Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “I was watchin’ you, thinkin’ about it. You wanta start at the upside end, by the bone?”

  “Where the tear is nearest the bone, yes. I didn’t realize until now that it’s built more like a bat’s wing than a bird’s wing. It has feathers, but it also has long, fingerlike bones in it, to spread the wing out, and it’s torn from the big bone down along one of those fingers, as though Despos caught a claw in it, near the wing shoulder—­she has two sets of shoulders! The claw caught the membrane and ripped it all the way to the outside edge. So I’ll start at the top. If we’re very careful not to stretch either side, we should come out even at the bottom. And if we don’t, it’ll be better if the extra tissue is at the bottom, where I can kind of trim it off or just leave it. It’s mostly very strong muscle tissue with nerves and blood vessels running through it, but there are two layers of skin to sew.

  “I figure I’ll do a bit of the bottom skin, then if there’s flesh I can just pull together with a stitch here and there, I’ll do that and put some healing stuff on it, then sew the same length of the top skin. Eventually, the stitches will have to come out, so I don’t want many inside. Maybe the skin will hold it close enough it can heal inside without stitching. Then we’ll move down along the wing and do another stretch. The big muscles in her wing shoulders aren’t hurt . . . well, they’re not cut, at least. They may be badly bruised from the fall, but with the feathers and fur, I can’t see whether they are or not. You’ll have to hold the skin for me. Oh, and we have to wash it first and trim away any dead tissue and put some of the medicine on it as we go, and be sure our hands are really clean.”

  Willum stood, hands on hips, cheeks puffed out, looking at that long length of wing. There was a word, one of Needly’s words, in-­ter-­min-­able. That’s what that was.

  “Yes,” said Needly, as though he had spoken. “It will be virtually interminable, so we’d better get started.”

  She was reflecting that Willum was not what someone well schooled would have called thoughtful. He was not at all stupid, but he had been born and grown in a village where most things, actions, reactions, and distinguishing characteristics had been defined for centuries. The ­people rarely had to explain anything to anyone except children, and even with them, most instruction was of the “Watch and you’ll find out” kind. Wordless, or at the best terse, and always by example. The result was that Willum was not incapable of thought, but he lacked the tools of thought. He lacked the words he would need to describe or define unfamiliar situations, unfamiliar things.

  She knew that just now, he knew he felt very shivery inside, but he had no word for insecure. Lust he knew by recognition. That was what the bull felt for the cow, the boar for the sow. Maybe he had recognized it in some of the villagers. Fear he knew because there were natural things to fear: lightning, forest fire, flood. Certain ­people, perhaps. Impudence he knew, though not by that name. It was what he couldn’t get away with where Ma and Pa were concerned. Hunger he knew, and desire he knew, for it was almost like hunger.

  What she did not perceive was the depth of his feelings about her, feelings so complicated that he had no language for them at all. He had no word for cherishing or being in love. There was sadness at the possibility of loss; wonder at the possibility of continuance; sick terror at any threat. His body went into brief fits of shivering and wanting to cower or shout, but he had no label for it, so he struggled with his weakness. The familiar thing closest to it was sickness, so he feared he was sickening for something, and he could not allow himself to sicken, could not allow himself to weaken. Strength, he understood, and weakness. Ma had, once in a while, been weakened when the labor of harvest had worn her down to, as she said, a nubbin. When that happened, her children had helped her to bed and made her mint tea with a great deal of sugar in it! Sometimes even with a bit of the stuff in the emergency bottle!

  In the village, men avoided weakness. They did not push themselves to that point. They walked as farmers always have done, seldom if ever without destination, each step taking them somewhere needful. If the fence needed fixing, their feet went there. If the cow needed milking, their steps led there. Each step was timeless and necessary, and there was no strength wasted on wayward wandering, wondering, or discovering. What the villagers called growing up consisted of giving up any urge to wander or wonder. As for discovery? What was there to discover? The family had been here forever.

  The order and simplicity of village life had required no more than a sparse vocabulary. Now, into this limited but familiar word-­world, Xulai’s teaching had come, and Abasio’s, and then Needly’s—­each of them full of words that had led Willum onto branching paths where he had no landmarks. Paths with fear alongside of them, wonder at the end of them. Sometimes, as now, sitting atop a Griffin and holding her wounded flesh between his hands, he felt he could do better if he did not try to think at all. Abasio had said something like that. When thinking got hard, some ­people just stopped trying . . . Chipmunk brains.

  So, as both the huge hunter and Sun-­wings went on sleeping, he tried to turn off his brain and concentrate on each simple step, helping Needly lay the tissue of the wing back on either side of the wound, gently, carefully, cleaning it as they went. The stuff she used softened it as well, so she could see what was alive and what was not. Then, lying carefully on the uninjured part of the wing, Needly sponged each length of the bottom skin clean, sponged it again with the healing medication, trimmed off any dried tatters with her tiny pair of scissors, then stitched the skin together, very carefully, locking each stitch. On top of the stitched skin, she pushed the torn tissue together, soaked it in the infection-­fighting stuff, put stitches into that as well, not as closely as in the skin, then repeated the sewing with the top skin. Then they moved a few handspans farther toward the edge of the wing and repeated the process.

  “You gonna have enough thread?” Willum whispered.

  “I only unraveled half my scarf lining,” Needly replied. “Hand me another end. This length is used up.”

  Dawn-­song awoke, tore meat from the carcass near her mother’s head, went to the spring to drink, went into the trees briefly, and returned to lie next to her mother. Sun-­wings slept on. The children were halfway down the long slash in Sun-­wings’ flesh when Yung For’ster stopped snoring with a loud explosive honk, sat up, and shook himself awake. He, too, went off into the woods, then returned to build up his own fire and cook—­that is, half char the outside of—­another chunk of the deer flesh.

  “ ’Longs it gonna take?” he grumbled.

  “Several days,” Needly replied, her needle slipping through the layer of flesh, which was growing thinner as they neared the edge of the wing. She and Willum had been cleaning the feathers as they went. Only a few had been lost, and the chances were good that they would regrow. The tiny sockets that had held them appeared unbroken . . . or uninjured. It was difficult to tell which word applied.

  “You hungry, Needly?” asked Willum.

  “Yes. But I don’t want to quit. Can you make me a sandwich?”

  He slipped from his place and went to their packs, where he assembled some rather dry cheese and some equally dry bread. Regarding this with disgust, he took his own knife to the venison, cutting several very thin slices that took only moments to brown above the coals, the slices tilted so the juices would run down to a rock at the side where he had laid the bread to catch the dripping. He put the cheese on top, watched it melt, then assembled the sandwiches. They smelled savory, at least, and he carried them back onto the Griffin’s back or side—­yes, side, he decided. He and Needly were actually stretched along the huge ribs that ran from the backbone down toward the grass. He wondered, very briefly, if Sun-­wings had ever counted her ribs. Probably not. She was lying just a little on her right side, not to injure further the wounded left wing. When they had eaten their sandwiches, they wiped their hands with stuff from one of Needly’s bottles, then Will
um took up his flesh-­holding job once more. Interminable though it had seemed, they were nearing the end of the task. For’ster, having eaten, was bored with it all. He took his bow and arrows and departed once more.

  “When you finish sewing, is that it?” asked Willum.

  “Sponge it one more time with the healing stuff. I can only do the top. I can’t get at the underside of the wing.”

  “I’ll lift it,” murmured Sun-­wings drowsily. “Unless you don’t want me to move.”

  “You can lift it when I’m ready,” said Needly. “Just don’t flap it. This stuff of Grandma’s has been known to heal a bad cut within two days, but no sense ripping out what’s taken so long to do.”

  “Grandma. She would be a Silverhair, ah?” Sun-­wings’s tone underlined the word as important.

  “I guess. Her hair’s white, but I always thought that was because she’s old.”

  “You know who the Silverhairs are?”

  “I think some kind of . . . special ­people who know things most ­people don’t.”

  “They’re ­people left over from a long time ago,” said Sun-­wings in a dreaming voice, as though she heard a voice from some other place. ­“People who know how things fit together. Stars. Mountains. Trees, ­Peoples.” There was a long pause. “Worlds, too, I think. Suns, planets, something called a . . . galaxy.”

  “When you say a long time ago . . . ?”

  “Before men came. Became. What’s the word they use? Evolved. Before the world was. Silverhairs are among the beginners, the starters, the world seeders. So I was told.”

  “Who tole you that?” demanded Willum.

  The Griffin spoke softly, as in a dream. “A very old man who lived at the top of a very tall mountain in that continent south of this one. The whole west side of that continent looms like a wall, and he lived like a cricket in that wall. He sucked dew and rain from the stones for drink and birds brought him food, and still he was thin as a reed. He told me the whales told him about the Silverhairs. When the whales were land-­living creatures, they met the Silverhairs. They were shaped like whales then. Later, they shaped themselves like ­people. Now the whales remember the Silverhairs in their songs.”

  “How could he talk to whales from the top of a mountain?” asked Willum scornfully.

  “He had not always been at the top of that mountain,” the Griffin said drowsily. “When he was young, that mountain had been deep in the sea . . .”

  Needly objected, “But Grandma looked like ­people; like me, I mean.”

  “He told me Silverhairs can look like anything they want to.” The Griffin chuckled, as though in that moment pain were forgotten. “I thought, when he said that, that he might well be one of them, a Silverhair in the shape of an old man. He told me Silverhairs have no shape of their own.”

  Needly sat on Sun-­wings’ vast side, mouth slightly open, forgetting to chew the last bite of her sandwich. She was thinking of her mother. “And . . . I suppose they can interbreed with other creatures, if they want to.”

  “I suppose,” whispered Sun-­wings, already half asleep. “If they want to.”

  Needly looked at the work she and Willum had done. She had only to sponge this last little sewn bit, and then, when Sun-­wings awoke enough to stretch the wing out, sponge the other side of the wing, and she’d be finished. Her whole body was stiff from the position she’d had to work from and the way she’d had to reach, stretching almost past endurance. Now it was done. She gathered her tools and supplies and slid down across the ribs, dropping off the edge of the belly with an unintentional “oof.”

  “Um,” murmured Sun-­wings, her eyes shut. Needly wasn’t surprised. She had given the great beast a large dose of the pain stuff in order to keep her quiet while her wing was being stitched together. The deer carcass was nearby, and Needly took a good look at it as she passed. Sun-­wings had eaten a good bit of that, too. Good. One had to balance keeping wounded creatures comfortable with keeping them awake enough to eat and drink. Serious pain made it difficult. Grandma had doctored sheep and cows and horses as well as ­people.

  At their fireside, Willum was waiting for her.

  “You’re tired,” he said. “I’m making us some stew for later. It smells almost as good as yours.”

  “It smells better than mine. What did you put in it?”

  “Summa this. Ma always does.” He held out his hand, full of small, fragrant bulbs.

  “Wild onilic! I never have any luck finding onilic!”

  “Y’have to look for bright-­beetles! Those little bright red ones with the spots on their wings?”

  “Spotty ladies? They lead you to onilic?”

  “They nest in the onilic-­sign. Early springtime, Pa used to pull the bushes out of the field, and they’d be red as blood at the bottom, from thousands of bright-­beetles.”

  “Show me!” Needly demanded.

  He led her to the far side of the clearing, a stretch of dry, sandy soil where stiff, swordlike leaves thrust upward, a narrow, thick clump of them, tight together at the bottom, spreading at the top around a dried spear of flower stalk, thick through as Needly’s arm and as tall as a man. Willum pulled two of the leaves apart and stared down between them. Their bottoms appeared to be resting in a puddle of red paint, paint that squirmed and shifted. Bright-­beetles. Spotty ladies. Hundreds . . . thousands of them.

  “Only one problem,” said Needly. “This isn’t an onilic plant. It’s something else.”

  “It’s what I said, it’s the onilic-­sign. It’s got an old-­time name. Yucka. That’s the name. The onilic is nearby, underground, you know that.”

  “You mean this plant, this yucka, grows next to where onilic is?”

  “Yeah. ’Zackly. Ma calls ’em ‘companion plants.’ Look there, that’s onilic,” and he pointed at the bunches of fleshy, tubular leaves scattered nearby.

  She stared at him, frankly at a loss. Until this moment she had not thought it possible that there was anything her grandma had not known. For sure, she had not known this. A sign, a sentinel plant.

  “Are there others?” she whispered. “Companions.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Willum, yawning. “Dozens of ’em. That’s mostly how Ma finds stuff to flavor things, roots and bulbs and leaves, and stuff. It’s like Ma says, country ­people don’t get half the credit they should for the stuff they know. There’s tasty little things like mushrooms that grow on a certain kind of tree roots. Pa never liked ’em, but like Ma said, that left more for her n’ me! There’s a kind of moss that grows on certain other trees that smells like . . . smells good. Country ­people stuff pillows and mattresses with it and it keeps fleas away. And I know another plant that stops pain, too. It’s a kind of flower. It has a big seedpod in the middle, shaped sort of like a cup with a lid, and when the petals drop, that pod is full of sleep juice. The women in Gravysuck make little slits in the pod and the juice oozes out and hardens. Scrape that off and you can keep it in little jars for when ­people are hurt or real sick.”

  “Do you have any of it with you?” His description sounded rather like Grandma’s description of her pain stuff.

  He shook his head. “Ma said I couldn’t handle any of her remedies—­that’s what she calls them—­unless I learned all about finding them and making the juice or powder or whatever, and I haven’t had time yet to learn about those things because Pa said the farm came first. But I know some stuff about it, just from hearing her talk. She said it had to be taught, parent to child. Ordinary, it’d be Ma to the girls, but she was planning to teach me instead, because I’m int’rested an’ neither of them’s int’rested one bit. She’d teach you. No question to that!”

  Across the clearing from them, the Griffin stirred into momentary half consciousness. She lifted her wing, slowly stretching it, and it opened. The Griffin was staring at Needly, or through her. “When will I fly?”


  “Not for a while, Sun-­wings. It’s all right to move the wing, but don’t let the man see you can move it. And you can’t heal unless you go on eating . . .” She had the pan ready with the stuff and moved toward the Griffin. “Hold your wing where it is so I can sponge the underside of it.”

  Willum, however, had already clambered onto the creature’s side to hold the wing bone aloft so the Griffin did not have to strain to hold it. Needly was quick, and administration of the medicine took a very short time. They slid to the ground once more, the great wing folding behind them.

  Sun-­wings made a sound of discomfort, sighed. “The bear should have found help by now.”

  “What bear?” the children said in unison. They were standing by her head by now, looking up into the huge eyes.

  “One who talked. He knew . . . the man you were traveling with . . .”

  “Abasio?”

  “He knew Abasio. So did his friend Coyote, also a talking creature. We were all at the great battle near here, a few years ago. The two creatures found me here, they brought me what food they could. Rabbits and fish. They had no way to bring water. They were already on their way to find Abasio and tell him what happened.”

  “When?”

  The Griffin’s eyes closed and she breathed heavily. “I took you children on one night. That next day we moved to the new cave. The next day Golden-­throat came. The third day they brought the eggs, and we all flew to our nests. That afternoon Despos wounded me. Bear and Coyote saw me fall, I think. The animals were frightened of me, but when I called to them in words, they understood and replied! I begged them to find Abasio.” Her eyes fell shut, as though with embarrassment. Griffins did not beg. They ordered. “They left two . . . no, three days ago. They thought it would take them two days to get to the foot of the mountains, by the road.”