Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

He found he was shuddering, partly from exhaustion and the aftershock of violent and dangerous action, but also from the knowledge (though not the understanding) of what he had done. Though both had seemed necessities, this was something wholly different from the killing of Prince Fo’s slavemaster. The world had been well rid of such a man. The gryphon . . . there was no code by which he could value the gryphon’s life against his own. Good or ill, he knew he had done something portentous. What would the gods feel? Mercury had many responsibilities, being god, along with travellers, of science, commerce and healing, tricksters, vagabonds and thieves, and all merry fellows. He seemed to have answered Varro’s prayer and guided his blade point to the artery, which in turn seemed to suggest that he had no particular fondness for gryphons, but how could Varro know which of the captious deities might feel otherwise?

He went down to the pool again and poured a libation to the unknown god before he drank. Already the water tasted of blood. There was no point yet in washing. He had gorier work to do, but he needed to rest, so waited until as much of the blood as was going to had drained from the carcass. Even then he took the precaution of stripping naked before he started his butchery.

Skinning a gryphon proved little different from skinning a horse or bullock—all part of his apprenticeship. He did it systematically, as if sparing the leather that no one would ever have a use for. When he had loosed a flap large enough to fold back he cut out the huge right lung and exposed the heart. He cut that out and folded the flap of hide back over the flesh. Exhausted again by now he carried the heart up into the shade of one of the temple pillars, where he sliced small pieces off it and chewed them slowly, feeling the strength flow back through his body. By the time he had eaten enough the sun was almost overhead and the first vultures had arrived.

He dragged the loose lung a little way up the slope to distract them and then drove them away from the main carcass with rocks. Splashing himself often with water from his skin he toiled on, first constructing a meat cache out of fallen masonry, storing the liver in it, and then cutting out the rest of the innards and hauling them off for the birds. Next he cut and cached as much meat as he could eat in a fortnight, pulled the hide back over what remained and weighted it with boulders, and at last went and bathed in the now reeking pool. The sun had dried him by the time he returned to the temple.

Staggering and hazed with tiredness he tied cords between three pillars, draped his stolen cloak across them and lay down in its triangle of shade. The harsh cries of the vultures threaded through his dreams, which were of the gryphon still alive, but with half its hide stripped from its flank. As it snarled and slashed at a ring of prancing scavengers an outer ring of monsters—centaur, sphinx, basilisk, hydra, gorgon—watched lamenting. Mercury presided dry-eyed with a god’s half smile.

It was dusk when Varro woke. The gryphon’s hide had proved too tough for the vultures, but they had pecked out the great sunset eye.

There was a good moon, so he continued to dismember the gryphon far into the night, dragging most of the meat away for the vultures, and again next morning until the heat became intolerable. He rested out the worst of it and worked methodically on, careful not to break his knife, impatient with a joint. By late afternoon he had removed enough of the meat and bones to be able to heave the remains of the carcass over, and by nightfall he had the hide free, and almost whole, apart from the two large holes he had cut in order to be able to drag it over the wings. This had been his main aim. With it he could create a bigger and denser area of shade than was possible with the cloak and cloth. He dragged it up to the temple and laid it out, pelt upward, between the pillars. It was larger than he needed. There would be enough left over for him to add a hammock to his plans. He continued to work by moonlight, trimming rawhide thongs from its edges, until he was exhausted, at which point he folded the pelt in on itself several times and slept on it in more comfort than he had done since they had taken him to the slave-market. He did not dream at all.

By the third noon he had both awning and hammock in place, and strips of gryphon flesh drying in the sun, protected from the vultures by a structure of rib bones. That evening he started making his new shoes.

Here he had had two strokes of what seemed again to be god-given good fortune. While wrestling the hide loose he had planted a foot beside one of the wing roots for purchase as he heaved, and had noticed how neatly at that point the pelt that covered the sinews around the wing root matched the shape of his foot, running a handsbreadth up the wing bone beside his ankle. He was looking at the upper of a shoe, ready-made on the animal. Carefully he now cut loose the whole patch of pelt that he had left around the wing root, slitting it down the back of the heel to get it free of the wing. Then the same on the other side.

The soles he had also found already half-made. The beast’s immense pads, though almost circular, were each longer than his own foot, the skin as thick as the width of his thumb. He soaked his chosen pieces in the pool, then laid them out in the sun, urinated on them, folded them hair-side inward, covered them with sun-warmed rocks and left them to begin to putrefy. He then slept out the rest of the day.

When he woke he started to fashion crude tools from the beast’s bones and the rocks of the desert, and also hammered some of the long bones and extracted the marrow, which he mixed with part of the gryphon’s brain. By now he judged that the pieces he had set aside would have decayed enough for the hairs to begin to loosen in the follicles, so he laid them out on a cylinder from a fallen pillar and with the roughened inner side of one of the ribs rubbed the hair free. That done he turned them over and used his knife, sharpening it again and again, to slice away the innermost layer of the skin, exposing the true leather, which he set to soak in the pool while he ate. Lastly by moonlight he hollowed a shallow bowl in the earth, lined it with a single piece of hide, and used it to compound a reeking mix of water, marrow and brain. He then slept, again without dreams.

When he woke he drew his pieces of hide out of the pool and laid them out in the rising sun, while he cut more strips of the meat to dry beside them. Another day, his nose told him, and what was left would be no longer safe to eat. He worked on his tools for a while, turning the pieces of hide over from time to time until they were no more than moist. Now he smeared his mixture onto them, and worked it in until they were again saturated, and then laid them out to dry once more. When they were again merely moist he spread them onto the fallen pillar and rubbed and stretched and rolled and pounded them steadily for several hours. By the time night fell he had four cuts of true leather, crude but both supple and strong, even now that the water had dried right out of it. It was far better than he could possibly have hoped for. One might well have thought it had spent weeks, if not months, in the tanner’s vats.

Next morning, the eighth of his stay at the gryphon’s pool, he cut the pieces to shape and stitched them together, hissing peacefully at his work as he had always used to at his own bench in Ravenna. It was a long while since he had felt anything like this contentment. Before he tried the shoes on he inspected his feet, and was surprised to find how well they had mended while he had been busy with other matters. For this he dutifully praised Mercury, god, among everything else, of healing.

What he had made turned out to be short boots, rather than shoes, running neatly up just beyond the ankle bones and lacing down the back. What is more, they were amazingly comfortable, a pleasure to wear. In them he was able to walk far more easily than he would have dreamed possible a few days back.