"Then I have good hope of finding you here again. Perhaps we might travel together for a time."

So little did I forsee how our present venture would detain us under the earth.

Bunt's balconied dining room, four floors up, opened onto an unobstructed view of the harbor and the channel beyond. We viewed the windlicked waters all purple in the dusk, and dined sumptuously. Bunt proposed that we present him to Costard as a chance-met traveller, a man in the market for sap whom we'd brought along so Costard could sell him some. Bunt needn't hide he was a Hive-Master. Hiveries used plods, skinnies, and other draybeasts for mulching and transporting mead and the like, and were always buying sap as bulk fodder. Mean- while Costard's financial straits might make him open to partnership. Bunt, by investment, might secure a stable source of the ichor he sought-the substance, that is, we were to obtain for him from a Queen, and which he also referred to as "giants' pap."

I listened patiently, toeing my gold beneath the table, feeling the shifty coin within its leather swaddling. This morning, I was waist-deep in blood in the stenchful glabrous' maw; this afternoon, I was in a dazzling world of breeze-licked flowers; this evening, there was Higaia in the baths, this rich food, and wealth. I had to be on guard at moments, to stop myself from breaking out into a stupid grin of delight and disbelief.

But then my glance kept meeting Barnar's, as if by some odd synchrony in our inner musings. And each time our eyes met, I felt pass between us that little chill of mutual disappointment that had first struck us in the sweat- room's warmth. Our difference would not leave us, but was an icy spark our eyes struck off each time they met. I knew that Barnar's will still clasped as stubbornly his pet ambition, as mine clung to my own.

"The opulence of your entertainment," Barnar told Bunt jocularly, "somewhat troubles me as I reflect on it.

We must affirm that your stipend is princely. Yet I find myself asking key questions too late. How dangerous must it be to penetrate the Royal Brood Chamber of a Behemoth nest? Let alone to gather some sort of exudate from the Queen's own body? I have never heard such an exploit even conceived of, much less undertaken. Nifft and I naturally regard ourselves as bound," (I bowed here my assent) "but for all we know of what we've under- taken, even six hundredweight might be too little payment."

Just at this juncture, a tall, robust young woman marched into the room, caped against the dusk winds outside, her back-swept pompadour of brazen hair still charmingly mussed by those same winds.

"Sha'Urley! Dearest!" cried Bunt. "My sister, Sha'Urley, gentlemen! Please dine with us, my dear!" There was a grit of irritation in his voice that all his attempt at honey could not quite candy over. Bunt presented us to her as a pair of wayfaring fellows who had agreed to guide him on a ramble into Kairnheim. For he was feeling stale with work, he told her, and we were to be his breath of fresh air. Sha'Urley did not uncloak, but she sat to take a brief, amiable chalice of wine with us.

"You look quite fit and . . . trail-wise, gentlemen," she told us. Her pale eyes smiled at us with a frosty little light of irony in them. "My brother is well met with you. And how richly he deserves a stroll abroad! He is too much at business. It is a business which our mother left to our joint direction, but which Ha'Awley dreads to burden me withal, and so he strives to manage it almost single-handed. Dear brother! You fret to spare me burdens, yet you treat your own health villainously. Look how fat you have grown! But nothing I say makes the least bit of difference to you, does it?" Already she was rising, and kissing her brother good-bye, at which Bunt wore a look both nettled and relieved.

She paused at the door before stepping out. "I am lucky at least," she said, "that Ha'Awley would not dream of making any major investment without my prior and full involvement in the decision. With this certainty I rest content. It was a pleasure to meet you, gentlemen. Good night, all!"

III.

If we are still to manage deeds that shine, We must be up and doing them. First, mine!

WE TOOK SHIP not long after dark. There was the bustle of boarding, and getting under way, and then Bunt retired at once to his hammock, and lay snoring within moments of our casting off. It was true he had partaken liberally of mead and viands at table, but his haste to bed down smacked of evasion too, for we had discreetly urged on him our wish to know more of our errand to the Royal Chamber in the Behemoth's nest.

Barnar and I stood at the rail of the creaky craft, an old pirates' caravel re-decked to ferry beasts and carriages like our own to and from the Kairnish coast. The half moon, zenithed in the early dark, made spectral statuary of the bare-masted vessels in the harbor. These fell astern of us, and the bright-windowed houses of the harbor dwindled to a little crescent-shaped constellation on the moon-silvered sea, as the wind took us out in the open channel. We leaned at the rail, enjoying the rickety dance of the old tub on the smoothly rolling waters.

"Well," Barnar ventured. " 'giants' pap'. . . . Have you ever heard of it before?"

"I've heard Behemoth workers nurse or feed in some way at the flanks of the Queen, but I have also heard that same notion mocked as myth."

"It smacks of myth to me," Barnar said. "Who's ever been in a Royal Brood Chamber and seen a Queen? If it's been done, I've not heard of it."

"Well, we'll get what else we can out of Bunt. The rest, I suppose, we'll learn first hand in the attempt. . . ."

We stood at the rail through a long silence, our separate dreams wide awake in us, roaming through our minds. The night wind chased us, and set our scow creaking and lumbering through the easy swells. Above the shadow of the Kairnish coast ahead were thick-strewn stars only a little dimmed by the high half moon, and blazing as if they were coals that the wind blew to life.

"Barnar," I said, "I'm feeling lucky. I'm getting a feeling that luck is gathering itself under us like a great wave. Like a rising tide. I should have known it this morning, even before we came by this gold, for are not men who are swallowed by a glabrous, and emerge alive, among the world's luckiest imaginable?

"Let me tell you a story, old friend," I went on, "about a man we both know, a man who is dear as a brother to my heart. This man has nine living uncles and seven living aunts, and cousins uncountable, and thirteen brothers and sisters of his own"-Barnar made to interrupt me but I thrust up my palm-"and all four of his grandparents living and great aunts and great uncles at least half a score, and no less than four of his great grandparents still stepping most lively on the skorse-scented, needle-carpeted mountain slopes of his native valley, Ham-Hadryan Vale, the immemorial holding of the Ham-Hadryan clan. Can any doubt remain that the man I speak of is Barnar Ham-Hadryan, called, only half facetiously, Barnar Hammer-Hand, and Barnar Ox-back? Don't answer! Hear me.

"This Barnar, whose beloved kin thrive near as thick on his natal slopes as does the timber that is their livelihood, is an earth-loving man, who wielded an axe from his earliest youth, who winched the howling blades of his family's sawmill since he was a stripling, and who, long before he came a man, had by his own sweat and skill done his part to set many a straight-keeled ship afloat, many a stout-walled home a-standing, many a strong-axled wagon a-rolling.

"And, when the Kragfasst clan of the Lulumean Highlands began its depredations in the Great Shallows, and thrust its blade of conquest down half the length of Ham-Hadryan Vale, who exchanged a tree-jack's axe for a battle-axe with half the furious will that this our Barnar did? Nine years of war transformed him from a fresh youth to a seasoned veteran, tough as an axe-haft of ironwood, but still with the same tender heart for his kin and his homeland beating in his formidable body.

"But when the invaders were repulsed at last, they left a clear-cut waste, and these shorn slopes were a torment to the eye of this same Barnar Hammer-hand who, having fought for his valley till its deliverance, turned away from it when he had helped to win it back. He went abroad a-thieving over the earth, too grieved by his hearth-land's despoliation to long abide in it.

"In the decades since, he has lavished the better part of all his takings on his kin, refurbishing their faltering saws, replenishing their teams of plods, and generally nourishing along their laborious husbandry of the trees - remaining to them.

"How can we not think, then-we who love and honor this same Barnar Ham-Hadryan-that his eyes may have grown . . . too fixed upon the earth? Of course it will most infallibly come to pass, that Barnar Hammer- hand will drive home the Witches' Seed in the flanks of his native hills. Most surely he will do this, and call up his homeland's vanished hosts of skorse to stand tall again out of the soil! This will come to pass! But if, beforehand, an incalculable enrichment may be had-if, first, this Barnar-"

"Enough, Nifft! Stop it. Do you not realize, my friend, that you and I are at that point in years where, if a great thing lie in hand, then we must do it, then and there? We are not made of immortal stuff, old waybrother. If we are still to manage deeds that shine, then we must be straight about them when they offer. And this dream of the Witches' Seed I have held so long, it is not a thing I will set by for any other venture, now that it has come at last within my reach . . . or almost in my reach."

"Use reason, Barnar! If we possessed the Gantlets, Cowl and Buskins of Pelfer the Peerless, then we could shortly make ourselves so rich we could reforest all of Chilia, make even her stoniest ridges green with skorse, have the great trees growing thick as grass even in the high barrens of Magnass-Dryan."

That last shaft made him startle just a bit, for in the high barrens still dwelt Marnya-Dryan, whom Barnar had loved since boyhood; Marnya was the daughter of a proud but tree-poor clan. How might she not be wooed with Witches' Seed, and the forestation of her natal highlands? He repossessed himself, however, and smiled wanly.

"Look at us, jarring over the spending of phantom gold!" He hauled his bags of gold up onto his shoulder and, before trudging off to his hammock, he thwacked my shoulder in his old friendly manner. But I knew him; though he was carefully concealing it in his well-bred way, he was hurt and resentful.

I lingered at the rail, bitterly resenting my friend's stubbornness. I was so vexed it ended by surprising me. I struggled for composure.

And I could admit, after a while, to feeling this same sad, mortal urgency Barnar had confessed to. While I'd trudged around Dolmen's shore this morning, shivering from the briny bath that left us still smelling of glabrous blood, this same bony finger of Time had indeed touched my own heart, and the Specter had murmured with lean lips at my ear that I was a vagabond who had achieved nothing, and now, never would.

But by the Crack, Key and Cauldron, under it all, I did indeed feel . . . lucky. Strange fortune had come to us, and was still coming. I looked north, to our future's unfolding. There, unveiled by the moon's decline, the blaze of stars brightened above the dark line of the Kairnish mainland. Those stars swarmed as thickly as I imagined Behemoths might swarm, down the subworld walls, and across the subworld plain, a-hunting the fleeing hosts of demons. . . .

IV.

With beverage that giants sip Fill up my beaker to the lip But how to tap that brew Below I cannot tell. I do not know.

WE DOCKED at KairnGate Harbor in the first light, and by the time of the sun's rising, our barouche had already whirled a league out of town up a north-trending highway. The highway was a fine, smooth-flagged thor- oughfare that thrived with commerce.

Across the river-knit southern plains of Latter Kairnlaw, Bunt cracked the whip above his thoroughbred skinnies and set us racing through the honeyed spill of morning light. He kept the wheels rattling, and the wind ruckusing in our ears, perhaps to forestall the questions he sensed in us.

But I insisted on a sit-down at an ale house we glimpsed in a riverside hamlet, one that Bunt would have galloped past had we let him. The establishment had a pleasant garden fenced with proom trees and rumkin vines. We chose our table in a nook amidst these fragrant growths, and decanted a delicious honey-wine, a drink as golden as the grassy prairies that unrolled across the river from us.

"I believe this is our own vintage," Bunt murmured, tonguing a sup of the wine judiciously.

"May we speak of other beverages?" Barnar prompted. "This giants' pap for instance. Must we, as it were, milk a Queen Behemoth for it? Kindly share with us now what you know of this thing you send us after."

"I may not share my sources," Bunt gravely answered. "This would-forgive me-give away too much to those who might wish to emulate my venture. But the gist of it I will give you, though it is admittedly slight.

Adult Behemoth workers, all castes of them, nurse in an unspecified manner at the flanks of the Queen. They do it occasionally, you understand, but they all do it. They drink from Her.

"From a documentary source unknown even to the erudite, I have learned that, in all likelihood, each - Behemoth by this nursing imbibes an ichor specific to her caste and form of body. The exudate, it seems, prompts and sustains the several shapes and orders of the Queen's progeny. The specific ichor I would have you obtain is that particular pap consumed by the Forager caste, far and away the giants of all workers, and the scourges of demonkind. The precise How of the obtaining, I'm afraid, is completely unknown to me."

"Would it be fair to infer," I ventured after a silence, "that this giants' pap is believed specifically to promote the Foragers' hugeness? And might I further guess that it is specifically this giantizing property of the sap which you crave it for?"

"This much I will admit, if you will be so kind as not to press for any further particulars."

"Well and good, Bunt. Still, assuming this pap to be what you think it is, what virtue would it necessarily have outside the Nest?"

"Well," smiled Bunt cooly. "That would be the question, wouldn't it?"

The highway, swinging northwestward, cut a course to intersect the north-trending line of the Broken Axle Mountains. This was a low, pale mountain range, the peaks blunt and knuckly, a bony old range rounded down by a million winters.

Yet I seemed to sense a movement, an unrest in their eroded eminences. These old mountains were alive within, were the swarming wombs of uncounted Behemoth Nests, each Nest itself uncountably aswarm. As we drew towards our night's rest in the city of Dry Hole, which lies half in the plain and half in the foothills of the Broken Axle Range itself, it seemed I could almost feel the faint vibration of this activity. We lodged in a hostel in the city's upland half, and here, perched on the mountain's very flanks, I fancied I felt the faintest tremoring through the floor underfoot, and almost heard the sleepless giants rivering through the mountain-bone.

Dry Hole (named for a sap mine that went bust in the days before the place thrived as a cattle town and crossroads of commerce) is a comely city, especially when viewed from the heights. From our hostel we could enjoy the sweep of Dry Hole's rooftops down to the plain, where the Broken Axle River, issuing from the mountains just to the north, stitches its silver thread through the city's outskirts. Most of the feedlots, corrals, tanning yards and slaughterhouses lie along the river, and thus up in the hills we were spared the smell of dung and stale blood, and the flies, that haunt all cattle towns. Not that even up in the hills a certain carnal perfume was lacking, for I nosed a waft of raw hides, of salt meat and new barrels at the picklers' yards, of hay, and the dry scent of dust raised by ten thousand hooves.

We watched the sun sink past the vast, straight prairie horizon, watched the plain's sea of golden grasses blaze fiery copper, then turn amber, then silver, while the window lamps freckled alight all down the slopes, and the lamps on the bridges over the Broken Axle River sparked white above the sword-steel thread of the water.

Then I went to my bed with a will. On the boat last night my brain so blazed with golden ambition I had but a fitful sleep of it, what with the sea, too, restless under me. I lay listening for a while. No sense is more doubtful than the hearing, wherein the thought so imperceptibly becomes the sensation, but I could have sworn the mountain under me faintly hummed. Then I slipped snug into oblivion, like a sheathed sword.

V.

High in the peaks She hides the treasure troves That nest Her newborn spawn as rife as stars, As numberless as shingles on earth's shores.

Down in the deeps Her warlike daughters rove Where demons flee them in their bleeding droves, But high in the peaks, Her sleeping young ones are. . . .

WE SET OUT into the mountains at first light. A viaduct plunged up into the range not far from our hostel; it ran, where needed, on piers or arched bridges, and made a smooth, safe climb of it for our carriage. We rolled amid slopes thinly wooded with black skorse and dwarf-cone: the arid, thin-soiled old mountains were balding, as it were, the peaks and ridgelines bare, polished by steady winds.

Sap-mines were nestled everywhere on the flanks of the heights. They were rather plain, sprawly installations of bleached wood, and conformed to a basic pattern. Typically, they comprised a large central building-which housed the drill site, the pumps, and the barrelling operation-and an array of smaller structures that housed the offices and the miners' dormitories.

They were, on the whole, shabby structures, but their numbers testified to Behemoth's multitudes at work within the peaks. At nightfall, we withdrew from the highway into a ravine to take our rest. I lay in my blanket on the soft sand listening for the thrum of Behemoth's vast business deep in the mountain-bone.

Next day at midmorning we reached Barrelful Heights. This was a nexus of ridgelines and saddles, in whose canyoned and arroyoed flanks half a dozen sap mines flourished. No one knew how many separate Nests sus- tained these mines. Though more than a mile separated even the closest mines, it was still quite possible that at least some of them fed off a single Nest; any one Nest has dozens of the larval nurseries that are sap's source.

The Superior Sap Mine did not flourish. It stood utterly silent. We walked our team into the main building, and the click of their hooves and the rattle of their harness echoed from the lofty rafters. The building's rear wall was the bare flank of the living mountain, and inset into it were huge brass petcocks, designed to pour the pumped sap into three brazen vats, big as houses. Regiments of casks stood ranked below the vats. But no one was barrelling. No one was here. The whole plant was void of humanity. In its echoey silence we could hear a faint, drumlike rumor, and after a moment, we were able to identify it: it was the noise of the barrel chutes over in the nearest neighboring mine, a thriving place clear on the other side of the ridge from us.

"Difficulties with his crew," Barnar rumbled bitterly. This was how Costard's letter had described his dilemma to his mother, Barnar's formidable elder sister. She, Anhyldia, with doting faith in her sole issue's every word, had enjoined her brother to supply that youthful paragon with the "fortnight's help or so" that was plainly all Costard needed to have things "running right as rain again." "Difficulties with his crew," Barnar repeated, his exasperation mounting.

"Dear old Uncle Barnar! Oh, this is a joy!" And in ran the young man in question, hurling himself against my huge friend and hugging him. I had to smile at seeing, in the grizzled granite of Barnar's weathered cheekbones, the crinkling of a smile despite his vexation. Perhaps he was remembering Costard as a loud little boy coaxing him for presents, or demanding a shoulder-ride. Indeed, Costard looked small enough hugging his uncle. He was a trim young man just a handsbreadth less than tall, and just a ten-weight or so more than slight. His hair was short, and shaved in a spiral pattern that was locally modish. Crossing his forehead diagonally was the recent scar of a sizeable laceration. The injury was garish rather than severe, pebbly now with old scab about to flake away.

He made his courtesies to me, and we introduced Bunt as a trail-met merchant out shopping for sap.

"Knowing your difficulties," Barnar added, "we told good Bunt here that you might perhaps give him a slightly discounted rate if he would tarry here to be your first customer, once we've gone down and started tap- ping."

"Absolutely not!" Costard's refusal had startling resonance in the vaulted emptiness. "It's plainly and simply unthinkable that the yield of a mine like the Superior should sell for less that ninety lictors to the ghyll!" Costard uttered this with a level stare, his brows raised, as at a suggested outrage. One sensed that the young man had rehearsed this response for use in any discussion of price. Apparently, Costard favored a very strict Manner and Method when doing business.

The embarrassed Bunt sought only a pretext to abide here until Barnar and I had been underground long enough to execute his secret errand. With five other mines at h a n d t o f ill Bunt's sap order without delay, his patience in waiting around here would not s e e m p l a u s i b l e w i t h out some slight bargain on the price. But now the hive-master bleated hastily, "Of course! I have certainly heard the high quality of the Superior's sap most f e e l i n g l y r e p o r t e d, and will gladly wait for it at your stated price!"

Costard nodded, baffled-even piqued-by this prompt and unconditional compliance.

Apparently he yearned to employ s o m e m o r e M a n n e r a n d M e t h o d on this lone petitioner for the product of his paralyzed mine.

"Well," he said, re-collecting himself after a moment. "Let's go to my quarters now for some refreshment!"

The main building of the mine had been thin-walled and drafty, and the deserted barracks which had housed the miners looked still more weathered and ramshackle, but Costard's residence was lavishly carpeted, tapestried, and furnished with very cushiony divans and lounges. He served us delicacies from a gilded salver, describing his labor troubles with rising fervor.

"How did Mama handle this crew? I've asked myself a hundred times. They were all such greedy idiots! I tried to make them understand that a wage reduction was an absolute necessity! The current sag in sap prices demanded austerities-Another pickled quiffle, Uncle? They're quite delicious, imported from Kolodria!- demanded that we suck in our stomachs and tighten our belts, so to speak."

"So the crew decamped in a body, all of them, just like that?" Barnar asked. "Where did they go?"

"They actually had the gall to threaten me! To say they'd go work for my competitors!"

"And that's what they did? They are all now employed at other mines?" Barnar's voice was fainter; the extent of his nephew's folly was beginning at last to dawn on all of us.

"And how long will their jobs there last?" Costard snorted with contempt. "I alone have understood long- range trends in the sap market; I alone have seen the need for mine owners to amass large cushions of surplus capital against the harder times ahead! When the Superior is the only operating mine in the region, my workers will return in humble pilgrimage, upon their knees!"

"I see," murmured Barnar. "When you are the only operating mine in the region. . . ." In the following silence, once again we faintly heard the drumlike jostle of barrels being filled in the operation across the ridge.

Had we not come with the lucrative secret enterprise of the giants' pap already in hand, we would have left the doomed Superior Sap Mine then and there, Anhyldia's wrath be damned. This formidable woman was not to be lightly crossed, of course, but she was quite unlikely to cross paths with us. Anhyldia had been touched by a restlessness of middle life, a haunting sense of paths not taken, and two years ago she'd gone a-pirating. Since then she'd sent Barnar several enthusiastic epistles recounting the peace and joy she'd found in hewing heads and plundering merchantmen on the high seas.

But her attention to sap-mining had been wavering even before her setting-forth, and she'd bequeathed to her son a mine that drew from only one larval nursery chamber. Behemoth Nests are subject to what miners call "nest wander"; nursery chambers in use through four or five human generations will, in the mysterious tidal ebbs and fluxes of the Nest's life, be abruptly abandoned. A new nursery chamber is invariably established near the abandoned one, and usually still in range of the mine's "drilling field," its legally owned piece of mountain.

But sinking new gangways and pipelines to the new larval chamber required hard work at great expense, which Anhyldia had not cared to muster, and which her son had been unable to. And now that his own greed and folly had lost him his labor force, and pinched off the flow of his remaining profit, Costard's whole enterprise looked as good as dead.

Barnar and I, with our covert motives, must now do what we could to prolong the foundering mine's death throes. Through that long af ternoon we lounged, gathering strength for the morrow, and suffering Costard to entertain us with his theories on global trade, his views on effective business management, with his opinions on every conceivable subject, in fact. Even the pleasant view of the mountains we enjoyed from his office balcony, and the abundant food and wine he served, could only partly palliate the torment of his monologue.

The urbane Bunt tried now and then to deflect the youth's pontifications into the more adult channels of congenial conversational exchange. At some reference to Behemoth, Bunt ventured, "One can't help but wonder, can one, about the giants' origins? Are they our natural allies, or our offspring? Are they our earth-born bene- factors, evolved over time, or are they a living weapon wrought by our ancestors through a thaumaturgy that is now long lost to us? It's a question, I suppose, as old-"

"As all informed people agree," Costard announced, "Behemoths were fashioned by a wizard, of whose name not even an echo now survives." For Costard, the contrived perplexities and feigned bafflements by which polished folk set conversation going were plain and simple entreaties for instruction. Having made this pronouncement, he studied Bunt for any failure to agree; the young man seemed still vaguely nettled by Bunt's earlier acquiescence in the matter of the sap's price.

"Surely, esteemed Costard," Bunt answered, irked in spite of himself, "if it is to the sorcerous hypothesis that you incline, then its proponents generally agree that the great Hermaphrod was Behemoth's creator. His legendary words are often cited: 'Behold my Behemoths, my Watchdogs, Diners on Demonry.' "

"Impossible." Costard shook his scabbed brow serenely from side to side. The helix of his cropped hair seemed, at this moment, to bring his head towards a point. "I have never heard this name anywhere."3

I burst out laughing here, and had to struggle for self-command. I soothed the youth, "Perhaps, good Costard, this is because you have not yet learned all there is to know of the subject."

While scowling Costard struggled to digest this preposterous suggestion, Bunt regained his poise, and resumed the work of self-ingratiation. "Well, whatever those titans' provenance," he offered, searching for a distraction, "your place here in the very heartland of their domain is enviable, good Costard!" He waved an enthusiastic hand at the peaks around us, whose wrinkled barrenness the sun's decline had accentuated with shadows. "These very peaks seem to bulge and buckle with Behemoth's busy energies! Their-"

"We are far from the heartland of their domain," snapped the captious young man. "The great bulk of their Nests lie far below us. Only their highest and most protected chambers lie in reach of the peaks here."

Who is not aware that Behemoth Nests back their way up into the mountains? That their Nest-mouths open in the stony walls of the subworld, where the giants descend to forage and to feed on demonkind, and that their brood chambers and larval nurseries are recessed high into the peaks at the greatest possible remove from the demon realms they ravage? Costard's petulant pedantry at last conquered our efforts at adult discourse. We gave our attention to the wine and viands, and let the youth resume his monologue until we could decently retire.

VI.

I met a Titan in the earth Where Mountain Queen gives endless birth, And though so terribly She glowered, Her helpless babe I half-devoured.