by James Kahn
“No one following us now,” answered Josh. He would have said more, but stopped to anticipate a yawn.
“It wouldn’t hurt to rest here a few minutes anyway,” Jasmine commented. “We haven’t stopped all day.”
“Fine,” jibed Beauty. “Maybe he can write a book.”
Josh finished his mark, then turned to Jasmine. “There was really a time when everyone could read and write?” he asked in wonder.
“All Humans,” she nodded. “But then, years before the Coming of Ice, people got so angry at all the destruction caused by the intellectuals, there was a huge backlash. Books were burned, universities bombed. Got so nobody trusted anybody who could read. By the time the Ice came, everything was so fragmented and chaotic already—well, that was just the last straw. People even blamed the Ice on books.”
“Books have always been blamed for what’s wrong in the world,” Josh nodded. “The power of words has always been feared.”
Jasmine shook her head. “Words are neither more nor less powerful than those who write them, Joshua.”
“But the closer we get to the First Word …” he began.
“No such word will ever be found,” she declared. “But it will be deduced,” he assured her, “extrapolated backward from all the words that—”
“No, Joshua, words have none of the magic powers that your priests ascribe to them. There are no words anyone could write that could make the Ice come or go, make the Accidents disappear …”
“But it was words in secret codes that made the Accidents appear in the first place—so you said.”
“Not the words; only the force the words described. And it was those forces against which all the other creatures rebelled—though they didn’t exactly understand the forces, so they—like you—chose to think it was the words themselves. That’s when reading was outlawed. And that’s when Scribery emerged.” “When?” Josh asked tentatively. He wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.
“Oh, maybe fifty years Before the Ice. After the Clone Wars. I’ll tell you about those some other time. But during the Clone Wars, all the Humans left on earth—except the children—were killed by the other species. Every adult Human. The children were spared because the animals—well, because animals don’t fear children, I suppose. Reading and writing, were banned, then—as a Human scourge. But that didn’t last long. The children began to grow up, and sure enough, found some books their parents had hidden. Some of them could read, and you know what a child does if something is not allowed. So a secret society formed around young Humans who could read. They taught others and the cult grew.”
Somewhere outside, lightning whipped the sky, muted as if seen through closed eyes down in the forest. A moment later, though, thunder shook the ground, and a moment after that, the hypnotic patter of heavy rain could be heard scratching the forest roof. Jasmine continued.
“Some Humans, of course, believed what their animal friends told them—that Scribery was evil. For others, though, the Word was strong. They didn’t know much history—only random facts from fragments of old books—but what they didn’t know, they made up. From half-remembered stories, from daydreams and nightmares, from hopes and fears. The same way Humans have always made things up. That was the inception of Scribery as a religion—a mythological belief system created by rebellious orphans.”
To Jasmine’s surprise, Josh only smiled. “Your story isn’t directed at all to the power of words, then. Only to the science of reading and writing as you knew it—before the ascent of Scribery. For all you know, the concepts gleaned by the first Scribes, a hundred and fifty years ago—children, though they may have been—were far more advanced than any of the writings of your age on which they were based.” When speaking of Scribery, Josh often talked like a book. “Scribes may have discovered many more powers to words than you ever knew. For all you know the magic of the latter-day Scribes may have caused the Coming of Ice.” Again, he smiled. “If our religion is indeed so young, the more power to it. But I suspect its seeds are much older, and its secrets just more tightly kept during earlier centuries.”
Jasmine’s eyes twinkled at her young friend’s combined acceptance of her history and adherence to his own beliefs. “Joshua, hunter and Scribe, I bow to your faith in the magic of the Word. I only pray you not to let it cloud your judgment in matters of greater moment than debating the Coming of Ice.”
Beauty raised his eyebrows, remotely interested. “Pray, what did cause the Coming of Ice?” It was obvious he’d always subscribed to the Book theory, without ever really having given it much thought.
Jasmine smiled. “Don’t know, exactly. Started with the Great Quake, you know, that was the big one that dropped so much of the continental shelf. But that’s not to say the quake caused the Ice. It’s just an Ice Age, that’s all, it’s just something that happens every few hundred thousand years. Glaciers, they used to be called. The ice will keep coming down farther south for a while, then it’ll all go back up to the pole where it belongs.”
A few raindrops finally managed to wind through the mat of leaves that ceilinged the forest. They dropped, one by one on the yellow-mulch ground, plop, plop, as if the trees were actually crying.
Josh sat down, unexpectedly tired.
“You need to rest longer, Joshua?” asked Jasmine, her tone one of concern.
“No, no, I’ll be fine …”
Beauty was impatient to go, partly to resume the hunt, partly to be free of these woods, whose confines frightened him unreasonably.
“Come, you can sleep on my back, little pony,” he said affectionately, covering his own ill feelings.
Josh bridled at the implied affront to his stamina. “I’m fine now, I can walk myself, my fine furry …” he began, standing up. But as soon as he stood, he sat down again, hard.
Jasmine and Beauty ran over to him. “What is it, Josh, are you all right?”
“Fine, I’m fine …” he said, or at least he thought he said. In fact, he hadn’t said anything at all, he was unconscious to the world. And to Josh, for the third time, a strange thing happened. He slipped, under a crushing pressure of sleep, into an embryonic blackness, where a dark wind pulled him toward a now unmistakably growing pulse of primally intense light, through the countless measure of the void.
“Don’t go,” whispered Dicey. Fear contorted her face.
“I’m here, I’m not going anywhere,” Rose reassured. She’d just turned to pick a potato off the ground for supper. In her arms she continued rocking Ollie, resting now, still mute from the ordeal.
“Just don’t leave me alone,” Dicey reiterated more softly.
Not that either of them could go anywhere. They were still tied at the ankles, surrounded by the thirty-four other Human hostages huddling against the cold rain. Ten yards away, under the shelter of a large, acutely angled cement slab—a crumbled wall from a crumbled era—stood the escort guard: Bal, Uli, Scree, three Accidents, and a female Vampire named Ena. Vampires didn’t like being so physically close to Accidents, because of the odor, and just because; but even more than that, Vampires detested rain, and since this was the only shelter within eyeshot, they swallowed their hubris to wait out the storm.
Ten yards away, the Humans sat; soaking, shivering under the downpour. Five already had died on the forced march—from sickness, fatigue, hunger, blood loss. Those who died were given to the Accidents. Those left were of hardier stock. But the trek wasn’t over.
Dicey pulled closer to Rose, for warmth and comfort. The young girl’s neck was black and blue, her skin ashen, red. Rose extended her arms, brought the girl in, held both children tightly, sharing body heat. She took a bite of the wet, raw potato and passed it to Dicey. The young girl looked at it bleakly and began to cry. Rose stroked her dripping hair.
“There, there,” murmured Rose, “this won’t last forever. We’ll get wherever it is they’re taking us, and we’ll be warm and dry and fed and rested, and Joshua will find us. And my Beauty.”
; Dicey bit into the hard sustenance and chewed without conviction. “If I knew a strong enough word, it would free us,” she said. “Josh would know how to write it.”
“They’ll come armed with more than words, when they come,” Rose said in monotone. She didn’t think much of the power of words against the likes of Vampires and Accidents.
“They won’t need more, if they have the right words. Some words can make walls fall down, and some can burn flesh and some can make boats fly and some can make ten thousand people follow you. Just by reading the written word. Some people, you know, think you have to find powerful words, that have already been written. But Josh thinks—I think—you can calculate what a powerful word must have been, just by knowing all the words that came from it. If you were smart enough, you could even come to the First Word that way.” Her face fell, then, into a jumble of lost directions. “If I only knew the right words.” She began printing ancient powerful words in the dirt: Abbacadabba. Omen Sesame. A-OK. Heil Hitler.
Rose stopped chewing the mouthful of potato she’d been working on, put her mouth down on Ollie’s thin, blue lips, and force-fed him the spit-and-starch mulch. The little boy hardly stirred; but managed to keep down most of the pap. Rose turned back to Dicey. “If there is such a word, Joshua will write it,” she assured the frail girl.
“I’m afraid, though,” Dicey admitted. “The one they call Bal—he can read.”
Rose smiled sympathetically. “Joshua can read better, I have no doubt. Now. Turn this way, let me try to read your eyes again.” She was as disturbed by her inability to see into Dicey’s eyes as by anything else. But she never lost hope. Her will was strong and she would live. Help was everywhere. Josh and Beauty would come. The water from the sky gave her strength. And wasn’t there even a funny little Cat in the night who’d almost gnawed through her bonds? No, nothing was lost: this was but part of the world.
Across the muddy flat, Bal stared at the sky. “Bloodless rain.” he swore.
Ena, the woman Vampire, sharpened her nails on the rock behind them. “I’m bored,” she whined.
Bal looked at her blankly, then exposed his neck in her direction. A small Vampire joke.
Uli looked at Bal. “I like not this waiting, Sire Bal. Jarl’s troops are not standing still, I warrant.”
“Ice take Jarl’s troops,” hissed Bal. “We’re no longer in their lands, they’ve no reason to follow further. Besides, the rain will stop soon.” Bal hated rain more than most. The Griffin, Scree, suddenly flapped its wings, left the wind-break, and made a few low passes over the cowering Humans, just to frighten them for his own entertainment. Ena laughed. One of the Humans, a shirtless, muscular man, broke from the pack and started running, desperately. He was on a ten-foot tether, though, which caught him short. He fell hard on his face, and lay where he fell. He was cut above the eye. The blood streaked over his forehead as the rain poured down upon him.
Ena saw the blood.
Her nostrils flared, her nipples hardened, her wings spread. With a single swoop she was on him: on the ground, over him, atop him, straddling him, her huge leather wings covering them both like a slick brown umbrella.
Everyone watched—the Humans, in horror; the Accidents greedily anticipating the remains, if the victim died. Uli salivated. “I could use a little of that,” he said under his breath.
Bal barked out, “What did I tell you about killing the goods!”
Ena pulled in her wings, pulled her mouth off the man’s neck; sated. He was alive, but unconscious. The Accidents grumbled. The man’s neck kept oozing blood slowly into the mire. Ena continued to lay on top of him, rubbing her bare breasts and hips into his back and buttocks, lapping at his throat, growling, puffing her wings, fondling his mud-slippery chest.
“No manners whatsoever,” muttered Uli, licking his lips.
Bal did not like to see resentment in his ranks. “Go on, take some nourishment for yourself, Sire Uli. We’ll be here yet another hour. Not too much, mind.”
Uli prided himself on his restraint, though, especially when he could demonstrate this trait to his superiors. “In a bit, perhaps,” he said, yawning.
Bal had no one to impress, however; and his blood was up.
He snapped his fingers once.
Dicey’s head shot up like a marionette on a string. She let out a small gasp. Her eyes were glazed, scared, red.
“What is it?” asked Rose, alarmed. “What’s the matter?”
“He w-wants me,” she stammered. Her teeth were chattering.
“How do you know?” Rose demanded. Three times, now, the beast had had the young bride.
“He called. He’s waiting now.” She looked achingly at Rose. “Help me,” she whispered.
Rose stared deeply into her young friend’s eyes. As before, she could read nothing. Black as wells into the earth. She held Dicey fast. “I’ll keep you here. They’ll have to tear you from me.”
Dicey embraced Rose for a few moments, then pushed herself away. She stood up, her face a complex mixture of resignation, loathing; Rose could not tell what else those eyes had seen, would see.
“Well,” Dicey spoke, almost calmly, “at least it gets me in out of the rain …”
“Dicey …” Rose held out her hand.
Dicey turned away. “And maybe he’ll read to me again …”
She sat hunched over on the soft side of a shallow grade. The rain drenched her motionless body, matting the black fur, running in gushes and rivulets down her flanks, her head, into her eyes. She looked like the scrawniest, saddest cat ever invented. She watched.
Through the foggy shower she observed the distant creatures: a large group huddled in the rain; a smaller group protected by a sloping rock face.
She’d been following them half the night and most of the day. Far enough to be invisible to them; close enough for her to see. When they stopped to eat, she stopped to eat. When they stopped in the rain, she got soaked, chilled.
She wasn’t thinking of the water, though; her eyes never blinked. She watched. The storm, she knew, would wash away all trail, all scent; and she alone would be able to follow. And only if she watched.
She’d watched since the moment of the Human scream. She’d run back into the camp to find that the Accident who’d been chasing her had returned to tear one of the Humans in half. Not the girl-Human with the blood-smell, and not her friend. But another Human in the same group. There was a great hubbub after that, yelling and scurrying and murmuring and dithering and various other strange behaviors common to larger animals. Then they split into several groups, and all broke camp—right then, in the middle of the night. But who could understand Vampires? Who would even want to?
They’d all separated, then, and Isis had followed this group, the one with the girl-Human she’d tried to free. Three Vampires, three Accidents, a Griffin, and many Humans. All day she’d stalked them. They would never spot her, of course, she was too stealthy for that. The question was how to snatch the ones she wanted without getting caught. She narrowed her eyes into slits, and imagined herself carrying the coveted Humans in her teeth all the way back to her beloved Joshua, to drop them at his feet: a present. How he would love her then! Then she would be appreciated. He would scratch the special spot between her ears until she could no longer stand; and then she would fall, helpless, against his foot, and her eyes would close, and …
She opened her eyes. She must keep them open now. To watch.
Josh opened his eyes. Above him Jasmine’s face loomed, her fingers touching the pulse in his wrist. “What happened?” he said. Beauty’s face came into view. “You passed out again. We have been pushing you too hard.” The Centaur looked deeply worried. “We can rest here a while. The devils will not escape us. You lost more blood than we thought.”
Joshua shook his head. “No. No. This was different. This wasn’t like blacking out from the bleeding. This was … different.”
Beauty assumed Josh was minimizing so he could continue the hunt.
“No,” he shook his head knowingly, “we will stay …”
“No, I’m telling you. This is something else. It’s … it’s happened before.”
Beauty shook his head; but Jasmine, whose brows had been knitted in perplexity, suddenly pricked her ears. “Wait, Beauty, let him speak. There was something strange in this. If it had just been hemorrhage, his pulse would have been rapid. But his pulse—I’ve been feeling it the whole time since he went down, and it’s … undecipherable. First it was slow—deadly slow, down to twenty beats a minute. Then suddenly up to two hundred. Strong, then weak. Regular, then irregular. Now it’s completely normal, sixty a minute and strong.”
Josh sat up. Beauty looked doubly concerned now. “It’s these spells,” began Joshua. “I’ve been getting them for a week or so. I feel sleepy, like I’ve been drugged. Then it all goes black, except for this bright light. This light … like a magnet. Then I wake up.” He looked to Jasmine for an answer.
She examined him briefly but completely. “Headaches?” she asked him. “Odd smells? Nausea? Dizziness? Double vision?”
He shook his head No to everything. “I’m not certain,” she said, stroking her cheek. Then her mood lightening, she helped him to his feet. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
Beauty didn’t like it, and said so. Outside, the thunder echoed his sentiments.
“Nothing else to do,” Jasmine shrugged. She really wished he could understand that stance. He only grumbled. She said no more, though her thoughts were darkly speculative. These spells of which Josh spoke had the distinct flavor of an organic brain syndrome of some variety. Epilepsy seemed a likely candidate. Tumor, possibly. Narcolepsy could not be ruled out. In any case, she reminded herself—as she’d just pointed out to Beauty—there was nothing to be done but wait and see. Sometimes, unfortunately, that was the hardest thing to do.
So off they went. The trail was easy to follow, though the farther into the wood they went, the darker it got. Bear tracks split off at various points, which Beauty found disconcerting. He rose up from studying one set of prints closely, and hit his head on a low-hanging bough. It reopened the gash he’d sustained at the brothel, and a trickle of blood flowed slowly down his face.
