Lee Klein: Jrzdvlz

I must have seemed like a walking armoire, wearing scarves, coats, a braided jacket across my shoulders, a hat cut open to accommodate my horns, old boots on my hooves, the soles removed, the uppermost leather tied to my legs with rope. I saw the world through peepholes in a simple mask. I wanted to raise my wings without dislodging the many satiny capes draped across my back. I was Larner’s guard, dressed like an exploded wardrobe.

The mist brightened but did not burn off. Once we hit the road to Umbria to the southeast, it was a straight shot from there to the island. A web of sand trails crossed these parts. No maps tracked their layout other than in travelers’ memories.

Not far from Umbria we met morning sorts, messengers and laborers and farmers. None seemed to notice us until a man stood in the road. He wore faded black clothes so tight they seemed fused to his skin. He had no meat on him, other than a ropey waggle neck. His arms seemed longer than average, the exposed wrists and forearms scabbed and bruised.

“Tax,” the man said. “Tax to travel these roads.”

“You cannot tax what you do not own.”

“To keep you safe.”

“From what?” Larner said.

“Pay now or regret.”

Larner whispered to the wardrobe beside him: “What do you say?”

“Walk on,” I said.

“What masked clothing seeks to pass?”

“It is my dear friend, Mr. Merriweather,” said Larner. “Burned in a fire not long ago, he must wear fabric rubbed with soothing lard and herbs.”

“Show the burn or both shall wear funeral shrouds.”

The man revealed in each hand a small blade.

“Now, now,” said Larner. “If Mr. Merriweather reveals himself, you will cause no trouble?”

“We must be sure he’s no escaped prisoner or kidnapped kid.”

“Mr. Merriweather, it is your choice,” Larner said. “Shall we sport him a trifle or show him what had once been your hand?”

This man who demanded taxes reminded me of Dade, though worse off. The eyes were sunken and his exposed scalp was reptilian, the flesh like sunbaked earth. He seemed in misery. Yet he was accepted as human, no matter how he maintained his humanity.

I could overcome our obstacle with a swipe. We could be on our way. But it’s better to become human via humane treatment of humans. Even such a questionable one.

I worked a claw out from a sleeve of the braided coat.

“Does this please you?” Larner said.

My fingers were long and overknuckled. At each end were conical nails, sharp and thick, more like horns than fingertips. I clicked their ends together.

The man leaned in to inspect my hand. I aimed a finger at his nose.

“I trust you’ll let us pass,” said Larner. “Quite a misfortune for Mr. Merriweather here, but as you can see, misfortune is often accompanied by unforeseen benefits, such as protection from bandits on the path to Umbria.”

The man stashed his blades in his belt, behind his back. “Fires turn hands to that?”

I snapped my hornfingers and pointed the longest now at the man’s heart. “We owe you no answers,” Larner said. “Let us pass.”

“Or pay with your life.” I let some rasp enter my voice. I regretted the threat, but I enjoyed the pulse of anger, the risen strip of skin along the uppermost part of my spine.

“Anyone asks, tell ’em you okay by Branley. Way is paid. Your way is paid.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” said Larner.

I returned my hand beneath its garments and growled to speed the man along.

Larner stopped me and whispered: “He may slip around an unknown path and gather a posse to meet us in Umbria. We must move now in secret.”

I unfurled my wings and the garments fell to the ground.

“Lie upon the sturdiest cape,” I said.

I took up its corners and tied them together so he lay bundled in a makeshift sack. I wrapped my tail several times around the knot and secured it in my claws, and then I spread my wings.

In the distance, pines gave way to beach and water. In the other direction was the tower of Larner’s home, the path we’d been walking, perhaps even the man we encountered, scampering to Umbria. “Mr. Merriweather” could drop Larner far below to the underbrush, but he trusted me. He could have ordered me to dispatch the thief. A sickly meal. Those purple wrists. An intruder upon the race of man, more so than someone with horns, wings, and scaly skin.

My wings open and strong, flapping a few times and then soaring as we descended, our path through the air rising, rising, and falling though clouds. Wet with mist, we saw silent breakers on the coast, boats in the bay, a tall cargo ship perhaps conveying the widow’s century-old husband lost at sea.

Larner, if he fell through the fabric of the cape, his bones would snap, never to appear in the stories of grandsons, the heirloom legends. His own mother had brought such life to the stories. When she told of the nor’easter the night the thirteenth son of Mowas Leeds was born, young Larner smelled the rain that lashed his cheeks and saw lines of liquidy steel travel parallel to the ground. When she said the words lightning flashed, he covered his ears ahead of the thunder. He closed his eyes from fear when she told of the beast feasting on its mother, the midwives, and the children before shooting up the chimney and into the rain, washed clean of gore.

Larner now peeked over the edge of a cape, as though in the basket of a one-man airship, and heard the surf as I brought him down gently on a dune.

The cape sprawled open and Larner rolled onto sand and grasses. We made it in a fraction of the time it would have taken in wagon and ferry. And we made it apparently undetected. No armada waited off shore, cannonballs pounding the dunes, skiffs filled with men intent on capturing and displaying me for profit.

Tumultuous surf pulled back from flattened land, leaving a glassy stretch that lightened until salt-spray and foam slid shoreward again before it pulled back again, tumbling shells and driftwood toward the horizon.

“Have you flown me to the moon?” said Larner. He had never visited the ocean here, needing no rest from his island in that ocean of pine.

Sand moved more than one thought. With no one to dig out the excess, the hole where I had stayed was almost filled. The clamshell roof had fallen. Not much of a sanctuary.

Larner studied me now in the open light of day. I could tell he thought I seemed weathered. The flesh of my face was covered in fine short hair beneath which it seemed scaly, neither mammal nor reptile. My wings were smooth, pale, nearly transparent flesh.

We stood there in silence as he looked at my spread wings.

“Have you always been this way, Mr. Merriweather?”

“This name brings me joy, but is it my first or last name?”

“We could say the first is Merry and the last is Weather?”

We started along the shore toward the widow’s house. Larner walked easily while I stood straight, my senses, like those of the rabbits I had devoured, set to detect the least threat.

“You trusted I would not drop you,” I said.

“I worried more that the capes had been weakened by moths or wear unknown.”

“Ended by a moth, your whole long life. It is terrible, yet I find it amusing,” I said.

“A marvel how you mirror my speech. Part ram, horse, kangaroo, pterodactyl, and apparently part parrot too,” he laughed. “In your mouth, protected by such teeth, no doubt one may find a chameleon in place of a tongue.”

We walked to the south. Some boats on the horizon were too far off to discern us.

“Much more to go?” Larner said.

“Shall we fly?”

The sun overhead was a pale orange disc, the clouds more like smoke than anything innocent, gray celestial vapors beyond which it was surely blue, and beyond that all was more difficult to understand than my existence on this beach.