Dragon's Teeth (53 page)

Sometimes we write for odd markets; I wrote this piece for a magazine called
Pet Bird Report
, which is bird behaviorist Sally Blanchard’s outlet for continuing information on parrot behavior and psychology. It’s a terrific magazine, and if you have a bird but haven’t subscribed, I suggest you would find it worth your while. With twelve birds, I need all the help I can get! At any rate, Sally asked me for some fiction, and I came up with this.

Gray

Mercedes Lackey

For nine years, Sarah Jane Lyon-White lived happily with her parents in the heart of Africa. Her father was a physician, her mother, a nurse, and they worked at a Protestant mission in the Congo. She was happy there, not the least because her mother and father were far more enlightened than many another mission worker in the days when Victoria was Queen; taking the cause of healing as more sacred than that of conversion, they undertook to work
with
the natives, and made friends instead of enemies among the shamans and medicine-people. Because of this, Sarah was a cherished and protected child, although she was no stranger to the many dangers of life in the Congo.

When she was six, and far older in responsibility than most of her peers, one of the shaman brought her a parrot-chick still in quills; he taught her how to feed and care for it, and told her that while
it
was a child, she was to protect it, but when it was grown, it would protect and guide
her.
She called the parrot “Gray,” and it became her best friend—and indeed, although she never told her parents, it became her protector as well.

But when she was nine, her parents sent her to live in England for the sake of her health. And because her mother feared that the climate of England would not be good for Gray’s health, she had to leave her beloved friend behind.

Now, this was quite the usual thing in the days when Victoria was Queen and the great British Empire was so vast that there was never an hour when some part of it was not in sunlight. It was thought that English children were more delicate than their parents, and that the inhospitable humors of hot climes would make them sicken and die. Not that their
parents
didn’t sicken and die quite as readily as the children, who were, in fact, far sturdier than they were given credit for—but it was thought, by anxious mothers, that the climate of England would be far kinder to them. So off they were shipped, some as young as two and three, torn away from their anxious mamas and native nurses and sent to live with relatives or even total strangers.

Now, as Mr. Kipling and Mrs. Hope-Hodgson have shown us, many of these total strangers—and no few of the relatives—were bad, wicked people, interested only in the round gold sovereigns that the childrens’ parents sent to them for their care. There were many schools where the poor lonely things were neglected or even abused; where their health suffered far more than if they had stayed safely at the sides of their mamas.

But there were good schools too, and kindly people, and Sarah Jane’s mama had been both wise and careful in her selection. In fact, Sarah Jane’s mama had made a choice that was far wiser than even she had guessed . . . .

Nan—that was her only name, for no one had told her of any other—lurked anxiously about the back gate of the Big House. She was new to this neighborhood, for her slatternly mother had lost yet another job in a gin mill and they had been forced to move all the way across Whitechapel, and this part of London was as foreign to Nan as the wilds of Australia. She had been told by more than one of the children hereabouts that if she hung about the back gate after tea, a strange man with a towel wrapped about his head would come out with a basket of food and give it out to any child who happened to be there. Now, there were not as many children willing to accept this offering as might have been expected, even in this poor neighborhood. They were afraid of the man, afraid of his piercing, black eyes, his swarthy skin, and his way of walking like a great hunting-cat. Some suspected poison in the food, others murmured that he and the woman of the house were foreigners, and intended to kill English children with terrible curses on the food they offered. But Nan was faint with hunger; she hadn’t eaten in two days, and was willing to dare poison, curses, and anything else for a bit of bread.

Furthermore, Nan had a secret defense; under duress, she could often sense the intent and even dimly hear the thoughts of others. That was how she avoided her mother when it was most dangerous to approach her, as well as avoiding other dangers in the streets themselves. Nan was certain that if this man had any ill intentions, she would know it.

Still, as tea-time and twilight both approached, she hung back a little from the wrought-iron gate, beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to see what, if anything, her mother brought home. If she’d found a job—or a “gen’lmun”—there might be a farthing or two to spare for food before Aggie spent the rest on gin. Behind the high, grimy wall, the Big House loomed dark and ominous against the smoky, lowering sky, and the strange, carved creatures sitting atop every pillar in the wall and every corner of the House fair gave Nan the shivers whenever she looked at them. There were no two alike, and most of them were beasts out of a rummy’s worst deliriums. The only one that Nan could see that looked at all normal was a big, gray bird with a fat body and a hooked beak that sat on top of the right-hand gatepost of the back gate.

Nan had no way to tell time, but as she waited, growing colder and hungrier—and more nervous—with each passing moment, she began to think for certain that the other children had been having her on. Tea-time was surely long over; the tale they’d told her was nothing more than that, something to gull the newcomer with. It was getting dark, there were no other children waiting, and after dark it was dangerous even for a child like Nan, wise in the ways of the evil streets, to be abroad. Disappointed, and with her stomach a knot of pain, Nan began to turn away from the gate.

“I think that there is no one here, Missy S’ab,” said a low, deep voice, heavily accented, sounding disappointed. Nan hastily turned back, and peering through the gloom, she barely made out a tall, dark form with a smaller one beside it.

“No, Karamjit—look there!” replied the voice of a young girl, and the smaller form pointed at Nan. A little girl ran up to the gate, and waved through the bars. “Hello! I’m Sarah—what’s your name? Would you like some tea-bread? We’ve plenty!”

The girl’s voice, also strangely accented, had none of the imperiousness that Nan would have expected coming from the child of a “toff.” She sounded only friendly and helpful, and that, more than anything, was what drew Nan back to the wrought-iron gate.

“Indeed, Missy Sarah speaks the truth,” the man said; and as Nan drew nearer, she saw that the other children had not exaggerated when they described him. His head was wrapped around in a cloth; he wore a long, high-collared coat of some bright stuff, and white trousers that were tucked into glossy boots. He was as fiercely erect as the iron gate itself; lean and angular as a hunting tiger, with skin so dark she could scarcely make out his features, and eyes that glittered at her like beads of black glass.

But strangest, and perhaps most ominous of all, Nan could sense nothing from the dark man. He might not even have been there; there was a blank wall where his thoughts should have been.

The little girl beside him was perfectly ordinary by comparison; a bright little wren of a thing, not pretty, but sweet, with a trusting smile that went straight to Nan’s heart. Nan had a motherly side to her; the younger children of whatever neighborhood she lived in tended to flock to her, look up to her, and follow her lead. She in her turn tried to keep them out of trouble, and whenever there was extra to go around, she fed them out of her own scant stocks.

But the tall fellow frightened her, and made her nervous, especially when further moments revealed no more of his intentions than Nan had sensed before; the girl’s bright eyes noted that, and she whispered something to the dark man as Nan withdrew a little. He nodded, and handed her a basket that looked promisingly heavy.

Then he withdrew out of sight, leaving the little girl alone at the gate. The child pushed the gate open enough to hand the basket through. “Please, won’t you come and take this? It’s awfully heavy.”

In spite of the clear and open brightness of the little girl’s thoughts, ten years of hard living had made Nan suspicious. The child might know nothing of what the dark man wanted. “Woi’re yer givin’ food away?” she asked, edging forward a little, but not yet quite willing to take the basket.

The little girl put the basket down on the ground and clasped her hands behind her back. “Well, Mem’sab says that she won’t tell Maya and Selim to make less food for tea, because she won’t have us going hungry while we’re growing. And she says that old, stale toast is fit only for starlings, so people ought to have the good of it before it goes stale. And she says that there’s no reason why children outside our gate have to go to bed hungry when we have enough to share, and my Mum and Da say that sharing is charity and Charity is one of the cardinal virtues, so Mem’sab is being virtuous, which is a good thing, because she’ll go to heaven and she would make a good angel.”

Most of that came out in a rush that quite bewildered Nan, especially the last, about cardinal virtues and heaven and angels. But she did understand that “Mem’sab,” whoever that was, must be one of those daft religious creatures that gave away food free for the taking, and Nan’s own Mum had told her that there was no point in letting other people take what you could get from people like that. So Nan edged forward and made a snatch at the basket handle.

She tried, that is; it proved a great deal heavier than she’d thought, and she gave an involuntary grunt at the weight of it.

“Be careful,” the little girl admonished mischievously. “It’s heavy.”

“Yer moight’o warned me!” Nan said, a bit indignant, and more than a bit excited. If this wasn’t a trick—if there wasn’t a brick in the basket—oh, she’d eat well tonight, and tomorrow, too!

“Come back tomorrow!” the little thing called, as she shut the gate and turned and skipped towards the house. “Remember me! I’m Sarah Jane, and I’ll bring the basket tomorrow!”

“Thenkee, Sarah Jane,” Nan called back, belatedly; then, just in case these strange creatures would think better of their generosity, she made the basket and herself vanish into the night.

She came earlier the next day, bringing back the now-empty basket, and found Sarah Jane waiting at the gate. To her disappointment, there was no basket waiting beside the child, and Nan almost turned back, but Sarah saw her and called to her before she could fade back into the shadows of the streets.

“Karamjit is bringing the basket in a bit,” the child said. “There’s things Mem’sab wants you to have. And—what am I to call you? It’s rude to call you ‘girl,’ but I don’t know your name.”

“Nan,” Nan replied, feeling as if a cart had run over her. This child, though younger than Nan herself, had a way of taking over a situation that was all out of keeping with Nan’s notion of how things were. “Wot kind’o place is this, anyway?”

“It’s a school, a boarding-school,” Sarah said promptly. “Mem’sab and her husband have it for the children of people who live in India, mostly. Mem’sab can’t have children herself, which is very sad, but she says that means she can be a mother to us. Mem’sab came from India, and that’s where Karamjit and Selim and Maya and the others are from, too; they came with her.”

“Yer mean the black feller?” Nan asked, bewildered. “Yer from In’ju too?”

“No,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “Africa. I wish I was back there.” Her face paled and her eyes misted, and Nan, moved by an impulse she did not understand, tried to distract her with questions.

“Wot’s it loik, then? Izit loik Lunnun?”

“Like London! Oh, no, it couldn’t be less like London!” Nan’s ploy worked; the child giggled at the idea of comparing the Congo with a metropolis, and she painted a vivid word-picture of the green jungles, teeming with birds and animals of all sorts; of the natives who came to her father and mother for medicines. “Mum and Da don’t do what some of the others do—they went and talked to the magic men and showed them they weren’t going to interfere in the magic work, and now whenever Mum and Da have a patient who thinks he’s cursed, they call the magic man in to help, and when a magic man has someone that his magic can’t help right away, he takes the patient to Mum and Da and they all put on feathers and Mum and Da give him White Medicine while the magic man burns his herbs and feathers and makes his chants, and everyone is happy. There haven’t been any uprisings at our station for
ever
so long, and our magic men won’t let anyone put black chickens at our door. One of them gave me Gray, and I wanted to bring her with me, but Mum said I shouldn’t.” Now the child sighed, and looked woeful again.