Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal

by Diane Duane

  She crouched there in the low-slanting sunlight and trembled. It was partly from hunger again—she hadn’t even felt the last hour or two go by—but also from something else she couldn’t yet identify. She searched her newfound memories, but neither her egg-sire or her egg-dam or her parents’ Sacrifice-friend knew what to call what she was feeling. It was a new feeling, and it was troubling to her, but she wouldn’t have given it up for anything.

  Finally she realized she was going to get no further with this at the moment—and no further at all if I don’t live to see the days after tomorrow! For though by her parents’ and their friend’s grace tomorrow was seen to, and though hatchlings could go a long time between their birthmeals and the ones that followed, those birthmeals were still important.

  So she went back to visit with her parents’ friend again, and then with her dam and her sire, or as much of them as remained and could be dug out from under the stones. And after that was done and it was dark again, she burrowed under the heaviest stone and curled up where her sire’s bones lay, and said, “I’m here!” And then she slid over the cliff of night into sleep again, thinking of malfeh all the way down.

  Very early the next morning she heard scratching on the stones again, and waited to see flying-predator feet show just past the slab of rock where she lay hidden. This predator was no wiser or more careful than the last, though as she finished picking the fine shards of its crunched-up ribs from between her teeth, she was pleased to see it had internalized a map of the area that was far superior to the previous one’s. Bigger predators have better maps, she thought. It stands to reason: they can fly further. I must think of a way to catch the big ones.

  In the bright light of morning she returned to her egg-parents’ Sacrifice-friend for the last time and concentrated on doing her justice. Once more, looking at what remained of her, the hatchling realized that again Tivish was smaller and she was bigger. She sighed in gratitude as she laid the Sacrificer’s bones out for the smaller hungers of the world to find—this being seen as the proper way to complete the Protocols with someone who was almost finished giving of their best. The hatchling felt sad to do this, for it was the first of a number of farewells she must now say: in particular, farewell to the end of the first age of her childhood (or, as some Tauwff would have it, the end of childhood entire).

  She went over to the other side of the outcropping where the cracks were, and gazed for a few moments at the bone, which was stripped bare and clean as if there had never been a Tauwff wrapped around it. There were no malfeh now. They were gone as if they had never been there, and the water that had been in the crack was all sunk away now into the stone.

  It occurred to the hatchling to wonder if what she thought had happened had just been some kind of dream. But no: there was the bone, and it was cleaner today than it had been yesterday.

  She turned away and went back to the stones that concealed what remained of her egg-dam and egg-sire. To them now she said the words of Gift and Acceptance, the last of their hatchlings who would say them. After that, she turned to Tivish.

  “Now part of your name will be part of mine,” she said: for Tauwff remember those they’ve incorporated and think of with affection by incorporating their names too. As for choosing Tivish for this intimacy, it was not that she was ungrateful to her egg-sire or egg-dam. But, as she knew from their own memories as well as Tivish’s, taking a parent’s name was so often done, even thoughtlessly done. And the hatchling could not get out of her mind the image of Tivish laboring with the heavy stones in the hot sun, and being so tired at the end of it that rendering herself up to the One felt like a relief and a solace.

  At last there was nothing more for the hatchling to do but set out into the rest of her life. But something else was burning in her to be said, the way the sun, high now, was burning on her back.

  “Now I go out to walk the world,” she said. “But I do that to find out how to put the wrong things right. I will act and I will learn, I will ask and I will answer; and I will eat every single one I meet who seems likely to be able to help me put right what’s gone wrong! I will do them due honor and add their strength to mine and make them young again. And with them in me I will walk a year and two years and five years and ten about this work if I must, until I’ve eaten wisely enough and well enough to be the strongest and wisest and bravest Tauwff there ever was. And then I will hunt down the one who did this wrong, and eat It too.”

  The wind went whining by, and there was not the slightest sign that anyone or anything had noticed what she was saying at all. In fury the hatchling stamped all the feet she had, briefly wishing the day would hurry up when she had some more. “I mean it!” she shouted into the wind. “So you’d better pay attention!”

  Nothing. The wind went hissing away over the sand, unhearing, unbothered.

  “Well,” the hatchling said. “We’ll see about that.”

  Then Vish left that place, not looking back, climbing carefully down the sheer walls of the outcropping, and went forth into her world to put everything right.

  The Quest

  So Vish began her journeying.

  In the beginning of her travels, Vish spent all the long bright days of Wimst walking across the sandy plains and through the rocky wastes, up the mighty dunes and down the lowland badlands. When the long dark nights of Wimst fell over her she hid herself away, digging herself in beneath big stones or deep under the sand. She grew skilled at this business, learning (by virtue of a few near-misses and scars that took many days to heal) that she was not safe until she was deep enough in the sand or below the stones to feel so cold she shivered. Her nights were not comfortable, but at least she woke again in the mornings. And she learned to tell the hours of the day without needing to see the sun, which was useful in places where the larger and more persistent predators lived.

  For some days in the very beginning of her travels she had not a scrap of flesh to eat nor a drop of blood to drink except from various small incautious predators of the creeping and tunnelling kinds. This was because Vish’s egg-parents and their Sacrificer-friend had walked many days through land otherwise unfrequented by Tauwff to where they could safely clutch without the danger of others of their kind raiding the site for tender juicy hatchlings or the sacrificers’ flesh.

  Vish, though feeling increasingly empty, went about her travels with a good and high heart; for she was about the business of putting the world right, and what was a little hunger to that? Also she knew her way better than most other hatchlings might, for the flying predators she had incorporated rode in her mind and behind her eyes and told her which way to go (while complaining incessantly about having to walk instead of fly).

  Nonetheless she knew she couldn’t allow the hunger to last long. “If I’m to put the world right,” she told herself, “and make the wise and the quick and the brave and the strong of Wimst to be part of me, I must first become strong myself. Therefore I must quickly find the biggest, strongest Tauwff I can: and a place where there’s already good food is a good place to start that search.”

  With this in mind, Vish’s plan was to seek out the nearest of the places where Tauwff sometimes congregated in small numbers. The closest of these, known of old to her egg-sire, was nearly a million lengths away. It attracted people because a rare spring of water rose up there in the midst of rocky foothills, and some of the planet’s few lifeforms that needed water (instead of getting all of it from what they ate, as Tauwff did) gathered there too. Eating other lifeforms was for many Tauwff far preferable to eating one another—if only for the sake of a little variety in their diet—and therefore those who could make their way there often did.

  It would be a long walk there for a hatchling, nigh onto a Wimsih year. “But I said I’d walk a year and two years and five years and ten to put things right,” Vish said, “and so I will.” And so she began making her way across the world, day by weary day using her egg-sire’s memories and the mind-maps of the flying predators she’
d made a part of her.

  The seasons shifted as she went, the hot to the cool and the cool to the cooler (in which one could actually feel the difference in the air temperature of oncoming evening as much as an hour before the sun set). And on her way Vish got to see what many Tauwff never did, not though they lived full lifetimes: she saw the rain.

  The planetary climate, even in this latter day still much damaged by the Disaster that was part of the Doom, is a turbulent affair, full of weather patterns easily disrupted by even minor shifts in solar behavior. Long dry periods alternate with brief hard-hammering spells of ferocious rain that fill the air so full of water, one can scarcely breathe; flash floods tear viciously across erosion-savaged terrain and then sink away to nothing. Tiny against the huge surface area of one of the biggest “rocky” planets known anywhere, these thin sparse weather systems appear and vanish mostly unseen.

  But Vish, unable to sleep one night because the cold in her dig-under-stone was too chilly for her, crept back up to the surface and saw a stormfront come rolling in—saw the lightning in the bellies of the clouds, saw and felt the rain begin, and clambered up to the top of the rock under which she’d dug. Perhaps the cold was lucky for her. As the water got deeper and started to slide by faster every moment, as (once more too curious) she clung to the spear of stone she’d dug beneath and put her face down into the water rushing past, she realized that while she could taste it, she couldn’t breathe it. And the hole she had dug to hide herself under the stone was full of water now, its sides falling in.

  That might have killed me in my sleep, Vish thought as the storm passed and the water sank away. Yet unsettling as this thought might have been, she set it aside as she watched the clouds pass over and leave nothing but darkness behind them. Except that up in that broad darkness, as if behind it somehow, there was a faint, faint light, almost too faint to see.

  Where does the rain come from? Vish thought. Where does it go? …And what else might be up there? I wonder…

  There were no answers from any of the memories inside her, so she huddled down against the wet sand and gravel to wait for day, and when the sun was up, began walking again. Yet the thought of the clouds and rain, and what there might be above and beyond them, kept coming back to her in the days that followed and would not let her be.

  At long last she came to the place she had been seeking, which in Wimsih was called Bethesath. It was an old mountain that was made of the bones of a mountain older still, one that had once been like a mouth spitting out the world’s fiery blood. But long ago the blood had ceased running and turned to stone, and now what was left was a sheer high rock with long ribbed sides running up to a broad flat top.

  About the bottom of the great rock was a tumble and scatter of huge jagged old stones that had cracked and fallen from it, and among those stones rose the spring of water. Many small creatures of Wimst hid among the stones and up on the slopes of the great Rock of Bethesath, waiting for a chance to win down to the spring without being eaten. And this was a challenge for them, as many Tauwff people were down among the rocks as well, bedded in or prowling about, waiting for some one of the small creatures above to be so overcome by thirst that it could wait no longer.

  Very cautiously and stealthily Vish approached this loose gathering, for these were the first living Tauwff she had ever seen. The rubble field surrounding the Rock of Bethesath reached out a good distance into the barren sandy ground around it, and Vish dodged from boulder to boulder and did her best to seem small and thin and unappetizing. And at this business she had good success, for the Tauwff who caught sight of her as she moved toward the Rock mostly favored her with expressions that her egg-dam’s and egg-sire’s memories registered as disinterest or disdain.

  Good, she thought. For I don’t want them interested in me unless I am first interested in them. And she scuttled and crept among the biggest stones near where the spring rose, and watched to see who came and went, who spoke and was silent.

  For three days and three nights she kept herself hidden, moving no more than needed to keep from being noticed, wedging herself as deep under stone as she could go by night, and mostly staying small and curled-up and hard to see by day. Many Tauwff to this day have the colorshift gift that allows them to be more difficult to see in some lights and against some backgrounds, and Vish had it as well, though she was too young to be much practiced with it yet. Fortunately most of the stones around the Rock of Bethesath were its own color, a near-black veined with grey. So Vish mostly kept herself mottled in those colors and kept herself still, eating not a scrap of flesh and supping not a drop of blood, but watching the older Tauwff come and go.

  When the fourth day rolled around Vish thought, Soon I’ll have seen enough to know what I must do. Since she came she had seen Tauwff who were plump and Tauwff who were thin, Tauwff with ten legs and Tauwff with eight or six or only four, sharp-fanged Tauwff and blunt-toothed ones, bright-colored Tauwff and Tauwff whose color could hardly be told from whatever surface they stood against. She had listened to them speak and watched them be silent; she had heard some of them praise the Choice of the Tauwff and the Protocols, and others of them roundly curse both. And she had seen them both decline to devour one another, and set upon one another with every intent to kill and eat. These meetings Vish had watched most intently, seeing how either luck or skill could quickly turn the attacker into the attacked and the would-be devourer into the devoured.

  It was on that fourth day that Vish saw again someone she had seen on all three of the previous days. He was a big Tauwff and a strong one, long-tailed and muscular, eight-legged and in hide-color a bright blue; and he had a kind of den or lair high up behind the biggest fallen stones of the Rock of Bethesath—a place from which he could look down on the spring and all those who came and went around it. Once each day he came down by the spring and joined the Tauwff there, and moved among them, speaking and listening, asking and answering. And on two of the days, Vish saw, after having words with some smaller or younger or fewer-legged Tauwff, the two of them would go up together between the rocks and make for the big strong one’s lair. But Vish particularly noticed that though the big blue Tauwff came down among the stones again the next day, the Tauwff who had gone with him did not come back.

  Now I know what to do, Vish thought.

  So when things were quiet around the spring later in the fourth morning—for it was in the dusks before dawn and after sunset that the smaller beasts came down to drink—she made her way down to the water and waited there as if hoping for a scrap from someone’s meal. And after a while, when she roused herself to move under cover near the heat of the day, a shadow fell over her. Vish paused, looking around in surprise, and then tilted her head back and back, for she found herself looking up at the big blue Tauwff.

  “Whither away, little eft?” he said to her.

  “The sun is hot,” Vish said, “and the day has long to run yet. If I stay here among the small stones I’ll bake my brains.”

  “I know a cool place up the mountain side,” said the big blue Tauwff, “where you may shelter safe until the sun is low.”

  “Show me the way and I’ll follow,” Vish said. “What are you called?”

  “Tarsheh I am. And what name might a little eft like you have earned?”

  “I am Vish. Lead on, Tarsheh.”

  So Tarsheh led the way up the mountain, a steep climb even for a Tauwff with more than the minimum number of legs. As they went, the spring and all the other Tauwff fell away further and further below them, and Vish saw well how if she called for help she would certainly not be heard, and that if she tried to run away, any haste would likely make her miss her footing and be dashed to her death on the stones. Realizing this, she briefly felt as cold as if she were dug in deep, and shivered; but still she went on.

  Soon enough after that the two of them came to the crevice or shallow cavern in the mountain’s side that Tarsheh had made his den. It was shadowy enough, for the door was narrow a
nd the sun could only come in for a short time each day.

  “Come inside,” said Tarsheh. “Here you can rest as long as you like.”

  Vish walked in and saw that there was no way out but the way she’d just come; and Tarsheh settled himself in the doorway as if to see what was happening below them. “Thank you for respite from the sun,” Vish said, and settled herself on the floor of the cave.

  Tarsheh stretched his neck up high and looked down at her with the jaw-stretch that her egg-dam whispered was meant to say he was amused, and his tongue worked in a way that made her egg-sire whisper, He wonders how many bites you will take, and how much work they will need to go down. “So tell me now,” Tarsheh said, “how you come to be walking about all by yourself in the wide world?”

  “I’m the last and youngest of seven clutch-kin,” Vish said, “and I’m following the sun around the world in a great quest to put right what’s gone wrong. And to do that I must become the wisest and strongest and quickest and bravest person who ever was. So I’m seeking out the wise and the strong and the quick and the brave, to make a meal of them and make them young again, so we may go questing together. You are very strong—that’s plain to see. Will you give yourself over to me, brother?”

  Tarsheh looked down at her as if he thought she was making a joke. “Why, you’re hardly out of the egg to be bandying about such bold words,” he said. “You hardly even count as an eft as yet.”

  “That may be true,” Vish said. “But what do you say?”

  Tarsheh uncoiled himself and stood up again, moving forward to tower over her, and letting her see all his teeth, which were very sharp. “I say that of course we should be together, and your youth and my strength will go very well together. But perhaps not the way you think.”

  Vish pushed herself right down against the floor of the cave and stared up at him with big wide-open eyes as Tarsheh moved closer. His jaw dropped wider open in his amusement at what he thought he saw—the dejected, scared-looking little Tauwff with her skin still shell-smooth, suddenly realizing that her big ideas were about to come to nothing—and a tender morsel to be sure, the flavor of her about to be made all the sweeter by her fear.