Fish Tails (3 page)

 

Chapter 1

An Unexpected Lamentation

N
EAR THE EASTERN EDGE OF THE
G
REAT
S
TONIES,
barely within the last jagged file of mountains before the long descent into the deserts and prairies beyond, there was reputed to be an astonishing landmark—­
reputed,
for it was spoken of more often than it was remembered. Few sought it out. Fewer had seen it, and fewer yet had seen it in the season and hour of its glory. Those who lived near enough to consider the landmark a local thing—­whether they had seen it or not—­generally called it “the curly rock,” and did not regard it as having any particular distinction beyond its odd shape. However named or referred to, it stood on a lofty prominence west of and equidistant from two jagged peaks that sheltered it from the rising sun three hundred and fifty days of the year. Only as Earth tipped the sun back and forth along the horizon during a few successive dawns in spring and again in fall did sun and season work in concert to create something almost miraculous.

In geologic terms, the Stonies—­in their present form—­were young. Some thousand years before, a great upheaval had shaken the continent, splitting off and drowning the western third of it and thrusting the western edge of what remained so far into the sky that air-­breathing creatures who were along for the ride descended rapidly. Unlike its predecessor range, which had achieved a pleasantly rounded permanency, one that map makers felt secure in locating and labeling, this most recent cataclysm had awarded the Stonies a shifty and transitory reputation, as though any part of them might be subject to sudden erasure or change. Even the rivers moved about from season to season: like flea-­bitten travelers, desperately and perpetually seeking cleaner and more comfortable beds.

There were not many roads through the mountains, and those there were often lasted no longer than a decade or so. Few penetrated all the way from east to west. A few—­not the same few—­penetrated from west to east. There was nothing mystical about this. Some roads one could scramble up but not down, where “down” would require putting a rope sling around the mules. All of which is to say that the mountains were dark, sneaky, and dangerous, and they made no exceptions for stubborn travelers who should have had better sense.

On a particular morning in a high, cupped valley, one such traveler stood weary and shivering. All the roots of things were asleep, darkness still lay in drifts; treetops trembled in the ice-­chilled air that darkness had sucked down from the heights. The traveler and the child with her had walked a long way to get to this particular place at this very particular time. Lillis, usually called Grandma, had been here before, on several occasions. Her granddaughter, Needly, had not. Today was Needly's tenth birthday: she had been told this was to be an occasion, an announcement that had led her rather tentatively to anticipate something in the way of candy, perhaps, or a wrapped something, maybe even with a ribbon. Grandma was capable of such surprising details. In reality, the child's life had allowed few if any illusions, and she already had an adult awareness that planning and happening were quite different things. Cold and weariness, though extreme, were not yet accompanied by despair.

Grandma was equally weary, shifting from foot to foot at the edge of a fury directed entirely at herself! This journey had been a gamble, but she had foolishly allowed anticipation to trifle with details of her previous visits; allowed optimism to strengthen two sets of bones and muscles, one not yet adult, one no longer young. She knew perfectly well that lengthy waiting unrelieved by sleep or food or amusement could seem an eternity. During her life she had done a good bit of such standing about, enough to be familiar with that dagger point at which every successive moment attenuates into forever. Well, hope had outrun good sense. She had wanted so to show an enchanting thing to an eager, intelligent little girl whose childish strength her fatuous grandmother may badly have misjudged! She grieved for the child. The cold hand in hers was limp with weariness.

Both watchers, old and young, sighed in simultaneous exhaustion, looked down, rubbed their eyes, shifted their weight, sighed again, counted silently to one hundred—­as the older one had taught the younger one to do in situations of a similar kind—­and then, without particular hope, raised their eyes to the height above.

To glory! There it was!
As though a heavy window curtain had been suddenly flipped aside, fiery light flooded over the fangs of the esker, darted between the two sheltering peaks, and blazed the landmark into radiance. Where had been only darkness was now a miracle: creation come upon the height, majestic and unbelievable! A thing, a living thing, red as ruby, huge as the most mighty monument, leaping up from the ledge that held it as though it had lain there through millennia and was now, impossibly, endlessly uncoiling itself upward into the sky!

Grandma squeezed a suddenly muscular and vibrant little shoulder, and whispered, ­“People, those few who've seen it, they give it different names. Mostly around here, ­people call it the Listener.”

Needly was too busy marveling to reply. The enormous curlicue sprang from the ground angling toward the north, curving as it climbed, higher, higher yet, then circling back toward the south . . . no, perhaps slightly east of south, all that monstrous weight arched across the sky as though flung there, supported by nothing at all! It twisted, it spiraled, the narrow, questing tip of it finally pointing due east. In this light, it seemed to quiver! Needly thought it was most like the tendril of an enormous vine, one of those eager, trembling, impossibly slender fingers reaching out upon the wind, exploring the air for anything it can touch, and touching, grasp, and grasping, hold fast! What was it reaching for? Needly held her breath waiting for it to fall, knowing in the instant that of course it couldn't fall. Grandma had said other ­people had seen it before, long, long before, so it
had been there for a long time,
and falling was
not what it did
. But . . . but . . . it must have survived only by miracle!

Over the centuries, other travelers had thought the same. The area was not as remote as it seemed, particularly if one came from the east, but its approaches were hidden. If someone was crossing the mountains from the west and came from below, there was only one very short section of road from which it could be seen. In these mountains, winter came early and stayed late, so few travelers would have risked travel during the brief period of visibility in spring or fall. Fewer would have found a suitable campground within reasonable distance the previous night; fewer still would have left that campground in darkness, well before dawn, to have reached this one place on the road; only a fraction of
them
would have arrived there just at or before the moment of dawn; and of those, even fewer would have been looking eastward at just the right moment to see the sun burst through those gated mountains!

So, though the great rock formation—­which is what most of those who had seen it supposed it to be—­was indeed
visible
from other places and at other times of day, those who had actually
perceived
it numbered very few.

From the point of view of the thing itself, a few was barely tolerable.

Volcanologists had suggested that molten stone had been thrust into some deep, twisting cave and had solidified there to be heaved up during some great cataclysm. It had undoubtedly been smoothed by blown sand, washed by rain, polished by time. To Needly, how it had happened didn't matter. It was here now, majestic, marvelous . . . and alive. The child was quite sure of that. Stone, maybe. But unlike any other stone.

Grandma caught the child's thought as she often did (often hearing the thoughts more clearly than words) and was not surprised to find it mirroring her own. In this scarlet light, birthed bloody from the womb of morning, the reaching curl of it had the shape of vitality: the coil of a sinuous vine, the time-­perfected veer of a wooded river; the arched line of a windblown tree, the flawlessly spiraling twist of a shell. All such transient living precisions were here frozen into an eternal reality. The substance was irrelevant.

Grandma remembered, decades ago, attracted as much by challenge as curiosity, she had come this far, camped overnight in this same cup of shadow, then when it was barely light—­using rope, and metal spikes that she had pounded into cracks with a hammer, and, yes, no small measure of egotism—­she had come from below, climbed the precipitous wall, and then crawled over the razor edge of rock onto the narrow ledge on which the pedestal rested. Once there, she had touched the Listener, touched it, stroked it, examined it closely enough to assure herself that the formation was in every sense solid and real.

Before deciding to make the journey, she had decided the thing had to be called “the Listener” for a reason, and she had desperately needed someone to listen. She had leaned against the glorious whatever-­it-­was, put her face against it, and pled for help:
“Someone help me. Someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”

During and after this plaint, she had probably uttered the word “help” at least ten times. Then, all those years ago—­as she turned to climb dangerously and laboriously back the way she had come—­she had seen that her final, vertiginous effort to reach the Listener had been utterly unnecessary. There was a route visible only from this end, a short, simple way that led toward a well-­traveled road and would have brought her to the monument with a fraction of the time and effort she had expended. On that occasion she had collapsed in tears and agonies of frustration that had absorbed a good deal of time and fury even though she used that easier route to return to the place she referred to and occasionally thought of as
home
.

She had intended to take Needly along that route as soon as it was light so the child could actually climb onto the pedestal and touch the Listener. That climax to the experience was now . . . not possible. The ledge at the foot of the Listener's pedestal was already occupied. She hadn't seen it at first. Half blinded by dawn, she'd been looking past it at that curling, crimson glory, but now her eyes had dropped onto the ledge that should have been empty. This morning it was occupied by an unreality.

Since neither she nor the child had seen it arrive, it must have been there during the darkness: a fantasy only slightly dwarfed by the Listener above it. It was obviously a mythical thing; anyone who could read knew that! No matter how the old woman blinked and wiped her eyes; incredible or not, there it was! As the sky-­flung stone above it faded from fiery copper and blazing bronze, the creature below it on the ledge received the metallic sheen and, enlivened by it, moved its great wings, the long primaries unfolding upward, the arc of the feathers that followed repeating the arc of the overarching formation, successive quills rising on either side of the massive chest, two perfect vertical fans that framed the prone body, the regal head with its queenly crest, the burnished mane that seemed to shine with its own radiance; the great beak like a shield of bronze, all this living assembly shining while the morning held its breath until the escutcheon was complete.

There it was. Whole. Alive. And awake! A Griffin! A living Griffin!

Needly and Grandma were still hidden in the cup of shadow below. Before starting on this birthday journey, Grandma had shared certain memories: her own sensations on first seeing the Listener; her wonder and delight; her perception that Earth itself seemed to rejoice at this particular revelation. Now she felt something approaching fear. Not terror, not yet. But things with great beaks like that, they did eat things, and Grandma and Needly were very probably among the types of things they . . . ate. She and the child were still hidden. The trees were only a few steps away. If they did not delay, they could creep away. They should do that right now, while darkness hid them . . .

They did not.

Why? A subtlety. Though Grandma could not possibly have expected this additional marvel, its presence was a perfect and suitable completion of the occasion. One did not flee from perfection!

So, standing silent, her hand on the child's shoulder, she swallowed apprehension and assured herself it was good that she was not too old and the child with her was not too young to see and hear and feel. They stood while the quivering wings still cast reflected sequins of gold and glory across the valley, the fiery light faded slowly, and the Listener's brilliance slid into more muted shades. The darting lights seemed to evoke a tingling over the surface of her body and the child's, and she—­they—­heard an almost inaudible ringing, as of innumerable tiny crystal chimes.

Needly's eyes had not blinked since her first sight of the marvel. Her voice was only a dazed whisper, a sliver of sound emerging from a bubble of enchantment.
“Grandma. If you had a barley field made of glass, it'd sound like that.”

“Might. Yes.”

“If the winds were gentle, if the stalks were made of music.”

“Yes. Could be. If.”

“And if the sound could go on and on and on, even when the wind stopped . . .”

“If all that, I suppose, yes.” The old woman wondered—­only briefly—­if the sounds had been stroked into being by a particular wind or by the rays of this particular sunrise, or whether they had been uttered or created by the creature herself, and whether her own skin was reacting to sound or smell or something entirely extraordinary. That one . . . that winged one on the mountain had never been an ordinary anything. That one had not evolved, not accumulated, not adapted to become. That one had been created by someone, someone who had been striving for perfection.

Needly whispered, “It's turned green: the Listener.”