Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

He reached the water on the verge of delirium. By the second midnight his shoes had fallen apart. His feet were already blistered, and now slowed him to a hobble. He was weak for lack of food. If the last section of his route hadn’t lain along a valley, delaying the apparent sunrise, he would never have made it. Even so, by the time he found the place the landscape was wavering before his eyes, what had begun as a plea to Mercury would end up in fragments of nursery rhyme, and the pitiless sun had become one enduring blow against his flank and shoulder, to send him reeling, then lie among the rocks, and die.

The valley floor dipped suddenly. He stood at the rim of a shallow slope and gazed down. There was the pool, a stone-rimmed circle with steps leading to the water. Beside it, exactly as described, stood a little roofless temple, a flagged paving from which rose a dozen squat, barbaric pillars. No demon, of course, but, confirming his conjecture, the headless image of some large winged quadruped—ludicrous anatomy—that had fallen opposite the steps, lay between the temple and the pool.

Cautious as ever, despite his desperate need, he crawled down the slope rather than risk a fall, and on down the steps to drink. The lowest steps were in the shade, so having drunk as much as was safe, and poured his libation, he turned and sat with his bleeding feet in the water. From down here he could see nothing but the excellent masonry of the wall, vast blocks fitted so well that there was nowhere he could have driven a knife between them. Above that the unornamented rim of the pool. Above that the intense harsh blueness of the sky. And, between the rim and the sky, a single large eye, watching him.

A single eye, because the thing was watching him sideways, bird-fashion, though the eye was much too large for that of any bird—indeed of any creature that he knew. He could now see the beginnings of the curve of an immense, hooked beak, and a fringe of small feathers, though the scalp seemed bald. Surely, even half-delirious, he would have noticed that head on the fallen statue. No, the thing had seemed headless, but clearly a mammal, with the only plumage on the wing, the rest of the body the same colour as the sandstone desert rocks, from which he had assumed it to be carved. The head must have been tucked away out of sight, bird-fashion again.

He was startled, but not for the moment terrified, in fact not much more than wary. When the creature rose and came for him, then would be the time for terror. But the only move it made was to lay its head back down somewhere out of sight. The movement didn’t look like that of a hunter, withdrawing for a stealthy approach, more like that of an exhausted animal, momentarily interested in the arrival of another creature, but then deciding that the intruder was no threat and returning to its rest.

Varro drank again and half filled his skin, just in case, then rose and climbed the steps, watching over his shoulder as the creature came into view. It was indeed huge, not as big as an elephant, but half again the size of any ox he had ever seen. Apart from the scalp, the neck was feathered as far as the shoulders, and the body beyond that furred, both a rusty yellow-brown, the colour of the desert. A vast wing, desert coloured too but barred light and dark, lay along its flank.

It seemed to have lost interest in him and made no move as on wincing feet he crept round the pool and climbed the temple steps and turned. Seeing it from above he recognised at once what the thing was. The dark tuft at the end of the almost naked tail was the giveaway. A gryphon. The body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Ridiculous. Anatomically impossible. There, in front of him.

Delirium? How does a man prove to himself that he isn’t mad, when the very proof may be merely part of the madness? His feet, so much more conscious of their soreness now that they had been cosseted a little? In a futile attempt to validate the proof Varro sat down on the steps and inspected them. Something had carved a half-inch gash into the ball of his left foot. Further back, what had begun as a blister was now raw flesh. There was a matching, but larger, sore on his right foot, as well as a dozen minor cracks and abrasions either side. Well bandaged, and with good shoes, they might be fit to walk on in a week. Academic. He would be dead of starvation well before that.

The gryphon sighed. He looked up and saw the vast flanks still collapsing from the breath. Otherwise the creature hadn’t stirred. He returned to his feet.

He was painfully picking grit out of one of the cracks with the butt of a needle when the gryphon sighed again. This time Varro listened, and heard in the indrawn breath before the sigh, a low, half-liquid rattling sound, that made the import of the sigh itself instantly clear. The monster was sick.

Dying?

He rose and hobbled round to where he could see the thing sideways on. The head lifted and for a moment the round eye—darker than gold, the colour of sunset—gazed at him. There was death in that eye. The head fell back, indifferent.

Death. “The demon of the well demands a death.” This time it would have two, its own, and Varro’s.

A delirium notion wandered into his mind. But it only needs one. Why mine? He giggled, and pulled himself together. There was meat on that carcass, but he couldn’t wait for it to die. He must kill it. How?

As Varro studied the huge animal in this fresh light it sighed again, and this time slowly stretched a foreleg. The claws were already extended, but they seemed to stretch further with the movement. Each was as long as Varro’s middle finger, but twice as thick at the base and curving to a savage point. Even a dying blow from such a weapon would be lethal. He would need to come at the creature from behind its back.

It was lying on its left side, so the heart was presumably out of reach. Slit its throat? The dense plumage of the neck prevented a quick, clean strike. But once, on a crossing of the Alps, Varro had watched the train captain deal with a pony that caught its leg in a cranny and broke it. The pony’s load had been precious and fragile. The pony, trapped half upright, but threshing around in agony, would in another couple of seconds have dragged itself free and fallen, but the train master had darted in, gripped the load with his left hand, and with his right driven a blade no longer than Varro’s hilt-deep into the soft strip between the collarbone and the neck, then taken the weight of the load while a pulsing jet of blood arched clean across the track. With decreasing struggles the pony had collapsed, and before long died.

Varro returned to the temple and honed his knife point on one of the steps. Though the appearance of intelligence in animals can be very deceptive, especially in birds (how bright, really, is a lark?), there was something about the creature’s patient dying that made Varro feel that it might understand what he was up to, and why. But the only move it made as he went round and crouched behind the shoulders was to raise its head and watch him again. He reached out, testing, tensed to snatch himself away if the fierce beak darted to attack, but the creature continued to watch him steadily as he shifted to choose the spot at which to strike. The train master had clearly known the exact run of a large artery in the pony’s neck. Varro had almost two handspans to choose from, and could only guess.

As his hand poised for the blow the monster laid its head back on the paving and stretched its neck a little, much as a brave man might, making things easier for the surgeon.

“Mercury, God,” Varro whispered, “guide this hand.”

Summoning his last strength, he plunged the knife in at a slight angle, forced the hilt forward to widen the inward cut, then flung himself back as the monster’s body convulsed, once. He rose and stood, gasping. Instead of a jet, a pulsing gush of blood was welling from the wound, so rapidly that by the time Varro looked it had begun to spread across the paving, draining towards the pool. The colour seemed no different from that of his own blood, or any other animal he knew of. He went and sat on the steps, watching the life fade out of that sunset eye.