Mirabile (26 page)

“Real pretty ornamental,” I said, not meaning Jibril any more than she had. If the canes were the problem, I hadn’t seen enough to worry me yet. Lalique grunted a reply and pushed forward.

Getting through the herd was a lot like slogging through hip-high water—except that the water complains at you for shoving and, once in a while, especially if the herd’s antsy, like this one was, tried to shove back.

Mabob had been sticking behind Leo—cows were new to him and he wasn’t taking any chances—but one of the bulls took serious offense at the color of his beak and made snorting noises.

Mabob got defensive and glared at it. Mabob being a half foot taller (if only because of the spiked hair) had the psychological advantage, I think, but the only thing dumber than a cow is a bull.

It snorted again and pawed the ground threateningly. I was about to go over and clout it, the way I’d seen Lalique do often enough, but Mabob knew a threat when he saw one. He answered in kind. He drew himself up to full height—standing on his toes to do it—and bristled his scales.

They made a rasping sound and Mabob suddenly looked twice as big as he had before. At the same time, he bugged out his bright orange eyes—“eye-blazing,” they call it, when a parrot does it. Those orange eyes blazed all right.

Stupid bull didn’t give an inch. So Mabob escalated. He arched his head over the Guernsey and said, at the top of his lungs, “GRONK!”

All around us, the cattle started. The calf in distress even stopped its squalling.

“Annie,” said Lalique, with a note of warning in her voice.

“I know.” If Mabob rattled them too much, they’d stampede, and I didn’t want to be in the middle of it if they did. Grant you, it’s not the kind of stampede you see in ships’ records, but I, for one, prefer my hips unbruised and my toes untrampled.

“Mabob, hush!” I said. Leo was already pushing back toward him.

But the single gronk seemed to have done the job. The bull was backing away.

Mabob, delighted by his newfound power, followed… until even I could see that he was deliberately stalking the bull. Step by step, and for the pure pleasure of it.

Because each time he forced the bull back another step, he paused to rattle his scales before he stepped forward again.

About the third step, Leo caught up to them both. “That’s enough, Mabob.

Don’t bully the damn thing.” Mabob rattled scales at Leo and invited him to play with the bull too. I swear I could actually see the offer made.

“Thanks, but no,” said Leo. “Come away.” It took a bit of coaxing, but he managed to lead Mabob away. The bull vanished into the herd, probably to find somebody lower in the pecking order to take it out on.

The calf took up squealing just about where it had left off, so we pushed on.

Finally we’d all slogged through to Jibril.

“Hey, Annie!” he said. “Come to slay our Dragon’s Teeth?”

“Depends,” I said. “Do they need slaying?”

“Well,” he said, “I dunno. We’ve got to cut enough of them down to get the calf out, at least.”

He pointed into the canebrake.

All I had to do, really, was look where the calf’s squeals were coming from… the poor thing was thrashing about wildly, and the canes thrashed with it. Looked for all the world like a sheep caught in brambles, just tangling itself deeper the more it struggled. Only the canes didn’t have any thorns that I could see.

“You must be Leo,” Jibril was saying. “Boy! Do you ever look like Nikolai!”

My ear appreciated Leo’s chuckle at that. (“Wrong way around,” Leo said.

“Nikolai looks like me.”) But mostly I was giving a close look at the canes nearest me.

Close up they looked messy as all hell. The stalks were covered, top to bottom, with something clear and gelatinous. It reminded me a lot of the waterproofing on the stems of a water lily, but embedded in it was the damndest collection of insects I’d ever seen.

Not just insects, either. Bits of fur and scales were stuck to it as well, along with here and there a small animal.

Dragon’s Tooth or not, the plants were unquestionably carnivorous. And they didn’t seem any pickier than Mabob about what they ate—a number of the insects looked Earth-authentic to me.

I had just about stuck out my finger to poke one into position for a better look—at least enough to confirm my suspicions— when Lalique grabbed my wrist.

“Don’t touch it, Annie, or you’ll lose skin.”

“Wasn’t going to touch it. Just the bug.” I pointed with my chin at the calf. “If it’ll tangle something that size, I know enough not to touch it.”

“Okay,” Lalique said. To Leo, she added, “Getting loose is a lot like having surgical tape ripped off your body.”

“Gotcha,” said Leo. “Let’s get that calf out before it tangles itself worse.”

Lalique shook her head. “You watch while Jibril and I do it. This takes technique and practice.

Next time you can help, I promise you.”

The technique was tricky at that: without grabbing the cane to steady the cut, cut away from you, then lever the cut cane against the ground to snap it off the blade of your machete. And hope you don’t get hit by any flying bits. If anybody on Mirabile needed a good source of high-quality glue, Lalique had found it.

Things got even trickier when they made it to the calf—they literally had to shave the canes from its body before cutting them down. The calf, of course, did nothing to help, just kept squalling and struggling.

Mabob got nosy and went in for a closer look before Leo or I could stop him.

Leo made to call him back but it was already too late. Mabob had brushed against one of the canes. “Okay, Mabob,” Leo said, “Hold still and—

Mabob glared over his shoulder—not at Leo but at the cane holding him captive—and made a
Page 103

quick swipe with his beak. The cane sprang free, taking a single scale with it.

From then on, he picked his way through the canebrake as gingerly as a waterwalker—and not once did he brush against another stalk. Nor did he step on any of those Lalique and Jibril had cut down.

“Wonder why it took him three times to learn not to gronk in the hover,” I said to Leo.

“The connection wasn’t as obvious.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll buy that.”

Lalique glared at Mabob, but he didn’t notice, being too busy checking out the calf. The calf took one look at Mabob and froze.

That made the job easier. Still in all, it took ’em close to twenty minutes to free it up.

Finally, Lalique emerged from the canebrake carrying the calf, followed by Mabob, who looked so smug you’d have thought he had performed the rescue work. Jibril followed with the machetes. Lalique let momma cow check her baby over, then she picked it up again, said, “Come on back to the barn. I’ve got to put some salve on the little idiot. See you later, Jibril.”

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “I need a sample, Lalique. Any suggestions?”

“Take your sample with something you won’t mind having the sample permenently stuck to,”

said Lalique.

Jibril laughed. “Its not that bad, Annie. Take one of the leaves. The cows eat them all the time and it doesn’t seem to gum up their mouths or their guts.”

So the cows had learned something about the canes. That was worth knowing.

They’re not utterly stupid, just mostly. Momma cow followed us all the way to the barn, lowing at baby, who bleated back. Eager to get into the conversation, Mabob gronked at momma cow, who promptly shut up for the rest of the trek.

Leo and I got the door to let Lalique through. I stopped Mabob before he trotted after Leo.

“Listen, you,” I said. “One gronk out of you and you get yourself chucked out on your—” I was going to say ‘ear’ but it’s not as if he has external ears “—ass.”

Mabob paid me careful attention—at least, it looked that way, as he kept his eyes on me the entire time I was laying it on the line to him.

“So, hush!” I finished. “Got that?” Mabob rattled at me, for all the world as if he’d understood every word. I’d have settled for his understanding the “hush.” It was worth a try though, so I let him in and closed the door behind us.

Inside, about a dozen people were flopped on bales of snapgrass. (Lalique’s family—if some of them aren’t blood, they’re family still. Lalique’s that sort of person.) Most of them looked about as dried out as the snapgrass did—from little round Brehani to long tall Gunnar, they had pouchy bags under their heavy-lidded eyes.

One of them—Villamil was his name if memory served, though he too had grown a lot in the last two years—found the strength to raise his head and say, “Last one done, Lalique. That’s it for this year.”

Orlando—Lalique’s husband—his face darker than ever in the shadow of the arm thrown over it, just snored.

Having helped with the calving any number of years (come to think of it, this was only the second year I hadn’t), I could remember how it felt. Give ’em each twenty-four hours of straight sleep and they’d be ready to celebrate. Until then they weren’t up to feeling anything more than relief.

I went to the cupboard they kept the vet supplies in. Only one of the salves didn’t look familiar. I held up the pot.

“That’s it,” said Lalique.

So while Leo kept Mabob from scaring the daylights out of Lalique’s family, the two of us doctored the calf. The surgical tape analogy didn’t quite make it, I saw from the damage. The calf had actually ripped at least one strip of skin off its hide in its struggles. “Is that common?” I said, pointing to the wound.

Lalique shook her head. “Mostly it’s just a bit of hair here and there that they lose. The older ones anyhow. It’s the calves that get the most damage.”

She salved up the ripped patch. “At first, we thought they’d been burning themselves somehow—see here.” She pointed out a long stripe on the calfs flank; no skin missing, just the hair. I might have guessed a healing burn too, if I’d seen only that one.

“But when we started seeing the flayed bits, we were sure we had a new predator.

Or an old predator that had recently acquired a taste for the Earth-authentic.” Lalique finished the last of the wounds, wiped her hands clean on the calf’s side and shooed it back outside to its mother, who promptly began to lick the salve off the calf.

Lalique sighed. “It wasn’t until Brehani found the first calf caught in the canebrake that we found out what we were up against. We came off worse than the calf did, to tell you the truth.” She managed to grin. “Figured we were human… we could handle a plant, for god’s sake! We barged right into the canebrake… Well, that was pure arrogance, and we learned our lesson real fast. We wound up just as stuck as the calf, or maybe worse. Damn things practically snatched me bald. You can still see where the hair’s growing back out!”

She parted her hair just enough to let me see a long pinkish brown scar. Healing well but it must’ve hurt like hell at the time.

“I’d have called you about them sooner but—”

“Calving,” I said. “You don’t have time to think about anything else. Hasn’t been all that long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like, Lalique.”

She smiled at me ruefully. “Let me put the worst of these to bed, and then we’ll get the cell samples from the last few calves.”

I shook my head. “Just point out the ones that haven’t been done, and tell me which of the calves needs special attention and what kind. We’ll worry about your canebrake when the whole troop of you is rested. I need more information and just now I don’t think I could get a coherent word out of a one of them. Bed for you too. Leo and I will see to what needs doing for a while.”

“Thanks, Annie. I appreciate it.”

“Hell,” I told her, “I’m the one who appreciates it. Best thing I ever did was request a gene analyzer for you. You’ve been doing enough of my work, seems to me I can do a little of yours.”

“Sure it’s okay with Leo?”

I looked around. Leo had roused one of the kids—or Mabob had. Even though I hadn’t heard a gronk, the kid couldn’t have been staring at Mabob harder if he’d air-blasted him one.

Leo’d obviously been following the conversation. He called over, “I volunteer, Annie. It’s a matter of family honor. Nikolai’s asleep on his feet, so somebody’s got to take over for him.”

I should have known. The resemblance was unmistakable. Nikolai’s crisply curled hair was darkest black where Leo’s was pure white, and his brown skin was smooth where Leo’s was crow’s-footed and laugh-lined, but when the kid smiled—well, I could see where Leo got his crow’s-feet and laugh lines because the kid’s face crinkled up in all the same places.

Nikolai came shakily forward and held out a hand—a huge one like Leo’s.

“Nikolai Opener Jembere,” he said. “And you’ve got to be Annie Jason Masmajean.

Sorry I missed the wedding.”

I took the hand. He had Leo’s handshake as well. “We can get acquainted later,”

I said. “I can see the family resemblance but just now you look a lot older than Leo.

Get some sleep.”

He burst into laughter and grinned at Leo. “Perfect! Makes perfect sense!”

Leo grinned and nodded back.

“You don’t,” I pointed out. “Go, get some sleep! Honest to god, you’re a compulsive volunteer, just like your dad.”

Nikolai turned to include Lalique in his grin. “Hey,” he said, “they help me dig bones. The least I can do is help them birth calves!” Still grinning mischievously, he gave one last look at Mabob and stumbled off to the house.

“That was clear as mud,” I told Leo, after he’d gone.

“Don’t worry, Annie. He’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up. In fact, you won’t be able to stop him.”

One thing Leo’s a helluva lot better at than I am is patience. I’m always finding that out at the damndest times. He waited until it was just the three of us (I’m counting Mabob only because he shared our interest in everything new), and then he gave me a grin and said, “Out with it, Annie. Tell me all about these ‘Earth-authentic’ cows.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Aha!” I said. “

You’ve been watching the ‘westerns’ in ships’ files.” Mabob rattled too.