Earth and Air Read online

  A single eye, because the thing was watching him sideways, bird-fashion, though the eye was much too large for that of any bird—indeed of any creature that he knew. He could now see the beginnings of the curve of an immense, hooked beak, and a fringe of small feathers, though the scalp seemed bald. Surely, even half-delirious, he would have noticed that head on the fallen statue. No, the thing had seemed headless, but clearly a mammal, with the only plumage on the wing, the rest of the body the same colour as the sandstone desert rocks, from which he had assumed it to be carved. The head must have been tucked away out of sight, bird-fashion again.

  He was startled, but not for the moment terrified, in fact not much more than wary. When the creature rose and came for him, then would be the time for terror. But the only move it made was to lay its head back down somewhere out of sight. The movement didn’t look like that of a hunter, withdrawing for a stealthy approach, more like that of an exhausted animal, momentarily interested in the arrival of another creature, but then deciding that the intruder was no threat and returning to its rest.

  Varro drank again and half filled his skin, just in case, then rose and climbed the steps, watching over his shoulder as the creature came into view. It was indeed huge, not as big as an elephant, but half again the size of any ox he had ever seen. Apart from the scalp, the neck was feathered as far as the shoulders, and the body beyond that furred, both a rusty yellow-brown, the colour of the desert. A vast wing, desert coloured too but barred light and dark, lay along its flank.

  It seemed to have lost interest in him and made no move as on wincing feet he crept round the pool and climbed the temple steps and turned. Seeing it from above he recognised at once what the thing was. The dark tuft at the end of the almost naked tail was the giveaway. A gryphon. The body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Ridiculous. Anatomically impossible. There, in front of him.

  Delirium? How does a man prove to himself that he isn’t mad, when the very proof may be merely part of the madness? His feet, so much more conscious of their soreness now that they had been cosseted a little? In a futile attempt to validate the proof Varro sat down on the steps and inspected them. Something had carved a half-inch gash into the ball of his left foot. Further back, what had begun as a blister was now raw flesh. There was a matching, but larger, sore on his right foot, as well as a dozen minor cracks and abrasions either side. Well bandaged, and with good shoes, they might be fit to walk on in a week. Academic. He would be dead of starvation well before that.

  The gryphon sighed. He looked up and saw the vast flanks still collapsing from the breath. Otherwise the creature hadn’t stirred. He returned to his feet.

  He was painfully picking grit out of one of the cracks with the butt of a needle when the gryphon sighed again. This time Varro listened, and heard in the indrawn breath before the sigh, a low, half-liquid rattling sound, that made the import of the sigh itself instantly clear. The monster was sick.

  Dying?

  He rose and hobbled round to where he could see the thing sideways on. The head lifted and for a moment the round eye—darker than gold, the colour of sunset—gazed at him. There was death in that eye. The head fell back, indifferent.

  Death. “The demon of the well demands a death.” This time it would have two, its own, and Varro’s.

  A delirium notion wandered into his mind. But it only needs one. Why mine? He giggled, and pulled himself together. There was meat on that carcass, but he couldn’t wait for it to die. He must kill it. How?

  As Varro studied the huge animal in this fresh light it sighed again, and this time slowly stretched a foreleg. The claws were already extended, but they seemed to stretch further with the movement. Each was as long as Varro’s middle finger, but twice as thick at the base and curving to a savage point. Even a dying blow from such a weapon would be lethal. He would need to come at the creature from behind its back.

  It was lying on its left side, so the heart was presumably out of reach. Slit its throat? The dense plumage of the neck prevented a quick, clean strike. But once, on a crossing of the Alps, Varro had watched the train captain deal with a pony that caught its leg in a cranny and broke it. The pony’s load had been precious and fragile. The pony, trapped half upright, but threshing around in agony, would in another couple of seconds have dragged itself free and fallen, but the train master had darted in, gripped the load with his left hand, and with his right driven a blade no longer than Varro’s hilt-deep into the soft strip between the collarbone and the neck, then taken the weight of the load while a pulsing jet of blood arched clean across the track. With decreasing struggles the pony had collapsed, and before long died.

  Varro returned to the temple and honed his knife point on one of the steps. Though the appearance of intelligence in animals can be very deceptive, especially in birds (how bright, really, is a lark?), there was something about the creature’s patient dying that made Varro feel that it might understand what he was up to, and why. But the only move it made as he went round and crouched behind the shoulders was to raise its head and watch him again. He reached out, testing, tensed to snatch himself away if the fierce beak darted to attack, but the creature continued to watch him steadily as he shifted to choose the spot at which to strike. The train master had clearly known the exact run of a large artery in the pony’s neck. Varro had almost two handspans to choose from, and could only guess.

  As his hand poised for the blow the monster laid its head back on the paving and stretched its neck a little, much as a brave man might, making things easier for the surgeon.

  “Mercury, God,” Varro whispered, “guide this hand.”

  Summoning his last strength, he plunged the knife in at a slight angle, forced the hilt forward to widen the inward cut, then flung himself back as the monster’s body convulsed, once. He rose and stood, gasping. Instead of a jet, a pulsing gush of blood was welling from the wound, so rapidly that by the time Varro looked it had begun to spread across the paving, draining towards the pool. The colour seemed no different from that of his own blood, or any other animal he knew of. He went and sat on the steps, watching the life fade out of that sunset eye.

  He found he was shuddering, partly from exhaustion and the aftershock of violent and dangerous action, but also from the knowledge (though not the understanding) of what he had done. Though both had seemed necessities, this was something wholly different from the killing of Prince Fo’s slavemaster. The world had been well rid of such a man. The gryphon . . . there was no code by which he could value the gryphon’s life against his own. Good or ill, he knew he had done something portentous. What would the gods feel? Mercury had many responsibilities, being god, along with travellers, of science, commerce and healing, tricksters, vagabonds and thieves, and all merry fellows. He seemed to have answered Varro’s prayer and guided his blade point to the artery, which in turn seemed to suggest that he had no particular fondness for gryphons, but how could Varro know which of the captious deities might feel otherwise?

  He went down to the pool again and poured a libation to the unknown god before he drank. Already the water tasted of blood. There was no point yet in washing. He had gorier work to do, but he needed to rest, so waited until as much of the blood as was going to had drained from the carcass. Even then he took the precaution of stripping naked before he started his butchery.

  Skinning a gryphon proved little different from skinning a horse or bullock—all part of his apprenticeship. He did it systematically, as if sparing the leather that no one would ever have a use for. When he had loosed a flap large enough to fold back he cut out the huge right lung and exposed the heart. He cut that out and folded the flap of hide back over the flesh. Exhausted again by now he carried the heart up into the shade of one of the temple pillars, where he sliced small pieces off it and chewed them slowly, feeling the strength flow back through his body. By the time he had eaten enough the sun was almost overhead and the first vultures had arrived.

  He dragged the loose lun
g a little way up the slope to distract them and then drove them away from the main carcass with rocks. Splashing himself often with water from his skin he toiled on, first constructing a meat cache out of fallen masonry, storing the liver in it, and then cutting out the rest of the innards and hauling them off for the birds. Next he cut and cached as much meat as he could eat in a fortnight, pulled the hide back over what remained and weighted it with boulders, and at last went and bathed in the now reeking pool. The sun had dried him by the time he returned to the temple.

  Staggering and hazed with tiredness he tied cords between three pillars, draped his stolen cloak across them and lay down in its triangle of shade. The harsh cries of the vultures threaded through his dreams, which were of the gryphon still alive, but with half its hide stripped from its flank. As it snarled and slashed at a ring of prancing scavengers an outer ring of monsters—centaur, sphinx, basilisk, hydra, gorgon—watched lamenting. Mercury presided dry-eyed with a god’s half smile.

  It was dusk when Varro woke. The gryphon’s hide had proved too tough for the vultures, but they had pecked out the great sunset eye.

  There was a good moon, so he continued to dismember the gryphon far into the night, dragging most of the meat away for the vultures, and again next morning until the heat became intolerable. He rested out the worst of it and worked methodically on, careful not to break his knife, impatient with a joint. By late afternoon he had removed enough of the meat and bones to be able to heave the remains of the carcass over, and by nightfall he had the hide free, and almost whole, apart from the two large holes he had cut in order to be able to drag it over the wings. This had been his main aim. With it he could create a bigger and denser area of shade than was possible with the cloak and cloth. He dragged it up to the temple and laid it out, pelt upward, between the pillars. It was larger than he needed. There would be enough left over for him to add a hammock to his plans. He continued to work by moonlight, trimming rawhide thongs from its edges, until he was exhausted, at which point he folded the pelt in on itself several times and slept on it in more comfort than he had done since they had taken him to the slave-market. He did not dream at all.

  By the third noon he had both awning and hammock in place, and strips of gryphon flesh drying in the sun, protected from the vultures by a structure of rib bones. That evening he started making his new shoes.

  Here he had had two strokes of what seemed again to be god-given good fortune. While wrestling the hide loose he had planted a foot beside one of the wing roots for purchase as he heaved, and had noticed how neatly at that point the pelt that covered the sinews around the wing root matched the shape of his foot, running a handsbreadth up the wing bone beside his ankle. He was looking at the upper of a shoe, ready-made on the animal. Carefully he now cut loose the whole patch of pelt that he had left around the wing root, slitting it down the back of the heel to get it free of the wing. Then the same on the other side.

  The soles he had also found already half-made. The beast’s immense pads, though almost circular, were each longer than his own foot, the skin as thick as the width of his thumb. He soaked his chosen pieces in the pool, then laid them out in the sun, urinated on them, folded them hair-side inward, covered them with sun-warmed rocks and left them to begin to putrefy. He then slept out the rest of the day.

  When he woke he started to fashion crude tools from the beast’s bones and the rocks of the desert, and also hammered some of the long bones and extracted the marrow, which he mixed with part of the gryphon’s brain. By now he judged that the pieces he had set aside would have decayed enough for the hairs to begin to loosen in the follicles, so he laid them out on a cylinder from a fallen pillar and with the roughened inner side of one of the ribs rubbed the hair free. That done he turned them over and used his knife, sharpening it again and again, to slice away the innermost layer of the skin, exposing the true leather, which he set to soak in the pool while he ate. Lastly by moonlight he hollowed a shallow bowl in the earth, lined it with a single piece of hide, and used it to compound a reeking mix of water, marrow and brain. He then slept, again without dreams.

  When he woke he drew his pieces of hide out of the pool and laid them out in the rising sun, while he cut more strips of the meat to dry beside them. Another day, his nose told him, and what was left would be no longer safe to eat. He worked on his tools for a while, turning the pieces of hide over from time to time until they were no more than moist. Now he smeared his mixture onto them, and worked it in until they were again saturated, and then laid them out to dry once more. When they were again merely moist he spread them onto the fallen pillar and rubbed and stretched and rolled and pounded them steadily for several hours. By the time night fell he had four cuts of true leather, crude but both supple and strong, even now that the water had dried right out of it. It was far better than he could possibly have hoped for. One might well have thought it had spent weeks, if not months, in the tanner’s vats.

  Next morning, the eighth of his stay at the gryphon’s pool, he cut the pieces to shape and stitched them together, hissing peacefully at his work as he had always used to at his own bench in Ravenna. It was a long while since he had felt anything like this contentment. Before he tried the shoes on he inspected his feet, and was surprised to find how well they had mended while he had been busy with other matters. For this he dutifully praised Mercury, god, among everything else, of healing.

  What he had made turned out to be short boots, rather than shoes, running neatly up just beyond the ankle bones and lacing down the back. What is more, they were amazingly comfortable, a pleasure to wear. In them he was able to walk far more easily than he would have dreamed possible a few days back.

  All the bits of carcass he had strewn around the place were now picked bare. Apart from what was in Varro’s cache nothing remained except bones, a feathered skull with an amazing beak, and the hide slung between the temple pillars. As the sun went down on his ninth day he took that down, folded it and piled masonry over it. One day, perhaps, he would be able to come back for it. He might even make a saddle out of it, if the leather wasn’t ruined by then.

  Five days later, still feeling reasonably strong, Varro reached a nomadic encampment at the far edge of the desert. The herders spoke no language that he knew, and would take no payment for their hospitality, but when he spoke of Dassun in a questioning tone they set him on his way with gestures and smiles. Later there was farmed land, with villages, and a couple of towns, where he paid for his needs from the slave master’s purse, and finally, twenty-seven days after his escape, he came to Dassun.

  The city was walled but the gates unguarded. Inside it seemed planless, tiny thronged streets, with gaudy clothes and parasols, all the reeks and sounds of commerce and humanity: houses a mixture of brick, timber, plaster, mud and whatnot, often several storeys high; the people’s faces almost black, lively and expressive; vigorous hand-gestures aiding speech; the fullness of life, the sort of life that Varro relished.

  He let his feet tell him where to go and found himself in an open marketplace, noisier even than the streets—craftsmen’s booths, merchants’ stalls of all kinds grouped by what they sold, fruit, fish, meat, grain, gourds, pottery, baskets and so on. Deliberately now, he sought out the leatherworkers’ section.

  He approached two stall-holders, both women, and showed them his tools, and with obvious gestures made it clear that he was looking for work. Smiling, they waved him away. The third he tried was an odd-looking little man, a dwarf, almost, fat and hideous, but smiling like everyone else. He would have fetched a good price as a curiosity in any northern slave market. He chose a plain purse from his stall, picked a piece of leather from a pile, gave them to Varro and pointed to an empty patch of shade beneath his awning. Varro settled down to copy the purse, an extremely simple task, so for his own pleasure as well as to show what he could do he put an ornamental pattern into the stitching. When the stall-holder came back to see how he was getting on, Varro showed him the almost
finished purse. The stall-holder laughed aloud and clapped him on the shoulder. He pointed at his chest.

  “Andada,” he said.

  “Andada,” Varro repeated, and then tapped his chest in turn and said “Varro.”

  “Warro,” the man shouted through his own laughter, and clapped Varro on the shoulder again. Varro was hired.

  That night Andada took him home and made him eat with his enormous family—several wives and uncountable children, each blacker than the last, and gave him a palliasse and blanket for his bed. The children seemed to find their visitor most amusing. Varro didn’t mind.

  Over the next few days, sitting in his corner under the awning and copying whatever Andada asked him to, Varro shaped and stitched out of scraps of leather a miniature saddle and harness, highly ornate, the sort of thing apprentices were asked to do as a test-piece before acceptance into the Guild.

  Andada, when he showed it to him, stopped smiling. He took the little objects and turned them to and fro, studying every stitch, then looked at Varro with a query in his eyes and made an expansive gesture with his hands. Varro by now had learnt some words of the language.

  “I make big,” he confirmed, and sketched a full-size saddle in midair.

  Andada nodded, still deeply serious, closed his stall, and gestured to Varro to follow him. He led the way out of the market, through a tangle of streets, into one with booths down either side. These clearly dealt in far more expensive goods than those sold in the market, imported carpets, gold jewellery set with precious gems, elaborate glassware, and so on. Halfway up it was a saddler’s shop, again filled with imports, many the standard Timbuktu product, manufactured for trade and so gaudy but inwardly shoddy—a saddler who produced such a thing for Prince Fo would have been flogged insensible.