Fish Tails (34 page)

“And where was that?”

“Where we stopped t'other night an' you went back to Saltgosh. Where we watched those men find out they lost their horses. I hid her on top a' the wagon, longside a' me.”

Abasio reflected on the stop. They had commented on the wagon track leading from the road down over the hill. They had commented that there might be a community there, or perhaps only a farm. He glanced at Xulai, who was rubbing her forehead while staring at Abasio. His lips quirked and he shrugged.

She interpreted his shrug correctly. “How old are you, Needly?”

Needly did not look up from her labors. She had taken a comb from her pocket and was busy grooming the mane of the little Griffin, who had begun to purr. “Eleven or about, I think. Grandma kept track. But she died before she could tell me. Last time she told me, I was ten. That's when I first saw the Lady Animal . . .”

Abasio thought that she and Willum seemed to be of an age. The girl was clean, no dirtiness that could not be accounted for by the dust of travel. Her hair was neatly braided. He cast a glance at the Griffin, who seemed to be watching the child in fascination. Well, good. He swallowed and asked the child, “Will someone be looking for you?”

“Old Man Digger, maybe,” she said, looking up a bit fearfully. “Though maybe he won't come this way. Hench Valley ­people don't go over the mountain hardly ever, because they don't know what's on this side. But there's ways to come round north side the peak, to here. He could come here.”

The child looked very young and thin. Xulai asked, “What are you able to do, Needly?”

The child turned, tucked her comb away, and came to stand beside Xulai, to take her hand and lay it upon her own narrow shoulder. “That there that feels like bone, that's my skin,” she said matter-­of-­factly. “Grandma said I grew a good patch on both sides, and that's good. That's from carrying the water every day. Two big buckets. From the well.”

“How far?” murmured Xulai, astonished at what she felt. A callus like wood. Thick and hard.

Needly shrugged. “As far as from here to that turn in the road down there,” pointing to a switchback half a mile or so down the road.

“Isn't there any water closer than that?”

“There's water everywhere,” she said. “Little streams, all kinds of water. But that water isn't well water.”

“Wouldn't the stream do as well? For washing in? Or scrubbing clothes. Or whatever,” the Griffin asked, her voice low and soft.

“Oh, no, Lady Animal. No, water used in a house has to be covenanted water. From the well. The well has the only covenanted water. Going to get it makes the women covenanted, you see? We wouldn't be covenanted if we didn't haul the water.”

Abasio, frowning, started to say something, but Xulai held up one hand. “Will you be able to use regular stream water on this journey, if you come with us?”

“Oh, yes, lady, gentleman! The Kindlies told me the covenant thing was made up by the Founder. The Kindlies told me all about him, the man who settled Hench Valley ages ago, him and his five wives—­four, really. He thought he was a god, populating a separate place. Each wife had her own place, and he put them far enough apart they couldn't talk with one another and plot with one another. The older ones had one child right after another. One of them was only twelve years old, though, and she died in childbirth before her house was even finished. The Founder had named her place Child Wife, and there's nothing left of it, but the other four places are still there. Tuckwhip and Gortles and Grief's Barn and Bag's Arm. All the men in the valley are descended from the Founder and his four wives, but they don't keep girls alive much now.

“Grandma says all covenanting does for a girl is make sure she dies young. She planned for me to vanish. She even told me the timing of it: I should do it when danger was soon coming. They were suddenly going to give me to Old Man Digger, and that was surely danger coming. And, Grandma said, when someone sympathetic came by—­that was Willum . . . or maybe the bear. And when there's a way to hide me until I got away—­that's the wagon. She told me if danger came, I shouldn't bother with either sympathy or hiding, I should just git, she said. Just git! Fast!”

“Is that what you did?”

“Pretty much. They weren't going to give me to Old Man Digger for a little while, but Grandma said don't wait, so I didn't.”

“No doubt,” said Abasio grimly, looking up at the Griffin, who had followed all this with considerable interest. “Does your child want her feather back, Great One?”

The little Griffin raised her wing. “It goes here,” she said, indicating a place beneath her wing with the tip of her beak, a tiny opening, like a pore. Needly went close, slipped the quill into place. It made a tiny, woodlike click. The small Griffin commented, “A new one would grow, but it would take a long time, Mama says.” Needly stood stroking the Griffin child, a child several times her own size, but Needly treated her as she would an infant. Xulai realized that she really was: if a creature lived two thousand years, then its infancy and childhood would last at least two or three hundred years.

The great beak above the Griffin child stroked down, the baby snuggled to her mother's breast. The Great One's head came back, the expression hardened once more. “Listen, both of you. Man-­person, woman-­person; you, children, also!”

They froze in place, even Willum motionless, caught by that voice like a fish on a spear.

“Your ­people made us. You gave us pain, you gave us joy, we are not machines! You gave us language, or you lent us your own, we are not machines! You are responsible for us! You must help us—­at least those of us who ask for it, for we have sworn that if you do not help us, your children will not survive either. We are not many, but we have friends who feel as we do, created as we were created. Some live in the air, but
many created as we were created now live in the seas
. Dogs are being made who can live in the sea. Horses, too. Cows and goats and sheep. And those who are not being changed are being . . . moved. Moved away, to other worlds that are not being drowned!”

“Moved?” cried Needly. “Moved where?”

“We don't know where, but we know it is being done. There are enough of them to make us sure what you have done for them can be done for us! Oh, be sure, you men, be sure none of your little ones will survive unless ours do as well,” the Griffin whispered. “You see?”

A single crystal tear dropped on the little one's plumage, slid off the feather, and clinked glassily as it circled before coming to rest on the rock beneath.

Xulai, tears in her own eyes, murmured, “Yes, we see. I don't know what we can do, Great One, but we will try. We truly will!”

The Griffin reared onto her hind legs, picked up the little one in her front paws, the claws curving around beneath it like a cradle. Her great wings beat downward, stirring a hurricane of dust and pine needles and gravel as the great body lifted, lurched upward, and dropped into the canyon below, where her wings caught the air and soared upward. “Think deeply on that,” it cried, not loudly, but loudly enough that they heard it clearly. “How you must do for ours what you have done for your own!”

“Think on that?” whispered Xulai to Abasio, who had come close behind her and put his arms about her. “By all the soul lanterns of all the Tingawan generations under the depths of the sea, Abasio! It took my ­people—­our ­people—­a thousand years to do it for humans. We don't have another thousand; so how do we think
upon that
?”

A
NOTHER HALF DAY SHUTTLED THEM
north to south and south to north, repeatedly, switchback after switchback. At noon they found themselves not a great deal lower but considerably farther north of the peak, a small clearing among towering pines. Abasio and Xulai sat beside the fire late into the dusk. While Needly slept in the wagon—­wearied out, as Xulai thought, by too much labor, too little food, too much apprehension, not enough security—­Willum took it upon himself to badger them about the Griffin, blaming them for not having invited the creatures for dinner so he could have asked it for a ride.

Finally Abasio, aggravated past endurance, snarled at him. “I thought you were a smart boy, Willum! You're doing it again, just as you did back there before Saltgosh. You're not listening. You didn't listen about the giants, now you're not listening to what the Griffin said! She is not pleased with humans, and much though you sometimes give me reason to doubt it, you are human! She might well choose to drop you from halfway up the sky just to prove she meant what she said! If you don't shut up I may emulate that event by kicking you off the side of the road!”

At that, Willum gave up. He rolled himself in his blankets, and finally stopped mumbling to himself and began to breathe like a sleeper. Xulai had begun her own analysis of the situation earlier in the day, listing both in writing and aloud what the ­people of Tingawa could and could not do, as she had understood the genetics of the changes made in Xulai's mother. Something similar would have to be done for the Griffins, and she explained this aloud, to herself and to Abasio, who tried to be attentive. He was losing the battle to drowsiness. However, when she repeated for the tenth time, “It was done genetically! We didn't have the before-­time machines that could put together the genetic units in sequence, one after the other. We didn't have them! That meant it took generation after generation of breeding to isolate each characteristic, and it took a thousand years! But I think they have built a sequencer recently. Precious Wind said something of the kind. Of course, by itself, that's meaningless. Even if we started tomorrow, how could we manage enough generations of Griffins to change their . . . their shape? Their function?”

“If there is no time,” he murmured from a half dream, “I rather imagine it would need to be done all at once.”

She repeated the words. “All at once! How could it possibly be done all at once?”

T
HAT NIGHT, FOR A CHANGE
Abasio did not dream of Lom. Instead, he dreamed of his first watery meeting with the Sea King. The great Kraken had tricked him into going swimming by lending him a fisherman's mask; they had swum among the coral, seeing the wonders of the sea, including the coral palace that had been built for the king that was full of his children. All those wonders, and by the time they had come up onto the beach once more, the mask had been long forgotten, and Abasio had acquired eight tentacles without realizing it. He had crawled out onto the sand, however, looking down to see a great writhing, sucker-­laden serpent instead of an arm, and had gone into panic and shock. The realization of what he had become had taken days—­months—­to become accustomed to, even longer to accept.

But tonight, in his dream he was talking to the Sea King, repeating an earlier comment: “It had to happen all at once! All at once!”

The Sea King replied in Xulai's voice, “Hush, dear. All at once, we know, but go back to sleep.”

W
HEN
A
BASIO WOKE,
K
IM HAD
taken the extra horses and ridden away down the road, giving the dust time to settle before the rest of the group came along behind him. Xulai was muttering to herself beside the fire.

He interrupted her. “When the ­people in the before time made the Griffins, what genetics went into them, do you think?”

Xulai, who was concentrating on timing the hen's eggs she was boiling by counting to two hundred, ignored him.

“You'd need something catlike for the body. A lion maybe. Her beak is very eagle. Though, actually, the Sea King has one much like it.”

Xulai said, “If Precious Wind were here, she could probably tell us what would work.”

“And we're meeting her, where?”

“She's moving toward us now. If we haven't arrived in Artemisia when she gets there, she'll come on west until we do meet.”

“So, what do we tell the Griffin?”

Xulai gave bowls of porridge to Willum and Needly, each topped with a soft-­boiled egg, scooped from the shell. She carried the other bowls to the grassy bank where Abasio was sitting and sat down beside him. Around a mouthful of breakfast, she said, “The first thing we need to do is find out where the Griffins were created. The Griffin may know, and that will give us a place to start. The only thing we can tell her immediately is to keep in touch with us until we meet Precious Wind. Her far-­talker will reach the ­people in Tingawa.” She mused for a few moments, seeming puzzled. “Did the Edgers make all the fantastic creatures? Why don't we know specifically where? And by whom? Doesn't that seem strange to you?”

Abasio shook his head at her, considering the question. “Considering everything else we don't know, love, it's not terribly strange. The men in Saltgosh have heard the Edgers brag about making many kinds of strange things. I know they did. Just last night, as I was getting drowsy, I remembered one time, while I was still living in Fantis, old Chief Purple was going through one of his half-­drunk speeches about his friends the Edgers, telling us they had taken over an old place east of the city. A factory, he said. A place where large things had been manufactured long before. The person who told me . . . he said the place, the building or whatever it was . . . he said it was huge. They had made ships there . . .”

“Ships? That sounds unlikely! So far from the ocean?”

“Airships, Xulai. Flying ships. They were called something else, I've forgotten what. I thought it was ‘planes,' but that's a kind of woodworking tool! The place was mostly underground, so it was well preserved, a lot of the machinery was still there. That place was large enough to have made Griffins, and even giants.”

“One of the Edges? Or perhaps more than one Edge? Co­oper­atively?”