John Wright - Fugitives of Chaos

I put my hand to the snow, touched a drop, raised it to my nose, touched it to my tongue.

Ink? It was red ink.

Wait a minute. Who had just been saying that wounds were nothing but red ink… ? And the vulture. I knew who sent the vulture. Lord Mavors. It was part of his curse. Whoever threatened to kill one of us would die. And the vulture…

The vulture had not been coming to save me. Grendel had no intention of killing me. The vulture had been coming to save…

I looked at the eagle.

"Colin… ? Is that you… ?"

1.

I walked south, parallel to the sea cliffs, my feet wiggling a bit inside Grendel's big boots. Snow whitened the ragged boots and the burnt hem of the bearskin. I wore the bearskin over my head like an Indian squaw in a blanket. My hair was still wet, and it hung in icy snarls down my back.

I had lost my leather aviatrix cap somewhere along the way. It was true that I also had lost my shoes and underwear and clothes and every other worldly possession. But I missed my cap.

At first, I walked with the eagle held close to my chest, with a flap of the bearskin over him, trying to warm his cold feathers with my body heat. His wounds were mostly healed, but not all. I do not know why the turn-the-blood-to-red-ink trick worked on some wounds and not on others.

For that matter, if Colin could cure two broken wings, why was Grendel unable to wish his severed leg back on? Surely there was no desire stronger or more profound than that of a one-legged man to get his foot back. I wondered if Boggin had interfered with Grendel's wishing-ability in some way.

There was still blood seeping from his feathers, but I did not see any red spurts, as you would get if a major artery were pierced. I kept him wrapped in a handkerchief, until it got brown; then I would change bandages by throwing that hankie away, and wrapping another one around the shivering bird.

For the first mile, I had talked with the bird, trying to get him to clack his beak to count out numbers, or respond to signals, or do something to demonstrate that he was something smarter than a bird. Maybe he was too sick and cold to try to communicate. Maybe he wasn't Colin at all. I didn't know.

My ability to fret was eroding. I was still grateful to the bird, even though the idea that he was not Colin grew on me. I did not drop the creature in the snow, but I stopped thinking of him as my wounded comrade-in-arms. I held him to my chest under Grendel's shirts, so that his head was under my chin, his beak peeking out from my collar, yellow eyes peering at the pathless path ahead.

2.

After the first mile, I was too cold and weary to keep trying to talk. I just gritted my teeth and trudged.

Little white clouds puffed from my lips; sogginess sloshed in my boots. Every hundred paces, I would try to look into the fourth dimension. The light from the hypersphere was a distant ember, then a dull spark, then a not-so-dull flicker. It was still too dim and far-off to see with; my hyper-body and higher senses were blind and numb still; but the fact that Grendel's curse seemed to be wearing off comforted me.

And I admit, I had to use one of the handkerchiefs to wipe away tears that, to my surprise, I kept finding on my cheeks. By rights, I should have cheered when Grendel got his throat ripped out and fell to his death. He had boasted about murdering people and "biting ears off," and I suspected I was not the first virgin girl he had dragged down to his lair for a quick wedding and a brief life as a sex toy.

I could not even think of another person so horrible as Grendel had been, except maybe for some of the oriental tyrants described in Herodotus, or Torquemada, or Adolf Hitler or something.

Those sailors he killed had wives and sweethearts and children back home. No doubt, they had stared out windows at the gray sea on cold nights, wondering; and no doubt, years passed, and no news ever came of the boyfriends, husbands, and fathers who had been the central pillars of their lives.

But pity is not something that fits in an either-or matrix. Just because I felt sorry for his victims did not mean I was not also sorry for him.

It would have been simpler if I could have just hated him and laughed when he died, or made some cruel wisecrack, like a good British spy in the movies when he pushes the bad Chinese spy into a nuclear reactor coolant tank. ("Have a nice trip , Grendel! See you next fall ! Har, har, har!") When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less innocent.

Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because the word "innocent" does not mean "naive," it means "not guilty."

Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults, not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small. Grown-ups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that power. But what about the ones who don't? Aren't they more innocent than children, not less?

So I trudged in the snow, weeping slow tears for a dead monster who had wanted to marry me, and wishing I were like a child, cruel and unpitying, again.

3.

I topped the rise. Below me was a narrow slope of hill, then the brink of the upper cliffs, the ragged limestone juts of lower and lesser cliffs, and the inlet, where the docks of Abertwyi are. The village curves around the mouth of the inlet, separated by a low stone retaining wall from the water. Across the water could be seen the looming silhouette of Worm's Head, a steep-sided island, which rises sheer from the waves.

On the slopes north of the village, climbing up toward my vantage point, were derricks and ropes used by stone miners. To the south was the fish cannery that had made the Lilac family rich. On a hill in the middle of the village were the church and the courthouse, and to the east were the tenant estates of some of the influential local families, the Penrice and Mansel Halls. To the northeast was the extension of the highway, easily visible through the nude trees of wintertime, a marching line of telephone poles and power lines to either side…

Except it was not there.

Gone. Vanished.

The physical features were the same. There was the inlet, the cliffs of limestone, and, across the water, the brooding rock of Worm's Head.

There was a village there. It looked enough like Abertwyi that a moment passed before I noticed how small it was. During the day, it is hard to tell whether a town has suffered a power blackout, but after a moment, I noticed no lights were burning anywhere.

The fish cannery was gone. The highway was gone. There were no power lines or telephone poles. The streets were narrower, unpaved, and there were no signal lamps. There was no traffic. On the slopes closer to me, there were a few crudely made wooden derricks, and only a small part of the cliff had been mined for limestone. At the mouth of one of the cuttings, I saw, not a diesel engine, but a steam engine from a museum, next to a coal bin. Both were coated with snow and ice at the moment, white and motionless.

The boats. Nothing seemed that different about them, except that there were far more, even though the docks were fewer. Then I noticed the lack of motorboats. Then I saw the side-wheeler, with a crooked black smokestack above it.

I tried to look into the fourth dimension again. For a moment, I got a clearer view, then a dimmer, and I could see the utility and inner nature of the things around me. The moment I looked, a strand of the morality substance touching me jerked rigidly, and glittered as some energy or signal passed along it.