Fish Tails (17 page)

Xulai went on: “Dogs and horses are now being adapted to underwater living as well. Sea dogs, sea horses.”

The tailor beamed. “Remarkable! Quite. However, my intention was to say that I understand the problem the horses are having with the wagon. Water is remarkably heavy, isn't it! Perhaps I can help by making the children some wet suits.”

Abasio and Xulai stared at each other. “Wet suits?” said Abasio. “I don't understand.”

“You were mentioning a tank? Wool holds water very well. If I make some trousers out of lambskin—­with the layer of soft wool on the inside and something to prevent evaporation on the outside—­they should be able to travel without a tank. And then, for nightwear, a similar garment closed at the bottom, like a sack? Fastened around the waist? It should take far less water than a tank. I should imagine a quart or so would keep them nicely damp all night while leaving their bed dry. Which, I presume, you prefer.”

Kim, who was nursing his bruised face at the side of the road, said, “Try it, 'Basio! We're not gonna find another team anywhere close, and Blue's right. They can't haul the wagon up the pass with all that water in it.”

While Xulai quieted the children, Kim and Abasio accompanied the tailor into his shop. “That's a good idea you had,” said Abasio to the tailor. “How did you come up with it?”

“A very old book. I was reading it just the other night. It spoke of wet suits. Something that divers wore. If I read it correctly, it was to prevent their being chilled in deep water. There were pictures of ­people wearing them. The outsides looked very much like the surface of your children's . . . tails, legs, they must serve both functions, no? There were no detailed illustrations showing the construction of such devices, so I don't know what they were made of.” He fetched the book from the back of the place and showed them the picture. The surface of the suits did look like the children's tails: shiny, slick, dark.

“Old book?” whispered Abasio.

Bertram looked about, as though afraid to be overheard, and whispered, “Can I trust your discretion, sir?”

Abasio smiled, feeling how wry the smile actually was. “A great many ­people seem to have done so, Bertram. If it's a secret . . .”

“The books are in a cave behind the shop. They've been there for more than a thousand years. Many volumes go back to the before time. You'll have to wait until tonight to take a look. I never go into the cave until all the Gravysuckers are asleep. The books have been preserved, but I wouldn't trust the towns­people to leave them alone. Many of them are like squirrels. What they can't eat, they chew holes in! Or in this case, they'd use them to start fires. Or as toilet paper, though the Suckians seem to have found a dried leaf that works better. Flexible, soft, absorptive. They're thinking of making it a market crop, sold in bundles of one hundred.”

Abasio whispered. “Tonight or a later night would be fine. I've committed us to staying here near you, Bertram! I've upset the ­people below by threatening them with the King of Ghastain. I hope you don't mind our camping here awhile and letting the horses rest while Gravysuck considers its position.

“The pond is just a few yards from the wagon. The children will likely spend hours playing there. About half of what they're eating is solid food, now, but Xulai really needs to wean them. Nursing them is wearying for her on top of everything else, and she needs some time to relax. We're all filthy; we need to clean up. When that's done, then you and I can spend some time in your cave.” He turned and raised his voice. “Kimbo-­niro can heal from his bruises a bit.”

“I'm all right!” blurted Kim. He had come all the way from Tingawa to serve Xulai and he was determined to do his job well. He did not want to be sidelined because of injuries.

Abasio shook his head. “I didn't say you weren't all right, Kim, but taking a little time off to heal is always sensible. It saves trouble later on. Go get some of Xulai's special heal-­all tea and take a nap.”

As Kim moved away, Bertram actually smiled. It was an exceedingly sweet smile, with some longing in it, and it came to Abasio suddenly that the tailor was probably an extremely lonely man. He asked, “About grazing for the horses?”

The tailor said, “The area just through the trees, beyond the pond, excellent grass. And I mentioned the boiler out back. The water is piped down from a stream uphill where it's perfectly clear. Tailors have to be clean, otherwise everything we stitch would be filthy by the time it is completed. There's a tub, and a kind of shower-­bath arrangement there. If you build the fire under the boiler—­it holds enough water for two tubsful—­and get it started now, it should be quite hot within the hour. Several families in Gravysuck have similar arrangements. Not all. Some prefer being filthy to chopping wood for the stove.”

Abasio thanked him, remarking, “You said you had to move up here onto the hill because customers had to fight their way to you down in the town. Was that the real reason?”

Bertram ducked his head in chagrin. “Partly. ­People would come looking for me, meet somebody in town who'd snarl at them, utter a few ‘cata-­pull-­its,' and direct the poor souls the wrong way—­”

“Cata-­pull-­it? A local swearword, right?”

“More or less. Definitely a localism. The way I understand it, they used to have a man in the town who was . . . well, not normal, shall I say, about women and little girls. He tried to make off with some female children, and another man in town, a visitor, told the inhabitants they should have a catapult. He built them one. They showed the rapist the catapult, put him in it, and catapulted him out into the middle of Gravysuck Pond. It does—­suck, I mean. Once in, you cannot get out.”

“Don't you get lonely up here?”

“I do. But the books are here, and I moved here mostly so they wouldn't find the collection up here in the cave. You see, for the last several centuries, it had been cared for by a local family of Volumetarians. Not tailors, needless to say! They had a farm a bit east of the village down there. All they had to do was keep an eye on the place, keep local ­people away from it. A few stories about ghosts and evil spirits, an occasional manifestation of weird lights and howling, that took care of keeping them away. Well, whenever the Volumetarian in charge died, the duty would be passed on to the next family member. Eventually the local family died out, word got passed to me, and in accordance with our usual vows, I came. I had a house built for me down in the village; one adequate also for the shop.”

He sighed. “However, I was a stranger to Gravysuck and did not resemble them in the way they all seem to resemble one another. You'll note the lean muscularity, the strong cheekbones, the almost uniform straw color of the hair and the pale eyes. Long breeding within a restricted population, I should think. Strangers are anathema in Gravysuck. After putting up with them for a time—­a time and a half, actually!—­I hired a ­couple of carpenters who were traveling through. Volumetarians who relocate are always supplied with adequate funds. While we dare not move the book repositories, each of us can certainly arrange to put ourselves in an appropriate relationship to the one we guard! Pursuant to that, the carpenters and I took my house down, board by board, and rebuilt it up here, backed right up against the mountain. My cellar door opens up into the cave, so I can go back and forth unobserved. If Gravysuck ever found the books, someone would very probably yell, ‘Monster books,' and they'd burn them all.”

“And yet you mentioned them immediately to us?”

Bertram's mouth dropped open. “I did. I really did. At the moment it seemed to be the right thing to do. I've never, never done that before. I haven't figured out why it happened this time!” He was quite pale, obviously upset over the lapse.

“In this case, it was the right thing to do, and something probably told you that. Are you here alone? You have no family?”

“I was only twenty-­four when I came. My brothers were both grown, off on their own, adventuring. Mother and my older sister, Linian, came here with me, but Liny first married a man in Flitterbean—­that's the family she and mother taught to make sugar after waiting two years for a supply of beet seed to reach them—­and some little time after her husband died, she married a man from Saltgosh, next town south, on the east fork up in the mountains. Mother stayed in Flitterbean with Liny's son—­they'd taken him into the sugar business—­but Mother passed on, five years now. I travel down south or up the hill—­isn't it interesting that ‘south' is
down
directionally but can be
up
altitudinally—­to see my nephew and his family or my sister Liny in Saltgosh when I get a chance. That's about it.”

“What did the villagers have against you?”

“I'm an outsider, I don't look like them, I'm not a farmer, and I'm a very good tailor who actually entices strangers to seek me out, isn't that terrible? Why, I had ­people from Saltgosh and Flitterbean and south beyond the turnoff to Saltgosh about twelve miles from the town of Asparagoose, and—­”

“Asparagoose?” said Abasio. “Asparagoose?”

“Have you never seen a goose with green, sort-­of-­ferny feathers? Well, they had one hatch, so they named the town after it.”

“Did
you
see it?”

“I did. Looked like an asparagoose to me. It grew up and laid twelve eggs, hatched six regular geese and six asparageese. There were ganders and geese both in the hatch, and they've had flocks of asparageese ever since. I say green, but the goose color is really more toward the celadon. It shouldn't be surprising—­the color, I mean. Many waterfowl are brightly colored. At any rate, at my suggestion, a few of the village women have taken to making couturier cloaks: asparagoose down on velvet! Special order only, and they're selling quite well.”

“Who in heaven's name around here would have the money to buy—­”

“Oh, not around here. No. To the traders that come through. We're on a main trade route for wagoners. Sugar, salt, wool, dried fruits, hand-­carved toys . . .”

“And did you say Flitterbean?”

“There was once an oddity called jumping beans. I found them mentioned in my books, back there.” He nodded furtively toward the back of the shop. “Actually, of course, it was the movement of newly hatched worms inside the shell of the bean that made them hop. It was very much the same kind of thing down in Flitterbean. They always raised crops of red beans—­with the usual green pods—­and apparently one year the pods grew wings and flew away, right off the vine. What actually happened was that a new kind of insect with a long green body and long green wings laid eggs inside the pods. The little ones matured and crawled out; the long green bodies looked like bean pods that took wings and flew away. The locals thought it was the beans that flew, so they named the town after the event. Prior to that time, the village was called Thwonkville after the Thwonk family there.”

“Didn't the Thwonk family object to the change?” asked Kim.

“As I understand it—­and of course the tale may have been embroidered—­by that time, there were none of the Thwonks left to object. The towns­people had been killing them off for about twenty years. Killing Thwonks was, as I understand it, a collaborative though covert project undertaken as a civic responsibility. It took a long time because there were a lot of Thwonks, and whenever one of them was disposed of, the event had to look accidental. As the family shrank, I understand that some of the Thwonks seemed to feel a certain disquiet and moved away. The last pair remaining, Urgle and Orgle Thwonk, twins, were caught in a propitious avalanche just a week before the beans flew off. Extremely unpleasant ­people, the Thwonks.”

Bertram was dead serious, but Abasio had to struggle with his face.

“What's all the business about monsters?” Kim asked. “They were bound and determined we were bringing in monsters.”

“Oh.” Bertram shook his head. “That dates back a ­couple of decades, at least. There was a woman named Villy who lived here in Gravysuck. She fell in love with a traveler—­a man who moved about peripatetically, rather as you seem to be doing, sir,” he said, giving Abasio a long, analytical look. “She married the man—­his name was, I believe, Gurge, or perhaps Garge—­and went off with him. She was gone for quite some time—­he was killed, she returned pregnant. She gave birth to something that didn't look human at all, and it died. Villy told ­people they'd been living in a place the locals called ‘the burn,' where the animals were all wrong. The town claimed she'd brought back something bad with her, which proved prophetic. She died of it, too, about a year later. Nobody else has ever suffered as a consequence, but that has been the town's excuse for screaming ‘monsters' ever since. That and the Lorpists. I'm sure you've been warned about Lorpists.”

“I think I've been near a place known as the burn,” said Abasio sadly. “Full of deadly radiation. If this all happened six or eight years ago, it's not there anymore. Someone . . . something cleaned it up.”

“Now, that sounds like a story.”

“No reason you shouldn't know, and I can make it a short story. North of Artemisia was the area called Manland, because there were still cities in it, including the one nearest my home: Fantis. It was a final survival, I guess, the only place where there were still . . .
are still
enclaves with a high level of technology, subterranean communities around the cities: the so-­called Edges. The city itself was divided into gang territories, even though the gangs were dwindling. The death rate was very high. The Edges remain, but the city is gone now.

“Some days' journey south of Fantis was the so-­called Place of Power. Some of the partly or mostly human creatures in the Place of Power were conspiring to start the Big Kill all over again. They were stopped by three very powerful beings who had been overseeing things there for several generations at least. In the end, they stopped the conspiracy from happening. There was a Kill, but it was mostly the killers who died.” He fell silent, musing.