The Care and Feeding of Griffins (9 page)

13.  Across the Plains

A
isling woke her in the morning, crying for lack of food.  He’d soiled his blanket, which had in turn soiled her sleeping bag.  Taryn fed him a few bites of her precious jerky and set him on a patch of grass so she could try and clean up.  A few handfuls of water from her canteen were all she dared to use.  Romany had told her there would be no stores nearby, but somehow Taryn hadn’t really been nervous until she realized that Washington wouldn’t be nearby either.  Water was her new major concern.

As she scrubbed at the damp patch on her sleeping bag, it occurred to her that she actually felt pretty good.  Having spent her first night sleeping without a mattress in several years, she
’d expected to be fairly stiff this morning, especially considering her hike and that cast iron cauldron full of potatoes.  She knew her arms had been killing her the night before, but she flexed them now and felt nothing but good.  Not stiff, not tired, not even hungry.  Just good.

Her gaze went by its own accord up to the capstone.  She eyed the spiral carving, thinking uneasily of her dream.  In the light of day, it seemed more obvious than ever that it had been a dream, of the
‘just-a’ variety, sub-class ‘wet’, but it had been awfully vivid.  And she saw now with no surprise whatsoever that there were carvings on the inner face of the Standing Stones as well, male and female figures etched out with exquisite detail in postures of sex.  Each stone suggested its own distinct method of coupling, from missionary all the way around to mutual masturbation (under which stone she had slept).

‘
Just a dream,’ she thought uneasily, but all the same, she decided it was time to go.  She pushed her gear and her cauldron out between the stones, picked up her griffin, and started to move between the dolheims and back out into the field.

But she really wasn
’t stiff at all, and her arm really did feel great.  Reluctantly, Taryn looked back over her shoulder at the inner ring, empty now and dimly-lit by early dawn.  She rubbed at Aisling’s feathers, feeling awkward, and said, “Thank you…I guess.”

Even before she
’d finished saying it, she felt like an idiot, but no sooner had the last word left her than she felt the brush of cold lips against hers.  Her heart leapt and she stumbled back and out into daylight, tripping over her backpack and landing with a jarring thump on her butt in the wet grass.  She stared wildly into the shadowed inner ring, clutching Aisling tightly enough to make him gasp, but of course, she saw nothing.

Oh yes, definitely time to go. 

Unfortunately, the gypsy’s directions had ended here.  Taryn moved her things a little further back from the Standing Stones and went to have a look around.

There were carvings
on the outer face of the stones too.  Not all of them.  Only four, in fact, the four oriented to the cardinal directions, and the markings were very different from those on the inside.  It was, she guessed, a kind of map.

On the
southern stone, facing the wooded hills she had come through to get here, were the most ominous markings:  four rough, deep lines, parallel to each other, like the gashes left by enormous claws.  Framing these provocative marks were jagged lines above and below.  Mountains, maybe.  Fangs, more likely.  She couldn’t look at them without remembering Romany’s admonition not to be in the woods after dark.  It was, she decided, a warning well worth heeding.

On the
west-facing stone was a round indentation which she thought might be the moon and which acted as the background for two carved wings.  One wing was leathery, bat-like, and the other was feathered.  Between them was carved a blunt, flat-topped object like a stump or an altar, further ornamented by a number of crudely-indicated skulls.  Yeah, she wouldn’t be going west.

On the eastward stone, the simplest and most unnerving carving stared back at her in the form of two staring eyes.  Whoever had carved them had been brutally adept.  Tiny chips of quartz had been set deep in the pupils and the rising sun threw out startlingly lifelike points of gleaming reflection.  There weren
’t any teeth or claws or skulls or anything, but those fierce, unblinking eyes didn’t need them.  They raised gooseflesh all on their own.

But on the last stone, half in shadows, Taryn found the first thing that truly lifted her spirits since she
’d followed Romany into the woods.  A carved hoofprint, and above it, horns like those of an ox or a bull.  Cattle.  Or game of some sort, anyway.

She raised her hand against the sun and looked away north, scanning a seemingly endless plain spotted with copses of trees here and there.  In the far distance were the mountains she had noticed the night before (and they still weren
’t the Cascades, her brain observed), and below them, just a dark smudge, was something that might be a greenbelt, and a greenbelt usually meant a river.

It looked awfully good to her.  A far walk, but still pretty good.  And if her choice was between a couple of cows and some fangs, altars and eyes, well, she was going with the cows.

Taryn gathered up her gear and got ready for a long day of hiking, and although she heard trackless little breezes whispering through the dolheims behind her, well, she ignored them.  They could be anything.  She had other things to think about now.  And it was just a dream.  Taryn put her back to the stone marked with the hoof and horns and started marching.  And if she said goodbye before she left, so what?  It was still just a dream.

Taryn started walking.

Her enthusiasm waned as the day lengthened, but not her determination.  There was game in the plains—she stirred up a number of pheasant-looking birds with brilliant yellow breasts, heard more of that grumbling bovine lowing, and saw dozens upon dozens of springy-legged little animals that looked like a cross between antelope and tiny horses—but although that was on some level very comforting to her, on a deeper level, it was concerning.  Logic told her that wherever there was this much game, there had to be something eating it.  The longer she walked, the more the fact that she hadn’t seen anything that looked like a predator made her nervous.  She needed to get camped.  Not that her tent was going to be any great shield against a lion or whatever it was they had here, but it would be psychologically soothing and that had to count for something.

She kept thinking that when her arm got tired or she started losing her breath, she
’d take a break, but that never happened.  The pervasive sense of feel-good with which she had awakened stayed with her in spite of the heaviness of the cauldron and the long walk through wet grass.  She didn’t think about that too closely, she just made the best use of her unexpected strength and made as much distance as she could.  When Aisling fussed, she brought out little strips of jerky and chewed them until they were soft enough for him to manage.  And when even that failed to calm him, she tucked him up under her jacket and too-ra looed him until he went to sleep.

She wasn
’t sure how far a person could walk in a single day, but there came a point when she looked back and saw the wooded hills behind her were as faded and far as the greenbelt at the foot of the mountains ahead of her.  And when the sun eventually began to fall orange in the west, she thought she could make out some hazy stripes on the distant mountains that might be waterfalls.  She reasoned that if she were close enough to see that, she maybe only had one more day’s hike ahead of her before she reached the greenbelt.

But it was time to stop for tonight while she still had some light.  Taryn set up her tent beside a standing thick
et of perhaps a dozen trees.  She gathered grass and deadfall for a fire, brought out her Boy Scout striker and a pinch of steel wool, and soon had a comfortable little blaze to dry out her jeans and a nice plume of smoke to scare the critters away.  Taryn settled down with Aisling in her lap to watch the coals form.  She was aware of a weariness sinking into her joints, not pain exactly, but something more, something raw and unformed-feeling.  Something, she thought mildly, that was probably going to hurt like a mother tomorrow morning.

But for tonight, Aisling was warm and soft and peeping contentedly against her heart after he
’d had two slices of jerky.  And he was still a griffin, a baby lost outside of myths and time, and still the most amazing thing she had ever seen.  He was still worth it.  Even looking up at a cloud-patched sky and watching stars she did not recognize emerge into night, he was worth it.  She was alone and she was afraid, but she wasn’t sorry.

She put out her fire once her clothes were dry and crawled into her tent with them, tucking herself into a sleeping bag she was resigned to finding soiled in the morning.  Aisling snuggled up beside her and she sang him the same Irish lullaby her own mother had sung to her once upon a time.  She fell asleep smiling.

She did not hear the grass-muffled hoofbeats approach her camp.  She did not stir as someone knelt to nudge at the coals of her fire.  She didn’t even rouse when the intruder quietly worked the flaps of her tent open and stared in at her.

She did wake up a little as the hoofbeats moved away, but only to think,
‘Game,’ and fall comfortably asleep again.

14.  Camp Sweet Camp

D
ear Mom and Dad and Rhiannon,

Well, I
’m here, and wow!  You should see the view from my backyard!

How do you like that? 
“My” backyard.  How it works around here is this:  I walked until I liked what I saw and then I set my tent up.  I hardly slept at all that first night, just waiting for someone to come around and tell me I was trespassing, but no one came.  Which is not to say I don’t have neighbors.  I do.  I just can’t get out of the tent fast enough to get a good look at them.  It’s so strange to think that little old me could make other people that nervous.

I
’m not a very good letter-writer, am I?  I’ve got a feeling I’ll get better at it, though.  A lot better. 

Boredom doesn
’t even begin to cover how this feels.  I thought I’d be okay on that regard, just because I’m not a big TV watcher at home.  What I failed to take into consideration is that back home, I turn off the TV and read a book (no bookstores) or a newspaper (no newsstands) or go to a movie (no movie theaters) instead, and there’s a whole lot of none of that around here.  Just letter-writing.  Oh, and settling into camp, but that doesn’t count because it’s work
.

Taryn put her pen down and smiled around at the camp in question, deeply satisfied by everything she saw.  She had a nice little copse of trees maybe a mile across behind her tent to block the winds that combed constantly through the plains, and it was full of wonderful things like firewood, and even some late-season berries and wild grapes.  Two hundred paces before her (she’d counted them off assiduously because her
Wilderness Survival Handbook
had instructed her to do all her laundry and toiletries two hundred feet from her water source, and this book was rapidly becoming her Bible out here in this strange new world), was the river she had known she’d find.  The greenbelt that had led her to it was on the other side and the waters were wide and fast-flowing, but there were fish leaping all over down there and as soon as she figured out how to tickle them out onto the bank, she would be one happy and well-fed woman.  Not that she was starving now.  A few rocks gathered from the riverbank and her trusty slingshot had eventually brought down two of the pheasant-like, yellow-breasted birds and both she and Aisling were currently stuffed just as full as could be.  Beyond the river and the thick growth that grew on the far bank were the mountains, rising jaggedly into the low clouds and just as pretty as any postcard.  There were numerous little courses running off the rock and into the river, and not far to the east, the distant mutter of some truly magnificent falls kept her easy company.  It was a good spot.  It was the best spot.  She was going to be okay.

It is a little isolated
(she wrote)
by which I mean there is nothing around as far as the eye can see.  I have to haul water from the river for drinking and I have to kill my food before I eat it.  I’m not familiar with most of the plants I see, so foraging is pretty much out for now.  I’m a little worried about scurvy, but I suppose it’s early for concerns like that.  I’m sure I’ll find better things to worry about as time goes by
.

Right.  Beginning with where she was going to get new clothes and ending with what happened when she got Arcadia’s version of the flu.  Or, God help her, infected everything she touched with her version of the flu and wiped out all life on this world.  Oh yeah.  Scurvy was the very least of her concerns.

I haven’t seen my mail runner yet, so I’m writing this letter in good faith that she’ll find me and you’ll eventually receive it.  In all honesty, I haven’t seen anybody yet, except for Aisling, of course.  Aisling is an orphan they gave me to raise when I first got here.  He’s just a baby, really.  I’d send you pictures, but his people are one of those that think photographs steal your soul, and even though his family isn’t anywhere close by, I’m still trying extra hard not to offend anyone.  You’ll have to take my word for it that he’s just as cute as a button in a bug’s ear.  And if you’re wondering what a kid named Aisling is doing in Africa, it’s because I got to name him.

So Aisling and I are very happy here in my tent at the edge of nowhere, and hopefully, any other natives will warm up to me once they see how completely harmless I am.  And heck, even if they never come out to say howdy, I
’ve still got Aisling, and I’m happy.  Wish me luck
.

Taryn put her letter aside again and walked out a little ways to take a picture of the plains with the river and the falls in the distance, and another of her campsite, careful to keep the tawny lump that was her sleeping griffin out of the shot.  She tucked the developing photos into the folded page of her letter home and put that in the front pocket of her knapsack to wait for Romany.  That done, she settled down by the coals of her fire (burning comfortably away at the bones of their first meal) and pulled Aisling into her lap for a quick cuddle, a positional ritual he proved he knew by opening his beak to her blindly.  She had nothing to feed him and his tummy still bulged from his recent feeding, so Taryn simply tickled at his spiky feathers until his head drooped again. 

Taryn snuggled with him for a few precious minutes and he peeped sleepily in response to her sporadic mommy-talk conversation.  Was he a good boy?  Yes, he was.  How did she get so lucky to have met such a good boy?  He didn
’t know.  Was her good boy sleepy?  Yes, as any fool could plainly see.  And so forth.

She really didn
’t have the time to fritter away on snuggles, and she knew it.  There were things she had to do.  She needed to bring up more water and boil it for the next time she wanted a drink (the water had to boil for ten minutes, according to
The Wilderness Survival Handbook
, which meant that nearly half of what she hauled up from the river disappeared before she even got any of it), and she needed to gather in a good load of wood for the fire.  Come to that, she needed to let the existing fire die out so she could clear away the burnt circle she’d made and dig out a proper fire pit, and that meant gathering rocks.  But not river rocks, and she didn’t need her survival book to tell her that.  Water-logged rocks had a tendency to turn into shrapnel when they got heated up, and you only had to be sitting next to an exploding fire pit once before you committed that little fact to memory.  So the rocks from her fire pit would have to come from further up the bank, and she’d probably have to do some digging for them to get as many as she wanted for a good, deep, keyhole pit.  And while she was at it, she’d ought to get some good Y-shaped branches and so forth and smoke them to make a sturdy spit, since pheasant was definitely going to be on the menu for a while.  And if she had any time left in the day, she’d better get started on making her accessories.  There was a fallen tree in her miniature forest that, in addition to making great firewood (once she’d made an axe), had bark like that of a paper birch.  Leaves like an ash tree, but bark like a birch.  Go figure.  And her second Bible,
Primitive Technologies for a Modern World
, included several instructions on how to fold bark into baskets.  She was going to want several of those, and she’d need at least one watertight one as soon as possible for bathing Aisling, since he was soaking himself as part of his morning routine, and another one for water-hauling, because her cauldron was damned heavy even when it was empty.  And when she was done with that, she’d better start clearing out a place to have her garden.  Her seed potatoes were out of the cauldron and lined up in the sun to green up, but they’d need to go in the ground as soon as possible.  That meant pulling grass to clear a plot—by hand—and turning rows—again, by hand—so she could plant her potatoes.  Also, the grass itself looked excitingly like some kind of grain to Taryn’s uneducated eye, and she wanted to try hulling and cooking it.  Her survival book assured her that all grasses were edible, but if this grass was actually grain, it would be a lot more substantial than just grazing would be.  She could even make a bark basket to keep the harvested grain in.

Yeah, all of this, and here it was two in the afternoon already and she was snuggling her griffin just like she thought she had all the time in the world.  She had a lot to do.  She needed to get reading.

Heck, no point in blundering through stuff blind.  There was plenty of daylight left to gather firewood.

She read
Primitive Technologies for a Modern World
first.  There were several informative photos of knapped stone which she studied closely.  It didn’t look that hard.  Just whack some rocks together until they fall apart in the right shape and tie them into some split branches.  Easy-peasy.  She was certain she could have a stone axe and a tiller in just a few days.  That would make planting her garden relatively easy.  Relatively.

She skipped confidently ahead to the basket chapter, and there her self-assurance failed her.  Basket-weaving was going to be hard.  Oh, the folded-bark baskets were at least possible (although she
’d never been all that great at origami), but the woven ones were never going to happen in this lifetime.  Still, there were plenty of long, thick blades of grass around to practice on, so Taryn pulled a few dozen and gave it a go.

An hour later, on her third try, she managed to assemble a scrap of weaving that might hold a fish, provided it was already cooked, but it was never going to hold grain or even berries.  Also, she couldn
’t get the edges to fix without unraveling.

She had better luck braiding
grasses into cord, but what was she planning to do with the cord?  It wasn’t as though she had anything that needed tying up.  Oh well, maybe she’d bust a shoelace someday.

Taryn picked up her book again and flipped to the next chapter.  Wilderness hygiene.  Instantly, her open hand slapped into her forehead, bringing Aisling squawking up out of sleep.  She
’d brought soap.  She’d brought a hairbrush.  She’d even brought her toothbrush, even though she hadn’t remembered to use it yet.  She’d forgotten her monthlies supplies, however.  Good grief, and she’d only been having periods since she was ten.  Oh well, she’d known she was going to forget something.  At least it was this and not Aisling.

Never mind, next chapter.  Leather working and brain tanning.  Yummy.  Well, that was going to have to wait until she
’d killed something with a hide on it.  So far, it had just been pheasants.  The grass ponies were just too cute to eat, and she was going to need something a lot bigger than her slingshot to take down one of the big yak-like monsters that grazed on the plains.

An idle thought:  Could she learn to hunt faster than she could starve to death?  No, God no, she would not think like that.  She
’d brought potatoes.  Good, hardy, Irish potatoes.  And the sooner they were in the ground, the sooner she’d put the beast of Starvation to rest.

Taryn lifted Aisling out of her lap and set him on his blanket inside the tent.  He shifted, peeped, but settled when she stroked his feathers and sang to him.  She left him zipped securely inside and walked out to the south side of her camp.  The full sun side.  She started pulling grass.

She brought the grass by the armload around to the front of her camp.  She could take the grains off the tips and practice her weaving with the rest, and when all else was said and done, it would always make nice fire-starter. 

Taryn
’s hands were bleeding after the first few pulls and her back was screaming before she’d cleared a patch more than three feet across.  She let that stop her.  Infections were nothing to sneeze at.  She bandaged her hands with some of her meager first aid supplies and returned, hobbling to her tent to rest.  She curled up next to Aisling, her body throbbing, but a glow of accomplishment in her heart, and opened up her copy of
Care and Feeding
.

She hadn
’t cracked these covers since before leaving home, and that only to double-check what she was supposed to be feeding her little prince.  It felt wonderfully decadent to be able to lie down and start at the very first page, taking the time even to read the title and the author’s name in that carefully-inked and obviously-exhausted hand.  To read from the very beginning seemed, in this company and on this world, a necessary and vaguely ominous thing, like taking that first step of an epic quest.  She turned the page.

Many books have been written about the so-called
“magical” beasts of our lands, and this is one of them.  To my knowledge, no other writer of books has ever attempted to examine or document the youngest years of a griffin’s life, and since I happen to be stuck here in the Mountain of the Werewinds with two broken legs and one eye out—again—just as the latest generation of griffin hatches, I figured, what the hell.  By the time I can walk out of here on my own and find my crew so I can beat them up and fire them, I might as well also have something I can sell for enough coin to buy another damn eye. 

Oh, and all hail the Emperor
, of course.