Fish Tails (64 page)

“The same spring that fed the pool the children used comes down through the place Bear and Coyote found, and though I was prepared to go get provisions for them, there was most of a deer carcass in the clearing. I hopped it up where Bear and Coyote can get at it easily. It had been partly butchered, but it's fresh enough that Coyote and Bear tell me they won't need to hunt for the two more days they'll be there.

“I set up their overlook as a new arrival point on
ul xaolat
and erased the clearing as a destination.” She held it up for Xulai to see what she was doing. “I'm taking it out of yours right now, so none of us can blunder into it by accident. We wouldn't want to arrive there coincidentally with more of the hunter types, whatever they are. We'll relieve Bear and Coyote in a ­couple of days. If they haven't seen anyone, we can replace them with pairs of hunters who are used to the woods. They won't mind spending one or two days at a time, and I think we'll want to keep a watch on that hunters' camp for a while, just to see what or who turns up.”

Xulai whispered, “I'm so utterly thankful Bear was with them. That body was enormous. He's another like the ones Sybbis has, isn't he? Have you any idea what that coating is on the outside of its body? Were the veins in it still moving when . . .”

“They were, for a while.” Precious Wind shuddered. “Even though the thing was dead.” She sat down to put on the stockings she was carrying, following them with trousers, a shirt, and shoes. Finally, she opened her personals kit on the chair beside her, threw the towel around her shoulders, and took a comb from the kit.

Xulai said, “I don't think the wormy things are part of the stinker, Presh. The wormy things take a while to die after their host is dead. They obviously live off the host . . . bloodstream, maybe. Lungs, too, maybe. I believe that smell is the smell Abasio has always called the Ogre stink.”

Precious Wind separated the left side of her hair into strands and began braiding it. Xulai took another comb and began working on the right side. “According to what we've put together, the hunter came back to the camp drunk and said ‘Ahgar' or ‘a Gar' or an ‘Ogre' told him nobody wanted a Griffin hide from a young one, so he should just kill the young one.” Precious Wind burrowed into her personals kit and brought out two beaded cylinders, thrusting one of them onto the end of her braid and twisting it tight. “We've now seen twenty-­five of the monsters. How many of them are there?”

Xulai put the other cylinder on the braid she had finished and left Precious Wind to pin the braids into a crown. “ ‘Yung For'ster' could have talked with one of the Gars from Sybbis's camp without much trouble. Or it could have talked with someone who makes or directs his kind of creatures. I feel that makes more sense than another one of his own kind telling him nobody wants a small Griffin skin. That kind of instruction sounds like it came from a human, to me.”

“How could that one get back and forth from the Griffin clearing to Sybbis's camp? It would be a two-­to-­three-­day journey from here without
ul xaolat
.”

“No, it wouldn't. That's what I'm saying. Something that size moves faster than an ordinary human. Longer legs, longer steps. It took Abasio two days to get to that clearing from the foot of the mountain, but if someone from Catland went up the mountain, west of the ridge, it could have met the hunter halfway, at some prearranged spot.”

“And all we know about them is that there are more than a few of them?”

Precious Wind nodded. “We'll know more when we can get some of the samples analyzed. It's of some importance to find out how many there really are, and where they are, as well as whether they are a reproducing population or individually created. I'm thinking in terms of logistics. Things that size must eat enormously, and I'll wager they're carnivorous only. We need to be sure—­”

“Could Sybbis be feeding them . . . ­people?”

Precious Wind shuddered uncontrollably. “Captives? It's probably within the ganger frame of reference, yes. It would explain the attitude of the guards Sybbis left here. The ones I moved to other places. They were very glad to go!” She stared into the distance for a moment or so. “All the ­people here think the hunter Bear killed is at least part Ogre, don't they? There's no excuse for these creatures,” she snarled. “None at all.”

Xulai made a strange, strangled noise, half laugh, half sob. “No excuse at all! Nor for Griffins. Nor for Trolls. Nor perhaps for children like Needly, and perhaps not for ­people like me. Meddled-­with creatures. Living things created purposefully. Nothing natural about us!”

Precious Wind paled, seeing that Xulai was trembling. “Shhh. Don't upset yourself. We've had this discussion before, and you know it's nonsense!”

“I'm not
upset
. I'm
terrified
for us, Presh. Terrified. I love the babies but . . . sometimes I look at them and wonder what they are. How are they mine? Are they mine at all? What is my responsibility for them? Griffin says
we must guarantee her children's future as we are guaranteeing our own. Because we made them.
I didn't. You didn't. What is our responsibility for Griffins? What about our responsibility for these ghastly, stinking monsters! The accusation would be the same in both cases.
Mankind made them!
”

“You just said it, Xulie, dear. You didn't. I didn't.”

“Humans did! Is there such a thing as collective guilt?”

Precious Wind sighed, rubbing at her forehead. “Religious ­people taught so, a long time ago. They called it ‘original sin' because some early ancestor committed some supposed indecency—­I've forgotten what it was.”

“Committed! And went on committing!” Suddenly Xulai was weeping, and nothing Precious Wind could do would comfort her. The older woman sat beside her, holding her, wondering how she herself would have responded to being created as the new Ave, the birth mother of
Homo aquaticus
. Raising children totally—­well, no. Not
totally,
but
greatly
different from oneself. Children who would not share one's own childhood experiences. No gathering at the dinner table in the evening. No playing ball in the meadow. No bedtime stories as one tucked them into bed. Children whose own childhood experiences one could not fully share. To love children who might never return that love . . . not as had been traditionally expected. When one really thought about it, weeping did not seem at all . . . irrational.

“What's wrong?” asked Abasio from the door. He too looked bathed. His hair hung in wet curls around his forehead.

“Nothing,” Precious Wind replied, trying to smile. “She just gets overwhelmed about being Ave, every now and then.”

He grinned, a wry grin. “Avam doesn't always have it so easy either.”

Precious Wind made a half bow in his direction. “Has either of you read the daily reports on
ul xaolat
? The one you and Xulai were using?”

“What daily reports?”

“I needed to remove the location of that clearing up the mountain from your device, and I accidentally hit the daily-­report combination. Your
ul xaolat
has a very low opinion of you.” She showed Abasio the combination and left him reading the reports that popped up in sequence on the tiny screen. As she left to return to her own quarters, she heard Abasio's explosive “Idiots, are we! Xulai wondered what happened to those burned trees. Well, if it wants work to do, I'm sure I can find just loads!”

Precious Wind stuck her head back through the door. “Abasio, remember
,
you
cannot
retaliate against a device. It's like kicking the wagon when the axle breaks! And if you've got it stacking a winter's worth of firewood somewhere, some other poor soul may be drowning in a swamp for lack of power to transport out. The revised models are really snippy, and there's no way to get even with a device. They don't get bored, they don't get tired, they can't be punished. I wish they could. I've tried.

“You can do what I do with mine:
ignore it
. OR you can retaliate against the man in Tingawa who did most of the revisions while imprinting them with his personality. His name's Bung Quai. Just tell it, ‘Yes, Bung Quai.' ‘No, Bung Quai.' Every time you do that, he gets a resonance itch. At least we can feel like we're getting even.”

F
ROM THEIR HIDING PLACE ABOVE
the clearing, Bear and Coyote stood alternate watches. Coyote said he couldn't stand one, but he'd lie down one. Bear admitted it was the easier thing to do. “Problem is, when I do it that way, I keep goin' to sleep,” he said.

Coyote thought about this. “Well then, that's why humans say they
stand
watches. So they don't go to sleep. Though I've seen Abasio so tired he was asleep standing up.”

“If we could figure out when the critter, if there's a critter, was comin', it'd be easier. I mean, if we knew it was comin' at night, we'd sleep through the daytime.”

“Men mostly move around in the light.”

“Right. But if this thing's half Ogre, which is what I think he is, then he moved around at night just as well as in the sunshine. Better, maybe. They're sort of like Trolls, you know. Trolls don't like the sunlight one little bit.”

“Because they've got weak eyes. They can't take the sunlight. They go blind.”

Bear said, “Shhh. I hear something . . .” They rose from their mossy couch beside the tiny pool and crept to the ledge of rock overhanging the clearing below. The trees between allowed a partial view of the clearing. Bear expelled a breath audibly, suddenly catching himself as one of the creatures below raised its head and sniffed the air. There were three of them: one smaller than the hunter Bear had killed; two about the same size. Two male, one female—­that is, both Bear and Coyote believed it was female, though there was nothing specifically female-­shaped about it. It shared the general shapelessness of the dead one, huge stumpy legs and arms, a thick torso, a neck as thick through as the head. The two watchers shared a look of confusion. The appearance didn't equate with the smell. Part of the smell was one they associated with females in general, and one of the figures looked . . . bulbous.

“Nah heeer,” drawled one of the creatures. “Ah'gar nah heeer. Nah mell Ah'gar.”

“Whurs?”

A giant shrug from another. “Nah heeer.”

“Whuh mell?” asked the third.

Another giant shrug.

Bear whispered, “The little girl said the one I killed talked clearly, didn't she?”

Coyote nodded. “Maybe it had like . . . a quarter Ogre in it, 'stead of half.”

“N' you think these're half?”

Coyote nodded, watching the creatures below. “When these go, I'll follow. I'll come back here for you. If Precious Wind comes for you before I get back, have her come back each evening until she finds me. If I don't . . . get one of my kin to track me and get me out, or kill whoever killed me.”

Bear nodded ponderously. He could move as silently as Coyote, but not as quickly. Not that the creatures below seemed capable of much speed. Still. He was willing to wait. There was water, food, even a sheltered place to sleep. He rested one paw briefly on Coyote's back before the canine slithered off one end of the ledge and down the slope among the trees. When the creatures left, he did not see Coyote follow, but then, he hadn't expected to. That smell . . . either of them could track that without fail, even though this end of the stink trail had been softened by the stuff Precious Wind had spread on the ground where the hunter had bled and died. Maybe tomorrow he'd backtrack that trail and see where the thing had gone.

 

Chapter 11

What Are Stinkers
Made Of?

C
OYOTE SLIPPED AMONG THE TREES ON A TRACK
along the south-­facing slope that was more or less parallel to the monstrosities' path, forested slopes below him, snow-­crowned blue peaks appearing between treetops to the north. He had tried following the creatures at first. Impossible! They . . . emanated—­a good word Abasio had taught him—­they emanated a stink fog that attached itself to anything that came along behind them!

“Off to one side,” Coyote snarled to himself, “offside and uphill,” making a breathy chant of it,
up-­hill, up-­hill, up-­hill,
while trying to determine exactly how far uphill he needed to be. So far, he'd found no outer limit of the smell. The word “smell” didn't even say what it was! There was no human word he knew that was bad enough for what it was, and if humans had no word for a thing, animals who spoke human didn't either.

Coyotes had their own language, of course. There were howls: curse howls; mourning howls; celebration howls; the “Gather now” howl for a hunting pack. Then there were yaps: insult yaps, “Hurry up” yaps, “Do it outside or I bite” yaps for cubs who fouled the den or strayed from the pack. That one was actually more of a snarl. And of course there were other snarls for a variety of unpleasant occasions. When the pack did a sing, they used all of them, plus what Xulai called “yodels.” Even using the whole vocabulary, nothing any coyote or pack could possibly howl, snarl, yap, or yodel would describe this stench. Even running water picked it up! When the creatures waded through a stream, the water immediately darkened with a roiling cloud that spread in all directions, even backward, against the flow! Filthy clouds of it that seemed to stay right there in one place, getting stronger the longer it got smelled! It was the same color Coyote had glimpsed when the largest of the creatures had pulled at the neck of its shirt. It should have been flesh, but it didn't look like flesh. Of course it might have color. Abasio said most things did, but Coyotes didn't see color—­not that they needed it; their noses more than made up for that.

It had been obvious from the first that the stinkers had a destination even though what they were following was more of a suggestion than a trail. Nobody'd been on it lately. The only good thing about the stinkers was that they kept moving and they changed direction only to go around things. Or the path did. Also, they were too big to move quietly. Coyote could hear them at quite a distance, and he'd taken advantage of that by following from the far edge of their noise! Anywhere near and even the sunlight stank!

Stinking sunlight would make a good start of a curse howl! For a while he amused himself thinking of all the good words the stink would ruin. Lots of the words Abasio's Olly had taught him back when she was . . . alive. Some nights when she couldn't sleep she had come out of the wagon and taught him words. Good words. “Grace” was a willow in a soft wind. “Sparkle” was sun on ripples. “Solemn” was sun sinking beyond the hills with long, darkening clouds reaching into the distance and no sound anywhere . . . That was before she'd gone up in the ship to save the world, and from the middle of this stink Coyote wondered if it was worth saving! Her words were good words to think, but if the stink was in his nose, he couldn't think words at all!

He put his head down and ran, ran hard, until he was so far ahead of them he couldn't catch a whiff of them. He was gulping for air, his front paws tearing at the ground before he even halfway caught his breath. By that time he had his nose in the hole he'd dug, sniffing the moist earth. Pine needles and mold. The soft smell of damp soil. The melting scent of something mushroomy. A tang of bugs, maybe ants. It didn't matter what it was so long as it was something other than the . . . things, they weren't even creatures, just . . . things.

Next time Bear could do this following. The stinkers moved slow; that was Bear's usual speed. Better yet, Bear did not have a doggish, coyote-­ish, wolfish nose and he could probably tolerate this quite well, but for Coyote, never again! After breathing deeply for some little time, he sighed, shook himself, sat up, and listened. Nothing. He backtracked. They had decided to spend the night in a clearing. He glanced at the sky. It was almost night. So much had happened, so fast . . .

He retreated to the place he'd been, where he couldn't smell them. A fallen tree offered shelter, a hollow that had been dug by something else, something he couldn't smell, so it hadn't been here for a long time. He crawled into it thankfully. He'd hear them when they woke and moved in the morning.

He slept deeply, waking to light and to the sound of branches cracking and crunching among the trees behind him. The stinkers were catching up to him . . . no! They had turned. Why? They'd been headed west. Now they were headed north, into the mountain instead of along it!

He went back quietly—­though they didn't react quickly, the monsters had very good hearing. He found them lurching awkwardly uphill, this time on a real trail, one that looked very well used. He'd been in such a hurry to breathe, he'd crossed it yesterday without even seeing it! It seemed to be leading them out of the trees, and when that happened there'd be no way for him to keep out of sight! He sat down, momentarily baffled as the stinkers straggled into the sunlight, a little way up the slope of the clearing beyond. Then they stopped.

Now what? Coyote expelled his breath in a long, silent sigh and lay down to evaluate the situation. Abasio said
evaluate
meant not to do anything really stupid without thinking about it first. He also said sometimes there wasn't any smart thing left to do, so one ended up doing a stupid anyhow. Sometimes Coyote knew Abasio was joking with himself; other times he knew Abasio was joking with himself to keep from feeling something else. But still, thinking about the situation wouldn't do any harm—­starting with the trail . . .

The trail the stinkers had followed until now had been just barely. (Xulai said that a lot. “Are these pans clean enough, Xulai?” “Just barely.”) The trail they had just reached was wide with a surface lower than the surrounding soil. Now that he was thinking about trails, he could make out other trails of the “just barely” kind coming through the trees from different directions. That meant some stinkers came from here, some from there, and somewhere else, and when they got here . . . there were lots of them. If that was true, there might be more stinkers coming right now. If this was where they were headed, why did they sleep out in the trees last night?

Prudently, he squirmed his way into a thicket, burying himself where he could still see the big new trail and all of the clearing beyond. From the forest's edge the ground sloped up toward a cliff so tall that the trees at its top were only a fuzzy line, a kind of fringe, like the edge of Xulai's shawl. The wall was highest at its center, gradually lowering as it curved outward on either side, as though someone—­someone with a round jaw, like humans, not a narrow one like coyotes—­had taken a big bite out of the side of a hill. The sidewalls closed off the area at both sides; the new trail led out of the forest and straight into a gaping darkness at the bottom of the cliff. A hole. A big hole. Big enough for two or three of the stinkers to go in side by side without bending over.

That was it. There was nothing else, no possible cover except a man-­high ridge of stone that came out of the cliff just to the right of the hole, ran straight toward him, and extended a little way downhill, into the forest. From this side of the ridge, no one could approach the entrance without being seen, and there were shadowy hints of movement inside that opening, as though something was waiting there. Coyote didn't want to meet whatever it was!

Under cover of the tees, he left the thicket and clawed his way over the ridge, sliding down the other side. It was a tilted double layer of stone, darker on top of lighter. Coyote couldn't see colors but he could see darker and lighter. The really black layers were lava from deep inside the earth. The light-­colored ones were ashes—­sometimes almost white—­or all sorts of medium-­colored sand. And the river that ate down through them had been doing it for millions of years. Coyote had had no thought that included
million,
so Abasio had told him to think “All the pieces of sand in the bed of a river.” That was
millions
.

Coyotes had only four numbers. There was one, a few, many, and more many. Many was the same as the pack number. Generally. A many had its own smell. Each coyote had its own smell; with a few, each one smelled separately (a mama and her cubs was a few); pack smell was all the coyotes added together. If anyone was missing, it was pack smell missing something. If anyone was new, it was pack smell with something added. Xulai had told him the most difficult things about giving animals speech had been to fit words with how their brains worked rather than changing their brains so much that they would lose their coyote-­ity, or their bear-­ity, or their horse-­ity.

She gave him a word howl:
“Coyote-­ities, bear-­ities, both have necessities! And I confess to be utterly sure that it is plain to see, incontrovertibly, creatures must keep their identities pure!”

Coyote had remembered that! He could actually howl it! Except for all the
T
s and
P
s.
T
s just wouldn't howl. He had to make
L
s out of them. Xulai said when one creature's words didn't fit another creature's brain, they had “incompatible vocabularies.” On their way to find Sun-­wings, Abasio had told Bear and Coyote about the ­people from Earth who had gone to another world a long time ago, and they had met creatures who had “incompatible vocabularies” with humans. All well and good, as Abasio would say, but what about tongues that just didn't bend that way!

This mountain with the hole in it might be a volcano that hadn't completely cooled down. The hole might be a lava tube. Lava tubes usually came in bunches; sometimes they had water and warm places inside. Coyote was very thirsty and tired—­and now that he'd quit running, he was cold. The idea of someplace warm, with water—­that idea was very . . . appealing. “Appealing” was being warm with fresh meat.

Over in the clearing, the creatures were shifting uneasily and mumbling to one another. Coyote lay quiet, still searching for cover nearer that hole. The only possibility seemed to be a pile of rocks next to the ridge, about a third of the way to the cliff. If he stayed close to the side of the ridge, the pile would hide him from the entrance. Of course, if something was looking down on the area from above, they would see him or they wouldn't. That was one of those no-­smart-­things-­left-­to-­try situations. “Sit-­u-­ation” was the right word. He'd heard Xulai say, “Abasio, we have a situation.” In a situation, you just went ahead because there was nothing else to do.

He skulked along the bottom of the ridge to nose the rock pile. Lichen. Lichen took a long while. Not as long as a million, but long. He tested a stone with a paw, pushing hard at it. It didn't move. Lichen on all the surfaces, cracks filled with dirt that things had taken root in. The dried old roots were still twisted among the stones, so the pile was cemented together by soil, root, rain, and time. Solid. He climbed it slowly from the side away from the stinkers. At the very top, three sizable stones had an even larger one resting atop them, like a three-­legged stool with very fat legs and a nice, dark hollow in the middle and a slot between two of the leg rocks that was just big enough for him to squeeze through. The next slot over let him see the dark hole. Perfect! Abasio said that a lot, usually when he fixed something. Until it broke again, then he said other things.

The stinkers still weren't going anywhere. No one was noticing him. But. Something was biting at him! What? A smell? Actually another smell getting through the stink? Danger mixed into the stench, trying to tell him something. He had a flash of memory, Mama with one paw firmly placed on his small, wriggling back, holding him down and quiet until she identified some new smell. Mama hadn't had human words. Words had come later, much later, long after he'd left Mama and the den. He didn't remember much about its happening to him: except that he'd been very, very scared when the first words had exploded in his head!
You are Coyote!
Up until then, he'd just been self-­smell.

The new smell was
oil
. The word “oil” yattered at him like an angry crow!
Oil
went with machines. His insides were giving him all kinds of reasons why a tunnel smelling of machines was not a good place for a coyote. Machines always had humans attached, and the first thing most humans did when they saw something with fur on it was kill it. Brain strongly suggested that if running away was not possible, being very quiet might be the best alternative. There was a word for that, too! “In-­con-spic-­u-­ous,” and he already was: under cover and lying down. He was hungry, thirsty, but he was inconspicuous. He let his body sag into the gentle cup of soil time had blown across the stones. He was used to daylong walking and running, but the stink of the creatures was like being sick. Every part of him ached. The thought came dimly. He would have to ask Abasio. Could smells do that?

Movement beyond the ridge caught his eyes. More stinkers! He had to count! He could, when he had to. His three and a new three! Six of them, now! A flick of excitement! So. Something was going to happen! This was why the creatures spent the night in the clearing. They weren't supposed to be here until now! He laid his jaw gently onto his crossed paws, considering the dark opening across from him. It might be a lava tube. Places like that provided winter cover and warmth for whole tribes of forest creatures. Stone tunnels weren't as comfortable as earthen ones, but they sometimes led to chambers warmed by hot water. Bear and Coyote, between them, knew the location of a dozen such places: always warm and generally safe, though too hard to be comfortable in, in their natural state. The water often tasted strange, but it was usually all right to drink . . .