The Care and Feeding of Griffins (23 page)

35.  Kraal-Rucombe

T
aryn spent the next few days in a hedonistic haze.  Sleep came easy on a bed that put so many soft inches between her and the ground.  The day had lots more hours when she didn’t have to spend so many of them gathering grain.  And life was just all-around better without the prospect of hauling that heavy old cauldron all over creation.

She started off each day with breakfast straight from the jar, and spent the hours she would have passed trying to scratch it together from the grass seeds over in the copse instead, gathering wood and foraging only if she felt like it.  She had lunch
—fish, if she’d caught any, and jerky if she hadn’t—and then used her lavishly long afternoons to practice her tool-knapping and basket-folding.  She had dinner from the jars or the river, and then took herself to bed for a little light reading before more sleep.  She could feel her strength returning by the day, virtually by the hour.

The minotaur didn
’t come back, nor did the Farasai, but their absence no longer felt ominous.  They weren’t leaving her alone, after all, they were just leaving her in peace.  A subtle difference, perhaps, but she didn’t think she was imagining it.  She could be jumping the gun a little, but she thought she might actually be approaching a point of real welcome.

There was no doubt
, however, that Taryn’s personal outlook was affected by her new circumstances.  The leisure to actually make improvements instead of scraping along from day to day had results almost as immediate as those produced by three meals a day and good sleep at night.  Almost overnight, her stone tools started looking (and cutting) much better.  That encouraged her to try cord-braiding again, this time paying much closer attention to exactly how to work the fibers.  The finished product helped fix a stone blade to a thick chunk of wood, and when she whacked this crude axe on her fallen paper-bark tree, it actually chopped, as opposed to simply flying apart.  She had so much firewood by the end of that day that she devoted the next day to target practice.  After several hours spent knocking stone chips off of stumps and branches, Taryn took Aisling out into the plains (never losing sight of her tent) to hunt for real.  To her surprise, she actually killed a hopper, and although she’d fired off some twenty stones before she hit it, the stone that did hit killed it cleanly.  With the memory of the rabbit farmer back in Washington (a whole world and a whole lifetime away) as a kind of mental index, Taryn and her Leatherman multitool puzzled their way through the skinning and cleaning process.  The little meat that survived this amateur undertaking went to Aisling, who was so happy, he serenaded her for the rest of the day with too-ra-loos.

And then one day, much to her delight, Taryn woke up and didn
’t really have any big plans at all. 

Oh, there was still plenty she supposed she could be doing to buckle down for winter.  She had some spare bark baskets now, she could fill them up with grain before it all died and rotted in the wet fields.  She could try cord-baskets again, maybe make one to strap on her back for easier portage of foraged goods.  Her primitive tech book had instructions for those.  She could knap herself another axe, since hers was already dulling down, maybe get another hoe together now that she knew how to make stronger cord.  For that matter, she could make a few thousand miles of strong cord.

So there it was.  Tons to do, but nothing, oh, nothing really pressing.

Tonka
’s offer to come and visit was burning in her heart before her breakfast of trail mix and fish was half-over.  She told herself that she hadn’t made up her mind about going or not, but she did almost immediately lean over and start putting out the fire.  As soon as the last bite of fish was popped into Aisling’s open beak, Taryn was on her feet and packing up.

Everything of value went into the tent, apart from her backpack, to whose everyday contents she added her Hershey bars.  But instead of sending her pack up to the top of th
e nearest sapling, she slung it on her back.  Nothing said neighborly like a box of chocolates.  Her slingshot and some rocks went into her pockets, and a good coil of rope went onto her shoulder and then it was out into the plains for Taryn and her too-ra loo-ing little man.

The borenut tree that stood alone in the plains was a colossus.  The shadow cast by the rising sun showed Taryn plainly enough which way was true west, and stretched the dark stain of this pointing finger nearly the length of a football field.  Taryn stood beneath the spreading branches amid piles of hairy teardrop-shaped nuts the size of ostrich eggs (borenuts, she would assume), and sighted out along that shadow all the way to infinity.  She saw nothing but the valley
—golden grass, thick belts of trees, narrow ribbons of green to indicate creeks, distant seas of cattle, and here and there, the swirling eddies of wind to show her where hoppers or grass ponies might be.

Sight into the setting sun, he
’d said, and that meant west, but the keyword of Tonka’s instructions had to be ‘eventually’.  If she wanted not to lose her way, she needed to make herself some street signs.

Taryn pulled her coil of cordage down off her shoulder and used her multitool to cut herself off a respectable length.  She used it to wrap a quadruple-handful of grass, which she pulled out of the ground around her (her hands ached sickly at this abuse; clearly, they
’d thought she was done with this sort of thing now that her potatoes were planted.  Oh well.  Someday, she’d have calluses and her hands wouldn’t care anymore), and then she tugged down a low-hanging branch and tied the bundle up.  It looked like a scarecrow hanging there behind her, but she was sure it would be very visible even from a distance.  As if the borenut tree itself could be overlooked, but the theory was sound.

Taryn put her back to the trunk of the monolithic tree and sighted along its shadow to another tree, this one considerably more modest.  Looking back over her shoulder, she could see the crisp, blue blob that was her tent.  Her camp.  Her beacon in strange lands.

Taryn picked Aisling up, found her tree again in the west, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the open valley.

When she reached her new tree, the first thing she did was turn around and make certain that, yes, she could see the straw log swaying from the branches of the borenut.  Thus assured, she made another one to tie here, then sighted west along
its
shadow, and moved on.

So it went across the plains, from east to west, tree to tree.  Taryn let Aisling down every so often, and though he seemed increasingly puzzled by the long walk they were taking, his spirits were easily bolstered with a few rounds of his lullaby or some other song.  He even joined in once in a while, merrily trilling out a loud peep or even a word, such as,
“Ouch!”, “Too-ra-loo!” or (only once, mercifully), “Fuck!”

The sun crept up on her and ultimately began to pass her.  This validated her directional prowess, as she was able to see concretely that she was going west, but it did mean she
’d been walking for several hours with no corral in sight.

‘
Eventually,’ she told herself.  ‘He did say eventually.  Not soon.  Eventually.’

She reached her next tree, tied up a fallen branch she found at its base to avoid having to pull more grass, and then paused to check her bearings, wishing she still had her watch.  She
’d brought her flashlight, but she still didn’t relish the idea of walking back through the plains in the dark.  If she didn’t stumble on Tonka pretty soon, she’d better think about heading back.

‘
One more tree,’ she decided.  ‘One more and then, if I still don’t see anything—’

Her thoughts chopped themselves off into startled silence as she realized that she could see something.  Off to the west and a good clip south, there was smoke.  Thin streaks of it, in several columns. 

“
Nollag shona duit
!” Taryn said happily.  It was Granna Birgit’s favorite swear, and Taryn had been using it surreptitiously for years before she learned enough Gaelic to realize it meant nothing but ‘Merry Christmas.’ She scooped up Aisling and started walking again, a new lightness in her step.

She paused at another tree mid-way there, to use the last of her cord and make one last road sign for the return home.  By then, she could see the dark lumps of buildings in the distance.  A few minutes
’ walk more and she could hear the distant mutter of voices if the wind was blowing right, and see carts and fences and horsemen moving around.  And a few minutes after that, why, she was there.

She wasn
’t sure what she’d been expecting.  A half-dozen huts, maybe.  For some reason, bizarre even to her own mind, she’d imagined they’d live in teepees, but of course, they didn’t.

The
‘corral’ was a bustling village, as welcome to her eyes as she guessed a McDonald’s or a WalMart would be about now.  A broken fence loosely surrounded it, and dirt roads grew in from just beyond this border to connect the log cabins where the horsemen lived and worked.  There were barns as well, and fenced areas for livestock—cattle and sheep, pheasants and geese—and a number of smaller shed-like structures where such things would be best needed.  Trees far too dense to be properly called copses grew nearly up to the fence in some places, but the thing that surrounded the village was not woods nor plains but fields, great squares of turned earth in various stages of use that stretched out nearly as far as Taryn could see.

There were horsemen hard at work all around her in those fields, tilling and tending the land with tools uniquely-designed for them.  The plows were great Vs of metal with long bars reaching back; one horseman would be harnessed to pull, and one would walk behind, guiding the rows into razor-straight lines.  Grain was threshed by a long, spiky spiral pulled by three horsemen and raked up by a row of others into carts they themselves pulled.  Some tall stalky crop was in harvest, cut with hooked sickles, gathered by hand and thrown into cone-shaped baskets worn like saddlebags.

Not everyone was a farmer.  Horsemen came in small groups back from the reaching forest with saddle-baskets filled with branches, or with braces of game or simply with their runkas loosely balanced on their shoulders.  But everyone was clearly working, everyone had something to do and everyone was doing it.

There were so many of them, a few hundred at least, and so ma
ny children.  They were working too, in the fields gathering the stones turned over by the plows, in the pens feeding and brushing and herding the livestock, running back and forth between the adults doing all the little things that adults need done.  After so much time by herself, the sight of all those people made Taryn positively giddy.

She was aware of some covert stares as she walked up the road among the lodges and of a gradual gathering, very subtle, as more and more horsemen began to work their way closer to her.  She saw one of them looking directly at her and waved.  The horseman waved back, and everyone near him stopped what they were doing and stared at him.

Then Tonka came galloping up, sliding his runka into the sheath on his back.  He was smiling.  It was the first time she had seen that expression fully on anyone’s face since leaving Washington, and her heart leapt foolishly as she returned it.

“
Well met!” he called, cantering to a stop.  “I greet you, traveler, and bring you into my corral!”  He was pronouncing it oddly.  Not corral at all, but kraal.  “You are very welcome here.”

“
I greet you, chieftain,” she said firmly, and shifted Aisling to one arm so that they could clasp wrists.  “I came to thank you again for your gifts,” she said.  “You’ve made winter possible for me.  You just don’t know how much that means to me.”

He flicked an ear. 
“No more thanks are necessary.  You have been owed as much for the trouble we have given you.”

“
I’m sure you had your reasons,” Taryn said tactfully.

“
Aye.  But you, at least, are exonerated of them.  Come, Taryn.  The mid-day meal is being prepared.  Eat with me.”

She glowed and followed him to the wide commons where the road ended, and toward an enormous lodge.

The good smells of roasting meat and simmering herbs enveloped her as soon as she stepped into the door he opened.  There were many long tables arranged in a double row down the center of the lodge and one that stood apart at the furthest wall.  Wide fires burned in a hearth that stretched the full length of the building and several horsemen, predominantly women, tended to the pots and spits while children carried platters of food to the tables.  There were no chairs, of course, but that was all right.  Any furniture at all was a sight for Taryn’s sore eyes.

One of the horsewomen had detached herself from the others and was coming forward, head regally high and eyes intensely focused.  Her body was flawlessly black, her tail cropped short, and her head had been shaved into an equally close-cropped Mohawk mane.  Like Tonka, she wore a black bar across her eyes, and there were other markings as well
—an inverted triangle on each flank, an arrangement of three white dots encircling her human half’s navel, and two wavy lines in green encircling her upper arms.  It was clear that this was the person the others at the fires had been taking orders from, and even Tonka moved back to allow her to come and face Taryn fully.