Badass and the Beast: 10

by Shrum, Kory M.

  Kak, kak. Kak!

  Sand fluttered to the ledge above Zoe, dislodging a shower of dust. She turned her face away, but pebbles still sought her, bouncing from hair and head, and a sneeze threatened to tear her from the wall. “Thanks, bird!”

  Tchak.

  Sand was her strong bird, but Smoke was the smart one. She knew that he was watching the leopards, being her eyes when she could not spare her attention from the rock face. Finding the next hold, she pulled, muscles burning after the stress of the fight. And the next. And pull.

  Tchak!

  “Okay.” She risked a glance. She was almost to the top. Reach and pull. Reach—

  Tchak. Tchak!

  “Okay!” Pull. “What?” Reach and—

  Snarl.

  She felt something tug on her tail of rope. “No!” She risked another glance, only down this time. Leopards she feared, or worse, but only a vexing carrion bird stood on the dusky dead cat, tangling itself in the rope. “Sand. Go!”

  A flurry of browns and ivories. Reach and pull. Reach and—

  A ledge disintegrated beneath her foot. “No!” Hanging from the sheer face, her sandaled foot scrapping the wall, questing for purchase, it found at last a pocket to slip into, and she pushed, forcing herself up. Her hand, reaching, slipped over the ledge and she grabbed a hold and pulled. Rocks scraped her.

  Tchak!

  Smoke hopped away as she dragged herself over the edge and could finally use simple friction to move. Heaving, she flopped face-first onto the ledge, let her eyes slip shut, and panted. Muscles, cuts, stomach, hands—everything hurt. I want a nap.

  Eyelids snapped open as a snarl washed up the spire. Can’t. Shedding the pack and rolling over, she sat on the edge of the cave mouth and surveyed the world. The elephant carcass crawled with vultures, which squabbled and beat their wings. Even the pair that had followed her seemed to have rejoined the flock of feasters. Closer, the desert-hued leopards ambled, noses scenting her and their erstwhile companion, unaware of its fate but enthralled by the prospect of fresh game. Crimson teeth and the stench of blood flared up before her mind’s eye. She wondered what it felt like to die, what those last few moments would be like. Will I be brave? The cats closed in, one of them eyeing her. I don’t want to find out. Not yet. Not today.

  Reaching behind her, she grabbed the rope tail and pulled the slack out, a neat coil forming beside her. Now comes the fun part. Binding her hands in crude mitts of leather, she tugged, assuring herself that the rope was still snug, and began to lift. Her left arm came up, trembling, followed by a clasp with her right hand, And that arm up, trembling worse, and then a clasp with her left hand. She pulled, and the leopard left the ground, its entire weight on her arms, shoulders, and spine. Leaning back, she lifted her arm—but only half as high as before—and clutched at the rope with her right hand. Six feet! She reckoned. A fifth of the way there. She pulled again, and grabbed again. Seven. Arms muscles, already taxed from the climb, began to burn.

  Across the sand, the leopards, sensing the movement of their companion, began to lope. Zoe pictured them stretching up, claws extended, to pull their own back down to ground. Leopards aren’t meant to fly, they’d say, she thought. Biting her misery, she yanked on the coarse fibers and grabbed, one, two, three more times. Should be safe now. Ten feet, at least. Wrapping the rope around her leg and body, and holding the free end under her leg, she shook out her arms. The cats were closing the distance, leaping with disconcerting ease. She got back to her task with a renewed vigor, imagining one of them jumping up to swipe her survival. Pulling and grabbing became her immediate existence.

  A cry raked her parched throat when the first of the leopards bounded up and leapt, finding purchase on the face of the spire and climbed. It stretched up and sniffed at its dead. The other leopard arrived and turned in circles on the ground, rumbling at everything and nothing. Zoe waited and watched, fearing that continuing to pull up the carcass would coax the other cat to continue to climb. A blur of brown and white struck the leopard, which snarled and twisted.

  Sand!

  Zoe tore her gaze from the menace below and sought out her bird, but Sand was nowhere to be seen. A huffing noise brought her attention back to the ground. The climbing leopard bared impressive canines, its pink tongue curling like a beckoning finger. Come, let me eat you, it seemed to say.

  “No, thanks,” she whispered. “Go away.”

  Behind her, the sound of wings brushing the air made her look up. Dark gray filled her sight as Smoke flew over, a rock clenched in his beak. “What are you doing?” She watched for a moment, but then returned her attention to the leopard. It was also watching the jackdaw, until Sand appeared out of nowhere and talon raked the cat, which snarled, swiveling its head around.

  Tchak!

  Still snarling, the leopard looked straight up at the sound as Smoke’s rock fell into the cat’s open mouth. Consternation seized the cat’s features and it choked. Trying to snarl, it only gagged harder on the lump of stone. It inhaled and immediately shook with coughing. It fell, bunching and twisting, and landed on the sand, where it hacked and staggered away.

  Tchak!

  “Yeah! Mess with me and my birds will you?” She gazed up at Smoke, turning lazy circles over the ledge, while Sand came blasting around the spire again. Finding the offending carnivore gone, she banked right and climbed to join Smoke.

  Kak! Tchak! Kak! Tchak!

  A smile limned Zoe’s face, the first in days, as she watched her companions frolic together. “My brave, clever birds.”

  Joy and triumph were shortened by the tingling in her hands, reminding her of the dead weight of her salvation. The third leopard still stood at the spire’s base, head swinging in an arc from Zoe to the hacking cat. Can’t worry about that. She pulled again, unable to feel the rope any longer, and grabbed it, shrieking in frustration as it slipped through her numb fingers. Clenching tight, she stopped the rope and felt herself jerked forward by the momentum. She hung over the edge, regarding the burden that had nearly pulled her down.

  Life had never been easy, that she could recall, but it had been easier with her momma and papa. They had lived in a house with a door and beds and a hearth for the fire. There had been plentiful trees to climb, and a fenced garden had given them food to eat and a place for Zoe to play. Then her mother had disappeared and her father, sad and quiet, had raised her alone. He had harvested the small tree that had become her bow and taught her to use it. He had cut the reeds from the creekside and fashioned the shorter arrows for her, tipping some with wood—“Use these for practice”—and others, many others, with the blood-red wedges of chert he had knapped himself—“Use these to kill.” She had sat beside him and watched as he dressed and skinned animals, salted and smoked the meat, and tanned the hides. After her first successful hunt, he had made her do every step with the rabbit she had gotten.

  Blinking away the past, she pulled at the rope again, her body crying in protest. A foot at a time, the carcass rose. In the end, the progress was mere inches, but it finally came over the ledge as she stood, with the rope over her shoulder, and walked into the shallow cave. She collapsed and lay panting on the dusty floor. There was much to do, but for a few moments, as Smoke and Sand returned and cavorted on the ledge, she could only rest, unmoving, staring at another two weeks of life.

  The other cats had gone away, a fortunate event for Zoe, because her small fire required frequent trips for brush and what downed wood she could find among the scattering of dead trees. On her first trip out, she had located one of the abundant salt licks that were scattered across the desert and had broken off a large chunk of the mineral. Now, as she sat in the back of the cave, most of the salt was gone, used up in preserving the meat and the hide. Two days had passed since she had found the elephant carcass and nearly found her own death. Across from her were the results of those days of labor—a jumble of stones and her tent poles held strips of dried meat and the tanned hide over the smoky fire, w
hile more jerky was packed away in leather bags.

  She was grateful for the tent poles. The meat and hide would have been difficult to smoke without them. She had first seen the tent when the creek had dried to a seep, killing any hopes of sustaining the garden and driving most of the animals away as they searched for water. “That’s what we must do,” her father had said, “follow the animals and become searchers of water.” And they had, wandering down out of the hilly country, the only land she had known, carrying everything they could on their backs and a sled made with two wooden poles that her father dragged behind himself, while Momma’s birds, Smoke and Sand, wheeled and plunged overhead. Camping in the tent with her father had been an exciting experience at first, but as they descended, she had watched her father’s expression grow sadder by degrees.

  “It’s just a house,” she said. “We can make another. When we find water again.”

  “Hmm? Oh, it’s not that. I’ll miss the memories the house brings, but not the house. I carry my memories inside of me. I don’t need a house for that.”

  She squinted out at the flat grassland that lay before them, broken only periodically by groves of weary trees and great mounts of rock, before turning back to him. “Why are you sad, then?”

  The wind soughed over the rocks and through the scrubby trees and played with her hair as she waited for him to answer. Finally, he took a deep breath and glanced down at her and smiled again. “I had hoped…well, if your Momma were ever to return, that house is where she would come first. And I had hoped that someday she would come back. In a way, leaving the house feels like giving up that hope. It feels like giving up on the dream of ever seeing her again.”

  Zoe felt it then, the dread, the nausea, the sick feeling she always suffered when this question came to mind, but she finally felt brave enough to ask it. “Why—why did Momma leave? Why’d she leave us?” The golden grasses blurred then and the sobs struck with no warning. At that moment, despite the years that had passed, she was simply a little girl who missed her momma and needed to be held in loving arms. And she felt arms, not the soft arms of her memories, but the strong arms of her father, who lifted her and held her and shushed in her ear and kissed her head until the wracking tumult passed and she hung limply in his embrace, missing her momma but grateful that her papa was still there to hold and comfort her. “She didn’t leave willingly,” he whispered. “She didn’t abandon us. She left this place, not us.”

  Tchak!

  Zoe looked up from her hands, blinking away her father’s face, and launched to her feet. Smoke paced across the cave mouth, the reason for his anxiety stretching from horizon to horizon. “What?” Mouth hanging open, she made her way around the fire and stood on the ledge, staring up. Half the sky was gone.

  A brief storm blew in shortly after dawn and forced Zoe to re-pitch the tent and wait it out. Some good came of the bluster as she gained a belly full of water and bulging water skins, but she lost several hours of daylight between the storm itself and the short wait for her tent to dry enough to stow. She wished that the grayish clouds that brought rain would stay and block out the view of the sky, but even now they were thinning, revealing patches of black. Not the deep black of nighttime, sprinkled with the cheery light of stars and the wise moon, but a dead, flat black, almost gray, that seemed to reflect light, as if something hovered up there, watching and waiting to pounce on the world.

  Sand perched in her usual spot on Zoe’s left shoulder, her head down and feathers fluffed against the chill breeze that descended, continual and cutting, from the cliffs and the mountains. A bird of a different nature, Smoke spent much more time on the wing now, enjoying the wind and taking the opportunity to glide for hours, interspersed with rolls, spins, and tumbles. “Goofball!” she yelled at him, using one of Momma’s words.

  She had raised Smoke and Sand from baby birds—fledglings, Momma had called them—while Zoe had sat in her lap and watched. Smoke had joined the family first, arriving cradled in Momma’s pale brown palms.

  “Wha’zit, Momma?”

  “It’s a jackdaw, sweetie pie.”

  “Dakdaw?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Where’d you get ’im?”

  “From the ground. It fledged and its momma couldn’t take care of it anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “A fox came…” She had looked sad as she said this. “The momma bird had to go away. So…I’m going to be its momma from now on.”

  “Yay! I help you!”

  Zoe pitched in to feed and care for the bird, and one day her mother asked her what they should call it. “We can’t just keep calling it It, after all.”

  Zoe thought about the question, all the while looking at the bird’s gray-blue eyes and stroking its downy gray feathers. “He look like smoke.”

  Her mother smiled. “It’s ‘looks,’ sweetie, and that’s a great name. Is that what you want to call it?”

  “He’s a boy, Momma, just like Papa.”

  “Is he?”

  “Um, hmm! An’ ’is name is Smoke.”

  “Okay. I used to have a boy jackdaw. I never could figure out how he got to New York.”

  “Where’s New York?” Zoe thought the words felt fun in her mouth. “New York, New York, New York!”

  “It’s a city. I used to live there.”

  “What’s a city?”

  Her mother grew quiet and Zoe wondered if she had said something bad. “Momma?”

  “Sorry,” she smiled at Zoe, “I got lost in thoughts. Your grandmommas would have loved you.”

  “Grandmommas?” Zoe’s eyes got huge. “I have more mommas?”

  “At least two, well, three. I don’t know about your papa’s side of the family.”

  “Can we go see ’em?”

  “No…no, they’re on Earth, baby.”

  “This’s earth!” Zoe said. She had heard her mother call the dirt in the garden earth.

  “No, this looks like Earth and is full of Earth animals, but it’s not Earth, just ersatz.”

  “Airzots?”

  “Close enough.”

  Sand had come the next year, in much the same way. “It was abandoned. Its nest-mates were all dead, so the mother seems to have been gone for a while.”

  “Another fox, Momma?”

  “You’ve got a good memory,” her mother said and smiled. “No, I doubt it. This little one is a merlin, unless I’m getting unaccountably stupid at twenty-five. At least, I think I’m twenty-five. It’s hard to keep track in a world without seasons, clocks, or calendars.”

  “What’s a merlin?”

  “A kind of falcon. Noble ladies used to fly them, to hunt smaller birds.”

  Zoe frowned, thinking about what the word hunt meant. To her it was what Papa did that made meat appear in the larder. She could not picture this little lady bird ever going out to get the meat, so she put the thought aside and just petted the pale gray puffball while Smoke and her mother looked on. “She looks more like smoke than Smoke.”

  “She?”

  “Uh, huh.”

  “Okay. Well, she won’t stay this color. She’ll get brown wings and a speckled breast, like a scattering of sand. She’ll be a very handsome bird. And she won’t look anything like smoke. Or Smoke, for that matter.”

  Tchak, Smoke said, hearing his name.

  “Sand.”

  “Hmm?” her mother asked.

  “Her name is Sand.”

  “All right. That works…Smoke and Sand. Guardian angel birds for my little sweetcheeks.”

  “Sweetbeaks for sweetcheeks!”

  Her mother’s smile was radiant and she kissed Zoe’s cheek. “That’s my clever girl.”

  A year later, her mother disappeared.

  Tchak!

  The call drew Zoe’s gaze. She had been walking for hours and knew that the sun was about to leave. Not set, though. The sun no longer set on Airzots. It would reach the dead line in the sky and disappear behind whatever the black colos
sus was. The sky would glow for hours afterward, before darkening to black. Uniformly black, but only half-filled with stars. It hurt her brain to consider what that thing was. It offended her eyes just to look at it.

  Tchak!

  Smoke followed the wind. Behind him, the mountains looked taller and more menacing than ever. Perhaps it was a trick of perspective, but she was almost certain that the snow pack had grown, descending farther down the slopes. It’s certainly colder. She had the leopard pelt wrapped around her, two corners tied up to shield her face and Sand from the gusts.

  Tchak, tchak, tchak!

  Smoke sailed overhead and turned a tight circle.

  Tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak, tchak!

  She had never seen him this agitated before. “What? What is it?” Scanning the ground around herself revealed nothing. She was beginning to turn again, to scan the middle distance, when Smoke swooped down and pulled her hair. “Hey!” she yelled and glared up at him. And saw it. Shaking her head and blinking did nothing to resolve the absurdity of witnessing a mountain hovering in mid-air. No, not hovering. At the edge of hearing, she detected a faint whistling.

  “Falling!”

  She ran, but Smoke cut her off and flew in a different direction. Follow him. On her shoulder, Sand pitched and bobbed before launching herself in pursuit of Smoke.

  Tchak!

  “I’m running as fast as I can!”

  The whistling was getting richer, elaborating into both shrill and mid-tones as if a single voice had multiplied. A memory flooded her mind, of her sitting on the rug in front of the hearth, wedged between Momma and Papa, singing songs. Zoe, high and clear, a soprano, while her mother sang lower, darker notes, an alto, and her father sang even lower, a baritone. Some of his notes had made Zoe’s body shake, and that had always made her giggle.

  Tchak, tchak!