Fish Tails (41 page)

The sun sank behind the hills. Abasio yawned, blinked, came around a slight curve, and saw Kim's encampment at the end of the stretch they were on. Good. They were weary and needed rest. He looked again. Kim was not alone. “Whoa, Blue,” he said. “Xulai, I'm going to get off and check a wheel, take a look down the road. Do you see any threat?” He jumped from the wagon seat, stretched, bent, twisted to get the kinks out, then knelt beside the left front wheel.

“Don't think so, Abasio,” she said. “Kim has met up with a pair of travelers. They have two saddle horses, one packhorse. All the men are drinking tea by the fire.”

“Remember? From now on my name is Vahso,” he reminded her. “Needly? Willum? You listening?”

“We got it, Vahso,” said Willum. “Who are we 'sposed to be?”

Xulai murmured, “Willum, Needly, Vahso is your uncle Vahso and I'm your aunt Shooey. Your mother . . . What's your ma's name, Willum?”

“Bess.”

“Bess sent you two children with us on this trip so you could see something of the world. Uncle Vahso is her brother.”

“Needly and me, we'll both call her Ma.” He and Needly put their heads together and agreed upon what they would say about Da and Ma and what was going on back home. “You and me, Needly, we live on a farm between Gravysuck and Saltgosh, and ever'body there says you're a throwback to some gran-­cestor back a ways 'cause you're so white. Tonight, I can tell you what crops we farm and what animals we have so's you can tell ­people 'f they ask.”

“And everything else is simple truth,” said Abasio, making an ostentatious examination of a front wagon wheel. “We are traveling to tell everyone the waters are rising. I have acquaintances in Artemisia because I'm a traveler and I've been there before. The only name we have to avoid is my real one, and it's simpler if ­people think we're a family group.” He stretched again and climbed back onto the wagon seat. “All right? Wife Shooey, nephew Willum, niece Needly, let's go meet whoever it is camping with Kim.”

“Who's Kim supposed to be?” whispered Needly. “Is he related to us?”

“Oh, yes,” said Abasio. “Since they're both Tingawan, he'll have said he's a cousin of Shooey's. Remember to call him Cousin Kim. He'll expect you to.” He had intended to spend a few days practicing this slight deception before they reached the bottom of the road, and he prayed attempting it now, without adequate rehearsal, would not prove a disaster. He climbed onto the wagon seat and picked up the reins, saying softly, “Hup, Blue, my faithful, nonspeaking equine, let's get on down the road.”

“Yes, O profoundly wonderful master,” muttered Blue, leaning into the harness. Needly, reassured by the talk on the way down the road, giggled. Xulai looked up in astonished delight. It was the first time she had heard the child laugh.

The men sharing Kim's fire seemed harmless, which immediately put Abasio on guard. They were too smiley. Too welcoming. Too “My-­oh-­my, let me help you step down, ma'am, and what's this lovely lady doing out here in the wilderness”-­y. Xulai greeted them without ­smiling.

“Good evening, gentlemen. Kim, is the water hot?”

“Yes, cousin! I knew you'd want to wash the dust off first thing.”

Abasio indicated a place. Blue and Rags, silent, maneuvered the wagon into the place, the door on the side away from the fire. Abasio and Willum removed the harness. Xulai took a bowl of warm water behind the wagon and washed the dust from all her available surfaces. Abasio had told her the Artemisians had real baths, baths near hot springs that one could submerge in, and she was looking forward to hot water in volume. She had not had an all-­over warm bath since leaving Saltgosh, in the women's bathhouse. Before that, she'd had several dips in Bertram's pool, after dark, and had taken advantage of his hot shower. While she was at it, she cleaned the babies' bottoms and used the last of the water to wash out their wool-­lined trousers. They were, at the moment, contentedly full, scarcely waking as she unclothed and reclothed them in the shelter the wagon provided.

Kim knocked on the wagon corner and whispered, “Ma'am?”

“Yes, Kim?”

“There's a pool a little way off. It's getting a little late to use now, but I thought maybe you'd like to know about it in the morning. It'll be chilly, but—­”

“Kim, you are a very thoughtful man. Do the men with you have their own stores?”

“Yes'm. They've had their supper. I waited to eat with you all.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Didn't want to be . . . in their debt at all.”

She nodded, understanding, dried her face and arms, and went into the wagon to gather foodstuffs, returning to the fire with a stew already assembled, needing only to be heated. “Gentlemen,” she said again.

Abasio spoke: “My wife. My dear, the dark-­haired young man is Clume,” he advised her, nodding in Clume's direction. “The other is Walkin. Traveling to see the world, they tell me.” Clume's hair was dark, as was his skin, a rich tan, all in all a good-­looking young man, in his late twenties perhaps. Strong, from the looks of him, though not as bulky as Walkin, whose muscles bulged alarmingly whenever he extended an arm.

“Ah,” she said, maneuvering the grill across the fire and setting the pot firmly upon it. “What have you seen of it so far?”

Clume set himself to be charming, and Xulai responded nicely to his charm, smiling, nodding. They had seen the ruins of the city to the north, he said. Fantis. Almost covered with tiny trees of various kinds that were still being planted by the Sisters of the Trees. There were many birds. They had gone north of there, even, into the deep forests, but had hesitated to continue where there were no roads.

Abasio nodded. “I've been up there. Got lost one time for the better part of a season before I found my way out. Got down into a valley somehow and could not find a way out of it again.”

“You couldn't backtrack yourself?” asked Walkin.

“Got in there in the midst of a blizzard,” Abasio explained. “Then the weather turned warm, everything was slipping and sliding, avalanches here and there, water dripping. By the time it dried out enough to travel, the landscape had changed to the extent that I had no idea where I was. Could have come out easy if I'd left the wagon, but I didn't want to do that.”

“Family wasn't with you then?”

“Oh, no. That was years ago. When I was still a young man seeing the world, just as you are. How far east have you traveled?”

Well, it seemed Clume and Walkin had started from the south. Now they were going over the mountain and west to the sea. “We've been on our way up two days,” they said. “We stopped at a village a day or so away from the climb: Artemisian village. You know the ­people there?”

Abasio swallowed a huge sigh of relief. Wonderful! It meant they would come out of the mountains into Artemisian territory! He need not leave the group and go inspecting the countryside. “I do know the ­people of Artemisia, yes; very good ­people.”

Xulai saw his relief and grinned at him. “You'll have roads, such as they are, most all the way,” she told the visitors, tasting the stew and deciding it was hot enough. The meat was left over from a roasted leg of venison, the last of the fresh meat they'd bartered for in Saltgosh. From here on, they would have only salted and smoked meat, but it was only two more days down!

Abasio took over the conversation, telling them how the road went from here over the mountain. A baby cried from inside the wagon. Xulai excused herself and went to tend to the twins. She would avoid their being seen, if possible. It was too late in the evening for ex­planations.

Needly and Willum, meanwhile, ate their supper nicely, without argument, being polite to Uncle Vahso, Aunty Shooey, and Cousin Kim, as though they had never behaved in any other way.

The men rose, said they would go a bit farther up road before dark, thanked Kim for sharing his fire. They rode away. Sometime later, Xulai and Abasio heard their horses on the road above them, the clop of hooves and the inevitable slide and splat of gravel that always seemed to rattle down whenever there was traffic on the next switchback up.

The nights were cool, though not actually cold as yet. They covered the chicken coops and put the “winter skirts” around the bottom of the wagon, canvas barriers to keep out the cold so that Needly and Willum could sleep warmly there. Abasio had put a line along the bottom of the wagon so the children could hang their daytime clothing over it, to air.

Before going to bed, Abasio and Kim spent some time with the horses, talking to them, finding out from Blue if any needed a hoof cleaned out or a bur removed. Later, from their bed in the wagon, Abasio and Xulai could hear the children talking, sometimes a word or two, sometimes, if it were very quiet, whole paragraphs. Tonight, Needly was telling Willum something her grandma had told her, and the two adults lay mesmerized, listening . . .

“ . . . and see, a purpose of the Creator is the universe—­we always say ‘A purpose,' not ‘THE purpose,' because we can see only this one but must allow that there may be others. And a purpose of the universe is life—­there are bits of the chemicals that make up living things floating around all through the universe. ­People studied meteors, and they analyzed what they carried, and there's life stuff in them. And a purpose of life is intelligence . . . Thing you have to remember is that because something has a purpose doesn't mean more of it is necessarily good! Even though a purpose of the universe is life, having ten stupid children doesn't fulfill the life purpose, which is making intelligence. You have to follow the litany clear to its end. A purpose of intelligence is language. And a purpose of language is communication. A purpose of communication is knowledge, of knowledge is discovery, and of discovery is the universe, and of the universe is the Creator. It's a circle. We learn the will of the Creator by observing creation.”

“So you'd just kill off . . . like the birds or fish that can't talk?”

“No, no, no. They're part of the universe. Part of creation. Speech evolved on Earth—­and probably in millions of other places—­but that doesn't mean every creature on earth has to speak. Grandma said each step in the litany is kind of like a . . . a mountain. You pile up a lot of life, and at the top of the mound you get intelligence, but that intelligence rests on the whole mountain, and all of it is important. It's part of creation. You don't kill off any part of creation; you can eat one fish but not all the fish there are! Then you pile up a lot of intelligence, and at the peak you get language. Maybe in some worlds they talk in smells or in whistles. And there may be a whole mountain of words stacked up before you talk back and forth to some other planet—­that's communication.”

“An' a mountain of back-­and-­forth before you learn somethin' new.”

“Exactly, Willum! And you pile up the knowledge to discover new things, and you pile the discoveries to understand the universe. Then you're working toward understanding the Creator, see? Not that we do. Not that we monkey-­brains do understand, not yet, but it's important to try!”

Xulai breathed deeply. Abasio reached over and put his arm across her. Both of them listened, fascinated as Needly explained Mobwows:
monkey-­brains
and willy-­waggers, which Willum accepted with comments about some of those he knew of back in Gravysuck. The two adults were yawning and smiling at the wagon roof above them when Needly moved on to something else.

“World spirits are supposed to help. As a planet becomes life-­ful, it develops a spirit, a world spirit who helps keep the balance, tells creatures when they're too many or dangerously few. Grandma said most olden-­time ­people understood this, or at least perceived it, because they always had a name for the Earth spirit. Some called her Gaia, or Persephone; others called her other things. Some just said Mother Nature.”

“That spirit, she'd be lonesome,” murmured Willum. “All by her­self . . .”

“You'd think so, because all the worlds are far, far apart in the great wheel of the galaxy,” said Needly. “So far apart that it would take thousands of years to go from one to the other the way normal creatures would have to go. But Grandma said world spirits can talk together across that space. They can kind of fold up the space that's in between, fold it up and make little holes from fold to fold so they can talk to each other. She called it wormholes. She says they can travel through those wormholes, too, but mostly they don't. The way Grandma used to talk, I think she thought the Silverhairs might be like . . . servants to those world spirits.”

“Why'd they need servants?” murmured Willum between yawns. “ 'F they c'n do all that foldin' an' stuff, why'd they need any servants?”

“Maybe to take messages?”

“Y'awready said they could talk to each other . . .”

Needly sighed deeply. “Maybe not take messages. Maybe do something important. I guess a world spirit wouldn't leave its own world and go across the galaxy if they could just as well send some Silverhairs to do whatever . . .”

“Like what?” asked Willum.

“Like to save this person or let that one go, like tell this one to go to another place. Like Abasio says he was told to go to another place, and that's where he met Xulai.”

The sound of a long, unmuffled yawn. Then, very sleepily, “So, if you're one o' them, you don't acshully have hair. You've got like antennys on your head.” Another yawn. “Antennys to pick up those signals they send.”

“Where'd you hear about antennas.”

A long pause, then, barely heard: “Xulai said bugs have 'em.”

“I guess. Maybe. That might make sense. Willum. Willum?”

There was no answer. There was a child's sigh, a rustle of cloth, then silence.