where man-belly became steed-chest. His shoulders tensed. “You beast,” she growled, and bit his lip. He flared his nostrils, reared up on his hind legs and pawed the air.
“Begone and hurry back,” she shouted, and slapped his rump. He took off down the road. Joshua jumped up on his back at a dead run, and the two disappeared over the hill as Rose watched with a loving smile.
*****************************************************
Joshua’s cabin was less than half the distance to Moorelli’s farm from Beauty’s, but a little out of the way. It wasn’t until they’d traveled almost an hour that Beauty slowed to an easy clip, then stopped altogether.
“What is it?” asked Josh. He jumped down to the ground and stretched his legs. He knew the Centaur well enough to know when something was on his mind.
Beauty pawed the earth. “There was something else in Port Fresno,” he said. “I did not want to upset Rose.” He knew he would never understand Humans completely, but of one thing he was certain: they could assimilate only small amounts of information at one time, they could not intuit the large sweeps of meaning that constituted the real world; they had no sense of the essence of wholes, though their understanding of parts was admittedly great. So Beauty was never quite sure what had to be spoken, and what was implicit even to the Human mind.
Joshua’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
Beauty threw his head back and forth, waving his mane. “It is only Humans who are being attacked.”
Joshua met the Horseman’s eyes with his own. “Race War again?”
“Could be. They are kidnapping young ones, though. Pirates, maybe. Slave trade.”
They were both silent, digesting the information, thinking of all the hard times they’d seen and were yet to see. “Anyway,” Beauty went on, “after this errand, I am restringing my bow and staying close to home.” He nodded at the forest ahead of them. “These woods are dark, Joshua. Keep your people in the house after sunfall.”
Joshua nodded. Beauty backed off a few steps and raised his right arm. “Until soon, friend.”
“Until soon,” returned Josh. Beauty ran in the direction of Moorelli’s farm, while Joshua headed into the wood.
Josh knew something was amiss as soon as he neared the cabin. Not a sound, not a movement. No Ollie playing, no Mother singing. He dropped to one knee and listened. Only a mockingbird, mocking.
Joshua put down the squirrel he’d been carrying and slipped a knife out of his belt. He waited. Still nothing. He ran silently through the trees around to the front of the house, to try to get a look in through the west windows.
What he saw was that there was no door. And when he looked past the doorway into the main room, his insides twisted tight.
He ran into the house, knife in hand, and looked around desperately. Dead, all dead. He sucked in his breath, trying to take in the scene. Mother, Father, Grandma, Jack. All horribly mutilated, irrevocably dead. He knelt by his mother’s side, his eyes filled with tears. He held her hand. Cold, stiff.
There was a noise in the corner. Joshua swiveled with knife out, all his fury and grief concentrated instantaneously in the steel blade. But it was Jack moving, not quite lifeless yet. Josh ran over to the old man and held his head up.
“Uncle Jack, what happened?” He wanted to say more, but his voice wouldn’t work, his throat was constricted, and dry as his eyes were wet.
Jack looked up at him. “Joshua, is it you, boy? I’m dyin’, boy. Word help me.”
Joshua shook him gently. “Jack, who did this?”
Jack focused a little. “Two monsters and a bloodsucker, boy. I tried, I tried…”
“What about Dicey and Ollie? What about Dicey?”
“Carried ‘em off,” whispered the old man. “I’m dead, boy.”
“What did they look like?” persisted Joshua. His despair was already forging grief into hate.
Jack’s voice hardly moved air. Joshua had to lower his ear to the man’s mouth. “One was a lion-hawk. One was a bloodsucker. And one foul thing no man should ever give name to and I thank the Word I’m dyin’ so I’ll never have to remember its face.” He closed his eyes, then, and died.
Joshua ran through the cabin, looking for something, anything. He wanted to run, to fight; he felt, for a moment, as if he were going crazy. He picked up a chair and smashed it repeatedly against the floor, he kicked the wall. Then he sat down on the rug and cried and cried and cried.
*****************************************************
When he finished burying them, he sat down at the table in the main room and stared into the cold fireplace. He felt hollow, but somehow clean. Purposeful. His life to this minute was over: his life from now on had commenced.
He pulled the quill from his boot and dipped it in the tin of ink he’d just mixed from ashes, dried blood, and water. On the thin paper before him, he methodically wrote:
Here lies the family Green. Old woman Esther, sons Jack and Bob, and Bob’s wife Ellen. All were Humans. Murdered viciously and without provocation by a Griffin, a Vampire, and an Accident, as sworn by dead Jack. Jack’s daughter, Dicey, and Bob’s son, Ollie, abducted by same. Surviving son Joshua, hunter and Scribe, hereby sets the record and claims Venge-right, on this 14th day of March, After the Ice 121.
Joshua Green, Human & Scribe
He slipped the quill back into his boot. He rolled the parchment into a tight cylinder and fitted it into a thin, stainless steel tube, which he sealed at both ends. He had a whole box of these tubes – Scribe-tubes, they were called – stored under the bed. He took two more empties and strapped one to each leg. Finally, he wrote an identical statement on another paper and secreted that one in his belt.
He went outside and dug one last hole among the four graves he’d just laid. The day was dimming, he was tired. He felt an oppressive need for sleep coming over him. Soon he would rest from his ordeal.
When his hole was two feet deep, he dropped in the paper-filled tube and began to cover it over. He had to stop momentarily, as another wave passed over him, a pressing, physical need for sleep. He closed his eyes. The absence of visual input relieved his dizziness somewhat; but the sense of sleep pressure was replaced by a discrete pinpoint of light, deep inside his internal field of vision. It seemed far away, this tiny bright spot, but it tugged at him, exerting a gentle pull, like a cool draft sucking softly down a well, like static electricity, like the ambivalent gravity of a first kiss.
He opened his eyes. The sun was almost down. He finished filling in his hole and marked the place with a wood marker bearing the standard symbol of the Scribe – a snake twisting inside a circle – which he carved into the wood. Only then did he notice the black smoke rising ten miles to the north. He stared at it dumbly for a few moments, then whispered the dreadful realization: “Beauty’s farm.”
Grimly, he started running.
Joshua
