The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [84]
He had a pleasant, high voice, especially given the difficulty of a goat’s head and long tongue. His horns whorled impressively, his grey fur curling in the damp. His legs were human, but covered in goat-hair trousers that matched his waist-up pelt. Only his large, flat, man’s feet and his thick fingers revealed any ungoaty nature. His big arms had found a kind of halfway point, covered in sparse, coarse fur that showed through to brown skin beneath. His body stretched and bunched with labor, altogether shaggy and impressive. I didn’t think he meant to sing out loud, but the tune bubbled up out of him, the sort of nonsense song that served to pass interminable work.
We called out to him; he greeted us with glad hands and a goaty, frank smile.
“Oh, hello, hello! Oh, la, I didn’t hear you come down! If I’d known company was coming, I’d have shoveled faster—oh, but it is good to see a soul!” He embraced us all, kissing faces, paws, hands, his humor high, his name Knyz, his profession digging, his home this very city.
“But where is everyone?” I said—we could see only ourselves, and Knyz with his shovel, its pearly handle wet with condensation. The rest faded into fog and cold, a few rounded lumps, shapeless shadows. We heard no sound but the amiable scrape of the spade.
“You’re in my bubble,” bleated Knyz. “It’s terribly hard work to keep it going—stuff just slides back in. Thule abhors a void, you know.” He indicated one of the huge, fog-shrouded humps behind him. “Someday I’ll reach the palace. There are probably others, too, with bubbles. Though no more than two or three, or we would have met by now—at first I thought you all were Thulites and we’d finally managed to thwack into one another! But alas—no shovels.”
“I saw a church,” John said breathlessly, and I rolled my eyes. He couldn’t even see the wonder of it, stuck in his longing for home and God. I felt an embarrassment for him, the priest being too dense to feel it himself.
But Knyz nodded, his horns spattering dew. “Near the palace, where it won’t hurt anyone. And if there are tunnels in Thule like mine, they all went towards the palace. Like blind worms we nose toward our sightless queen, oh, la. And if along the way little airy mineshafts collapse, and the bodies of old sciopods drop down out of the mist, dazed, if travelers drift in, well, then, hurrah. But I don’t stop digging. The chief industry of Thule is digging, digging toward the queen. And perhaps the queen has a black spade in her own hands, too, but sits still by the window in the heavy air, barely able to dig out her own front door. It’s like when it used to snow, and you couldn’t open a gate for the slush of it.”
“What happened?” Qaspiel asked, running its hands over and through the jellied fog.
“Oh, la,” grinned Knyz sheepishly. “Gog and Magog, I suppose. They bled here, on their way back beyond the Gate. No one meant it, but they’d got wounded and a few drops fell—caught us all by surprise, and everything coalesced like cream in a bucket, and here we are. I don’t blame anyone, though. Times give and times take.”
“Even their blood is so caustic?” Fortunatus clucked. “Even their blood.”
“Oh, no,” Knyz said, “you don’t understand. They can’t help it. Just like you can’t help those big long feathers there. Someone made them that way, and set them going, and they just keep being that way, just like I keep digging. You’d be surprised how digging makes a soul sanguine about such matters.” This chilled me, for it was my own argument thrown back at me.
“They destroyed your city!” John interrupted.
“Oh, la, cities come and go. You’re too young to grasp the situation. Gog and Magog don’t destroy things, they change them. Thule is still here, it’s just different now. And the fog—well, we’re not stopped, just slow. They say