Earth and Air (15 page)

Daybreak found him well into the desert, where no sane man travels much after sunrise, but he trudged on for as long as he could bear to, and then found a rock on a north-facing slope with a thin strip of shade from which he could watch back the way he had come. By now the slave-master's sandals were falling apart. It was difficult to sleep for anxiety, heat, thirst and discomfort, so he spent part of the day taking the ruined sandals apart and using the pieces to adjust and reinforce the next pair.

He walked all that night, hurrying, because even with the stars to guide him and the memorised list of landmarks from the manual, he knew he might finish the stage only in the rough vicinity of the water hole, and then would need daylight to find it. As dawn broke he came to three separate sets of animal tracks converging in the same direction. He walked on until he came to harder ground and turned aside in the direction that the animal prints had taken, along a line that should intersect with them. Ten minutes later he was kneeling by a scummy pool in a hollow.

First he poured a libation to Mercury, then drank sparingly and filled his waterskin. He drank again, twice, before heading off, still aside from his route and still on hard ground, and didn't start searching for shade until he was well clear of the pool.

This time he slept well. In the late afternoon he woke and returned to the pool, where he tied a large loop with a slipknot into his toughest cord, laid it out along the water's edge, and led the loose end up to the rim of the hollow, and hid. In the evening small animals came to the pool to drink, but they were very quick and wary, and seemed able to smell where he had been. They sniffed around the noose and went elsewhere.

He had two long nights' journey to the next water, so couldn't afford to watch too long. In the late dusk he filled his skin with what he could carry, and his stomach also, and set out. By next morning his sandals were again in ruins, so he spent some of the day cobbling a last pair together, and set out again in the dusk. His food was by now almost gone, so while he trudged on he tried to devise more effective animal traps in his mind.

This place, he hoped, would be easier to find. There was a sort of notch in a range of hills, the outlines clearly described. His way led through the notch, on the left flank of which water oozed down a rock. It turned out to be exactly so. He praised Mercury, and poured a second libation for the soul of the long-dead traveller who had written the manual. The water was sweet and clean, but the only sign that any animals came there was a scattering of bird droppings. He saw no nests and heard no cries. Nevertheless he tried laying out nooses for them, but none came all day.

He moved on that evening, knowing that if he didn't find food at the next water place, or sooner—it was another two nights' journey—he wasn't going to make it through the desert. It amused his sardonic turn of mind to think that this was the supposedly demon-guarded pool. It had been made by men, ages before, and had what was apparently a small temple beside it. The demon might be the statue of some forgotten god. Perhaps the priests who had served it had demanded a human sacrifice, which would help to explain the sudden little absurdity in the otherwise reasonable and accurate route details. Well, if it didn't provide him with something to eat, he thought, the demon would get its payment of a life.

He reached the water on the verge of delirium. By the second midnight his shoes had fallen apart. His feet were already blistered, and now slowed him to a hobble. He was weak for lack of food. If the last section of his route hadn't lain along a valley, delaying the apparent sunrise, he would never have made it. Even so, by the time he found the place the landscape was wavering before his eyes, what had begun as a plea to Mercury would end up in fragments of nursery rhyme, and the pitiless sun had become one enduring blow against his flank and shoulder, to send him reeling, then lie among the rocks, and die.

The valley floor dipped suddenly. He stood at the rim of a shallow slope and gazed down. There was the pool, a stone-rimmed circle with steps leading to the water. Beside it, exactly as described, stood a little roofless temple, a flagged paving from which rose a dozen squat, barbaric pillars. No demon, of course, but, confirming his conjecture, the headless image of some large winged quadruped—ludicrous anatomy—that had fallen opposite the steps, lay between the temple and the pool.

Cautious as ever, despite his desperate need, he crawled down the slope rather than risk a fall, and on down the steps to drink. The lowest steps were in the shade, so having drunk as much as was safe, and poured his libation, he turned and sat with his bleeding feet in the water. From down here he could see nothing but the excellent masonry of the wall, vast blocks fitted so well that there was nowhere he could have driven a knife between them. Above that the unornamented rim of the pool. Above that the intense harsh blueness of the sky. And, between the rim and the sky, a single large eye, watching him.

A single eye, because the thing was watching him sideways, bird-fashion, though the eye was much too large for that of any bird—indeed of any creature that he knew. He could now see the beginnings of the curve of an immense, hooked beak, and a fringe of small feathers, though the scalp seemed bald. Surely, even half-delirious, he would have noticed that head on the fallen statue. No, the thing had seemed headless, but clearly a mammal, with the only plumage on the wing, the rest of the body the same colour as the sandstone desert rocks, from which he had assumed it to be carved. The head must have been tucked away out of sight, bird-fashion again.

He was startled, but not for the moment terrified, in fact not much more than wary. When the creature rose and came for him, then would be the time for terror. But the only move it made was to lay its head back down somewhere out of sight. The movement didn't look like that of a hunter, withdrawing for a stealthy approach, more like that of an exhausted animal, momentarily interested in the arrival of another creature, but then deciding that the intruder was no threat and returning to its rest.

Varro drank again and half filled his skin, just in case, then rose and climbed the steps, watching over his shoulder as the creature came into view. It was indeed huge, not as big as an elephant, but half again the size of any ox he had ever seen. Apart from the scalp, the neck was feathered as far as the shoulders, and the body beyond that furred, both a rusty yellow-brown, the colour of the desert. A vast wing, desert coloured too but barred light and dark, lay along its flank.

It seemed to have lost interest in him and made no move as on wincing feet he crept round the pool and climbed the temple steps and turned. Seeing it from above he recognised at once what the thing was. The dark tuft at the end of the almost naked tail was the giveaway. A gryphon. The body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Ridiculous. Anatomically impossible. There, in front of him.

Delirium? How does a man prove to himself that he isn't mad, when the very proof may be merely part of the madness? His feet, so much more conscious of their soreness now that they had been cosseted a little? In a futile attempt to validate the proof Varro sat down on the steps and inspected them. Something had carved a half-inch gash into the ball of his left foot. Further back, what had begun as a blister was now raw flesh. There was a matching, but larger, sore on his right foot, as well as a dozen minor cracks and abrasions either side. Well bandaged, and with good shoes, they might be fit to walk on in a week. Academic. He would be dead of starvation well before that.

The gryphon sighed. He looked up and saw the vast flanks still collapsing from the breath. Otherwise the creature hadn't stirred. He returned to his feet.

He was painfully picking grit out of one of the cracks with the butt of a needle when the gryphon sighed again. This time Varro listened, and heard in the indrawn breath before the sigh, a low, half-liquid rattling sound, that made the import of the sigh itself instantly clear. The monster was sick.

Dying?

He rose and hobbled round to where he could see the thing sideways on. The head lifted and for a moment the round eye—darker than gold, the colour of sunset—gazed at him. There was death in that eye. The head fell back, indifferent.

Death. “The demon of the well demands a death.” This time it would have two, its own, and Varro's.

A delirium notion wandered into his mind.
But it only needs one. Why mine?
He giggled, and pulled himself together. There was meat on that carcass, but he couldn't wait for it to die. He must kill it. How?

As Varro studied the huge animal in this fresh light it sighed again, and this time slowly stretched a foreleg. The claws were already extended, but they seemed to stretch further with the movement. Each was as long as Varro's middle finger, but twice as thick at the base and curving to a savage point. Even a dying blow from such a weapon would be lethal. He would need to come at the creature from behind its back.

It was lying on its left side, so the heart was presumably out of reach. Slit its throat? The dense plumage of the neck prevented a quick, clean strike. But once, on a crossing of the Alps, Varro had watched the train captain deal with a pony that caught its leg in a cranny and broke it. The pony's load had been precious and fragile. The pony, trapped half upright, but threshing around in agony, would in another couple of seconds have dragged itself free and fallen, but the train master had darted in, gripped the load with his left hand, and with his right driven a blade no longer than Varro's hilt-deep into the soft strip between the collarbone and the neck, then taken the weight of the load while a pulsing jet of blood arched clean across the track. With decreasing struggles the pony had collapsed, and before long died.

Varro returned to the temple and honed his knife point on one of the steps. Though the appearance of intelligence in animals can be very deceptive, especially in birds (how bright, really, is a lark?), there was something about the creature's patient dying that made Varro feel that it might understand what he was up to, and why. But the only move it made as he went round and crouched behind the shoulders was to raise its head and watch him again. He reached out, testing, tensed to snatch himself away if the fierce beak darted to attack, but the creature continued to watch him steadily as he shifted to choose the spot at which to strike. The train master had clearly known the exact run of a large artery in the pony's neck. Varro had almost two handspans to choose from, and could only guess.

As his hand poised for the blow the monster laid its head back on the paving and stretched its neck a little, much as a brave man might, making things easier for the surgeon.

“Mercury, God,” Varro whispered, “guide this hand.”

Summoning his last strength, he plunged the knife in at a slight angle, forced the hilt forward to widen the inward cut, then flung himself back as the monster's body convulsed, once. He rose and stood, gasping. Instead of a jet, a pulsing gush of blood was welling from the wound, so rapidly that by the time Varro looked it had begun to spread across the paving, draining towards the pool. The colour seemed no different from that of his own blood, or any other animal he knew of. He went and sat on the steps, watching the life fade out of that sunset eye.

He found he was shuddering, partly from exhaustion and the aftershock of violent and dangerous action, but also from the knowledge (though not the understanding) of what he had done. Though both had seemed necessities, this was something wholly different from the killing of Prince Fo's slavemaster. The world had been well rid of such a man. The gryphon . . . there was no code by which he could value the gryphon's life against his own. Good or ill, he knew he had done something portentous. What would the gods feel? Mercury had many responsibilities, being god, along with travellers, of science, commerce and healing, tricksters, vagabonds and thieves, and all merry fellows. He seemed to have answered Varro's prayer and guided his blade point to the artery, which in turn seemed to suggest that he had no particular fondness for gryphons, but how could Varro know which of the captious deities might feel otherwise?

He went down to the pool again and poured a libation to the unknown god before he drank. Already the water tasted of blood. There was no point yet in washing. He had gorier work to do, but he needed to rest, so waited until as much of the blood as was going to had drained from the carcass. Even then he took the precaution of stripping naked before he started his butchery.

Skinning a gryphon proved little different from skinning a horse or bullock—all part of his apprenticeship. He did it systematically, as if sparing the leather that no one would ever have a use for. When he had loosed a flap large enough to fold back he cut out the huge right lung and exposed the heart. He cut that out and folded the flap of hide back over the flesh. Exhausted again by now he carried the heart up into the shade of one of the temple pillars, where he sliced small pieces off it and chewed them slowly, feeling the strength flow back through his body. By the time he had eaten enough the sun was almost overhead and the first vultures had arrived.

He dragged the loose lung a little way up the slope to distract them and then drove them away from the main carcass with rocks. Splashing himself often with water from his skin he toiled on, first constructing a meat cache out of fallen masonry, storing the liver in it, and then cutting out the rest of the innards and hauling them off for the birds. Next he cut and cached as much meat as he could eat in a fortnight, pulled the hide back over what remained and weighted it with boulders, and at last went and bathed in the now reeking pool. The sun had dried him by the time he returned to the temple.

Staggering and hazed with tiredness he tied cords between three pillars, draped his stolen cloak across them and lay down in its triangle of shade. The harsh cries of the vultures threaded through his dreams, which were of the gryphon still alive, but with half its hide stripped from its flank. As it snarled and slashed at a ring of prancing scavengers an outer ring of monsters—centaur, sphinx, basilisk, hydra, gorgon—watched lamenting. Mercury presided dry-eyed with a god's half smile.

It was dusk when Varro woke. The gryphon's hide had proved too tough for the vultures, but they had pecked out the great sunset eye.

There was a good moon, so he continued to dismember the gryphon far into the night, dragging most of the meat away for the vultures, and again next morning until the heat became intolerable. He rested out the worst of it and worked methodically on, careful not to break his knife, impatient with a joint. By late afternoon he had removed enough of the meat and bones to be able to heave the remains of the carcass over, and by nightfall he had the hide free, and almost whole, apart from the two large holes he had cut in order to be able to drag it over the wings. This had been his main aim. With it he could create a bigger and denser area of shade than was possible with the cloak and cloth. He dragged it up to the temple and laid it out, pelt upward, between the pillars. It was larger than he needed. There would be enough left over for him to add a hammock to his plans. He continued to work by moonlight, trimming rawhide thongs from its edges, until he was exhausted, at which point he folded the pelt in on itself several times and slept on it in more comfort than he had done since they had taken him to the slave-market. He did not dream at all.