by James Kahn
“And a rich one, now,” Beauty laughed. “I sold every seed in Port Fresno.”
“—and strong as a Horse,” Rose continued her thought, patting Beauty’s haunch with just the slightest trace of innuendo. Beauty brushed her face with a snap of his tail.
“Stronger by half than the puny animals you call Horses,” he snorted. “It is said that when the noble race of Centauri migrated to this continent from our own, long Before the Ice, the local Centaurs of this land were so shamed by comparison that they all donned dog-masks and were forever after known as Horses.”
Josh and Rose laughed. Beauty’s pride in his ancestry was well known to them—it was said by many that his great-great-great grandmother had been a leader in the heroic trek over the land bridge which had connected the continents Before the Ice. Sometimes pride in his heritage purled the Centaur up a bit too much, though, and then he became a target for his friends’ gentle jesting.
“The first Centaur. Now I’d always heard,” smirked Joshua, “that Horses were here first, that one day a Horse met a strumpet on the road—”
“Enough,” said Beauty balefully, “I know this joke.” “—and the strumpet said, ‘I’ve a grand treasure between my legs if you’ve the Horse-sense to find it.’” Josh continued, chuckling. Rose’s eyes twinkled. “Enough, I say,” warned Beauty. “So up her love-nest the Horse thrusts his head and when he’s up to the neck, what happens but he gets stuck—”
“Enough!” Beauty boiled. Josh and Rose did nothing to hide their merriment. Above all, Beauty was a proper gentleman.
“Sometimes,” he continued, greatly put-upon, “you can be the most tasteless boor. I suppose you’re only Human, though, so I must make allowances.”
He couldn’t long stay angry with those he loved, though, soon relenting to their apologies and prods.
And so, well into the cradle of the afternoon they sat, warmed by the sun and the company.
The yard was perched on the high slope of a gentle hill, and in the intermediate distance they gazed on the gray Pacific. Far, far away, near the almost invisible horizon, a small, triangular white sail could be seen.
“A boat alone,” mused Josh. “Pirate?”
Beauty shook his head. “Too close in for a pirate ship. Probably the Port Fresno mail run.” He finished his wine.
“What’s the word in Port Fresno?” Joshua asked. “Anything about the War? Any new Kings or Popes to worry about?” His tone was light, but he saw a shadow cross Beauty’s face.
“Nothing on the War,” the Horse-man said, “but there is something.” He paused, gave Rose a sideways glance. “Bands of savages, pillaging and killing, all up and down the coast.” He paused again. “Vampires have been seen.”
Rose made a disgusted, loathing sound in her throat. Joshua tilted his head. “Hard to believe,” he said. “Never heard of Vampires coming this far north.”
Beauty shrugged. “That was the rumor.”
There was a long moment’s silence. The sun somehow looked lower in the sky now, the sky itself less joyous.
Josh rose. “Well, I’d best be gone, the day’s not waiting.” The thought of Vampires north of the Line was a chilling one; bleak news for the Human race. Was there no end to troubles on this earth? Josh wondered.
Rose stood and kissed him on the cheek, and then Beauty stood, too. Beauty said, “I will go with you.”
“That better be a joke.” Rose warned.
Beauty raised his hands in apology. “I have to go give Moor his seed money. I should have dropped it off on the way in, but I could not stand the thought of keeping you waiting,” he placated.
She looked skeptical.
“It is a two-hour trot,” he protested, “I will be back before the day is cool.” And then, as her frown softened to a pout, he continued, “Cool enough to warm you up, woman.” He bent down, kissed her quickly, and grabbed a handful of her bottom. He was rarely so demonstrative in public; but then, Joshua was hardly public.
Rose pulled her fingernails lightly down Beauty’s chest, down his belly, and then scratched the sensitive area where man-belly became steed-chest. His shoulders tensed. “You beast,” she growled, and bit his lip. He flared his nostrils, reared up on his hind legs and pawed the air.
“Begone and hurry back,” she shouted, and slapped his rump. He took off down the road. Joshua jumped up on his back at a dead run, and the two disappeared over the hill as Rose watched, shaking her head, smiling.
Joshua’s cabin was less than half the distance to Moor’s farm from Beauty’s, but a little out of the way. It wasn’t until they’d traveled almost an hour that Beauty slowed to an easy clip, and then stopped altogether.
“What is it?” asked Joshua. He jumped down to the ground and stretched his legs. He knew the Centaur well enough to know when something was on his mind.
Beauty pawed the earth. “There was something else in Port Fresno,” he said. “I did not want to upset Rose too much.” He knew he would never understand Humans completely; but of one thing he was certain: they could assimilate only small amounts of information at one time, they could not intuit the large sweeps of meaning that constituted the real world; they had no sense of the essence of wholes, though their understanding of parts was admittedly great. So Beauty was never quite sure what had to be spoken, and what was implicit even to the Human mind.
Joshua’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
Beauty threw his head back and forth, waving his mane. “It is only Humans who are being attacked.”
Joshua met the Horse-man’s eyes with his own. “Race War again?”
Beauty looked puzzled. “Could be. They are kidnapping young ones, though. Pirates, maybe. Slave trade.”
They were both silent, digesting the information, thinking of all the hard times they’d seen and were yet to see. “Anyway,” Beauty went on, “after this errand, I am restringing my bow and staying close to home.” Then he nodded at the forest ahead of them. “These woods are dark, Joshua. Keep your people in the house after sunfall.”
Joshua looked down at the ground and nodded. Beauty backed off a few steps and raised his right arm. “Until soon, friend.”
“Until soon,” returned Josh. Beauty turned and ran off in the direction of Moor’s farm, while Joshua headed into the wood.
Josh knew something was amiss as soon as he neared the cabin; not a sound, not a movement. No Ollie playing, no Mother singing. He dropped to one knee and listened. Only a mockingbird, mocking.
Joshua put down the last squirrel he’d been carrying and slipped a knife out of his belt. He waited. Still nothing. He ran silently through the trees around to the front of the house, to try to get a look in through the west windows.
What he saw was that there was no door. And when he looked past the doorway into the main room, his in-sides twisted tight.
He ran into the house, knife in hand, and looked around desperately. Dead, all dead. He sucked in his breath audibly, trying to take in the scene. Mother, Father, Grandma, Jack. All horribly mutilated, irrevocably dead. He knelt by his mother’s side, his eyes filled with tears. He held her hand. Cold, stiff.
There was a noise in the corner, and Joshua swiveled with knife out, all his fury and grief concentrated instantaneously in the steel blade. But it was Jack moving, not quite lifeless yet. Josh ran over to the old man and held his head up.
“Uncle Jack, what happened?” He wanted to say more, but his voice wouldn’t work, his throat was constricted, and dry as his eyes were wet.
Jack looked up at him. “Joshua, is it you, boy? I’m dyin’ boy. Glory help me.”
Joshua shook him gently. “Jack, who did this?”
Jack focused a little. “Two monsters and a bloodsucker, boy. I tried, I tried …”
“What about Dicey and Ollie?” whimpered Josh. “What about Dicey?” he begged.
“Carried ‘em off,” whispered the old man. “I’m dead, boy.”
“What did they look like?” persisted Joshua. His
despair was already forging grief into hate.
Jack’s voice hardly moved air. Joshua had to lower his ear to the man’s mouth. “One was a lion-hawk. One was a bloodsucker. And one foul thing no man should ever give name to and I thank Glory I’m dyin’ so I’ll never have to remember its face.” He closed his eyes, then, and died.
Joshua ran through the cabin, looking for something, anything. He wanted to run, to fight; he felt, for a moment, as if he were going crazy. He picked up a chair and smashed it repeatedly against the floor; he kicked the wall twice, as hard as he could. Then he remembered what he’d said to Rose about not missing Uncle Jack, and he sat down on the rug and cried and cried and cried.
When he finished burying them, he sat down at the table in the main room and stared into the cold fireplace. He felt hollow, but somehow clean; purposeful. His life to this minute was over: his life from now on had commenced.
He pulled the quill from his boot and dipped it in the tin of ink he’d just mixed from ashes, dried blood, and water. On the thin, hand-pressed paper before him, he slowly, methodically wrote:
Here lies the family Green. Old woman Esther, sons Jack and Bob, and Bob’s wife Ellen. All were Humans. Murdered viciously and without provocation by a Griffin, a Vampire, and an Accident, as sworn by dead Jack. Jack’s daughter, Dicey, and Bob’s son, Ollie, abducted by same. Surviving son Joshua, hunter and Scribe, hereby sets this record and claims Venge-right, on this 14th day of March, After the Ice 121.
Joshua Green, Human & Scribe
He slipped the quill back into his boot. Next, he rolled the parchment into a tight cylinder and fitted it into a thin, stainless steel tube, which he sealed at both ends. He had a whole box of these tubes—Scribe-tubes—stored under the bed. He took two more empties and strapped one to each leg. Finally, he wrote an identical statement on a smaller paper, and secreted that one in his belt.
He went outside again and began digging one last hole, among the four graves he’d just laid. The day was dimming, and he was tired. He suddenly felt an oppressive need for sleep coming over him. Soon he would rest from his ordeal.
When his hole was two feet deep, he dropped in the paper-filled tube, and began to cover it over. He had to stop momentarily, though, as another wave passed over him, a pressing, physical need for sleep, almost nauseatingly intense. He closed his eyes. The absence of visual input relieved his dizziness somewhat; but almost immediately this sense of sleep-pressure was replaced by a discrete pinpoint of light, deep inside his internal field of vision. It seemed far away, this tiny bright spot, but somehow it seemed to be tugging at him, exerting some ambiguous, gentle pull, like a cool draft sucking softly down a well, like static electricity, like the ambivalent gravity of a first kiss, like long-awaited sleep, like …
He opened his eyes. The sun was almost down. He quickly finished filling in his hole, and then marked the place with a wood marker bearing the standard symbol of the Scribe, which he carved into the wood.
Only then did he notice the black smoke rising, ten miles to the north. He stared at it dumbly for a few moments, then whispered the dreadful realization: “Beauty’s farm …”
Grimly, he started running.
Joshua was a hunter, and that meant it was not rare for him to run two or three hours without pause; so he reached Beauty’s farm easily in less than an hour. He needn’t have hurried.
The farmhouse itself was razed, smoldering in its own charcoal now. Beauty stood staring, weeping mutely into,the rubble, as if looking for some sign in the smoke. He was at once majestic and beaten.
Josh walked over to the Centaur, his own anger and sorrow fed anew by those of his friend. There was shared grief now, a new bond between them. And shared hatred—strongest bond, perhaps, of all. They were patriots, now, compatriots, in the land of loss.
He told Beauty his story, what he’d found at home. Beauty told Joshua he’d returned to the farm an hour earlier and found—this. Rose was gone; no trace of Human remains in the ashes. The one thing Beauty had found, near the house, was Rose’s knife, sticky with blood.
“But it wasn’t Human blood—I know that smell well,” said the Horse-man. “It was … vile blood.” He squinted back his tears, his venom.
Joshua nodded. “Jack said one of the creatures was—what sounded to me like—an Accident.” They couldn’t look at each other.
Beauty held up Rose’s bloody knife. “A wounded Accident, now.” He threw the knife into the dirt.
Some feet away, beneath a broken board, Josh saw a feather. Feather of falcon. He picked it up, and they both stared at it with burning eyes: it was all that remained of Rose.
“I’ll take it for my quill,” said Josh. “It will give us power to find her, if I use it to write with.” He cut the tip into a quill point with his knife, and stuck the newly fashioned pen into his boot, replacing his old one with it. Beauty did not believe in the power of Scribery as did Josh; but he knew that from this time on, whatever resources they could tap, whatever powers they could individually draw upon, they would need.
They looked at each other a moment, and the moment was theirs. They held hands, on that spot, through the night.
In the morning Joshua set the record, marked it with his sign; and the two young hunters made a plan.
CHAPTER 2: In Which It Is Seen That Time Is A River Which May Briefly Stop, Yet Then Moves
ON the hills of Monterey formed a promontory on the tip of a crooked finger of land that pointed southwest into the blue Pacific. The base of the peninsula curved gently back to a coastline that ran east, and then smoothly south all the way to Port Fresno. From Fresno the coast turned east again, and then south once more down to Newport, near what once had been the Mexican border. Of course, since the last war there were no more borders; only frontiers.
Beauty’s farm lay in the southern meadows of a depopulated area that extended north to the Ice Country. The Ice Country itself was uninhabitable: a vast, frigid zone, the penumbra of a glacier that sat snugly on the top third of the world like a white electrocution cap. The glacier moved ten miles south every year now, extending the boundaries of the Ice Country with almost imperial resolution. Monterey had grown accustomed to seeing the invader’s frosty designs as late as June.
South of Beauty’s farm were scattered ranches, settlers, trading posts. Population density increased farther south, until there were actually cities now and then—usually walled, self-sustaining centers where people and other animals gathered for companionship, for commerce, for protection.
Beauty’s farm was ideally situated. Cool and sparse enough most months of the year to be uninteresting to adventurers and soldiers; warmed enough by the Pacific currents to make fruit-growing easy. Beauty hadn’t ever considered leaving before—once he’d settled down there with Rose—and neither had Joshua.
So it was with considerable regret that they folded up their lives and slid them like wedding suits, into the bottom drawers of their memory. But they were hunters now, and a successful hunter can afford only one thought: the prey.
They set off in the morning, as first light trembled. Beauty carried only his bow, and a quiver; Joshua had his knives and his falcon-feather pen.
There was no trace of the Vampire or the Griffin, save a green wing feather from the latter—they’d obviously made their escape by air. But the wounded Accident left a fairly easy trail—of blood, smells, footprints, and sign—which Beauty and Josh tracked east from the farm for many miles, into a woodsy marshland.
There the trail turned south.
Tracking became a little more difficult through the marshy scrub, but Josh had a good eye, and Beauty an equine sense of smell. So they kept up a steady pace all morning; silent, side by side, senses alert. When their shadows were short they paused by the rim of a pond, to rest and to eat.
“He is paralleling the coast,” said Beauty, flaring his nostrils into the wind. “Still south.”
Josh lay on his belly and sipped from the pool, “He’s
slowing, though.”
Beauty nodded, shook his mane back and forth, pawed the ground.
Joshua stood up. “Be still, Beauty. Thoughtful rest is the hunter’s friend.”
Beauty snorted. “Spoken like a Scribe.” He stood at the edge of the cool water and watched his reflection dance in the ripples that still ran from the spot where Joshua’s thirsty lips had touched. Beauty scorned the Human religion of Scribery. It elevated unreal, meaningless scratches to something they were not, turned them into powerful tokens. It promoted false patience, false hope, false priority. Beauty shrugged: it was but one more Human enterprise that remained cryptic to him.
Josh put his hand on his friend’s back. “We’ll find our people.”
Beauty turned his head, and his lips thinned in half-smile. “It is good to hunt with you again.” He gave all his words equal weight, and his meaning was many-layered, alluding to much that had passed between them. First, it referred to the fact that .he was born to the hunt, had always hunted, had missed the hunt these past few years on his farm. It referred also to ten years earlier, when he and Josh had hunted together all the time, when they together supported an extended family of friends and relatives on their game. It referred to the great Race War that had pitted Humans against all the other species, had divided Beauty and Joshua; had even forced them to hunt each other. Until Beauty was wounded by a Human prince, and Joshua hid him in the woods and nursed him back to health, with Rose’s help.
When the War ended, national boundaries were gone, and Kings and Popes went on waging their own personal wars here and there for land and power; but Beauty put down his bow and swore to be farmer the rest of his days, and give part of his crop always to what was left of Joshua’s family.
So now he meant to tell Josh that it was good to hunt again, good to hunt with Josh again, good to hunt with Josh again, good to hunt with Josh again.
Josh understood and said so with his face.
A nearby orange tree provided the two hunters with a meal of the sugar-heavy fruit.
