//------------------------------// // Closer Than Yesterday // Story: The Princess's Bit // by Mitch H //------------------------------// They passed over Rust Island somewhere in the darkness, the distant roar of the orebreakers hopelessly lost in the Princess's Bit's own rumbling engines. Perhaps the bat-ponies saw that red-stained streak of granite and pine spinneys that marked the end of the Griffish Isles, but no other waking member of the regiment did. The dawn broke bloody and fey over the Bight of Iron, greeting Giles and his lance as they climbed to the top of the Bit's envelope. Two posts marked the aft and fore lookout posts perched on the crest of the envelope, little partially-enclosed porch-like structures called 'aeries' by the sailors. In a normal airship, these would be mared by proper sailors, sharing the precious old spyglasses which were the tools of the trade. They'd decided early on, the ship's master and the master sergeant, to put members of the flightless troop to this task. Charlie Troop was the odd tom out in the squadron, immobilized in the air by their lack of wings, dependant on pegasi or griffons or bat-ponies to haul them around in heavy, awkward chariots. The idea was that they'd be used to take and hold landscape features, to protect the guns of the battery, to clear the decks of heavy ships, and to control the decks of the squadron's own ship, the terribly vulnerable Bit. But as a result, the mares and stallions of Charlie Troop were often stuck in place, locked down by doctrine and their inability to just pick up and flitter off. A file of watchponies clambered along with Giles' lance, the dawn watch come to replace the early morning watch. The rope ladders leading up around the fat bulk of the envelope was an easy climb for a talon'd race, but apparently it was kind of a mane-raising effort for the poor hooved races. He tried to make allowances for the wingless ponies. Giles had intended to launch from the fore aerie, where the redness spreading across the horizon just above the ponies' princess's still-unseen sun heralded the advent of day. The earth pony that held the watch looked up from his cheap binoculars, and blinked his astonishing dragon-eyes at Giles and his normal-eyed relief. "By the brown-stained tartan of MacDoo, what 'appened to you?" Giles gasped out in surprise. "Wot? Nuffin', corporal. What are you on about?" "Your eyes, Pill Box," said the relieving Charlie trooper. "Yer glowin' like a bat." "Oh, right, yeah. Rippin', ain't it? The major, she gave us these!" Trooper Box held up a cheap trinket necklace with a fleck of crystal glowing in its grasp. "Night vision 'exes!" Giles glared at the giddy Trottish pony with envy, and began plotting how he could steal one for himself. He was still turning it over in his head when he and his birds threw themselves off the leading edge of the Bit and soared into the heart of the sunrise. The Bight of Iron was vast and empty in mid-June, the shoals of fish and other creatures of the deep long since run north for the arctic upwells and the rich green algae of the continental shelves. The only moving things in that great emptiness were ships, ships racing from one populated place to another. It was a desert of water and air, a void through which objects hurtled hither and yon. The Bight wasn't a place to be, but a space to traverse.  The Bight of Iron was nowhere, but it was the way to everywhere. And a great bird was tearing through the empty, cloudless void over those empty endless expanses of swift-currented waves, dropping in front of Giles' weary griffons.  "Gertie's found somefing!" one of his file-closers yelled at Giles as she belled her wings and dropped back from the fore of their patrol. "You don't think!" Giles waxed sarcastic. The roc was a great distraction from the unpeopled void they were attempting to patrol. He understood it was a sort of practice for the days ahead, when they entered the crowded spaces over the archipelagos and peninsulas that crowded the complex around the mouth of the Gullet. But actually doing it in the here and now was painfully dull. There was absolutely nothing in the air over the Bight, and endless fathoms below the low waves that barely marked the surface of the Bight.  Giles twitched his wings and shrugged to signal the rest of his two-file patrol to rise and cover his movement. They would ascend, and lay in wait to pounce on any 'enemy' that might approach Giles and the roc and the roc's handler. The roc was stooping on an empty expanse of ocean, far away from either of the two surface ships in view, carving shallow furrows as they raced off to their respective destinations. As Giles dropped along with his fellow flier, he lost view of said sailing ships, his world shrinking from the vast enormities of the empty Bight, to a smaller vestibule of that particular empty stretch of the general emptiness.  As Giles got closer, he saw what the roc had spotted. A great white shark - more of a dingy, dirty beige, despite the name - had risen to the surface and was moving swiftly. The shark, like everything else in this void, had tried for speed, hurrying out of the empty, fishless starveling trap it had somehow found itself within, to some place with something to eat. It was, instead, going to be something to eat, as the great talons of the enormous raptor-bird knifed into the waves and seized upon the great predator of the deep.  Giles' eyes widened in astonishment. It was a huge fish, and although the roc was enormous, the weight of the shark was great, and to pull it out of the jealous grip of the sea - he thought for a moment that the cheering roc-handler was going to lose her charge, and her life in a single ill-considered impulsive predatory start.  And then the water let loose its grasp, and the enormous wide wings beat, once, twice, victoriously! Salt water sprayed everywhere, as the twisting great fish twitched and spasmed desperately, trying with flailing flippers and tail to find purchase in the dry, alien air.  The roc couldn't get her beak around to give the struggling shark a killing bite, as she fought against that old villain gravity and her captive's own coiling spasms, and the roc's handler for some reason didn't take to the air with a knife or spear to aid her charge. Giles finally met his fellow flier, and pulling his spear out of its sheath on his back, curved hurtling beneath the roc's beating wings. He used his speed and his spear, lancing one of the great fishy beast's eyes shaft-deep.  He came to a complete stop, cupped wings and forearms and haunches around his spear and the shark's alien monstrous bleeding head, and pulled his spear-shaft out of the unsettlingly flexible eye-socket of the beast.  The blow hadn't killed the shark, and he nearly lost his rear right paw to the gnashing teeth of its saw-toothed maw, sized just right for the devouring of stupid griffons. Re-directing his spear, Giles stabbed again for the other eye-socket, and buried it deep, deep, stirring it around, looking for the idiot fish's tiny brain. Eventually, the shark stopped struggling in the roc's talons, and Giles could breathe again, drawing in that salt-tang stink of dying fish.  "Thank you, little bird," said the smug voice of that idiot roc-handler. Where was she? Why didn't she help? "My Gertie appreciates your help. If you could get off the shark, it would lighten her load a bit." "Oh, right, sorry," Giles said, taking to his wings once again. His glittering armor was stained a bit with shark's-blood. He hadn't thought about sharks or fish having blood, but they certainly did. He'd never been a naval bird, not in his civilian life, not in his half-life in the stews of Trottingham… "You're going to have to wash that off, lance corporal," the roc - no, the roc's handler said. "It'll start to smell right off if you don't." "I… don't know how to wash in the sea, without getting so wet and heavy that I sink." "I'll show you how, after we get this baby back to the Bit. It's more than I can eat in a sitting, I think we'll have the cooks do a proper cook-up, what do you think?" "I think that sounds fine, Lady George. What do you think it was doing out here? I don't see any fish it could have been chasing." "Only it knew where it was going, my fierce little friend. And now nobody else will ever know. Let's go home, and clean up." You can go into the great empty, hoping to find some distant shore. But there are no promises that you'll ever find that farther shore. Sometimes, the only thing a shark - or a griffon! - will find is some unimaginable surprise awaiting them in the unknowable deep. The redesign had resulted in a number of auxiliary hatches built into the main deck along the center line, which theoretically could be used to access parts of the engines and the drive shafts to the aft of the ship, and the cargo holds and workshops to the fore. They'd also been overbuilt in several cases so that underneath the smooth-surfaced 'top' hatch were a set of ceramic fitted forms built to take detachable open hearths.  Four ponies could join hooves and flip the hatch cover over, revealing the ceramic base and sockets. Another team brought over the hearth and the fuel, and socketed them in place. The wood was cooked until a bed of charcoal formed, and then came the chowder pots.  A single shark, even a great white shark like the one that Lady George had brought home for the noon meal, couldn't possibly have stretched to feed the whole ship if they'd cut up the remnants into steaks; it wouldn't even have fed the griffons alone. They had to stretch it out for the rest of them. So, chowder. Eventually, nine boiling chowder pots were putting up their savory steam over the gathering heads of the sailors and the troopers crowding the narrowed confines of the main deck. Diced potatoes, corn, beans, powdered milk and assorted fresh vegetables were thrown into the pots along with the shredded flesh of the great fish. Lyra drooled, staring from the railing on the forecastle down into the foremost chowder pot, and watched one of the kitchen ponies stir the milky chunks as it slow-boiled.  "You know," said the turul as she picked her beak with one of the shark's ribs, "you ponies are a lot more carnivorous than I expected when I came west looking for aid. I pictured these vast fruited plains, full of field crops and pastures, with somehow sapient ruminants grazing placidly among the bobbing grain-heads, pausing now and again to argue philosophy over the chewing of your cud." She was sitting above the half-butchered remnants of the shark, having donated the remains to the squadron's lunch.  "Could you possibly conjure a more offensively pastoral picture, Gyongyike? You make us sound like a bunch of cattle." Griffons and ponies were engaged in butchering the great fish, and ponies were carrying buckets of shredded and flensed shark-meat down the stairways to the chowder pots steaming on the main deck. There was hardly any blood left to drain through the gutters underhoof, to be eventually rinsed away and the planks holystoned by well-fed troopers or sailors after all was said and eaten. "And you don't think that sounds offensive to cows? Ah… cows are thinking creatures, aren't they?"  "Don't they have cows in Beakland?" Lyra asked, looking up from her slow-cooking lunch in the nearest chowder-pot on the deck below, and tried to forget how hungry she was. "Not as such. There are prey animals in the steppe which I think are similar - big, juicy ruminants. As far as I can tell, they don't talk. Or, at least, I've never gotten one to say anything sensible before I stopped playing with my food and put it out of its dumb misery." Lyra swallowed, a little sickly, and not feeling that hungry anymore. "I didn't really think about how much meat a species your size must eat. They really aren't sapient?" "I've never had a successful conversation with an aurochs, no. Or the long lizards. Most turul think that the long lizards are more likely to be thinking beasts, but again, no signs of tool use, or speech." "Just to be sure… don't just ask your prospective meal if they're a person. Ask anyone around them if they think so, too. I've known ponies who are mute." "If it ever comes up, Magus Heartstrings. I've mostly subsisted on fish and sharks since coming west, anyways. Though I'm told that pigs are dumb beasts, I've only had pork once or twice." "Well, yeah, don't eat any cows. They're idiots, but they're talking idiots." "I'll take it as gosling truth, magus." "So… do you miss the Great Nest?" "I barely ever spent any time in the capital. Few turul do. It's more of a place to gather for roosts and to brood. We spend most of our days flying the steppe or the taiga, or the polar shores." "So that's a no?" "No, magus, I miss it desperately. All my journeys are a passage to, or from home. All distances are calculated, in my heart of hearts, as distances from the Great Nest." "How far are we today?" "Closer than we were yesterday, Lyra Heartstrings, closer than yesterday."