Fish Tails (72 page)

“Crawly?”

“Like . . . something unwelcome on your body, something that itches . . .”

Sun-­wings did a strange thing with her beak. While he puzzled over that, she lifted her unwounded wing, half unfolding it. “There, in my wing pit, I feel a bug. Can you see it?”

Abasio crouched to look up under the wing. He saw a bright blue thing, as long as his thumb and broad, rather beetle-­ish. “You want it out?”

“I would be grateful. I can only reach there with a hind leg, the wrong hind leg. The children missed it yesterday, and it makes
me
feel crawly.”

Abasio removed the bug between thumb and finger. Despite its crawliness, it was very beautiful. It had six legs, at least one pair of wings, and gemlike iridescent wing covers. “I don't recognize it.”

“You would have no reason to,” she said. “It's a dragon flea. Soon after Griffins were made, dragon fleas appeared. Might it be Griffins and dragons are similar species? Or perhaps we are . . . the next best thing in the flea's . . . judgment? Perhaps when some mankind made a Griffin he also made the flea, just as a . . . what would the word be? A little thing, a . . .”

“A trifle, an amusement . . .”

“Ah, I know. One of the boy children gave Needly a gift in a box. The box was . . . made fancy? It had around it . . .”

“A ribbon and a bow? To make the gift special. Is that what you're saying?”

“Yes. Something like that. So I think the one who made Griffins made the dragon flea like the bow on the box. Even though we are not dragons.” She purred. “I think you are troubled by a dragon flea in your brain.”

She did the peculiar thing with her beak, and Abasio realized she was smiling. She had made a joke.

He waved the beetle thing at her, saying, “I removed your dragon flea. Can you remove mine?”

She did the smile thing again, a crinkling of the tissue at the outer edges of the beak. “I can take the idea of the stink creatures out of your head, but then your head would be of no more use to you and I think Needly . . . I think both she and Xulai would be . . . cross with me?”

“Furious, I hope. That's worse than cross.”

She shrugged. “Furious. That is a Despos word! Always he is furious. Perhaps there is no cure for human crawlies or Griffin crawlies. I think maybe only very . . . Needly told me the word . . . ah! Only very ‘conscientious' creatures have crawlies, ­people so . . . ‘ap-­pre-­hen-­sive' they think of disasters ahead of time, and the thinking drives them into apprehen . . .”

“Apprehen-­sion.” He did not like the other words that came to mind. Terror! Horror!

Sun-­wings nodded: “Apprehension. That is what I feel for our future, your little ones and mine, Abasio. Give the flea to the one called Precious Wind. She collects . . . bugs.” She shifted, a little uncomfortably. “I have learned from Needly that names must have a
Namer
and a
why
. She said she and Willum were
sent
to be our Namers, and part of the
why
was our need for names and the other part was to name us suitably. Did Precious Wind have a
Namer
? And
why
is her name?”

Abasio thought the question only slightly strange. “Her parents were her Namers. As she was being born, a wind came from the sea. That wind brought rain to save crops that were dying from lack of water.”

“Ah. Crops would be food? Food much needed? I see. So the wind was ‘precious,' which means . . .”

“Of much value. Dawn-­song is of much value to you. Xulai and the children are of much value to me, we are of value to one another. We are treasured. You and Dawn-­song are treasured by us and by the children.”

“Ah. Treasured. And a treasure is . . . something of value. Yes?” She sighed, a very human-­sounding sigh. “Give the flea to Precious Wind. She will . . . value it! She likes new things. Especially bugs. I find that strange but interesting. With your ­people, Abasio, I am finding many things strange . . . but interesting. If a person does not eat bugs, then why does a person like bugs?”

­“People . . .
some ­people
study the world around them.” He stopped, suddenly remembering the Great Litany. “The
universe
around them. They seek to understand the
universe
in all its parts. Bugs are parts, Griffins are parts, humans are parts . . . all that exists is . . . part of it.” He stepped back with a polite bow before wrapping the bug, which was still very lively, in his handkerchief, bidding her farewell politely, and taking the bug back to the wagon.

The wagon his grandfather had built for him several lifetimes ago—­or so it seemed to him now. Though Precious Wind had a wagon of her own, she was spending most of her time with Xulai and the babies, and that is where he found her to give her the dragon flea.

“Where did you get this?” cried Precious Wind. “It's beautiful. Xulai, Needly, look at the wing covers, that gorgeous azure blue! Green and purple lights in it. It's marvelous!”

“It's a dragon flea,” Abasio said. “Sun-­wings sent it to you. It was itching her wing pit. She finds you strange but interesting.”

“What are you grinning about?” demanded Xulai.

He realized he was actually smiling. “Both Sun-­wings and I had a fit of crawlies. I rid her of hers, and she has rid me of mine.” He laughed. “I didn't realize the Griffins have a sense of humor.”

“
Some of them
have a sense of humor,” Needly corrected without looking up from her self-­imposed washup job at the dishpan. “There are sixteen adult females. Willum and I met six of them, and three of them have no humor or kindness in them: Flame-­tail, Copper-­beak, and Silver-­shanks, as well as the male, Despos. Despos is partly scaled, and I believe those four have serpent genes in their design. Two are carrying eggs in their pockets, and the other one, Silver-­shanks, has a female child, Snow-­foot. However, Snow-­foot was
not
sired by Despos, and she already has a sense of humor. She is a lovely little Griffin, like Dawn-­song. The other three adults are friendly ones: Sun-­wings and her child, Dawn-­song; Golden-­throat and her child, Amber-­ears; Bell-­sound and the baby male Griffin Willum and I hatched for her. We named him Carillon. He shouldn't have been named until he was fledged, but the name just jumped out of my throat.”

All three adults were staring at her with their mouths open. “Despos?” Xulai squeaked then, clearing her throat, “Despos is who?”

“The male Griffin. He's enormous and dangerous and destructive!”

“You've seen him?” cried Xulai. “I didn't realize . . .”

“What's this about pockets?” said Abasio.

“Did you say ‘baby male Griffin'?” Precious Wind muttered. “We thought there might be only one male!”

They had all spoken at once, and Needly looked up into three intent, concerned, demanding faces. She flushed before saying plaintively, “Well, Xulai . . . Everyone has been very busy since we got back. Willum and I . . . we didn't get a chance to tell you anything we did while we were . . . taken away. Not about our new cave or becoming official Namers and making up a ceremony to name the Griffins, not about our costumes or Willum's drumming or sending all the Griffins to Tingawa, or about how Griffins have pockets to keep their eggs in and how we hid the eggs and hatched one of them and fooled Despos and sent him away to the north pole . . .”

Abasio sat down with a thud. Xulai, paling visibly, sagged onto a chair and took a very deep breath. Precious Wind, reaching for her notebook, said in a firm voice betrayed by only a slight quaver, “There's no time like the present, Needly. Why don't we start with Despos and the north pole.” Her eyebrows went up, very far up. “That is, of course, unless you have a more consequential point of origin from which you prefer to begin?”

“Wait just a moment,” said Abasio. “No sense making her tell us twice. I think Arakny and Wide Mountain Mother need to hear this.”

A
RAKNY AND
W
IDE
M
OUNTAIN
M
OTHER
joined them to hear the naming saga, everyone seated on cushions or folding chairs drinking tea, after which Wide Mountain Mother had left them. She had gone, speechless, shaking her head slowly side to side as though she feared something was loose inside it. Precious Wind, however, made an excuse to delay Arakny.

Arakny looked them over with a wry half smile. “You're looking very portent-­ious. Is there some additional disaster you didn't want Mother to know about?”

Xulai took a deep breath. “Sit back down, Arakny, do. Take off your shoes, you've been twisting your feet about as though they hurt. It's nothing like that. We don't want to be thought intrusive, but we've been told Wide Mountain Mother won't visit the Oracles. Is there a reason for her avoidance that we should be aware of before we go there?”

Arakny frowned, sat down, removed her moccasins as suggested. “I don't think Mother's avoidance should influence you. They make her uncomfortable, so she chooses not to visit.” She crossed one leg over the other and rubbed distractedly at the foot she had sprained during the quake. “We tell the Oracles things we think are important, and they tell us it doesn't matter. And conversely, they make remarks that to us sound incidental and even silly, but they do it in a manner that seems to indicate importance. Of course, they don't say ‘this is important' or tell us why it's important, which rather destroys the value of their having said anything about it at all. We have been keeping meticulous records, however, and we've found some correlation between things they've mentioned and subsequent events, though sometimes there's a very long elapsed time between the two. That can be very annoying—­especially to Wide Mountain Mother.”

“Could you . . . give us an example?” Abasio asked.

Arakny stared into the distance. “Oh, there was a thing over a year ago. We had taken them a load of food supplies as a gift. They've given us to understand that such gifts are ‘acceptable.' You should understand that Mother is not immune to criticism by her ­people, and food is considered to be a tribal resource which should not be needlessly wasted. During the unloading—­they weren't helping unload, they never help do anything, but they were standing by, supervising, I suppose—­anyway, two of them mentioned that it was raining in the mountains. Two of them, a few steps apart, two statements apropos of nothing separated by a few moments of time. ‘It's raining in the mountains.'

“We were not surprised that it was raining in the mountains. It often rains in the mountains. If there are any clouds over the mountains at all—­Stonies or Little Stonies—­chances are it's raining. They
didn't
tell us that as a consequence of this particular rain, the river was going to flood the plaza several days later during the Corn Festival.”

Xulai murmured, “Corn Festival meaning lots of visitors? Dignitaries and so forth?”

“All of that, plus some. Well, we've gradually learned to . . . to
extrapolate
what the implications of any such seemingly meaningless but repeated statement might be. Distant rain might affect us how? Free association leads us to disaster words like ‘drown' and ‘flood' and ‘washout
.
' Then we might ask ourselves
whose
drowning might most upset us, or
where
a flood or washout in the near future would be particularly troubling? Among other suggestions, we might possibly come up with ideas such as
While Wide Mountain Mother is crossing a bridge in the Little Stony Mountains
, or
While an important visitor is trying to reach us,
or
During Corn Festival in the plaza.
”

“Little Stonies being the small range just north of here? And difficulties which you couldn't do anything about?” asked Xulai.

“Oh, but we could! We could treat it as a mystery. We could
pretend
some enemy had set
a trap
for us, that
rain
had been given as a
clue,
and we could examine our routines to see what unpleasant event might occur as the result of rain. We could make sure Mother—­or any other clan leader—­didn't traverse any route until it was checked. It was time to do that anyhow, though we'd intended to delay the routine for a while; we went ahead and had the maintenance teams check trails and bridges at once. Also, since we all know this place was built near the confluence of the Wickinook and the Chawook streams, we'd have a good water source . . .”

Abasio said, “And since both these streams originate in the Little Stonies . . .”

“Exactly! And finally, since many of us are old enough to remember this plaza has been flooded in the past, we could move the festival to higher ground, just in case!”

Precious Wind murmured, “All of which, in fact, you did?”

“Indeed. Most of it required only a revision of the schedule. We found the bridge over the canyon near Black Peak had a piece of timber under it that had been chewed in half by a packrat, or a pack of rats; the maintenance team found the only trail from Shangos'k'nee had been both blocked and collapsed by a big stone dislodged from the ridge above. It's not a trail that's in constant use, but it's the only one that saves half a day's foot travel from there to here.

”Men from half a dozen places volunteered to do a quick rebuild of the trail. It's along a cliff side and dangerous if not shored up. The bridge got a new piece of timber—­after we dug out the packrat nest under it—­a monster nest, must have been hundreds of generations of rats. Normally the stream bed that separates the plaza from the men's houses is just that, a dry or almost dry bed. However, when an infrequent very heavy rain comes down, it is likely to pick up all manner of things, a huge dead cottonwood, for example, which will inevitably hang up on something, somewhere, with brush and deadwood piling around it. The water level rises, and the plaza is slightly lower than all the houses around it. It was indeed flooded. As we had arranged to hold the festival somewhere else, it was no great problem. It has flooded before, and we have little flood dams to put at the bottom of all the doors to keep the water from running into the houses. For that very reason, the lower parts of the walls around the plaza are laid up in stone, not adobe.”