Fossil Hunter (4 page)

Toroca wondered what would cause a growth such as this horn. He’d heard of birth defects, but rarely saw them. The culling by the bloodpriest tended to eliminate those, but Babnol’s affliction was one that wouldn’t have been apparent at that time, since all egglings have a birthing horn.

A birthing horn on an adult. How bizarre! Toroca’s mother, to, had told him that when she had lived with Pack Gelbo, she had worked in the same abandoned temple building that housed two young savants who had bred thousands upon thousands of little lizards, studying the inheritance of traits. They’d proven that offspring often have essentially the same characteristics as their parents. Although there was no way to determine who Babnol’s parents actually were, Toroca probably would have heard stories or gossip about other adults who had such a horn.

But that meant…

No, ridiculous.

And yet…

Could Babnol have a characteristic that wasn’t present in her parents? How could that be? A spontaneous appearance of some new quality, some novelty? What would give rise to such novelties?

The hike was long, the terrain rocky. Babnol would come close to Toroca for a while, they’d talk a bit, then territoriality would get the better of her, and she’d fall off to the rear or speed up to put some distance between her and him. Toroca usually looked forward to the times when she was willing to talk: it made the trip go more quickly. On one such occasion, though, she startled him with her boldness. “Forgive my impertinence for asking,” she said, “but it’s well-known that you are Afsan’s…”

“Son,” said Toroca. “The word is ’son.’ “

“Afsan’s son, yes. And Novato’s, too.”

“That’s right.”

Babnol looked fascinated. “I don’t mean to pry, but what’s it like, knowing your parents?”

Toroca was a bit taken aback at this, but he was going to spend much time with Babnol, so he decided to answer her question. “It’s interesting. Strange. All things being equal, I think I’d prefer not to know who they are.”

“Oh?” She seemed surprised. “I’ve spent some time idly wondering who my parents might have been. I’ve got the father narrowed down to three possibilities, I think, back in Pack Vando. The mother’s more elusive. I’m not obsessed with knowing, you understand. But I’d think it would be satisfying to know.”

“It’s … it’s not. Not really.”

She turned her muzzle to face him. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, perhaps it would be different for you,” said Toroca. “Forgive me; this is going to sound callous. You see, my parents aren’t just any two people. They are Sal-Afsan and Wab-Novato, the one who discovered the nature of the world and the one who invented the far-seer and now leads the exodus. Great people, famous throughout Land.”

“They are indeed.”

“You know the old greeting, ’I cast a shadow in your presence’?”

“Sure.”

“Afsan is blind; I doubt he’s aware of how luminous he is. I’m — I’m washed out, lost in his glare. And in my mother’s. People judge me differently. They know where I came from, and they expect great things from me. It’s … it’s a burden.”

“Oh, I’m sure no one gives it any thought.”

“You do, Babnol. You asked me what it was like knowing my parents. In fact, one could take that question two ways: what’s it like knowing who your parents are? Or what’s it like knowing Afsan and Novato? I do know them both, you know. Indeed, Novato is my overseer on this survey project. It’s not just in the eyes of strangers that I see the implied message that, oh, he’s Afsan and Novato’s child; he must do great things. I see it from them — from my mother and father. They expect much of me. It’s not like I have just duty to the Emperor and duty to my Pack and duty to my profession. It’s as though I have an additional duty to them, to live up to their expectations.”

Babnol scratched the side of her neck. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“So you can see that it is a burden, this knowledge of one’s personal ancestors.”

“But you will do great things…” began Babnol.

Toroca grunted. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

Talking with Babnol about his parents had gotten Toroca thinking about the bloodpriests, and that brought back fears that he’d thought were long buried. Babnol and he still had two more days of hiking until they would join up with the survey team. They slept on high ground, under the dancing moons, the great sky river shimmering overhead. Babnol, a dozen paces away, was fast asleep; Toroca could hear the gentle hissing of her breathing. But Toroca himself could not sleep. He lay awake beneath the stars, thinking about the disciples of Mekt, the bloodpriest who swallowed hatchlings whole.

Most Quintaglios gave the bloodpriests little thought, and their exact role in society was rarely spoken of out loud. But Toroca had become fascinated with them, had been driven to learn all he could about them, precisely because he and his brothers and sisters had not had to face them.

Eight eggs to a clutch.

Seven of every eight children devoured within a day or two of hatching, tiny bodies, still brilliant green or yellow, eyes barely opened, sliding down the gullet of a male priest, a comparative giant, clad in purple robes.

The egglings were doubtless horrified, their brief tenures in this life ending in screams of terror.

Except it wouldn’t have gone that way for him. He was Toroca. Toroca who didn’t fear other people. Toroca who seemed to have no territorial instinct. Toroca who would have sat there, staring in awe, at the apparition of the priest, but who would not have run away.

He would have been the first to have been devoured.

During the long hike back to join his survey team, Toroca and Babnol stopped several times to rest. Babnol had few belongings with her, but one she did have was a sketchbook, containing studies in charcoal and graphite of many of the fossils she’d collected over the kilodays.

“I’m always tempted to keep intriguing pieces for myself,” she said, “but my Pack needed many things, and the fossils were always popular in trading. Our sandstones are very, very fine: we get fossils showing all sorts of detail normally not visible.” She opened up the little book, its soft leather cover flopping over. “Anyway, I make sketches of the nicest ones before I put them out on the trading tables.” She thumbed the pages. “Here,” she said, passing the book across to him. “This is the nicest bird I ever found.”

Birds.
No one knew exactly what they were, since all that remained of them were their tiny, hollow bones preserved in rock. To the untrained eye, they seemed at first glance to be small carnivorous reptiles. But they had beaks and breastbone keels, characteristics associated with wingfingers — although wingfingers had no tails, and bird fossils usually did.

But they couldn’t be wingfingers, these birds. A wingfinger’s wing was a membrane, supported along its leading edge by the vastly elongated fourth finger. Bird wings, however, were supported by a variety of bones, including the lower arm and the bones that would have comprised the second finger — none of a bird’s digits had claws, so it was thought that none of them actually emerged from the wing structure to be true fingers. Birds also lacked the wingfinger’s little backward-pointing lifter bone on the wrist, which supported a small leading membrane flap that connected to the torso at the base of the neck.

And occasionally bird fossils, such as the one in this sketch of Babnol’s, showed some kind of bizarre frayed body covering, like stiff fern leaves with inflexible spines. This was completely unlike the simple leathery hide or scales or plates of reptiles, and completely unlike the filaments of hair that insulated wingfingers.

Toroca and others guessed that birds might have flown, but no one knew for sure, for no living bird had ever been seen. They were known only from the fossil record.

Toroca studied the sketch minutely. Babnol was talented indeed.

The cliffs along the eastern shore of Fra’toolar were the tallest in all of Land. They rose up out of the great world-spanning body of water like giant brown walls, towering toward the purple sky. A thin beach ran between them and the churning waves. Scattered along the beach were ragged chucks of rock, pebbles, and fine sands.

The entire height of the cliff face was made of thin horizontal bands, almost as if the whole thing were some impossibly thick book, and each band represented a separate page seen edge on.

The bands were all brown or brownish-gray until near the top, where some white layers appeared. Wingfingers nested in crooks in the rocks, their reptilian heads poking out, their membranous wings covered with silky fur wrapped tightly against their bodies to protect against the chill wind. The only thing marring the neat horizontal banding of the rocks was the countless white streaks caused by their droppings. But these were washed away by the frequent storms, leaving the book of stone layers scrubbed clean for a short time.

Toroca and Babnol arrived on the beach shortly after noon. Overhead, the sun, tiny and white, was visible through the silvery clouds, but none of the thirteen moons was bright enough in the daytime to be visible through the haze.

Far up ahead, they could see two other Quintaglios, barely more than green knots against the long expanse of beach, the vast cliffs, and the churning gray waters.

Toroca cupped his hands to his muzzle and called out, “Ho!” There was no response, the wind whisking the word out over the waters. He shrugged, and they trudged on farther. Eventually, Toroca sang out again, and this time the distant figures did hear him. They turned around and waved. Toroca waved back and, although exhausted from five days of hiking, picked up his pace, trotting along to join his friends. Babnol followed alongside. She stopped about fifteen paces away from the others, an appropriate distance when approaching individuals one has not met before. Toroca, though, surged in as close as six paces from the nearest of them, a distance too close by anyone’s standards. Reflexively, the other Quintaglios backed up a couple of steps.