Chapter 2
Her head felt heavy, like it was overfilled with water. Gemma had slept all night without moving a muscle. Now sunlight pushed through the lattices, marking bright yellow lines on the wooden floor.
Gus was stooping over her, dabbing her forehead with a cold washcloth.
“Take your time,” he said. “We are in no hurry today. I will check the traps later. Right now we have better things to eat.”
Ponies must have been very fat. In the adjacent houses Gus had found dozens of spices, bags of dry vegetables and many pounds of hardtack sealed in glass jars.
“All the bread is long gone,” he explained over soup. “There were mouse bones everywhere.”
“This is great,” Gemma said with her mouth full of broth and flakes of hardtack.
“We cannot stay here,” Gus continued. “You did not look into that mirror, did you?”
“No,” Gemma said with a shudder.
They did not leave the house until past noon. Gemma felt rather weak, but her headache had faded to a manageable throbbing. Her new cloak was cool on her skin; she wore it under her old earth-red one.
Gemma took three steps and stopped dead in her tracks. A trail of red slush led across the street, ending at a pile of cracked bones and fluffy white fur at the opening of an alleyway. A loop of coarse string lie at the halfway point, one end still tied to a sizable aspen branch.
“Bah.” Gus spat and rubbed his temples with one hand. “Damn cougars.” He turned a full circle, squinting against the glare of the sun.
“There’s nothing here for you!” He bellowed. “You hear me? No more ponies! No more pigs! Go get your own food!”
The rope broke in two upon the gentlest tug. The thief had bitten through it. While her father tried to salvage the snare Gemma cautiously approached the remains of the rabbit. She touched the cord-wrapped hilt of her dagger to make sure she still had it. If this cougar was anything like the ones in the mountains a young griffin would be a perfect meal.
The bones were badly mangled, mixed with bits of muscle. The thief must have been young and quite hungry; even the skull had been crushed and parts of it swallowed.
Stepping back, Gemma froze. In the snowdrift were three small wide footprints. It would have been a baby cougar, if it was a cougar at all. The four toes were squished together near the palm and rounded like eggs. The print was more like that of a little griffin.
“That is strange,” Gus said of it dismissively. “In any case, a creature this small is of no concern to us. We will have to be smarter with the traps tonight.”
Gemma stayed beside her father as he dismantled the six remaining snares. They were all empty. A familiar uneasiness had settled over the young griffin. The empty city seemed once again a scary place full of dark secrets.
She recalled the stories she used to hear about the ponies. Some of her older friends remembered the Last Harvest, when griffins from ten nearby tribes drove the ponies out of Kelp town. Gaston swore that he had been there to hamstring the biggest unicorn who ever lived (though he would have been four years old at the time). The older kids told many stories of evil enchantresses who lured griffin children with sweet cookies and spiced drinks and then cast spells to bind them in servitude.
“They always wore these big black cloaks, even in summer.”
“This one unicorn had three little kids scrubbing her house all day and all night. They had this dumb look in their eyes; like fish.”
“All their feathers fell out. If you walk down that street at night, you’ll hear a hundred children crying from inside the houses.”
Gemma strained her ears as they followed the roads north towards the farm. Her father’s presence was a great comfort to her, though she wished she was still small enough to ride on his back. The stone ground was cold and unforgiving, built for hooves and not fleshy feet. Evil oozed from the cracks.
“The earth itself is cursed; it’s how the ponies kept it so clean. That’s why nobody ever goes there. Just looking at it from afar gives you bad luck.”
“Gemma,” Gus said suddenly.
Gemma’s shoulder was pressed tight against her father’s side, forcing him towards the houses on his side of the road. She jumped away with her feathers puffed up in embarrassment.
“What’s wrong?” Gus asked, pulling Gemma into his bosom. “Are you still thinking about the cougars?”
Gemma hugged her father and cried into his feathers. He pulled his cloak around her; it felt safer than any wall of stone and mortar.
“Let’s go home,” she sobbed. “I… I want to go home!”
Gus sighed heavily and ran his beak across the top of her head.
“Gemma,” he said. “I said you could stay with mama until spring. I asked you to do just that many times, but you said you wanted to come here. For two fortnights you have walked with me. In this hard winter you have done more than anyone can reasonably ask for. I am proud of you. So what are you afraid of? Tell me; there is no one else around.”
“Unicorns,” Gemma mumbled and immediately squeezed her eyes shut.
“Ah, that’s the problem.” Gus squeezed her one more time and laughed drily. “Which version do you like best? ‘Gingerbread cookies’ or ‘cupcakes’? ‘Witch’ or enchantress? Do they eat the slaves after the work is done?
“Gemma, do you think any of your friends ever walked these streets in the old days? How many of them could walk at all back then?
“Those stories have been around since your grandpa’s time. Just think about it this way: ten tribes of griffins drove all the thousands of ponies from this town for the birth of one boy. Why would we tolerate generation after generation of unicorns stealing our children?
“No, those stories aren’t right at all. Ponies don’t eat meat unless all their crops fail, and that has not happened in my lifetime. Even their pigs they keep as companions. And they are small in general; about the size of a fawn, but stouter. That cloak you’re wearing was probably made for a full-grown mare.
“There were five races of ponies in this city. Name a few for me, Gemma.”
“Unicorns,” she said immediately.
“And?” Gus smiled.
“Earth ponies?” Gemma said.
“Three more.”
Gemma’s brows drew together in annoyance. Her father smiled wider.
“You see?” He said. “You do not know nearly as much as you imagine.
“The other races were pegasi, sylvanocians and alicorns; strange names, I know. These last three could fly; the pegasi spent most of their time in the air, though they had the tiniest wings. The sylvanocians, or bat ponies, were all the same colour: a kind of blueish dark grey. They had bat wings and big bat ears, and they were seldom seen during the day. And the most powerful of all was the alicorn. There was only one as far as I know, and she was their leader. She was bigger than all the others, but not a giant by our standards. She was simultaneously a unicorn and a pegasus, and some said that she was alive when the ponies first showed up on these shores.”
Gus paused and looked at his daughter. Gemma had stopped crying, and was instead staring up at him with her mouth hanging open.
“Walk with me now,” he said. “I can tell you all kinds of things, if you want to hear them, but I want to see the farm before nightfall.”
Gemma still walked close to Gus, but her heart was eased. True to his words, he spoke almost constantly of the ponies; stories that Gemma had never heard before. They went into some of the houses, and Gus showed her a handful of ‘bits’: little round wafers of brass that all ponies used to ‘buy’ things.
“They traded too,” Gus said. “But to get anything reliably you had to have ‘bits’. The pony in that house at the end of this street used to give me four bits when I brought her the milk from the farm. That was enough for a burger and a big mug of cider from this ‘food stand’ at the end of the sea wall.
“That’s the best thing about the ponies. They spend years pulling up grass, pulling down trees, digging up rocks and stomping seaweed into the ground. It seems absurd. But then they have more than they can ever eat. They had so much food that there were ponies who did nothing but cook. And in winter they used to give us things almost for free. I once traded a single rabbit pelt for eight jars of ‘strawberry jam’ and a loaf of bread. That was more than I could carry.”
They emerged into a big square plaza facing the northern end of the sea wall, where mortar merged with a rocky hill. The air was perpetually thick with a fishy-smelling mist, and the paving stones were coated with a fine white dusting of salt. Gus took a deep breath.
“This was a ‘public salt farm’,” he said. “This whole plaza used to be full of salt piles higher than your shoulder. Griffins from even further inland than us would come here every summer and go home with big sacks full of salt. There are pumps on this part of the sea wall. You can’t see them in this mist, and I doubt they still work. In the summer I used to go up there and pump sea water. It’s a scary place to be, so high up with the ocean on one side.”
He looked to the sky and frowned. It was starting to get dark again.
“Come on,” he said, putting his hand on Gemma’s shoulder. “I know the way from here.”
They went inland along the northernmost street of the city. Many miles of flat land lay between the last paving stone and the first small hills to the north. Gus spoke no more, and quickened his steps.
At last she saw it. A long grey building at the foot of a hill, far from all the others. Its slanted roof was covered with snow, and two of the upstairs windows were missing their lattices, but it looked to be in good shape otherwise.
They left the road and trudged through the pristine snow. Underneath was a bouncy layer of grass; in life it would have been taller than Gus. The snow was even thicker near the farmhouse, and the entire first floor was buried. Fortunately Gus remembered where to dig. By sundown Gemma was chipping through the last chunks of ice that sealed the cracked red door.
The air was dusty with faint scents of a hundred things mixed together. Into the twilight they dug, until they had an alcove of packed snow wide enough for the door to swing freely.
Gemma huddled close to her father as they stood peering into the completely dark room. Any moment now a horrible creature could burst out from within; a bear perhaps, or something worse.
“All her servants are undead! They’re still waiting in the city. They have nowhere else to go. Hiding by day, coming out at night to catch mice or rabbits, or even…”
“Come on, Gemma,” Gus said, putting one arm across her shoulder.
He lit a fire on the part of the floor that was dirt. They left the door open. Night had settled in for its long lonely shift, and Gemma could not decide which way to face. The room was huge and had a high ceiling. Thick wooden beams cast great shadows overhead, and she could not see under the gigantic long table draped with a tattered yellow tablecloth. Floor to ceiling cabinets took up the southern wall; there was no telling what secrets they held.
“Don’t be scared,” Gus said, motioning for her to sit down. “The door was intact. There is nothing here but us.”
“I don’t like this place,” Gemma whimpered. Huddling close to the fire gave her little comfort, for her own shadow was as dark as any other.
“This whole town has seen better days,” Gus sighed. “When the ponies were here, there were lamps in this room. Eight of them in total, and candles too. Big, bright candles as long as your arm. During winter solstice there were bowls of burning oil on that table. We kept it burning all night.”
“But the ponies aren’t here anymore!” Gemma snapped. The dancing shadows kept her constantly on edge. If ponies were so small, why did they build such a big house?
Gus walked around the fire and took her under his cloak. With one wing he held her by his side.
“That is why we came back,” he said, craning his neck so that his dark face covered the only opening in Gemma’s field of view. “We are going to save everyone, you and I.
"We have endured three hard winters. The boar get smaller and smaller every year. Soon we’ll be chasing piglets. The rabbits won’t last either. We need this farm, Gemma; all the tribes do. We have hunted this whole wide land from east to west! We’ve picked every bush clean. We’ve dug up all the roots we can find. The Goldenhands have been going to sea for fish since before the ponies came.
“There will never be enough to eat if we go on like this. You think it’s normal to gorge after a good hunt and then tell yourself that you are not hungry for several days. That’s how you’ve had to live, and it pains me to see you that way. When I was your age I didn’t know what it meant to be truly hungry.
“We are here to prepare the way. In spring the whole tribe will follow in our footsteps, and we will welcome them with warm beds and a feast. You can tell mama about all the things we did when she gets here. Next winter we’ll have lamps and candles and bread on the table. Then we’ll see how you like this place.”
Gus prepared the meal without leaving his daughter’s side. They had no more meat, but boiling the rabbit bones produced a passable broth.
Gemma felt a lot better after eating.
Papa is right, she thought as her mind grew cloudy. This is nice.
They each picked up a burning stick from the fire, and Gus led the way through the house. The wide wooden stairs squeaked under their weight. Starlight filtered through the second floor windows. The hallway was much smaller than the rooms below, and for that Gemma was grateful.
“We’ll sleep in here,” Gus said, peering into one of the many rooms. “Come on. Hold my light so I can make the bed.”
The room was smaller than the one from last night. A night stand and a simple wood bed were the only furnishing; no mirrors anywhere. Its window lattice was tighter than the ones in the hallway, so almost no light came through.
Gus laid two blankets on top of the prickly hay mattress and bid Gemma sleep, but she would not leave his side. So they went out together to set new snares and survey the surrounding land.
Gemma fell asleep as soon as her chin touched the bed.
That night she dreamed that she heard footsteps from the lower floor. They walked slowly and deliberately, silent save for the creaking of floorboards and the sound of talons scraping wood.