind coming from Nightside, and I was red-faced and breathless by the time I arrived at Throne. Michael made me welcome, apologizing for having taken so long to call me back. He led me into a small and very cozy office, where lantern flames danced happily and logs crackled in a tubby iron stove.

The chairs looked soft and difficult. I chose to settle on the floor with my back against a wall. Michael fetched some shabby old cushions for me, and then he proceeded to warm dulcified wine on the stove and to roast beef nuts. He was being charming again, and that put me on guard.

But I seemed to have misjudged him. He was amused and excited at having a real live son turn up in Heaven. To console him in his old age, he said with a laugh that came close to a cackle. We must get to know each other. Tell me about your childhood. Have some more wine. Have you heard the story…?

He was bright and inexhaustible, witty and irascible by turns. I was weary after a long series of lessons given and taken. I sat there, and we talked until my neck sagged and my eyes glazed. Finally he relented.

“You’re weary!” he said, as if that had not been obvious for a long time. “I was hoping the weather would clear. Well, I can summon a dogsled—unless you’d care to stay here?”

I looked up at him blearily. “Would that be wise?”

He sulked for a moment. “No, I suppose not. There would be more gossip.” Then a flash of humor: “You make me feel like a maiden guarding her reputation!” And a pout: “Such pettiness!”

“Can they throw you out?”

The blue eyes narrowed. “Certainly not! Oh, it’s been done a few times—Michaels who became too old, or went mad, or became corrupt… I’ve done nothing to provoke that. But they can stop me from experimenting with new things that need to be done—like trying to enlist herd-men. No angel wants to be the first, in case it doesn’t work out.” He paused, thinking. “If we suffer serious losses against the ants, then they might pull me down, I suppose.”

He sighed in exasperation and rose from his chair. “Well, I have enjoyed our chat. We’ll have time for lots more, I’m sure.”

Relieved, I levered myself away from the wall on my seat. “You’re coming… You’re coming along to lead the mission in person?”

“Eh? No, I’m not going! Who would I blame if it failed? I’m not going, and neither are you!”

I had been about to do my rollover and double-up maneuver. “I’m not going? But I’m the one—”

“A war party is no place for a cripple.” He folded his arms and was suddenly big. Partly it was a trick of the giant shadow dancing on the wall behind him. Partly it was his bulky white gown, and of course, I was sitting on the floor looking up, but the little man did look big, suddenly. I saw that I was not going to accompany the angels’ attack on Hrarrh’s nest.

“Damn! I can shoot as well as—”

“So I’ve heard. Uriel admits that you’re a better all-rounder than most of the cherubim and, he says, many of the angels. So’s your young friend, and I suppose you trained him.”

“Well, then—”

“He can’t be an angel until he can read and write. He needs some book learning, but in fieldwork he’s ready. Don’t tell him, though.” Michael had not moved. Only his shadow writhed and swayed.

“And me?”

That surprised him, and suddenly he showed caution. “You said you were not a pilgrim. Not a candidate, you said.”

“I wasn’t. But I want to go on this war party, and—”

“No.” He sank down on his chair again, which happened to put his face in shadow. “Don’t you understand, Knobil? Hasn’t Kettle explained?”

“Explained what?”

“Why you can’t be a cherub or an angel as long as I’m here in Heaven. You shouldn’t be here at all.”

“Because you’re my father.”

“Yes. But that’s not the scandal. Angels make bastards all the time. We encourage it! It spreads the genes around… I mean, it reduces the inbreeding, and that’s a bad problem in many areas. Groups don’t mix much, but seamen angels visit the deserts and treefolk angels the wetlands—the more angelbrats, the better! But we never know who they are. And—hasn’t Kettle explained the Great Compact?”

“He’s explained some. We’ve both been busy.”

“Of course.” Now he became kindly and gracious. “I could leave, of course. You’d make a good angel, and if you weren’t a cripple, I might even do that, so that you could become an angel. But that is an important factor, Knobil: you can’t deny that being a cripple makes a difference. And I think I’ll be a good Michael, given more time. As for going home… I don’t know what my arthritis would say to the wetlands now.”

I felt suddenly sorry for the little man and angry at myself because of it. “This is why there are no women in Heaven?”

“Talk to the seraphim if you get desperate. There are usually some trader wagons just over the hill.”

Anything’s negotiable.

“That wasn’t what I meant!”

He chuckled, then sat back to stare at nothing. “No. And yes. No women in Heaven! That’s what the Compact says. And no sons. No known sons. Because knowledge is power, and power leads to tyranny and oppression. You know how men feel about sons…son.”

“I know how herdmen feel about them. They kill them.”

He turned his blue-blue eyes on me without revealing anything. “I forgot again, didn’t I? Apart from herdmen, then? Most men favor their children over others. They will pass on their goods when they die. And their power, if they can.”

I had seen enough of traders’ customs and met enough village herd-men to be able to nod in agreement.

“So that’s the Compact! That’s why angels expect to be trusted with power—they have less temptation to abuse it. That’s another reason we get to tumble the women—because we can’t have any of our own.” We both sat in silence for a while.

Then he murmured, “Do you feel more guilty or less guilty now?”

I rolled over and jackknifed myself upright. Then at least I could look down on him. “I thank you for the hospitality.”

Michael might not have heard me. He was gazing dreamily at the misshapen wall opposite. “I often wonder about the firstfolk and those mysterious goods of theirs… How many trader wagons would it take to move Heaven, Knobil?”

“I don’t know a number big enough!”

“Ironic, isn’t it, that the answer was something as simple as snow? Those poor firstfolk, seeing all their precious goods destined to be destroyed by the dark—and then they discovered the snortoises. Nothing else can move a load like a snortoise can.”

I hesitated and was about to head for the door, but apparently he was still musing.

“So they saved their knowledge, their library. Ironic again—this is the worst place on Vernier to live, except Nightside itself. Do you see the problem?”

“Er…no.”

Michael was a curiously changeable character, but this dreamy introspection was both new and surprising. Then Throne uttered an enormous bellow, and I hastily lurched across the room to lean both hands against a wall while the building rocked.

Michael did not seem to have noticed. “Some people staying to guard the snortoises and the books and things, others spreading out all across Vernier…finding all sorts of ingenious ways of earning a living… I suppose at first they all sent their youngsters back here to be educated. Gradually the distances would become greater…so the girls wouldn’t come any more, because girls would be precious. Boys…well, it’s always nice to get the boys out of the compound when they get to a certain age—at least the rowdy ones. Send them off to learn, you know? Like the ghoulfolk still do?”

“Yes?” I straightened up cautiously.

“It’d be more restful.” Then Michael’s eyes flickered around to regard me, and he smiled his thin-cheeked, old man’s smile. I wondered if he’d been playing a part deliberately. “Then send off fewer and fewer boys, just the adventurous ones, and those would be sent back to advise and teach… That must have been how it all came about, I think: the start of Heaven and the angels. But maybe I’m wrong. It was a long time ago.”

—3—

EVENTUALLY THE ARMY WAS READY and it departed—forty-two men and nineteen chariots. I stayed behind in Heaven, and so did Michael. The commander was Three-brown, a heavy-jawed, long-armed slasher. He did not impress me. I thought better of his deputy, who had the typical yellow eyes and tousled hair of a wolfman. When I cheekily said so to Michael, he explained that wolfmen rarely made good leaders because they were always too eager to please, but they were infinitely loyal subordinates and dogged fighters.

An exhausted peace settled over Heaven. It lasted about one sleep, and then all the duties that had been neglected had to be caught up. Only a few aging angels remained, but the cherubim were still anxious for promotion, and thus I found myself instructing in everything from chariot driving to herb lore—at least the little I had picked up from Misi.

There was nobody heading out, to the grasslands or anywhere else, and without transportation, in Heaven I must remain. Of course, I could have stolen a couple of ponies and just vanished into a snowstorm, but that would have required a stouter heart than mine, for I knew I should find Loneliness out there waiting for me. Moreover, Michael could have sent angels to bring me back. Instead, I cravenly accepted the situation and settled down in Heaven for the time being.

Some of the blame belonged to Kettle, who managed at last to open my eyes to knowledge. I discovered that herdmen, or at least herdmen half-breeds, were not too stupid to learn to read. My penmanship was better than most—thanks to Misi’s embroidery lessons, I suppose. Somehow I found myself absorbing all the history and geography and sociology and biology and the myriad other things that cherubim must learn.

I had no real duties and no status. I taught cherubim. I exchanged lessons with angels—trader signals in return for navigation, for example. I copied archives for the saints, and I listened to their lectures. I played seraph at times, for I thereby learned skills I thought might be useful to me later. I sharpened knives, shoed horses, blended gunpowder, threw pots.

I visited with Michael often, drinking his sickly wine, arguing and swapping stories. We shared jokes, skirted sensitive spots—quarreling, arguing, probing, testing, stalking around each other like suspicious dogs.

Heaven was a seductive trap for a man who had a mission and a purpose elsewhere. It was safety after danger, and fellowship after loneliness. I had friends—even, I suppose, family.

I had sung in my childhood, and with the seafolk. I had sung when I was with my darling Misi, and even sometimes on my long trek with Quetti—usually while lounging by a campfire, in the company of a pretty girl or two. And in Cloud Nine I sang along with the cherubim.

The war party returned, tails down, having found the mine long deserted. The tribe had formed itself into an ant army and vanished into the forest, undoubtedly heading for some better lode that their ancestral wisdom told them was due to emerge from the wetlands. Before leaving they had killed off many, or perhaps all, of their slaves. They may have taken the better ones with them or sold them to traders, although traders usually shun slaves in large numbers. Had Hrarrh sold me off to save me from enjoying a quick death?

The angels had failed me again, and I was not surprised.

Heaven settled back into its ages-old routine. Now angels were heading out on missions all the time, even if only on routine patrols of neglected niches. It was time for me to go. Heaven was a snare. I was procrastinating, thinking of a million excuses to put off my departure. I had learned much and there was much more I could learn still, but if I tried to learn everything, then I would die before finishing. I could feel my courage ebbing away. I had begun to tell myself that I was dreaming impossible dreams, that I had been mad when I had first thought up my plan and now was sane again. Nothing argues more convincingly than cowardice.

I did ask. During one of our long chats, Michael started riding his hobbyhorse about herdfolk yet again, how he wanted to save the poor loners. This piece of hypocrisy always infuriated me. He wanted to use herdmen, but he secretly despised them. In his eyes they were merely muscular brutes. I suffered in silence for a while and then forced out the words: “It’s time for me to leave.”

He straightened in his chair, bristling. “To go where?”

“Home,” I said simply.

He looked surprised, then pleased. “Well, you’d never get into a kayak, but that shouldn’t matter. Did you know I had four brothers? The wetlands must be teeming with your cousins, if you could ever find—”

“Home to the grasslands.”

“What?” He threw back his head and cackled.

I glared in silence. I no longer needed to sit on the floor when visiting Michael. He had ordered a special chair made—solid, high enough to be easy for me, with a footrest. It was infuriatingly comfortable.

“Rot!” he said. “Decay and putrefaction! Why would a civilized being like you want to go back to live among those animals?”

“They’re my people. I don’t belong here nor in the wetlands. I want to go home. Everyone does in the end.”

That was not quite true. Some angels, like Michael, elected to live out their life span in Heaven, but most headed off eventually in search of wife and hearth and children. Michael, having considered the matter, was now openly suspicious. “No, you’re no child-killer. Why? You’ve got something else in mind!”

His insight stunned me, but of course, that was the key to his success at manipulating people. “No, I don’t! Will you let me go?”

“Not until I know why!” We were both shouting.

“I’ve told you!”

“No you haven’t!”

“Animals, are they?” I swung my feet down. “But the women perform satisfactorily?” I heaved myself upright.

Michael switched moods, a common trick of his. He stayed in his pillowed chair and beamed up at me jocularly. “Now what vast confusion is churning inside that blond head of yours, son?”

“Just that word: son! You took my mother like the loan of a blanket!”

“You ought to be glad I did, surely?”

“You made me a yellow-haired freak!”

He sniggered. “Your complaint is paradoxical. You display an unthinking lack of gratitude. Your mother was very grateful.” I screamed at him.

“Seriously!” he said blandly. “She told me she’d never realized it was supposed to be a pleasure.”

“Liar! Filthy liar!”

“No. And when I returned and found you…” He paused, eyeing me oddly. I was shaking with wild fury. “Lithion? That was her name, wasn’t it, Lithion?”

“Yes.” I took a lurching step toward the door.

“What happened to her? Did she have many more children after you? How many others?”

“Damn you to dark hell! I don’t want to talk about her!” I stepped for the door again, just as the snortoise lurched. Caught off balance, I staggered, missed a grab at a chair, and pitched to the floor. That was not the first nor the last spill I took in Heaven, but it was one of the worst. Throne must have felt my skull hit his shell.

The strange lights faded from my eyes. The building settled. I was lying on my back, listening to the rumbles of the world’s mightiest digestion. I struggled to sit up and discovered Michael was kneeling at my side, assisting me.

“Easy!” he said. “You took a bad knock. Easy, son!”

“Don’t call me that!” I flailed vainly.

“But you are my son. Mine and Lithion’s.”

“No!” I tried to shout but only groaned. Though my head was spinning, I knew I must go, and go at once. “I won’t talk about her. I killed her. Help me up—now!”

“Easy!” He tightened his grip, with more strength than I would have believed he possessed in his withered little frame. To stand up I must first lie down, and he was supporting me. I floundered like a child. My frustration made me start to weep.

“Tell me,” he whispered, hugging me tight. “Tell me what happened.”

I blurted out the story of Anubyl, or some of it, anyway. I don’t know how much I told, because I wasn’t listening to what I said. At the end of it, I buried my face in the collar of Michael’s coarse white gown and sobbed like a baby. He clutched me firmly until at last I snuffled away into shamed silence.

“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.

Time slipped by and I did not leave. I might be there yet, had I not fallen off a ladder.