by Tad Williams
“Why don’t you just make it run through a pipe or something?” Tyler asked.
Gideon scowled. “Oh, Lord, what would I ever do without children to point out the obvious? Because, boy, if we meddle with the creek it might flood the Fault Line chamber, which is just a few hundred yards away, over there. So we had to find another way to defend it.”
With Tyler smarting a little at his great-uncle’s rebuke, the cart rolled on over the little bridge before Mr. Walkwell pulled it off the road and reined up. They could see the dark water better now that the sun was behind them. The creek was muddy green and brown with bumps of light in it as it splashed over rounded, multicolored stones, and surprisingly noisy.
“It’s all the spring rain,” said Gideon as they pulled to a stop. “We’ve had a wet year.” The cart had come to a halt under some leaning alders, just at a point where the earth turned to shale and reedy grasses. “So here is our first new line of defense,” he said.
Tyler stared out across the reeds to the river. “I don’t see anything.”
“Don’t worry, you will.”
Tyler’s sister let out a little moan of worry beside him.
“Not unless we tell them we are here, Gideon,” said Mr. Walkwell.
“Ah, of course, silly of me. Do the honors, will you, Simos?”
Mr. Walkwell bent and found a large rock that Tyler would have had trouble even lifting, then flicked it with one hand into the river where it disappeared with a loud blurp.
“You see,” Gideon said, “even if they’re half a mile away they feel the vibrations. Even with as strong a current as the Kumish has. I think they must have some kind of special gland-platypuses do, you know, and the two species are related.”
“I don’t get it,” said Tyler. “ What feels the vibrations?”
“Sssshh.” Gideon held his fingers to his lips. He pointed out to the far side of the river, where something was making the tall reeds shiver and bend. It slipped into the water without ever once showing itself clearly, then something very large was moving beneath the surface, quickly and silently. “Here it comes… ”
Lucinda’s fingers were gripping Tyler’s sleeve. “Uncle Gideon,” she said, “You’re scaring me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, child.” He didn’t sound like it. “I am just very proud of them. They’re creatures right out of Australian Aboriginal myth-bunyips.”
“ Bunyips?” said Tyler with a snort of laughter. “That sounds like some kind of Japanese kiddie anime.”
“Don’t sass me boy, and don’t take these creatures lightly!” Gideon’s anger was swift as a summer storm: a moment later he had recovered himself again. “Yes, bunyips, I suppose it is a funny name. Legendary swamp demons-but they’re quite real. And even more fascinating, they’re monotremes.”
Something rose in the center of the creek, out of a dark spot where the bottom dropped away. The water bulged and then a broad, flat brown head emerged, a few twigs and limply streaming grasses snagged in the creature’s bristling, thorny pelt, its eyes all black and big as saucers.
“It’s huge!” Tyler said, his heart speeding. It was one thing to see something that big behind bars in a zoo, quite another to find it staring at you from open water a few yards away. “Bunyip. Is it going to come out?”
“Not if we stay out of the water… but I wouldn’t get too close, anyway,” Gideon said. “They’re all male, very territorial. This one came because he felt the splash. They’ll swim half a mile to attack one of their rivals and protect their territory, like bull crocodiles. Make a tremendous noise when they’re fighting-they roar like elephant seals! We hear it, come and save the poor fool, then give him one of Patience’s forget-your-own-name potions… ”
“What’s… what’s a monotreme?” asked Lucinda worriedly. She had backed right against the far side of the wagon seat.
“Same family as the echidna and the platypus,” Gideon said cheerily. “They’re the only poisonous mammals, and the only mammals that lay eggs-very weird critters. But my bunyip was a hundred times bigger than any modern monotremes and has been extinct for thousands and thousands of years.”
For just a moment the thing at the center of the river splashed upward instead of sideways, rising a little way out of the water. It was big as a hippo but shaggy or maybe prickly-Tyler thought its silhouette looked a little like a giant porcupine-and its blunt, huge-eyed head ended in a short trunk with wiggling fingers at the end, like the snout on a star-nosed mole.
Lucinda gave a shriek of dismay and Tyler jumped in alarm too. The bunyip slid back into the water, a large, flat island rippling its way back across the river to disappear into the crackling reeds.
“Wow,” Tyler said.
“You bet!” replied Gideon, smiling broadly. “Don’t you feel safer just looking at that magnificent animal?”
They left the creek behind, following the line of the innermost fence away from the farmhouse. Mr. Walkwell, who as usual had not said twenty words all morning, suddenly narrowed his ageless brown eyes and said sternly to Tyler and Lucinda, “You must behave now, children. Remember, there are beasts on this farm who can repay impatience with blood or even death.”
“I know,” said Tyler. “We just saw one, right?”
Mr. Walkwell ignored him. “Hear me! No games where we go next, Tyler Jenkins.”
“Hey,” said Tyler, “I’m all grown up now.”
Mr. Walkwell made a noise that Tyler couldn’t quite convince himself was a grunt of agreement. Lucinda’s face had gone quite pale. In fact, she hadn’t looked very comfortable since the creek. “Do we have to do this?” she asked.
Gideon had his hat tipped low to keep off the worst of the sun. Eleven o’clock in the morning and it was already very hot. “People would pay thousands just to see what you’re going to see next. We have amazing things on this farm-taking care of them and this place is a sacred trust.” As Tyler watched, one of the old man’s hands reached up to his throat and Tyler guessed he was fondling his wife’s necklace again.
“Uncle Gideon, where’s Zaza?” Tyler asked suddenly. “The flying monkey? I haven’t seen her yet.”
The old man waved his hand vaguely. “She’s around somewhere,” he said, but he was thinking about something else. For someone who basically owned the most astounding zoo in the world, Gideon Goldring sometimes seemed almost indifferent to the individual animals, especially those who weren’t a new project…
Mr. Walkwell punched in the numbers at another gate and it slid open to let them through. Within a few moments they crested a rise and saw a large tan brick building sitting by itself in the middle of an otherwise empty dirt lot. Its shiny metal roof stood out dramatically above the earth-colored walls.
“Is that building new?” asked Lucinda.
“No, but the roof is. We had to fix it up for our new guards!”
“Guards?” Lucinda looked relieved but still confused.
With relish, Gideon said: “Yes, the ‘manties’, as Colin calls them. Our manticores.”
“Manticores!” Tyler was impressed. “But you said last summer they were vicious.”
“They are,” said Mr. Walkwell as the wagon pulled up and stopped beside the building. “Come along, follow me-don’t hang back!”
“It’s so much cooler in here!” said Lucinda as they all entered the barn. She was trying to sound cheerful, but her voice was even more nervous now and Tyler could guess why-the place stank with the sharp, nose-burning urine of predators.
“Cool, yes. It’s the adobe,” said Gideon. “It keeps the temperature down. People have used it around here for years.”
Most of the barn’s interior was taken up by a huge cage, which extended up to the new metal ceiling and ran along most of two walls. The cage floor was covered in sand and sticks. At the center a pile of large concrete blocks formed an artificial jumble of boulders.
“Enough,” said Gideon Goldring. He had lowered his voice. “No more talking now. Simos, go and bring th
em out.” He turned to the children. “They’re usually sluggish during the daytime. They’re night hunters.”
Tyler watched avidly as Mr. Walkwell made his way around the two walls of the cage on his deceptively delicate hoofed feet, whistling a series of repetitive notes and keeping well away from the bars. Lucinda hung back near the door, her eyes wide and her face making it clear she would rather be somewhere else. Even Tyler, who normally enjoyed anything spectacular or dangerous, was beginning to feel anxious.
“Hurry them up, Simos,” said Gideon after Mr. Walkwell had been walking back and forth whistling for half a minute or more. “We don’t have all day.”
Walkwell gave him a look, but took a long metal pole off the wall and reached it through the bars to rap sharply on one of the concrete blocks. The first manticore emerged a moment later, sloping out into the open as leisurely as a sullen teenager.
“Whoa!” said Tyler. “They were tiny last summer!”
“They did grow up fast, didn’t they?” said Gideon.
Two more followed the first. Once out in the open the manticores sat on their haunches, pale tan faces half-hidden in the ruff of mane, watching the visitors with surprising orange eyes. Each one was the size of a full-grown lion, but it was something else about them that made the children stare.
Lucinda’s voice was very shaky. “Their faces… they look like
… ”
“They look almost human, don’t they?” said Gideon. “Manticores are a sort of simian, I think-like a giant baboon, but their faces are more like those of apes. But tan instead of black-skinned, like gorillas or chimpanzees.” He laughed.
“They’re horrible,” Lucinda said.
“I’m disappointed in you, child,” said Gideon with a frown. “These are amazing creatures. My goodness, these are more wonderful than the dragons! You have no idea how hard it was to raise so many to adulthood! We’ve been struggling with them all year-several of them died when they were small. And just training them to take simple commands-here, I’ll show you.” He stepped to the bars and whistled in much the same way Mr. Walkwell had. The manticores turned to watch him. Six had now come out of their artificial den. He whistled again and they slowly drew closer, then lay down on the sand in front of him with obvious reluctance, twelve orange eyes watching his every move. Only the bars stood between Gideon and the weird, manlike faces.
“Oh,” said Lucinda. “Oh. They have such big teeth…!”
“The old stories claimed they had rows and rows, like sharks,” said Gideon, grinning rather impressively himself. “Now, up, you lot! Up!” He raised his hands in the air: the bright orange eyes and the expressionless, masklike faces watched him. Slowly, the manticores began to rise to their feet. “Do you see? They know who’s the master!”
Mr. Walkwell was watching intently, standing very close to the bars: Tyler suddenly saw the monster nearest him had fixed the old Greek with its tangerine-colored stare. Its tail twitched. Could it reach him through the bars with those jagged-nailed hands? It was so still, so watchful…
“Mr. Walkwell!” he cried, sensing something, and at that same instant the manticore leaped forward, silent as air until it slammed heavily against the metal bars. But Mr. Walkwell had already stepped back out of reach.
“Hee-hee!” laughed Uncle Gideon. “Keeping you awake on your hooves, eh, Simos?”
Mr. Walkwell only shook his head.
Gideon said, “Well, obviously this is all too distracting for the manties. They’ll never behave properly with all these new smells and people. We’d best get on now.”
“What… what are you going to do with them?” Lucinda asked as they climbed back into the wagon. Back out in the sun, Tyler found himself sweating.
“We let them out at night, of course. They roam between the two fences here on the property. If one of Ed Stillman’s spies gets over the outer fence, or even tries to parachute in…!” He let out a breathless laugh. “He’ll be begging us to save him when the manticores come after him, I’ll tell you that much.”
Or not begging for anything, because he’ll be dead, thought Tyler. How are you going to deal with that, Uncle Gideon? But of course he didn’t say anything.
“The new, improved Ordinary Farm!” crowed Gideon. “There you have it!”
Tyler looked at Lucinda. He could see on her face that she was even less comforted by these so-called improvements than he was.
Chapter 7
Communication Problems
Some things about Ordinary Farm hadn’t changed at all. One of them was the hard, hard work.
As the long summer days passed, Lucinda and her brother quickly fell back into the farm’s routine-they had no choice because at Ordinary Farm everyone had to do his or her share, most definitely including the two young visitors. Feeding the animals meant following daily schedules that could not be broken- “A sea-goat doesn’t care if you didn’t get your own breakfast,” as Gideon liked to say, “he just wants his.” The bleating capricorns could be snappy when they were hungry, too, and they fought over each fish, so that some days they had to be taken out of their pool and fed individually. The dragons needed twice-weekly deer carcasses and the unicorns had to have their daily fodder and supplements. And the bonnacon’s cage had to be cleaned out everyday, which-since the buffalo-like creature’s dung burst into flame once it was out in the air, then lay smoldering for hours-was absolutely no one’s favorite job.
Lucinda and Tyler spent much of their day tending to the smaller creatures in the Reptile Barn and elsewhere, taking some of the load off Mr. Walkwell, Ragnar, and the others who also had to care for the big animals. But even the small animals could be a lot of work. The jingwei, white Chinese birds with long tails, had got loose from their cage in the Reptile Barn some weeks before, and each day they did their best to fill the biggest water trough, Meseret’s, with small stones, swooping down in turn to drop pebbles with a plink, plink, plink that went on all day as if someone was using a tiny hammer. Each afternoon Lucinda or her brother climbed into the trough and removed them all, but the jingwei could fly in and out through the empty spaces in the vast barn and so they always found more.
“The Chinese believed this bird was a drowned princess trying to fill the ocean so no other would ever lose her life there,” Gideon informed them, frowning at a rising island of stones near one end of the trough. “Mythological or not, I wish we could get them out of the Reptile Barn. They’re a dang nuisance!” But the beautiful, fast-moving jingweis refused to be caught, so every day one of the children went swimming in Meseret’s greasy trough and shoveled out the stones so she wouldn’t swallow too many of them and get her insides plugged up. Dragons didn’t even notice things that small going down.
Even after feeding time was over many other chores awaited: Lucinda and her brother spent three long, hot afternoons of their second week on the farm whitewashing a new barn for the unicorns. Five hornless, staggering foals had been born that spring and Gideon wanted the young ones and their nursing mothers to have a place they would be safe from summer storms.
And of course Gideon’s greater concern for security added to the work load as well: the electric gates and fences that kept strangers out and animals in had to be checked regularly to make sure they were secure-even a branch across the fence could shut down a large part of the system.
Lucinda was thrilled to be back on Ordinary Farm, but the chores were hard and she was equally happy when Sunday rolled around, her first free day since they’d arrived. Spared for once from early egg duty, it was hard even to drag herself out of bed. Only the threat, relayed by Tyler, that all the breakfast things were going to be cleared and washed in ten minutes finally drew her downstairs, where Azinza gave her some eggs, a fruit muffin, and a glass of milk. She had forgotten the notebook she meant to use for dragon-communication observations, so after returning the plate to the kitchen she plodded back upstairs to get it.
A few minutes later, as she made her way down one of the
back staircases, notebook in hand, she heard voices coming from the room full of pictures of Gideon’s wife-the “Grace Shrine”, as she thought of it. The first voice was clearly Gideon’s, then, quieter but just as distinct, the cool tones of Patience Needle. Lucinda paused, her heart suddenly beating fast. What were the two of them doing in the seldom-used parlor? And what if they thought she was spying on them? For a moment Lucinda considered turning around and heading back the way she’d come.
But that’s not fair! she thought. I haven’t done anything wrong. Beside, they’re probably talking about bills or something, anyway.
She slowed as she reached the parlor door-she was feeling a bit curious now about what the two might be discussing so far from the rest of the household.
“… But I do not approve, Gideon.” That was Mrs. Needle, and she sounded angrier than usual, her voice with a hard, piercing ring like metal. “With all due respect, you are not a young man.”
“I assure you, Patience, I’m far more aware of that than you are,” Uncle Gideon told her. “These days, even my aches have aches. You’re right-I probably don’t have very long left to me. That is precisely why I’m going to do this now.”
Something in his tone and what he said frightened Lucinda badly. Was Uncle Gideon sick? Dying? He upset her sometimes, made her frustrated and even angry, but she couldn’t imagine the place without him.
Apparently, Mrs. Needle felt the same way. “You’re in no danger, Gideon. In fact, you’re quite healthy for a man your age. But what would become of this place if… if something did happen to you now? An accident, perhaps? Before the children are really ready? Are you certain you want to see the lawyer and change everything without thinking about it a bit longer…?”
