The Care and Feeding of Griffins (17 page)

And she believed she was dreaming, and so simply stood and let it happen, still with that uncertain little smile.  He wondered just how amenable she would be, with a little encouragement.

“
I’m half-fairy,” he said, and leaned over to press his lips to her cheek.

She didn
’t pull away.  He could sense, distantly, her bewildered thoughts trying to determine where this dream of him had come from.  The name John kept sounding.  He explored that, tickling out impressions of place and person, then slipped his hand down to take hers.  “Let’s go,” he said, falling easily into the off-hand patois of American-English.

She came with him, and as they walked, he gently folded the dream around them so they could appear painlessly in a room he pulled from her memories of John.  He thought it was a squalid place really, filled with the technologies of Earth that had replaced magic and learning in this world.  But she was at ease here, serene even when he drew her into his embrace.

Would she be as fine a thing to hold when he had her in the flesh?  Would she be this warm, this soft and rounded?  So often it was that people dreamed a better self than they were in fact.  He kissed her again, and she was no stranger to it.  Her arms twined around his neck, holding him firmly to her as their lips tasted at one another.  It had been a long time since his last kiss; to come home to one so well-executed was a soothing thing.

But when he ventured a hand beneath her clothes to brush at her full, firm breast, he met with surprising hesitance.  She stepped away, her eyes dancing but unsure, and said,
“We shouldn’t.”

“
Should we not?” the wizard asked, so astounded that he forgot the way of her speech. 

“
I…It isn’t you.”  She unlocked her arms from him.

“
Yes,” he said, pursuing her.  “I am John.”

She was shaking her head, but the annoyance that swelled up in him evaporated entirely when she said,
“John, it isn’t you I’m waiting for.”

Waiting?  No.  No, there was not even a chance.  He would not torture himself with the thought.  This was a dream and dreamselves were often different from the flesh.  No fruit this ripe could possibly age so far untasted.

“I’m not waiting for you,” she said again, trying to back still further away.

“
And I’m not waiting at all,” the wizard said, pulling her back into his arms.  “I am well done with waiting.”  He kissed her and she resisted this time, but only with her hands, not with her mind.  She did not try to waken.  Which meant a part of her was not surprised by this reaction out of ‘John’.  And that was liberating.

The wizard moved beneath her shirt again.  She fought him, crying words to stop him with exciting sincerity.  The wizard pushed her to a wall and held her pinned so that he could see her face as he pinched at her delicate flesh.  There was fear in her eyes.  More than that, there was heartbreak.

When the wizard tried to reach down between her legs, she came alive again, begging this John to stop.  He did, but only because her clothes so confounded him.  He had to pull away, (one arm pressed over her throat to hold her in place) so that he could see how to get them off her.  He found the metal tab that opened her breeches, and once opened, they pushed easily down.  Still more clothes!  He tore the thin covering away to bare her woman’s sex.

She screamed as he stabbed a finger inside her, but it held a plaintive note.  It was misery, yes, but confusion as well.  Wonderingly, the wizard used his free hand to stroke her hair back from the contorting face and then he kissed her deeply, pulling her breath inside him to taste her experience.

Her despair burst through him.  He pushed it back and focused instead on what she felt with this dream flesh.  He thrust his finger at her, forcing reaction, and to his astonishment, gleaned only the palest awareness from her own mind.

No.  No, it couldn
’t be.

The wizard hurriedly dissolved himself of his own clothing.  He was already erect, sickly throbbing with expectation.  He let her see his member standing eagerly before him and he laughed as he heard her woeful scream.  Now she kicked at him, but he turned the act against her, catching her flailing leg and wrapping it around his hip.  Her voice shattered on the air as he pushed inside her.

His mouth crushed down on hers, stripping breath from her and shredding it as he felt for her impressions.  Her body, so tight as it gripped his shaft, was distracting even though he did not move.  It was an effort to maintain the necessary calm to harvest her perceptions, but once he had—

By hell, she could scarcely sense him at all.

She couldn’t feel him in her because she didn’t know what it felt like to hold a man in her vessel.  She didn’t know because she was virgin.

The wizard held his kiss, suckling at this astounding turn of events, as he began to thrust at her.  He drove her hard, hard enough to bruise if this were her true flesh, but she continued to be aware of only the faintest sensation.  She was aware of the force, of invasion.  She was aware, in short, of the concept of rape, but not of the act of sex.

This girl, this girl alone in her tent with the stink of Earth still on her, this girl was a virgin.  Impossibly, miraculously, blessedly virgin.

The wizard
’s amazement burst out of him as triumphant delight, and he spent his dreaming seed inside her.  He stepped away, laughing, and she slid down the wall to huddle sobbing on the floor.

Now she was waking, the nightmare done for her, and the wizard left her, soaring rapidly back and away as she tossed in her rough bed.  He had much to do.  So much to do.

The tether of his body came to him as he flew across the Valley and he let it pull him faster.  He shot past his startled cat and struck into his flesh with a jolt.  His first suck of air came raggedly back as laughter. He looked down at the gleam of semen over his loins, imagining the smear of blood that would shine there soon enough.

A virgin.

The wizard sprang to his feet, making his way hurriedly out of his circle, already bellowing for his cat.  He wanted his sigils set.  Now.  Without delay. 

A
virgin
!

27.  Good Irish Potatoes

T
aryn knapped what she considered a prize-winning hoe and tied it onto a mostly-straight branch as she finished feeding Aisling his breakfast.  She put him down where she could keep an eye on him, gave him her backpack to pounce on, and went to work in her garden.  Today was the day.  It had to be the day.  She’d finally gotten enough grass pulled to open up a pretty good square of earth, even if it was still choked in by roots, and her hands had finally healed up enough that she could stand to hold something in them for any length of time.  They ached, though.  Even clenching an empty fist made her palms throb sickly.  Hopefully, now that the skin had healed over, she’d finally build up those calluses she’d heard so much about.

The woven cord she
’d been so pleased about making snapped on the first blow of her hoe to the grass-root infested soil.  Grumbling, Taryn tied it up again with new cord and tried again.  It broke again.  She double-tied it.  It broke on the second blow.  She threw her cordage, all of it, into the tall grass with a particularly blue streak of constructive criticism (not entirely immune to the way Aisling sat up and gaped at her), and then pulled out her shoelace and used that to tie her stupid rock to her stupid stick.  That worked for five whacks and then the stick broke.

Taryn had a choice.  She could swear a lot and throw things, or she could think Buddha-thoughts, let it go, and get back to work.  Potatoes.  That was the thing to think about.  Potatoes in the ground before the frost.  Potatoes to keep the bony bird of starvation from pecking out her liver in the coming year.  Good Irish potatoes.

She got down on her knees with the knapped rock in her fist and started whaling away.  She hacked at the ground with her crude tool, her hand a black blister of pain where it had to clench on the solid stone, and tugged clots of roots up with the other, bashing them against the earth to knock as much good soil free as possible.  It was painfully slow going.  God, she wasn’t going to get anything else done today at all.  No water boiled.  No wood gathered.

She couldn
’t let herself be swayed by that.  She could go a whole day without water.  She’d done it all the time back at home.  It wasn’t good for her, but she could do it.  And she had a little firewood still.  Not enough to get her through the night in comfort, but heck, she didn’t have anything to cook on it anyway.  She had two pieces of jerky left in her backpack.  That would satisfy Aisling (maybe), and as for her…well, she could chew on some raw grain if she wanted to, but it wouldn’t kill her to skip lunch and dinner.  The potatoes were the important thing.  Time was running out.  She could smell winter in the air.

It wasn
’t long before Aisling got bored stalking her backpack straps.  He tried to entice her into playing, but after being pushed gently away fifty or sixty times, he finally seemed to get the message that mommy was working.  He grumped over to the side of the tent and lay down between it and her pack, his tail lashing at first, then twitching, and finally drooping.  He slept, stretched out golden in the sunlight.

Taryn hit her own personal wall with only half the garden de-rooted.  She leaned back on her knees, gasping air like hot rocks and holding her sides.  No wonder Paleolithic Man ate so many mammoths.  Agriculture was hard work.

She couldn’t stop or she’d never start again.  This was just what she got for frittering away so much time making baskets.

She made herself carry armloads of roots over to the compost heap and then bring chopped and mulched fish-heads back.  She dropped to her knees again, dumping her smelly fertilizer unceremoniously into the middle of her meager scratch of land, and then picked up her rock again.  Her hand flared alarmingly.  She paused and looked at it, but no, it hadn
’t broken open again.  It was just bruised or something.  She’d live.  She got a grip on it, braced herself and her already-aching shoulders, and attacked the ground, mixing in fish-heads and ashes with arms that shrieked and a back that felt like a busted spring.

‘
Look on the bright side,’ she told herself.  ‘You’re keeping warm.’

That wasn
’t wholly true, however.  Sweat poured down her face, plastering her hair and making her clothes clammy, but exertion could only heat so much.  Her legs on the autumn ground were still numb with cold and damp with morning’s dew.  Her feet were blocks of ice.

‘
It’ll be worth it when you grow all those yummy potatoes next year.’

“
You know what, brain?” she panted crossly.  “Shut up.  I don’t really like potatoes.”

Aisling chirped sleepily and tucked his head under a wing that still had no real feathers.  Taryn looked at him, her body bobbing madly as she hacked at the soil, and made herself keep going.  No one liked potatoes, but they
’d by-God keep the life in her body next year.  She couldn’t keep living day to day like this.  She had to start thinking about the future.

‘
Speaking about the future, what are you going to do about this impending winter?’

“
Shut up, brain, seriously.  I’m not telling you again.”

But the seed of fear was good and planted.  What was she going to do about winter?  She could fill up every bark basket she
’d made with grain.  Heck, she could make a dozen others and fill them up too, and that would last maybe a month if she wasn’t greedy, and it still would end with her horribly malnourished.  The fish would be gone by then, she was pretty sure, and maybe the pheasants.  She hadn’t seen any migrate yet, but she couldn’t count on them.  Those little rodent things would almost certainly hibernate.  What did that leave?  Grass ponies?  The plains cattle?  She could almost imagine taking out one of the cute little carnivorous horses with her slingshot, but one of the big bulls?  Not a chance.  They traveled the plains in herds that stretched, literally, as far as the eye could see, and they were each one of them bigger than a buffalo.  What’s more, what would she do with the extra meat a bull brought her?  Besides draw predators, that is.  Her survival handbook sternly informed her that snow could only be counted on to keep meat at thirty degrees, which meant it could and would spoil if she just let it lie outside.  She couldn’t salt it.  She could try smoking it, but if she screwed up (as was damned likely), she wouldn’t know it until after she’d given herself food poisoning and then died of diarrhea.  Sweet God and all the pretty fishes, she could actually
die
on this horrible planet of diarrhea.  How was she going to live through the winter?

Never mind.  Work.  Plant the potatoes.  That was the first step.  She
’d figure out where to go from there after it got done.

At last, the soil was clear and malleable, black as tar and crumbling in her hands.  She couldn
’t even smell the fish when she brought some to her nose.  Time to make her rows.  She wanted badly to stop, if only for an hour or two, but there was a deep ache in her body that warned her if she stopped, she’d never start again.  She had no idea how much she was going to hurt tomorrow, but she knew it was going to be enough to prevent her from gardening again in the near future.  This had to be the day, all right.  The point of no return was already behind her.

Taryn crawled, inch by inch on her hands and knees, patting the soil into raised humps just like the ones she remembered in her grandmother
’s garden, back before she’d gone to live at the Home.  She made hollows to nestle her seed potatoes, and then rose, stooped almost double, and hobbled over to get them.

Aisling opened an eye as she went by, but didn
’t follow.  When she came back with a shirt-front full of green spuds, he didn’t stir at all.

Getting back on the ground and bending over to plant made her feel like her spine was melting.  It wasn
’t even necessarily an all-bad feeling, which she instinctively knew was seriously bad news.  She crawled through the garden, arms shaking when she had to brace her weight, and got her damned potatoes in the ground.

‘
There,’ she thought, panting with choking force as she collapsed on her side next to Aisling.  ‘All done.’

‘
Now water,’ her brain piped up.

“
Oh, the
hell
you say!” she cried shrilly, tears sparking.  She couldn’t make even one trip to and from the river with a feather in her hands, much less her cast-iron cauldron full of water.

Her brain was implacable.  Potatoes didn
’t need much water, but they had to have some to get started on.  She knew she’d never be able to do it tomorrow, maybe not even the day after.  It was today or nothing, and if it was going to be nothing, then she might as well have thrown her potatoes out into the tall grass along with her worthless grass cord.

Taryn got up with a sob of effort, physically unable to stand up straight.  She collected the heavy pot from the fire pit (holding its handles in the creases of her knuckles, and even that sent a bruisy pang through her hands that had her wincing) and shuffled down to the river.

Coming back was hell.  She had to stop and rest every few paces to put her load down and try to stretch out her back.  Her sweat had turned to mud somewhere along the way; now it felt frozen and gritty.  She’d have to take a bath when this was done.  That meant another trip to the river and back, a fire (which might mean firewood), the cleaning itself, the cleaning of her filthy clothes, and still no dinner to help her sleep through the cold night.  She didn’t dare consider bathing in the river itself.  She was exhausted right to the edge of a good, old-fashioned stupor, but she was still lucid enough to know a dip in those waters was risking hypothermia and the current was easily strong enough to pull her under if she were even a few steps out from the bank.

But making herself portion out the water
, as opposed to just dumping it, took the last of her reserves.  She upturned the cauldron and sat on it, every bone turned to Jello.  The first time she tried to stand up again, her stomach turned over and she leaned blindly over and retched dryly, her vision unfurling white for several seconds.

‘
Okay,’ she thought dizzily.  ‘Okay, I’m done.’

Except she wasn
’t.  She needed one more pot-full of water for the rest of the potatoes, and she needed to clean up afterwards.  She could not lie down like this.

‘
I’m going to die.’

The thought held no emotion whatsoever.  It was a remote and analytical statement of fact.

She looked at Aisling, sleeping soundly beside her backpack.  She got up.

“
You’re almost done,” she told herself, laboring to lift the cauldron.  “Just take it slow.  You can do this.  Almost done.”

Her baskets were empty, but a fish
swam into her cauldron as she pulled water.  She caught it and threw it out without even thinking and then stood and wailed with stupid dismay as she realized she’d just tossed out a perfectly good dinner, the only one she was going to have the time or energy to get for herself. 

No use crying over thrown-out fish, but she did anyway.  Three or four fat tears at least, squeezing their way out of her eyes as she tried to blink them back, hating herself for the uselessness of crying at all.  And once she
’d knuckled her emotions under control and turned around, the sight of all that distance between here and her damned potatoes made her feel like crying all over again.

This time, she had to stop after every single step to rest.  She
’d measured two hundred paces out from the river to her campsite when she’d set up.  She counted two hundred and fifty-eight getting back.  She got the dry heaves twice, but somehow she made it back to the garden without falling down.  She scooped out handfuls of water because she couldn’t trust herself to pour, and finally, finally, she was done.

‘
Get cleaned up.’

“
Get bent.”  She fell down in the grass, her hands, knees, and throat caked with earth.  Everything hurt.  Her hair hurt.  Aisling came over and crawled onto her chest and his little weight was like lead on her aching lungs.  She managed to pet him anyway.  At least a little.  She could probably work herself up to the necessary task of washing herself up, but she couldn’t even imagine having to bathe him today.  Still, for the moment, she could rest.

For a while, she thought the approaching footsteps was her heart pounding stuffily in her head.  But the footsteps got louder and her heart began to slow and even out as she relaxed.  Her guard coming back, she guessed.  She
’d known it was too good to last.  But although it did sound like hooves coming…it didn’t really sound like the right hooves.

Taryn forced her eyes open.  At first, she saw only a black blur with the sun behind it.  Then she sat up, struggling onto her elbows, and the intruder took shape.

It was a shape she knew at once, even though she’d never seen it except in bad illustrations.  His chest was broad and powerful, with a thin coat of cocoa-brown fur smoothing the outline of his muscles into slabs of raw strength.  His arms bulged comic-book style, his forearms rippling as he clenched and unclenched his massive hands on the haft of an equally-massive axe.  His torso narrowed into naked loins; the brazen fact of his maleness was stamped from a human mold rather than beast, the only part of him below the waist that was.  His legs were beast’s legs that led down to great, spreading, split hooves that were capped with sharpened, brass crescents.  His neck was thick.  It had to be, to support the bull’s head that grew there.  His horns curved impressively wide and forward, made into lethal daggers with brass points.