Earth and Air (17 page)

He was chatting with a neighbour when one of Andada's younger offspring scampered up, stopped, stared for a moment, pointed, and exclaimed, “Funny feet, Warro got!”

Several adults snapped at the child. Remarks about a person's appearance were considered extremely offensive. The child's mother snatched him away, apologising over her shoulder as she led him off. The nature of the whole exchange made Varro realise that everyone around had been aware of the peculiarity, but by then he had recovered his poise enough to shrug and say, “Forget it. It's true, anyway. It's not a disease, just a deformity that runs in my family. That's why I wear these boots. I'll put them on so you don't have to look at my feet.”

To conceal the wings he had with some difficulty removed boots and trousers as if they had been a single garment. His companions looked elsewhere as he put them on the same way, but far more easily. As the light died they built fires of driftwood all along the shore and roasted gobbets of meat and sweet roots and passed them round. But the sense of embarrassment, of something not entirely acceptable about Varro, hadn't fully faded by the time they were walking home from the river under the stars. Varro carried one of the sleeping children slung over his shoulder and Andada walked beside him with another, gossiping all the way, obviously aware of his need for support.

Another man in Varro's position would have gone out and got very drunk. Varro preferred to keep his liquor for pleasure, so he merely went back to his room, lit his lamp, removed his boots and studied his feet with care. Again, this must have been something that he had subconsciously avoided doing for a long while.

He had known, of course, that the skin was tender, but hadn't realised how thin it had become all over the foot, including the sole. No wonder he had found the few barefoot paces down into the water and back up the shore that evening so uncomfortable. The nails were soft and tender too, and more pointed than rounded, but not very noticeably so, any more than the unusual breadth and stubbiness of the feet themselves seemed actually freakish. The thing that must have caught the child's attention was the position of the big toes, each of which had separated itself from the other four by moving backward over an inch, so that it now lay alongside the ball of the foot.

As Varro put the boots on again the wings—fully fledged now, desert-coloured, barred dark and light—gave a little flutter of pleasure, like a dog cavorting on being taken for an unexpected walk.

By now the gates of the city were closed, so Varro climbed up onto the unguarded walls and walked round to the northern side of the city. Here he leaned on the parapet and gazed out towards the desert.

It was quite clear to him what was happening. It wasn't only the boots that had brought it about.
I have eaten the gryphon's heart, eaten its flesh,
he thought.
I have slept on its hide, I have bathed in its blood. I could abandon the boots, but still it would happen.

He remembered the magnificent strange creature that he had killed. He remembered the life fading out of that sunset eye.

Next day he asked Andada to close the stall early and took him up to his room. In the stifling dim heat he told him his whole story, rolled up his trousers and showed him the boots. Tentatively Andada reached to touch a wing, but it shrank from his hand.

“Warro, what is happening to you?” he whispered. “Witchcraft?”

“Godcraft, more like,” said Varro. “Mercury enjoys a joke.”

“I know a clever woman. Expensive, but I pay.”

“You are a good man, Andada, a good friend. I haven't had a friend like you for a long while. But when a god decides, there is nothing anyone can do. Everything I might try would serve, one way or another, to make it happen. But it is not so bad as you might think. I shall be free—freer than most men. And you will be rich. And unless my whole nature changes we will still be friends. Listen. This is what I want you to do . . .”

Varro stayed in the city, enjoying its life and constructing saddles to any pattern he fancied, until his toenails began to grow through the toes of his boots, each point as sharp and hard as a steel bradawl. He could have carved rock with them. His feet were now unmistakably paws, and he was walking with a strange, catlike lope. He was already wearing a long, loose cloak all day, for though his wings had migrated to the small of his back their tips trailed almost to the ground, and his tufted tail was not much shorter.

He said good-bye to Andada's wives and children, giving each of them a handsome present, and headed north with Andada and four laden pack ponies, though it turned out that the two men needed to travel well separated as the animals were ungovernable in Varro's presence.

Five times Andada came north with further supplies. By their last meeting Varro was half again the size of an ox and walking on all fours. His neck had begun to fledge and his wings were almost full grown. For Andada's benefit he managed a clumsy flutter of about forty paces. Andada laughed with streaming eyes, but wept very differently as they said good-bye, though Varro told him, speaking with a marked screech in his voice, that he was content with his fate.

It must have been over a year later that Prince Fo, out hunting, was watching an austringer being flogged to death because a hawk had failed to return to the lure. Naturally his entourage were also intent on the spectacle, since it was unwise to be noticed inattentive to the Prince's pleasures, so it was only when the austringer's cries were drowned by a wilder scream that anyone looked overhead. By then the monster was plummeting down with a falcon's stoop. Prince Fo was snatched from his saddle and carried skyward, screaming himself. The monster swung, poised as if having chosen its spot, and dropped him. By the time his company were running towards the outcrop onto which his body had splattered, the monster had swooped again and was carrying the austringer away.

In that same year a strange little man arrived in Timbuktu, black and hideous, but leading two mules laden with expensive and exotic goods. He seemed to know which merchants were reputed to be honest and through an interpreter explained that he had discovered an ancient trade route across the desert and was anxious to reopen it. He didn't want to travel it himself, because he was by nature a stay-at-home, but would like to act as an intermediary and facilitator in his home city for merchants from the north. He had brought samples to show what was available from there, and gold for anything extra that he might buy at the northern end. Because of the scantness of the watering places, his could never be a major route, but for small and costly items such as he had brought it was so much shorter than the long circuit round the desert that it was well worth while.

All this seemed straightforward enough, and worth further investigation. Only two things he said raised eyebrows. When he was asked about the security of the route, and how many guards would be needed, he laughed and said it was unnecessary. That might have been foolhardiness, though the little man seemed sensible enough in other ways, but what were his hearers to make of his explanation that only one fee would be demanded for use of the route—a young and healthy slave, to be left for the demon that guarded the fourth and best watering place? Still, unless remarkably handsome, untrained slaves were two a penny in the market, and the little man was evidently serious for he went and bought three on the morning of his departure, explaining that one was his own fee and the other two were for the two men the merchants had hired to go with him and return with a report on the route.

Word of the expedition must have reached ears other than those for which it was intended, for they were followed into the desert by a party of brigands, expecting to overtake and rob and possibly kill them once they were beyond help. The bodies of these men were found two days later piled against the south gate of the city, apparently dead from the mauling of some large beast. The scouts returned to report that on the little man's instructions they had left the slaves tied to a rusty old ringbolt set into the masonry of a ruined temple beside the demon's pool, but had found all three gone on their return; that the route was possible for small parties, well-guided; and the city at the further end was the same as that they already knew from the longer route, and well worth trading with.

Travellers began to pass to and fro. They never saw the demon, though the slaves they left for it were invariably gone without trace by the time they returned. It was assumed that the demon had carried them elsewhere to consume. Other evidence of the demon's existence accumulated. No brigand survived any attempt to rob the merchants. Moreover, occasional travellers who had missed the route in a sandstorm, and given themselves up to die in the desert, woke to find themselves back at the pool with a cache of sun-dried meat under a small cairn by their side. The demon clearly guarded his route well, so much so that in gratitude masons were eventually sent from Timbuktu to rebuild and renovate his temple.

Andada flourished, becoming immensely wealthy and acquiring several more wives and children. He did not trade along the route himself, but once a year, despite his increasing girth, he would have himself carried up into the desert, left there overnight in his litter, and fetched back next day. In his old age, knowing he would never make another such journey, he took his eldest grandson with him, having made the young man vow to repeat the trip each year but tell no one, ever, what he found there. The route remained active on these terms for several hundred years, until suppressed by a puritanical Sultan of Timbuktu who refused to countenance pacts with demons.

Centuries later, the great Victorian explorer, Sir Pauncefoot Smethers, mapping the pitilessly barren ranges near the eastern edge of the desert, found an anomalous fertile valley, uninhabited now but apparently once intensively cultivated, with every slope neatly terraced to catch the seasonal rains, and great cisterns for water storage against drought years. But there was no sign of any city such as would have excited the interests of the archaeologists of those days, so it was another hundred years before any came to enquire further. They were baffled by what they found.

Digging in middens they unearthed plenty of scraps and shards, mainly more or less crudely made from local materials but in a surprising number of styles, with parallels in the ware of places as far away as Armenia and Germany, but with a frequently recurring motif of a winged quadruped with the head of a bird. These could be dated on both stylistic and scientific grounds to any time from the start of the Christian era to around 1200 AD. In addition to these the trowels turned up a considerable number of small luxury items, all ultimately traceable as trade goods that might have passed through the ancient city of Dassun, long ago buried by the desert but even in its prime nine hundred untravellable miles away west.

As if that was not enough of a problem, one of the party, a birdwatcher, scanning the cliffs through binoculars at a time when the slant evening light picked out every detail of the surface, saw a strange carving on a stretch of sheer rock face. It was the outline of a man, five times life size—or rather of a god, for the iconography was clear, the brimmed helmet, the wand of healing, the winged boots. Mercury, or possibly Hermes, if the thing had been of Greek origin. Even the conventional half-smile of the god was discernible with good glasses. But the image had been carved with a technique unknown in the classical world, as far as anyone in the party could remember, every detail gouged into the rock with four parallel lines, as if carved with a four-pointed tool.

The inscription was on a surface at a different angle, not lit by the revealing light of sunset, and so was not noticed until later, by a young woman scanning the rock around the carving for some sign of how it might have got there. The two words, being in Latin, cleared up the question whether the work was Greek or Roman, but otherwise added further dimensions to the riddle. They were carved in yard-high letters using the same four-line technique as in the image of the god and read simply:

MEMENTO VARRONEM

Remember Varro.

Scops

TIME: a dozen or so centuries ago, when there was still a Christian Emperor in Byzantium.

PLACE: One of the several hundred little islands that were part of his Empire, though it is doubtful whether he had ever given this one a thought.

ACTION: A young man is throwing up.

Yanni was drunk, bewildered, miserable,
lost in the pitch-black dark, shuddering and gasping. All he knew was that he was leaning forward, propping himself against the square edge of something stone, having just vomited everything out of his stomach in one reeking gush into the gap between his legs and the something.

A blinding glare. Immediately on top of it a deafening blast of sound. Lightning and thunder, he woozily recognised.

Two senses blasted away. Now there were only the taste and stink of his own vomit, and the touch of the stone something.

And a memory. In that instant of glare, the stone surface, flat as a table. On it a small, round, fluffy ball.

He straightened a little and gently swept a quivering hand across the top of the something. There. Even more gently, he eased his trembling fingers round the soft ball and picked it up. It squirmed slightly in his grasp but didn't struggle. Through the diminishing fuzz of his deafness he heard a faint cheeping. Yes, he thought that was what he'd seen. A baby bird.