The boy ran off happily, past the stately rows of cypress, back towards the minarets of the Palace, rising into the dark sky like a second grove of trees.
But the next evening found the boy not roaming free in the Garden, but curled in the corner of the stall, pouting. He drew his knees up to his chin and scowled. He had been lying that way for a long while when he saw a shape crawling towards him through the secret door. It was the girl, hay decorating her black hair like a crown of gold. He starte
d in joy and dragged her with eager hands out of the passage and into his stall.
“I was not as clever as I thought,” he confessed. “Dinarzad did not discover me, but the fat Cook saw me sneak in and swore to tell if she ever caught sight of me out of doors again. I could not decide whether to go out again—I was trying to think, trying to be brave as Sigrid on the pirate ship, to go to my Griffin no matter what. But I could not decide.” He blushed, though he hated to do it.
“It doesn’t matter. You are easy to find,” the girl whispered, smiling with half her mouth. The two settled into the corner of the stall while the sorrel snorted and stomped softly, nuzzling at his salt lick.
“Now, the white Griffin was despondent for a long while after Giota embraced her wall,” she began, her voice lilting like the sway of rushes in a summer storm. “She could not be consoled, and flew in circles around the Basilica, crowing in grief like an albatross. And this sound, though not so piercing as her mother’s shrieks had once been, were carried gently on the wind to the red peaks of Nuru, and there Jin the blue Griffin heard his sister’s sorrow echoing for years upon years. So when the Monopod climbed upon his back to go down into Shadukiam, Jin was glad, for the last two creatures he loved in all the world would be waiting for him under the dome of roses…”
I DID NOT KNOW MY BROTHER WAS COMING, BUT something in my lion’s heart woke and began to stalk back and forth within me. Something in my eagle’s heart rustled and tested the air with its wings. For days before his turquoise shape appeared, a blurry spot in the sky, I waited, though I did not know for what.
And then he came, carrying some misshapen creature on his back. We stood together before the Basilica, before the twisted roots of the high-arching door, dwarfing the parishioners who were so well trained to avoid looking at monsters while they passed in and out of the holy place. Monsters were part of the other Shadukiam, the shadow city which found its sacred space behind the church in the body of a twisted, mouthless creature. The pious Shaduki were very skilled at ignoring the other city.
The creature, which I could see was a Monopod with a rather unimpressive foot once he had extricated himself from my brother’s feathers, stood awkwardly by while Jin pressed his head to mine, and we nuzzled each other in silence, stroking necks with our beaks and closing our eyes against the other’s familiar scent. Unbidden, crooning, burbling cries rose from our long-separate throats. The Monopod cleared its hideous throat pointedly. Without looking at it, Jin barked:
“Go, Monopod. Bring the Yi-woman to me by midnight, and I will do your deed.” His eyes stayed locked on mine, and the little man hopped away.
“Giota is not my mother anymore,” I croaked, the sadness of it still able to break my throat in half. Jin only shrugged his azure shoulders.
“She never truly was, my sister. You ask so much from her.”
“You haven’t seen what she did to herself! Go to her and see it, see how she has beggared herself into filth and squalor! Go and ask her to tell your fortune—that’s all she is now, a stupid gypsy reading the Stars for signs!”
And so we went to her together. Reunions are wearying to relate—they only matter to those reunited. The complicated embrace of two giants and a slight creature clad in her own hair is too delicate and careful to describe. We loved her; we still love her; we held her like a chick between us. She rolled her black eyes up to us, parting the hair over her belly to speak.
“I know you do not wish to hear it, but it is time—there are eggs waiting to be hatched, and my pretty blue boy will not live out the night.”
Jin did not stir, but caressed Giota’s cheek tenderly with a long ink-blue forefeather. I started, stricken. “I wish I had come only to see you, Quri,” he whispered, “but I am here for the stump-leg, and I am meant to kill a thing tonight. Whenever you murder, you pay for it—thus do we pay for the Griffin who murdered horse and Arimaspian, and they pay for the Griffin they kill.”
“Go now, into the sky,” Giota rasped urgently. “If these can be called my grandchildren, so be it—but they must be born. There is no one else to quicken her.” She climbed from our embrace back to her mossy wall, and turned her face from us, stroking her lips and muttering softly. Jin looked at me calmly, with shame or joy or despair I could not tell. But he rose up into the sky with a single stroke of his wings, and I followed.
How can I tell you of the mating of Griffin? We are not birds; we are not cats, but we spiral up to the bellies of the clouds as birds do, and we bite into each other’s throats and shoulders as cats do. No one had told us how; no one had told us we should not. Our eyes blazed gold and black, our fur bristled and our hackles rose. We snapped at each other and growled deep in our chests; we wrestled in the air like angels. We circled each other in the blinding blue and white of heaven, and he sunk his teeth into the back of my neck, and I cried out like the sound of bells shattering, and we wept as we came together under the sun and the thousand roses of Shadukiam.
When we descended, the stars had broken the skin of the sky, and we were bloodied and bruised. The Monopod stood waiting at the great door of the church—at his side was another of his kind, a female. Its skin was pockmarked and sallow, almost translucent, like petals wilting. It leered at us, revealing tiny teeth, jagged and sharp. I sucked in my breath—it was clear that a Yi was lurking under that skin.
“Do I get the male or the breeding cat?” it hissed, grinning horribly at us.
“It was the only way,” the first Monopod said pleadingly. “It would not come unless I promised it a body.”
The Yi licked its cratered lips. “We have never managed a Griffin. You all fix it so that you die alone on wretched beaches and boil your blood in the desert. We are curious; what will it be like to fly with those wings?”
Jin looked at me for a moment and whispered thickly, “It is like dying.”
Then his dark shoulders shifted imperceptibly. He moved so quickly I saw only a blue rush, and sunk his talon into the eye of the decaying Yi. It screamed with such violence my ears ached to burst, a terrible sound—metal grinding on metal or the squeals of pigs and rats. The eye-white around my brother’s talon puddled and sagged, dribbling onto the polished courtyard like spoiled milk. Finally, there was little left but a pile of half-liquid bones, and these the Monopod gathered to his chest lovingly, weeping with thanks.
“I will bury them properly, I will say the words of the High-Growing Moss above her grave, and every year after on this day. Thank you, Jin-of-the-Red-Peak, thank you, thank you. You do not know how much you have given me.” He bowed many times, bobbing ridiculously like a toy. I breathed relief; this horrible transaction was done.
And suddenly the courtyard was full of white shapes, panting like a pack of dogs and baring their teeth, yelping and snapping. I had never seen Yi, truly, only heard of them, and certainly I had never seen so many, and so many in the late days of their possession, when the bodies mirrored the surface of the moon—green-white, scarred, tight and shining like masks of bone. They had lost all semblance of the civilized demeanor they liked to affect, and stood around us howling and slavering like starving wolves. They clapped their cadaverous hands together with a gesture between menace and joy; bits of their fingers flew off the bone, thudding to the pavement like dough dropped from bakers’ spoons.
Their speech was a terrible chorus of hissing and smacking of tongues, and they did not speak at once or separately, but their sentences floated from creature to creature, as though none could finish a thought without his brothers and sisters.
“How dare—”
“You touch us? You are—”
“Hated of Moon, we are her best—”