Tad Williams: The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

Tyler watched avidly as Mr. Walkwell made his way around the two walls of the cage on his deceptively delicate hoofed feet, whistling a series of repetitive notes and keeping well away from the bars. Lucinda hung back near the door, her eyes wide and her face making it clear she would rather be somewhere else. Even Tyler, who normally enjoyed anything spectacular or dangerous, was beginning to feel anxious.

“Hurry them up, Simos,” said Gideon after Mr. Walkwell had been walking back and forth whistling for half a minute or more. “We don’t have all day.”

Walkwell gave him a look, but took a long metal pole off the wall and reached it through the bars to rap sharply on one of the concrete blocks. The first manticore emerged a moment later, sloping out into the open as leisurely as a sullen teenager.

“Whoa!” said Tyler. “They were tiny last summer!”

“They did grow up fast, didn’t they?” said Gideon.

Two more followed the first. Once out in the open the manticores sat on their haunches, pale tan faces half-hidden in the ruff of mane, watching the visitors with surprising orange eyes. Each one was the size of a full-grown lion, but it was something else about them that made the children stare.

Lucinda’s voice was very shaky. “Their faces… they look like

… ”

“They look almost human, don’t they?” said Gideon. “Manticores are a sort of simian, I think-like a giant baboon, but their faces are more like those of apes. But tan instead of black-skinned, like gorillas or chimpanzees.” He laughed.

“They’re horrible,” Lucinda said.

“I’m disappointed in you, child,” said Gideon with a frown. “These are amazing creatures. My goodness, these are more wonderful than the dragons! You have no idea how hard it was to raise so many to adulthood! We’ve been struggling with them all year-several of them died when they were small. And just training them to take simple commands-here, I’ll show you.” He stepped to the bars and whistled in much the same way Mr. Walkwell had. The manticores turned to watch him. Six had now come out of their artificial den. He whistled again and they slowly drew closer, then lay down on the sand in front of him with obvious reluctance, twelve orange eyes watching his every move. Only the bars stood between Gideon and the weird, manlike faces.

“Oh,” said Lucinda. “Oh. They have such big teeth…!”

“The old stories claimed they had rows and rows, like sharks,” said Gideon, grinning rather impressively himself. “Now, up, you lot! Up!” He raised his hands in the air: the bright orange eyes and the expressionless, masklike faces watched him. Slowly, the manticores began to rise to their feet. “Do you see? They know who’s the master!”

Mr. Walkwell was watching intently, standing very close to the bars: Tyler suddenly saw the monster nearest him had fixed the old Greek with its tangerine-colored stare. Its tail twitched. Could it reach him through the bars with those jagged-nailed hands? It was so still, so watchful…

“Mr. Walkwell!” he cried, sensing something, and at that same instant the manticore leaped forward, silent as air until it slammed heavily against the metal bars. But Mr. Walkwell had already stepped back out of reach.

“Hee-hee!” laughed Uncle Gideon. “Keeping you awake on your hooves, eh, Simos?”

Mr. Walkwell only shook his head.

Gideon said, “Well, obviously this is all too distracting for the manties. They’ll never behave properly with all these new smells and people. We’d best get on now.”

“What… what are you going to do with them?” Lucinda asked as they climbed back into the wagon. Back out in the sun, Tyler found himself sweating.

“We let them out at night, of course. They roam between the two fences here on the property. If one of Ed Stillman’s spies gets over the outer fence, or even tries to parachute in…!” He let out a breathless laugh. “He’ll be begging us to save him when the manticores come after him, I’ll tell you that much.”

Or not begging for anything, because he’ll be dead, thought Tyler. How are you going to deal with that, Uncle Gideon? But of course he didn’t say anything.

“The new, improved Ordinary Farm!” crowed Gideon. “There you have it!”

Tyler looked at Lucinda. He could see on her face that she was even less comforted by these so-called improvements than he was.

Some things about Ordinary Farm hadn’t changed at all. One of them was the hard, hard work.

As the long summer days passed, Lucinda and her brother quickly fell back into the farm’s routine-they had no choice because at Ordinary Farm everyone had to do his or her share, most definitely including the two young visitors. Feeding the animals meant following daily schedules that could not be broken- “A sea-goat doesn’t care if you didn’t get your own breakfast,” as Gideon liked to say, “he just wants his.” The bleating capricorns could be snappy when they were hungry, too, and they fought over each fish, so that some days they had to be taken out of their pool and fed individually. The dragons needed twice-weekly deer carcasses and the unicorns had to have their daily fodder and supplements. And the bonnacon’s cage had to be cleaned out everyday, which-since the buffalo-like creature’s dung burst into flame once it was out in the air, then lay smoldering for hours-was absolutely no one’s favorite job.

Lucinda and Tyler spent much of their day tending to the smaller creatures in the Reptile Barn and elsewhere, taking some of the load off Mr. Walkwell, Ragnar, and the others who also had to care for the big animals. But even the small animals could be a lot of work. The jingwei, white Chinese birds with long tails, had got loose from their cage in the Reptile Barn some weeks before, and each day they did their best to fill the biggest water trough, Meseret’s, with small stones, swooping down in turn to drop pebbles with a plink, plink, plink that went on all day as if someone was using a tiny hammer. Each afternoon Lucinda or her brother climbed into the trough and removed them all, but the jingwei could fly in and out through the empty spaces in the vast barn and so they always found more.

“The Chinese believed this bird was a drowned princess trying to fill the ocean so no other would ever lose her life there,” Gideon informed them, frowning at a rising island of stones near one end of the trough. “Mythological or not, I wish we could get them out of the Reptile Barn. They’re a dang nuisance!” But the beautiful, fast-moving jingweis refused to be caught, so every day one of the children went swimming in Meseret’s greasy trough and shoveled out the stones so she wouldn’t swallow too many of them and get her insides plugged up. Dragons didn’t even notice things that small going down.

Even after feeding time was over many other chores awaited: Lucinda and her brother spent three long, hot afternoons of their second week on the farm whitewashing a new barn for the unicorns. Five hornless, staggering foals had been born that spring and Gideon wanted the young ones and their nursing mothers to have a place they would be safe from summer storms.

And of course Gideon’s greater concern for security added to the work load as well: the electric gates and fences that kept strangers out and animals in had to be checked regularly to make sure they were secure-even a branch across the fence could shut down a large part of the system.

Lucinda was thrilled to be back on Ordinary Farm, but the chores were hard and she was equally happy when Sunday rolled around, her first free day since they’d arrived. Spared for once from early egg duty, it was hard even to drag herself out of bed. Only the threat, relayed by Tyler, that all the breakfast things were going to be cleared and washed in ten minutes finally drew her downstairs, where Azinza gave her some eggs, a fruit muffin, and a glass of milk. She had forgotten the notebook she meant to use for dragon-communication observations, so after returning the plate to the kitchen she plodded back upstairs to get it.