Andada gripped Varro’s elbow to prevent him moving nearer.
“You make?” he whispered. Varro nodded, and they went back to the market. He spent an hour drawing sketches of different possible styles. Andada chose three, then took Varro to buy the materials, casually, from different warehouses, among other stuff he needed for his normal trade. Varro watched with interest. From his experience with the guild in Timbuktu he saw quite well what was happening. There was good money in imported saddles. Andada by making them on the spot could undercut the importers with a better product. The importers would not like it at all.
Andada was a just man, as well as being a cautious one. Having done a deal that allowed one of the importers to conceal the provenance of Varro’s saddles, and leave a handsome profit for both men, he started to pay Varro piecework rather than a wage, at a very fair rate, allowing Varro to rent a room of his own, eat and drink well, and for the moment evade the growing prospect of finding himself married to one or more of Andada’s older daughters. He started to enjoy himself. He liked this city, its cooking, its tavern life, its whole ethos, exotic but just as civilised as Ravenna, in its own way. So as not to stand out he adopted the local dress, parasol, a little pill box hat, thigh-length linen overshirt, baggy trousers gathered at the ankle . . .
But not the slippers. While his fellow citizens slopped in loose-heeled flip-flops, he stuck to the gryphon-hide boots he had made for himself in the desert. They were the only footwear he now found comfortable, so much so that on waking he sometimes found that he had forgotten to take them off and slept in them all night. Presumably, in the course of that last hideous stretch to the gryphon’s pool, he had done some kind of harm to his feet, from which they had only partially recovered—indeed, unshod, they were still extremely tender—but had managed to adapt themselves to the gryphon boots during the long march out of the desert. It was almost two months before he discovered that there was more to it than that.
Unnoticed at first, he had begun to feel a faint tickling sensation on the outside of both legs, just below the top of the shoes at the back of the ankle bone. He became conscious of it only when he realised that he had developed a habit of reaching down and fingering the two places whenever he paused from his work. The sensation ceased as soon as he unlaced the boots and felt beneath, but though he could find nothing to cause it on the inside of the boots themselves, it returned as soon as he refastened them. It was not, however, unpleasant—the reverse, if anything—so he let it be and soon ceased to notice it.
So much so that it must have been several days before he realised that the sensation was gone. He explored, and found that where it had been there was now a small but definite swelling in the surface of the boots, but nothing to show for it when he felt beneath, apart, perhaps, from a slightly greater tenderness of his own skin at those two places. The swellings had grown to bumps before the first downy feathers fledged.
He studied them, twisting this way and that to see them, and then sat staring at nothing.
Talaria, he thought. The winged boots of the God Mercury. Impossible. But nothing is impossible to a god. Talaria. Mine.
Varro’s attitude to the gods had always been one of reasoned belief. He didn’t think, suppose he had been ushered into the unmitigated presence of a deity, and unlike Semele could endure that presence, that he would have seen a human form, or heard a voice speaking to him through his ears. Whatever he might have seen and heard he would done so inside his head. The human shape and speech were only a way for him to be able to envisage the deity and think about him. Similarly with the talaria. Suppose Mercury had chosen to appear to him in human form, he would have done so with all his powers and attributes expressed in his appearance, including that of moving instantaneously from one place to another. The talaria were, so to speak, a divine metaphor. Now the god was presenting him with a real pair. To what end? So that when the wings had grown he could fly instantaneously back to Ravenna? He wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He liked it here.
Another few days and the little wings were clearly visible, bony, pale and pitiful beneath the scant down. They would have been a distinct embarrassment with Roman dress, but the trousers he was now wearing fastened just below them and there was plenty of room for them in the loose-fitting legs. Indeed, he himself barely noticed them during the day, and spent his time as usual, but at night when he took the boots off and laid them beside his bed the wings started to beat in pitiful frenzy. They quieted at his touch, but fell into their frenzy again as soon as he let go, so in the end he took them into his bed and let them nestle against his chest, where they were still.
They were, he realised, in some sense alive. Faint quiverings ran through them in their sleep. He found their companionship comforting, taking him back to a time early in his apprenticeship when he had found a stray puppy and adopted it for his own until it had grown big enough to become a nuisance about the household and his master’s wife had insisted on its banishment. He hadn’t minded that much. Growing, the animal had lost its charm, but he could still remember the pleasure he had taken in it when it had been smaller. He felt something of the same protective affection for the talaria.
It took a while for the first true feathers to fledge, and by then the boots were changing in other ways. Their tops were creeping up his calves, bringing the wings with them, and also the stitching down the lower part of the heel. There were still the same five lace-holes on either side of each boot, and the same dozen crisscross stitches, but below that the leather had simply joined itself up, with a faint seam marked mainly by the flow of the hairs. All this made the boots increasingly tiresome to remove. So if he was tired, or a little drunk after a pleasant evening in a tavern, he tended to sleep in them.
Looking back later he sometimes wondered how long he had been concealing from himself what was really happening to him. The truth was thrust in his face one evening at the start of the hot weather—apparently they were due a month of appalling temperatures before the blissful onset of the rains—and Andada took him down, along with all the family, to bathe in the immense river that ran a mile from the city walls. Almost the whole city seemed to be there, each section of the community bathing in its designated place. They all stripped off, men, women, and children, and waded in together, with a great deal of shouting and splashing and general horseplay to keep the crocodiles away—or so they claimed, though Varro guessed that the natural high spirits of these people would make them behave like that if nothing more aggressive than a newt inhabited the river. Afterwards the children rushed screaming up and down the shore while the adults lay chatting on the sandy earth, the more fastidious with a scrap of cloth over their privacies. Varro was popular. He had an excellent stock of tall stories picked up from the adventures of his fellow slaves, and a dry way of telling them which these people found amusingly different from their own ebullient style. (He kept quiet, of course, about his own slavery, and also about gryphons.)
He was chatting with a neighbour when one of Andada’s younger offspring scampered up, stopped, stared for a moment, pointed, and exclaimed, “Funny feet, Warro got!”
Several adults snapped at the child. Remarks about a person’s appearance were considered extremely offensive. The child’s mother snatched him away, apologising over her shoulder as she led him off. The nature of the whole exchange made Varro realise that everyone around had been aware of the peculiarity, but by then he had recovered his poise enough to shrug and say, “Forget it. It’s true, anyway. It’s not a disease, just a deformity that runs in my family. That’s why I wear these boots. I’ll put them on so you don’t have to look at my feet.”