Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Chapter 11

  What Are Stinkers

  Made Of?

  COYOTE 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 doi
ng 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 Ts and Ps. Ts just wouldn’t howl. He had to make Ls 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 . . .

  The mumbling became momentarily louder. He raised his head. Two new stinkers. That made eight . . .

  He went back to thinking about burrows. Coyote remembered being with a man—­long before he knew Abasio—­a man who had been sent to find the coyote cubs who had grown up able to talk. They had spent the night in a rock cavern. In the middle of the night, Coyote had wakened to find his own front paws working at the stone, trying to make it comfortable. The man was watching him and writing something down. That night he had given Coyote a blanket, and the next day he had taught him to do recipes. Recipes were chains of words you stuck in your head about doing things that weren’t instinctive. “Instinctive” was like howling, hunting, or mating, but creatures—­even humans—­needed recipes to remember complicated stuff. “Complicated” was a bunch of main things with a lot of branches going off in all directions. The thicket he’d hidden in was complicated.

  Coyote’s first recipe had been “making a bed.” “Making” meant putting things together. Birds and mice and rabbits were born with instinct for “making a bed.” They used twigs and straw and fur. Coyotes had to learn the recipe, then do it: bite off bunches of grass and low-­growing twigs of pine; carry them into a cave or hole among rocks, or into a hole in the ground after you had dug a long tunnel to it. Grass made a softness on the rock, and fleas didn’t like the smell of the pine sap. Once he had the “making” idea, he could do other things with it.

  Coyote had taught “making a bed” to Bear, even though Bear didn’t really need it. Bear had his own bed, a nice fat layer under his fur that didn’t get sore no matter how long he slept on it. Coyotes ran with their noses to the ground a lot of the time, smelling the way, so coyote heads weren’t high above the ground, and it was hard to carry things very far in their mouths. Carrying a rabbit home to the pups was about it. With Coyote, it was more dragging than making. Bear hibernated in winter, which Coyote did not, but warmth was a good thing no matter where the warm came from. In winter it was good to be curled up against Bear’s furry, warm hide, listening to the weird dream sounds Bear made while his belly rumbled.

  Lost as he was in such musings, more than half asleep, his head and ears came up at the sound of a shout from up the hill. He counted. There were now eleven stinkers, and the shout had come from a thing standing outside the tunnel—­a thing completely covered, arms, hands, face, body. Th
e face had eyeholes with . . . something in them. Glass, maybe. Under all that, it was the right height and bulk to be a human. The stinkers shifted and muttered. They didn’t want to do whatever the human wanted them to. Finally one of the ones Coyote had followed shambled up the hill with the others following, one at a time. Another human had come out of the tunnel; he held a small, probably black thing in front of him. Abasio had told him: “Just say dark-­colored. Or medium, or light. That’s enough to give us the idea.” As the stinkers approached, the second man pointed the small dark thing at the stinker and the second man fiddled with something he was holding. When somebody did twitchiness, that’s what Abasio said: “he fiddled with it.” That was how Coyote got language. Someone had fiddled with him.

  “Where’s babble babble babble?” one of the humans said, nasty-­voiced.

  The front stinker mumbled something. “Godair nodair ghohn.”

  What was it saying? Go dare node air gun? This was one of the ones that had come to the place where the Griffin was, where Bear had killed a stinker. Coyote mouthed the sounds. “Go dare . . . there, no there, gone”? Yes! “I go there, it was not there, gone.” The killed stinker was gone, all right! Precious Wind had jumped it all the way back to ­Artemisia.

  The human did a quick fiddly thing, like . . . writing something. Abasio and Xulai did things like that, put recipes down so they could remember them. Recipes and lists. Recipe words went across; list words went down, one under the other. This one was probably a list of the stinkers because this man knew one was missing. If it knew one was missing, then it could tell the stinkers apart. The other man kept on talking as the other stinkers went past, one at a time. Coyote could barely hear him, but it was definitely a human male voice. When all of them had gone inside, the two humans followed them.