Fish Tails (22 page)

Willum's question was answered by a shout/cry/yell, something-­or-­other kind of furious sound issuing from the tunnel. As Abasio had feared, the cry was one of hunger along with the anger/frustration. He did not trust himself to speak. He merely held up two fingers. When his breathing slowed, he said, “Willum, if you don't keep your mouth shut, they'll probably follow the sound here. I'm going to give you to them. They can eat you first!”

Turning to Xulai, he murmured, “The livestock in those fields wouldn't be there if those creatures hunted in here. They evidently can't get through there.”

Xulai, forcing herself to stop shaking, had spread her cloak along one side of the wagon and fastened it there to dry. Now she took Abasio's to the other side while Abasio sat on the wagon step to strip off his outer clothes and boots. Barefoot, cursing, he stepped into the wagon, dried himself, put on dry underclothes and trousers, and came out to take towels and brushes to the horses. They were still shivering, only partly from being soaked with very cold water, a state that was not improved by Abasio's continuous, fluent, polysyllabic damnation of map makers who'd had the stupidity, malfeasance, and egregious unprofessionalism not to bother indicating either this barrier or the fact that there were giants on the prowl. There was a taxable city beyond this point, he muttered. The map had been provided by the tax-­hogs
. They had to have been here! They had to have seen this road!
Were tax collectors predation-­proof? There was no excuse for it! He choked, gargled, stopped to clear his throat and breathe. Breathing felt . . . pleasant. He bit his tongue and went on breathing.

Certainly this valley gave no evidence of predation. The trees were alive with birdsong. River and road wound peacefully down toward them from the east, the road swerving back and forth in languid S's as it paralleled the north side of the river's meanders.

Abasio held out his hands. They were still trembling. Willum was pouring questions from an uncountable store, but for the moment he was not yelling them. Of course, he hadn't seen giants. Abasio wished he hadn't seen them either. He was not allowed to forget, for Xulai asked, “What did they look like?”

“All I could see were faces.”

“And?”

Abasio shook himself like a dog. “I need a dry shirt.”

Xulai busied herself finding a dry shirt, socks, and shoes for Abasio; she had already put dry blankets around the babies. Though it was clear to everyone who had been around the children for any length of time that they did not feel cold as Xulai and Abasio did, she was unable to convince herself the babies were not in frequent and perpetual need of dry blankets
.
Xulai would put blankets on fish, so Willum said. Abasio thought Willum was probably right. She would; and without asking them first, either.

He stopped at the wagon step to pick up his boots and turn them over to drain. He had only the one pair. He did have two pairs of shoes, however. Which he had told Xulai he didn't need to bring. Which she had insisted he bring. He wondered, briefly, where he might find a boot maker. Considering . . . everything, he really needed a spare pair.

“Now tell us what you saw,” said Xulai, handing him a dry shirt.

He breathed some more. It took a while before his throat would open. “I saw two faces, part of one shoulder, one hand and lower arm. I should say each eye was about the size of my hand. The one . . . the one that was lying in the road had his mouth slightly open. The teeth were a lot wider than . . . those marks on the bone Willum found: eyebrows, hair, dark. Skin and hair dirty or dark or both. No clothes, of course. That is, I didn't see any. The ones I used to know wore clothes. I think. I don't remember their being naa . . .” He choked, unable to force the word out.

“Abasio. Shhh. Breathe.”

“I
am
breathing.
They were breathing.
They had very wide noses. Possibly they hunt by smell. Couldn't see the ears, but I'm quite sure they had located us by sound.”

“Oh, wow,” said Willum.

Xulai handed him dry socks and gave him time to get them on.

He said, his voice grating, “If we'd fiddled around just a few moments more outside that notch, they'd have had us, horses and all. And the babies. And the sea-­eggs.”

“But they're not in here! They can't get in here,” cried Willum.

“I hope that's true, yes
. And if you, Willum, hadn't spent the last hours on the way here making as much racket as you possibly could, they might not have found us in the first place
.”

“You mean I brought 'em,” said Willum, eyes wide. “I didn't mean ta—­”

“Willum, you never mean ta. I'm not angry at you
yet.
However, it is not necessary for you to make all possible noise at every possible occasion. When there are evil things out in the world, smart animals are quiet. You do not hear mice making echoes in the kitchen when the cat is there.” He heard his own voice, loud and trembling with . . . what? Just plain fear was what.

Willum actually seemed to be listening. Abasio turned away and took a deep breath to calm himself. From behind him Willum crowed at the top of his lungs, “It's a room, Abasio!”

Abasio turned, glaring. Willum went on loudly, “Did'ja notice we're in a room! Doesn't have a roof, but it's a room. Like for giants, Abasio. The ones you saw. You think they'll keep tryin' to come in here?”

Abasio grabbed him and shook him, hard. “Well, now they can hear you yelling again, so my bet is they'll sure try, won't they? They're hungry, Willum. And
you are food.
Maybe if I let them have you, they'll leave the rest of us alone. At least they won't be able to find us so easily!”

“Y'mean they're still out there?” Willum paled. “I thought we got away!” He looked puzzled. “Ya mean—­I shouldn't yell, huh?”

Xulai shook her head at Abasio, took Willum by the shoulder, and escorted him into the wagon, where Abasio heard her voice raised. Willum had a very thick skin. It might be necessary to get through his hide with something like a bullwhip. It might be necessary to cut through that skin with a chisel first, then use the bullwhip! Though, come to think of it, Xulai's voice could flay one almost like a whip when sufficiently aroused. She did sound aroused.
Go to it, Xulai!
He sat down on a convenient stump and tried not to think of anything. Not giants. Not Willum. Not Willum's skin . . . ears . . . hearing . . . he didn't listen.

Or,
he thought to himself in a moment of revelation as he recalled the time they had spent in and near Gravysuck, the conversations he had overheard,
it was possible that Willum had never learned to listen because very little if anything had ever been said to him or within his hearing that required listening to
.

Xulai came to the wagon door and handed Abasio his shoes. Kim was standing next to Socky, both of them shivering. She cried, “Kim, you're freezing! Come in and get yourself changed. I put a towel and dry clothes out for you.” Kim and Socky carried only what would be needed during the day; everything else traveled with the wagon.

Abasio put on his shoes and forced himself to examine the surroundings. The great upheaval that had created the northern wall behind them had created the eastern wall as well. They were now enclosed on north and east by cliffs of ruddy stone. That northeast corner of the space did have, as Willum had suggested, the vertical walls and enclosed feeling of a room—­if one could accept sky as a ceiling. The south side of the valley was all mountains, rising rather steeply and thickly forested. They were not enclosed on the west. The wall went on west, the mountains went on a little south of west, the area gradually widening the farther one looked. The enclosed space was triangular, the tip of the triangle chopped off by the eastern wall, which was not complete. It had a gap at its southern end where the road and the river came through. Through that gap they would come to Findem Pass.

Xulai came out of the wagon carrying cups and a pitcher. She was followed by Willum, a Willum who was neither shouting nor running anywhere, who did, indeed, seem rather thoughtful as he moved away down the road. Abasio gave her a questioning look.

She handed a cup of hot tea to Abasio. When Willum was out of earshot, she cleared her throat, with only limited success. She still sounded choked as she murmured, “Two things, Abasio. When I heard them coming, the . . . the giants, I reached for a weapon, that is, for
ul xaolat
. I started to ask it to . . . to kill those things. Then I remembered Precious Wind insisting that before I did anything irrevocable, I ask the device for possible . . . side effects. So I did, and it said don't drop those bodies out there or everyone within several days' travel would die along with them. It didn't say why.”

“Will it tell you why?”

“Probably. When I stop shaking enough to sit down and read it. Second thing: Willum. He's a liability, Abasio. He's a risk to our . . . duty, our quest. We may have to send him back. I've pointed out as forcibly as possible that we cannot possibly take a mere farm boy with us. I told him that farm boys don't have to think, because they just do the same things year after year, and so long as they get the chores done the way they've always been done, nobody cares if they spend the rest of their time yelling and pounding on things. I explained that traveling through strange territory is not like that, and his mother should have thought of that before she told him to go with us, unless maybe she just wanted to get rid of him and his noise. Traveling is always dangerous in one way or another, and if Willum cannot change from a farm boy into a traveling boy VERY quickly, when we get to Saltgosh we'll make arrangements to send him back to Gravysuck.”

Abasio nodded. “Well, when he came out he looked . . . dare I say ‘thoughtful'?”

“It's barely possible I got through to him. Maybe we can think of some other image he could work toward, you know, the adventurer or swashbuckler. Problem is, there are no images in these farm communities that would be helpful to us. I've been trying to think of stories he might know that have intrepid heroes he might want to emulate, and I can't come up with one. I don't know. Something has to get through to him, nothing seems to faze him, and he just doesn't listen! Ever!”

“Not unless it's something he's curious about,” muttered Abasio. “Then he listens. Xulai, I had one of my rare fits of revelation a moment or so ago. Do you remember anyone in Gravysuck saying anything that
you
thought was important enough to listen to? I'm not including Bertram, obviously, but I'm wondering if Willum doesn't listen because nobody in that village listens. They make noises at one another, like chickens clucking, a generalized flock noise to assure the flock everybody's there, but I never heard anyone saying anything worth remembering. Lorp was the only thing they argued about, and those weren't real arguments, they were just ‘shut up about Lorp' retorts.”

Xulai's eyebrows went up. “Chicken talk!” She turned, staring into nothing, considering. “Like hive noise, with bees. Just a comforting cackle that lets you know you're among known ­people. You might be right! Bertram was different, of course, but then he reads books. Willum may just let words flow through.”

Kim came out in dry clothing and took a towel to Socky. Once they were dry and had had a chance to catch their breaths, there was no reason for further delay. When Socky had warmed up and been furnished with a dry saddle blanket, Kim mounted and headed up the valley at an easy canter. He would get to the town and make whatever arrangements were necessary long before the wagon got there. The actual distance wasn't great, but the road still followed the river, back and forth, over and over, loop after loop, multiplying the distance. Now dry and relatively calm, Blue and Rags ambled. Abasio left them to determine their own pace. It was a longer distance than ­people needed to be hauled; he and Xulai followed Willum, straight across the pastures. Those that were fenced had gates; if the babies yelled, Blue would let them know.

As the tumult of white water faded into silence behind them, they turned to look back. A grove of huge dark trees stood along the base of the wall, their drooping branches shadowing and hiding the entrance to the notch, while the road to the west stood open and clear. The river forked into north and south branches some distance east of the notch, not naturally, but because of a V-­shaped diversion wall built of stones and set into the riverbed. As the river forked, so did the road, the north-­half road veering away to accompany its half of the river through the notch while the south road crossed the north fork by a stout timber bridge and followed the south-­half river westward.

“Abasio, have you ever seen such a tree?” Xulai cried, pointing at the notch. “Look at it.”

Abasio had been looking at it, or rather looking past it, to see if there were huge hands clawing over the top of the wall. The enormous tree stood just west of the notch, one side of the trunk quite near the vertical wall, a trunk so thick that it would take more than ten large men to make a hand-­to-­hand circle around it. The other side of the trunk reached almost halfway to the south branch of the river.

“Hundreds of years old, I imagine. I wonder if there are more of them.” He thought the diversion must have been built centuries ago. Neither wall nor notch was recent, yet neither wall nor notch was on the map!

Willum had removed his shoes and hung them around his neck by the laces in order to better investigate something in the river. When they caught up to him he said, “One time some explorer came to this place, and he asked some fellow, ‘What's all that white stuff?' So they gave him some to taste, and he shouted out, ‘It's salt. Gosh!' That's how it got named!”