Fish Tails (36 page)

Somehow Abasio was not surprised. He had expected for some time there would be some other, even more troublesome involvement. Even though he and Xulai had for the last several years done everything expected of them and a good deal more, it had all been . . . fairly easy. Tiresome, yes; possibly dangerous—­had they not been carrying
ul xaolat
—­but not repugnant. Not vile or mind-­numbingly boring, merely wearisome, heavy, an unending tension during which the analytic part of him waited in dread for the counterstroke, the obliteration that seemed inevitable, coming from someone, somewhere. It was as though he had been warned without being able to remember by whom or when or how. Maybe he'd dreamed it. He couldn't remember dreaming that particular dream, had there been one, but then the dreams were full of half-­remembered details. He hadn't been surprised at Needly's remarks about the Listener. He wouldn't even be surprised if they turned out to be true.

He was, however, repeatedly surprised at her perception. Where had she learned to look that clearly behind and within? Even now, as she came over to him, put her hand on his arm, looked up at him as though reading his mind—­no
. She was reading what he had been looking for in his own mind and could not find there.

“What is it?”
he asked in a desperate whisper.
“Where is it?”

“You have it.” She returned his whisper with that same little smile. “Stop worrying about it, Abasio. You have it, your family has it. You don't have to worry about it or worry for them. It's all right.”

Abasio breathed deeply and tried to believe that. He tried to believe he already had whatever he had been feeling he needed, even though he had no idea what that thing was. A weapon? A . . . dictionary? A translator? A quiet period of a few months during which he would not have to worry about anything?

He met Xulai's eyes. If he told her right now that it didn't matter what was happening, not so long as Needly knew what it was and where and how . . . would that effectively excuse them from having to play the game anymore? Because this journey, this life they led, it was like that game they had played in Tingawa. One player gave another player an imaginary gift without telling him what it was. The recipient had so many questions to find out what he was supposedly given. “Does it have legs?” “Is it furry?” “Is it galactic?” “Does it have more than four dimensions?”

Or, would it be enough simply to stop . . . worrying. To believe, as Needly said, that everything was all right. Whatever he needed, he had it. How did he know? Needly told him so.

Needly: named for the needle's eye, because she saw things very sharply.

 

Chapter 7

In the Company of Griffins

T
HE FEELING THEY WERE BEING WATCHED MADE THE
descent an anxious one. Going down was less laborious than climbing had been, but without a concurrent sense of accomplishment. Nothing distinguished one switchback from another. Some sections of road led along sheer, clifflike drops where even the tops of the nearest trees below did not reach to their height. At either end of each stretch, darkly forested slopes ran unbroken down to the east. Only far down, where the road debouched onto either prairie or desert (as rainfall would have determined by the time they reached it), did the forested wilderness give way to vague, no-­colored plains, broken by the scars of scattered arroyos that winked fugitive gleams from deep inside themselves: little pools there; tiny streams; seasonal gatherings of blessed moisture, habitats for the fanged and scaled, the rarely seen, the scarcely known.

From time to time, almost unconsciously, Abasio and Xulai looked up, eyes keyed to wings even as minds prayed there were no wings. So far there had been none, but Needly was not alone in feeling eyes, and the feeling led to whispered suppositions among the four of them, five if one included Blue. Rags seldom spoke while hitched, as she felt it inappropriate for a speaking creature to be harnessed, though Needly had pointed out to her that heavy clothing and backpacks were just as much a burden.

Suppose,
Needly wondered to herself,
suppose the Griffins have friends among other creatures, many other creatures . . .

Suppose other things are watching us and will report to her . . .

Certainly the Griffin was not depending on human spies. This late in the season the threat of storm limited traffic on the road. Once they passed a man loading a donkey with the scattered deadwood that accumulated at the uphill edge of the road. Though the donkey saluted them loudly and persistently, his bulky owner did not acknowledge their presence. He faced into the mountain, head down, still as stone when they spoke to him. Xulai wondered if he was dumb or disdainful. His attitude fit nicely with Abasio's description of the northern mountain men's rejection of company. As did his smell. This gave Xulai something to amuse herself with: Can a human creature be said to be dis-­odorly? Wasn't there something she had read concerning dis-­odorly conduct?

Trails led away at many of the switchbacks, south or north. In order to siphon off some of Willum's overabundant energy, Abasio asked Blue to pick a placid horse familiar with brats and give Willum temporary ownership: a mount of his own! Freed from the boring trudge, Willum was off, exploring up and down, returning at a gallop to say a nearby trail split into networks of smaller tracks—­by the look of them, seldom used.
“But,”
he cried enthusiastically, swollen with self-­importance
. “But 'f I could just go just a little farther down!”

Abasio threatened repossession of the horse; Xulai announced that she would send him home with the next traveler headed in that direction; Needly deflated him with elaborate descriptions of the bears she (might have) barely escaped during her own forest journey; and Blue made it clear that given a choice between bear getting horse or bear getting rider, most horses immediately disposed of their riders—­and in Willum's case, without a qualm. Among all of them—­though only by returning to the subject at intervals—­they managed to shadow Willum's ebullience with a faint tint of caution.

Xulai usually sat beside Abasio on the wagon seat. When the day warmed sufficiently, she opened the shutters behind the seat so the babies could be passed through when they were hungry, though they were no longer nursing with any frequency. Needly and Willum had taken over the task of feeding them spoonfuls of mashed apple, mashed potato, mashed peas. “Mashed ever' darn thing,” Willum griped as he pushed hard-­boiled egg through a sieve with the side of a wooden spoon.

“Gently, Willum,” Xulai admonished. “That's the only sieve I have, and you're pushing it all out of shape!”

Each night Xulai and Abasio shared the bed in the wagon, the babies curled up in their baskets beneath it, top halves dry, bottom halves wet. If the weather was good, Kim put his own bedding near the horses; if it threatened rain, he shared Willum's space beneath the wagon—­already shared with Needly, who also preferred it to the small bunk bed that could fold down above the big bed in the wagon. Though Willum had brought nothing with him to sleep in, after several early-morning encounters with him in his natural and extremely shivery state, Xulai had adapted an old shirt of Abasio's, shortening the sleeves and eliminating the buttons. Though Willum considered this totally unnecessary, he admitted he was warmer at night in the shirt, along with the pair of soft, drawstringed undertrousers Xulai had made from half an old sheet. Also, Abasio had told him the ­people of Artemisia allowed nakedness only up until the time children were toilet-­trained, so if Willum were observed running around naked it would be assumed he still pottied in his pants: shameful at his age.

Xulai's notebook, kept for the benefit of the Tingawan chroniclers and historians, benefited from the discussion of cultural differences: in Gravysuck, children were regarded as asexual until puberty and went naked whenever weather and surroundings allowed. Xulai approved of the custom, for she had noticed there was little or none of the preadolescent sneaking, peeking, and nastiness in Gravysuck that she had noticed in other places. Needly, however, had grown in a society in which uglification and shapeless clothes were necessary for females almost from birth. Another of Abasio's old shirts and the other half of the sheet were sacrificed promptly to meet Needly's need, and Needly was left wondering why Grandma had not included at least one of Needly's nightgowns in the getting-­away pack.

“But, when you travel afoot, you sleep in your clothes, don't you?” asked Xulai.

“Yes. Of course you do. If something comes at you, you don't have time to get dressed. You grab your pack and run, or hide, or climb a tree—­if you're not already up one.”

“Well then, that's why. Your travel pack was just to get you where you were going. Once you're there, the other things you might need would be available. Besides, you knew exactly what was in your getaway pack, didn't you? You didn't think of it either.”

Needly agreed that was probably the case but was still left with a small, aching doubt she had never had before. Grandma had always thought
of everything
.

Each morning Kim and the extra horses set out an hour or so ahead of them. Abasio occupied the wagon seat out of habit, though he did not pretend to drive the team. His only duty was to apply the wagon brake when it was necessary. Usually it wasn't, for he had designed the wagon to be brakable by the team itself. The wagon body had two short, widely spaced shafts in front. Between these shafts stretched a stout leather strap, securely fastened at each corner so its wide, flat surface was perpendicular to the road. Blue and Rags could simply back their rear ends against it to slow or stop the wagon as needed. Blue and Rags preferred to be the rear hitch, as they were the ones most familiar with the stop-­strap, and also because they enjoyed hearing what the humans had to say to each other; this despite the fact that most of the conversation was dull.

“Not horse-­ful,” complained Rags.

“Y'could hardly expect that!” Blue replied.

“You n' him were alone together all that time in the north forests. I shoulda thought he'd have absorbed some horse sense by now.”

“He has. He just doesn't always talk like it.”

Each night they caught up with Kim to share food and campfire, preferring sites open to the east so they could watch the widely separated skeins of smoke that rose above the shadowed slopes below: faceless gray specters with glowing feet; ghostly, blood-­tinged arms reaching upward into oblivion. Each wavering spirit marked the location of someone alone in all that darkness, and no obvious track or trail led toward any of them. If there were such trails—­Abasio explained with a direct stare at Willum—­they were hidden from above by trees and on the ground by endless convolutions as well as by deadfalls or other traps. Abasio took some time to describe the traps he had seen in the north—­including vivid details of the partly or wholly consumed bodies found therein.

“Only bones,” he confirmed to doubting Willum. “Ask Blue. He was there.”

One evening Willum pointed out an unusual gathering of smokes that had risen almost to the level of the road they were on: a dozen or so of them, near enough to one another that they were being braided by an eddying wind.

“That many forest camps close together is unusual,” Abasio agreed. “The trader up north told me sometimes kinfolk would share a good home place, one close to water and well protected, because three or four together would be better able to defend against raiders who might to steal their furs. Even then, he said, no matter how they depended on one another, they would never share trapping territory.”

The braided pillar, much larger than the usual smoke ghost, danced on into the night, its top flushed with rose by sunset rays still slanting through high valleys behind them. For a long, breathless moment several smaller spirits undulated in attendance until light vanished all at once, leaving only far-­separated sparks of campfire glow to populate the dark.

Xulai shivered. “I wouldn't want to be lost in there.”

Abasio nodded agreement. Seeing these fires reminded him of his long trek through the north country on his way to find Xulai. He'd almost forgotten that journey, so much had happened since. It had been long and tiresome and dangerous, but it had taken him to Woldsgard: where the child Xulai had been; where he had needed to go. And all the way there he had wondered why he was going! No prize had been offered at the end of the road; no glory or riches would be forthcoming. Just . . . go, go there. Get there as soon as you can.

“But at least there
were
roads,” Xulai commented.

He half smiled, ruefully. “They were given that title thereabouts. The trader told me if night was coming on, it was better to keep going, to get some distance between my wagon and the nearest camp, for the horse and wagon might prove irresistible if trappers thought they could take it without too much trouble. Blue and I got very, very good at hiding the wagon and ourselves.”

This interested Willum to the extent that he, Needly, and Blue spent most of one evening discussing techniques of hiding oneself and one's belongings in the midst of a forest.

Abasio fell asleep promptly on lying down. Later in the night, he dreamed.

In this dream he knows who he is: he is Abasio Cermit, Abasio the Dyer, Abasio the Traveler, who is married to the Princess Xulai, Abasio the father of the Children of the Future and the supposed owner of the horse Blue, a speaking horse who knows very well he is not owned by anyone save himself. The dream Abasio knows also that this particular Abasio is dozing on the wagon seat and is dreaming yet again of a throne room in some very distant place . . .

The one enthroned—­is that one Plethrob? Or is Plethrob something or someone else? Of course, if this is a new dream, Abasio wouldn't know who it is. It could be anyone. The dream feels familiar, however, and those blood drinkers on the perches—­Abasio has seen those before; something like birds, but birds didn't have long, tubular tongues that unroll endlessly, from the perch all the way to the floor—­so the thing on the throne is probably Plethrob.

Abasio looks down at . . . itself. It is wearing a sort of vertical brassiere with three—­no, five lumps protruding. If it were female there would be . . . six? Or four? Some even number, surely. The wall opposite him or her or it is mirrored. He, it moves slightly, watching for movement in the mirror. Ah, there. An apparently bipedal, two-­armed, erect creature wearing a circlet on its head to hold back a full head of slowly squirming tendrils? Tentacles? A short, open-­fronted jacket and whatever garment it is down the front to cover the bumps. Not breasts. Not testes or anything similar. No. This body is not a he or a she. It is the body of an IT. An IT in the ser­vice of Plethrob, surely, who is now . . . thinking, his broad brow furrowed, the two nostrils under the right eye slightly elevated in . . . annoyance? Perhaps. Or simple irritation.

Plethrob speaks: “So this world decided to intervene, is that it, Jeples?” The words are not in Abasio's language, but he understands them nonetheless.

“Yes, great corpuscle of heaven.” The glabinour replying is an old one with gray integument, wrinkled earflaps, vlagators veined in blue, age spots all over them. Which means, thank heavens, there will be no dominance rituals or . . . any of that. Uninvolved ­people could get accidentally dead during dominance rituals.

“This is a world name of Lom?” Plethrob inquires.

“It has upon it a place named Lom, indeed, O golden lymph node!”

The very masculine presence narrows his several eyes: “Jeples!”

“Yes, O marvelous bone-­marrow, master of miracles.”

“Make a note.”

Jeples takes a deep breath and makes a note. It is r'datitch (B flat, says Abasio's mind in the dream). Very slightly off. Abasio knows this without knowing how he knows it or caring very much. He seems to be alone in this disregard, however, for everyone else in the throne room is suddenly . . . stiffer. The old person tries again, and this time the note emerges purely. Everyone breathes carefully, silently, enormously relieved. Abasio finds himself thinking that deheadings are so damned messy, especially early in the morning, and it, Feblia, hates mess. (So that's who Abasio is! Abasio is an IT, probably named Feblia!) It—­Feblia—­will speak to the old thing's carapace polisher and tell him to serve old Jeples a bulb of herb tea with ziblac nectar first thing in the morning. Ziblac removes that accumulation in the throat, a precaution made necessary when a Ruling One has a tendency to poke, poke, test, test, call for a note here, a note there, purely to annoy, purely to irritate, to give an excuse for slaughter so he can watch the blood drinkers slurp!