Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

Another few days and the little wings were clearly visible, bony, pale and pitiful beneath the scant down. They would have been a distinct embarrassment with Roman dress, but the trousers he was now wearing fastened just below them and there was plenty of room for them in the loose-fitting legs. Indeed, he himself barely noticed them during the day, and spent his time as usual, but at night when he took the boots off and laid them beside his bed the wings started to beat in pitiful frenzy. They quieted at his touch, but fell into their frenzy again as soon as he let go, so in the end he took them into his bed and let them nestle against his chest, where they were still.

They were, he realised, in some sense alive. Faint quiverings ran through them in their sleep. He found their companionship comforting, taking him back to a time early in his apprenticeship when he had found a stray puppy and adopted it for his own until it had grown big enough to become a nuisance about the household and his master’s wife had insisted on its banishment. He hadn’t minded that much. Growing, the animal had lost its charm, but he could still remember the pleasure he had taken in it when it had been smaller. He felt something of the same protective affection for the talaria.

It took a while for the first true feathers to fledge, and by then the boots were changing in other ways. Their tops were creeping up his calves, bringing the wings with them, and also the stitching down the lower part of the heel. There were still the same five lace-holes on either side of each boot, and the same dozen crisscross stitches, but below that the leather had simply joined itself up, with a faint seam marked mainly by the flow of the hairs. All this made the boots increasingly tiresome to remove. So if he was tired, or a little drunk after a pleasant evening in a tavern, he tended to sleep in them.

Looking back later he sometimes wondered how long he had been concealing from himself what was really happening to him. The truth was thrust in his face one evening at the start of the hot weather—apparently they were due a month of appalling temperatures before the blissful onset of the rains—and Andada took him down, along with all the family, to bathe in the immense river that ran a mile from the city walls. Almost the whole city seemed to be there, each section of the community bathing in its designated place. They all stripped off, men, women, and children, and waded in together, with a great deal of shouting and splashing and general horseplay to keep the crocodiles away—or so they claimed, though Varro guessed that the natural high spirits of these people would make them behave like that if nothing more aggressive than a newt inhabited the river. Afterwards the children rushed screaming up and down the shore while the adults lay chatting on the sandy earth, the more fastidious with a scrap of cloth over their privacies. Varro was popular. He had an excellent stock of tall stories picked up from the adventures of his fellow slaves, and a dry way of telling them which these people found amusingly different from their own ebullient style. (He kept quiet, of course, about his own slavery, and also about gryphons.)

He was chatting with a neighbour when one of Andada’s younger offspring scampered up, stopped, stared for a moment, pointed, and exclaimed, “Funny feet, Warro got!”

Several adults snapped at the child. Remarks about a person’s appearance were considered extremely offensive. The child’s mother snatched him away, apologising over her shoulder as she led him off. The nature of the whole exchange made Varro realise that everyone around had been aware of the peculiarity, but by then he had recovered his poise enough to shrug and say, “Forget it. It’s true, anyway. It’s not a disease, just a deformity that runs in my family. That’s why I wear these boots. I’ll put them on so you don’t have to look at my feet.”

To conceal the wings he had with some difficulty removed boots and trousers as if they had been a single garment. His companions looked elsewhere as he put them on the same way, but far more easily. As the light died they built fires of driftwood all along the shore and roasted gobbets of meat and sweet roots and passed them round. But the sense of embarrassment, of something not entirely acceptable about Varro, hadn’t fully faded by the time they were walking home from the river under the stars. Varro carried one of the sleeping children slung over his shoulder and Andada walked beside him with another, gossiping all the way, obviously aware of his need for support.

Another man in Varro’s position would have gone out and got very drunk. Varro preferred to keep his liquor for pleasure, so he merely went back to his room, lit his lamp, removed his boots and studied his feet with care. Again, this must have been something that he had subconsciously avoided doing for a long while.

He had known, of course, that the skin was tender, but hadn’t realised how thin it had become all over the foot, including the sole. No wonder he had found the few barefoot paces down into the water and back up the shore that evening so uncomfortable. The nails were soft and tender too, and more pointed than rounded, but not very noticeably so, any more than the unusual breadth and stubbiness of the feet themselves seemed actually freakish. The thing that must have caught the child’s attention was the position of the big toes, each of which had separated itself from the other four by moving backward over an inch, so that it now lay alongside the ball of the foot.

As Varro put the boots on again the wings—fully fledged now, desert-coloured, barred dark and light—gave a little flutter of pleasure, like a dog cavorting on being taken for an unexpected walk.

By now the gates of the city were closed, so Varro climbed up onto the unguarded walls and walked round to the northern side of the city. Here he leaned on the parapet and gazed out towards the desert.

It was quite clear to him what was happening. It wasn’t only the boots that had brought it about. I have eaten the gryphon’s heart, eaten its flesh, he thought. I have slept on its hide, I have bathed in its blood. I could abandon the boots, but still it would happen.

He remembered the magnificent strange creature that he had killed. He remembered the life fading out of that sunset eye.

Next day he asked Andada to close the stall early and took him up to his room. In the stifling dim heat he told him his whole story, rolled up his trousers and showed him the boots. Tentatively Andada reached to touch a wing, but it shrank from his hand.

“Warro, what is happening to you?” he whispered. “Witchcraft?”

“Godcraft, more like,” said Varro. “Mercury enjoys a joke.”

“I know a clever woman. Expensive, but I pay.”

“You are a good man, Andada, a good friend. I haven’t had a friend like you for a long while. But when a god decides, there is nothing anyone can do. Everything I might try would serve, one way or another, to make it happen. But it is not so bad as you might think. I shall be free—freer than most men. And you will be rich. And unless my whole nature changes we will still be friends. Listen. This is what I want you to do . . .”

Varro stayed in the city, enjoying its life and constructing saddles to any pattern he fancied, until his toenails began to grow through the toes of his boots, each point as sharp and hard as a steel bradawl. He could have carved rock with them. His feet were now unmistakably paws, and he was walking with a strange, catlike lope. He was already wearing a long, loose cloak all day, for though his wings had migrated to the small of his back their tips trailed almost to the ground, and his tufted tail was not much shorter.

He said good-bye to Andada’s wives and children, giving each of them a handsome present, and headed north with Andada and four laden pack ponies, though it turned out that the two men needed to travel well separated as the animals were ungovernable in Varro’s presence.