Aist was young.
She hatched on a whorlwise moon, tail-first – a stubborn, significant sign. She spent eight skycoils eating and hiding and when the ninth passed she ambushed her pater from above as he fed her brethren. Her attempted ingestion of his leftmost eye was laudable, and brought her fresh from her clutch to the roaming paddock.
Aist was strong.
She was half the size of the rest of the crèche, but caught up to them quick and fierce, by stealing and jumping and biting and spitting and hissing. And more biting. She took the food of the strongest by the end of her third skycoil in the paddock and everafter the biting required was lessened. Nobody wanted to be at the end of that again. They enjoyed having a full eyecircle of nine.
Aist was quick.
When the doommaker came to the roaming paddock and inspected the crèche, she ran and hid and took the adults nearly all spin to catch. The doommaker laid eyes and hands upon her, counted her eyes backwards and forwards, slapped her tail, wriggled her arms.
“This one,” she said, “is going to be trouble.”
“Whose?” inquired the attendant feedmaker, and the doommaker shrugged. So they gave up on it and took her out of the roaming paddock early.
Aist was clever.
They put her to the boneworker, and she grew bored with tending coals and began to steal small leftover sherds until she was caught making an entire scimitar. They put her to the borderwarder and she attempted to wrestle the packmater during feeding sessions. They put her to the sheltersheller and she ate half a wall when its hide would not scintillate correctly, then used the spraying blood to paint articulate and hurtful truths upon the remainder.
And it was because of all those things that the boneworker and the borderwarder and the sheltersheller and her pater came to the pathwatcher and spoke to it and said this, which was “this one is trouble.”
The pathwatcher shrugged. “Find things for her to do.”
“She will not do them,” said the boneworker.
“Keep her busy.”
“She will not stop her business.”
“Distract her.”
“She is distraction in scales.”
The pathwatcher hummed to itself and clacked the big claws that denoted its station under its official carapace. “Mmmph. Use your imaginations.”
“She has too much im-“
“Together. All of you together. Go on. Think. Think of something to preoccupy one neonate. I trust you, or you wouldn’t be you. Go on. Fulfil the trust.”
So they put their heads together and their arms entwined and they thought and argued for a full spin. And when that was done, they split up. Three of them went to eat, her pater went to Aist He found her by walking about exposed and vulnerable, and at last she landed upon his neck-nape.
“Neonate,” he said. “You have a thing to be doing.”
“I do and am,” she said, and bit at his eyes, which he was shutting carefully.
“Not this. You have a thing to be doing. Go out there outside the walls and outside the halls and go into the forest and find me a white stone the size of your head and bring it back. I need a new eyerest or your mater will devour me from boredom.”
Aist shrugged. “As pater pleases,” she spoke, and she bounced off into the air and off a wall while he went off to get something to eat, whereupon he found that she had already eaten half the honey.
“Neonate,” called a voice as she hurried through the rumbling bridge that swung between the halls as they plodded along, “neonate. I have a thing that must be done.” It was the boneworker.
“I’m busy busy busy,” she scolded him. “So busy that I can’t even talk.”
“No no,” said the boneworker. “It’s a small thing, a little thing. I need some bones from a bradbuck, there should be a dead one not far from here, only a little ways away. Go and fetch its ribs, won’t you? Just its ribs, the big nice hollow ones for blowpipes, that’s a good neonate.”
Aist sighed and hummed and whined and said “fine! Be that way!” and ran away, sliding down the walls and feeling their big grumpy sighs as her claws pricked them.
“Neonate, neonate! Attend to me, neonate!” The sheltersheller was hanging there, brushes in hands, surveying a dreadful big blank spot where one of the walls had shed a scale. “I am paintless, neonate!” he shouted. “Positively paintless! Fetch me some dyes, some good dyes from the good grey berries you can find outside. Go and get them, go on and on or this colour will set and we will be blemished for good! Go on!”
“FINE,” shouted Aist. And she stomped down down down the leg of the wall and down to its foot, where the borderwarder sat with her guards and watched the moons go by.
“It’s a wobblewise tonight,” she said idly as Aist went by. “Bad news if we don’t get these boys more feed.”
Aist didn’t reply, just hissed.
“Anything crunchy,” she said. “They’ve got good strong teeth. Anything nice and crunchy, or they won’t give it so much as a nibble’s nibble.”
Aist walked off into the foliage with her arms set as if to crush stones, and the borderwarder chuckled after her.
Aist was a lot of things, but she wasn’t foolish, and she knew all those errands at once meant something, and that something wasn’t all good news for her.
“They want to tire me out,” she said to herself as she hid on vines and slipped through pools. “They want to bring me down. They want to humble me up. And that means that there’s probably tricks in all these jobs. Yes, there’ll be tricks. I’ll track those tricks, I will, and stop them dead. Dead, dead, dead. Dead like that thing there. That thing that’s dead.”
It was the bradbuck the boneworker had set her after, and it was a good one – the bones were clear and glistening against the shrunken skin, as beautiful as a polished lip.
“That’s too good,” she said to herself. “Too good, too good by half.” And she threw a little stone at it.
Sure enough, up from those bones swarmed a feast of fleshwasps, each as big as her arm and three times angrier. They shrieked and screamed and gave up looking while she lay low there, half-immersed in her puddle.
“Mmmm,” she said. “Mmmm.” And she rolled in the mud until she was nothing but a muddy blob, took her stolen honey (not yet eaten) in her teeth, and crawled inchy-winchy all the way up to the very base of the bones, so close she could hear the little shouts the wasps used to talk to each other.
“Here,” she whispered, and she poured that very tasty honey inside the mouths of the three largest bones. “Here, here, here.” And the wasps heard the noise and smelt the honey and dove into those three fine bones quicker than anything. They were most unhappy when she plugged the ends with mud, and less still when she swung it into her bag.
“Good,” said Aist. And she rinsed off the mud, because it was smelly, and she dove to the bottom of the pools to look for white stones.
Six pools later she was making up new words that meant bad things. Every stone was red or orange; white was gone as gone could be. Just half a skycoil ago every stone they’d passed had been whiter than her mater’s eyes, but now they were harder to find than legs on a stenchworm.
She considered the stenchworm’s egg that had just halted her train of thought.
“Huh,” she said. “White enough.” And she tucked it into her bag.
Now she went to the thickets to look for food – guard-food, not normal food – and was disappointed. They were deep in the thickets by now, and if a thing was not soft and pliable enough to slip between branches it did not exist.
“Crunch crunch crunch, need crunch munch, a bunch bunch bunch” she nonsense-hummed to herself.
(Aist was not poetic)
She stopped to give her aching feet a rub and looked around. The hardest game she saw was an immature isoblob, smooth and hairy and nub-nosed and mostly mouth. It was shoveling its way through the forest floor on a journey that would take its whole life.
“Hmm,” she said.
Then she picked up some nice ripe quickseeds, put them in front of the isoblob, watched as it ate them, and bagged it.
“VERY crunchy,” she said. “At first.”
The grey berries were easy to find – very easy. So easy that she didn’t believe it, and that’s why she poked them with a single toe instead of grabbing them up.
“Oooh oooh ooh,” she hissed as the toe itched like mad, so hard that she almost tore it off with her scratching and clawing. “Ooh oh ooh no, ooooh no way am I grabbed that up. Oooh. Ooh!”
So she walked away from the grey berries, dug up a little juma-burrow, skinned the prickly little juma, and wrapped the berries in its hide spike-side-in, carrying the whole thing with the greatest care.
Then she walked home. And smiled a lot on the way.
“Have you brought food?” asked the borderwarder?”
“Here!” said Aist. And she fished out the isoblob, which snuffled aimlessly at the new things it was seeing.
“That’s as crunchy as a wet leaf,” said the borderwarder.
“Not after what it ate,” said Aist. And she threw it to the guards, who tore into it ravenously and downed it in less than a blink and a bite.
“What did it eat?” asked the borderwarder.
“Quickseeds,” said Aist. Then she ran, because some of the guards were already beginning to squat. The borderwarder’s shouts started loud in her ears as she ran, but then grew quiet – she probably didn’t want to open her mouth.
“Neonate,” said the sheltersheller suspiciously. “That was fast.”
“It was, it was, it really really was,” said Aist. “I didn’t want an ugly wall. Here, here, take the berries – I wrapped them up nice!” And she threw the bunch to the sheltersheller, who screamed a little and grabbed them out of the air by the skin of his teeth.
“Careful!” he admonished. “Careful careful careful CAREFUL!” If you get these on your scales, it’ll-” and then he started whimpering, as he watched the juices from the prickle-pierced berries seep out of the package and down his arm.
“Paint carefully!” she yelled. And then she was gone, and the scratching started.
“Ah, these are good ribs, fine ribs, true ribs,” said the boneworker approvingly as he eyed them up. “Did you have any trouble getting them?” he inquired, just a little too idly to be true.
“No,” said Aist. “I did take a trip getting them though. There’s a bit of mud on there and there and there and there and there.”
“Huh!” said the boneworker. “Easily fixed!” And he jammed his long, clever claws into the mud plugs of the ribs and pulled them right out, along with a fistful of fleshwasps.
“Oops,” said Aist. And she ran, ran, ran.
Aist’s pater knew she was there. She had just landed on his neck again.
“Did you have fun?” he asked.
“It was HARD and BORING and LONG and TIRED and I got bit by wasps and itched by berries and I looked everywhere everywhere EVERYWHERE,” she whined, “but then I found this here you go.”
“This is a strange stone,” said her pater, as he took the stenchworm egg in his arms. “It feels soft.” Then it wriggled.
“It’s near-hatched,” she told him. “Good luck.”
This time she didn’t stop running until she reached the very top of the very horn of the very tallest wall, and she didn’t stop laughing until the moon slid from wobblewise to whorlwise and the world went quiet again.
The boneworker, bandaged head to heel, left his post alongside the sheltersheller, swollen of arm. They walked the long slow road to the pathwatcher’s post, and on the way they fell step-in-step with Aist’s pater and the borderwarder, who walked far apart from them and each other, both a little downwind. And when they entered the pathwatcher’s post, they spoke all at once very loudly in a way that somehow turned into a single, clear message.
“We have tried together,” they told the pathwatcher, “and we have failed. We give up on her altogether.”
And that was that.
And for the rest of that skycoil, there was hardly an adult that could look at a neonate without grousing, and there was that real quiet that came from the heaviest of sulks, and the quiet pitter-patter of scheming revenge that would never come to fruition. And overlaid on all of it, hiding in the dark corners and clogged with stolen honey, a stealthy, unstoppable giggle.
Aist was happy.