“No more begging,” said Betani. “I’m sure there are other things you can do. Can you sew?”
“No, I never learned how. I don’t know anything except begging.”
“Well, no time like now to learn.” Betani tugged on the wagon’s rope, and it began bumping over the cobblestones of the plaza.
Sofria turned to look at Pietra, clinging to the roof of the Guild Hall. It lifted a wing, as if to wave to her, and tears filled her eyes. Would she be able to have adventures with Pietra again? “When I’m old enough, I’ll come back for you, Pietra, and we will travel the world.”
“I am made of stone. I will be here for you.”
Osanna the storyteller sat on the rim of the fountain, her back to the Cathedral, waiting as children gathered at her feet. Something caught her attention—something fluttering in the breeze, high above her head, She looked to the top of the Guild Hall to see something bright, perhaps a ribbon, about the neck of the nearest gargoyle. How—and why—had anyone climbed that high to tie a ribbon on one of the great stone statues? That was a story she would someday like to tell.
Lullaby
John D. Payne
As plaintive cries from the nursery chamber intruded on the unconscious bliss of slumber, I curled up in a ball, wrapped my wings more tightly around myself, and squeezed my eyes shut. “Go back to sleep,” I whispered to myself. And to the children.
No good. Their voices kept rising, both in pitch and in volume, until the shrieks stabbed their way into my skull and banished sleep completely. Maybe permanently. With a heavy sigh, I gathered the strength to heave myself up and out of bed.
“Sweetheart,” Sam asked, “why do you do this to yourself?” He had the uncanny ability to jump in an instant from deep sleep to coherent conversation. It was perhaps the second worst thing about him.
“Unngggh,” I replied. Well put, I told myself. You truly are a gifted communicator. A real wordsmith.
“Just let them cry,” Sam said. In the darkness, I could hear him shifting his weight to prop himself up, accompanied by the ringing, watery tinkle of precious metals and jewels being displaced by his movements. At this sound, the cries from the children grew louder. More heart-wrenching. More insistent.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I grumbled. I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. Poor things. They didn’t mean to wake me. They didn’t know, couldn’t know. They were so small, so helpless.
“It won’t kill them to wait,” Sam said. I couldn’t really see him, but I could sense him lying close to me in the darkness. His recumbent form was the one source of warmth in the otherwise frigid sleeping chamber.
“It might kill me.” It ought to get easier to ignore their crying when I was more tired myself. But if anything, exhaustion made it worse. At this point, as sleep deprived as I was, it was a special kind of torture. It must have been, or I never would have considered getting out of my warm bed and onto the cold floor.
Our chambers should have been warm, since they were built into the side of a fire mount that still had a few active lava tubes. But we had given the warmest room to the children. It was the right decision, but it meant that my floors were always cold. That annoyed me.
I stoked this spark of annoyance until the flames in my belly grew bright and hot. Then I opened my mouth and uncorked a spray of fire on the floor until the stones gave off a dull, red glow. There. Much better. I got out of bed and put my feet down, and enjoyed the warmth.
Sam shook his head. “We’ve talked about this. Every time we get up–”
“Every time I get up.”
“Hey, now. You know that’s not fair.”
My head whipped around and in an instant I was facing him on all fours, wings spread and tail lashing from side to side. In the faint but growing glower, the light tinged an angry red by its journey outward through my flesh and my scales, I could see him lift his forelimbs in surrender.
“Fine.” He rolled his eyes. “Every time you get up—”
“Thank you,” I murmured, my belly fires slowly cooling.
“—it reinforces the pattern. Behavior rewarded is behavior repeated.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. But there’s only one way out of this cycle, and at some point we’re going to have to grit our teeth and do it.”
I considered that for a moment, but renewed cries from the next chamber interrupted my train of thought.
“At some point, fine. But not now.”
“If that’s your decision,” he said, “then I’ll go. It’s my turn.” He heaved himself upright, which set off a new cascade of gems and precious metals.
I reached over and gave him a pat. “No, I will.”
He hesitated.
“Stay,” I said. “I mean it. Go back to sleep.”
“Well, that’s hardly fair to you.”
“If you go, I’ll lay awake anyway. One of us might as well get some rest.”
He chewed on this for a moment, and then said, “Okay. But I take the next shift.” Then he rolled over and was instantly asleep. Which is the very, very worst thing about him.
I checked the larder and found nothing that would soothe the brood. So instead of going straight to the nursery, I popped outside briefly to scoop up a few morsels. All the while, I cursed the past version of myself from the last time they woke up.
“You could have set something aside for next time,” I muttered, feeling more than a little hungry myself. “But no, you wanted to go back to bed. Lazy cow. Think of someone else for a change.” My future self nodded in approval, taking my side. But my past self didn’t even bother to respond. She just slept.
Flying through the nearby valleys as quickly as possible, I tried to focus on the task at hand and not get distracted looking at the scenery. The children were still hungry and crying, after all. But I couldn’t help noticing that our pest problem was back.
Humans, it looked like. Or maybe Elves. Either way, it was quite a big colony from the look of things. And it seemed like Sam had just cleared out the dratted things, but of course you never really got rid of them permanently. Like a persistent rash or a chronic cough, the infestation just kept recurring.
I made a mental note to mention it to Sam when I went back to bed. He would handle it; he always did. And come back covered with scratches and bites all over, every time. Poor dear. He was so cute when he complained about his little wounds. Thinking of it brought an involuntary smile to my face and a warmth to my belly.
He really was very sweet, I thought, turning a dreamy and languorous spiral in the air. A good provider, a doting father, a fierce protector. A fine mate. And nearly my size. Well, at least three-quarters my size. Very respectable, for a male.
The warm summer breeze felt good in my wings, and I felt lighter and lither than I had in ages. Part of me yearned to climb and soar and ride the winds until I became one with them, floating like a cinder in the smoke.
But the children needed feeding. So I swooped back home, limbs and jaws laden with delectable nibblets. Sam was absent from our sleeping chamber, but I found him in the nursery. From the look of things, he had tried in vain to appease the children with the meager scraps he had been able to scrounge and now was attempting to pull rank on them, silly thing.
“I am Shamel-Shesha, the Enduring One,” he cried, sounding more desperate than commanding, “I rule all things from the molten core beneath to the empty void above. Please stop biting me!”
Suppressing a smile, I rushed in to Sam’s aid. Murmuring to them in my most soothing tone, I pulled each of the little dears off of their father, which in most cases elicited a shriek from both parties.
The babies were, by and large, easy to mollify. They didn’t have long memories. You popped something sweet in their mouths and they would latch right on and forget why they had been crying in the first place.
Sam was somewhat more difficult to appease. Instead of going back to bed, he just stood there rubbing his wounds and heaving pa
ined sighs. The faint light coming up from the lava tubes left much of his face in shadow, but it wasn’t hard to see that he was upset.
I wanted to go to him, to take him in my arms, or at least to run my claws along his dorsal spines, the way he liked. But I was lying on the floor of the nursery, encircling the brood with my body and tail and cuddling them close with one wing. They had stopped crying, but if I put them down, we’d be right back where we started in a heartbeat.
So I gave Sam what I hoped was a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry, dear. They really got you good this time, didn’t they?”
“Yeah.” He sucked in his breath as he craned his neck to examine a particularly nasty-looking bite under his left forelimb. “Those little teeth. So very sharp.”
“Well, they’re at a curious age,” I said. “Maybe they just want to know what Daddy tastes like.”
With my attention on Sam, one of the little ones decided to make a break for it, and attempted to wriggle free. I quickly swept her back with my free wing, which she bit.
“Mommy, too, apparently,” he said.
“Apparently.” I pried the scamp loose and plugged her little mouth with a half a cow’s head that one of the others had dropped. Soon, she was happily (and noisily) enjoying her treat and seemed to have no more interest in escaping. “It’s a phase. They’re less than a century old. They’ll grow out of it.”
“Yeah.”
For a while the only sound was the slurping and smacking and crunching of the children feeding. Very messy, of course, but also very cute.
I looked up to see Sam still standing there, watching me.
“I . . .” He hesitated, then threw his forelimbs up in the air. “I thought you were going to feed them.”
With my free wing, I gestured expansively at myself and the children, a mute answer to his accusation.
“Yeah, now you are. But I thought you were going right then to feed them. And instead, you went I don’t even know where, while they just got hungrier and madder and louder. So, there I am, lying there listening to this and wondering what in the name of Alala is going on because you told me to go back to sleep because you were going to handle it. If you wanted me to take a turn, you could have just said so. I offered, if you remember.”
He shot me an accusing glare.
I glared back. “We didn’t have anything to feed them. I stepped out for literally less than two weeks to grab them something to eat.”
“Two weeks is a really long time for them. And they don’t like waiting.”
“What should I have done instead?”
“You could have said something. Let me know. I would have been happy to go in and entertain them while you were out.”
“Evidently not, since that’s what you did and you aren’t happy.”
He flexed his claws in frustration and exhaled a stream of bright orange flame.
I shook my head, searching for the words that would help Sam see how ridiculous he was being. But before I could unleash the stinging rebuke I was carefully constructing, I noticed that the children had grown noisy again.
Looking down, I realized that in my irritation I had unconsciously let my belly fires grow hot, and it was making the brood restless. Some of them were trying to climb out of the protective ring I had made with my body, others cried plaintively, and one seemed intent on chewing my wing to shreds. The whole point of coming in here was to soothe them, and instead we were stirring them up with our argument.
“Sweetheart,” he began, sounding very, very tired.
“One moment, please,” I said.
With some effort, I tried to calm myself and cool my temper down from a boil to a simmer. As the scales on my abdomen grew less scalding, the children once again let me draw them in close. Feeling them wriggling happily in my limbs, snuggling up tight, it was easy to let go of the anger.
Sam stepped closer, his neck and head hanging low and his wings dragging on the rough stone floor of the chamber in mute apology. Looking abashed, he leaned down and placed a kiss on my forehead.
“Forget I said anything,” he said. “Stupid of me to pick a fight.”
I lifted my head to rub the dorsal spines slowly against the sensitive skin under his chin, eliciting an involuntary shudder of pleasure and a low rumble of satisfaction. “Don’t give it another thought,” I said. “We’re both exhausted. That always has us at each other’s throats.”
“True.” After a pause he nipped at my neck playfully.
I smiled. “Go back to bed, dear. I’ll get the children to sleep.”
He hesitated, looking for a moment as if he were about to say something, then nodded and left.
“All right,” I said to the children. “Who’s still hungry?”
They all were, of course. I did my best to distribute the livestock equally, so that everyone got a nice, full tummy, but some of the brood were more aggressive and so got more than their share.
In scarcely more than a few days, all the food was gone. Most of the brood were stuffed up nice and plump, their eyes heavy and their limbs limp and languid. They hardly stirred as I lowered them back down into an inactive lava tube to sleep. There they curled up in a heap, one on top of one another, sharing their warmth as their unconscious bodies struggled to digest the massive feast.
Soon, there was just one left, the littlest. Having fed poorly, she fussed and cried and would not be contented.
“Now, now,” I said, stroking her as she writhed in my limbs. “You’re just fine. No need to cry. Everything will be just fine.”
A pang of guilt struck me as I uttered the words, because in truth I was worried about her. We both were. Sam had said that she wouldn’t last long enough to get her wings. I hadn’t said as much out loud, but couldn’t help but share his opinion.
That’s why I had already given her a name. Belinda. Bright One. She was less than half the size of her brothers and sisters, but her eyes were sharp and attentive. More than any of the others, she made me wonder how much she understood.
“I know you want more,” I said, lifting her up to my face, “but there is nothing left for you.”
She stopped crying for a moment and leveled a gaze at me that was nothing short of a unspoken accusation.
“I’m sorry. Next time I’ll bring more. And I’ll make sure you get your share.”
Screwing up her little face, Belinda wailed in a voice that was louder than I could have believed from such a tiny creature. I held her close and jiggled her up and down lest her cries wake Sam, or the rest of the brood.
“Hush now, hush.”
After what seemed like years, but was certainly no more than a week, Belinda finally quieted down. But she wasn’t sleeping peacefully in my arms, her face wore a look of such terrible betrayal that it absolutely broke my heart.
“All right, all right. We’ll go grab something.”
Holding tiny Belinda close to my heart, I went outside to see about something to eat. I couldn’t see anything right away, which was irritating because all I really wanted to do was get this little one fed so I could go back to sleep. Nursing my irritation into a flame, I burned back the vegetation creeping up the sides of our mountain and immediately spotted a crispy herd of blackened deer.
“Mmm!” I murmured to the bundle of wiggles in my forelimbs. “Roasty-toasty treats. Let’s give them a try, shall we?”
Belinda tried the deer, and loved them. But despite her evident pleasure and my own impatient coaxing, she seemed determined to take her sweet time eating them. Not wanting to waste the time, I looked around to see if there was anything else that needed doing while I was outside.
My gaze was drawn once again to one of the pest colonies, just outside the circle of burned-back vegetation and apparently completely unscathed. Annoying, but easy to fix.
I blew an experimental jet of flame at the nest, but it was made of stone and didn’t combust well. So all I really did was stir things up. A whole host of the nasty critters came boiling out of every
crack and crevice, many of them headed straight for me.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” I put my foot down and squashed several of the ugly things flat. “No itchy bites or scratches for me, thank you.”
This made little impression on them, so after a few more desultory stomps, I decided to let Sam handle this once he was up. Suppressing a yawn, I scooped up Belinda along with the rest of the charred herd of deer, and headed back inside.
Cradled in my forelimbs, she was asleep before we got back to the nursery chamber. Asleep, and adorable. A delicate little baby snore whispered out of her slightly-parted mouth. Her long tail drooped, the tip occasionally twitching. And somehow the most adorable thing of all was her grotesquely swollen belly– her skin stretched, her scales straining to contain a meal that probably doubled her mass.
“Aw. You finally got a good meal, didn’t you?” I stroked her little nose, and the ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “That’s all you needed. Just a tummy full of yummy food, and now we can all have a good rest.”
I stooped to lay her down amid her siblings, and she instantly awoke, crying lustily.
Of course.
I sank down to the floor of the nursery chamber. And maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but I felt like having a bit of a cry myself. I’d been up for weeks now– maybe months. It had been nearly a century since I got a decent sleep. Why had I sent Sam back to bed?
“All right,” I told Belinda, jiggling her up and down. “You’re as tired as I am. So why are you still awake? What’s wrong? You’re not sick. Do you want something? It can’t be food. We already took care of that.”
She slapped petulantly at me and hissed.
“What are you mad at me for? I’m trying to help, here. If I knew what you wanted, I’d give it to you. Believe me. There’s nothing I’d like more. If I only knew what was going on in that little head of yours.”
She whined and struggled, shaking her head rapidly back and forth like she had a sheep in her mouth and was trying to break its neck.
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