Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  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.

  Abasio slept the sleep of an exhausted man. He half wakened once, thinking he had heard the frantic whinnying scream of a panicky horse at some distance, but all was utterly silent except for two owls, talking over a considerable distance. Hoo. Hoo? Who? Who? Who indeed?

  WHEN MORNING CAME, XULAI WAS first up to prepare breakfast so that Kim could get on his way with the horse. He was as eager to get started as they all were. Abasio rose, went into the woods with the latrine shovel, and returned to lean it near the wagon door.

  Xulai called to him. “Wake the children, will you? Willum’s usually first up!”

  Abasio pulled the curtain aside from the wheels and leaned down. “They’re up,” he called. “They’re not here.”

  She turned from the fire, suddenly alert. When the children were awake, they were inevitably audible and, usually, visible. Kim rose and came to stand beside her. “No, they’re not up, Abasio. I would have seen them.”

  Xulai bent over to stare under the wagon. The bedding was disturbed. Their clothes were still hanging on the hooks. She knew at once they were not merely up. They were gone! There were footprints near the wagon, large ones that had not been made by Abasio or Kim. There was the sign of a very small struggle at the place the canvas skirts reached the ground. There was no sign of Willum or of Needly.

  When they pulled the children’s bedding out, a note came with it, a piece of heavy paper, somewhat wrinkled, as though it had been clutched in someone’s hand.

  Our children are at risk. It is only fair that your children should also be at risk. I would have taken your own had they been older and other than they are. These are not born to you, but they are dear to you, nonetheless. They are hostages being held against your word that you will do for ours what you have done for yours.

  There was no signature. The writing itself was . . . clear but clumsy, written by someone who did not write a lot. Its provenance was made clear by the tiny bronze feather, half the length of Xulai’s smallest finger, threaded through two slits in the paper—­which wasn’t really paper. It was the skin of something: maybe a lamb; maybe something else. Xulai sat quite still upon the wagon step, white-­faced, while Kim and Abasio trailed the footprints back into the forest a bit, then up the hillside toward the road above, where they joined the hoofprints of two horses, hoofprint
s that wandered into the forest, headed south. And shortly after that, disappeared entirely!

  And there had been that frantic whinny in the night!

  “Lifted,” Abasio whispered to Xulai when he returned, ashen-­faced. “Two horses, two riders, two children lifted, carried through the air: gently no doubt. The Griffin may have made several trips. They were set down somewhere else . . . I think I heard one of the horses last night. It screamed as it was hauled into the air, no doubt. I should have, should have . . .” He should have nothing! It had been too late even then.

  “Another Griffin may have helped her,” said Xulai hopelessly. “She spoke of others, Abasio. She may not have planned this alone.”

  He went on, doggedly. “Whether the children are with the men or with her, we don’t know. Where they may be, we don’t know.”

  “Where she may be, we will know,” grated Xulai. “She will be following us!”

  AT THAT MOMENT THE GRIFFIN was not following anyone. She was poised on a ledge above a canyon, her back to the cave behind her, from which two voices continued to speak as they had been speaking querulously for far too long a time. Her command to her two prisoners that they lie down and go to sleep had not been obeyed.

  “ . . . and just shows you don’t know much about humans if you think we can sleep on that rock! You better figure some way to soften it, then, ’cause if we try to sleep on that, you might just as well kill us and get it over with. Without some kind of mattress we’re already so sore we can hardly move,” said a small female voice.

  Another, slightly louder, continued another plaint. “ . . . and what in all that’s holy do you expect us to eat—­raw rabbit?”

  “There’s firewood there,” the Griffin muttered, turning to stare at the lump of fur Needly was confronting.

  “There’s nothing to start a fire with,” Willum replied, with scornful indignation. “An’ I didn’t notice you breathin’ fire. Griffins don’t do that anyhow. Dragons do. You got a pet one hid somewheres? There’s no pot to cook anything in even if we had a dragon. There’s no knife to skin a rabbit, supposing there is any rabbit flesh on that particular carcass, though it looks to be mostly bones.”

  Needly remarked, “If those two sneaks and villains had brought my pack, I’d have what I need, but they didn’t bring anything at all useful.” This was not quite true. The sack containing the Griffin’s tear and all the little bottles was still tied around her waist, under the loose shirt Xulai had given her to sleep in. Following Grandma’s precept, sleeping or waking, she kept it always with her.

  “I’ve got a little knife in my nightshirt pocket,” said the sullen voice from the back of the cave. “But I can’t start a fire with it ’less I have tinder and a piece a flint, which I don’t! ’Less maybe the lady has flint claws? That’d help. What I want to know is where do we go when we need to go. I’m not goin’ to hang my bottom out over that edge and let the wind blow me off! An’ Needly can’t piss off the side neither.”

  She, the Griffin, had never considered pissing. She and her like did it catlike, first digging a hole. Obviously, the stony ledge would not be suitable.

  “ . . . and besides, if you give us nothing but meat,” Needly continued, “we’ll get sick. Humans have to have roughage. Grandma insisted on it!”

  “Roughage?” the wholly carnivorous Griffin muttered. “And that is . . . ?”

  “Whole grain! Fibrous fruits and vegetables! Oats and rice and wheat and corn stuff. And grain has to be cooked. That’s what. And what are we supposed to drink? That water back in that cave stinks . . .”

  “It’s pure rainwater,” insisted the Griffin.

  “It may have started out as pure rainwater before it got a whole lot of something dead in it,” snarled Needly. “You go take a sniff of it! I’d say it’s pretty good rotted-­bat soup by now.”

  The Griffin went to the edge of the precipice and dropped into the canyon below, snapping her wings open at the last moment. She often slept on ledges! She scorned such things as mattresses! So did her little one! She found herself wondering, however, whether having an exceptionally thick coat of fur on belly and sides might not serve the same purpose as a mattress. The children did not have a thick coat of fur. They did not even have adequate clothing. She had not considered that when they were sleeping, they would be largely unclothed, that they might wear only thin little garments, without shoes. Whenever had Griffins had to consider clothing? Her little one had kept the children warm last night. Both the children cuddled with the little one, but neither of them would come near her, the little one’s mother, even though she had not hurt them. Except that she had not thought to tell the men to bring their clothing or bedding. She had had enough trouble getting the men to write the message correctly!

  She circled, climbed, landed once more on the ledge, in time to hear Needly saying, “You know, I don’t think your mama figured out this hostage business in advance!” The little Griffin had come out of the cave and Needly was sitting on one of her front legs combing her mane. When the big one landed, Needly turned toward her, stared upward into her right eye, and said in a pathetic little voice, “You really should have figured it out in advance, Lady Animal.” She turned her face back into the baby’s mane and began to weep, heartbreakingly.

  Willum came out of the cave with tears in his own eyes. He put his arm around Needly, and the Griffin child snuggled up to them both, giving her mother a very angry and puzzled look that said, “Why are you being so mean to my friends?”

  “Ax,” muttered the Griffin to herself. “Knife. Clothing. Mattresses. Blankets. Pot. Food supplies.” Her eyes raked the surroundings, looking for any diggable surface. None. Only rock. “New location where they can dig holes. Something to dig with! ”

  Her angry soliloquy was interrupted by a sound from the sky: a scream, as of tortured metal, rent into shards. A shout as of a monstrous ripping of the very firmament, shrill and deep at once, a sound that cut into ears, pierced brains. It hurt. The children cowered as the sound neared from behind the peak above them.

  The big Griffin’s head snapped back, and she hissed, her voice full of barely suppressed panic. “Into the cave, quickly! Quickly, or he’ll kill you!”

  The little Griffin was already up, butting Needly with her head. Willum stood, peering up.

  “Now,” the Griffin hissed, in a voice that allowed no dissent, bowling Willum through the cave entrance with one vastly outstretched and very muscular wing.

  The children had been virtually launched into the cave. The little Griffin righted herself, opened her own wings, and pushed them farther back, hissing with alarm. There was a place, there, where the roof went straight back only a few feet from the floor, making a long, low, horizontal niche mostly hidden behind a litter of fallen stones. They squirmed into it, scratched by the floor of it, bruised by the walls of it. Once inside, they were hidden, the little Griffin in the middle where the roof was a bit higher, a child pressed tightly against her on either side, their heads invisible behind the stones in front.

  “Who’s up there?” whispered Willum.

  “It’s the male Griffin. He is named Despos,” whispered the little one in return. “Little things stay hid when Despos comes.”

  “Why?” whispered Needly.

  “He kills things. He wants to kill all mankinds now, before the waters come. Mama and the other Griffin mamas say no. Mankinds can help us live, but Despos says no, vengeance now, no waiting. He is very angry.”

  “He’d kill us if he saw us?”

  “He kills everything,” said the little one. “He was made very angry, you see. He did not get that way. The ones who made him, they made him terrible to begin with. So he would kill, without thinking, without considering . . .”

  “If you have lots of female Griffins, I should think they could conquer him,” said Willum.

  “Oh, no, no,” cried the little
one. “To conquer Despos they would have to kill him. There is no conquering unless it is to kill Despos, and if he is killed, then we would be no more!” She began crying, crystal tears, falling onto the stone like shards of tinkling glass.

  Needly stared. “Child, tell me about the ­people who made the Griffins. Did they make many female Griffins?”

  “They made several, not many. One time I have seen ten in one place. Mama said that was more than half.”

  “How many male Griffins did they make?”

  “They made several, but Despos has killed all the others. Despos is . . . never thinking of tomorrow. For Despos, everything is now.”

  As she whispered, the cave went dark as something moved before the entry. They could detect the glitter of dark, almost black scales edged in bronze. Scales the width of a human head, as long as a forearm. They could note the expanse of a shoulder that blocked out the sun. Limbs as thick through as great trees! Needly shivered and put her hand over Willum’s mouth, all in one motion, for he had been about to make an unconsidered sound out of sheer surprise.

  “Shhh,” she whispered. “It’s bigger than the female one.”

  It was bigger . . . and louder; and more violent; and more vehement. The muscular arm that blocked half the cave entrance reached out. They saw it grasp something, heard the sound of an avalanche, saw the claw come back holding an enormous boulder. A moment later came heard a thunderous crash from the forest below. Voices roared. His deep, so deep it was like listening to thunder talk. Hers softer, higher, submissive. Too submissive.

  Came a questioning roar, verbal but unintelligible. “Not here,” replied the female. Another roar. “Far from here,” came the answer.

  Needly threw her arms around the little one’s neck, put her face against that much larger face, her cheek against the smooth beak, her hands stroking behind the ear, as one might a cat, along the jaw, as any self-­respecting cat would demand one to do. She whispered, “What does he want?”