West of January

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.

He growled. “No. Are you hungry?”

“Yes sir.” I was always hungry.

“Then eat now. Drink. Then keep down while we’re in their camp. No one will know you’re here.”

“Thank you, sir!” Soon I was gulping down handfuls of delicious smoked woollie. The angel watched me in nauseated disbelief.

The chariot came to a halt again. Children were shouting in the distance. I had vacated the pile of furs and was now stretched out at a lower level on a much less comfortable collection of spars and oars and other hard things. The angel lowered his sails.

“Remember: Keep down!” he warned. He began moving toward the rear, and now I heard and felt the sound of hooves approaching.

Then the angel paused, turned back to rummage among the loose junk near his seat, and straightened up with one of the tyrant’s claws in his hand. Scraps of bloodstained fur clung to one end of it. He sent me a cryptic and disagreeable smile, and then resumed making his way to the back. As he climbed out, a deeply masculine voice hailed him. I shivered nervously and tried to wriggle lower in my bone-breaking wooden nest.

I assume that Violet was feasted and that he tried to explain to the herd-master about the catastrophe building in the grasslands. He would have had to accept the hospitality of a tent and the woman who came with it. I soon decided that I could safely move back to the more comfortable bedding if I lay flat there. I arranged a sunscreen and then slept some more. I ate again, having decided that my angel would not grudge a few more strips of woollie flesh. I had the sense not to drink, but long before Violet at last returned, I was frantic to relieve myself, a deprivation I had never before experienced.

I heard voices. Violet came into my view as he clambered to the little platform at the back of the chariot. Someone handed up a bundle, which he tossed in. Then he was passed a bow and quiver, and he placed those more carefully. Farewells were spoken.

Sails went up, the brake came off, and the chariot began to pick up speed down the slope. The bouncing was torture. It was impossible to speak over the squealing of the axles and the rattling, but I put an expression of agony on my face and pointed at my groin. The angel scowled angrily—having just made a good start, he would now have to again find another leeward slope to stop on. He probably did so as soon as he could, but it seemed a long torment to me.

“I traded your claw,” he announced as I gratefully raised my pagne over the side.

“Sir?”

“I was going to let you have one of the tyrant claws. I traded it for this bow instead. The herdmaster is very puzzled as to why I should want one, but he dared not ask. And he is very cocky about the claw.”

A bow was a wonderful gift. I thanked him sincerely. He looked even more disgusted than ever.

More bouncing…

As I was now well rested, I sat up and watched the country go by, enjoying the experience, savoring the sensation of being an angel. This marvelous chariot was faster than a horse, I concluded, and it did not tire. An angel was not bound to a herd; he could go anywhere. Had I had a chariot like this, I could soon track down my enemy, Anubyl. I probably assumed that two or three tries with that bow would make me an expert archer.

Then, unexpectedly, Violet spilled wind from the sails and the chariot rolled to a halt at the top of a long slope. I saw what he had seen—open water.

It was only a small puddle in the middle of a wide dry flat, but there were trees around the edges and no woollies in sight. I turned to look at him. He was snarling in silence.

For a healthy man to survive alone was a challenge; for a cripple, an impossibility. How could I even learn archery if I could not retrieve my arrows? Memory of terrible loneliness crept back, and my dreams scattered in the wind. Yet somehow I knew that pleading with this surly old man would be worse than useless, and I suppose I had pride.

“Do you want me to get out, sir?” I asked.

“I don’t owe you anything, do I?”

“No sir.”

“Then…goodbye and good luck, herdbrat!”

I struggled to my feet and began to make my stiff-legged way to the back, clutching the mast or anything else handy to keep my balance. Getting down to the ground was torture, for my left knee hurt badly and even to put weight on my other leg sent spasms of agony through my whole body. Sweat seemed to explode from my skin. But I made it and he passed down the bow, the quiver full of arrows, and then the other bundle.

“That’s more of your filthy burnt woollie.”

“Thank you, sir. You have been very kind.” I meant that. Yet, as he had said earlier, it might have been a greater kindness to have let the tyrant eat me than to abandon me here in the grasslands as he was doing now, even with a bow.

“Can you walk?”

I loaded myself up with the new gear and tried. The answer, in truth, was no, but I managed a couple of limps and said, “Yes sir.”

“Wait!”

He pouted at me, hesitating. “Come here.” He fumbled in a pocket and brought out a leather packet. As I retraced my two lurching steps, he opened this and took out a small triangle. “I’ll give you one of these,” he said, “just in case.”

He poked at it briefly with a short stick that had also come from his pocket and then dropped it to my hand. The rough side was marked by more of the black squiggles, the smooth side dyed in three colors—a violet strip along the edge, a dark blue triangle, a smaller red one…the colors of his chariot.

“Keep it in the dark,” he said, “or the dyes will fade away. Then it’s useless. They’re not supposed to outlive you. You know what it is?”

I shook my head.

“It’s an angel token. Take it to Heaven and they’ll let you in.” He laughed. “Or you can show it to another angel if you need help. It’s a mark of approval. I liked the way you tried to draw off the tyrant, herdbrat. Angels give these out, sometimes.”

“I already have one, sir.”

I laid down my burdens and fumbled in my pouch. By the time I had produced the triangle my mother had given me, Violet had clambered down and was regarding me with a very angry expression. It grew even more furious when he saw what I had.

“So I was right? Green-two-blue?” He inspected the rough side. “West of January, Wednesday? Of course! Well, well… Tell me.”

So I told him.

He shook his head. His pink jowls quivered when he did that. “You have a strange effect on angels, herdbrat.”

“Sir?”

“It’s against the rules to give you a ride in my chariot—although that one gets broken often enough. It’s much more against the rules to go back to a woman. Did you know that?”

“No sir.”

“You don’t know anything, do you? An angel is supposed to enjoy a woman once and never go back to her. If he visits the same tribe, he should choose another woman. Your father must have gone back to your camp, or he could not have known about you…and he certainly could not have passed her this unless they were alone in her tent again.”

Now I was recalling a vague image of a yellow-haired man with no clothes on, playing romp with my mother. I could just remember it, I thought. Or remember being able to remember it once. Or was I making it up? I said nothing.

“It’s supposed to be a mark of approval!” The angel’s face was turning redder than ever. “How old…big…could you have been when he met you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Green-two-blue?” he repeated. Violet spoke to himself a lot. He was a bitter, sour old man and more than a little crazy, which is not uncommon among angels.

“Do you…know my…father…sir?”

“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.

—2—

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.

The herds were becoming enormous as they packed in closer against the ocean, for when two herds meet, one herdmaster will inevitably kill the other and so own both. My angel came back from his visits looking grimmer every time. Eight women he’d been offered, he would say, or even ten.

Then he decided that I could walk well enough for his purposes.

—3—

“I HAVE NEVER KNOWN ANGELS to travel in pairs,” Herdmaster Agomish rumbled in the deepest voice I had ever heard.

I could not see his face, for I had been told to keep my eyes lowered. I could see the end of his black beard, however, and it hung below his belt. I could see his boots and breeches, and two giant hairy hands, either of which could have snapped my neck without calling for help from the other. I had not known that most herdfolk males were made on the same scale as my father. That rock-smasher voice seemed to fall from the sky.

Violet had ordered me not to speak, for he had said that I spoke like a herdman, not like an angel. I doubt that my dry throat would have put out intelligent sound, anyway. I stood at his side with my eyes down and my mouth shut. I stared at the herdmaster’s enormous boots and fervently wished I was safely hidden in the chariot as usual.

But this time Violet had decreed that I would accompany him, without saying why. He had also told me not to believe anything he said about me. Herdfolk were too dumb to see through a few lies, he had said.

“Even angels have to be trained, Herdmaster,” he now replied cheerfully. “He is merely here to learn and will remain silent in the presence of his elders, as children should.”

The hint was taken. My fair complexion deceived the herdman, as it had earlier deceived both Anubyl and Violet.

“The boy is as welcome as you are, sir,” Agomish retorted. “I offer you whatever hospitality I have to give. Come, then!”

I limped painfully behind my guardian angel as he accompanied the giant herdman down the slope toward camp. I had observed the tents earlier, nine of them. The colors and designs looked wrong to me, and there were many more than nine women fussing around the fire, so Agomish had several old wives in his family. There were strangely few children, yet woollies without number swarmed everywhere, in all directions. Perhaps the children were out herding, yet the herd was straggling badly. I disapproved.

As we drew near, though, the familiar bustle and the familiar smells of a herdfolk camp sang softly to me of my lost childhood, and a lump grew hard in my throat. A girl laughed like Rilana. I saw a boy so like Todish that I almost called out to him.

Cushions had been spread on rugs before the tents. Angel and herd-master sat down together. Still favoring my right knee, I lowered myself to the ground behind Violet, keeping my face turned as far away from Agomish as I thought I decently could. I was no angel but a herdman, within sight of his women. If he as much as suspected that, how long would the truce last? As long as one breath—my last.

The unexpected appearance of a second visitor had caused some confusion among the women. There was a brief delay. Agomish clapped his hands angrily, with impacts like ax blows, and then two bowls of water were rushed over to us. One of them was held before my downcast eyes. A woman…a woman…was kneeling on the other side of it. I admired the pattern of her skirt furiously, to avoid seeing anything above her waist. Copying the angel’s actions, I splashed water over my face, laved my hands, and accepted a towel.

But the savory scent of cooking was making my young mouth water. Dried and smoked meat had been my diet for too long. Now I could smell hot fresh meat and juicy delicacies…roo brains…roast dasher! Another dress appeared before me. Two slim hands laid a piled dish alongside my outstretched legs. The woman vanished, and I set to work to make the feast do the same.

“Think of a tall tree, Herdmaster,” Violet was saying, with his mouth full. “If you stand close, you have to bend your head back very far to see the top of it—is that not so? While, if you are far away, then you can look straight at it. Well, the sun is very high, but the same is true of the sun. Is it not higher—closer—than you remember it as a child?”

The herdman growled. “I had not noticed, sir.”

“Think back to when you were a herder. Remember your shadow?”

I paid little attention as Violet went patiently on, trying to persuade his host that the sun did move, although so slowly that a man would not notice. Woollies did not like to be too far from the sun, he said—they became sluggish. But they could not live too close to it, either, for the heat dried up all the grass and also the water holes that the herders needed. So the herdfolk always lived about the same distance from the sun, moving slowly westward as it advanced…in a crescent shape…

Agomish insisted that he had been a herdmaster long enough to sire twenty-eight live daughters and he had not moved westward more than in any other direction. Always he had gone to the best water and the best grazing.

As the conversation dragged on, as my appetite died of its own success, I began to gain an inkling of Violet’s repeated insistence that herd-folk were stupid. It was obvious to me, but not to the mighty thunder-voiced Agomish. I felt rather smug once I understood that, but of course, I had heard this explanation before and had had much time to think about it. And I had enjoyed an angel’s-eye overview on a long journey through a grossly over-grazed, overstocked countryside.

Then I realized that the other two had finished eating. I quickly dropped the dasher bone I was gnawing. I licked my fingers.

“You will need rest, sir.” The doubts had crept back into our host’s voice. “I shall be honored if you will accept the use of one of my tents and a companion to ease your cares. And your…boy?”

He wanted to know how many tents, how many women…and suddenly I wanted to know, also. What did Violet have planned now? A mingled rush of renewed nervousness and incredulous hope began to interfere with my hardworking digestion. My groin tingled strangely. He couldn’t expect…

Could he?

“I shall be most honored to accept your kind offer, Herdmaster. The lad can curl up in a corner of the tent. He will not interfere with my rest, I can assure you.”

“I do have an ample supply of females now,” Agomish muttered, torn between greed and pride. “I have been extending my herds, also, as you may have guessed.”

“One will be more than generous. He is only a child, as you can see.”

I was greatly relieved. And yet, for just a moment, I had almost hoped…

I stood behind my angel as the herdman showed off his women—eight of them, with a cluster of five old wives in the background in case the guest wished to choose experience over agility. I could not help sneaking glances, for I was safely behind Agomish also. Three were obviously pregnant and hence out of bounds.

“…and this is Ullinila,” he boomed. “Not quite the youngest, yet unusually sprightly. The old wives are not certain, but it is possible that she is with child—but do not let that possibility worry you if she pleases you…”

The catalog continued, but even I had caught the extra enthusiasm over Ullinila. Agomish believed that she had already conceived, and therefore he would prefer that she be chosen.

She was. I followed Violet as he followed Ullinila to her tent. I was not looking forward to the experience, and yet I was naturally curious to see how this intriguing activity was performed. Would the angel actually couple with her in my presence?

I waited outside briefly as the old wives bustled in with a second set of bedding. Then they departed. I entered. I made sure the flap was securely closed. I turned around.

The second pallet had not been placed in a corner. It lay next to the other in the center of the stuffy dimness. Ullinila was little older than me or perhaps even younger, for women blossom sooner than men. She was wearing nothing but a sheen of multicolored light, and she sat with outstretched legs, leaning back on straight arms, smiling nervously up at Violet as he lowered himself to his knees beside her. My throat tightened at the sight of her youthful grace, the play of color over her skin as she leaned forward to put her arms around his neck.

“No, just stay as you were, my dear,” he said. He still wore all his clothes, which must have been surprising to her—even if he had no plans for intimacy, the tent was chokingly hot. “Come here, Knobil, and look at this.”

I limped across the rugs toward them. The camp outside was falling silent, giving the honored guest peace for his rest.

“Sit, lad. Closer! Let me show you.”

Awkwardly I seated myself on Ullinila’s other side.

“Closer!”

I heaved myself nearer.

Ullinila, finding herself between two fully clothed men, glanced from one to other of us apprehensively, not understanding.

I feasted my eyes on her as greedily as I had eaten her master’s food. I had seen Jalinan naked, of course, but at a distance, and I had been younger then. Ullinila was no older than Jalinan had been and more deliciously rounded, a miracle in smooth brown skin. One long braid hung behind her slim feminine shoulders, the other trailed down between…

“These breasts, Knobil,” the angel said, “are they not magnificent? Observe the generous proportions, the bold angle and graceful curve, the roseate perfection of the nipples and aureoles. In a hundred camps I have never seen a woman with finer adornments. Feel them!”

They were indeed superb. I remember them distinctly—exquisite, just starting to swell in the early stages of pregnancy. Violet cupped one breast in his hand. Sweating mightily, I obeyed orders and fondled the other. I wished I was able to pull my knees up. I laid my unoccupied arm in my lap instead.

“And the soft, luxurious firmness of these thighs…” Violet sighed and stroked. “Statements of strength and promises of indulgence. Feel them, lad! These hips—the ideal of feminine physique expressed to perfection, do you not agree?”

I may have croaked an answer. I do not recall. My heartbeat had risen dramatically, and not only my heartbeat.

Now the poor girl was thoroughly alarmed. “You will take pleasure with me now, sir?” she whispered to Violet.

He sighed. He sat back and crossed his legs. “Perhaps later. First try that young fellow with the big eyes and the bulge in his breeches. He has a stiff leg, also, so he will need some help.”

I could only gasp, wondering if I had heard him correctly, but Ullinila did not doubt and did not hesitate. She swung around to me with a big smile, white teeth in a heart-shaped child’s face. Still so innocent, I had not dreamed that my slim youthfulness might hold more appeal for her than the balding obesity of my companion. Probably I had never considered that a female could have any preference in such matters.

It is very alarming for a virgin to have his pants pulled off him by a naked woman and then to be straddled by her as she tugs his shirt up over his head, but she sensed that my need was already urgent, and she expertly did what was required. I discovered that the procedure could be completed in only a fraction of the time I had expected—indeed, I did almost nothing except fall backward, drowning in torrents of unendurable joy. And among those heaving spasms of pleasure, I vaguely decided that if this was what herdmen killed for, then their murders were forgivable.

All too soon it was over, and I was lying naked and unashamed, sweaty and panting, but secretly exulting in the knowledge that my fears had been unfounded. I was a real man after all! No more need I worry that my strangely pallid coloring indicated some lack of virility. Apparently all my equipment was satisfactory and operating as it was supposed to.

Ullinila was lying half beside me and half on top, soft yet firm, solid but delicate, smooth and desirable still. I had my arms around her. I reveled in the sweet scent of a herdfolk woman, a distinctive mustiness remembered from my childhood, forgotten once, now recovered and imbued with a new and deeper excitement. She turned her head toward my companion.

“And now you, sir?”

I heard another, longer sigh. “Not yet. Try him again. He obviously needs a lot more practice.”

She looked at me with an inquiring and mischievous smile. I smiled back.

Ullinila! How sweet she was!

How insatiable, how rewarding!

No man ever forgets the first time.

I awoke when Violet nudged me in the ribs with his foot. I blinked around in alarm at the unfamiliar tent, remembering where I was and what I had been doing.

“Get dressed, herdman!”

I winced—too loud! The camp was still quiet beyond the tent walls. “Yes sir.” I sat up and fumbled awkwardly with my breeches, seeing now that Ullinila had vanished, and her garments, also. Even the memory of her was an excitement.

The angel grunted. “Don’t tell me you wanted more? She’s gone to warn the others—so they can warm up another batch of vomit to feed us.”

“Yes sir. Did you—I mean, she was good, wasn’t she?”

He growled angrily and turned away.

“Are they always as good as that, sir?”

“No, probably not… Get dressed!”

I was going as fast as I could. “Sir, did I do something wrong?”

“You were no damned help at all!”

“Sir?” I did not understand, but I was suddenly heartbroken and ashamed for having somehow failed him, he who had done so much for me. What more was I supposed to have done?

Violet ducked under the flap without explaining.

The chariot squeaked to a halt. Violet cursed. We had not long left Agomish and the unforgettable Ullinila. I was stretched out on the bedding, facedown and bare to the sky. He had noticed in the tent that my fair skin was losing its pigmentation inside the angel clothes I wore. He was teaching me to sunbathe.

I knew that oaths at a halt meant that he had made a misjudgment. He would have to turn the chariot and run back downhill to try again. “May I do it for you, sir?” I asked.

“No.” He had risen and was scowling off to the north. I peered and saw woollies.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Not very, sir.”

“Amazing! Sleepy?”

“No.”

“Even more astonishing! We’ll have to visit them, though—they’ve seen us.”

His expression was foul, but his tone so unusually pleasant that I daringly asked, “Why?”

He shook his head at me. “They’re all terrified, Knobil. Didn’t you notice? Next time look at their eyes. An angel going by without stopping—that would be a great cruelty.” Then his usual acerbity returned. “If you’re not hungry or sleepy, then you’d rather stay in the chariot?”

My face must have been answer enough.

He sneered. “Herdboy glutton fancies another little woollie, does he?” He headed for the rear, to dismount and turn the chariot. “Very well… At least they can’t try to talk to me while you’re fornicating with them.”

My second visit to a herdfolk camp was much like the first. I was less nervous of the herdmaster and much less interested in the food. I eyed the women openly, wondering which one the angel would choose. When the tent flap closed behind us, Violet wasted no time in teasing. He merely said, “You go first.”

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.

—4—

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.

The heat in the lowlands was incredible, even to me who had never known cold. Light flared up from the sand in unkindly waves and silvery shimmers of mirage, roasting a man’s eyeballs. The wind alone could flay him. Teasing, useless clouds still hung far ahead of us, seaward, while the hills we had left were now elevated to the sky, transformed into pale blue ghosts of mountains—so far had we descended.

Far off on either hand, great spurs of highland flecked the sand. Our course lay toward the ocean, but also toward one of these barriers, the more southerly. That was our fastest route, Violet said, in that wind, and also a better chance for water. He spoke little; the silence was broken only by the hiss of our wheels and a keening of the wind in the rigging.

How long? I have no way of knowing how long we took to cross that desert. I slept three times, I think, but my sleep was fitful in the heat and thirst tortured my dreams, so perhaps my sleeps were short. Violet sat grimly by the mast, working the sails, steering with every speck of his great skill, losing not a moment. Red and bloated still, he somehow could yet look haggard, his face caked with dirt and a silvery growth of whiskers, his eyes almost hidden below the brim of his hat, screwed up against the glare. Our tongues felt huge and calloused in our mouths.

As the ordeal continued, I began to worry about him—I, who had cared nothing while a whole people died around me. I wondered if he would hand over the controls and give me my first lesson in driving a chariot. He might have done so had the way been flat, but the sand rolled in ridges. There were fields of deadly soft dunes and outcroppings of rock. A broken axle would have doomed us. So I remained on the bedding in the front and he stayed by the mast, and the chariot hurtled endlessly over the limitless plain like a frantic ant.

Then came a strange tang in the air, and an inexplicable sound. I looked to Violet and found there a smile for the first time in longer than I could recall, perhaps the first I had ever seen on his face.

“Breakers!” he said.

I watched the breakers in amazement. He had told me to imagine a big water hole, but my mind had never conceived an ocean. I wanted to drink all of it, until he explained about salt, and soon I could taste the salt on my lips. Breakers and unfamiliar white birds and interesting things being washed up in places—all these I could not tarry to investigate.

Now we must follow the shore, still southward, looking for fresh water. We were down to our last canteen when we found it. Where the sand ended and the hills sank gracefully into the sea, a tiny stream trickled from the rocks to die away into the back of a beach ridge. It was barely more than a lagoon—acrid, dead-tasting brackish stuff—but it was life for us. We plunged in bodily, soaking and drinking at the same time, as if we could absorb moisture through our skins. Yes, it was life to us, but it also meant death for the herdfolk, the steady draining of the last groundwater from the grasslands, emerging here to die in the ocean. We splashed and drank and laughed.

Then Violet went squelching back to the chariot, stretched out beneath it in the shade, and went to sleep.

When I saw him sitting up, leaning against a wheel, I went marching over and knelt down to speak. During his long absence I had napped, eaten, napped again, tried archery, bathed many times, and discovered the fun of rollicking in surf. I had almost drowned in learning about undertow. I had killed a bird with my sling. I had even dug out the mirror and confirmed what my fingers had been telling me about a mustache, although it had a disappointingly accidental appearance.

“I thought you’d died,” I said. I had checked three times to make sure he had not, but I tried to sound as if I were joking.

He took a moment to reply. “No.” It was a sigh of regret.

“Can I bring you some food, sir?”

He shook his head and continued to stare at the faint smudge of hills that we had left behind us. He looked very old and spent—and limp, as if he had been blown against that wheel by the wind like a litter of leaves.

“Can you live by that now?”

I was holding my bow. Archery was not as simple as I had hoped. “Not yet, sir.”

“I’ll show you how to fish. There are lots of fish.”

That sounded as if he might be planning to abandon me. I was alarmed, but I did not question. When he spoke again, it was of other things. For the only time in our acquaintance, in this moment of defeat, he revealed a glimpse of his soul.

“They knew,” he said. “Heaven has known for a long time. The texts warned them. It always happens.”

“Sir?”

“It happens every cycle. But not so bad. Never as bad as this.”

“No sir?” But he was not really talking to me.

“Trouble was, not enough angels. Not enough men, not enough equipment…too many herdfolk. You got any idea how many descendants one woman can have in the ninth or tenth generation?”

“No sir.”

“About a million—and that’s not counting sons.”

He wiped his face with the usual rag and let his hand fall back to the sand with it. “They’ve been sending us out for…for a month. Your father must have been one of the first.”

A month is one of the twelve north-south strips that the angels use to define the world, but they also use the term to denote time, the time taken for the sun to cross one month. I was about a month old, more or less. But I did not understand all that then.

“Doesn’t work with herdfolk,” he went on. “They won’t spread the word around, like other peoples…won’t cooperate.” The wind lifted the rag from his hand and rolled it out into the sunlight and away across the sand. I jumped to retrieve it. When I returned, he was still talking.

“…at the north end. Let just enough woollies by to feed them. Kill off the rest and spare the grass—narrow, it is. And the rest of us were to send them up there, stop them going south. Should have stayed.”

“You did what you could, sir?”

He looked up at me blearily. “I went to save the herdfolk. Looks like I saved one. No, you’re half angel. So I saved half a herdman. Should have stayed.”

He fell silent, staring again at the distant hills where the people were dying. Suddenly I knew what was alarming me the most: his eyes. They had the same flat hopelessness that had haunted the eyes of the herdfolk—yet we had escaped, had we not?

Probably he had guessed what I only learned much later, from the saints. Heaven lost more angels on that herdfolk mission than it had ever lost before. Too many waited around too long and died alongside those they had come to save, snared by the doldrums of High Summer.

Then I asked the one question that I had been carefully trying not to consider: “My family, sir?”

His unwinking eyes crawled around to study mine. “What do you think?”

I nursed my agony for a while in silence. Violet had been running away, even then. He wouldn’t have been running if he’d thought he could do any good by staying. I shook my head.

“It’s not quite hopeless,” Violet said, but he didn’t fool me. He didn’t mean to—he was just being gentle. I wanted Anubyl to have saved my family. I wanted him to have escaped, so I could find him and kill him myself. But I knew he could not have reached the sea before he starved.

Vengeance was denied me.

“What do we do now, sir?”

“You go south. Eat fish. There’s lots of fish in the surf. There will be springs, along the edge of the sea.”

I looked out over the barren windswept sand, the rocky hills, and the misty islands. I shivered.

“Go south, lad. Then west. The ocean will be shrinking. By the time you’ve got your growth, you’ll be on the west shore. The herds will be coming in from the north. You can make your kill then—little woollies of your own, little blue-eyed herdbabies.”

“Sir, I want to be an angel.”

He sighed and reached for the canteen that I had laid beside him when he first went to sleep. The drink seemed to revive him slightly, and he sat up, wiping his mouth.

“No. They’d never take a herdman.”

“I shall go and ask, anyway.”

“Then you still go south. Turn east at the Great River.”

I was already on my knees. For the first time I begged. “Sir—take me with you! Please?”

He stared at me glassily and said, “Not where I’m going.”

So he knew.

He unloaded his chariot and caulked the seams where the planks had dried out. Then he repacked it in seaworthy fashion, as he had been taught when he was a cherub.

He showed me surf fishing and clam digging, and there are few easier ways of gaining a living than those. He told me how to approach strangers, and he explained about doing work to earn charity and how to behave toward women. He talked of Heaven, but he still advised me to go west.

I helped him, and I practiced archery. I cooked our meals, doing what I could to be useful. We ate and slept and worked some more, while the sun glared murder from the sky, while the wind blew sand, while the whitecaps rolled unceasingly. In a sense he gave me a lecture as my father would have done, although he told of other things and it went on much longer.

Then he left me standing on the shore, wearing a pagne, as I had worn when he snatched me from the teeth of the tyrant. He had given me what I needed to survive—a rod and much line, bow and arrows, a hat, two water bottles. And a purpose. He turned his dead eyes away from me as he said, “Good luck, son!” I was the taller now.

“I’ll see you in Heaven!” I said, hoping my lip was not trembling too much. “That’s a promise.”

He nodded and shook my hand, and sailed away.

I watched him until I could not be sure of his sails among the waves. Then I turned to the south and began to walk, already beginning to hear the mocking whispers of Loneliness in the rush of waves and the sighing of the wind.

But in his last words to me, Violet had not called me “herdbrat.”

From the joyful moment of joining until the final tears of farewell, most men have only one father to give them life and show them their place in the world.

I had three.