Fish Tails (50 page)

Xulai put her hand on Abasio's shoulder. “What's all this noise about your going off without me?”

He took the hand in his own. “Bear brings us word that our Griffin, the mother Griffin, has been badly hurt by the big male. She's down and can't fly—­her wing's ripped, according to them. She can't walk either. She left Willum, Needly, and the little Griffin holed up some distance from there, and they're all alone with no one to protect them.”

“That doesn't answer my question!”

He shook his head at her. “Xulai, let's not waste time arguing, or even discussing. Neither of us will accept leaving Willum and Needly up there on their own! And we can't risk our sea-­babies' lives by taking them up there! Equally, we can't take the very grave risk to our babies if we leave them with Kim while both of us go find the children. Even though they're almost weaned, what would happen to the babies if Kim were accosted by an accusation of Lorpers?”

Her eyes filled. “I suppose you're going.”

“What would
you
have me do?”

“Oh, go, go, Abasio, of course you have to go. What else!”

“That's rather what I thought,” he said, putting his arms around her.

She pushed him away and wiped her face, muttering, “I shouldn't even question your going. It's not that big a problem! I used the talker last evening, and Precious Wind told me they'd already entered Artemisia. She'll be here day after tomorrow!” She looked up. Above the peaks, a crescent moon mocked them with a pale, disembodied grin. “No, it's almost moonset. She'll be here tomorrow.”

His face lighted up. “Then you and Kim won't be alone more than a few hours! Knowing Precious Wind, she'll be here as quickly as she can. Don't move from here! We'll keep this place here as our meeting place. When we've found the children and done what we can among the Griffins, we'll return here. If you all leave here before we get back, ask Precious Wind to leave a few ­people here to meet us, or carry messages or whatever.”

“If the big Griffin can't move, what will you do?”

He stared into darkness. “I don't know, Xulai. I truly don't know. I'm hoping maybe she isn't that badly hurt, that we can hunt for her and get water to her while she heals.”

“That may be overly optimistic.”

“Well, you know me. Always look on the shiny side.” He tried to smile, without great success.

“Ha.”

He drew himself up and attempted to look capable: half the battle, looking capable. “I do know one thing for sure. If I could move her, Artemisia would be the best place I could pick for the care and feeding of a large, wounded mythical beast. And her child. And if she can't be moved, then Artemisia is the most likely place to find healers who will go to her and help cure her. When I know what the situation is, I can have someone—­Bear or Coyote maybe—­come here and guide any willing helpers back where the Griffin is, hopefully a healer of some kind . . .”

“You would really need several ­people left here, then. To carry messages and so forth.”

“Any help would be welcome.” He tried a confident grin, unsuccessfully.

She said, “You haven't noticed but I am helping. I began this conversation with help in mind. You've forgotten
ul xaolat,
haven't you?”

He stared into the darkness, momentarily gone elsewhere, mouthing
uhl SHAH-­oo-­laht
. Then—­of course,
ul xaolat
!
The thing master:
the hunter-­protector device they had used during their travel to Saltgosh; that Xulai had used when she jumped to Saltgosh to warn them about the marauders. He'd become so accustomed to using it as either personal jumper or defensive weapon, he'd forgotten it could also move
big
things! He had forgotten all about that particular attribute!
It could move big things!

“Do you think it could move a full-­sized Griffin?” he asked, ­wonderingly.

She made a face. “I have been told if the holder of
ul xaolat
puts his hand on something, anything, the device will move that thing. It could probably move a mountain, given sufficient power. Moving a Griffin should be no problem. Distance is the problem, the thing only jumps about a day's foot journey at a time, and since several ­people now have the devices, they're all calling on the same power source. Depending on available power, the device may not always be able to make even that distance—­especially with a heavy load! To be safe, I would say half a day's foot travel maximum with a Griffin. If it's a two-­day journey, it will take four or five jumps to bring you back, and you will need to select and record locations on your way there.”

“One each evening and each noon? Through the forest?”

She considered former journeys and forced marches that had been off-­road, through woods. “Yes, noon and evening. The device should be able to jump you a half day's journey each time with no problem.”

He frowned. One had to picture a destination clearly in order for the device to move one to that place. One destination could be easy, but a whole line of them . . . “I don't know if I can remember . . .”

“I know, I can't either! That's always been the problem with the thing!” She laughed. “It's easy enough to go from the gates of a city to a temple on the hill, and from there to the ship at the shore. But on a desert? Going from one clump of cactus to a very slightly different clump of cactus half a day's journey away? I could never do it more than one jump. I couldn't even do it twice. Even Precious Wind told me she had trouble with more than two.

“So, around the time I was in Tingawa having the babies and you were there being bewildered by fatherhood, the Tingawan technicians were modifying the
xaolats
.”

“I wasn't exactly bewildered . . .”

“You looked bewildered at the time. For days and days. I told Father we couldn't possibly travel until you stopped looking that way. I was afraid you'd fall overboard in your bemusement.”

He rubbed his stubbled face, wearily fighting laughter. His grandfather had had a saying about wives:
Any man who's been married more than once gets into heaven automatically, 'cause he's already fully accustomed to hell
. He was not going to explain that to Xulai! He put his arms around her instead, trying rather vainly to focus his own thoughts. “Xulai, are you now, amid intermittent and lengthy circumlocutions, telling me that your ‘thing master' has been modified so that remembering destinations is not necessary?”

“Yes, it has been so modified.” She relaxed against him. “Now it takes hardly any brain at all.”

“Oh, good! Imagine what Willum would do with an
ul xaolat
!”

She shuddered and stepped away. “We haven't used it on this trip except to provide passive protection for us and the wagon and horses, and I honestly hadn't thought about using it as a mover. I didn't even use it as a weapon when those . . . giants came after us.”

“For good reason.”

Xulai went on: “Well, yes. But, I didn't think about
ul xaolat
's other functions until those men captured Kim, and that reminded me I could jump to Saltgosh. However! I do have one of the modified ones that will take an imprint of the selected locations on the way, and when you want to return,
ul xaolat
will automatically jump from location to location in reverse.”

“Is it very complicated?” At the moment he did not believe he could manage anything more complicated than . . . his razor. If that. Maybe.

“They made it as simple as they could. I'll show you how. And, if you're going to take the
thing master,
you'll also have a weapon.”

Abasio shook his head. “No, Xulai, you'll need to keep that!”

“
I don't plan on killing anything
this morning!
Precious Wind will be here very soon, and she has at least one
ul xaolat
with her, complete with the same offensive capabilities this one has. I can move the wagon and the horses and all our clutter farther back into the woods before you leave. We'll wait for Precious Wind to arrive before we come out of hiding. She says she's coming with a good group of ­people from ­Artemisia!”

He could think of no argument to that. Certainly he couldn't move Sun-­wings by himself. What would it take to move a beast that size? Not counting the wings. He'd need a wagon with at least six sets of wheels; the wagon would weigh more than the load, and it would take at least four teams to haul it! And a decent road! No such wagon, no such teams, no such road. No way of getting any.

He put his arms around Xulai and held her very close. When young, he had longed for adventure and travel. He had since learned that adventure and travel usually meant leaving loved ones, and leaving them was often a dangerous thing to do. He hated being separated from Xulai, from the babies! Olly's departure had taught him that separations can be forever. The thought left him shaking. When he did think of Olly, the memory made him feel . . . like some goblet of very thin glass that reverberated to particular sounds and was likely to shatter from its own empathetic echo.

As with Xulai! When Xulai fretted, he fretted. When she feared, he feared for her. He had absurd notions of somehow keeping their vibrations from touching one another, because if she were in danger, he might be immobilized by his own fear for her. And it didn't stop there: Willum and Needly had somehow been grafted into his protective . . . area. He hadn't even realized it until now.

He could actually understand those lone men of the north. It was more comfortable to be alone, with no one at risk but himself. None of that terrible fear of separation . . . Yet, no matter what Xulai was up to at any given time, he preferred to be where she was. Even if what she was doing at the time was fuming at him. Fuming was as natural to Xulai as it was to a volcano. One simply learned to ignore the scent of sulfur and the heat. Unless, of course, the heat was . . . ah!

Here she was, her face nestled into his neck, her lips moving. She held him closely for a long, silent moment, feeling the thud of his heart, the breath moving in his lungs. At one time she had tried to disdain her feelings for Abasio, whatever they were, because she was annoyed that he and she had been meant for each other, meant in the sense of livestock, bred for the purpose. Sometimes, like now, she had to admit those who had done it had done it wonderfully well.

When she could forget her annoyance at being fiddled with, she could take a good deal of pleasure in life—­or in those
infrequent bits of it not totally taken up with the task that took virtually every instant of their time and effort
. Enjoyment in those infrequent bits was a rare and marvelous thing. She kissed his neck again. Such a kiss would ordinarily be a prelude to lovemaking and they had no time for that!

She pushed him away with a final touch of their lips and said in a not-quite-calm voice: “I'll make up a packet of things to take with you. If the creature is wounded, you'll need some things to stop bleeding, to ease pain, to sew wounds closed if they're not too deep.”

Such things might be helpful in treating Sun-­wings, though the word “wounded” was not specific enough to describe the extent of injuries. How could one splint the leg of something that size? When Xulai had put a packet together from among their supplies, she took
ul xaolat
from the secure cubby where she kept it and went over its workings with Abasio.

“In the pack I made up for you, there's a complete set of directions for using the
thing master
. If you need some of the
things
it's the master of—­the hunter, the defender, the collector, and so forth—­the directions are there: pages of them. You should need only the ax master on this trip. You need it to make clearings—­”

“To make clearings?”

“Clearings, Abasio. We've done this before. On your way back you don't want to land on top of a bunch of pine trees, or with your body half inside one of them! As you go you need to make . . . landing sites, clearings, every half-­day journey, big enough for all of you and Sun-­wings. They are the places you will hop to on your return journey, one right after the other.

“This is the new, improved
ul xaolat
. It will simply do what you tell it to. Tell it you're going to start a series and give the series a name. We'll call it ‘Finding Sun-­wings.' ” The device made a beep, and a mechanical little voice said, “Recorded.”

Xulai said, “That name is your code word for this particular journey. The first thing you do is clear a landing site and tell the device to record the site as Site One in Finding Sun-­wings. When you stop each noon and evening, make another space and record it as Site Two, Site Three, and so on until you get there. If you forget the number, ask the device. When the first site is the right size, tell the device to make each succeeding site that same size. It has to be big enough for the whole assemblage: you, the children, the baby Griffin, the mother Griffin, and all the creatures you're traveling with.

“When you return, you have some choices. One of you could probably do the whole trip in one jump. Moving all of you at once, you'll need to make shorter jumps. You're limited by available power. So, to bring everyone back, you say, ‘Finding Sun-­wings,
series
return.' It'll jump you back in short hops, through the series, but you'll need to push the red button or say ‘continue' at each site. It will not run the whole series.”

“Why not?”

“If someone was waiting at Site Four to tell you Site Three was an ambush, you would not like to land in the middle of it. If you heard, for example, that someone was waiting to ambush you at Site Three, you could skip over that site.”