Fish Tails

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “Right now I believe she is explaining her authority over Artemisia.”

  Xulai stifled laughter. “Sybbis? Her authority?”

  “I’m judging from what I know about her. The Artemisians have been attempting . . . diplomacy with her. They have to stop ganger raiding parties killing the farmers, stealing their stock, burning their barns and haystacks. The Artemisian delegation tried to convince her that farmers must be exempt from being raided, because they create the food we all eat, and once she kills them and takes the food, there will be no more food.” Precious Wind frowned, shaking her head. “Perhaps she imagined food would appear at royal command. The Artemisians are waiting for her to get the point. We don’t believe she’s stupid, just misinformed or . . . perhaps uninformed.”

  Xulai, brow furrowed, shook her head. “No, Presh, sorry, I think you’re wrong. I think she is stupid. She has a kind of ignorance that goes very deep. It’s a . . . depth of habit that’s even more difficult to modify than stupidity is.”

  “Girl, the ganger women had to have seen farmers bringing food into the city. They had to have seen them selling it!”

  “If that’s what you and the Artemisians have been basing your argument on, you’re wrong! Abasio has told me all about that ganger life! The women reserved for the ganger top men certainly did not see farmers bring food into the city, and they never saw them selling it!” She settled herself more comfortably, obviously ready to lecture.

  “The gang houses were typically buildings with four or more stories. The top floors and the roof were occupied by the gang leaders’ women and daughters, with a locked and guarded door between them and rest of the house. Female servants—­older women, unattractive women—­went back and forth, but the top-­caste women never left their quarters except for trips to the nearest bathhouse with an armed escort every few days. They did not move about the lower floors. They did not go to their men. The men who owned them went to them.

  “It was the men, the gangers themselves, who observed things brought to market, and it was usually the men who went to the market and bought food. And they did buy it, because the farmers stopped bringing food to town if they didn’t get paid. From the roof, however, all the women could have seen was the men going out and returning: returning with captives, returning with loot, returning with weapons—­all of them stolen. How would the women know that food was in another category?

  “If the Artemisians are trying to show Sybbis how farming works, they’re wasting their effort. She’ll continue the pattern she’s familiar with: men go out and steal stuff. That’s what that bunch headed for Saltgosh was doing, and it’s a pattern that will stand up under more pressure than Artemisia can bring to bear. What made them think she’d learned anything?”

  Precious Wind shook her head in dismay. “I said the Artemisians are waiting for her to get the point, but the point was based on an assumption Sybbis would know something about where food comes from. If what you’ve said is accurate . . .”

  She was silenced by the sound of shouting out near the road. Almost simultaneously Kim flew through the door of the wagon to sprawl breathlessly on the floor.

  “Gangers,” he gasped. “And that queen of theirs. A whole flock of ’em.”

  Precious Wind took ul xaolat from her pocket and poked at it.

  They felt nothing happening. Xulai had had enough ul xaolat experience to know one could feel nothing happening. There was a sense of cessation: a momentary stoppage of all sound, sight, smell, a feeling she called “the whoosh.” It was a creepy feeling that did not become less so with repeated experience.

  Precious Wind said, “Now you can open the door and we’ll see what’s going on.”

  They left the wagon and stood outside on the road. They were, at most, only a quarter of the way up the mountain, looking down onto darkness broken by the campfires around Arakny’s camp. The ganger group, lit by torches, had stopped east of the camp, leaving a gulf of darkness between themselves and the Artemisians. Torches grouped and shuttled across this darkness: a dozen from the gangers to the Artemisians, that dozen plus a few more back to the gangers.

  Kim went up the ladder onto the wagon roof and settled himself to watch. The two women climbed onto the wagon seat.

  “Arakny has been challenged and has gone to talk with whomever,” said Precious Wind in a voice that betrayed deep concern. Xulai had thrown a new light onto the relationship between the ganger queen and the Artemisians, and Precious Wind felt an abrupt sense of insecurity. She’d allowed herself to feel amused about Sybbis.

  “What reason will the Artemisians give for being out here?” asked Xulai.

  “Every year they come this way two or three times late in the fall to collect pine nuts. I’m sure Sybbis’s spies have reported that to her. Also, they bring groups of the younger ­people from Artemisia out here several times a year to let them get to know one another away from their separate lives, men doing this, women doing that. You, of course, will call that fiddling with them.”

  Xulai stuck out her tongue. “Abasio mentioned some separation by gender roles in Artemisia.”

  “Well, they have different songs, or I guess ‘chants’ would be a better word. They do not have a tradition of what I would call music, certainly nothing like the music you told me the Saltgoshians have.”

  “Being able to sing was the single greatest worry the Saltgosh ­people had about becoming sea-­­people. They wanted to know if they’d still be able to sing. Their music is remarkable.”

  “The Artemisians howl more than they sing,” Kim objected. “That’s what the ­people up in those valleys say about them. They howl.”

  Precious Wind thought about this. “From what you’ve told me about Saltgosh music, I can understand why they’d think so. That’s why I used the word ‘chant,’ and I think that’s more accurate than ‘howl.’ Though, come to think of it, I’ve heard the children sing melodies . . .”

  “Maybe what the adults do is a ritual.”

  “Could be. Or it could just as well be some traditional style created by some prior storyteller.”

  She leaned forward, as though to get a closer look at the distant camp below. “Now what’s happening down there?”

  A group bearing torches had left the Artemisian encampment and moved westward, the loose cluster gradually stringing out into a line. Xulai counted a dozen torchbearing riders, each streaming sparks into the darkness. The torches came almost to the canyon entrance, clustered and milled about briefly, then headed back the way they had come.

  Precious Wind murmured, “One rider left the group.”

  “I saw it,” said Xulai. “But only because we’re above them. I doubt anyone could have seen it from down there. One of the returning ones is now carrying a torch in each hand, arms extended! Now what is that about?”

  Precious Wind managed a derisory chuckle. “If Arakny wanted to send a message up to us, she wouldn’t want anyone to know she’d done it. So she’d send a dozen riders out on an errand to . . . find something she lost, perhaps. If she’s used that excuse, one of the riders who’ll be returning to camp already has the ‘lost’ item in his pocket. He’ll return it with loud rejoicing.”

  “Arakny is that clever?”

  “Arakny is more than merely clever. She’s her mother’s heiress apparent.”

  They watched the returning riders split up into twos and threes going off in several directions. Precious Wind nodded. “No one will realize that one of them is missing.” She stood up, stretched, moved restlessly about. “How long did your horses and wagon take to get from this point down to where you camped below?”

  It was Kim who answered. “Two and a half days from the morning when we learned the children were taken. The mountain is very steep along this side. As you see, the vertical distance isn’t great, but each switchback is extremely
long.”

  “Is it as bad as the road up the cliffs east of Woldsgard?” Precious Wind asked.

  “Worse, so far as being tiresome,” Xulai replied. “In daylight, the gangers will be able to see this wagon!”

  Precious Wind muttered, “We won’t let the rider come all that way. It’ll waste too much time, even if he uses the ‘scrambles’ you mentioned earlier, Kim. I think Arakny needs to tell us something we can’t observe from here. Very early in the morning, I’ll create a space at the nearest switchback, move the wagon out of sight, then hop down to meet the messenger. He won’t cover any great distance in the dark, and I’ve become very good at line-­of-­sight jumps. From what Kim says, I should be able to pick a suitable place near the bottom of the road.” She took the device from her pocket and poked at it. “Telling it to wake us at first light tomorrow.”

  Kim mumbled something about sleep, and they soon heard him pulling out his bedding. Xulai gaped a yawn. She hadn’t realized how tired she was. She turned to Precious Wind. “Do you want the inside or the outside of the bed?”

  “I’ll take the inside,” said Precious Wind. “If you have to get up with the babies . . .”

  “Not if ! When,” said Xulai. “They’ve been sleeping through the night, but everything’s been strange the last few days.” Her own words caught her by the throat and she gasped.

  “What is it?” said Precious Wind.”

  “It’s just . . . I hope Willum and Needly are sleeping through the night. Safely.”

  “Tell me about Needly,” asked Precious Wind, hoping to turn Xulai’s mind from the children’s peril.

  Accordingly, while they readied themselves for sleep, Xulai told her about Needly, what she saw in the girl, what she had heard from her and thought about her and supposed might be true, interrupting herself with yawn after yawn. After a time she fell quiet, breathing softly, while Precious Wind stayed thoughtfully awake. Silverhairs. Odd. In Tingawan, Veli, short for velipelot, “wise-­heads,” a common term for respected elders, could be translated as “silver hairs.” Sages. Old ­people. The same word was used for the invisible powers that Tingawans believed protected life on Earth. The Old Ones. Miracle workers . . . ?

  The thought did not keep her from falling asleep, as Kim did beneath the wagon, as Xulai did next to her in the bed and the babies in their baskets beneath it. None of them saw the huge wings at the top of the sky as they slashed again and again, their curved blades cutting slices from the dwindling moon. The wings were larger; much, much larger than those of the female Griffins.

  A GOOD DISTANCE SOUTH, IN a hollow beneath a fallen tree, Abasio, blanket-­covered, lay curled against Bear’s furry belly, Coyote curled against his own. Bear carried his own blanket in his thick, dark hide. Between the two creatures, Abasio was warm but still not able to sleep. He estimated they would find Sun-­wings’s clearing the following day, midafternoon, perhaps, if they weren’t delayed by any one of the fearful possibilities Bear and Coyote had listed, with amusement, earlier in the day.

  He had seen the campfires, the smokes. The idea of meeting one or more of the forest men worried Abasio more than any of the other putative dangers. Only once in his life had he felt more in peril than during that strange journey to Woldsgard, for no reason except that he had been told to go. Inspired to go. Bred to go. In total, he had met or seen—­sometimes at a comfortable distance—­perhaps twenty of the men he had called hermits or hunters. He had not felt safe within sight of any of them, whether they were alone or in pairs. All of them had moved in an aura of fury, a barely concealed enmity toward the world.

  At the time he had not been able to understand his reaction. The traders he had encountered dealt with these forest men from time to time seemingly without risk. They had recommended he follow certain nonconfrontational protocols that would keep him away from them and protect him if he came too near. Still, he had felt threatened, and some way into the trip he had finally realized why: each sighting or encounter with the forest men had given him the same feeling he had had when he and Olly had been discovered and tracked by Ogres.

  Back then, they had unhitched Blue, left their wagon, and run, as far and as fast as they could, knowing they could not move without leaving their scent behind them. One of the Ogres had smelled them! Abasio shriveled inwardly at the memory of that vast, wet snuffling, closer each time they heard it. Neither the forest men nor the Ogres moved faster than a walk. They did not run. They didn’t even seem to hurry, but each step was very long and they did not tire. Pursuit was inexorable. Abasio and Olly had no defense, no weapon. Terrified, they had clung together, thinking themselves lost.

  And they would have been lost, except for Coyote and his tribe, howling, dancing, luring the creature into a confrontation with a monster as terrible in its own way as the Ogre had been in his . . . or hers. Or its.

  He had considered the possibility that the northern men had been fathered by one kind and mothered by another, fathered by a man on an Ogress, for example . . . Or fathered by an Ogre on a human woman? Though it might be remotely possible that they were genetic discards, creatures intended as Ogres who had not grown to the desired size?

  All of which was the stuff of nightmares. Even before they left, he had urged Bear and Coyote to avoid meeting any forest men at all. The two of them had talked—­that is, had communicated—­with certain forest dwellers who were moving along ahead and to either side of them. Small things that lived in trees. Small things that flew. Meantime they stayed alert for the smell of campfire smoke. So far, they’d had to deviate from their original heading only once, to avoid the territorial claim being made by a belligerently bugling bull elk. Toward evening, the horses, smelling water, had sniffed out this pleasant glade protected from the wind by a wall of stone, diagonally cracked and emitting a slow, shining seep of moisture that sleeked the stone on its way to the tiny pool at the bottom.

  “One-­frog pool,” remarked Coyote.

  “Is that how pools are measured?” Abasio asked.

  “Um,” agreed Coyote. “Even hungry, y’never eat the frog in a one-­frog pool.”

  Abasio had tried to decipher the meaning of that, realizing in a moment that it was the same statement he had made about the male Griffin. Even if threatened, never kill the male Griffin in a one-­male-­Griffin world. Even if it meant tolerating terror.

  Which ­people did, all the time: tolerated terror in fear of something worse!

  And how often had terror come upon them because men wanted to be godlike? Because men wanted to create something in a dozen years that would have taken millennia to evolve, or never would have evolved at all?

  The fiber that made Griffin bodies light enough to fly was not organic, yet it grew somehow. Little likelihood it would ever have evolved. Only man-­created creatures had such materials. Man had created creatures who felt all the pain that natural creatures felt, but who did not have ten thousand years of history sustaining and guiding them in crisis. They did not have instincts developed over millennia. Their kind had no history. They could not say as the birds did: “When we were hatchlings, our parents taught us to fly to a better foraging ground when autumn came. It was not far away. Each century our ­people flew a little farther, for the continents were moving apart, slowly, slowly, making our winter foraging ground farther away. When it was a hundred miles farther, we flew it still, and when it was a thousand, we flew it still, and so we have flown north in summer and south in winter for thousands and thousands of miles over hundreds of thousands of years. Because we always have done it, we still do it!”

  Only recently—­in terms of Griffin years—­had the Griffins been rearing young. They had no history to tell them how young should be reared. Griffins existed only because men had wanted to make legends come true. How could man teach a legendary animal to do something the legends had never described? Did the Phoenix fly south in the winter? Did the Griffin hibernate
? And why did men have to have legends at all? Wasn’t there enough wrong in this small, real world to keep them . . . us . . . busy?

  Abasio yawned wearily. His head hurt. The task he and Xulai had been given was straightforward. Go, find the ­people who are willing to live in the seas, help them do it. Oh, but the complications: one small, stupidly courageous boy; one small girl with a strangeness about her; the two of them making an accidental pair who did not feel at all accidental, who felt, in fact, like a fated, perhaps doom-­laden pair. Abasio was unutterably weary of the fated and doom-­laden, and if anyone knew about fated lives, he did. Olly’s fated life. His own. Xulai’s. The babies’. And now Willum and Needly. A fated life always seemed to carry a fated threat with it. As if no being could be created without the accompaniment of a shadow. It was that, really, that bothered Xulai, though she refused to believe it and covered it up with pickiness. Precious Wind usually talked her out of it. Or he could, when he had the time and the energy.

  The worst of it was that the pursuing shadow did not seem impersonal. The following things weren’t merely hunting meat. Their appetite was for a particular scent named . . . who? Was it him, Abasio? If so, why? Why would the appetite seek Needly? Surely Willum was not significant enough to warrant such pursuit. And if none of them, then perhaps Xulai? As she sometimes seemed to think.

  If one only knew what form the shadow would take! Was it Ogre if on legs? Griffin if on wings? And if beneath the sea, some monster yet unseen? Or from beneath the earth, what? Or was it one thing, one terror that included them all, one horror that changed shape to fit the circumstance?

  Whatever it was, it brought the Ogre feeling, a dark veil that had pursued him in fits and starts since they had faced those giants below Saltgosh, followed him up the valley, across the mountain, growing stronger whenever they had spied those campfires burning among the forests, those wraiths of ghost smoke dancing above the trees.