The gryphon sighed. He looked up and saw the vast flanks still collapsing from the breath. Otherwise the creature hadn’t stirred. He returned to his feet.
He was painfully picking grit out of one of the cracks with the butt of a needle when the gryphon sighed again. This time Varro listened, and heard in the indrawn breath before the sigh, a low, half-liquid rattling sound, that made the import of the sigh itself instantly clear. The monster was sick.
Dying?
He rose and hobbled round to where he could see the thing sideways on. The head lifted and for a moment the round eye—darker than gold, the colour of sunset—gazed at him. There was death in that eye. The head fell back, indifferent.
Death. “The demon of the well demands a death.” This time it would have two, its own, and Varro’s.
A delirium notion wandered into his mind. But it only needs one. Why mine? He giggled, and pulled himself together. There was meat on that carcass, but he couldn’t wait for it to die. He must kill it. How?
As Varro studied the huge animal in this fresh light it sighed again, and this time slowly stretched a foreleg. The claws were already extended, but they seemed to stretch further with the movement. Each was as long as Varro’s middle finger, but twice as thick at the base and curving to a savage point. Even a dying blow from such a weapon would be lethal. He would need to come at the creature from behind its back.
It was lying on its left side, so the heart was presumably out of reach. Slit its throat? The dense plumage of the neck prevented a quick, clean strike. But once, on a crossing of the Alps, Varro had watched the train captain deal with a pony that caught its leg in a cranny and broke it. The pony’s load had been precious and fragile. The pony, trapped half upright, but threshing around in agony, would in another couple of seconds have dragged itself free and fallen, but the train master had darted in, gripped the load with his left hand, and with his right driven a blade no longer than Varro’s hilt-deep into the soft strip between the collarbone and the neck, then taken the weight of the load while a pulsing jet of blood arched clean across the track. With decreasing struggles the pony had collapsed, and before long died.
Varro returned to the temple and honed his knife point on one of the steps. Though the appearance of intelligence in animals can be very deceptive, especially in birds (how bright, really, is a lark?), there was something about the creature’s patient dying that made Varro feel that it might understand what he was up to, and why. But the only move it made as he went round and crouched behind the shoulders was to raise its head and watch him again. He reached out, testing, tensed to snatch himself away if the fierce beak darted to attack, but the creature continued to watch him steadily as he shifted to choose the spot at which to strike. The train master had clearly known the exact run of a large artery in the pony’s neck. Varro had almost two handspans to choose from, and could only guess.
As his hand poised for the blow the monster laid its head back on the paving and stretched its neck a little, much as a brave man might, making things easier for the surgeon.
“Mercury, God,” Varro whispered, “guide this hand.”
Summoning his last strength, he plunged the knife in at a slight angle, forced the hilt forward to widen the inward cut, then flung himself back as the monster’s body convulsed, once. He rose and stood, gasping. Instead of a jet, a pulsing gush of blood was welling from the wound, so rapidly that by the time Varro looked it had begun to spread across the paving, draining towards the pool. The colour seemed no different from that of his own blood, or any other animal he knew of. He went and sat on the steps, watching the life fade out of that sunset eye.
He found he was shuddering, partly from exhaustion and the aftershock of violent and dangerous action, but also from the knowledge (though not the understanding) of what he had done. Though both had seemed necessities, this was something wholly different from the killing of Prince Fo’s slavemaster. The world had been well rid of such a man. The gryphon . . . there was no code by which he could value the gryphon’s life against his own. Good or ill, he knew he had done something portentous. What would the gods feel? Mercury had many responsibilities, being god, along with travellers, of science, commerce and healing, tricksters, vagabonds and thieves, and all merry fellows. He seemed to have answered Varro’s prayer and guided his blade point to the artery, which in turn seemed to suggest that he had no particular fondness for gryphons, but how could Varro know which of the captious deities might feel otherwise?
He went down to the pool again and poured a libation to the unknown god before he drank. Already the water tasted of blood. There was no point yet in washing. He had gorier work to do, but he needed to rest, so waited until as much of the blood as was going to had drained from the carcass. Even then he took the precaution of stripping naked before he started his butchery.
Skinning a gryphon proved little different from skinning a horse or bullock—all part of his apprenticeship. He did it systematically, as if sparing the leather that no one would ever have a use for. When he had loosed a flap large enough to fold back he cut out the huge right lung and exposed the heart. He cut that out and folded the flap of hide back over the flesh. Exhausted again by now he carried the heart up into the shade of one of the temple pillars, where he sliced small pieces off it and chewed them slowly, feeling the strength flow back through his body. By the time he had eaten enough the sun was almost overhead and the first vultures had arrived.
He dragged the loose lung a little way up the slope to distract them and then drove them away from the main carcass with rocks. Splashing himself often with water from his skin he toiled on, first constructing a meat cache out of fallen masonry, storing the liver in it, and then cutting out the rest of the innards and hauling them off for the birds. Next he cut and cached as much meat as he could eat in a fortnight, pulled the hide back over what remained and weighted it with boulders, and at last went and bathed in the now reeking pool. The sun had dried him by the time he returned to the temple.
Staggering and hazed with tiredness he tied cords between three pillars, draped his stolen cloak across them and lay down in its triangle of shade. The harsh cries of the vultures threaded through his dreams, which were of the gryphon still alive, but with half its hide stripped from its flank. As it snarled and slashed at a ring of prancing scavengers an outer ring of monsters—centaur, sphinx, basilisk, hydra, gorgon—watched lamenting. Mercury presided dry-eyed with a god’s half smile.
It was dusk when Varro woke. The gryphon’s hide had proved too tough for the vultures, but they had pecked out the great sunset eye.
There was a good moon, so he continued to dismember the gryphon far into the night, dragging most of the meat away for the vultures, and again next morning until the heat became intolerable. He rested out the worst of it and worked methodically on, careful not to break his knife, impatient with a joint. By late afternoon he had removed enough of the meat and bones to be able to heave the remains of the carcass over, and by nightfall he had the hide free, and almost whole, apart from the two large holes he had cut in order to be able to drag it over the wings. This had been his main aim. With it he could create a bigger and denser area of shade than was possible with the cloak and cloth. He dragged it up to the temple and laid it out, pelt upward, between the pillars. It was larger than he needed. There would be enough left over for him to add a hammock to his plans. He continued to work by moonlight, trimming rawhide thongs from its edges, until he was exhausted, at which point he folded the pelt in on itself several times and slept on it in more comfort than he had done since they had taken him to the slave-market. He did not dream at all.