Peter Beagle - The Line Between

One thing I did understand from the first day was that he was plainly a fugitive himself, no whit different from me, for all his conceit. Why else would he have been hiding in a dung–cart, eager to commandeer the company of such a bumpkin as I? Kindly concern for my survival in a dangerous world might be part of it, but he was hardly combing our back–trail every night on my behalf. I knew that much from the way he slept — when he slept — most often on his back, his arms and legs curled close and scrabbling in the air, running and running behind his closed eyes, just as a hound will do. I knew it from the way he would cry out, not in any tongue I knew,

but in strange yelps and whimpers and near–growls that seemed sometimes to border on language, so close to real words that I was sure I almost caught them, and that if he only kept on a bit longer, or if I dared bend a bit closer, I'd understand who — or what — was pursuing him through his dreams. Once he woke, and saw me there, studying him; and though his entire body tensed like a crossbow, he never moved.

The gray eyes had gone full yellow, the pupils slitted almost to invisibility. They held me until he closed them again, and I crept away to my blanket. In the morning, he made no mention of my spying on his sleep, but I never imagined that he had forgotten.

So young I was then, all that way back, and so much I knew, and he was quite right — none of it was to prove the smallest use in the world I entered on our journey. That nameless, tireless, endlessly scornful old man showed me the way to prepare and cook aidallah, which looks like a dungball itself, is more nourishing than tilgit and tastes far better, and which is poisonous if you don't strip every last bit of the inner rind. He taught me to carry my silly little knife out of sight in a secret place; he taught me how to sense a sheknath 's presence a good mile before winding it, and — when we were sneaking through green, steamy Taritaj a country — how to avoid the mantraps those cannibal folk set for travelers. (I was on my way over the lip of two of them before he snatched me back, dancing with scorn, laughing his yap–laugh and informing me that no one would ever eat my brain to gain wisdom.) And, in spite of all my efforts, I cannot imagine forgetting my first introduction to the sandslugs of the Oriskany plains. There isn't a wound they can't clean out, nor an infection they can't digest; but it is not a comfortable process, and I prefer not to speak of it any further. Nevertheless, more than once I have come a very long way to find them again.

But cunning and knowing as that old man was, even he could detect no sign of the Hunters from the moment when we joined fortunes on the Queen's Road. Today I'd have the wit to be frightened more every day by their absence; but then I was for once too interested in puzzling out the cause of my companion's night terrors, and the identity of his pursuers to be much concerned with my own. And on the twentieth twilight that we shared, dropping down from the Skagats into high desert country, I finally caught sight of it for a single instant: the cause.

It stalked out of a light evening haze on long bird legs — three of them. The third appeared to be more tail than leg — the creature leaned back on it briefly, regarding us — but it definitely had long toes or claws of its own. As for the head and upper body, I had only a dazed impression of something approaching the human, and more fearsome for that. In another moment, it was gone, soundless for all its size; and the old man was up out of a doze, teeth bared, crouching to launch himself in any direction. When he turned to me, I'd no idea whether I should have seen what I had, or whether it would be wisest to feign distraction. But he never gave me the chance to choose.

I cannot say that I actually saw the change. I never do, not really. Never any more

than a sort of sway in the air — you could not even call it a ripple — and there he is: there, like that first time: red–brown mask, the body a deeper red, throat and chest and tail–tip white–gold, bright yellow eyes seeing me — me, lost young Soukyan, always the same — seeing me truly and terribly, all the way down. Always. The fox.

One wild glare before he sprang away into the mist, and I did not see him again for a day and another night. Nor the great bird–legged thing either, though I sat up both nights, expecting its return. It was plainly seeking him, not me — whatever it might be, it was no Hunter — but what if it saw me as his partner, his henchman, as liable as he for whatever wrong it might be avenging? And what if I had become a shapeshifter's partner, unaware? Not all alliances are written, or spoken, or signed. Oh, I had no trouble staying awake those two nights. I thought it quite likely that I might never sleep again.

Or eat again, either, come to that. As I have told you, I never went back to my room at that place, which meant leaving my bow there. I wished now that I had chanced fetching it: not only because I had killed a man with that bow when I was barely tall enough to aim and draw, but because without it, on my own, I was bound to go very hungry indeed. I stayed close to our camp — what point in wandering off into unknown country in search of a half–mad, half–sinister old man? — and merely waited, making do with such scraps and stores as we had, drinking from a nearby waterhole, little more than a muddy footprint. Once, in that second night, something large and silent crossed the moon; but when I challenged it there was no response, and nothing to see. I sat down again and threw more wood on my fire.

He came back in human form, almost out of nowhere, but not quite — I never saw that change, either, but I did see, far behind him, coming around a thicket beyond the waterhole, the two sets of footprints, man and animal, and the exact place where one supplanted the other. Plainly, he did not care whether I saw it or not. He sat down across from me, as always, took a quick glance at our depleted larder, and said irritably, «You ate every last one of the sushal eggs. Greedy.»

«Yes. I did.» Formal, careful, both of us, just as though we had never shared a dung–cart. We stared at each other in silence for some while, and then I asked him, most politely, «What are you?»

«What I need to be," he answered. «Now this, now that, as necessary. As are we all.»

I was surprised by my own sudden fury at his blandly philosophical air. «We do not all turn into foxes," I said. «We do not all abandon our friends — " I remember that I hesitated over the word, but then came out with it strongly — «leaving them to face monsters alone. Nor do we all lie to them from sunup to sundown, as you have done to me. I have no use for you, and we have no future together. Come tomorrow, I go alone.»

«Well, now, that would be an extremely foolish mistake, and most probably fatal as

well.» He was as calmly judicial as any human could have been, but he was not human, not human. He said, «Consider — did I not keep you from your enemies, when they were as close on your heels as your own dirty skin? Have I not counseled you well during this journey you and I have made together? That monster, as you call it, did you no harm — nor even properly frighted you, am I right? Say honestly.» I had no fitting answer, though I opened my mouth half a dozen times, while he sat there and smiled at me. «So. Now. Sit still, and I will tell you everything you wish to know.»

Which, of course, he did not. This is what he did tell me:

«What you saw — that was no monster, but something far worse. That was a Goro.» He waited only a moment for me to show that I knew the name; quite rightly not expecting this, he went on. «The Goro are the bravest, fiercest folk who walk the earth. To be killed by a Goro is considered a great honor, for they deign to slay only the bravest and fiercest of their enemies — merely to make an enemy of a Goro is an honor as well. However short–lived.»