The Care and Feeding of Griffins (3 page)

4.  The Hatching of the Egg

T
he first thing Taryn thought when she heard the noise was that something was blocking the heater vent.  A cardboard box, maybe, or a crumpled piece of paper.  Anything light enough to be stirred by an updraft and heavy enough to make that muffled scraping sound.  But when she leaned over to clear the vent, she saw plainly that nothing was covering it or even near enough to be moved by the trickle of air it forced out.

As she sat, puzzled, she heard it again and this time she decided it was a branch scraping the window.  She
’d only had the apartment four months.  There were all kinds of kinks that had been sprung on her already and no doubt, all kinds waiting to be discovered.  A need to prune the trees was probably one.  And if the battle over the running toilet was anything to go by, it would be another four months before the landlord got around to fixing the trees.  Still, no way was she going to spend the rest of her lease listening to that scrape.

Taryn got up and struggled the window open. 
That was no little feat in itself, thanks to the swollen frame, filthy runners and the sloppy paint sealing the whole thing shut.  How could a place that looked so good on a walk-through be such a dump once a lease was signed? 

The October night was wet and cool and smelled of dead leaves and pavement.  Taryn leaned out into it anyway, a perplexed expression slowly eating up her face as she looked for a branch that was even within arm
’s reach, much less able to tap and scratch at the glass of the window.

Skktchh
…Skap
.

‘
Rats,’ thought Taryn, heaving the window shut.  And if it was rats, then by God, there had better be an exterminator here tomorrow or Mr. Landlord was going to find Mr. Rat slingshotted in through his bathroom window.

Taryn picked up the closest thing she had to a weapon apart from her trusty slingshot
—a facsimile of a medieval chain mace made primarily from an old chair leg, duct tape, and a nerf ball—and gingerly began to listen her way through the apartment.

Scrrrap-pap
.

It was coming from the closet.

Skkttch-skttch…peep…shhhxxtik
.

Peep?

The egg.

Taryn
’s entire body froze over instantly.  The mace slipped from her numb fingers and clattered on the linoleum.  She was aware of it falling, but she couldn’t hear it hit the floor.  She couldn’t hear anything but a roaring in her ears that seemed to echo in her eyes.  She couldn’t see anything but white and grey outlines.  She couldn’t feel herself breathing.  She couldn’t feel anything but her hair, and only that because it was standing up in prickles.

The egg.  The egg the egg theeggtheggthegg.

Sound and sight crashed back into her with the force of a sonic boom after a near encounter with a B-2 bomber.  The shock of her senses returning sent her staggering forward and the momentum carried her straight to the closet.

She tore the cheap French doors open (she tore them out of their tracks, actually, but she did not yet notice this) and fell to her knees, digging through the heater pads and insulating towels until her fingers touched the shell.

Her heart was pounding hard enough to make her vision throb to its rhythm.  Her hands still felt numb.  She shook them out a few times, but it didn’t help.  Maybe she was having what they called a ‘cardiac event’.  Somehow, that didn’t matter as much as it should.

Slowly, Taryn brought the egg to her ear.

Nothing.

Well, of course nothing, what did she really expect?  She
’d had the egg for how many years?

All the same, Taryn lifted one trembling finger and tapped her nail on the shell: tak-tak.

Scrtch-peep
.

“
Nollaig shona duit
!” Taryn gasped, flinching back.  It was one of her grandmother’s curses, one Taryn had grown up hearing, believing it to be so forbidden that it could never be translated into English without risking arrest.  Taryn had been using it in secret all through high school and part of college before she’d finally nerved herself up to ask Granna Birgit just what it did mean, only to be told (not without a knowing sparkle of humor) that it simply meant ‘Merry Christmas’.  Still, the first curses tend to be the ones that stick with you, and this one had a way of popping out of Taryn’s mouth when she was in the grip of a particularly freezing panic and this one, this one certainly qualified. 

She turned the egg over, her hands shaking, biting her lip with the effort to
keep from dropping it.  After fifteen years and countless moves, after balancing the thing on a microwave in a luggage rack for Pete’s sake, suddenly her greatest fear was dropping it.

There was a crack, no more noticeable than a black hair on the ivory surface.

Taryn tapped at the crack and something tapped back and then pushed the crack just a little wider.  Now it looked like the ding in a windshield instead of just a hair.  Taryn knew she should leave it alone, but she couldn’t help herself.  She began to pick at the splintering shell.

And even though she
’d heard the sounds, even though she’d felt the scratching and shifting reverberating in her hands, the sight of the hooked beak pushing out at her still took her breath away.

What in heaven and hell took fifteen years to hatch?  More than fifteen
years; who know how long the egg had lain in its den before Taryn found it?  What—

The eggshell broke off in two big chunks, revealing the soggy down and wrinkly pink skin of a bird
’s head.  It panted, its beak not quite clicking as it opened and shut.  The eye that Taryn could see was huge and dark and sealed away behind a thin membrane.  There were tiny rivers of blue veins under its papery folds of skin; she could see its blood pulsing.

“
Hi there,” Taryn whispered.  Her breath stirred the spiky wet feathers on its head.

It peeped weakly and struggled again, pushing and wrigg
ling until another chunk of shell cracked away.  Taryn picked it off, crooning wordlessly.  She could see its talons, curled like a little fist, under its arched breastbone.

It rested, peeping periodically in answer to Taryn
’s whispered encouragement, for several minutes.  On its next attempt, it pushed its head entirely out of the hole it had made and hung there with its beak pressed against Taryn’s breast.  Its peeps drew off into drowsy bird-song snores.

What was it?  She watched the nature channels.  Eagles were smaller than this, a lot smaller.  And this was an eagle
’s head, or at least, eagle-like.  There were two bony lumps, one above each newborn eye, that Taryn didn’t think she’d ever seen on an eagle, but that was a moot point next to the first question: What kind of eagle took more than fifteen years to hatch?

“
Come on out,” she said, rubbing the bird’s head with the lightest brush of her fingertip.  “Hurry, hurry.”

It rallied bravely, peeping and pushing against her finger, straining until the shell split down the center and it finally got both taloned feet and one paw free.

And one what?

Taryn stared in slack-jawed shock at the curled, cat-like limb protruding below the avian fore-feet.  Its fur, like its feathers, was spiky and wet.  Its claws were pearly shards sheathed in velvet folds.  She stroked the smooth pads of its toes and it reached down and wrapped its talons tightly around her finger, peeping.

Taryn, her breath roaring and eyes burning, slipped her hands under its forelegs and gingerly pulled it all the way out of its eggshell.  There was resistance, but then the creature wiggled and it came free of its incubator and hung limp and peeping blindly in her hands.

Eagle
’s head, taloned forefeet, tiny wings, furry fanny, feline hindfeet, long tail.  She knew what she was looking at.  She knew and she still couldn’t believe.

It had spots in its fur like a baby lion.  Here she was, with a baby lion at last, and God help her, she was petting it. 
Her parents would be so disappointed.

It rolled its head up and lolled against her breast, chirping, exhausted.  She could feel its ribs expanding with each hard breath, delicate slivers of bone protected by the thinnest cover of furry flesh.  It was here in her hands, its head on her heart.  It was alive.  It was real.  It was helpless and it was hers.

Wonder coalesced into horror in a single instant, no longer and no louder than the beating of a tiny heart.

She had no idea what to do now.

5.  Next

T
hree hours later, as Taryn sat at her computer with the baby clutching at her shirtfront with all four feet, the hopelessness of her situation began to overwhelm her.  She knew what she had, but she couldn’t even find a name for it, much less a handy guidebook of care instructions.  To complicate matters, her Instant Messenger kept popping up every few seconds as her boyfriend tried repeatedly to invite her out to a movie or a late dinner or just coffee or a stack of rented movies at his house.  Long after this failed, he continued to barrage her with questions and comments, each of which felt like a slap as she sifted through web pages in desperate search for information.  Even under ordinary circumstances, Taryn only tolerated the nightly nuisance of online chat because it seemed to make John happy.  Tonight, it was the one more thing that she just couldn’t handle.  She typed a curt goodbye and shut it off.  She would apologize to him tomorrow if he acted like his feelings were hurt, but tonight simply had to be about the baby…baby what?

The Greeks called them griffins, but there were also gryphons, gryphens, griffons, griffens, gryphins, and, the perfect capper to a confusion-pyramid, t
he Egyptians had a critter just like a griffin that they called Hieracosphinx.  Taryn supposed there was really nothing weirder about having a Hieracosphinx flapping around in Washington State than a regular old griffin.  Or a gryphon.  Or whatever. 

N
o one could seem to agree on a description any better than a name.  Griffins supposedly had ‘the ears of an ass’.  Her baby had a couple of dimples on the sides of its head, hidden in the secret way of birds beneath a crop of down.  Some websites stated with authority that all griffins were female.  Well, her baby was definitely a boy, which still other websites asserted were wingless beasts called keythongs, contemptuously adding that it was an anomalous and very recent addition to the myth.  Other sites told her that the griffin’s tail was that of a snake or a scorpion.  Her baby’s tail was just as lion-like as the rest of his fanny.  The griffin was said to build nests high in trees or mountains, not in dens like where she’d found it, and instead of eggs, like the one sitting broken in her closet, it laid agates.  Just as many websites warned her that the baby was bound to grow into a mindless and murderous animal whose only talent lay in finding gold as there were extolling the wisdoms of a scholarly griffin.

Nowhere on any of the countless websites that Taryn visited was there any information on what griffins ate, unless you counted the many assurances that griffins would leap on and messily devour anyone who disturbed their golden hoards.  Oh, and one page that went into
disturbingly graphic detail when it came to the story of a griffin who habitually carried virgins screaming off to its lair, where it monstrously deflowered them before dining.  As a virgin, Taryn supposed she’d ought to be concerned, but she was a lot more worried about the fact that whoever authored that particular page was out driving tonight than she was in mortal peril of her own life.

And now here it was, half the night gone and she still had no idea what to do.  Her griffin, or gryphon or whatever, was just as real and alive as it had been when it hatched out of her closet, but it wasn
’t going to stay that way unless she started figuring out some basic principles in a real hurry.

As if sensing her distress, the baby hugging her shirtfront bobbed its head around in blind
agitation.  It brushed against a button at her collar and instantly lunged out to bite it.

“
No no,” Taryn murmured, stroking its powder-puff head, and it settled back down against her breast and peeped at her.

It was hungry.  It needed to eat.  Forget all the disinformation swimming around in cyberspace and focus in on that one thing.  What did griffins eat?
  Besides virgins.  She qualified, but she failed to see how loping off limbs to feed to the little tyke would help it in the long run.

She hated to guess.  She hated it and she had to do it, and it left her feeling sick all the way to the soles of her feet.  She was sitting in her living room with what could be the only griff-something in the whole world and that didn
’t leave a lot of wiggle-room for making mistakes.  She had never been so terrified in her entire life.  She could feel the baby’s life like a stone in her stomach.  She’d found it, she’d hatched it, and unless she did everything right the first time, she was going to watch it die from her ignorance.

A griffin.  A real, liv
e griffin.

The enormity of it tried to close in on her as it had done a dozen times since the hatching, but this time she managed to fight it off.  She couldn
’t keep freaking out.  He was depending on her.  He needed her to be focused.  He had no one else.

Never once did it occur to Taryn to share her discovery with anyone else.  The egg itself had been to
o unusual, too fantastic to show to anyone; over the years, she’d had many opportunities to turn the egg over to scientists and so forth, but she never had.  Deep down, there was a part of her that had never expected a natural bird to hatch.  Deeper down, she had always known something really would.  And now it was here, the most miraculous and precious thing Taryn’s mind could even conceive.  There was no one she trusted enough—not her father, not her mom, not Rhiannon, not the Pope—to share this secret with.  He was her responsibility.  Hers alone.

He lunged at her button again, peeping piteously when she pulled it away from his questing beak. 

Hungry.  He was hungry.

So okay, forget griffins (fear rose up
, cold and slick and sour), what about eagles?  Eagles ate regurgitated roadkill.  Lions drank lion milk.

Taryn sat and stared with unseeing eyes at Elfmagick
’s Mystical Creatures Guide shining out of her monitor.  After a long moment in this trance of thought, she started up her search engine and hunted down the nutritional facts for foods for various orphaned zoo animals.  Protein and fat.  That was what it boiled down to.  Protein and fat for newborn tummies.

It was such a leap of faith.

She could buy kitten formula.  Heck, they had that at the Wal-Mart.

The thought of leaving the baby behind while she drove clear out to Sugartree and back was chilling.  She didn
’t even have a box deep enough to put him in.  And even if she did, what if it tipped over?  What if he got too cold or…or got his head caught in something?  Anything could happen while she was gone.  Anything.

She
’d have to take him with her.

Taryn got up and rummaged through her closet until she found her high-school backpack.  It still had her French textbook in it.  She shook it empty and cushioned it with a towel, then poured sleeping griffin into its open maw.  He peeped at her.

“Hush now,” she said.  “Hush, baby.”

He peeped again, louder this time.

The completely illogical thought came to her that he’d listen better if he had a name she could call him by.  A good name.  A name to fit this priceless treasure.

Taryn brought the backpack up to her lips and whispered, just as though ears were pressing in on all sides.
  “Righ-allaidh,” she told him.  “Your name is Righ-allaidh.”  Fierce king, in the tongue of her grandmother’s people, a word she knew from a childhood spent listening to Irish fairy tales of the Tuatha de Dannon and Fomorians.  There was no other name for her young prince.

The griffin raised its downy head and aimed its sightless eyes at her, seeming for just that briefest instant to hear her, to understand.  Then it peeped, a baby once more, and with any newborn
’s utter lack of comprehension.

“
We’ll call you Aisling for short,” Taryn said, the affectionate baby-name that she and her sister and her mother, perhaps, had all been called in their youngest years.  And so named, Aisling tucked his beak up under his forefoot and chirred himself to sleep.

Taryn zipped up the backpack, not quite completely, and carefully shrugged into its straps.  She felt him shift once, but that was all.
  She got her keys and she headed out to the parking lot.

It was getting colder every night.  Taryn could see her breath on every exhale and she walked to her car as quickly as she could without jostling her sleeping charge.  She set him on the passenger seat, then on the floor, then in the back on the floor, and finally up front in her lap.  She
’d get a car seat or something when she got the formula, but right now, she needed to know he wouldn’t roll around.

All the lead-footed habits with which she had drive
n from the age of sixteen on were erased in one night.  She drove in a state of painful clarity, ten miles or more below the speed limit, tensing up every time another car dared to share the same road.  The twenty minute drive took a whole year to travel.  Her arms were aching to her shoulders by the time she finally parked, the strain of driving so safely as good as any workout, and then it was another rapid stroll across another wet parking lot to the bright lights and welcoming warmth of the store.

Wal-Mart was stocked with exactly the sort of person who had to shop at two in the morning.  There were red-eyed mothers with kids in pajamas hanging off them, stubble-chinned men in slippers instead of shoes, college-aged kids with raver
’s gel still spiking their hair, bar-hoppers looking for one for the road in twelve-pack form, and a smattering of just-off waitresses and nurses and gas station attendants still in their uniforms and on their way home.  Taryn, her unbrushed hair and vague look of desperation, not to mention her sporadically-peeping backpack, blended right in.

She bought two cans of kitten formula, eyedroppers to feed it to him, a bolstered puppy bed, two baby blankets, a pet carrier car seat, a currying brush, baby shampoo, some puppy training pads, and a teddy bear that played
Brahm’s lullaby when its paw was squeezed.  It killed that new TV she was saving for, but she didn’t care.

Aisling was peeping continuously by the time she got home.  She took her backpack and the bag with the formula inside and left everything else for later. 

No can of powdered milk was ever read as thoroughly as that one.  Taryn mixed up four ounces, tested the temperature on her wrist twice, tasted it, and finally filled an eyedropper for Aisling.

He bit as soon as the eyedropper touched his beak, but pulled back fast when Taryn squeezed the bulb to push milk into his mouth.  She crooned at him and he shuffled forward with answering peeps, only to retreat again at the touch of food.  Taryn shifted him awkwardly in the crook of her arms to pinch his beak between her fingers and hold him still while she dribbled a thin stream of milk into him.

He swallowed.  He coughed.  He thought about it as she praised him.  She could see the nub of his tongue poking at the inside of his beak for more drops to investigate and consider.  And then he opened wide as a book and uttered the world’s most pitiful plea for more.

He got the first ounce on him, but the rest in him, and went
to sleep immediately afterwards with formula beading on his beak.  Taryn swabbed him gently clean and dry and left him on the floor by the sofa as she went to bring the rest of her purchases inside.  She arranged his bed next to hers, laid out piddle pads everywhere, and was assembling her pet car seat in no time.  She was feeling pretty good about herself when he started throwing up.

The sound was unalarming, just a wheezy sort of cough.  She glanced around in the same overprotective curiosity that had caused her to drive twenty miles an hour around a forty-mile curve, expecting to see nothing at all out of the ordinary (apart from the griffin itself).  Instead, she saw streams and bubbles of formula pouring from Aisling
’s nostrils, his beak opening and closing and his little ribs working for breath.

Taryn swooped him up with a cry and whether it was the sound or the sudden movement, Aisling coughed violently and finally cleared his airway.  He peeped, his head bobbing bewilderedly around him, and tried to crawl up onto her shoulder.

She held him, her heart pounding.

Was that normal?  Should she have burped him?  She
’d read somewhere that birds didn’t burp, but lions probably did and that was the part where his stomach was.  Maybe the formula was wrong for him.  Maybe he wouldn’t be able to digest it at all.

She needed help.

There was no help.

Through the rising fog of panic came one quiet image, one she did not at first understand.  The library steps, that wonderful concrete library up in Washington from when she was a kid.  That great, grey monolith of slapped-slab architecture with all those marvelous nooks and walls and corners, black windows gleaming in the sun and dozens of shallow steps climb
ing triumphantly to the dungeon doors of its interior.

‘
Well, what about it?’ the logical left of her brain asked calmly.

There was a lady on the steps one time.