The warrior of worlds en.., p.2
The Warrior of World's End, page 2
But in time he learned to eat and drink, and to walk unclumsily. Phlesco glumly resolved he had been less than accurate in his first estimation of Ganelon’s intelligence: he was neither an idiot nor a cretin, but merely a moron.
Iminix, however, stubbornly refused to believe this. Observing the boy’s progress in learning to care for himself, she believed him to be of completely normal intelligence. But in her opinion his intellectual capacities were almost completely potential, or had been when first they had glimpsed him stumbling about in the Blue Rain. She argued that a newborn babe is as mindless and uncoordinated as a drooling idiot, too, but that he may mature into an intellect of genius; that his capacities, therefore, are completely potential, at birth. So, she suggested, it was with Ganelon.
“Wife, there is no arguing with you!” Phlesco sighed. “But I must say I have yet to hear of a newborn babe who stands seven and a half feet tall, and weighs four hundred and seventy pounds!”*
“Husband, there are very many things you have yet to hear of, I am sure,” Iminix replied, in that patient, sweetly reasonable tone of voice, against which Phlesco knew better than to argue. “And I am going to begin teaching Ganelon how to talk and read and write.”
Phlesco returned to work on a fetish, deciding the easiest course was to let her have her own way. Things usually worked out best that way.
The azure pigment in the Blue Rains did not adhere to Ganelon’s hide as it had to PhlescoV epidermis. His natural coloring was dark bronze, and he was remarkably handsome. His eyes were black and magnetic, under inky, scowling brows—at least when he frowned. But he seldom frowned in those days, for he was very happy. The black eyes and brows formed a rather startling contrast to his hair, for this was a long, flowing mane of incredible sparkling silver. I do not mean to imply by this term that he had the white hair, bleached by extreme age, which is sometimes called “silvery.” I mean silvery; his mane was composed of innumerable fine strands of supple, metallic silvery hue. This was not a trait of True Men, and so a Nonhuman strain was suspected in his ancestry.
No particular social stigma was attached to such mixed ancestry. In these, commonly believed to be the Last Days, trueborn humanity was a dwindling, perhaps a dying, species. Evolution had continued its subtle, invisible surgery amid the gene pool of Terrene life-forms, and many new races of beasts as well as sentient humanoids had arisen to challenge Man’s dominance of the Last Continent in the Twilight of Time. The Pseudowomen of Chuu were but the most harmless of these curious and often inimical creatures; the Halfmen of Thaad, the Death Dwarfs, the mobile and perhaps sentient Green Wraiths, the Strange Little Men of the Hills, the Tigermen of Karjixia, the Talking Beasts^ the Stone Heads of Soorm, and many another breed shared the supercontinent with True Men, and often on an even footing.
* That’s not what Phlesco actually said, of course, but I have resolved to simply translate all such common, everyday terms from this point on, in order to save my footnotes for tie conveyance of genuinely important information.
No, Iminix knew that Ganelon was not completely human. His skin, for example, was very much tougher than the delicate tissue of epidermis wom by Homo sapiens; his skin was supple and flexible, but as tough as Seasoned leather. And his flesh itself was much more dense than that of humankind, and could sustain without so much as a bruise a blow that would have pulped the flesh and shattered the bones of an ordinary man. His bones were three times harder than steel.
He had nine senses, although he did not until much later discover how to use the four that were extra human.
His vitality and stamina were that of thirty men. He could run faster than a bird-horse, even one bred for racing, and he could sustain the pace for more than one hundred miles. He could go six months without eating, and eighty-six days without water.
It was obvious to all that he was a superman, a hero.
But to Iminix he was her babe—no, not quite that: her son.
3. HAPPY TIMES IN ZERMISH
The City to wiiich Phlesco and Iminix the Pseudowoman had been traveling when they discovered Ganelon Silvermane wandering in the wilderness was named Zermish. It was sometimes called the City of Talismans, from its principal industry, which was the manufacturing of varieties of amulets.
The city stood to the north of the Crystal Mountains in the Realm of the Nine Hegemons, a loose confederacy of mostly independent city-states each of which was ruled by its own hereditary Hegemon. The entire country was governed lightly by the nine-member Hegemonic Council which convened twice yearly to decide on things like taxes and tariffs and the like. The cities of the Hegemony, counting clockwise from Zermish at the western border, were Pergamoy, Sabdon, (which was the northernmost), Aphe-lis to the east, Iblix and Gorome to the south; and, in the center of the Hegemony, Oryx, Jargo, and Nambaloth. The capital of the entire confederacy, if it had one, was probably Oryx; it was there, anyway, that the Hegemons met for their biannual councils.
It was generally a peaceful and pleasant country and a good place to live. The peasants were not downtrodden serfs, groaning under the licentious whims of a land-owning aristocracy, because there wasn’t any land-owning aristocracy. The Hegemons had passed laws against the existence of dukes, barons, princes, earls, marquises, counts, vaivodes, margraves, beys, and nabobs, figuring one Hegemon per city-state was aristocracy enough.
It was one of the more recently founded nations in this part of central northeastern Gondwane. Its history dated back only thirty-two thousand years (give or take a couple of centuries), which made it rather youngish as nations went on Old Earth these days.
Zermish itself was a medium-sized city with a red stone wall around it. This wall was pierced by seventeen gates, one for each sign of the zodiac.* The major boulevards were paved with stone and lined with shade trees; fountains splashed and sprayed in twenty-four squares, plazas, forums, and bazaars; the Hegemonic Palace was built in the outmoded Hadhazy style of architecture popular in these parts a hundred thousand years ago—a concentric system of buildings facing inward and connected at three levels by aerial bridges, with the entire structure topped by a ring of colossal statues, each identical to the tiniest degree, representing the six thousand, nine hundred and thirty-three Hegemons of the Zermetic Dynasty. Each of the Hegemons who ruled Zermish were virtually the same personage, for the sperm plasm of the First Zermetic Hegemon—Argelibichus the Perpetual—was still preserved in an Eternity Tank, and from this original ancestral sampling the wife of each regnant Hegemon in turn was ritually impregnated with a ceremonial catheter of stain-resisting platinum.
* The zodiacal signs recognized in this era consisted of seventeen Talking Beasts, mythological creatures, and varieties of Nonhumans. In the correct order, these signs were that of the Gryphon, Licorae, Su, Bazonga, Mantichore, Lamussa, Basilisk, Yoop, Catobleps, Mandragon, Gyraphont, Myriapod, Firedrake, Minimal, Wyvem, Merwoman, and Spurge.
For reasons such as the above, the long history of Zermish was a singularly uneventful one.
The shop which Phlesco purchased with his life’s savings stood, of course, on the Street of the Godmakers.
The principal industries of Zermish were periaptry, tal-ismaning, and amulet-smithing. The goods thus produced by the craftsmen of these several related Guilds were then exported to the religious, magical, occult, or mystical markets in the neighboring countries, and sometimes were sold as far away as Phoy or Barchemis, or even the Kakka-wakka Islands, which were in the Third Lesser Inland Sea, near Chuu.3
Phlesco set himself up as a Godmaker with his certificate of graduation, a handsome parchment of simulated demonskin adorned with gold and purple and scarlet seals, ribbons and sigils, prominently displayed over the main counter. In no time he enjoyed a thriving trade, for his concepts, design innovations, and visual renderings were new and exciting to the Zermishmen, who rarely got a chance to view the latest styles and fashions popular among the Godmakers of the Smoking Mountains.
The scrawny old artisan was delighted by his success. He had hardly dared permit himself the hope of such a welcome, after all those meager years of carving talismans and periapts—a trade to which, had his Godmaking venture eventuated in failure, he could always have returned. But his fellow Guild-members welcomed him with extreme cordiality, and in no time orders and commissions were pouring in. A barbarian chieftain from the Largroolian plains desired a new godling with thirteen heads, each more hideous than the last, and the whole carved from a single block of ongga wood twenty feet high; for that order, Phlesco billed the tribe for five hundred ounces of glelium. A shaman from the community of hermits who inhabited fumaroles in the peak of Mount Ziphphiz in Garongaland commissioned him to create a god of the winds and the airy spaces which should be as light as air itself, but durable as steel. Phlesco executed the commission by shaping an immense bubble of blown glass filled with helium, the glass impregnated with strands of boron twelve molecules thick and ninety million long, and thus unbreakable. For that, his fee was princely.
The new munificence meant a porcelain oven for the kitchen, woven silk wall hangings, a necklace of crystallized sphinx-eyeballs threaded on catgut, and a court dress composed of eleven thousand multicolored feathers. These, of course, were for Iminix, who might not have been human but was essentially a woman.
Human nature being much the same in every age, it was possible that Phlesco’s fellow-craftsmen might have resented his sudden success and come to regard him as a rival and an upstart foreigner. Such, I am happy to state, did not prove to be the case. Each Godmaker had his own speciality, and none had cause to resent the success of another; old Galzolb, for instance, tended to execute colos-suses, his principal achievement having been to carve an entire mountain into the form of the Sleeping God of Xoom in his youth; sprightly, affable Izzilp, on the other hand, sculpted gods in miniature, and once reproduced the entire pantheon of the Zul-and-Rashemba mythos on one side of a single seed pearl; and Karmph made gods of adamantine metals perishable only by needles of atomic fire; and Lloim made his of cloth, papier-mache, feathers, and balsa. To each man his own chosen area of expertise, that was the rule; and the success of any artisan in Zermish benefited all the Zermishmen.
Just beyond the Street of the Godmakers, where it terminated in Qualish Square, a side alley led into the Avenue of Seers. Therein resided the fortune-tellers, astro-mancers, horoscopists, diviners, haruspices, and all such persons who followed the more mundane of the divinatory arts. The great Street of the Prophets was on the other side of the city; there, of course, lived the major foretellers of the future, who were favored by the Gods. Such at least was their claim.
But in the shabby little Avenue of Seers lived Phlesco’s crony, a haruspex named Slunth. His shop was small and disreputable, the windows fogged with dust and garlanded with cobwebs, the gilt charactery all but faded into illegibility on the small sign that hung creaking over his door.
Slunth had studied haruspexy at the Collegium of the Sacred Sciences and Divinatory Arts in Great Veladon on the coasts of the Third Lesser Inland Sea, where the River Zelphus merges its waters with the waters of the cataract known as Thundermountain Falls. He was, thusly, more or less a fellow-countryman of Iminix, and in his way a colleague of Phlesco. A friendship grew up between the God-maker’s family and the haruspex.
He enters this narrative only in a minor and unimportant way. That is, it was he who gave Ganelon his name. Until that event Iminix had called the youth by a variety of fond pet-names. Phlesco had referred to him, in his short-tempered way, as Dummy, or Lumpish, or You Simpleton.
When they had been two years in Zermish, Iminix decided it was time the bronze giant had a proper name. Although Phlesco grumbled at the expense, the Psuedowoman took him to the Temple and paid the priest two rods of qrium for an auric reading. The results were, said the priest, unintelligible; he did not, however, return the qrium. Then Slunth volunteered to divine the boy’s True Name, which was written on the soul, according to the Zul-and-Rashemba mythos, not on the aura as the Oshpazian Mystery believed.
His True Name, he told them, was Ganelon.
But Slunth had seen other things written on Ganelon’s soul besides just his name. One of them was so significant, or so astounding, or perhaps both, that he dispatched a message to a magician friend of his, asking him to visit Phlesco’s shop when next he was in the city.
This magician was known as the Illusionist of Nerelon; he had formerly lived in Oryx but he no longer resided in that city, having transferred his place of residence to an enchanted palace in the northerly peaks of the Crystal Mountains.
From this fact you might easily have deduced that he was a magician of considerable power and potency, since he obviously had, or believed that he had, little or nothing to fear from the Ghost-Phexians said to haunt those mountains.
The fact of the matter was that he was a master of Mind Apparitions, and the Ghost-Phexians feared him.
What Slunth’s note had hinted at concerning the mysterious bronze giant with silver hair, whose antecedents were completely unknown, intrigued the Illusionist. He resolved to pay a visit to Phlesco’s shop at the next opportunity.
That afternoon he tried a toss or two of thirty slim ivory rods on a marked table inscribed with symbols of good or ill fortune, It was a minor divinatory art he had learned from Slunth: you could read the broad, general implications of an event or decision from the way the ivory rods fell, forming certain patterns, in certain marked squares.
After studying the way the rods fell, he decided to visit Zermish without delay, and before nightfall he entered the Street of the Godmakers.
4. PHLESCO THE GODMAKER
The Illusionist found it easy to make friends with Phlesco. The two easiest ways to Phlesco’s heart were to praise his work and to pay good money for it.
The Illusionist found no difficulty in praising the craftsmanship of Phlesco, for he had rarely seen better art. Nor did he begrudge Phlesco’s prices, for money was nothing to him, and there were a number of small, exquisite eidolons, statuettes, and images he yearned to possess. Phlesco basked in the praise of a knowing connoisseur, and was impressed to be patronized by the Illusionist. The reason for this was that the Illusionist was so superlative in his own area of work that he needed no other name than that of his craft; and from the fact that his features were perpetually concealed behind a mask of lavender vapor it was logical to assume that he had many jealous and vindictive
rivals, which only served to enhance one’s impression of his standing in his field.
Soon the Illusionist took to dropping into Phlesco’s shop quite often. He made no pretense of indifference to Ganelon; indeed, he professed his interest in the bronze giant very early in his relationship with the Godmaker, and with praiseworthy candor admitted it was Slunth who had suggested he visit the shop in order to examine the mysterious youth.
“You truly know nothing of his antecedents, then?” he asked Phlesco.
“Nothing much; he’s a good boy, I suppose. Helps around the shop, you know. Handy to have him here when there are heavy idols to lift or blocks of stone to move into the workroom. Not as dumb as I first thought; why, the wife has actually taught him how to speak and to conn his letters.”
“You have never deduced anything from the fact that you first discovered Ivm wandering in The Barrens, south of the Ardelix ruins, I take it?”
Phlesco shrugged. Discussions of Ganelon tended to bore him, because he disliked taking the great clumsy oaf seriously.
“May I ask him a few questions?”
“Suit yourself.”
The Illusionist turned to Ganelon, who stood behind his adoptive father, ready to serve more of the sparkling green wine when requested to do so. From the incurious expression on his features one would not have known he was aware it was himself they had been discussing.
“Ganelon, my boy, have you ever heard of the Time Gods?”
The young giant shook his head.
The Illusionist then asked him if the words “Construct” or “Time Vault” or “Epiphany” meant anything to him.
He indicated that they did not. The Illusionist soon left; returning to his palace of enchantments, he again consulted a certain huge book attributed to Yathab Shanderzoth the Unknown Prophet. The tome was written in a mode^ of charactery long obsolete in these parts of Northern Ya-maYamaLand, and employed a system of abbreviations peculiarly difficult to puzzle out. The volume was known to magicians and sorcerors and wizards of every kind as Oth Kangmir, the Book Imperishable.
He read far into the night; and even after turning from the ancient volume his mind was racing so that he could not compose himself for slumber.
Phlesco purported to view his adopted son with sour, peevish dislike. This was not, of course, true. Both members of the childless couple had taken the innocent young giant to their hearts, but Phlesco was uncomfortable in expressions of emotion and spoke harshly to the youth, although he treated him kindly and never punished him when he broke something or forgot an errand.
In his heart, the Godmaker knew that his son was no ordinary being, but an unusual creature destined for incredible deeds. He dreaded the day to come when fate should call Ganelon from the familial hearth to undertake the high and mighty enterprises for which he had been marked from birth.
Once Iminix had demonstrated that Ganelon was able to speak and to understand speech, and as soon as he began to read and write, the Godmaker undertook to give his son the rudiments of an education. The youth showed utterly no facility for learning his father’s craft. He was too huge, too clumsy, to master the fine points of God-making, and his great hands were obviously shaped to wield the broadsword or the ax or the war hammer rather than the fine chisels and graving tools of periaptist or Godmaker. Phlesco despaired of the boy’s future: how could the great, lumbering lout ever master a craft? Was he destined for no better life than to serve as a soldier in the Hegemon’s guard, or as a gladiator in the arena? His strength and size seemed aptly fitted for apprenticeship to a blacksmith, but the profession was a lowly one and never, Phlesco vowed, should it be said that the son of a Godmaker spent his days beating out plowshares on a smelly great forge!
