by M. L. Ryan
“He’s not breaking up with me because I’m stuck as a reckless beast with anger-management issues?” It sounded stupid the moment I pushed out the thought, but Ulut’s explanation for Alex’s behavior had taken me aback and I wasn’t thinking straight.
“I don’t think so.” Ulut tilted his head to the side. “However, I suspect he wasn’t angry as much as scared. He doesn’t want to lose you; of that much I am certain.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Then how can you be so certain? You don’t think he might be having second thoughts about me?” I spread my wings out to emphasize just how unsexy I was. “I could be like this forever.”
Ulut regarded me for a moment, his expression pensive, before answering. “You should have more faith in him. I suspect there’s more going on here than his concern over your current form.”
“What could possibly be the problem other than that?” This conversation seemed to be going nowhere; we obviously had completely different perspectives. “You’re just siding with him because you both have a Y chromosome,” I griped.
He canted his head once more, this time with irritation. “I’m not siding with anyone, and gender aside, has it occurred to you that he may have issues with the situation that are only peripherally related to you and your issues?”
“Like what?”
“Alex is used to being the most magically-inclined guy in the room, if you take my meaning. Not having much control might make him feel like less of a man.”
It seemed silly that he should feel diminished somehow by not being able to find a quick solution, but the inner workings of a man’s brain were a bit murky to me.
“Even if that is the problem,” I said, unable to concede the argument, “it doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t tell me this himself.”
I knew by Ulut’s expression that only the physical impossibility of the gesture was preventing him from hoisting his front legs over his head to convey total exasperation.
“Women,” he grumbled, stalking toward the opposite side of my pen. “Doesn’t matter what species, they are completely illogical sometimes.” He reached a spot as far from me as possible, turned around twice, and plunked down in the dirt. “You really are behaving oddly,” he murmured after eyeing me for a bit. “Are you sure you aren’t expecting your period?”
I flicked one wing, setting a small pile of sticks lying near him ablaze. I did it mainly so Ulut would have a nice, cozy campfire to keep him warm because I sure as hell didn’t want him sidling up to me later for my body heat.
“If you value your life, Ruffles, don’t even go there.”
26
The guards returned empty handed after half an hour or so, bits of the surrounding landscape tangled in their hair. Since Ulut rarely shifted in front of the soldiers, they often forgot he wasn’t actually a dog and would speak openly around him. They believed a person, not an animal, had been lurking in the undergrowth. However, worried about saving their own butts, they’d agreed to tell Jifga a feral pig eluded them.
Either the prowler was very fast or had more incentive to remain uncaught than they had to snag him. I’d lay odds on the latter; Jifga’s minions performed their duties out of fear of punishment, not because they felt any great attachment to the warlord. As long as whomever they chased didn’t steal any of the plundered booty or attempt to harm Jifga, there was no particular reason to expend too much energy on some random interloper. Like any employee, you got what you paid for, and these were below minimum-wage workers with no paid sick leave or vacation time. Unless, of course, one counted staying alive as a job perk. After what I saw earlier, life was even cheaper than I thought here in Crazy Town.
“It could have been one of their own, doing something he wasn’t supposed to,” Ulut speculated.
What sort of activity might that cover? I wondered. Pilfering rations to which they weren’t entitled? Smoking some loco weed found along the river? The five-finger knuckle shuffle in lieu of their usual supply of kidnapped virgins?
I avoided asking Ulut for his take, as I still hadn’t forgiven him for his wisecrack about my attitude. Apparently, the archaic notion that women can only be short-tempered when suffering from PMS was cross-dimensional, but I sure as hell didn’t require monthly hormonal fluxes to make me bitchy. I could do that just fine on my own, damn it.
Whoever the person in the brush was, they were long gone. I settled in for the night, thoughts of wayward boyfriends and sexist canines muddling my mind, making sleep elusive. It was hard for me to tell for certain, but Ulut seemed unusually fidgety himself, changing position often and letting out an occasional, muffled sigh. I derived some pleasure in his unease, and I immediately regretted feeling that way.
The juxtaposition of seemingly disparate emotions was becoming my new normal, and I didn’t like it. Naturally, I didn’t know what to do about it, either. In truth, my current mood swings were a teensy bit similar to the days before that time of the month. Do supernatural creatures even have menstrual cycles? I wondered. Then, a horrible thought crossed my mind. There weren’t any other bird-lizard-flamey things. If permanently stranded in this form, I’d never be a mother.
“Oh God, Ulut,” I wailed. “I’ll never have babies, not even bird-lizard-flamey ones.”
He lifted his head and regarded me impassively. “Do you want bird-lizard-flamey babies?”
“Not really, but I always figured eventually I’d have children. You know, human ones.” I explained how I’d come to that conclusion, and Ulut considered my quandary.
“Judging from what I’ve seen of your relationship with Alex, I’m surprised you’re not more upset about the possibility of never having intercourse.”
Now that he mentioned it, not ever having gland-to-gland combat again was infinitely worse than not producing offspring. “That’s so unfair. I just started having regular, mind-altering, toe-curling sex, and now I might be doomed to a lifetime of not getting any.” Abstaining for three years after my divorce was bad enough; I wasn’t thrilled about doing it in perpetuity. “I suppose there might be some… uh… interspecies hook-up potential.”
Ulut stared with disbelief. “What, like with an elephant?”
“I think this falls into the ‘too-much-information’ zone,” I grumbled.
“That was TMI? You’re the one who brought it up!”
I barely registered his objection. Instead, I contemplated if pachyderms existed in this part of Dekankara. God, I really am demented.
“I think I might be losing my mind,” I confessed.
Ulut stood up, stretched, and trotted over. “You make it very difficult to be annoyed at you,” he declared. “Maybe I can come up with something that will help keep you sane.”
“A giant dose of anti-depressants might do the trick.”
His haunches quivered as though he was suppressing laughter. “Yes, but I was thinking of something more akin to the zip line, only in reverse.”
“An activity to simulate being human?” I wracked my brain to come up with behaviors that were innately Homo sapien. “Like what, sitting on my butt all weekend watching football?”
Ulut cocked his head. “Probably not that, but I’m sure Sebastian will have some ideas.”
That was a scary thought, indeed.
Once I’d regained some semblance of sanity—a process that took the better part of the next day—I asked Ulut to tell Alex I was sorry about the bottom-feeder remark. Had I been in my right mind, I’d never have said something that horrible or untrue, but even with the mea culpa, Alex still avoided me. I tried to take Ulut’s explanation to heart, but I had a hard time believing fear of Jifga gaining leverage was the sole reason for Alex’s absence.
Two good things came out of the disastrous events in Bifido. The first was word spread quickly about the carnage and at the next plunder-run, the villagers let Jifga’s men take what they wanted without a fight. The other was Jifga became more wary of my
reaction to the excesses of his troops, and his retribution against abuse of women and children was fierce and swift. Jifga had to behead miscreants at three separate raids before the rest stopped their unrestrained behavior. Not surprisingly, the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside learned much faster than Jifga’s band of scary men.
Sebastian and Ulut spent a fair amount of time dreaming up a way for me to keep in touch with my inner Hailey. I immediately nixed their first suggestion—wearing clothes—arguing both the difficulty in finding anything to fit, as well as the ridiculousness of whatever the hell I was, bedecked in sportswear. Sebastian thought I could easily get away with a hat, but I hated wearing them when I had a normal head, why would I agree to slap on a beret or beanie in my current form? Next, they considered letting me don the egg, much as I had done while tracking Keem. The egg and the basket Billman gave me survived my transformation, and the Jyryxahal were keeping them safe. In theory, I had no problem having it strapped against my leg, but it was so small that I didn’t think its presence would make me recall my humanity, and I sure as hell didn’t want reminders of Keem.
Eventually, after a number of other suggestions involving items to remind me I was human, they settled on an entirely different tack. Sebastian and Ulut knew how much I loved books—it was the main reason I’d purchased the Sebastian-loaded Kindle in the first place—so, each night, someone read me a bedtime story. Actually, there was almost no reading involved, as an encampment of rogue thugs had little in the way of reading material. They took turns regaling me with tales they recalled from works they read back home. Sebastian’s yarns dealt mainly with mystery and intrigue, and even Alex even got into the rotation, either translating the Jyryxahal’s stories or recounting some of his own for my entertainment.
Ulut did manage to scare up a work of fiction collected from the belongings of one of the men killed in Bifido. Of all the late soldier’s worldly possessions, the book was the only thing none of his fellow fighters wanted. Apparently, some things in the universe were immutable as the novel turned out to be a rather steamy romance, full of the same fair maidens and warriors with blazing swords and perma-hard-ons ravishing said maidens found in the human dimension. Sebastian suggested the novel’s scant popularity stemmed from the subject matter covered. However, Ulut believed illiteracy a more likely scenario. My inclination was no one had any interest because it couldn’t be eaten or smoked. Even if one didn’t want to read it, I’d have thought the torn-out pages might be coveted for a less cerebral use. Apparently, I was the only one who found corncobs—the typical ass-wiping contrivance in this part of Dekankara—a bit too rough on the behind. Not having to worry about toilet paper was one of the few advantages to my current form.
I laughed at much of the cheesy dialogue, yet there were aspects of Savage’s Lust I found less than amusing. In Dekankara, overpowering women was a way of life, not erotic fantasy. Sure, rape occurred in the other two dimensions, but it was a criminal act; here, there were no such laws. The book, written by a man, described female protagonists secretly wanting subjugation, even though they outwardly protested the act. Was this what Dekankaran men thought women wanted and if so, did that explain the seemingly total disregard for females in this dimension? No one had the answers, but the lively discussions the plot evoked gave rise to our version of a book club, where the designated story reader and I reviewed the night’s selection. It would have been better if more people were involved, but Jifga, who’d recently decreased the number of guards watching both the jail and me, still refused to ease up on my number-of-visitor restrictions.
Whether due to the literature alone, the philosophical arguments, or the comforting reminiscences of childhood the act of storytelling conjured up, I managed to keep my disposition on a more even keel. I still felt more edgy than normal, but I mostly avoided the fierce mood swings between senseless aggression and bleak despair, morphing into an emotional set ranging from inordinately grumpy to moderately glum. It wasn’t great, but manageable.
Over the next weeks, while the weather remained mild during the day, the nighttime temperatures dipped below freezing. Even a tyrannical creep like Jifga must have had formulas to determine the profit-to-risk ratios of marauding, and with the bulk of the fields empty—either because of prior sacking or intentionally left fallow until spring—the number of raids plummeted. Maybe they’d just run out of nearby villages to ravage. Whatever the reason, the lull meant I didn’t have to scare the crap out of anyone, a development I found comforting. That was, until I found out while new incursions were on hold, Jifga the Hun was still managing to screw over the people from who he’d previously stolen almost everything. In lieu of raids, he sent smaller, more specialized groups of thugs to extract taxes, a polite term for forcing the villagers to fork out cash, goods, or services to the warlord in exchange for not killing them.
“He really needs to die,” I said impassively to Ulut as we watched another gang of extortionists ride off.
“You mean, Jifga?”
I did my best to appear askance. “Who the hell else would I want dead?”
Ulut huffed out a breath. “Unfortunately, you get rid of him, and another will soon take his place. There’s no shortage of Jifga’s in this world.”
“That’s depressing,” I grumbled, stomping over to an open section of the yard. I stretched out, letting the warmth of the sunlight soothe my tender muscles and battered psyche.
“Still feeling poorly?”
“Not too bad,” I fibbed. I’d been unusually stiff and achy for the past week, a condition we attributed to the colder weather. While I didn’t feel particularly chilled, Hyattia built a fire in hopes the extra heat might ease the soreness. It didn’t, but each night, the stack of wood grew bigger and bigger, until we were afraid the bonfire might set some of the surrounding structures ablaze.
It wasn’t just the pain—which was more nuisance than anything because it disturbed my sleep—I just felt off. Slow, fuzzy, lethargic. I hadn’t mentioned those symptoms, or my loss of appetite, but I suspected my attempts at concealment were not as successful as I’d hoped. Everyone seemed unusually concerned about my eating habits lately, and Sebastian and Alex glowered at me a lot when they thought I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t too worried; this sort of malaise had overcome me before, always when I was under a lot of stress. Frankly, all the anxiety-provoking situations in my life combined weren’t as burdensome as the current train wreck. Still, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem.
Right on cue, Ulut inquired, “Did you finish the javelina Hyattia brought you this morning?”
Suppressing my desire to snap out a snitty, “Yes, damn it, I ate the flipping pig, now leave me alone,” I opted for a more even-keeled, “I ate everything but the liver.” I wasn’t a huge fan of the organ under the best of circumstances. In my current physical and mental funk, there was no way I was going to try and get that slimy, skunky-smelling thing down my throat.
“What did you do with it?” he wondered, sniffing at the air to detect its location.
“I kicked it over toward the privy. I figured no one would mind an oversized glob of grossness over there.”
Ulut eyed me suspiciously, but he didn’t press the issue further. In fact, I’d let Hyattia take it for his own dinner. I discovered my attendant was a farmer before becoming “indentured” to Jifga, a euphemistic term I surmised meant “taken into slavery.” He always looked like he could use a decent meal, and if he didn’t have culinary grievances against the multi-lobed detoxifier, I was happy to share with someone else bound to Jifga against their will.
From behind me, a deep voice called out, “So, how’s our girl doing?”
“I’m not your girl, Sebastian.”
“Still a wee bit cantankerous, eh? I am gratified you took my suggestion and are getting more sunlight. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”
“Look,” I bristled through gritted fangs, “the last thing I want right now is to be treated like a
child.”
“All right, then. Adult to adult. I am concerned about your condition, my dear. You don’t look well.”
Yeah, tell me something I don’t know. “Maybe I should add more fiber to my diet.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and slanted his head. “Is it my imagination, or are your feathers falling out?”
I craned my neck as far as possible, but I couldn’t see to what he was referring. “What, is there a bald spot or something?”
Ulut joined in to assess the quality of my covering. “Not bald, but now that I look carefully, the feathers on your back do seem thinner than usual.” He must have noticed my displeasure, and quickly added, “Maybe it’s just seasonal molting.”
I nodded, mostly to put an end to the tiresome discussion. Replacement of feathers at this time of year didn’t seem reasonable, but Ulut probably only proposed it to ease my concerns.
“Maybe I should go back to hunting for myself,” I offered. “I don’t think I was meant to be fed like a pet or an animal in the zoo.”
Sebastian considered my suggestion. “That could prove helpful, but we should be wary the activity doesn’t arouse your more base instincts.”
“If snagging my own chow is the key to making me feel better, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Not waiting to find out if anyone else was willing to take the risk, I spread my wings and was pleased to discover they weren’t as immovable as I feared. A few awkward flaps—crap, is this how I’m going to feel getting out of bed when I’m old?—and I took to the sky. The stiffness hampered my mobility somewhat, but the cool air sluicing past my face made up for it. I circled around Elephant Butte and headed north, searching for prey in the mountains. I sighted a deer, swooped down, and quickly dispatched it. After my usual pre-meal apology, I flamed the carcass briefly, and dug in.