Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  There were ten men in the group, two out in front carrying shaped clubs, perhaps ax handles, three behind them with knives in their hand, then a clot of five more, two carrying bows, complete with nocked arrows, the other three carrying axes, sun glinting from the edges of the blades. Xulai, he noted from the corner of his eye, was now standing by the wagon and had reached deep into the pocket where she carried ul xaolat: she could move away in an instant or she could remove all ten of the advancing men more quickly than the gang of them would believe possible. Before the men could come two steps nearer, Xulai could put her hand on the wagon and go away, taking wagon and child—­children—­with her. Abasio took a deep breath.

  “Hiya!” called one of the foremost marchers. “You dere.”

  Abasio raised his hand in a gesture of acknowledgment. “Yes. Something I can do for you?”

  “We hadda girl runoff,” cried the first man. “You seen her?” He brandished his club threateningly.

  “Only female here is my wife,” Abasio said, indicating Xulai with a nod in her direction.

  “That’un,” cried one of the others, pointing at Willum. “That’un’s ’bout the right size!”

  “Except that he’s not a girl,” objected Abasio. “Willum’s been with us for a long time, and he’s a boy.”

  “Gotta be sure,” growled the first one. “Gotta be sure.”

  “Willum,” called Abasio. “Come over here and pee for these men, will you?”

  “Sure, ’Basio,” said Willum. He came to stand near the drop-­off, unlaced his trousers, and let fly. “Needed to do that anyhow.” He settled himself, relaced his trousers, and followed Abasio’s whispered instruction to seat himself next to Xulai.

  The club wielder snarled, “How ’bout in the wagon?”

  “I always lock it when we’re outside,” said Abasio. “There’s nothing in there but our supplies.”

  “We’ll have to see,” growled a gray-­haired, bearlike man with an ax. “Havta look. Havta find ’er.”

  Another one cried, “Oh, Digger, they don’ got her. F’r grief’s sake!”

  “I bought ’er! I want ’er! Got to be sure! Havta look.” Digger was huge; his hair was tangled and filthy, like his beard. His eyes were an odd, pale color, like sour milk; they did not look, they burrowed, cut, lanced, dissected. His eyes, thought Abasio, were knives made of pain and ashes.

  “Ja’ mind, mister?” asked another.

  “Yes,” said Abasio. “I do mind. Just as you would mind if we came to your house and demanded that you let us scuffle through it.”

  “Mor’v us’n you!” snarled Digger. “Mor’v us. Try n’ stop us, get yersef killed.”

  Something very large had lighted on the road soundlessly, behind the men. There were now only five men standing, the five rearmost having been put quietly out of action.

  “I only count five of you,” said Abasio. “And two of us, not counting Willum. That’s about even.”

  The group of three turned, looked back, and howled as though they shared one set of lungs. The two foremost also turned. The Griffin lifted one limp body in her right front claws, turned her head to the right, and opened her beak to its widest, upward, dropped the body, and swallowed with an audible gulp. Four other bodies waited under her other feet, the two under her left front foot squirming frantically to get free.

  “I’m not really fond of human meat,” said the Griffin in a conversational tone as she extricated one of the two squirmers and held him aloft: Digger. “But I am rather hungry this morning and you are interfering with my messengers. They carry a message to others of their kind. I will not have them interfered with!”

  “She’s only eaten one of you,” said Abasio, struggling to get the words out. His mouth and throat were dry. “She may just take Mr. Digger and let the rest of you go if you go quickly. Either that, or she’ll be happy to dispose of all of you.”

  There was a furious nodding of heads, a sideways scuttle toward the road behind the Griffin, who was lifting her feet, one at a time, slowly allowing the other victims to escape. Abasio pointed at the one she was holding and drew his hand across his throat. She flipped him, as a farmwife wrings the head from a chicken, throwing both head and body in one furious motion over the outside edge of the road.

  Abasio counted eight men disappearing up the road in frantic haste. Though he had resolved to say nothing, the words “How’d you do that eating bit?” came blurting out.

  “Sleight of beak,” murmured the Griffin. “Spread my wing, turned my head up, dropped him behind my wing. He probably gave me lice or fleas as it was.”

  “Is it true, what you said? You don’t eat human meat.”

  The great amber eyes fastened upon him, half closed, considering. “If we have to kill one of you, we try to use the talons—­the back feet have talons—­or only the claws on the front feet. The claws are retractable. Talons are not. We find it interesting that our makers could not quite decide which it was to be. Either is preferable to the beak, for if we used the beak, the foul taste would be inevitable and persistent. Humans taste like something rotten.” The Griffin wiped her beak swiftly along the top of one wing, as though to eradicate a remembered flavor. “I’m told that babies are not as foul-­tasting, but a being that would eat babies would eat corpses.” She paused, staring into the distance, adding, “And has eaten them, no doubt.” She shuddered, an apparently unconscious movement.

  “You mean the Giants?” Abasio blurted thoughtlessly.

  The Griffin glared at him for a long moment before speaking. “Giants? You’ve never met a Ghoul? The offspring of certain Ogre-­Troll relationships? You must hope you never find out, Abasio the Cat!” The shudder went through her again. “To be clear, I like the meat of sheep and cattle. Deer are flavorful, as are elk or those huge shaggy beasts that have returned to the plains around Artemisia. I have killed and eaten all of those, yes. And I have killed men, too, but I have always avoided getting any part of them near my mouth.” She paused, asked, “What did you mean, Giants?”

  “I mean very big ones, over the mountain from Saltgosh.”

  Willum and Needly emerged from behind the wagon. Willum, actually speaking quietly, said, “We went out the window and we climbed a tree back there so we could watch.”

  Needly said, “They went back up the road a little ways where there’s a place the rock’s broken, and they climbed up to the next road, then they headed for the cut, around the mountain at the last place the road turned. Grandma didn’t think they’d be able to track me! That was Old Man Digger who came after me.”

  Fearlessly, Willum close behind her, she approached the Griffin, holding out her hands. “Did you throw him down on the road below, Lady Animal?”

  “That would have made a mess,” said the Griffin with a fastidious shudder. “The road below you tends toward the south; the man’s parts went into a crevasse north of it for the carrion eaters to enjoy: skunks, crows, magpies, no doubt, coyotes and bugs as well.”

  “You said she’d eat me,” Willum cried to the girl, outraged. “She doesn’t even eat ­people.”

  He had come too close to the Griffin and found himself suddenly pinned to the ground with one great forefoot, claws on either side of his head, driven into the ground, only now terrified as he stared up into the huge amber globes of her eyes.

  “You don’t listen well, boy!” growled the Griffin in a voice like rattling metal. “If you had looked and listened you would realize that I can kill you without eating you! Either talons or claws would go through you without difficulty, and I could wash them in the nearest stream. If you annoy me enough, be quite sure I could and would do that. I have given these ­people a task, and if you interfere with their getting it done, if you delay them, it will annoy me! I might even forget myself and bite your head off out of irritation, for when intelligent beings are sufficiently irritated, we all do thi
ngs we would not ordinarily do.” She dropped her voice almost to a whisper. “You would be wise to help your friends, for if they do not do as I have asked—­they and their kind—­you will die along with them.”

  She took her foot from the white-­faced boy, saying to Abasio, “I will follow your trail southward. You will always be within my sight or the sight of my ­people.” The great wings came down and she was gone, up and over the mountain, dropping behind the peak as into an abyss.

  For a long, long moment no one said anything. As was typical, Willum restored himself to impudence before the rest had managed to shake off paralysis.

  “See,” he said to Needly, puffing his chest somewhat. “See. She wuddn’ really hurt me, wuddn’ hurt you neither, Needly.”

  Needly stared at him, shaking her head in solemn negation. “Oh, Willum, you’re being silly! Lady Animal is right. You don’t listen. You’re always looking at her wings. You’re always thinking about riding around in the air. You didn’t watch her eyes when she talked. She keeps her voice nice, almost quiet, but if you were a threat to that little one, she’d kill you quicker than you could say ‘scratch.’ ” And she turned to Abasio. “And whatever she wants you to do. Oh, Mr. ’Basio, I do hope you can do it. I don’t know how many like her there are, but I suppose even one or two could do an awful lot of damage and she’s probably got different kinds of friends, things that see in the dark and under the water or under the ground . . . If she knows her children can’t live on, she won’t care if anything else in the world lives on at all. I think she’ll make sure nothing does.”

  Abasio, unlike Willum, had watched the Griffin’s eyes and knew very clearly the intention they held; the creature had not exaggerated. The child was right: the Griffin meant deadly finality. Complete eradication. And there was that other thing . . .

  “Back, over the pass, there was that Listener thing,” he said, reluctantly. “Do you know about that?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I came that way. Something had burned the trees. They were still hot. Griffins don’t do that, do they?”

  Abasio said, “I thought maybe lightning. But there hasn’t been a storm.”

  “From down in the valley the way is long and twisty,” Needly said. “Sometimes . . . ­people coming up the road from the east don’t have time to take the long way, so there’s a quicker way to get there. It’s very well hidden, but Grandma showed me. I heard the Listener humming. All kinds of talk was going and coming. The air was busy. I imagine it won’t take very long for the trees to grow back, not very long at all.” She had been witness to replacement trees, magically soaring up from the valley below, great balls of earth around their roots, those root balls plunging into holes prepared for them from which the charred remnants had been removed.

  “They were a century or more old,” argued Xulai, “great tall things.”

  “Some ­people can move . . . great tall things,” the child said. “I ­imagine.”

  “So you think some assistance might be coming?” asked Abasio.

  “To help? Oh, yes. I should think so. Grandma and I asked for help quite a while ago. And you all just did, when the Griffin told you her terms. We’re close enough here, the Listener would have heard that. Oh, yes. I imagine there’ll be someone to help.” She gave a funny, quirky smile, then said in a completely different voice, “Whether we like it or not.”

  Somehow Abasio was not surprised. He had expected for some time there would be some other, even more troublesome involvement. Even though he and Xulai had for the last several years done everything expected of them and a good deal more, it had all been . . . fairly easy. Tiresome, yes; possibly dangerous—­had they not been carrying ul xaolat—­but not repugnant. Not vile or mind-­numbingly boring, merely wearisome, heavy, an unending tension during which the analytic part of him waited in dread for the counterstroke, the obliteration that seemed inevitable, coming from someone, somewhere. It was as though he had been warned without being able to remember by whom or when or how. Maybe he’d dreamed it. He couldn’t remember dreaming that particular dream, had there been one, but then the dreams were full of half-­remembered details. He hadn’t been surprised at Needly’s remarks about the Listener. He wouldn’t even be surprised if they turned out to be true.

  He was, however, repeatedly surprised at her perception. Where had she learned to look that clearly behind and within? Even now, as she came over to him, put her hand on his arm, looked up at him as though reading his mind—­no. She was reading what he had been looking for in his own mind and could not find there.

  “What is it?” he asked in a desperate whisper. “Where is it?”

  “You have it.” She returned his whisper with that same little smile. “Stop worrying about it, Abasio. You have it, your family has it. You don’t have to worry about it or worry for them. It’s all right.”

  Abasio breathed deeply and tried to believe that. He tried to believe he already had whatever he had been feeling he needed, even though he had no idea what that thing was. A weapon? A . . . dictionary? A translator? A quiet period of a few months during which he would not have to worry about anything?

  He met Xulai’s eyes. If he told her right now that it didn’t matter what was happening, not so long as Needly knew what it was and where and how . . . would that effectively excuse them from having to play the game anymore? Because this journey, this life they led, it was like that game they had played in Tingawa. One player gave another player an imaginary gift without telling him what it was. The recipient had so many questions to find out what he was supposedly given. “Does it have legs?” “Is it furry?” “Is it galactic?” “Does it have more than four dimensions?”

  Or, would it be enough simply to stop . . . worrying. To believe, as Needly said, that everything was all right. Whatever he needed, he had it. How did he know? Needly told him so.

  Needly: named for the needle’s eye, because she saw things very sharply.

  Chapter 7

  In the Company of Griffins

  THE FEELING THEY WERE BEING WATCHED MADE THE descent an anxious one. Going down was less laborious than climbing had been, but without a concurrent sense of accomplishment. Nothing distinguished one switchback from another. Some sections of road led along sheer, clifflike drops where even the tops of the nearest trees below did not reach to their height. At either end of each stretch, darkly forested slopes ran unbroken down to the east. Only far down, where the road debouched onto either prairie or desert (as rainfall would have determined by the time they reached it), did the forested wilderness give way to vague, no-­colored plains, broken by the scars of scattered arroyos that winked fugitive gleams from deep inside themselves: little pools there; tiny streams; seasonal gatherings of blessed moisture, habitats for the fanged and scaled, the rarely seen, the scarcely known.

  From time to time, almost unconsciously, Abasio and Xulai looked up, eyes keyed to wings even as minds prayed there were no wings. So far there had been none, but Needly was not alone in feeling eyes, and the feeling led to whispered suppositions among the four of them, five if one included Blue. Rags seldom spoke while hitched, as she felt it inappropriate for a speaking creature to be harnessed, though Needly had pointed out to her that heavy clothing and backpacks were just as much a burden.

  Suppose, Needly wondered to herself, suppose the Griffins have friends among other creatures, many other creatures . . .

  Suppose other things are watching us and will report to her . . .

  Certainly the Griffin was not depending on human spies. This late in the season the threat of storm limited traffic on the road. Once they passed a man loading a donkey with the scattered deadwood that accumulated at the uphill edge of the road. Though the donkey saluted them loudly and persistently, his bulky owner did not acknowledge their presence. He faced into the mountain, head down, still as stone when they spoke to him. Xulai wondered if he was dumb or disdainf
ul. His attitude fit nicely with Abasio’s description of the northern mountain men’s rejection of company. As did his smell. This gave Xulai something to amuse herself with: Can a human creature be said to be dis-­odorly? Wasn’t there something she had read concerning dis-­odorly conduct?

  Trails led away at many of the switchbacks, south or north. In order to siphon off some of Willum’s overabundant energy, Abasio asked Blue to pick a placid horse familiar with brats and give Willum temporary ownership: a mount of his own! Freed from the boring trudge, Willum was off, exploring up and down, returning at a gallop to say a nearby trail split into networks of smaller tracks—­by the look of them, seldom used. “But,” he cried enthusiastically, swollen with self-­importance. “But ’f I could just go just a little farther down!”

  Abasio threatened repossession of the horse; Xulai announced that she would send him home with the next traveler headed in that direction; Needly deflated him with elaborate descriptions of the bears she (might have) barely escaped during her own forest journey; and Blue made it clear that given a choice between bear getting horse or bear getting rider, most horses immediately disposed of their riders—­and in Willum’s case, without a qualm. Among all of them—­though only by returning to the subject at intervals—­they managed to shadow Willum’s ebullience with a faint tint of caution.

  Xulai usually sat beside Abasio on the wagon seat. When the day warmed sufficiently, she opened the shutters behind the seat so the babies could be passed through when they were hungry, though they were no longer nursing with any frequency. Needly and Willum had taken over the task of feeding them spoonfuls of mashed apple, mashed potato, mashed peas. “Mashed ever’ darn thing,” Willum griped as he pushed hard-­boiled egg through a sieve with the side of a wooden spoon.

  “Gently, Willum,” Xulai admonished. “That’s the only sieve I have, and you’re pushing it all out of shape!”