The A'Rak by Michael Shea Read Free Book Online Page B

on his raft. She said something close to his ear to which he nodded. He sat on the casket. The widow led us away, babbling of our journey, led us out Clummock's gate and locked it behind us. Glancing back as we left I saw Clummock still quietly seated on the coffin, as if he meant to repose there a while longer.
    * * *
    The North Highway swept us smoothly out through the metropolis' purlieus, where the monumental profile of the city subsided to a sprawl of more modest residences, while the crags swung inland and merged with the green, easy-rolling hills.
    The widow Pompilla marched in the lead, a short, peaked heap of black gauze in billowy, unabated motion. I was denied a view of her precise locomotive style, but, short as her legs had to be, her pace and stamina were astonishing. Here, I would have thought, one saw the energy squandered by her emotional eruptions being channeled to useful effort—were it not that as she strode tirelessly forth, she held forth just as tirelessly, practically ranted in fact, about the countryside we crossed.
    " Hay -farming!" (This at the first shocks of hay we passed.) "I was a farm girl before I was wed! Helping dear Daddum bind wickers with withes my third year! Milking the gentle eyed momiles, squeezing the gleets' silken teats. The warm milk asteam in the chill of morn! The precious perfumes! The barnyard's pungencies!" And so on.
    From raptures about her Hagish childhood, she passed to raptures about Hagish culture. She laid her nativity here on so thick, that under any other circumstances I would have suspected her for the fraud she was, and though I now understand how I was duped, I still cringe with shame to think how I swallowed it all. "Now that —look! Look there!" (This was occasioned at the sight of the first rat-rick we passed, whatever that was.) " That is a rat-rick of the true Hagish style, the original , native Hagish style of the first Hagish rat-rick riggers! Note the plain, solid capstyle, tented on teepeed poles fanned out to rafter the eaves! In that humble but heartfelt capstyle is Hagish virtue in essence, Hagish—" And so on.
    But however much she punished our ears, the solid honorarium in our pokes made us patient with this undeniably grotesque little detour, as did the fact that it gave us a taste of the territory while we were still unyoked to our duty. This highway, for one thing, presaged a swift delivery if all the roads—as they in fact proved to be—were equally well engineered: wide and seamlessly flagged, it attacked slopes in graceful sweeps that eased upgrades and downgrades alike. We soon learned as well the pronounced rhythm of Hagian terrain, whose pattern we grasped when, near noontide, we emerged from the Rattlespate River Valley, crested the ridgeline, and began our descent into the Ebonflux River Valley. Hagia is in fact one vast network of grassy ridgelines—sun-warmed and sparsely treed—and, webbed in the net, a host of lush river valleys thick-forested along their floors.
    As with the Rattlespate's, the Ebonflux Valley's upper slopes were nearly all meadows, thicketed here and there with flowering shrubs. Rainy Hagia—we were there in its sole short dry season—is profuse in blossoms: scarlet gleetsbane with pistils like saffron stilettos, the lavender flagons of gnats-nest, the ranked bells of amber carrilion with indigo anthers a-dangle like tongues.
    Midway down into the valley, where the slope gentled, the farmsteads began, looking pretty and prosperous, their furrows straight as comb-strokes. From the gables it was the fashion to hang wind-chimes like clouds of butterflies or flights of birds, and fanciful weather vanes were another custom—sheet-copper in artful silhouettes: a milkmaid in windblown dress by a gleet with windblown fleece, a shepherd chasing a tumbling hat, two children struggling to pitch a tent with a wind-tugged blanket.
    It came to me then that we had been some hours in progress and that actual children had