World Enough, and Time. FastPencil Premiere
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late as June.
South of Beauty’s farm were scattered ranches, settlers and trading posts. Population density increased farther south, until there were actually scattered cities – usually walled, self-sustaining centers where people and other animals gathered for companionship, commerce or protection.
Beauty’s farm was ideally situated. Cool and sparse enough most months of the year to be uninteresting to adventurers and soldiers and warmed enough by the Pacific currents to make fruit-growing easy. Beauty hadn’t ever considered leaving before, once he’d settled down there with Rose. Neither had Joshua.
So it was with considerable regret that they folded up their lives and slid them like wedding suits into the bottom drawers of their memories. They were hunters now, and a successful hunter can afford only one thought: the prey.
They set off in the morning as first light trembled. Beauty carried only his bow and a quiver; Joshua had his knives and his falcon-feather pen.
There was no trace of the Vampire or the Griffin, save a green wing feather from the latter – they’d obviously made their escape by air. But the wounded Accident left a fairly easy trail of blood, smells and sign, which Beauty and Josh tracked east from the farm for many miles into a woodsy marshland.
There the trail turned south.
Tracking became a bit more difficult through the marshy scrub, but Josh had a good eye, and Beauty an equine sense of smell. So they kept up a steady pace all morning and were silent, side by side, with senses alert. When their shadows were short they paused by the rim of a pond to rest and to eat.
“He is paralleling the coast,” said Beauty, flaring his nostrils into the wind.
Josh lay on his belly sipping from the pool. “He’s slowing, though.” Beauty nodded, shook his mane back and forth, pawed the ground. Joshua stood up. “Be still, Beauty. Thoughtful rest is the hunter’s friend.”
Beauty snorted, “Spoken like a Scribe.” He stood at the edge of the cool water and watched his reflection dance in the ripples that still ran from the spot where Joshua’s thirsty lips had touched. Beauty scorned the Human religion of Scribery. It elevated unreal, meaningless scratches to something they were not and turned them into powerful tokens. It promoted false patience, false hope, false priority. Beauty shrugged as it was but one more Human enterprise that remained cryptic.
Josh squinted into the south. “We’ll find our people.”
Beauty turned his head, his lips thinned in smile. “It is good to hunt with you again.” He gave all his words equal weight, his meaning many-layered, alluding to much that had passed between them. First, it referred to the fact that he was born to the hunt, had always hunted, had missed the hunt these past few years on his farm. It referred also to ten years earlier, when he and Josh had regularly hunted together, when they together supported an extended family of friends and relatives on their game. It referred to the great Race War that had pitted Humans against all the other species and had divided Beauty and Joshua. It had even forced them to hunt each other. Until Beauty was wounded by a Human prince, and Joshua hid him in the woods, nursing him back to health with Rose’s help.
When the War ended, national boundaries were gone, and Kings and Popes went on waging their own personal wars for land and power, but Beauty put down his bow and swore to be a farmer the rest of his days and give part of his crop always to what was left of Joshua’s family.
So now he meant to tell Josh that it was good to hunt again, good to hunt with Josh again, good to hunt with Josh again, good to hunt with Josh again.
Josh understood and said so with his face.
A nearby orange tree provided the two hunters with a meal of the sugar-heavy fruit.
“Where do you think he’ll go to ground?” Joshua asked.
“There is a Forest of Accidents some hundred miles east and south,” said Beauty, “but I doubt the thing can last that far. Best just to stalk and corner.” He paused. “I only hope we catch it before it dies, so we can question it.”
Joshua nodded. “We need more information if we’re ever going to trace the others.”
“If it is slave trade this concerns, I know two places to nose about. One is a brothel, not more than half a day from here. The Accident may head there, in any event.”
“I remember, we went there once, fifteen years ago.”
“It is not so nice a place now, I am told.” They shared a brief, painful thought: their loved ones, sold in chains, to pirates or worse.
“And the other place to nose about?” Josh asked.
“A pirate camp, on the coast south of Newport. I have friends there as well who may help.”
“Pirates?’
“Now, yes. Once they fought with King Jarl’s Elite Guard.” Jarl was the Bear-King, and his Elite Guard Service – the JEGS – had won many battles against the Humans in the Race War.
Joshua remembered them well. “But if this isn’t slave trade, if this is war again…”
Beauty left the question unanswered. It lay between them a moment, then blew away like the ashes of yesterday’s fire. “We are brothers now. They cannot make us hunt each other again.”
Joshua felt Beauty’s truth. “Rose read my eyes yesterday,” he said.
“What did she see?” He didn’t always believe in Rose’s predictions, but they held special import now, if only as tokens of his beloved.
“She told me I lost something.” They looked at each other with sad hindsight. “She said there’d be a long hunt, though, and that I’d find it again.” He put the force of promise in his voice.
“What else?” Beauty insisted, buoyed by the vision.
“The rest needed translation. She said I was going to drown – but that I’d live again.”
“Better not tell that to the Pope’s men. They would drown you for blasphemy, and if you lived again they would drown you doubly for double blasphemy and insolence.”
They were about to set off when Beauty twitched his ears to the side and said, “What was that?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Josh.
They both listened. The wind, a cricket, the leaves. And then a subtle sound, almost not a sound at all.
They crept silently toward the noise, through tall grass and shallow puddle. It grew indistinctly louder and seemed to be coming from behind a large rock formation. It made the sound a hand makes passing through spiderwebs.
Beauty stood clear of the rocks and strung an arrow. Josh took out his blade and sidled around to the far side of the stones. Knife in hand, he crouched behind the largest piece of granite, then leapt over it blindly to the other side.
He was ankle-deep in mud. Before him was a pool, five yards across – a tar pit, covered with a quarter inch of water. At the edge of the pit, just beginning to sink, was a huge, brightly colored butterfly; its four-foot wings beating wildly to try to pull itself into flight out of the tar.
Josh smiled sympathetically. He reached out, grabbed the terrified creature by its dark furry body, and lifted it gently out of the mire. It shivered violently.
He carried it back to where Beauty was standing, bow drawn. “Just a Flutterby. Trying to drink the water off a tar pit,” Joshua explained. The animal was quivering, its delicate red-and-gold wings straight up in frightened attention. Josh carried it back to the pond and began to wash the tar off the large insect’s belly with sand and lemon juice from a nearby tree’s fallen fruits. Beauty put up his bow and walked over.
“Poor thing,” the Centaur shook his head. “They are beautiful, but not, I think, the smartest of creatures.”
Josh