Fish Tails (58 page)

And they would have been lost, except for Coyote and his tribe, howling, dancing, luring the creature into a confrontation with a monster as terrible in its own way as the Ogre had been in his . . . or hers. Or its.

He had considered the possibility that the northern men had been fathered by one kind and mothered by another, fathered by a man on an Ogress, for example . . . Or fathered by an Ogre on a human woman? Though it might be remotely possible that they were genetic discards, creatures intended as Ogres who had not grown to the desired size?

All of which was the stuff of nightmares. Even before they left, he had urged Bear and Coyote to avoid meeting any forest men at all. The two of them had talked—­that is, had communicated—­with certain forest dwellers who were moving along ahead and to either side of them. Small things that lived in trees. Small things that flew. Meantime they stayed alert for the smell of campfire smoke. So far, they'd had to deviate from their original heading only once, to avoid the territorial claim being made by a belligerently bugling bull elk. Toward evening, the horses, smelling water, had sniffed out this pleasant glade protected from the wind by a wall of stone, diagonally cracked and emitting a slow, shining seep of moisture that sleeked the stone on its way to the tiny pool at the bottom.

“One-­frog pool,” remarked Coyote.

“Is that how pools are measured?” Abasio asked.

“Um,” agreed Coyote. “Even hungry, y'never eat the frog in a one-­frog pool.”

Abasio had tried to decipher the meaning of that, realizing in a moment that it was the same statement he had made about the male Griffin. Even if threatened, never kill the male Griffin in a one-­male-­Griffin world. Even if it meant tolerating terror.

Which ­people did, all the time: tolerated terror in fear of something worse!

And how often had terror come upon them because men wanted to be godlike? Because men wanted to create something in a dozen years that would have taken millennia to evolve, or never would have evolved at all?

The fiber that made Griffin bodies light enough to fly was not organic, yet it grew somehow. Little likelihood it would ever have evolved. Only man-­created creatures had such materials. Man had created creatures who felt all the pain that natural creatures felt, but who did not have ten thousand years of history sustaining and guiding them in crisis. They did not have instincts developed over millennia. Their kind had no history. They could not say as the birds did:
“When we were hatchlings, our parents taught us to fly to a better foraging ground when autumn came. It was not far away. Each century our ­people flew a little farther, for the continents were moving apart, slowly, slowly, making our winter foraging ground farther away. When it was a hundred miles farther, we flew it still, and when it was a thousand, we flew it still, and so we have flown north in summer and south in winter for thousands and thousands of miles over hundreds of thousands of years. Because we always have done it, we still do it!”

Only recently—­in terms of Griffin years—­had the Griffins been rearing young. They had no history to tell them how young should be reared. Griffins existed only because men had wanted to make legends come true. How could man teach a legendary animal to do something the legends had never described? Did the Phoenix fly south in the winter? Did the Griffin hibernate? And why did men have to have legends at all? Wasn't there enough wrong in this small, real world to keep them . . . us . . . busy?

Abasio yawned wearily. His head hurt. The task he and Xulai had been given was straightforward. Go, find the ­people who are willing to live in the seas, help them do it. Oh, but the complications: one small, stupidly courageous boy; one small girl with a strangeness about her; the two of them making an accidental pair who did not feel at all accidental, who felt, in fact, like a fated, perhaps doom-­laden pair. Abasio was unutterably weary of the fated and doom-­laden, and if anyone knew about fated lives, he did. Olly's fated life. His own. Xulai's. The babies'. And now Willum and Needly. A fated life always seemed to carry a fated threat with it. As if no being could be created without the accompaniment of a shadow. It was that, really, that bothered Xulai, though she refused to believe it and covered it up with pickiness. Precious Wind usually talked her out of it. Or he could, when he had the time and the energy.

The worst of it was that the pursuing shadow did not seem impersonal. The following things weren't merely hunting meat. Their appetite was for a particular scent named . . . who? Was it him, Abasio? If so, why? Why would the appetite seek Needly? Surely Willum was not significant enough to warrant such pursuit. And if none of them, then perhaps Xulai? As she sometimes seemed to think.

If one only knew what form the shadow would take! Was it Ogre if on legs? Griffin if on wings? And if beneath the sea, some monster yet unseen? Or from beneath the earth, what? Or was it one thing, one terror that included them all, one horror that changed shape to fit the circumstance?

Whatever it was, it brought the
Ogre feeling,
a dark veil that had pursued him in fits and starts since they had faced those giants below Saltgosh, followed him up the valley, across the mountain, growing stronger whenever they had spied those campfires burning among the forests, those wraiths of ghost smoke dancing above the trees.

It shouldn't be happening! After the war at the Place of Power, the Edges had agreed with surface-­dwelling ­peoples that they, the Edges, would eradicate Ogres. Man and Ogre could not coexist when one was the preferred food of the other. ­People had come from Tingawa to meet with ­people from each Edge, “just to check,” as Precious Wind had said. They had gone back to Tingawa reporting the Ogre situation would be taken care of. Had the Edges really intended eradication? Or had they merely smiled, nodded, let others suppose they had agreed without meaning to do anything about Ogres? Why should they take the trouble? Ogres could not get into any of the Edges. If they were eating other humans, let the other humans worry!

Sun-­wings had threatened the lives of the new sea-­­people, threatened them with death inflicted by the Griffins'
kindred of the sea.
Had the Edgers made sea monsters? The Edgers made things for amusement, things they could watch. Could they have watched any such creatures? Not in those Edges on this side of the Stonies, for there was no ocean near enough. Had there been Edges near the ocean? And had anyone ever made an inventory of Edge-­made monsters? The Edges had been in competition with one another, so they had not shared their secrets. How many mythical or semimythical creatures had been created? How many of their manufactured monsters still lived, lurking hidden, unidentified, utterly unexpected?

Nonetheless. Nonetheless. He breathed deeply and tried to empty his mind so that he could sleep. He would think about the babies . . . sea-­babies laughing in the pool, darting through glittering shallows; shimmering sunlight falling through aspen leaves, wafers of golden light glinting across gleaming little faces . . .

That worked. Bailai and Gailai's little faces, gurgling at the sky. Rosy mouths open, shrieking: “Mama, Dada, Illum.” “Wish-­fish,” Willum's mother had called them. Dark little eyes peeking here and there. Quick little hands grabbing at the world. The children, happily at play. Yes. That worked.

Sometimes.

V
ERY EARLY IN THE MORNING,
when the sky was just light enough to let her see what was around her, Precious Wind slipped out the window above the bed without waking Xulai, hopped to the nearest switchback, made her way among a few sizable boulders to a fairly flat, lightly forested pocket invisible from anywhere around them except the sky. There she cleared a place for the wagon. The
ul xaolat
had to move a volume of stone and a few trees somewhere else. There were certain strictures built into the device. It would not kill any sensate thing unless told to do so: local beetles, lizards, birds, ground squirrels, were moved before the stone was displaced harmlessly but by no means silently. Precious Wind did not doubt the ­people down on the flat could have heard the noise, but it had sounded only like the rockfall it actually was. Though the resultant dust cloud was obvious, a fortuitous breeze moved it silently southward to hang among the treetops a goodly distance away.

She went back to peer under the wagon, making sure Kim was in what the device would recognize as a definable contiguity, then stood upon the step and moved the wagon with ancillary humans into the newly created space. Though the transition was instantaneous, the move woke Xulai. “Is it light already?” she mumbled, reaching for her clothes.

“We're already out of sight,” Precious Wind informed her, cheerfully, as she came in the door. “We're off the road at the nearest switchback south to where we were last night. I'm about to hop down the road and meet the messenger. I'll be back by the time you have the breakfast fire started. The less smoke the better, I should imagine.”

From the outer edge of the road she focused on the farthest clear space she could see clearly along the roads below her. In those places where the trees on the downhill side of the road were tall enough to tower above the road itself, the rising sun threw black shadows upon the roadway. She would jump down into these shadows, hidden from the downhill side, and no one in the camp below would see a person materialize out of nothing. She
went
to the chosen place, peered through branches down to the next, and repeated the process. It took five jumps before she saw the rider a short distance ahead of her. She sat on a stone at the side of the road and waited for him.

“Ma'am,” he said as he dismounted. “I can't see the wagon, so I guess you moved it.”

“I did,” she replied. “You're Deer Runner, aren't you? What's happened, Runner?”

“Well, ma'am, Arakny's been meeting with the queen.” He shook his head at some remembered idiocy. “She has a great pree-­ten-­shus throne in her wagon, did you know that? And another little one beside it . . . for the little boy!”

“I don't imagine the little one enjoys sitting on it much.”

“Well, it's no potty chair, but still, I 'magine not. The queen, she thinks she needs to be queen of the whole area down at the foot of the mountains, and she wants the Artemisians to de-­clare them-­selves her vassals.” He kept a perfectly straight face during this announcement.

“Vassals?” The word blurted. He licked it in and swallowed it. “­Vassals!”

“Oh, indeed, yes, ma'am. Arakny's some puzzled where Sybbis got the word. Says it sounds like to her somebody else, maybe, put the idea of vassals in her mouth.” Deer Runner rubbed the back of his neck in mute incomprehension. “So Arakny has told her that when their ceremonies down there are over, she'll take up the matter with Wide Mountain Mother, but that'll have to be when the tribes all hold their annual winter meeting. After first snowfall.”

“Odd. I'd never heard of such a meeting.”

“No, ma'am, none of us had. Heretofore.” He grinned at her. “Useful word, an't it. I ‘heretofore' ha'n't heard the word ‘heretofore,' I don't think. But Arakny says it's useful, and what Arakny says usually goes, so as far as the outside world is concerned.” He smiled sweetly and chanted, word by word: “So, though we had not heardtofore—­of such a meeting heretofore—­we must've had one every year—­for as long as we remember.”

“Which is clear back to yesterday.”

“Yes, ma'am, at least that far, though if asked, I'd be inclined to stretch it back to the time of our foremothers.”

“How did Sybbis react to all that?”

“Oh, very . . . royally, ma'am. Waved her what you call it . . . kind of a stick with a onion shape on the end of it, looks like gold, maybe. Wasn't, though. Not heavy enough. She dropped it and it just sort of rattled. Like tin.”

“I think it's called a scepter,” said Precious Wind. “A symbol of royalty.”

“Well, the queen she waved her royal-­ness very symbolically, and the queen she announced she would grant us poor Artemisians time to make the only possible decision. And then the queen royally announced she would leave a guard to see that we returned to Artemisia without interfering with the ‘pervision wagons' she was expecting to come over the mountain from ‘that salt place,' while her royal self would return to Catland to await our formal announcement of vassalage, which we must make as otherwise we will be wiped out, to the last man.” He frowned, his voice grating.

“And last woman, presumably?”

“She didn't mention that. Maybe she got a good look at Arakny's face and decided it wasn't the time to push it.” His expression changed to one of rejection, as though he wanted to spit, and his voice had deepened into formality. “The real reason I think Arakny sent me is that she thinks you need to know what the ganger queen brought with her. From somewhere the queen has obtained . . . an advisor. Great big fellow. Strange kind of man. Smells . . . bad. Unpleasant, say. NO! Truth is, he stinks worse than anything I've ever smelled before.”

“Dirt? Sweat?”

“No, ma'am, compared to his smell, dirt and sweat are the sweet flowers of spring. He stinks something more like . . . like something rotten. Bad rotten. He seems to breathe it out. A heavy smell. Makes you want to get away and take deep breaths, as though the smell keeps you from using air.”

“Where did he come from?”

Runner shrugged. “He was walking alongside. Didn't notice him in the dark. Not until they lit the fires and he showed up. He's too big for any horse to carry.”

Precious Wind started to say something but stopped herself. Better the Artemisians not start speculating. One could not fight panic after it had started. She murmured, “Big. How big?”

“Half again as tall as me. Four—­five times as heavy. His bones are more like the bones in horses or cattle. And there's the smell.”