Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

“Yes, you’ve got a problem there—not a lot of fun, that lot. Hold it. There was that fellow wrote a play about frogs. Aristo something. Aristotle?”

“I’ll ask Papa Alexi. I could call him Risto.”

Three months later came the start of the grape harvest. School was over for the next few weeks, so Steff helped all morning in the vineyard—a cheerful time, with a lot of laughter and chat between the regular farmhands and the casual pickers from the town. But it was clearly going to be a hot and tiring afternoon, and he’d not been looking forward to it when, just as everyone was rousing themselves from the midday break, Nikos said “They’ve more than enough hands here, Steff. They won’t miss two of us. Like to show me how that dog of yours is getting on?”

This was part of the deal. Not wanting to see a good dog spoiled, Nikos had been a bit reluctant to let Steff train Risto on his own, but he’d agreed to let him do the first stages, learning the simple pipe calls and so on, and see then to see how it had gone. Risto was still more puppy than dog, and still a bit of a clown, but he was a quick and eager learner, and had Ridiki to show him what was expected of him.

He was also a show-off—part of his clownishness—and in the dogs’ eyes Nikos was the leader of the human pack, and so he really laid it on for him, quivering with excitement as he sat waiting for the last note of each call and then darting into action. He finished with a theatrically stealthy stalk of a rock with a sheepskin draped across it, moving left and right, crouching and moving on, exactly on each call.

Nikos laughed aloud.

“Pretty good,” he said. “He’s got the instinct in him, and then some. Never seen a pup that far on. Like to try him on a few live ones?”

He whistled for his own dog, Ajax, and led the way up to the rough pastures above the vineyards. Risto watched, thrilled and eager, while Ajax cut out three staid old ewes who knew what was expected of them almost as well as he did. Then, at first with Ridiki to guide him but soon on his own, he raced off to team up with Ajax and move the patient sheep across the slope, between two large boulders, round and back before releasing them. He returned panting, delighted with his own achievement, lapping up all the praise Steff could give him.

“Don’t overdo that,” said Nikos. “He’s big-headed enough for three dogs already. Pretty good, mind you—good as I’ve seen. I’ll tell your uncle you’re doing fine. That’s enough for now. He’s only a pup still, and he’s all in. Not worth going back to the vineyard. Give yourselves a break.”

So Steff went back to the farm house and settled on a rock in the shade below the terrace to begin his weekly letter to his mother, with Ridiki and Risto curled up either side of him. The evenings were earlier now and the sky was just starting to redden as he gazed out over immense distances of the coastline beneath the sinking sun. Above him on the terrace some of the women were getting things ready for the party Deniakis held every year to celebrate the start of the grape picking. A happy and peaceful evening, but at the same time full of the feel of coming change, of the world readying itself for winter. The bustle on the terrace increased. The first of the workers began to arrive. Risto woke.

Puppy fashion, he’d forgotten his weariness, couldn’t imagine such a state was possible for him. He looked up at Steff. Not a hope. But there was Ridiki beyond him, still asleep. He pranced round, springy with pent energy, crouched an inch from her nose and snorted. She opened an eye, raised her head and yawned. He rose onto his hind legs and pawed the air. Ridiki looked at Steff—if she’d have been human she’d have shrugged resignedly, Kids!—and she was off, streaking away down the slope into the orchard, jinking in and out between the trees, with Risto after her, sometimes on her tail, sometimes careering on after one of her sudden full-speed turns, braking so frenziedly that at one point he went tumbling head over heels, and then racing to make up the lost ground.

At that speed they couldn’t keep it up for more than a few minutes and then came back side to side to Steff and sat panting, tongues lolling out, but still bright-eyed with the fun of what they’d been doing. Somebody coughed overhead and he looked up.

It was his uncle’s new wife, Maria, holding her baby perched on the terrace wall to watch Risto racing around the orchard. There were people who said her mother was a witch and had put a spell on Deniakis to make him fall for someone who wasn’t that young or that pretty, or rich enough to bring him that much of a dowry. But Aunt Nix had told Steff this was nonsense, and they’d been lovers for several years.

At Steff’s movement she looked down.

“Playing hunt-puppy all on his own,” she said. “Times I’d almost have sworn I could see the other dog.”

His hair prickled on his nape.

“Oh . . . Well, he’s Hera’s great-grandson,” he managed. “Nikos says she used to see ghosts sometimes.”

Automatically Maria flicked her fingers to keep the ghost clear of her baby. Steff looked down anxiously at Ridiki. Her whole attitude had changed, become quietly solemn. Faintly through her body he could see the shapes of the grass-stems she was lying on.

Steff nodded and rose. He was ready. Everything seemed to have been telling him that this was the moment. With Risto at his heels he followed her along below the terrace wall, up round the main farmhouse and between the sheds and barns to the fig tree beside the gate. The lower branches had drooped down to fill the gap he’d made when he’d dug her grave, but she snaked in beneath them and curled herself up in the place her flesh-and-bone remains lay arm’s-length down. He knelt and reached in towards her, but from habit withheld his hand just before he reached her. She raised her head and looked him in the eyes.

“Good-bye, Ridiki,” he said for the third time. “Good-bye, Eurydice.”

For a moment he thought he felt the feathery touch of her tongue on the back of his fingers, but then Risto, nosing in beside him, licked her firmly on the muzzle and she melted into the ground.

For a little longer Steff stayed where he was, kneeling by Ridiki’s grave, quietly letting her go. Then he rose and walked slowly back towards the sounds of the party, knowing that he would remember her all his life, but no longer, now, with grief.

Wizand

Foreword

The closest analogy that i can find in the material world for the behaviour of a wizand is that of certain tropical ticks, though the similarity applies only to one part of the life cycle. These ticks hatch from eggs, go through a larval stage, pupate, emerge as adults, and mate. The male then dies. Nothing like this occurs with a wizand.

Having mated, however, the female tick climbs a grass stem or bush to a suitable height, tenses her limbs to spring, and locks the joints so that the tension is maintained with no further effort on her part. She then goes into a state that cannot be called life, since there are no metabolic processes, but is not death either. It is not known how long she can maintain this condition, but an instance of nine years is recorded.

At length the necessary stimulus—a warm-blooded animal—comes within range of her senses. Her joints unlock. The released tension hurls her forward, and if all goes well she lands on the creature’s hide, clutches with powerful claws and sinks her modified mouth structure into the skin.

She distends her body with blood—her one meal as an adult tick—and this provides her with sufficient protein to form her eggs and lay them before she too dies.


Wizands are asexual, so they do not exactly mate or reproduce. They are technically immortal, but since both of their host organisms are mortal they may perish if they fail to make the transfer to the alternate host before the previous one dies. They do not reproduce in any normal sense, but they might be considered fissiparous, since, on the rare occasions when lightning strikes an ash tree inhabited by a wizand, the wizand is likely to divide into two or more entities. This is not an event that a wizand would in any way welcome, since it involves a proportional division of power between the resulting lesser wizands, but in the old days it used to be just enough to maintain the population.