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To conceal the wings he had with some difficulty removed boots and trousers as if they had been a single garment. His companions looked elsewhere as he put them on the same way, but far more easily. As the light died they built fires of driftwood all along the shore and roasted gobbets of meat and sweet roots and passed them round. But the sense of embarrassment, of something not entirely acceptable about Varro, hadn’t fully faded by the time they were walking home from the river under the stars. Varro carried one of the sleeping children slung over his shoulder and Andada walked beside him with another, gossiping all the way, obviously aware of his need for support.

Another man in Varro’s position would have gone out and got very drunk. Varro preferred to keep his liquor for pleasure, so he merely went back to his room, lit his lamp, removed his boots and studied his feet with care. Again, this must have been something that he had subconsciously avoided doing for a long while.

He had known, of course, that the skin was tender, but hadn’t realised how thin it had become all over the foot, including the sole. No wonder he had found the few barefoot paces down into the water and back up the shore that evening so uncomfortable. The nails were soft and tender too, and more pointed than rounded, but not very noticeably so, any more than the unusual breadth and stubbiness of the feet themselves seemed actually freakish. The thing that must have caught the child’s attention was the position of the big toes, each of which had separated itself from the other four by moving backward over an inch, so that it now lay alongside the ball of the foot.

As Varro put the boots on again the wings—fully fledged now, desert-coloured, barred dark and light—gave a little flutter of pleasure, like a dog cavorting on being taken for an unexpected walk.

By now the gates of the city were closed, so Varro climbed up onto the unguarded walls and walked round to the northern side of the city. Here he leaned on the parapet and gazed out towards the desert.

It was quite clear to him what was happening. It wasn’t only the boots that had brought it about. I have eaten the gryphon’s heart, eaten its flesh, he thought. I have slept on its hide, I have bathed in its blood. I could abandon the boots, but still it would happen.

He remembered the magnificent strange creature that he had killed. He remembered the life fading out of that sunset eye.

Next day he asked Andada to close the stall early and took him up to his room. In the stifling dim heat he told him his whole story, rolled up his trousers and showed him the boots. Tentatively Andada reached to touch a wing, but it shrank from his hand.

“Warro, what is happening to you?” he whispered. “Witchcraft?”

“Godcraft, more like,” said Varro. “Mercury enjoys a joke.”

“I know a clever woman. Expensive, but I pay.”

“You are a good man, Andada, a good friend. I haven’t had a friend like you for a long while. But when a god decides, there is nothing anyone can do. Everything I might try would serve, one way or another, to make it happen. But it is not so bad as you might think. I shall be free—freer than most men. And you will be rich. And unless my whole nature changes we will still be friends. Listen. This is what I want you to do . . .”

Varro stayed in the city, enjoying its life and constructing saddles to any pattern he fancied, until his toenails began to grow through the toes of his boots, each point as sharp and hard as a steel bradawl. He could have carved rock with them. His feet were now unmistakably paws, and he was walking with a strange, catlike lope. He was already wearing a long, loose cloak all day, for though his wings had migrated to the small of his back their tips trailed almost to the ground, and his tufted tail was not much shorter.

He said good-bye to Andada’s wives and children, giving each of them a handsome present, and headed north with Andada and four laden pack ponies, though it turned out that the two men needed to travel well separated as the animals were ungovernable in Varro’s presence.

Five times Andada came north with further supplies. By their last meeting Varro was half again the size of an ox and walking on all fours. His neck had begun to fledge and his wings were almost full grown. For Andada’s benefit he managed a clumsy flutter of about forty paces. Andada laughed with streaming eyes, but wept very differently as they said good-bye, though Varro told him, speaking with a marked screech in his voice, that he was content with his fate.

It must have been over a year later that Prince Fo, out hunting, was watching an austringer being flogged to death because a hawk had failed to return to the lure. Naturally his entourage were also intent on the spectacle, since it was unwise to be noticed inattentive to the Prince’s pleasures, so it was only when the austringer’s cries were drowned by a wilder scream that anyone looked overhead. By then the monster was plummeting down with a falcon’s stoop. Prince Fo was snatched from his saddle and carried skyward, screaming himself. The monster swung, poised as if having chosen its spot, and dropped him. By the time his company were running towards the outcrop onto which his body had splattered, the monster had swooped again and was carrying the austringer away.

In that same year a strange little man arrived in Timbuktu, black and hideous, but leading two mules laden with expensive and exotic goods. He seemed to know which merchants were reputed to be honest and through an interpreter explained that he had discovered an ancient trade route across the desert and was anxious to reopen it. He didn’t want to travel it himself, because he was by nature a stay-at-home, but would like to act as an intermediary and facilitator in his home city for merchants from the north. He had brought samples to show what was available from there, and gold for anything extra that he might buy at the northern end. Because of the scantness of the watering places, his could never be a major route, but for small and costly items such as he had brought it was so much shorter than the long circuit round the desert that it was well worth while.

All this seemed straightforward enough, and worth further investigation. Only two things he said raised eyebrows. When he was asked about the security of the route, and how many guards would be needed, he laughed and said it was unnecessary. That might have been foolhardiness, though the little man seemed sensible enough in other ways, but what were his hearers to make of his explanation that only one fee would be demanded for use of the route—a young and healthy slave, to be left for the demon that guarded the fourth and best watering place? Still, unless remarkably handsome, untrained slaves were two a penny in the market, and the little man was evidently serious for he went and bought three on the morning of his departure, explaining that one was his own fee and the other two were for the two men the merchants had hired to go with him and return with a report on the route.

Word of the expedition must have reached ears other than those for which it was intended, for they were followed into the desert by a party of brigands, expecting to overtake and rob and possibly kill them once they were beyond help. The bodies of these men were found two days later piled against the south gate of the city, apparently dead from the mauling of some large beast. The scouts returned to report that on the little man’s instructions they had left the slaves tied to a rusty old ringbolt set into the masonry of a ruined temple beside the demon’s pool, but had found all three gone on their return; that the route was possible for small parties, well-guided; and the city at the further end was the same as that they already knew from the longer route, and well worth trading with.

Travellers began to pass to and fro. They never saw the demon, though the slaves they left for it were invariably gone without trace by the time they returned. It was assumed that the demon had carried them elsewhere to consume. Other evidence of the demon’s existence accumulated. No brigand survived any attempt to rob the merchants. Moreover, occasional travellers who had missed the route in a sandstorm, and given themselves up to die in the desert, woke to find themselves back at the pool with a cache of sun-dried meat under a small cairn by their side. The demon clearly guarded his route well, so much so that in gratitude masons were eventually sent from Timbuktu to rebuild and renovate his temple.