Fish Tails (20 page)

While Bertram was available, Abasio asked if he would look over the map and give his opinion as to the northern route.

“Odd Duck. Oh, yes, we came through there on the way here. Nice little place, rather isolated, though not that far from Saltgosh, a one-­day, maybe one-­and-­a-­half-­day trip, I should think. Of course, it was around eight years ago, but I don't suppose it has changed much. It's named for a peculiar long-­beaked water bird that visits the chain of ponds down that valley and supposedly has never been seen anywhere else. They fly south in winter, but usually not this early, so do take the opportunity to see them.”

Xulai had used the time they were near Gravysuck, which had orchards, gardens and fields, flocks of chickens, and various animals, to replenish their supplies of dried and preserved meat, legumes, grains, and fruits, dried or preserved, as well as a food new to her: various dry shapes made from flour, water, and eggs that, she was assured, “kep' practical f'rever.” Willum's mother had showed her how to boil the shapes until they were rather soft, then put them in a sauce made mostly from a local vine fruit, a large, rather soft red one called, for some unremembered reason, Tom's toes, which could be used either fresh or dried. There were great racks of them baking in the sun down in Gravysuck—­and Xulai bought a goodly supply of the dried ones. Sausages could be added to the sauce, so she purchased sausage as well, along with a very hard cheese that lasted well and could be grated into other foods. Since they were assured of clean water at least as far as Findem Pass, they could keep the wagon weight down on the uphill trail.

To pass the time and keep her muscles working, Xulai always gathered field herbs, nuts, fruits, and roots along their way as they traveled. Some they could use themselves, some were for chickens, some few for Blue and Rags, who enjoyed certain fleshy roots but hadn't the ability to dig them up.

Traveling in coops on the roof of the wagon—­coops that were moved under the wagon at night—­the chickens would yield a few eggs most days. Redshanks had a coop of his own to which he retreated at sunset, as the hens did to theirs, and all the coops had secure doors that Abasio was careful to close and latch to keep them safe at night. The owls of the region were huge, feather-­horned creatures that could lift a chicken or a rooster with no trouble at all, and whatever scratching about the poultry did in the pen sometimes set up for them during the day, they always returned to their coops under the wagon at dusk as though well aware of the risk.

In very cold weather the area under the wagon could be warmed at night by enclosing it within a wagon skirt. The smokestack ran across the bottom of the wagon before ascending at the back corner of it. With a slow fire in the little ceramic stove inside the wagon, and the wagon skirt hung on little hooks screwed into the floor, the area beneath the wagon stayed much warmer than the outside air. Now that the drain holes in the wagon floor had been closed, the area under the wagon would be dry once more, so Abasio moved the wagon skirts to a place he could reach easily. Likely nights on the heights of the pass above Artemisia would be considerably cooler.

They set out before cockcrow, leaving the chicken coops to be uncovered later, when it was warmer. The village was still. They went through it quietly, even the rooster lulled by the familiar motion of the wagon.

Xulai murmured, “I thought Willum might stay up all night so he could say good-­bye.”

Abasio smiled. “He may have tried to do just that, and fallen soundly asleep around midnight.”

Beyond the village, scattered farms would take the place of the huddled houses; the little tavern with its oasthouse out back; the tiny general store, resupplied at intervals by traveling merchants and local farms who raised special crops; the mill with its creaking wheel; the tiny open-­fronted chapel or shrine dedicated to a goddess presumably of vegetation and sheep, for her body was made up entirely of the former (pumpkin belly, melon breasts, sheaves of grain for arms and legs) and she was clad in wool. Willum had identified one little building as the school where all children were taught by Ma Garney. Everyone learned to read and write. Some families even had books, for in addition to the big wagons that came by two or three times a year to stock the little village stores, peddlers also came through every now and then. Bertram had standing orders from suppliers in the east, and they included a few books as well as paper and ink to sell. Willum's school had a dictionary, half a dozen books (which Willum knew by heart), and a few maps of the surrounding countryside. It had a book of poetry, too, and Ma Garney taught them how to make verses and songs.

Most of the buildings were of stone, some roofs shingled with cedar splits, some thatched with reeds or straw. Any wagon that went into the forest for wood or nuts or wild mushrooms to dry picked up a few angled stones on the way home; stones suitable for building formed a considerable hillock at the edge of the village, there for the use of anyone who needed to repair a chimney or a wall. Some barns and sheds were laid up in earth brick that was replastered with mud each summer, and these had wide eaves to drain the water well away from the walls, walls in many cases invisible behind huge stacks of wood cut for winter fires.

Sheep and goats were grazing in stubbled grain fields that had been harvested of oats, wheat, corn, and barley, their dung fertilizing the ground for next year's crop. The orchards had been stripped of pears and apples; the fruit preserved or dried or stored away in lofts. Plums and cherries had ripened earlier, and they, too, had been dried or preserved. In sunny places on the south sides of barns and houses, dried Tom's-­toes vines rattled in their conical trellises among the drying melon vines, all to be raked up and added to this year's compost pile along with the barn cleanings. This year's pile was one of five, next to last year's pile and piles for two, three, and four years ago. The well-­rotted four-­year-­old pile would be dug into the gardens next spring. In places where the soil was light and sandy, the trenches from which potatoes had been dug awaited spring replanting. Along the stream there were several small rice paddies, now drained for the winter. Rice, said Willum's mother, was finicky stuff—­all that sprouting in advance and handwork to plant it, but it was traditional for one local family who, legend had it, had been “different” when they settled in Gravysuck. That had been generations ago, and though they now looked just like everyone else, they still grew rice and traded some of the grain for things they did not grow.

By the time roosters began crowing from distant farmyards, they had left the village and the close-­in farms behind and had passed an evil-­smelling gray swamp with a strange, angular construction on its far side, the whole surrounded by stiff, rattling reeds that carried faded, lilylike blooms. Redshanks, traveling in his covered cage, saw fit to answer the dawn challenges of the distant cocks with a muffled response. As Abasio climbed onto the wagon seat to uncover his cage, he saw tears on Xulai's cheeks.

“Oh, love. What?” he asked.

“It's just so peaceful and perfect and fruitful and . . . well kept. And it's all going to be gone.”

“I know.” He reached for her hand and held it tightly in his own.

“There's pastures beneath the sea,” sang Rags. “Planted for you and for me. If we all behave, then beyond the grave, there's pastures beneath the sea.”

“Good merciful heavens, Mare, what are you on about,” said Blue. “You sound like that humanish choir in Gravysuck!”

“They were singing it down in Gravysuck. I wandered down to listen.”

“Really, Ragweed?” cried Xulai. “Who got them started on that?”

The horse said thoughtfully, “Willum, I think. He and his ma make up songs. He plays a whistle kind of thing, too, with holes down the sides, and another thing like a . . . what is that thing with strings, Xulai? You play on something like it.”

“An ondang?”

“I think Willum calls his a bango; he bangs on it some,” said Blue, taking up the song: “There's pleasures beneath the sea, provided for you and for me. If we behave well we will not go to hell, we'll have pleasures beneath the sea.”

“A boy of many talents.” Abasio grinned. “Is the local religion one that speaks a good deal about hell?”

“Oh, horse apples,” said Ragweed. “That's just some Lorpian idea. ­People don't really believe in it. They figure stuff like that was made up by some cult or other that wanted to control how ­people acted. You can get rich if you control enough ­people, they say.”

By midmorning they had left the last scattered farms behind them. Only a distant croft here and there, a cluster of sheep on the hillside, a skein of smoke from a charcoal burner's fire, told them ­people were settled on the land. By noon they were in a forest, mixed evergreens and hardwoods, freckled with sunlight and a-­flicker-­twitter with the cries of birds and the peripatetic scurry of small creatures. The stream ran along beside them, larger than it had been near Gravysuck, for it had been joined by several streamlets on the way. The horses suggested a rest and drink, to which Abasio readily agreed: “Next opening where we can get at the water.”

It came up soon, a long swale cutting through the forest from higher land on the left down to a winding and widening meadow on the right where the stream ran into a sizable pool fringed with reeds and tall flowering plants before leaving it to meander across a small meadow. The road split ahead of them, an old signpost at the parting directing them east to Saltgosh and Findem Pass; south by west to Asparagoose and Flitterbean.

“Break time,” said Xulai. The babies had been angels all morning, sitting quietly, watching the world go by, comfortable in their traveling suits. By now the suits would need washing out, and the pasture near the pond would be a good place to do it. Blue and Ragweed trundled the wagon down to the pond. Humans and babies got off. Babies got stripped on the grass and their traveling suits turned inside out to be rinsed out by buckets of water. Then the babies themselves were rinsed by buckets of water before being pitched into the pool, where, with shrieks of joy, they plunged about seeing what they could find.

“Please, not another turtle,” said Abasio.

“I just thought,” said Xulai, “are there any poisonous water snakes?”

“Historically there were,” he said. “I haven't heard of any existing now.”

“Then the one Bailai is waving around probably isn't poisonous?”

Abasio turned quickly, dropped his clothes in a flurry, and plunged into the water. Two of his arms grabbed the thick, black reptile, two others grabbed his son, another two his daughter, and with the last two he pulled himself onto the grass. Xulai took the children from the waving tentacles.

“Ut's only a water snake,” gargled Willum. “Won't hurt nobody.”

He was standing beside Xulai, his eyes like moons, watching Abasio's tentacles pull him slitheringly onto the bank of the pond. He looked up at Xulai. “What'd he do?”

“He changed into an octopus,” said Xulai matter-­of-­factly. “Before one can have a sea-­child, one has to change into what Abasio is. The next generation are born with fish tails, like the children. But the first generation comes as a . . . shock.”

“Firs' generation. You n' him! You mean you can do like him? Like he did?”

“I can, yes.”

“Oh, wow. Could I do that?”

“If we decided to give you a sea-­egg, yes.”

“I
want
one!”

Abasio slithered toward his hastily flung clothing as he said, “Willum, what in hell are you doing here?”

“I'm off to see the world,” said the boy, totally unabashed.

“How did you . . . ?”

“I hid up on top under the canvas, atween the chicken coops. I crawled up in there this mornin', after you fed 'em.”

Xulai stared at the wagon top. She and Abasio always tied a canvas over the coops each night, as protection against predators, rain, and wind, though the sides were left partly uncovered for ventilation. Hens did not like being either stifled or wet. There was plenty of room up there for one skinny boy. “We'll have to take him back,” said Xulai. “Really, Willum! Your mother will be so worried.”

“I awready tol 'er I 'uz goin'. She's the one said hide atween the chicken coops. She's the one said best get it out of my system while I'm young. She told me what kinda ­people t'look out for. She says most ­people take pity on young'uns. When I get older, in a year or so, they won't be so nice to me.”

Xulai stared at Abasio, who stared back. After a time Xulai mouthed the word “bay-­bee ten-­der,” and waited while Abasio considered it. When he nodded, Xulai breathed deeply and said, “You'll have to work to earn your way.”

“I figgered so,” the boy said contentedly. “Older those fish tails get, the more trouble they'll be. I knew you'd need help.” He turned curious eyes on Abasio, head tilted at the writhing eight-­legged form for a long, long moment. “Y'gonna eat that snake or let it go?”

 

Chapter 4

Saltgosh Music

T
HE WORLD WAS EMPTY OF ­PEOPLE AND ­PEOPLE'S
doings on the northern road. The widely scattered farms had vanished entirely. Valley led into valley, the river to the right of the road dwindling as they climbed. Tributary brooklets wriggled down from the left into the road ruts, gargling beneath the wheels before slipping away on the downhill side. Each evening they camped by running water and fell asleep to sedative night sounds:
slup-­plip
of ripples; intermittent
ri-­i-­i-­p
of grass torn by grazing horses; drowsy rustles from the chicken coops under the wagon; the fluting
hoo-­whoo-­hoos
of hunting owls as counterpoint to the erratic, echoic piping of bats. If it had not been for Willum, the days would have been even quieter: the plop of hooves into dry dust, the sigh of a breeze through tall, dried grasses, crisply sequential beats from invisible wings. Ducks, Abasio thought. Ducks or crows; both had distinguishable wing sounds, sharp and purposeful and far more rhythmic than the other wings they occasionally heard. What else could they be but wings? Out of utter silence, a
whooosh,
then a long, long silence, and then again
whooosh . . .
from somewhere. Of course, Willum transformed every tranquil moment into one of imminent peril.

As Willum yodeled it: “Too much nothing!” with the
ing, ing, ing, ing
coming back from all sides like the resonance of a huge bell.

“Hush, Willum,” snarled Xulai.

Which he did, for perhaps four or five wheel revolutions. When Willum could be silenced, if only briefly, they could hear other things, particularly an anonymous cooing that seemingly arose from the depths of the black and featureless forests farther away. The cooing didn't come
from
anywhere. Abasio remembered pigeons from his youth. They had inhabited the barn as though by right and had made similar sounds. Softly insinuating. Sugary sweet. The barn sounds had not, as these sounds did, raised the hairs on the back of his neck or set his eyes searching for a defensible position. Thinking to dispel childhood terrors, he mentioned it to Xulai. She thrust herself into the circle of his arms, whispering that the sounds frightened her. She hated what she called their “ubiety.” She didn't mean ubiquity. Not that they
were from everywhere.
She meant they
could be from anywhere
!

Then, a moment later, with a shaky laugh, she admitted that she might be generating some of the effect herself. In rebellion against the stupefying silence, she had been counting how many echoes each sound evoked. Bailai's shriek of hunger on last waking, she said, had bounced back at her clearly at least six separate times. And, of course, there was Willum's constant racket. The boy generated noise merely by existing. If he wasn't using a stout stick to whack stones off the road, each whack accompanied by a shout, he was making a yodeling search for a new echo—­or a new footstep. Shivering deliciously, he claimed he heard footsteps from behind them, or maybe across the valley, or up one of those side hills. “Crunch, crunch, crunch,” he yelled. “Something big!”

Neither Abasio nor Xulai had heard anything, but then they had been on the wagon seat, where the rattle-­crack of the wheels snapping across fallen twigs would cover other sounds—­even a few of Willum's. Asking for, even
insisting on
quiet from Willum had thus far done no good at all.

On what the maps declared would be their last day's journey to Saltgosh, Willum raised his usual noise level by yodeling an unfamiliar song:

“Fahma Donal hadda fahm, see, I seed, I sow ah. Onna fahm he hadda cow, see, I seed, I sow ah. Feeda cow with corn I grow, feed it so the cow will know, moo-­moo here and moo-­moo there, moo-­moo moo-­moo ever'where, see, I seed, I sow ah . . .” as it went on from the cow to the goat and sheep, pig and horse, chickens and geese.

“What does it mean?” asked Xulai, having been unable to decipher either the words or the sense of it.

“It's the bargain song,” said Willum. “Din't you ever hear it? Ages old, Ma says. About the bargain the farmer makes with his stock. He grows food and feeds them, they give him eggs or milk or meat in return. He tells 'm, ‘See, I seed, I sow all.' Only when ya sing it, it gets kinda what she said, you know, when ya run the words together an make 'em sorta soft?”

“Slurred?”

“Thassit. Gets kinda slurred when ya sing it. Grandma—­that's my ma's ma—­she says ever child ever was learnt that song, even when they weren't farm ­people. It wuzz . . .”

“Traditional.”

“Like that, yeah.”

“Who was Farmer Donal?”

Willum shrugged. “Justa name, she says. Could be Fahma Brewer or Fahma Miller, whatever farmer was aroun' back then. She says ya go back far enough, wuzza time afore there was even cities an' near ever'body was farm folks.”

And that gave Xulai something to ponder over: this current age of Earth was not, as she had supposed, new and strange. It was
old
. . . and strange.

The road was double or triple the length the map indicated. Every straight line on the map was actually a lethargic snake, slowly squirming along the outthrust elbows of the mountain. The map also indicated the village of Odd Duck was a fairly sizable place, but they had almost passed through it before they knew they were there. A short length of fence on their right alerted them, five or six erect posts with most of the connecting rails in place: both rails and posts of that silver-­gray, grooved and striated appearance that spoke of long drying. It had been kept standing by a gnarled grapevine, still waving tattered guidons of dried leaf as Willum strained at it, jerking it away before Xulai could stop him. Only then she and Abasio saw what he had seen: the white rib cage, the arm bones thrust through the rails, the neck bones still supporting the front two-­thirds of a skull.

Willum, farm-­raised, accustomed to butchery, was seemingly unaffected as he cried loudly, “Somethin's bit the back of its head off! Izzit a man or a woman?”

Xulai, unwilling to set an example of weakness, swallowed hard and promised herself a crying fit, later, after she looked at the pelvis. She and Willum searched. There was no pelvis, or any legs. She explained to Willum why that particular bone was needed for sexual differentiation, pleased to note that her voice stayed reasonably level when screaming would have been more appropriate. She had been well prepared for rejection and hostility on this journey, but not for . . . whatever this was.

Abasio unhitched Blue and Rags so they could have a look around. Horses, along with dogs, cats, indeed, almost any animal, could often see—­or sense—­things humans did not, and Blue often offered helpful insights. Now that they knew where they were, they could interpret the fragments of rafter and beam on the dust piles spaced out along the river, the scattered falls of roughly squared chimney stones. The village was now occupied by beavers who had created an extensive waterway along the river, one with several smaller ponds and at least two lodges. Across the river a dozen cows lay chewing their cud at the edge of the forest while an equal number of horses grazed nearby.

Blue had in mind recruiting an additional two-­horse hitch, but his mere approach sent all the animals galloping wildly into the cover of the trees. He returned, shaking his head.

“Wanna know why it's called Odd Duck?” he asked. “That pond over there's got a bunch a the oddest ducks I ever saw. Red feathers, beaks like on—­what you call those tall ones with long, long necks, Xulai? Ones that eat fish?”

“Herons?”

“Like them. One was out there swimmin' around like a duck, stabbin' down till it got a fish speared on its beak, then it paddled to the edge, waddled out, shook the fish off on the ground. Rest of 'em gathered around, all'v'em pinchin' off bits an' throwin' their heads back to swallow! Odd ducks. Ha.”

Willum returned to exploration, scuffling through the fallen houses, calling out his findings. “There's more bones, they got tooth marks, Abasio.” He came toward them carrying a human thighbone. “Look here. That's the mark of a dog tooth, that's what Ma calls 'em even though she says no acshul dog'd want the ones we got. And see here, how it slid off the bone, and there's the back teeth.”

The marks were clear, a canine tooth that had bitten down, then slipped off the far side of the bone, each tooth imprinted on the bone by a jaw wider than the thigh had been long.

“See the shape a' that jaw,” Willum went on. “See, that's not pointy like a bear or a wolf. That curves more like yours and mine, Abasio. See that. But it's big. Lot's bigger'n you.” He laid the bone down and went off to see what else he could find, in a few minutes summoning them both to examine a pile of huge dried turds that he was poking at with a long stick, raking out the inclusions: small skulls. “How old'd you say those are, Xulai?” he asked in a suddenly quiet and grieving voice. “Just babies, an't they?”

“About the age of the twins,” she said, swallowing horror. “A year or two old.”

Willum dropped the stick and was off again, wiping at his cheeks with the backs of his hands. Abasio murmured, “What do you think?”

“I think what you think. I think after Bertram came this way, something else came this way: Giant. Or Troll. Or Ogre. Or something not necessarily human-­shaped, but big.”

“The giants I met before . . .” He cleared his throat. “They didn't eat ­people.”

“The ones you met before were actors in the whole archetypal village thing. Precious Wind has a saying.
Hunger finds its own meat
.” She stared at the cattle, slowly emerging from among the trees. “Why not the cattle, though?”

“Probably the cattle stayed closer to the trees and could run faster. And did.” He purposely did not add, “And do.” Instead he cleared his throat, adding, “Cattle and horses can lose themselves pretty well once they get into the forest. They, too, were once wild creatures.” He picked up the thighbone and the little skulls, wrapped them, and put them in one of the hidden compartments under the wagon. At some point, he might have to convince someone that he hadn't been seeing things.

Abasio beckoned to Willum and took a last look around while he slowly rejoined them, still searching every corner and pile. They moved leisurely, reminding one another of things that should have warned them: there had been no roads leading away to farms or neighbors; no one had spoken of the village in Gravysuck—­except Bertram, but he had been in Gravysuck for fifteen years. Perhaps this destruction had been old news. Or perhaps no one in Gravysuck had known of it.

“No Fahma Donal here,” said Willum with finality. “Was once, but he's gone.” He paled, head coming up, listening. The cooing again. Rebounding. From every direction. Some of them very close. They all heard it. If a pigeon made that sound, it was a pigeon the size of a very large cow.
Cow elephant,
Abasio thought to himself, remembering books he had seen in Tingawa. Tingawa claimed there were still elephants alive on the mainland west of the islands.

Not far from the ruined village the road made a brief climb, then went down into another, narrower valley that led more nearly eastward. The tumbled stone at the bottoms of the walls on either side had left extravagantly toothy ridges above what appeared and disappeared above the trees, gradually coming closer and closer to one another. Willum once again amused himself shouting and listening to the echoes that volleyed back and forth until Abasio, whose prior nine warnings had been ignored, told him to be silent or be gagged. Xulai remarked sleepily that they seemed to be inside the jaws of some long-­snouted monster.

Willum took the remark as possible truth and managed to talk himself, loudly, into a pleasurable panic that would have become even louder had they not emerged from the trees to confront a problem more immediate than being eaten by mountains. Kim stood awaiting them in the middle of the road; Socky grazed on the verge. Not far behind Kim, both river and road disappeared into a gaping hole. Abasio, Willum at his heels, left the wagon to stand as Kim was standing, staring at what confronted them. Xulai, who could see quite well from the wagon seat, did not join them. She was mentally, angrily, reviewing the map they had used in planning this route.
The map had not shown any sign of . . . this barrier.

The two sidewalls that had been angling toward each other met here, in this pocket of stone. At some much earlier time, someone had made a hole in the pocket. Both road and river emerged from the hole, a notch barely wide enough for the wild riot of water on the right, even less adequate for the road on the left. Abasio peered at the narrow, canted shelf the road occupied, his back rigid with . . . probably terminal annoyance. Xulai heaved a deep breath.

Though the spray obscured all but the nearest bit of the tunnel, Abasio surmised from the way the light fell from above it that the passage rose—­not very steeply—­then turned abruptly to the left toward another source of light. At that point, presumably, the tunnel had reached the other side of the wall. The tunnel was lit by light falling through jagged gaps from above, enough of it reflected back and forth to have encouraged the growth of a glistening green slickness on every surface.

Kim said, “There's rings set into the wall over the road, Abasio. Metal rings, and they look like they'd hold . . .”

Willum was already peering into the hole. Abasio said, “Willum, I wager you are most surefooted of us. Stay tight against the rock on your left and
do not run.
Find out for us how far this . . . burrow goes—­wait!” He turned slowly, peering into the west, his finger to his lips . . .

Xulai whispered, “Abasio?”