Earth and Air Read online

  Andada gripped Varro’s elbow to prevent him moving nearer.

  “You make?” he whispered. Varro nodded, and they went back to the market. He spent an hour drawing sketches of different possible styles. Andada chose three, then took Varro to buy the materials, casually, from different warehouses, among other stuff he needed for his normal trade. Varro watched with interest. From his experience with the guild in Timbuktu he saw quite well what was happening. There was good money in imported saddles. Andada by making them on the spot could undercut the importers with a better product. The importers would not like it at all.

  Andada was a just man, as well as being a cautious one. Having done a deal that allowed one of the importers to conceal the provenance of Varro’s saddles, and leave a handsome profit for both men, he started to pay Varro piecework rather than a wage, at a very fair rate, allowing Varro to rent a room of his own, eat and drink well, and for the moment evade the growing prospect of finding himself married to one or more of Andada’s older daughters. He started to enjoy himself. He liked this city, its cooking, its tavern life, its whole ethos, exotic but just as civilised as Ravenna, in its own way. So as not to stand out he adopted the local dress, parasol, a little pill box hat, thigh-length linen overshirt, baggy trousers gathered at the ankle . . .

  But not the slippers. While his fellow citizens slopped in loose-heeled flip-flops, he stuck to the gryphon-hide boots he had made for himself in the desert. They were the only footwear he now found comfortable, so much so that on waking he sometimes found that he had forgotten to take them off and slept in them all night. Presumably, in the course of that last hideous stretch to the gryphon’s pool, he had done some kind of harm to his feet, from which they had only partially recovered—indeed, unshod, they were still extremely tender—but had managed to adapt themselves to the gryphon boots during the long march out of the desert. It was almost two months before he discovered that there was more to it than that.

  Unnoticed at first, he had begun to feel a faint tickling sensation on the outside of both legs, just below the top of the shoes at the back of the ankle bone. He became conscious of it only when he realised that he had developed a habit of reaching down and fingering the two places whenever he paused from his work. The sensation ceased as soon as he unlaced the boots and felt beneath, but though he could find nothing to cause it on the inside of the boots themselves, it returned as soon as he refastened them. It was not, however, unpleasant—the reverse, if anything—so he let it be and soon ceased to notice it.

  So much so that it must have been several days before he realised that the sensation was gone. He explored, and found that where it had been there was now a small but definite swelling in the surface of the boots, but nothing to show for it when he felt beneath, apart, perhaps, from a slightly greater tenderness of his own skin at those two places. The swellings had grown to bumps before the first downy feathers fledged.

  He studied them, twisting this way and that to see them, and then sat staring at nothing.

  Talaria, he thought. The winged boots of the God Mercury. Impossible. But nothing is impossible to a god. Talaria. Mine.

  Varro’s attitude to the gods had always been one of reasoned belief. He didn’t think, suppose he had been ushered into the unmitigated presence of a deity, and unlike Semele could endure that presence, that he would have seen a human form, or heard a voice speaking to him through his ears. Whatever he might have seen and heard he would done so inside his head. The human shape and speech were only a way for him to be able to envisage the deity and think about him. Similarly with the talaria. Suppose Mercury had chosen to appear to him in human form, he would have done so with all his powers and attributes expressed in his appearance, including that of moving instantaneously from one place to another. The talaria were, so to speak, a divine metaphor. Now the god was presenting him with a real pair. To what end? So that when the wings had grown he could fly instantaneously back to Ravenna? He wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He liked it here.

  Another few days and the little wings were clearly visible, bony, pale and pitiful beneath the scant down. They would have been a distinct embarrassment with Roman dress, but the trousers he was now wearing fastened just below them and there was plenty of room for them in the loose-fitting legs. Indeed, he himself barely noticed them during the day, and spent his time as usual, but at night when he took the boots off and laid them beside his bed the wings started to beat in pitiful frenzy. They quieted at his touch, but fell into their frenzy again as soon as he let go, so in the end he took them into his bed and let them nestle against his chest, where they were still.

  They were, he realised, in some sense alive. Faint quiverings ran through them in their sleep. He found their companionship comforting, taking him back to a time early in his apprenticeship when he had found a stray puppy and adopted it for his own until it had grown big enough to become a nuisance about the household and his master’s wife had insisted on its banishment. He hadn’t minded that much. Growing, the animal had lost its charm, but he could still remember the pleasure he had taken in it when it had been smaller. He felt something of the same protective affection for the talaria.

  It took a while for the first true feathers to fledge, and by then the boots were changing in other ways. Their tops were creeping up his calves, bringing the wings with them, and also the stitching down the lower part of the heel. There were still the same five lace-holes on either side of each boot, and the same dozen crisscross stitches, but below that the leather had simply joined itself up, with a faint seam marked mainly by the flow of the hairs. All this made the boots increasingly tiresome to remove. So if he was tired, or a little drunk after a pleasant evening in a tavern, he tended to sleep in them.

  Looking back later he sometimes wondered how long he had been concealing from himself what was really happening to him. The truth was thrust in his face one evening at the start of the hot weather—apparently they were due a month of appalling temperatures before the blissful onset of the rains—and Andada took him down, along with all the family, to bathe in the immense river that ran a mile from the city walls. Almost the whole city seemed to be there, each section of the community bathing in its designated place. They all stripped off, men, women, and children, and waded in together, with a great deal of shouting and splashing and general horseplay to keep the crocodiles away—or so they claimed, though Varro guessed that the natural high spirits of these people would make them behave like that if nothing more aggressive than a newt inhabited the river. Afterwards the children rushed screaming up and down the shore while the adults lay chatting on the sandy earth, the more fastidious with a scrap of cloth over their privacies. Varro was popular. He had an excellent stock of tall stories picked up from the adventures of his fellow slaves, and a dry way of telling them which these people found amusingly different from their own ebullient style. (He kept quiet, of course, about his own slavery, and also about gryphons.)

  He was chatting with a neighbour when one of Andada’s younger offspring scampered up, stopped, stared for a moment, pointed, and exclaimed, “Funny feet, Warro got!”

  Several adults snapped at the child. Remarks about a person’s appearance were considered extremely offensive. The child’s mother snatched him away, apologising over her shoulder as she led him off. The nature of the whole exchange made Varro realise that everyone around had been aware of the peculiarity, but by then he had recovered his poise enough to shrug and say, “Forget it. It’s true, anyway. It’s not a disease, just a deformity that runs in my family. That’s why I wear these boots. I’ll put them on so you don’t have to look at my feet.”

  To conceal the wings he had with some difficulty removed boots and trousers as if they had been a single garment. His companions looked elsewhere as he put them on the same way, but far more easily. As the light died they built fires of driftwood all along the shore and roasted gobbets of meat and sweet roots and passed them round. But the sense of embarrassment, of somethin
g not entirely acceptable about Varro, hadn’t fully faded by the time they were walking home from the river under the stars. Varro carried one of the sleeping children slung over his shoulder and Andada walked beside him with another, gossiping all the way, obviously aware of his need for support.

  Another man in Varro’s position would have gone out and got very drunk. Varro preferred to keep his liquor for pleasure, so he merely went back to his room, lit his lamp, removed his boots and studied his feet with care. Again, this must have been something that he had subconsciously avoided doing for a long while.

  He had known, of course, that the skin was tender, but hadn’t realised how thin it had become all over the foot, including the sole. No wonder he had found the few barefoot paces down into the water and back up the shore that evening so uncomfortable. The nails were soft and tender too, and more pointed than rounded, but not very noticeably so, any more than the unusual breadth and stubbiness of the feet themselves seemed actually freakish. The thing that must have caught the child’s attention was the position of the big toes, each of which had separated itself from the other four by moving backward over an inch, so that it now lay alongside the ball of the foot.

  As Varro put the boots on again the wings—fully fledged now, desert-coloured, barred dark and light—gave a little flutter of pleasure, like a dog cavorting on being taken for an unexpected walk.

  By now the gates of the city were closed, so Varro climbed up onto the unguarded walls and walked round to the northern side of the city. Here he leaned on the parapet and gazed out towards the desert.

  It was quite clear to him what was happening. It wasn’t only the boots that had brought it about. I have eaten the gryphon’s heart, eaten its flesh, he thought. I have slept on its hide, I have bathed in its blood. I could abandon the boots, but still it would happen.

  He remembered the magnificent strange creature that he had killed. He remembered the life fading out of that sunset eye.

  Next day he asked Andada to close the stall early and took him up to his room. In the stifling dim heat he told him his whole story, rolled up his trousers and showed him the boots. Tentatively Andada reached to touch a wing, but it shrank from his hand.

  “Warro, what is happening to you?” he whispered. “Witchcraft?”

  “Godcraft, more like,” said Varro. “Mercury enjoys a joke.”

  “I know a clever woman. Expensive, but I pay.”

  “You are a good man, Andada, a good friend. I haven’t had a friend like you for a long while. But when a god decides, there is nothing anyone can do. Everything I might try would serve, one way or another, to make it happen. But it is not so bad as you might think. I shall be free—freer than most men. And you will be rich. And unless my whole nature changes we will still be friends. Listen. This is what I want you to do . . .”

  Varro stayed in the city, enjoying its life and constructing saddles to any pattern he fancied, until his toenails began to grow through the toes of his boots, each point as sharp and hard as a steel bradawl. He could have carved rock with them. His feet were now unmistakably paws, and he was walking with a strange, catlike lope. He was already wearing a long, loose cloak all day, for though his wings had migrated to the small of his back their tips trailed almost to the ground, and his tufted tail was not much shorter.

  He said good-bye to Andada’s wives and children, giving each of them a handsome present, and headed north with Andada and four laden pack ponies, though it turned out that the two men needed to travel well separated as the animals were ungovernable in Varro’s presence.

  Five times Andada came north with further supplies. By their last meeting Varro was half again the size of an ox and walking on all fours. His neck had begun to fledge and his wings were almost full grown. For Andada’s benefit he managed a clumsy flutter of about forty paces. Andada laughed with streaming eyes, but wept very differently as they said good-bye, though Varro told him, speaking with a marked screech in his voice, that he was content with his fate.

  It must have been over a year later that Prince Fo, out hunting, was watching an austringer being flogged to death because a hawk had failed to return to the lure. Naturally his entourage were also intent on the spectacle, since it was unwise to be noticed inattentive to the Prince’s pleasures, so it was only when the austringer’s cries were drowned by a wilder scream that anyone looked overhead. By then the monster was plummeting down with a falcon’s stoop. Prince Fo was snatched from his saddle and carried skyward, screaming himself. The monster swung, poised as if having chosen its spot, and dropped him. By the time his company were running towards the outcrop onto which his body had splattered, the monster had swooped again and was carrying the austringer away.

  In that same year a strange little man arrived in Timbuktu, black and hideous, but leading two mules laden with expensive and exotic goods. He seemed to know which merchants were reputed to be honest and through an interpreter explained that he had discovered an ancient trade route across the desert and was anxious to reopen it. He didn’t want to travel it himself, because he was by nature a stay-at-home, but would like to act as an intermediary and facilitator in his home city for merchants from the north. He had brought samples to show what was available from there, and gold for anything extra that he might buy at the northern end. Because of the scantness of the watering places, his could never be a major route, but for small and costly items such as he had brought it was so much shorter than the long circuit round the desert that it was well worth while.

  All this seemed straightforward enough, and worth further investigation. Only two things he said raised eyebrows. When he was asked about the security of the route, and how many guards would be needed, he laughed and said it was unnecessary. That might have been foolhardiness, though the little man seemed sensible enough in other ways, but what were his hearers to make of his explanation that only one fee would be demanded for use of the route—a young and healthy slave, to be left for the demon that guarded the fourth and best watering place? Still, unless remarkably handsome, untrained slaves were two a penny in the market, and the little man was evidently serious for he went and bought three on the morning of his departure, explaining that one was his own fee and the other two were for the two men the merchants had hired to go with him and return with a report on the route.

  Word of the expedition must have reached ears other than those for which it was intended, for they were followed into the desert by a party of brigands, expecting to overtake and rob and possibly kill them once they were beyond help. The bodies of these men were found two days later piled against the south gate of the city, apparently dead from the mauling of some large beast. The scouts returned to report that on the little man’s instructions they had left the slaves tied to a rusty old ringbolt set into the masonry of a ruined temple beside the demon’s pool, but had found all three gone on their return; that the route was possible for small parties, well-guided; and the city at the further end was the same as that they already knew from the longer route, and well worth trading with.

  Travellers began to pass to and fro. They never saw the demon, though the slaves they left for it were invariably gone without trace by the time they returned. It was assumed that the demon had carried them elsewhere to consume. Other evidence of the demon’s existence accumulated. No brigand survived any attempt to rob the merchants. Moreover, occasional travellers who had missed the route in a sandstorm, and given themselves up to die in the desert, woke to find themselves back at the pool with a cache of sun-dried meat under a small cairn by their side. The demon clearly guarded his route well, so much so that in gratitude masons were eventually sent from Timbuktu to rebuild and renovate his temple.

  Andada flourished, becoming immensely wealthy and acquiring several more wives and children. He did not trade along the route himself, but once a year, despite his increasing girth, he would have himself carried up into the desert, left there overnight in his litter, and fetched back next day. In his old age, knowing
he would never make another such journey, he took his eldest grandson with him, having made the young man vow to repeat the trip each year but tell no one, ever, what he found there. The route remained active on these terms for several hundred years, until suppressed by a puritanical Sultan of Timbuktu who refused to countenance pacts with demons.

  Centuries later, the great Victorian explorer, Sir Pauncefoot Smethers, mapping the pitilessly barren ranges near the eastern edge of the desert, found an anomalous fertile valley, uninhabited now but apparently once intensively cultivated, with every slope neatly terraced to catch the seasonal rains, and great cisterns for water storage against drought years. But there was no sign of any city such as would have excited the interests of the archaeologists of those days, so it was another hundred years before any came to enquire further. They were baffled by what they found.

  Digging in middens they unearthed plenty of scraps and shards, mainly more or less crudely made from local materials but in a surprising number of styles, with parallels in the ware of places as far away as Armenia and Germany, but with a frequently recurring motif of a winged quadruped with the head of a bird. These could be dated on both stylistic and scientific grounds to any time from the start of the Christian era to around 1200 AD. In addition to these the trowels turned up a considerable number of small luxury items, all ultimately traceable as trade goods that might have passed through the ancient city of Dassun, long ago buried by the desert but even in its prime nine hundred untravellable miles away west.