The Incompleat Nifft Read Online Free Page A

away below the ridge.
    The land itself there is wolfish. The boulders, pale and smooth, were like earth's bones jutting from her starved soil. Out on the prairie the moon-silvered grass grew lank and patchy, like a great mangy hide. And if you want to stretch the comparison, the wolves themselves were the lice moving through the patches of silver, or merging with the moon-shadows. We saw more than a few such, too, though at the time no comic view of them suggested itself.
    At length, Haldar sighed bitterly and threw down the crust he'd been gnawing. He glared at me, then at the fire.
    "You know, we're not a jot different from those wolves," he snarled. "We walk on our hind paws, and pull leggin's on over our arses, but that's all."
    To one who'd shared Haldar's thoughts for years, this said much in little. I must tell you my friend was terribly idealistic. I loved him as a brother, and tried to cure him of it, but I never did. And when I say terribly, I mean it. You want an instance? We once turned a trick in Bagág Marsh. It was a fine and nimble-witted piece of work, I promise you. We galloped out of town on the night of our take with near a hundredweight each of wrought gold. We were galloping out of sheer exuberance, you understand. Our canniness had guaranteed a delayed pursuit.
    Well, we came to a bridge crossing a very fast-moving river to the north of the city. Suddenly Haldar reined up at mid-bridge, and stood in his stirrups. He was a light man—wiry like me, but middling short. He had a hatchet face—his nose and chin formed a ridge-line which his black eyes and black beard crowded up to. It was a fierce little face, hawkish, and as he stood there in his stirrups he thrust it up greedily against the starlight. He seemed to want to breathe the whole night into himself, and you almost believed he could fit it all in, so intent and still he was. Suddenly he dismounted, pulled his saddlebag off the pommel, and dumped his hundredweight of gold into the river. I died a little at that moment, Barnar. No! I died a great deal! Thanks be to the Crack, I was professional enough to hold my tongue about what a partner does with his own share of a take. But I nearly had to bite it through to hold it.
    Yet even in my shock, I understood. The only fitting celebration of his pride in his work was to show that beside it, the gold was nothing. Oh, he was a craftsman too, every bit as fine as we are, Barnar, and I honored him truly for the passion of his gesture. But couldn't he have made some poetic statement, such as: "Beside the wealth of my art, this gold is but dross to me!"—and then squandered it on lowly things—flesh and feasts—to show his contempt for it?
    Well of course the point is that for Haldar, there was no substitute for the absolute. If he got pessimistic, as he did not seldom, he might not just talk about it. He was capable of jumping up and striding out onto the plain and fraternizing with the wolves, just to express his sarcasm and disgust with a thief's way of living.
    The cold and sickly feeling of our camp hadn't left it. The lure of Haldar's furious despair was strong.
    "Roast you!" I growled. "Will you eat? Blast and damn you Haldar, you've got no right to go sour. If you sink I'm almost surely gone. I'm not a wolf! If I were, I'm sure I'd like my life that way just as much as I like the one I've got, and I mean to keep the one I've got."
    Sadly, easily, he waved away my words. "You're fooling yourself, Nifft. The great tricks are gone now, don't you see? Those feats of deep cunning and brave flair—we're all alloted a few of them, and we get no more, no matter what our longing is. And you know, you're lucky if you even recognize when you're having your best moments. Half the time your soul is looking the other way when they come. And you never grow wise enough to know what they were until you have passed the hope of having more. Then, the rest of life is this—" he waved at the moonlit plain