The Care and Feeding of Griffins (19 page)

29.  Burying the Hatchet

T
aryn was every bit as sore as she thought she’d be the day after the Great Potato-Planting and her heart ached just as much as her body.  She lay in agony inside her tent, reduced to tears even in her fitful sleep as she tried to master her hurts, moving only far enough and often enough to meet her body’s basest needs.  She ate the few handfuls of grain she’d husked the day before, and she ate them raw, too sore to even think about hauling the cauldron down to the river and back for water.  Aisling had the last of her jerky, and after that, there simply was no food.

The next day was even worse, as impossible as that seemed.  Taryn closed her ears to Aisling
’s hungry peeps for as long as she could, but eventually made The Walk.  Her fish-baskets had six swimmers between them, and she let all but one of them go.  The one she tossed up on the bank and then collapsed beside it.  Aisling pounced, but did not kill.  Taryn eventually did the deed for him, and then slept in the wet grass while he ate it.  She saw no point in bringing a fish back to camp for herself.  Her hands were hooks.  There was just no way she could start a fire.

The third day was a little better, but whether she felt better or not, she had to get up and move.  She
’d had no food since the raw grain and no water since the day before that.  Even her eyeballs felt dry.  So back to the river she had to go, and this time, lugging the damned cauldron.  She had to stop three times to rest, and once just to cry.  This time, there was only one fish in her baskets.  She sat down on the bank to undergo a long moment’s debate on the idea of splitting it.  In the end, she gave it all to Aisling just to spare herself the weight of the thing on the walk back to camp.  She wasn’t really hungry anyway.  Deep down, she recognized that this was a Very Bad Thing, but she was too sore to care.

She was too sore for lots of things, caring was just the top item on the list.  Too sore to stand, too sore to sit up, too sore to unwrap and eat a chocolate bar, too sore to study her books.  The only thing she was not too sore to do was think, and the only thing she could seem to think about was the minotaur who had come to her camp.

By the end of that third day, one thing was depressingly clear.  She had to apologize.

Not because she was sorry.  She wasn
’t.  The only thing she felt any remorse about at all was swearing, and that only because she’d managed to spoil the joy of Aisling’s first word by teaching him a blue one.  But she recognized the necessity of diplomacy in her situation.

She recognized something else, as well.  The minotaur
’s anger had been terrifying all on its own, seeing as it came from such a huge and horribly-shaped person, but the most intimidating thing about it had been his sincerity.  He had animal stamped all over his body, but there had been nothing at all rash or unthinking in his hostility.  Quite the contrary.  He’d come to her as someone trying very hard to keep his temper.  Coming as she did from a family full of Irish (and the odd, displaced Italian), Taryn had recognized that look right away.

No, he had a reason, or thought he did, to swing an axe at her.  The same reason, she supposed, that Tonka
’d had to throw a spear at her.  Looking at it from a purely scientific point of view, Taryn knew there could only be one justifying cause for their behavior.  She wasn’t the first human to come to Arcadia.  Moreover, enough humans had to have trickled over to make the natives think there was an advantage to learning English.  That was a pretty telling thing right there. 

So there Taryn had been, probably the first human ever to come from Earth on a benign mission, and could she really blame the minotaur for wanting to roust her?  Well, yes, she could, especially since he
’d picked the moment after she’d half-killed herself planting potatoes to do it, but even she had to admit, she hadn’t exactly made an effort to win him over.

Well, she couldn
’t feel too guilty about that.  After so many days and nights of constant threatening stares from the horsemen, that minotaur had just picked the wrong day to start poking her in the chest and waving his axe around.  All she’d done was cuss at him a little.  She was practically a saint!

Especially compared to him.  His steely eyes.  His fearsome scowl and thundering voice.  Not to mention his sharp, twin-bearded axe.

He wanted her gone from his valley. 
His
valley, no less. His home, and she wasn’t welcome in it.

And that was just t
oo damn bad, because she had nowhere else to go.  And knowing she had nowhere else to go (as Taryn’s weary brain so doggedly kept reminding her), she’d better find a way to make friends with him.

And so, on the morning of the fourth day, Taryn made herself get up and get ready for a hike.  She didn
’t want to go, really.  In spite of all the lying around she’d done, she was exhausted to the point of shaking, even when she was just sitting down.  Furthermore, that lying around had really cost her in terms of the things she hadn’t been doing—things like getting more firewood and hulling grain for breakfast, for example.  There were plenty of other things Taryn needed to do with her day, but no, she was going to have to march out and find a minotaur so she could bury the hatchet before he came back with a battle axe.

Taryn had just enough firewood left to cook a fish on, so she lit it on up and went down to the river for a cauldron full of water.  Her baskets produced exac
tly two fish.  She put one into her cauldron with her water to carry back to camp and gave the other to Aisling, then sat on the bank with her head in her arms to doze while he ate it.  She roused herself when he pounced on her shoe and lugged her damned water back to put on the fire, half-heartedly cleaning and spitting the fish to roast on the same coals. 

The next thing she knew, Aisling was pouncing on her face, the fish was charcoal, the fire was out, and the water was almost gone.  She couldn
’t even remember curling up to sleep.  Oh well.  She took the cauldron off the lukewarm coals and set it aside to cool while she took another nap.  No point in going down for another fish.  There probably wouldn’t be one, and she didn’t have any more firewood anyway.  But when Aisling woke her for the second time, her water was nice and cool and the sun was almost directly overhead.  Time to get going.

Taryn drank off her water and ate a Hershey bar (the breakfast of starving champions), then packed everything of importance into her backpack and tugged down a sapling to tie it all up. 
She took a moment to consider the runka lying next to her tent, but she didn’t even try to take it with her.  It had taken a colossal effort on her part to pull the thing out of the ground, and she’d had to drag it back to camp because it was too heavy to lift and carry, so she knew for sure she couldn’t throw it at a critter.  Besides, if the Neighborhood Watch were lurking nearby to snipe her off, the act of arming herself could only encourage them to do it faster.  She made sure she had some stones in her pocket and her slingshot in her hand, and then she set off, following the river west.

She let Aisling walk for as long as he wanted.  She sure wasn
’t going too fast for him and she didn’t really want to have to carry him.  God, she was tired.

There was no sign of horsemen in the plains, although there was a broad, black sea of cattle not too far out.  This was the closest Taryn had been to the lowing things she
’d so often heard, but all she could make out from here was that there were a whole lot of them, they were big bastards, and some of them had horns.  She didn’t really want to get any closer.

There was a lot of movement in the grass close by, but she didn
’t know how much, if any, was due to critters.  The wind was pretty strong, in addition to being skin-chapping cold.  She’d forgotten her jacket.  One more oh well to add to the list.  Walking warmed her up pretty fast, anyway.  She’d probably be okay as long as it didn’t rain.

Her watch beeped noon exactly as Taryn passed a familiar-looking bit of riverbank
—the site of the Great Grass Pony Slaughter.  She continued on for another hour before her somnolent mind woke up a little and poked her.  She saw something.  Not the minotaur, but something just as interesting in its own way.

A bridge.  Long and narrow, built for foot traffic, not for herds of cattle or things with wheels.  It had no rails, not even a raised lip along its sides, and Taryn automatically bent to pick Aisling up before getting any closer.  The water that flowed beneath the high stone arch was frothy and deep.  The pillars that supported it were marked by floods of years past, but the stripes weren
’t much higher than the river was now.  That was comforting.

Taryn stepped onto the stone cobbles of its surface, but went no further.  The thick forest on the far bank beckoned, but really, she had no reason to believe she
’d find the minotaur there.  She had the whole rest of the plains to explore still.  With reluctance, she turned away and continued her downriver hike, Aisling like an anvil in her arms.

More walking.  The wind picked up, died down, blew harder.  Taryn didn
’t sweat, but her skin started throbbing.  Her tongue was like sandpaper in her mouth.

Oh, forget it.  He wasn
’t out here.  She needed to go home before she died.

A little further.

‘What for?’ she asked herself irritably.

Just a little further.

So she kept going, although she could see that there was no point.  There were woods up ahead, a thick copse of them maybe ten times the size of the one next to her little tent.  Something almost big enough to be called a proper wood, in fact.  She didn’t feel like stumbling through it and she didn’t want to go around it and risk coming out on the other side with no sign of the river.  She could clearly see no minotaur standing in the tall grass between her and the trees, but she kept walking anyway.

Her feet began to tingle.  Not hurt, just tingle.  She wondered if that were something to be concerned about.  Her step slowed as she took stock her herself
—tired, thirsty, hot, sore, throbbing, shaky.  Now tingling.  No, seriously, she needed to go home.

Just to the woods.

Why?  So she could touch a tree?  No!  Time to go.

What was that?

Taryn stopped and turned around as a glimpse of color in the plains caught her eye.  There were a few trees scattered here and there that weren’t part of the denser copses.  One of them, well out in the grass, appeared to be bearing fruit.  Deep, red fruit.  Apples, maybe.

Saliva flooded Taryn
’s mouth at once.  She shifted Aisling up onto her shoulder a little higher and headed on over to have a closer look.

The tree was a lot further out than it looked like from the bank, and the tall grass did a great job of disguising the uneven slope of the ground.  Taryn stumbled doggedly onward, only to discover once she got there that what she
’d taken for fruit were only broad leaves coloring up for autumn.

Disappointed was too light a word for the awful crush of emotion that dropped over Taryn as she looked at those leaves.  All her aches and pains seemed suddenly much greater, like the wind that suddenly blew harder and colder.  She felt like crying.

Sound.

Taryn froze, her raspy breath catching in her throat, very awake all at once.  Aisling peeped inquiringly and Taryn covered his head, pinching his beak shut so that she could listen.  She heard nothing.  She wasn
’t even sure what she’d thought she heard.  She started walking back.

There it was again, halting her in place and then wrenching her in a full circle to search the grass around her.  One thought
—oh please God, let that be the wind—sliced through her mind and then there was only the blackness of strained listening. 

Nothing.

She needed to get out of here.  Taryn took a step and paused, looking uncertainly around her.  Which way was the river?  The ground sloped up on every side and it seemed like every straggling tree surrounding her had those broad red leaves all of a sudden.

Sound again.  Was that a growl?  It couldn
’t be.  Was it?

How could it really be this easy to get turned around?  Taryn hugged Aisling tighter against her chest, trying to look everywhere at once.  She couldn
’t even see the river anymore, although the rushing sound it made still did a great job of obscuring the growls and rustling movements of whatever beast was out there.  There was no sign of it, unless the waving grasses were actually being pushed by the creature and not the wind, which meant it could be anywhere.

Panic was clawing its way up from inside her, a progression of pure hell.  Her feet were blocks of ice, her legs were itchy and numb, her stomach was churning and now her heart was thundering and hot.  Any minute now it would reach her brain, like a poison, and then she realized she
’d probably faint.

Taryn backed up shakily and cast around for some venue of escape.  The woods were behind her.  Would they be shelter, or a trap?