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A nice valley, a good valley, a valley halfway between rough and smooth on the world. But a noisy one right now. Lots of dispute. Lots of debate.
Cragg and Clodd, sister and brother, at it again with words and fists.
“My plains are broader than your hills.”
“My hills are taller than your plains.”
“Nrrmf.”
“Hrrmm.”
Cragg and Clodd, siblings together, on and off and on again.
“My hills have fine tall trees and are pocked by snowy white peaks. Your plains do not.”
“My plains have long waving grass and are shot through with gentle dells. Your hills do not.”
“Ugh!”
“Pffa!”
Cragg and Clodd, twins like mirrors, hot and cold.
“My hills have the hardiest beasts. They can walk through six blizzards and through four avalanches, stones AND snow, and still come back hungry. They are the best.”
“My plains have the vastest herds of beasts. They can walk by for four months and run into their friends coming back the other way, like a snake eating its own tail, and they make the ground rumble with their feet. They are the best and also yours are the worst and they are stupid.”
Cragg furrowed her brow. “No,” she said deliberately. “YOURS are stupid.”
Clodd put his fist in her face and that was that for another five minutes while they discussed things.
“Maybe,” said Clodd, through the iron hinges of Cragg’s knuckles, “we should prove it.” And besides, his teeth hurt. The ones that were left.
“Maybe,” said Cragg, past a nose that was twice the size it had been five minutes and four seconds ago, “we should do that.” And besides, she was seeing spots.
“I will fetch my smartest and bring them here in a few short decades,” said Clodd. “Then you will see.”
“I will do the same,” said Cragg. “And then you will see.”
They turned away and walked six paces each, then silently turned around and made secret obscene gestures whose meanings were unknown to all save themselves. Each pretended not to have seen that.

So Clodd walked down to his plains and his dells and he picked through the gazelles and the bison and the buffalo and the wildebeest and the horses and he started to get a little desperate.
“They are the best,” he told himself, “and that’s no lie. But they’re a little….dim.”
And Cragg walked up to her hills and her mountains and she picked through her bears and her deer and her goats and her sheep, and she was biting her lip again, split though it was.
“They’re the best,” she told herself, ignoring the red-hot blood that seeped down her chin. “But. Well. They’re nice, after all. Just. Maybe not them?”
And they both sat back, back-to-back, miles apart, and they pondered the question for about a year. And then they both sat up, clapped their hands together, and hooted loud: “I’VE GOT IT.”
First things first. Clodd took up a clod. Cragg plucked free a crag.
Second things second. Clodd moulded that clod in his hands. Cragg smacked that crag until it crumbled just so.
Third things third. They each breathed out, then breathed in, and they tried a little.
“Wham,” said Cragg.
“Bam,” said Clodd.
The things they had made just blinked at them. “This one’s going to know everything worth knowing,” said the siblings.
Then the things started to cry.
“We’ll have to work on that.”

So they did. They taught them to stand up straight and stop crawling around, to use words, to be careful about what went in your mouth and what didn’t.
This last bit was important, because Cragg and Clodd found out pretty quick that their new beasts were pretty fragile. They were bald, why were they bald? Everything had to have some sort of skin on their skin – feathers, fur, hair, rock, sod, SOMETHING – but not them. They were like big babies, right down to the big eyes and heads. And so needy all the time, all the time.
“I’m cold,” said Cragg’s beast to her. “So cold.”
“Here,” said Cragg. And she shaved the fur off a sheep with three whisks of her claw and showed the beast how to clot it together into a warm mat. “Wear that.”
“I’m cold,” said Clodd’s beast to him. “So cold.”
“Here,” said Clodd. And he struck a bison dead with his loamy fist and showed the beast how to strip the hide off and make it into a warm blanket. “Cuddle under that.”
“I’m hungry,” said Cragg’s beast. “So hungry.”
“Here,” said Cragg, getting more annoyed now. And so she showed the beast how to make a little bowl from clay, cool and round, and how to squirt milk from a goat’s udder into it. “Eat that.”
“I’m hungry,” said Clodd’s beast. “So hungry.”
“Here,” said Clodd. “I am tired of your complaints.” And he showed the beast how to put a sharp rock on a strong stick, firm and thick, and how to shove it into another beast until it stopped moving and became delicious. “Eat that.”
And so it went.
“These berries are bad,” said Clodd. “Don’t eat them.”
“These grains are good,” said Cragg. “Eat them.”
“These furs will make a good tent,” said Clodd. “Sleep in that.”
“This mud-and-stone will make a fine house,” said Cragg. “Sleep in that.”
“Do this,” said Clodd.
“Do that,” said Cragg.
And they said that for nineteen long, long years.

So down from the hills came Cragg and up from the plains came Clodd, hand in hand with their beasts. And they felt mighty pleased with themselves as they stood there in that quiet little valley again. Mighty AND pleased, all at once.
“You are early,” said Clodd, smugly. “Nervous?”
“You are late,” said Cragg, grinning ear to ear to mouth again. “Regretful?”
“Hardly!”
“No!”
They threw their heads back and laughed, laughed, laughed.
Clodd’s beast waved at Cragg’s. Cragg’s beast waved back at Clodd’s.
“Right!” said Cragg. “Time to prove that the hills have made the smartest beasts.”
“The plains,” corrected Clodd.
“We will leave our beasts on my hills-” said Cragg.
“-in my plains, and whichever-“ interjected Clodd.
“-does the best will be the-” said Cragg.
“-winner.” Clodd finished.
They glared at each other.
“Mine first,” said Clodd.
“Fine,” said Cragg. “Last laughs loudest.”

So Clodd led his beast into his plains, and Cragg and her beast followed. Finally they reached the centre of the plains, where the prairie rose high and went on forever.
“Be smart!” they said.
And then they left them there, and they waited.
“Your beast will starve,” said Clodd. “Look, look – see how it fails, season after season! It is failing at this very moment to perform so simple a task as tying a sharp rock atop a strong stick! It is failing in its efforts to make a shelter! It is even eating the berries that are bad, which it should not eat! It is humorous in its stupidity!”
“You cheated,” said Cragg sullenly. “Your stupid plains have no proper stones to live in, and your stupid animals are all too fast and too wild. And besides, you taught your beast things. It cannot be so clever if it has to go about learning things.”
“I never,” said Clodd, and it was just as convincing a lie between siblings as could ever be.
“Hmm.” Cragg squinted and placed her hand to her brow. “What are they doing down there?”
Clodd looked. “What ARE they doing down there?” he said.

“What WERE you doing down there?” they asked, as they brought their beasts once more to the valley.
The beasts looked at each other. Then they looked at the plains. Then they looked at the sky. Then they looked at the ground.
“That is a strange thing to do,” said Cragg. “You should be looking at us.”
“I was tying a sharp rock atop a strong stick,” said Cragg’s beast. “I needed it to skin a-”
“Not that!” said Clodd. “That. Yes, that, but WHY that! You were talking. You were talking to my beast! Why were you talking to my beast? You have lost doubly here, Cragg. Your beast stole lessons from my beast! Truly my beast is the smartest.”
“We are halfway done,” said Cragg. “And your beast cannot be as intelligent as all that. It just did what you told it to. MY beast got on just fine in your plains. My beasts are smartest.”
“Prove it,” said Clodd. “My beast goes to your hills now. It will do just fine, see if it doesn’t. Watch as your beast stumbles around like a blind old snail. Watch it, and I will watch it, and we will both laugh.”

Cragg led, Clodd followed. This time their beasts walked behind them, a little reluctant maybe. They were chattering in their strange beastly way. Cragg and Clodd were busy ignoring each other, and did not participate.
Finally they reached the rocky, rolling heart of the hills, just beneath the mountains and where the gullies rumbled through pine forests, sputtering out rapids as they went.
“Be smart!” they said.
And then they left them there, and they waited. This time a bit more attentively.
“Hah,” said Clodd. “See? See the mind of my beast? Look! Look! See as it hunts your go-oh.”
“Look as it trips on its own feet,” said Cragg. “Look! Look! See as it shivers under thin hides. Look! Look! See as it – oh ho ho ho! – trips down cliffs and stubs its toes off. It is making a house from stones, and the stones land on its toes as it sleeps! Your beast is smart indeed – it can make me laugh like nothing else! Hah!”
“Your beast has cheated,” said Clodd. “Look! You have filled your ugly hills with nothing but gangly little meatless scrawners, and there is nowhere to live but holes in holes! Such nonsense! How could any beast live here, unless you had cheated and told them how?”
“Not me!” said Cragg in the firm convincing voice that no one could ever dispute.
Clodd’s eyes narrowed and he was going to dispute this when he saw moving things. “Look!”
“More laughs?” asked Cragg.
Then she looked.

“Why would you do this thing?” demanded Clodd.
“I was hungry and-“
“Why would you know to pull its teat and drink the milk that landed in an ugly clay saucer?”
“Well, I asked and-“
“Why would you ask the stupid beast of the hills for this advice?”
Cragg laughed, laughed, laughed. “Because he knows he is stupider! My beast is the smartest, and this is truth! Were it not for my beast your beast would be deader than your head!”
“My beast took all your beast’s secrets by means of its smartness,” said Clodd loftily. “Your beast has no claim on this. My beast is smartest and fastest and also strongest.”
“My beast is smartest and also strongest and also fastest and it could take your beast and throw it over the hills.”
“Mine could stomp yours into the grass.”
“I will find out.”
“I will also find out.”
“Right now.”
“Right. Now.”
They turned around and walked out of that quiet little valley, and they left their beasts there alone.
The beasts looked at each other.
Clodd’s beast waved at Cragg’s. Cragg’s beast waved back at Clodd’s.

“Your beast has no fight,” said Cragg smugly. “See how mine has chased it into the trees!”
“Not so,” said Clodd. “Look! It returns with great armfuls of wood! Look! It will smite it with them!”
“Ah, but my beast has stolen them and built a home! It is safe now, and your beast will perish!”
“My beast has claimed game, and returns to bury the antler-dagger in your beast! It has invaded.”
“Ahh, but my beast has emerged! It has triumphed! Look – look! It sits there, and it moulds the clay at the lake-side. It is assured of victory, and it sculpts vessels to hold the blood of the foe!”
“Mine lives yet! It has feigned death! See how it approaches it from behind at the lakeshore! Soon your beast will drown!”
“Your beast is merely fishing,” scoffed Cragg.
“And YOUR beast is just making mud-pots,” snorted Clodd.
They looked down at them more closely.
Clodd’s beast’s fishing spear missed, and it fell over.
“Your beast is a poor fisher,” said Cragg.
“Well, it’s not the plains,” said Clodd. “The fish are different here.”
“Mmm.”
Cragg’s beast carefully added sand to the clay, and the sides of the pot fell in.
“That is… not a very good mud-pot,” said Clodd.
“It’s not the hills,” said Cragg. “This clay isn’t as nice. It’s too dry.”
Nights came and went. They watched, they waited, but the house in the valley still stood, and no victor would appear.
“I’ve lost,” said Cragg. “My beast is a dullard. It can barely feed itself by itself, and that only if someone tells it what to do.”
Clodd shook his head. “I’ve lost too. My beast is just as bad. And it’s not even fighting properly. Look – they’re fighting again. And neither of them have won. Again.”
Cragg peered at them. “They do that a lot, that fighting. They must like it. But if they like it so much, one of them should have won. They are both truly stupid. How have we done this?”
Clodd shrugged.
She sighed. “Well, if they’re all so stupid, we ought to at least give them company.”
“Maybe they can keep an eye on each other like these two.”
They pulled up clay from the lakebed and a little breeze for the sky. Clodd held it, Cragg punched and kneaded it.
“Wham,” she grunted.
“Bam,” he agreed.
The things they had made looked up at them from the ground with big, alarmed eyes. They patted them on their heads. Their big, bobbly heads. And they sighed a little.
“Maybe they’ll learn to stop being so stupid someday,” they said.
Then the things started to cry.
“We’ll have to work on that.”

It is the evening again. The evening before the Night.
Do not fear, small ones. You are not the ones who will be summoned to the Knee this day. That year is yet to dawn in your days. But no longer are you mere children, who must lay out the stockings and scrub away the snow-prints! You are youth, and shall learn the songs. And before you learn the songs, you must learn the singers.
Attend! Attend! Attend!
-Recorded litany of a carolmaster of New New New Hampshire, approx. 2374 A.C.

Frossti
One of the Elder Three Singers whose calls are endless to the ear. Appears as a great pillar of water turned solid, boiling away on one side, speckled with black earth on the other. He governs over Faith, Time, and the Cycle itself, and light and warmth are anathema to him – his priests lose digits to frostbite as a sacrement. Small children are his chosens. Each solstice a child is picked and is made sacred to Frossti, and that child receives all desires until the next solstice, when it is staked out in the sun until Frossti takes it away ‘over the hills of snow.’
The earliest Frossti myths make much mention of the hat. It is silk, or top, but it is always old, always old. The juxtaposition of elder hat with new snow creates Frossti, making the connection between the figure and its divine grip over time immaculate even before its eternal death and rebirth are known. It guards the path to the solstice.
If a hand is placed to ear in the strange deep places in the woods when the last ices are fading, it is said the listener can yet hear the thumpity-thump-thump of his passing, as he fades away under the sun.

King Wesslessness
One of the Elder Three Singers whose calls are endless to the ear. He has no form that a man has ever seen but bears a crown upon himself that is never removed. He governs over Abundance, yet only for himself; Flesh and Wine, yet none ever consume them; and Gifts, but the great-gifts made at the height of the sacred season are not his and he has no power over them. He lives alone in a perishing castle at the wend above the woods, and there he feasts alone with his page. The poor are sacred to him but they receive no aid; every solstice he travels the long woods with hot blood in hand and every solstice he is forced to turn back home by the gales to warm himself at his fires once more. Coldness in all regards is his anathema.
The King (eldest of the Elder Three Singers) is considered a paragon of convivial shared humanity, but he is left alone, in the far away past, in the deep wood. His feast is eternal and untouchable. Where Frossti is a promise of endless return, King Wesslessness is a forever-delayed, unshapable hope that will never be fulfilled. The present remains unopened, the feast is far away, and the plenty is as distant from reality as the summer sun is from the nights haunted by the King’s songs.
The land of Wesslessness is unknown and never has been known and never will be known.

Ruedolff
One of the Elder Three Singers whose calls are endless to the ear. There is a great beast in the woods which few have seen, and Ruedolff resembles this beast save for his face, which is obliterated at all times by a blinding red light. He governs over Solitude, Hatred, and Triumph, and friendship is his anathema; to petition the priesthood of Ruedolff mandates that the applicant have no surviving family, and the final test is to vanish into the woods for one week. If on return not a single person inquires as to the applicant’s absence, the applicant is made holy. Lights are special, but only lonely lights in the woods that might guide travellers towards its lair.
The Red One is elusive even more than the King. Ruedolff is solitary as he, but his loneliness is mandated and involuntary, shaped by hatred and spite. Of the Elder Three Singers he is the sole despised; Frossti is feared, Wesslessness is looked upon with sentimentality, but Ruedolff is shunned, mocked, and castigated. So much as his name may not be mentioned in the partaking of merriment, lest he be summoned and derive some pleasure from sport or games. All year round the Red One is despised, and on the very eve of the long cold dark he is finally, grudgingly rewarded: the promise of love is offered to him, if he should but pull the slumbering sun from its cold bed.
Every year, he gives in. Every year, he succeeds. Every year, his deeds are praised quickly, forgotten immediately, and begrudged eternally.

The songs are done. The mantelpiece is set. Your part is through, small ones.
Now go inside and sleep. Let the visions dance and play, and do not resist them, but stay silent and still throughout your long nap.
Dash away. Dash away, all!

“Awww now…..what’s wrong?”
Daniel stopped crying. Well, he hadn’t really ever started, really – what was the point with no audience? No, he’d been snuffling. Snuffling and scuffing and worrying over and over.
But there was something more important now, which was finding out where the voice was. Mom was upstairs working. Dad was out. Tammy was next door. The dog probably couldn’t talk.
So it was either him or the clock. And the clock was in no state now. Or ever.
“Thaaaat’s better. No sense crying, heh? None at all. You got a problem there, kid?”
Daniel looked at the clock again.
“Yeah, I thought so. Well, what’re you gonna do, kid? Gotta do something, right?”
“Who are YOU?” asked Daniel. He poked the clock. The minute hand slid off the cracked glass and buried itself in the carpet. A half-tick stopped.
“Well, let’s make introductions. Just listen to me, heh? Follow my word.”
Daniel hesitated. The voice was nice. It was too nice. The sound of smoke and mirrors.
“I’m no stranger, kid. I’m your best friend, been that way for years. Now it’s time to prove it. Follow my word. Over here.”
“In the kitchen.”
“Under the counter.”
“There I am. Nice to meetcha.”
Daniel didn’t yet know what ‘disconcerted’ meant, but if he had he would’ve described himself that way right then. He was pretty sure garbage bins weren’t meant to talk, and he said so.”
“Awwww come off it, kid! I’m here to help you out and here you are, talking trash at me! Naw, nah, na, that’s my job, kid! Let’s talk trash. Let’s get you outta this mess. How’s your momma’s clock, eh?”
Daniel flinched.
“That bad, heh? Oh no, oh too bad. Don’t worry. I gotta plan. I wanna help you, kid, on account of us being such good friends, even if you never said so on account of your youth-ful self-ish-ness.” The lid hissed happily as it snapped a single word into three. “Just c’mere, kid. Gimme the clock.”
“It’s mom’s.”
“Yeah, but if you break it you bought it. That’s not a clock anymore – it’s a mess. And that mess is YOURS, kid. But if you bring it over here, weeellll…. I’ll take it right off your hands and straight outta the picture. Easy.”
Daniel looked at his feet. Saw the broken glass winking at him. Saw his mom’s face.
“Good kid. Here, take the dustpan. Now I’m gonna say aaaaah, right? Ready?”
“Aaaaaahhhhhh…..”

Daniel’s mother never did find the clock. Tammy said it wasn’t her fault, and Mom said maybe it was her boyfriend, and Tammy didn’t speak to mom for a week and a day.
He cried a bit at first, at hearing the living room all quiet. But he was only little, and it all melted away soon enough.

“Well, THAT’S a mess.”
Daniel agreed before he thought about who he was agreeing with. There was a lot of garbage in that bin across the way from him in the station. Spray cans. Some dog crap in a little sack. A lot of really incriminating photographs.
That wasn’t the real mess though. The real mess was wearing the handcuffs and the swollen eye and nose.
“Wellll…. We all make mistakes, heh?”
Daniel found the voice. It smiled happily back at him through a mouthful of paper and candy bar wrappers, tucked beside a desk. The sergeant on duty didn’t seem to notice.
“Shhhh kid, shhhhhhooooooosh. In-cog-neat-o. Now, I say we all make mistakes. And this is a big one, right? But look, I’m your pal, kid. I’m your bud. Your chum. Your bro. You can lean on me, kid. Just give me the nod and I’ll help you out. They ain’t got nothing on you nohow once I’m done.”
Daniel thought of his dad picking him up from the station. Thought of the things he’d say once he’d see the things Daniel (and Porter and Conner and David, but THEY didn’t have the bruises and blame, oh no, they left Daniel holding the bag – and the cans) had said in paint on the mosque’s wall. That made Daniel stop thinking and start nodding.
“Smart kid,” said the bin. “Now just cough for me, heh? Cough a bit.”
Daniel coughed, and coughed, and coughed until he couldn’t stop and the sergeant sighed and got up and smacked him on the back a bit. Her belt clipped the box and sent it spiraling down, down, down.
Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

No evidence. No fingerprints. Even the digital camera had gone missing.
Well, Daniel’s dad said that was it, no case. And that got him his share of glares, and that got him his share of speeding tickets, and there was a proper row for the next four years until the family moved. Daniel tried not to think about it.

“Ac-a-dem-ick pro-bay-shun. Now THERE’S a winner for ya.”
Daniel kicked his trashcan violently.
“Hey! Hey! Hey! What is this shit, kid? I’m here to help, this is the thanks I get! I oughta ditch you here and now for this crap, if I weren’t so kind and kringle-hearted.”
“It won’t help,” managed Daniel, through lips so white they’d bleached his small, awful moustache. “You can’t help. It’s on his desk. It’s in the computer. Tomorrow, it’ll be across campus. They know I did it.”
The trashcan snorted, and Kleenex wheezed free from under its lid before being sucked back in. “Hah! ‘Puters. Faxes. Modems. Whaddo I care? You think those matter? Kid, what goes in me, stays in me. For-ev-er. You get me?”
“No,” said Daniel.
The can creaked, and the lid popped up and smacked him in the chin. “Smarten up, kid! You’re young ‘n stupid so I am cutting you a lotta slack, but there are limits! Give me respect! And listen up – all that zero-one-one-zero-one garbage means jack. I don’t care what it is, it goes in me, it goes away. All tidied up. For-I-repeat-myself-ever. You get me?”
Daniel looked at the red pen on the paper in his hand again. He read it as far as ‘plagiar-’ this time before he had to look away.
“You get me. Now just drop that nasty ol’ thing in here, heh? It can’t hurt you anyways.”

It took a lot of doing to get tenure demolished, but Daniel saw it before he graduated. A false accusation like that, even after a formal apology…. Well. It soured things. You’re not nominated for department head anymore, your colleagues don’t talk like they used to, and your classes shrink shrink shrink. You can’t get fired, but you can quit. Daniel just aimed for a seventy-eight average and kept his mouth shut.

“Oh boy, oh man, oh man kid,” the voice sighed. “You sure do know how to up the ante, heh?”
Daniel stopped mid-swear. He looked up, he looked down, he opened drawers and flicked on lights and was in the midst of tearing apart his desk when he heard the chuckle. “Not there, kid. Out HERE. C’mon. Out HERE.”
The office door creaked open, bumped against the dumpster. It smiled at him, disarmingly.
“Long time no see, kid,” it said. “Problems?”
Daniel looked back at Stewart. Yeah. Problems. How to describe it? Well, he tried.
“He was just. I just. There was. It shouldn’t have.”
He stopped trying. The dumpster was still smiling.
“Yeah. He was just something-or-nother, you just woopsy-doodled, there was a LOT of icky-accident, and it shouldn’t have splatter-carpeted. Ooooh my, kid. When’d you get that temper, heh? Good thing you didn’t flash the po-po that card back in the day or you’d be gettin’ out of time right now.”
Daniel looked at Stewart again. No, wait, his mistake – he’d never stopped. It was his eyes, that was it. He couldn’t tear away from those eyes. Was one pupil bigger than the other, or was that blood?
“Can get you outta this time right now, kid.”
Daniel licked his lips and blinked. He felt like he’d been pared down to a chameleon’s instincts. All the ape had gone home and left the lizard in charge.
“Just a nod and a by-your-leave. Or one or the other. I ain’t picky.”
Nod. Sharp, short, darting. Blink.
“That’ll do. Now, get ready for this – here, put your arm in. Over the shoulder, fireman’s carry like they do it on tee-vee. Now, wait for me, heh? Aaaaaahhhhh.”

There was no funeral. Stewart had complained about the internship before – as if unpaid wasn’t normal – and a few someones said he’d been homesick.
Serves him right for not keeping up, they all agreed. Couldn’t even keep his cubicle clean. Not like Daniel. Good ol’ Daniel.

Good ol’ Daniel looked down at the letter on his desk, and he wished he was at the bottom of the sea.
“Hey kid.”
No wait, he wished the letter was there instead.
“Kiiiiidd. You fooling me again?”
No, no, no, what he REALLY wanted was for that voice there to be there. He rubbed his forehead, felt the temples under the loose skin. How many years ago had that popped up? “I told you. Go away.”
“Aw kid, don’t gimme that claptrap. You snorting anything? Typical elected official, kid. I knew you’d go far.”
He glared at his garbage bin – it was small, sleek, and discreet, but right now it offended him more than an open manhole. “Go away. I can fix this.”
“Kid? You read a paper recently?”
Daniel threw a pen at it, spat a curse as it chuckled.
“This ain’t the ol’ days, kid. You go around creeping on your staff, they don’t just go home and smile at the family before they down a bottle of good ol’ Jack. You’re in the drink, kid. Don’t go and stick a straw in it to spite me, heh?”
“I can fix this,” said Daniel. He scrabbled across his desk, found another pen. There. Halfway there. “I can fix this myself.”
“Can fix yourself right outta your pension, you mean. You figure you’ll really get away with a little bitty it-is-to-my-pro-found-ree-grett and retire gracefully, kid? They’ll eat you alive.”
“I don’t need you,” said Daniel. And he regretted it.
There was a nice long, slow moment in his office while they both mulled that over.
Then the garbage bin let its mouth slide open as it laughed, long and wide, wide, wide.

When it was done, Daniel hurled the letter into it without so much as a word. And he sped the whole way home, through every red light, past every stop sign. Two tickets. Didn’t slow down.
He was re-elected in the fall, and nobody heard as much as a whimper from his interns.

“Kid, you have done exceptionally.”
Daniel paused halfway through a sip, coffee gritting against his teeth. He still liked the cheap stuff. It reminded him of a long time ago, a time when he didn’t have to look over speeches and try to imagine himself saying those words to the world without breaking into tears.
“I mean it. It’s been a looooong couple of years since I got anyone into this office.” Hot breath touched lightly on his ankle, moving in and out of something that didn’t have lungs. “But y’know what? I could count on you. I knew it. ‘Cause you’re special, kid. You’ve got something nobody else does.”
Daniel’s eyes were frozen on his page now. He was sure if he kept reading the voice would stop, but he didn’t seem to be able to finish the sentence.
“You don’t never say no.”
He felt something prickle at the corners of his eyes.
“I like you, kid. Shame that the papers are going to get all fussed. Weeeelll, WOULD be fussed. I think you know what I can do about-”
“I hate you,” whispered Daniel. It sounded very small and pathetic and the only way he knew it had heard him was it stopped to chuckle.
“Now why would you go and say that, kid?” it asked. He could hear the humor in its voice, the happy indulgence, and that was what made him go and kick it over.
“You. Won’t. Go. AWAY!” he shrieked, each period a pump of his ankle. “It’s MY job!” Kick. “I’M in charge!” Stomp. “I’m RESPONSIBLE!” Pleasantly oiled leather impacted on smooth plastic with a crunch. “And I. WILL. FIX. THIS. MESS. MY. SELF.”
There was a crack, a snap, and a thump.

Leaders die in office, even in peacetime. It happens. And compared to the way some of them go, a stroke is nice and normal. Nothing to fuss about. The papers even put aside the latest scandals to wave a flag or three.
But nobody could quite explain the mess on the floor. A tangle of faded paper and smeared ink, of shattered electronics – and a small scrap or two of human bone, quite unsettlingly.
And everywhere, trampled into the carpet so deeply that they gave in and replaced it, there was the winking shine of broken glass.

There are certain things that are certain.
Life, mostly. Death, usually. And whenever you get those two running hand in hand, you face a third – which, unlike them, poses itself as a question.
What the hell do you do with the body?
Pinning it under dirt is a good one, if you’ve got the muscle for it, and that muscle is allocated in an anatomically proper manner.
“Brother. Look at your arms. Look at them.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“…they’re too small.”
“No, we’re not burying him.”
Setting it on fire needs some decent grasp of tools.
“That won’t work either!”
“Why not? We saw that big forest fire, remember? Remember that? We ran and ran and ran and the Littlest One fell behind and we never saw it again and we ate our meals crisp and crunchy for-”
“Your brain is barely the size of a banana, and you want to crate, nurture, and build a flame strong enough to eat fifty feet of flesh?”
“It was just an idea!”
“A stupid one!”
You could always throw it up on a stone and let the birds and wind take it away, if you’re willing to stay upwind for a few weeks.
“Birds? BIRDS?!”
“Well, pterosaurs at leas-“
“It would take MONTHS! YEARS!”
“You’re yelling at me again!”
“You’re being stupid at me again!”
In the case of the mortal remains of Grash – Giganotosaurus, father, loving, murderous tyrant – none of these options were practical.
“Well I don’t see YOU coming up with any plans!”
“Because you’re taking up all my air yammering about your STUPID ONES!”
“You’re mean! Father always said you were mean!”
“Mother always said you were stupid!”
“Well, she’s dead so who cares!”
“So’s father!”
“He died second!”
“HE CHOKED ON HIS OWN MEAL!”
“It was a big bite! Nothing wrong with a big bite!”
“Maybe you’d realize how wrong you were if you had a BIGGER BRAIN for your BIG BITES.”
“So you’ve got a banana and a half! Big deal! You’re mean!”
Clearly, some tact and imaginative thought was needed here. Luckily, I knew just the woman for the job.
“Sounds like you’ve got problems, kids,” I said, in as laid-back a manner as I could. Which was easy. Because I was lying back.
Well, pinned back at least.
The older and angrier one – Gmmr – peeled his neck back to glare at me past his toes. “We’re busy,” he told me, and put a little more pressure on that foot to drive his point home into my chest.
“And you’re busy too,” chimed in brother Gaw. “You’ve got problems too, right? I mean, we’re going to eat you as soon as we just-“
“As soon as NOTHING, at the rate you’re coming up with ideas,” hissed Gmmr. “We don’t eat ‘till father’s buried, and if you don’t shut up this second we’ll both starve to death. Now. Shut. Up.”

I watched the clouds move. A nice day. For other people, theoretically.

“Know what to do yet?”
“I WAS THINKING!” shrieked Gmmr.
“Sorry! You think quietly!”
“We don’t all think WITH OUR LIPS MOVING!”
“We don’t have lips!”
“And you MOVE THEM!”
“Kids!” I said, as sternly as I could manage with a half-lungful of breath. “Don’t fight! I’ve got an idea.”
“Nobody asked you anything, nobody cares, and it’s bad anyways,” said Gmmr with practiced efficiency and bitterness. “I’m thinking again.”
“Nah, cheer up!” I said. “I’ve just done that for you!”
“Gosh,” said Gaw in awe. “Even with all that noise from –“
“Shut up shut shut up shut UP. And you!”
“Me?”
“SHUT UP.”
“I’ll listen,” offered Gaw.
“No, you should shut-“
“I can get your father’s funeral over and done with before dinner,” I said, as quickly as I could manage.
Long, slow eye contact. Some general reptilian signalling going on here, a system of social queues difficult to grasp without scales, a homogenous dental array, or a cloaca.
“That’s how it works already,” pointed out Gaw.
“Yes, that’s what we were just SAY-ing,” said Gmmr, testily. “It’s a matter of protocol.”
“No no no no, I mean today. Today’s dinner. I can have you two kids happy and chewing my legs off before the sun sets tonight.”
More elaborate body language based around slow blinks.
“That good?” asked Gaw.
“Acceptable…” mused Gmmr. “Alright. But no chewing. Molars disgust me. We bite and shred, like civilized creatures should.”
“Alright,” I said. “I’ll keep my heterodont opinions to myself,”
Gmmr shifted his weight and I inhaled my first full breath for two hours. Tasted good. Well, tasted like rotting death and carcharodontosaurid toe-jam, but goodness was relative, right?
The foot moved again, and I was rudely booted forwards. My nose whacked into cold meat.
“Well, there he is. Clever funeral idea, please.” Left unsaid: now.
I rubbed my feet with my other feet and I thought to myself: me too.
But I made do.
“Alright. So. What we need is…”

I kept my eyes on the clouds, not the brothers. It made me stammer less. Just watch the white flow on the blue and let the words follow each other out of your mouth until you can pretend they made sense.
“…and then you’re home free for the evening.” And then you can eat me.
They looked at each other again.
“That’s gross,” said Gaw.
“That’s…intriguing,” said Gmmr.
“What? No, no it is-“
“It’s very natural.”
“It’s sick! You know we don’t-“
“Oh, and what happened to the second Littlest One, hmm?”
Gaw flinched. “Uhhh…… he fell behind?”
“Yes!” said Gmmr with mirthless madly interested humor. “Yes! That’s right! He fell behind!”
“Yeah,” said Gaw. “Yeah. It is.”
“Into your mouth.”
“Yea – NO!”
Gmmr clacked his jaws and turned back to me. “It’s inappropriate and it’s disgusting and it’s just what we need right now. Father has to go somewhere, and we’re hungry. This’ll do nicely.”
“Sounds good!”
“And we can have you for dessert.”
“Sounds good.”
“Or maybe mid-course.”
“That’s…well, actually, you might want to hear the second part.”
Gmmr paused, mouth half-open over Grash’s flank. His orange eye flickered over me.

The trees were heavy with bodies. Spindly limbs and big blank eyes bulging over long, narrow beaks.
“This is too much like sharing. I don’t like it.”
“Hush.”
The ground was a-stir with life. Little lithe muscles dancing in circles past each other, living on nervous energy and a burning tank of meat.
“But they hated him and now we’re gonna let them-“
“That’s the point!”
The riverside was seemingly quiet. But if you looked at the water, too many little lights gleamed back at you to be just reflections of the stars. Some reflections winked at you.
“What’s the point if we don’t even get to eat him?”
Gmmr sighed. I admired that sigh. I couldn’t get that effect. Then again, I couldn’t push more air through my lungs that I massed, so it wasn’t really my fault. “Tell him, dessert.”
“Right, right. Right. Listen, kid, it’s a matter of respect. Your dad’s dead, right?”
“Right.”
“So you’re in charge now, right?”
“Right!”
“So you’re showing that by letting everyone have a bite of him because you’re so badass you can afford to go hungry, seeing as you’ll just run ‘em all down later and eat them whenever you feel like it.”
Gaw digested this. I tracked the idea’s progression through his brain by monitoring the saliva on his jaws.
“Gosh,” he said.
Maybe half a banana.
“Can’t I just eat them now? I really want to eat them n-“
“Shut up. Alright, dessert, ready to start this?”
I nodded.
“Go on, say your piece.”
I dragged myself to some semblance of uprightness – oh, the left hind leg did NOT like that one bit – and looked at a crowd of things that wanted to eat me.
“Honorable carnivores!” I said, with all the sincerity you can manage after a day of being literally underfoot. “Noble flesh-eaters! On this day, you are released from your tyranny!”
I paused for a second. No applause. Damnit, hard to read a crowd that mostly communicates through biting.
“…and delivered unto a new one!” I continued, trying not to lose rhythm. “Grash, hatched of, uh…”
“Grunch,” whispered Gaw, slightly louder than I could shout.
“…thank you GRUNCH, has passed from this world, and in his place now stand his lovely, intelligent-“
“Banana and a half-“
“You? HAH!”
“-and deeply vicious and fearsome hatchlings, Gmmr and Gaw. They pledge that they will continue their father’s practices and be unmerciful in the extreme, however-“
“She said your name first, why did she say your name-“
“I’m the one that matters. Shut up.”
“-they are not, uh, un…benevolent. Ish. Rulers? And they will…” I blinked a little too much, and felt sweat moving up from under the skin. Can’t stop the train of thought now. Can’t stop it now. Can’t stop it “Definitely show that by letting you all take a bite from their father’s aged, slightly-decomposed, battle-scarred, war-torn, terrifying, awe-inspiring carcass in hopes that it will inspire you to be slightly less timid and ineffectual prey when they hunt you down and devour you later.”
Still no applause. Oh damn I hope this works.
“At their word, you feast on flesh and don’t stop until you hit bone!” And then I bowed, or fell over, or both. It looked okay I guess. I wasn’t trying to figure that out, I was watching the brothers and thinking pleaseworkpleaseworkpleasework.
Pause. They both were looking at me.
Pleaseworkpleasework.
Then they looked at each other, and my pulse quickened.
Then out at the crowd.
Then Gaw cleared his throat of six cubic feet of mucus and said “Well then I guess you can-“
“Eat,” said Gmmr. “Now.”
“Hey you can’t-“
“Shut up. Eat. NOW!”
No applause. No movement.
A single little scavenger took a half-step forwards.
I’d never actually seen a woosh in motion before, but there it was. More like a whoom, really. And above the rumble of hurrying feet and gnashing jaws tearing into leathery hide, there was a thunderous whine.
“Why’d you do that?!”
“Do what?”
“You always-“
“Tell people what to do? Someone has to.”
“But you-“
“And it certainly isn’t you.”
“Why-!”
“Because you’re an IDIOT.”
“Can’t you-“
“Who won’t SHUT UP.”
“That’s-“
“Even though I’ve told you so nine thousand ti”
A foot moved without consideration, and I went for a quick flight that ended abruptly halfway up a tree. The world flicked on and off for a second, but when I came back in again I was smiling because I’d heard a sweet sound. Seven tons of dinosaur impacting seven other tons of dinosaur, against the backing of a roar ripped straight from the bile duct.
“STOP INTERRUPTING ME!”

I didn’t get the best view of what happened next, and I was a bit distracted. But I heard a lot of insults, a lot of violence, and a good deal of biting and shredding.
No chewing though.
And well, the last thing I saw before I lit out for the night – just a glance over my shoulder, because on three good legs you don’t linger – was the two of them tipping over right into Grash’s half-excavated ribcage, right onto a crocodile’s skull, where it did what crocodiles do naturally and bit them.
After that, well, blood’s flowing, you’re there for meat, and what does it matter if your next mouthful’s warmer than you expected? All meat, right?

So I left the funeral as they set out the main course, before the tears started. I never liked those things anyways.

Bang, clang. The day was rattling on the windowpane, slamming and knocking and trying to break in. It was fit to send your brains running home to bed, which was convenient because that’s where Thudmaker already was. Sleeping.
The day smashed the window in, climbed over the pillow, and poured into Thudmaker’s eye. The eye blinked. The bed shook. And up stood Thudmaker, ten thousand stone and a hundred feet tall; scales for skin and horns for hair; with more muscles than belly and more belly than anything.
“Mmmrgn. Hungry.”
So the day started up like they always did. Thudmaker got out the food and the little Thudmakers ate it. The biggest two ate fast, got up faster, and ran around the house sixteen times until they’d pulled together all the bits and pieces of Thudmaker’s outfit. The yellow hat, the overalls, the battered brown boots.
“Be safe,” they said. “Be careful.”
Thudmaker nodded and hugged them and walked off with hammer in hand and a bit of bread in belly. Another day, another job, another bit of work.
Better go find some then.

So Thudmaker walked and walked and down and by Thudmaker came to the sound of a godawful lot of noise and such. It was an old man with a black suit and a black cane and a black car, sitting at the side of the road next to the old dirt heap that the little Thudmakers used as a playground and yelling at his cool-looking phone like it’d pissed down his trouser leg.
“You!” he shouted. “YOU! You gormless git-shit! You pissless pennyfucker! I’ll buy your house and have it fed to you! I’ll come to your door and eat the meals right off your plates! I’ll use your vacations to have larger, showier vacations right next to you and I will have a good time doing it! GOODBYE!”
He hung up. Then he spied Thudmaker. “YOU!”
“Wasn’t me,” said Thudmaker.
“No, no, no, not THAT you. YOU. You must work for me! I need this foundation built! This is a good pile of dirt this is, this is a good pile of dirt. Nobody’s building on it and it was a steal, I say, a steal. I want a condominium on this thing lickety-split and sold fast, before this housing market goes up in flames. You build me this ninety-million dollar building and I will give you this little shiny thing I found on the ground.”
Thudmaker looked as carefully through nearsighted eyes as was possible. The thing was sort of shaped like halfway between a blob and a lump, and it was very shiny indeed. Sort of. “Deal.”
“Good, good. Now hurry up or I’ll break your contract.”
Thudmaker stood up tall, put hammer to hand and hand to task.
Thud, thud, thud.
And bam, there was a nice new condominium, sitting right on top of the big dirt heap that the little Thudmakers had spent so many hours making little worlds in and jumping on and falling off.
“Lovely, lovely. Here, have your shiny thing and go away.”
“Thanks,” said Thudmaker. Tucked that into a pocket of the overalls, good and tight.
Nice, but not enough. Not to keep all the little bellies full.

So Thudmaker kept walking, walking, walking, and kept on walking until someone said Hey You because Hey You was Thudmaker’s secret name that everyone had found out years ago.
“That’s me,” said Thudmaker.
“I need a demolition job,” said the person who knew Hey You’s name. She was long and heavy and serrated along her edges, like a Bowie knife but with a less friendly face. “This hovel’s in the way, and we need it smashed. You look big and dumb enough to do the trick.”
Thudmaker considered the object of her disdain. It was Thudmaker’s house.
“Pay me,” said Thudmaker.
She pursed her lips. “I am authorized to distribute one-half of a little piece of string.”
“Not interested.”
A sigh, as long and theatrical as the human-plus-a-little-bit-of-lizard lung could manage. “Fine. A full one hundred percent share of a little piece of string.”
Thudmaker walked up to the house and knocked on the roof. The oldest little Thudmaker opened the door a crack.
“C’mon out kids,” said Thudmaker. “Time to move.”
They carried out all their clothing and their toys and put them in Thudmaker’s old suitcase, and they stood there by the side of the road as Thudmaker stood up tall, put hammer in hand and hammer to house.
Thud, thud, thud.
And no more house, pounded so flat into the dirt that only the tip of the roof stuck out.
“Satisfactory,” said the woman, making a note in her tiny and ridiculously expensive yet already obsolete computer. “You may have seventy-two percent of a bit of string.”
This was more than Thudmaker had expected, but it still wasn’t enough. So Thudmaker said thanks, and tucked the string into another pocket of the overalls, and trudged off.
The little Thudmakers followed, and their bellies too.

Now by and large Thudmaker got tired of walking, so they all sat down for a spell next to the river, and Thudmaker’s toes got a nice long dip to keep them happy. And as they all sat there with their luggage, up hobbled a beard.
“Nice place,” said the beard. Thudmaker realized that there was a person behind it. “Beautiful place. Waterfront. Good proximity to community centers. Think I’ll dam it. You up for the job?”
Thudmaker looked at the little river. Thudmaker looked at the little Thudmakers. Thudmaker gently retrieved Thudmaker’s hat from the smallest of the little Thudmakers, who was wearing it as a full-body coat. “What you paying?”
“Ehhhh…..” The beardman cast about for a moment, then bent over and picked something up. “This stick. No more, no less. Take it or leave it.”
“Can I have a bigger stick?”
“What are you, some kind of communist? Loads of people wanting to make dams, friend. Loads of people. Scads. Gobs. Two-thirds of this stick, take it or leave it.”
“Deal,” said Thudmaker, taking off the overalls and handing them to the little Thudmakers. “Here, hold onto these. Going to get a bit damp.”
And Thudmaker stood up tall, put hammer in hand, put hand to river, dredged up stone from stone and strength from strength.
Thud, thud, thud.
And there was a proud new concrete sky in that part of the world, soaring hundreds and hundreds of feet and quite confusing the little river, which puddled up behind it and left Thudmaker and the little Thudmakers high and dry along the riverbed.
“This will do…sort of,” said the beardman. “But you took too long. No stick for you.”
“Pay me,” said Thudmaker.
The beardman scoffed, distinct from both cough and sneer, but with elements of both. “For such substandard, slapdash work? Never! I would sooner die.”
“Pay me or I’m going on strike,” said Thudmaker.
“Oh boo hoo. Some of us work for a living, loafer. Now hush up and clear off; you’re on my property.”
Thudmaker stood up tall, dropped hammer from hand, and sat down. Hard.

THUD.

Down the road, there was a creak and a crack and a woosh and down, down, tumbling down came ninety million dollars’ worth of condominium, tumbling through a sinkhole deep enough to swallow Timbuktu and you too until all that was left was a nice jumbled dirt heap full of shiny treasures, the most visible a cool-looking phone.
Up the road, there was a push and a pull and a POP as a whole house just hopped back up out of the dirt, launching a real estate agent over three kilometres.
And right there, right at that moment, there was a looooooong slooooowwww creeaaaakkkkinggg from the concrete sky.
“Wait!” shouted the beardman. “Half a stick! A third!”
“Fine,” said Thudmaker. “Hand it over.”
“Here, take it!” he shrieked. And he threw it to the ground.
The creaking stopped. Then one little noise.
Drip.
“Oops,” said Thudmaker.

When all the fuss was over, most of the concrete was clotted around Thudmaker’s thighs. Thudmaker picked it up, rolled it into a ball, rolled that ball into a smaller ball, rolled that ball until it fit between thumb and forefinger, and threw it away. Then Thudmaker took off the yellow hat and the big brown boots and heaved a sigh.
“Here,” said Thudmaker’s second-oldest, and passed Thudmaker the shiny thing.
“Here,” said Thudmaker’s oldest, and passed Thudmaker the bit of string.
Thudmaker sat down soft, put lump to line and line to stick. And they sat there for a good evening while the river played with bits of stone, and went home with fish dinners.

The women sat at the campfire, watching embers turn into fireflies. The elder held out her hand: two straws. The younger reached out: one straw. The elder’s palm flexed, and the fire flared: no straws.
“I’m for it, then,” said the younger. “Don’t forget about me, you hear? Be careful now. You watch yourself.”
The elder nodded, and she turned over in on herself in her blanket, watching the fireflies bleed out into the dark.

The younger woman walked down the hill from the fire, jumped through the crags, darted under the broken slabs, danced through the scree, and stood at last before the great dead stump. No tree grew for seven day’s walk in this waste, not after this had been felled.
“Hey you!” she sang out. “Listen! Old Cold-Akki! Akki! Akki Boulder-Nose! Akki Bone-Grinder! Hey! Akki with the teeth! I’m calling you out, I’m calling you up! Listen!”
The stump shook, and from its base out crawled Akki, all legs and lank and a big smile that wasn’t a smile that was just teeth from edge to edge. She wore nothing but hair and thrived on bristliness. “I’m here,” said Akki. “What do you want with me now that I’m out? You get a request, and a meal, and a night. All at once. Now what do you want with me? Now that I’m out.”
“I’m up for a fight, if you’d rather,” said the young woman. “I’m plenty strong and you’re plenty wicked. Lots want you dead, Akki. You eat the young and mock the old; you steal husbands and kill wives; you killed this tree and you killed your family. You’re better off bones than not. Come on now.”
“Let’s eat first then,” said Akki. “I’ll not go cheating anyone who’s asking for me. You’ll get your meal and at least half a night first, then we finish off with the request. Let’s eat first.”
“I can eat after you’re bones on stones, Akki,” said the young woman. “Come on now, let’s fight. I’ll chew you up later, just you wait.”
Akki smiled a real smile now, a real wicked one, and she was ready. “You first,” she said. “Don’t be shy, take a stab, aim at my heart and don’t miss. You swing at me first.”
And the young woman didn’t need encouragement, so she aimed straight and – bang! – sent her blade right at Akki’s old cold stone of a heart, but it bounced off her iron skin and oh she laughed. The rocks shivered at it, but she laughed until they split.
“Oh little thing!” she laughed. “You’ve as much might as a mouse! I’m tougher than rock and stronger than stone; metal sparks and wood breaks. Only thing that goes and splits my own flesh and bone is my own flesh and bone, and I don’t feel generous. Oh little thing, I don’t at all.”
And Akki swooped down on the young woman with her long, long legs and kicked her limb from limb, bone from blood, and ate until she was full all night long. Then she belched, and she spit, and she tucked herself right into her stump for the evening.

The elder woman was watching from the campfire, with her ears. Her eyes were shut but she let them leak a little. Then she curled tighter, and slept until dawn washed it all away.

Now was next day, and down the slope came the elder woman. She slipped through the crags, crawled under the broken slabs, tiptoed through the scree, and then she was there at the great dead stump of Akki, where she could smell the curdled dreams of the old hag-giant brewing.
“Akki,” she said. “Wake up now.”
There was a snort and a wheeze and up from the roots came Akki again, twice as fat and half again as leggy. She wore smug like a sheet.
“Two?” she asked. “There’s more than one, that is, that’s more. Two?”
The elder woman shrugged.
“Well, what you want is what you want. Request, meal, night. You get them now, you got them coming. Which do you want now, what you want, that is?”
“I’m not so hungry,” said the elder woman. “And I’m not so sleepy. I’ll trade you those terms. How about some stories? A story, and a carve for each story. Three stories.”
Akki preened herself at this. “Yes, I carve the best, it’s no lie,” she boasted. “No one can best my toes when they set themselves to wood, stone, or bone. I’ll handle them all, just you watch. It’s no lie. But we’ll make it fair, we will. You give me a story back for each story I tell, you see?”
“I see,” said the elder woman. “Then let’s get going.” And she held up a log she’d saved from the fire, hardened to a burnt tip with a weight that could stretch arms.
“Oh, a fancy!” said Akki. And she snatched it up in her left leg, and she sat down on her right leg, and she began to carve with her long, long toe-nails as she talked. “Way back when

back when the world ran round slower because it was just starting, I was the greatest and strongest of all the peoples. I was the fastest and swiftest. I was so quick and so tough that the woman who lives in the sun had to send down special sunbeams to wither up my arms to these little twigs, these little twigs. That was to save all the other animals and plants from my hands – oh, my hands could clutch boulders and crush bears. So you see, even back then they all feared old Akki, even then. A cruel world, way back when.

“That’s a sad story,” said the elder woman.
“It is, so sad, so sad,” sighed Akki, rotating the log in her feet. “But now you’re owed for me, my little storythief, and so you must tell me more. So sad.”
“Fine enough,” said the elder woman. “Let me tell you

about a long time ago, when all this was trees and all the trees were tall. Back then there was a person that stood short and squat in the forest, hiding from things under roots and stumps. It was fearful, so fearful. It feared so long and feared so hard it never spoke to anyone, and then it forgot what other people were but fear. So it hated them. And in the dark of night it crept out from under the logs and over the trees and it grabbed their heads with its hands and their necks with its feet and it throttled them slow. And it did this all night, all nights, until the people were scared and its legs had grown and grown. It made the world crueler, way back when.

Akki frowned. “I don’t like your story,” she muttered. “I don’t like it one bit. It’s all lies and also fiction. Here! Here’s your stupid carving! I don’t like it!”
The elder woman caught the hurled thing. It was a great club now, riven through the heart with arrows within arrows. At the head was a dear, bleeding down its neck.
“Perfect,” she said. And she held up her arm and hurled the club at Akki’s head. It bounced off with a rattlepan sound, breaking into a thousand pieces, and oh how that old hag laughed, laughed, laughed.
“So sad, so small!” she laughed, laughed, laughed. “I’m tougher than rock and stronger than stone, nothing –”
“Oh I know that, I knew that, and I wasn’t trying to harm you,” said the elder woman. “But it was an ugly carving. I had to get rid of it. Here, do a better job on my next.” And she held up a shard of flint that was as long as her forearm.
Akki’s face twisted up in knots at that. “Ugly!” she hissed. “You know ugly better than me, ugly one! Let me tell you an ugly story then, for your ugly self! Ugly! Now, you

see how everyone was trying to gang up on me a lot, on poor lonely Akki. But there was one who took my side, who told me it was all fine. What a liar he was, to poor lonely Akki! What a louse! What a worm! He went and spoke venom behind my back and told all the creatures and vermin of the world where I slept in my nice warm bed, and they all came and stabbed me so full of sharpness that I still clank in my sleep! Oh, how he tried to dissemble when I said so to him. Oh, how he tried to stab me one last time! But it’ll take more than any thing to cut up Akki, I’d decided, so he just bounced off my poor old hide. I did him as he wanted to do me, and now you see how everyone was my foe, of poor lonely Akki.

“That’s funny,” said the elder woman, leaning back a bit – Akki’s toes were flying fast now, and chips of stone were bouncing off her shirt at a fearful speed. “I’ve got a story about those times too. Now listen to what I say about

when that little nasty sneak had gotten just about everyone’s relations, everyone went looking for it. But it was a good sneak, and it kept itself hidden at night in the big bed of its only friend, its lover. And one day that lover asked why oh why were its fingers and toes so red at the morning. And it lied, and it smiled, but it couldn’t stop that lover from following it in the evening. Oh the things it saw done. Can’t be repeated. And when it came home to bed, well, who could blame the lover for quarreling, for arguing? And we all know who struck first. Almost got smothered in its own blanket, but it pled for mercy and bit the hand that granted it. Bit it off then bit more. It hadn’t had the taste for blood yet then, had it? But that started.
Know what else started? Sleeping without blankets. Without a bed. Nowhere to hide now but underplaces, like a bug.

Akki spat at this, and threw down the carving at her feet. “So!” she fumed. “That’s how it is! What a nasty thing you are, what a liar you are to poor Akki! You aren’t here to listen, you’re here to mock! Meddling with truth is a shameful thing! So that’s how it is!”
“Mmm,” said the elder woman. She held the flint blade in her palm. On its surface, a bed of thorns ate a bird. “Mmm.”
She flung that blade at Akki’s heart. It broke into brittles, and Akki giggled.
“Tickles,” she said. “One more carving for you. One more story for you to RUIN and SPIT at. Then I eat. Tickles here,” she said, and she touched her gut.
“As it is,” said the elder woman. She stooped to the ground and scuffled through the dirt and grime of the stump-rot, and she plucked up a long, gleaming leg-bone, freshly-chewed and with almost a hint of spit on its shaft. “Here,” she said.
“Leftovers,” grumbled Akki as she took it in her feet. “You cripple my creativity with leftovers. Well, you’ll have a leftover then, about

a leftover thing, the last thing, a selfish thing. You see after their treachery failed to kill old Akki, poor old Akki fought back hard. She took up a war and she fought the biggest deer and scattered the rest and fought the biggest bear and scattered the rest and she killed and she ate and she felt good, but they kept coming back. They wanted her land, selfish things.
So poor old Akki went to the heart of this matter, this land, and she found the root of the problem. These roots. And she took up her claws – poor thing, her toes were all she had left to battle with – and she took up her cause, hah, and she tore the greatest tree in all the land limb from limb from trunk from stem. And that – THAT – put an end to all… this. For good. For poor old Akki.

The elder woman scratched herself for a long moment, made longer.
“Well?!” asked Akki crossly.
“Well what?” asked the elder woman.
“What’s your nasty thing now, well?” asked Akki. “Come on. Call me names, curse me down, be a child like the child you are, come on!”
“I tell nothing but truths,” said the elder woman. “But I’ll tell you a story too. Here you go, why don’t

you hear about the time that thing went running and hiding, with its lover’s blood on its lips. It hid and it scurried but it never felt safe, not with all eyes and hands against it. So it ran under the trunk of the grandest tree, the one thing in all the land that loved all in it, even the thing, and it ate its heartwood from the inside out, for the spite of it, for the health it gave. It stole the tree’s bark for its skin and it said that since nothing loved it but itself nothing could harm it because love made weakness. And it laughed as all the trees died and the earth sickened and turned up dead, and it called itself fancy in its muck when all its friends and relations fled. And it never left.

The little bone knife smacked into the elder woman’s chest hard enough to make her stagger, hilt-first. Her watering eyes showed bones within bones on its surface, a scrimshaw of scavengers preying on scavengers.
Akki said nothing. Her face said a lot.
“This is ugly,” said the elder woman. “This is an ugly carving. But it was made from a beautiful thing.”
Akki said nothing.
The elder woman waited.
Akki said nothing.
The elder woman waited.
“WHAT?!” shrieked Akki, patience exhausted. “You come to my home, you demand my sculptures, you make rudeness at all turns! You beset me! WHAT do you mean by this?!”
The elder woman stood up, stepped forwards, and drove the ugly, ugly bone knife forwards until it scraped against Akki’s spine from the inside out.
They stood there, chest to chest, heartbeat to heartbreak.
“But…my flesh and bone..” said Akki.
“Came looking for you, and just found your heart,” said the elder woman. “Mother, this was for father, this was for the land, this was for all of us. But especially for sister.”
And she turned the knife of her sister’s bones three times and dropped it, and nobody ever came to that place anymore.

G turned slowly, at the speed of the little blue planet it rested upon. Its sides gleamed in a way that had nothing to do with the pallid yellow sunlight creeping up its sides in the fresh morning, and for a moment it amused itself by calculating the total number of atoms on the planet impacted by the star’s rays at any given time, accounting for seasonal variation. It was one of the most tedious 0.0000000000002s of a picosecond it’d seen on this planet since it’d arrived, and it was still the high point four hours later, when 9 appeared inside its skull without warning.
G wished 9 wouldn’t do that. It was an aggressive, needy act, and one that 9 had no authority to do as 9 wasn’t its boss – the concept of ‘hierarchy’ had been discarded almost two billion years ago. 9 was just the person that told it what to do all the time.
“Progress?” 9 asked. No, not the right tone of thought. Demanded.
“Yes,” said G.

“Well?”
“There has been progress.”
“What KIND of progress.”
“The usual kind,” said G, with the passive-aggressiveness only an immortal can muster. It almost sounded affectionate.
“G, you are being obtuse. Give a description or give nothing.”
“There are primitives with the capacity for sapience here.”
“Are they likely to advance under their own potential?”
G observed the nearest ape-man, seven thousand miles away. He was licking himself in unhygienic places with an enthusiasm it hadn’t seen in a long time. Behind him, a leopard approached with the casual swagger of someone walking into a nice restaurant.
“No.”
“G, you know what to do.”
G increased the pace of the quantum flow that eliminated its waste heat from existence. “At all times. What particular form of it is needed?”
9 sighed, and G increased the flow again. Sighs were not only unnecessary, they had been proven to be physically detrimental to your health back when they were still merely brain patterns in supercomputers. A sigh was a wasteful indulgence. “Test them. Evaluate them. If they have potential, uplift them. The same as the other 3730184637.8 times. Now hurry up and stop sulking.”
G permitted itself a few wasteful microseconds of sheer, unyielding frustration and rage after 9 left. Wasteful. Wasteful! Wasteful was acting as if you were someone’s mother in a society that had been asexual for 99.99[…]% of its existence! Wasteful was sighing with no clear purpose! Wasteful was using ‘9’ as your name a billion and a half years after it had been proven to not really exist, along with all other numbers divisible by three! Wasteful, wasteful, WASTEFUL.
G was so mad that it almost didn’t bother incinerating the leopard as it appeared directly behind the ape-man. But no; the population was small enough that testing should preserve subjects as much as possible.
When it happened. You couldn’t rush testing; it moved on the scale of hours and days, not picoseconds. Anything faster could burn out the frail and feeble little bodies of the poor non-sapients it was here to examine.
Yes, who could blame G if it took its time? It was applying all due care to a delicate task. If 9 were to intrude again, well, that sort of disruption of protocol would be horrifying. A disturbance at a crucial juncture could be all that would be needed to cause one of the subjects’ tiny little brains to pop like dark matter in quantum foam.
G watched the ape-man turn around to face it, and his expression pleased it so much that it watched it six more times just for kicks.
Yes, it’d be thorough about this. As properly expected. Why, it’d even run extra tests. Innovation – the obvious spark of a dedicated and thorough mind who wasn’t rushing things like idiots who were clearly not their superiors wished them to. Who could fault THAT?

“I’m not faulting you, G,” said 9, “but the point of this exercise escapes me.”
“It’s a reflex exam. Perfectly viable alternative to the 2Q-based Weave The Twigs protocol.”
“G, the entire point of the protocol is to test their ability to undertake non-normative goals. You are asking them to do something that by your own testimony comes entirely naturally for them.”
“A necessary variant,” explained G, engaging its gravitic anchors to prevent itself from falling over under a particularly forceful blow. “Ability to execute an already-practiced reflex is as informative as developing a new one.”
Another, horrendously unnecessary sigh. “Fine. Good luck.”
Another impact, splattering across G’s carbon-darkened surface like cosmic rays. It turned its attention away from the boring, stale realities of its inner self and back to the very important work at hand. Already the ape-woman subject was reloading its palm with another handful of its feces, a jaded, critical eye assessing its next target.
Just out of curiosity and sportsmanship, G returned fire.

“G, what is that damp… orange matter around your upper superstructure?”
“Fruit. I am calling it an orange.”
“Why is there smeared matter on your carapace? Eliminate it.”
“It was a gift from the subjects. Refusing it would be devastating to their tiny undeveloped brains.”
“Fine.”
G accepted this and returned to its transcriptive efforts. It had already established a dictionary, and now it was working on grammar. Most of it seemed to revolve around the proper enunciation of hoots.
“Big ugly what thing huh what?” asked the largest ape-woman to her mate. “Still there still there weird huh.”
G activated a subroutine that had lain unused since the last member of its species had left their original fleshy bodies. Sound emerged from its carapace.
“You weird me normal yeah.”
The ape-woman jumped a little. “What huh what huh what what what?”
“Normal nothing calm no harm yeah.”
They gathered round and sniffed it, more carefully than the last time. This included the traces of fecal matter and crushed fruit she’d acquired since.
“Yeah normal yeah yeah yeah. One of us?”
G thought about this. On the one circumstance, it was a violation of the norm that was beyond anything it’d yet committed. On the other circumstance, it was bound to annoy 9.
This was the easiest decision it’d made in a billion years.

“G, why have you moved position more than sixteen times in the past five minutes?”
“I wish to examine the widest possible group of ape-men.”
“G, you have been moving distances at a pace approximately equal to five miles an hour in a single line.”
“I travel as they do, to lull them and comfort them.”
“We are fundamentally disruptive forces! The entire purpose of our visitation is disruption! Hurry up and DISRUPT them!”
“Eventually,” said G in the special kind of calmness that drove 9 crazy. “Eventually.”
It continued to hover slowly across the veldt, humming in a reassuring sort of way. Every now and then the ape-men in front of it would pause to make sure it was still following, then wave it onwards. They had a long trip ahead of them if they wanted to make the cave by nightfall.

The next few days were a blur to G. There was so much to learn, so much to do. What the feel of fresh fecal matter between your toes was like; the satisfaction of seeing that same fecal matter thwack into the forehead of your least-favourite sibling; the secret of which fruit is the ripest; how to hide up a tree and scream at a leopard, at your friends, at the universe itself. It was an education – a re-education – in things it’d forgotten even mattered, like the importance of hitting people you didn’t like very hard until they whimpered. This was very therapeutic.
Days passed by. Weeks. The clouds wandered overhead in lazy patterns and the fruits went in and out of season. G had several prospective mates propose sexual activities to it, which it gave them permission to do if they could find sufficient orifices. This was widely recognized as an excellent joke and many grew to like it for the hooting and mockery it inspired.
It was nice, to be liked. And it was so nice that all of a sudden hours felt like picoseconds and days felt like minutes and over and over what seemed like no time at all later 9 was there again, yelling, whining, wheedling, griping.
Something would have to be done about that.
G watched as an ape-woman responded to her friend’s screeching by turning her back and jamming her paws in her ears.
Yes, something would have to be done about that. And wasn’t it a shame, that it was so evident to something that lived for just a little over two decades?

“This is UN-PRECEDENTED.”
“And therefore novel. Novelty is rarely documented. Recording rarely documented happenings is useful. Therefore this is useful.”
“Not when the novelty in question is this… obscene! You are a recorder – you record, you brood, you instill change! You do NOT observe from the position of a functional participant! What are you, unidimensional? You’ve altered their society just by existing!”
“I am just another ape-man, humble, happy, and healthy,” said G. “They are a simple people, and the fact that I am five times their height and made of a shining black material they have never even imagined does not matter to them. Only the delicious fruit that I have successfully located for the tribe.”
“The others will hear about this! Right this nanosecond!”
“So long as they know I am getting results, and that they hurry. This communication might soon cease.”
“What?”
“I have opened my exterior carapace, and there is a subject monkeying about with my internal components. I believe it is ‘grooming’ me.”
“WHAT?!”
“Be careful, be careful. A little louder and the humming might draw her attention. Would be a real shame if she were to destroy my trans-light mindlink systems.”
“Don’t you dare do that. Don’t you DARE. DON’T YOU-”
“Whoops!” said G, and it watched gleefully as the ape-woman’s prodding fingers blundered right through the middle of the delicate tangle of quantum strands, completely obliterating its communicative abilities. She yelped and withdrew her stung hand, sucking on it resentfully, then made a rude noise at G and its treacherous ways. For a moment G felt uncertain, then it recalled that unlike 9 any enemies it made would be dead in a scant handful of decades and it cheered up again.
It stood there for a moment in this new life that constantly mandated motion, looking around the wide, beautiful, colourful world that it had willingly subdued itself to. It wasn’t sure what to do next.
But something would turn up.

The question crossed Qlg’s mind in that slow-but-sudden way questions do, and it did it one day (there were no days then) when Qlg was chewing on a tiny gobbet of dead, rotting ichthyosaur.
“Tell me,” he asked one of his dozens of siblings, “what’s up there?”
The sibling, whose name nobody ever remembered, thought about this. “Up where?”
“There. Up there.”
The sibling looked. “Water,” he opined. “Recognize it anywhere.”
“No no no. Up there, past it.”
“Past it? More water.”
“Yes, but past THAT.”
The sibling scratched its exoskeleton with a foreleg. “Water. What’s wrong with you? You sick? If you’re sick, can I have your ichthyosaur? You aren’t going to need it.”
Qlg ate his ichthyosaur, gave his sibling an obscene four-legged gesture, and trudged to the highest point of the corpse. He gazed longingly up above, past the water and more water, and imagined what might lie beyond that.
Maybe it was… slightly different water.
Yeah.
Qlg stretched out his stubby little legs and paddled furiously upward for six days, and at the end of it he looked down with his eyes and could barely see the outline of the ichthyosaur, a full dozen body-lengths beneath him.
“Woah,” he said. “Woah.” He wondered if anyone else had ever travelled this high above the carcass, ever.
Then he wondered if he could go higher.
Qlg died some years later, but he left dozens and dozens of annoying, adventurous little children behind, most of whom spent their time trying to outswim one another.

“Tell me,” asked Gll, “what’s up there?”
“Past the water, the more water, the slightly different water, or the strange water?”
“All of them.”
Her mother considered this. “Dunno. Hard to get that high. Your legs are too tiny, you’ll get all worn out.”
Gll pouted at this, as much as you can pout with mandibles.
“Eh. Not much you can do.”
At this point the story goes one of two ways.
The first way, Gll stomped off in a huff and her stomps glued bits of the decaying pliosaur carcass that was their home to her toes, which she noticed made her feet much larger. Thus she discovered the paddlefeet.
The second way, Gll bit her mother’s face and it escalated into a fight which escalated into Gll accidentally tearing her mother’s age-weakened carapace into five pieces, each of which were impaled irrevocably on her spiny limbs. Thus she discovered the paddlefeet.
Thus, however it happened, Gll discovered the paddlefeet, and the voyages up beyond the water and more water and so on became easier and more common than ever before.

“Hey, Sp.”
Sp indicated that she was aware of this statement. It took one leg and a partial curl.
“You ever, uh…think about it?”
Sp signed in the affirmative.
“Like, about, uh, what’s really up there? Like, up there. Past the really weird water.”
Sp agreed vigorously.
“Wanna go look?”
Sp started paddling, each leg tipped with a tiny patch of mosasaur hide that turned her wiggles into strokes.
It took them a long time, and many times they wished they’d eaten sooner than a year and a half ago, but at last their tiny compound eyes gazed in wonder at a sight no isopod had ever witnessed.
On the way back down her friend was eaten by a stray fish, so it was up to her to tell everyone about what ‘light’ meant.

Blb bobbed in the water. His legs were all about ready to fall off from strain, but he wasn’t about to stop now. He’d travelled up past the Sp Zone at record pace, torn through the Seven Growing Glimmers so quickly he’d almost miscounted them as three, and now he was sure he was almost there, almost there. The speed was so fierce he’d lost a half-limb in the first seconds of ascent, but he dared not shed a single fish-bladder antiballast. He needed his momentum or he’d be lost.
Soon, soon, SOON he’d know what was really up there! Soon!
The light was overwhelming, the water was scorching-hot, and a strange thunder was growing in his ears, but he pressed on. Almost there! Almost there!
THERE!
Blb broke through a strange sort of barrier, and unfamiliar sensations surrounded his shell. It was brighter than ever, if a bit cooler, and there were noises he wasn’t sure he recognized at all. Something blue was up above – far brighter than even the topmost of the Seven Growing Glimmers – and white puffs surrounded it, whiter than bone and ivory. There were currents surrounding his shell, moving at strange speeds in odd patterns.
The sinking took much longer, as exhausted as he was, but at last he landed on the midwater platform, buoyed on fish bladders and tied by worn old sinews.
“What was up there?” they asked him.
Blb thought about this. He was about to describe a concept so new to his people that they had never even imagined it could exist: a place without water.
“Sort of thin and shiny,” he said.

The sort-of-thin-and-shiny air played upon the sea, and the sort-of-sloppy-and-jumpy sea played upon the air, and upon the sea and within the air played Kp, in her shellcraft. It’d taken many, many (mostly peaceful, thank goodness) deaths in her family to finish the main hull, but she’d made the ideal surface-going vessel: almost as indestructible, she fancied, as the legendary coconut. There was nothing in all the ocean that could threaten it and it could go anywhere, anywhere at all.
She’d been steering for a sort of large, ugly wave for the past week. It looked interesting, and besides, it hadn’t seemed that far away. Now, at last, it was almost there.
Two weeks later and she felt her hull grind to a halt against something hard and firm, like a bone. But bigger, oh so much bigger.
Kp looked up, up, up, up, up at the long slope of the wave above her. She hoped it wasn’t going to fall anytime soon.
Then she poked it, and she was relieved. “Oh. It’s just firmer sea-bottom.”
And then, inevitably, she added “I wonder what’s up there?”

Sff cursed at the controls of his otherbody, smashing at metal and bone until his hemolymph spilled. So close! So close! He’d not led an invasion that pierced the western landboard for this to end so close! He’d not walked four ape guide-slaves to death, he’d not watched a hundred scavengers perish from his scurry, he’d not lived his whole life on stories of Kp and the Landfall for this to all end so close!
He thrashed, screamed, and ejected himself, dropping already-curled to minimize damage. He bounced from the iron foot of his otherbody with enough force to chip his carapace clean in two, rolled, toddled, and fell over.
He reached out with one broken antennae and caressed the stone in front of him.
The peak of Mount McKinley. He’d made it.
And as Sff curled into a ball and hoped that he’d last until spring came and snowmelt brought him downhill, his last sight was of the almost-hidden stars, veiled behind ropey snow and the kelp-nets of cracks drawn across his broken glasses.
His last thought, following naturally, was “I wonder what’s up there?”

The world was so tiny, and so unexpectedly green. Well, the parts that weren’t brown. Some of their later wars had gotten sloppy. But then again, what did you expect from what came of trying to understand ape psychology? It had nearly gotten them all killed before they figured that one out.
Yll held up an antennae and watched as she made it disappear, then reappear. Here’s the world, there’s the world. Gone again, here again. How much of it had they really seen, had they really known?
Questions for the past. The past was for other people, like apes. The future was different.
Yll rotated her cockpit and stared across the asteroid’s surface, watched the mining systems disengage. Time to go home, time to bring the fuel.
But still she lingered for a moment at the controls, looking deeper into galactic central core. And she wondered what was up there.

Qlg, no relation to Qlg, thought of a thing, and it was so. Ten trillion miles of conduits and a bulk of metals and electromagnetic fields that outmassed a combined constellation ensued this, revolving gently to her will at a speed that made light gawp.
She was looking for something, here in this backwater little corner of this unimportant galaxy. A curiosity of the universe, something that, like so many others, was relatively rare yet existed in the innumerable.
A planet with liquid water. There. There it was.
She turned it carefully in the impossibly enormous structures that had long-ago replaced her maxillipeds, capable of handling stars without singing. Her gaze, magnified by telescopes that operated strictly by means of folding local space-time, focused on the tiny little thing.
Blue. So much blue. Strange.
And she asked herself a question, assembled out of old, long-forgotten words buried in data banks thousands of miles across.
I wonder what’s down there?

Shush, shush, don’t worry, don’t fuss now. I’m here, momma’s here, you can stop worrying and crying.
Yes, yes, you’re all alone now, you’re too old for your crib. You sleep in the high bedroom like a child should now, like a big grownup child. And that’s scary. I understand that it’s scary. To be so high above the house, to be nearer to the gulls than to your parents. To be alone.
Yes, yes, it’s not fair. It’s not fair that your hammock is your home, and it rocks in the night wind that blows through the holes where there should be wholes, the ragged gaps where windowframes were.
But listen.
Listen close now, listen clear, and I will tell you why it is this way. Why it matters.
A long time ago, right here…

There was a great storm blowing out from the brightreefs. Scary, yes? But not so dangerous. Your great-great-grandma was clever, and so were all her friends – the men had warned them of the signs coming down from the birds and the clouds and they’d all tucked their boats deep inside the cliffs, stopped up the knotholes with great big stones. Then they slammed their shutters and furled their windmills and called down the children and they spent their nights in the hearth-room praying over the little oil lamps. They were smart, and they stayed safe. Only a very few boats belonging to careless and lazy people were broken, and nobody drowned or was blown down below to the waves. It was very safe.
Then everyone came out in the morning, found the sun floating all soft in the sky high above the old steeple, and we saw there had been a very strange thing. Do you know what your great-great-grandma saw, dearest?
Yes, that’s right – a ship! A big ship, a strange ship. It was nearly bigger than the village, its cabin was broader than two houses put together, its mast was a stump but it was still bigger than anything they’d ever put on a boat. It was a strange ship. And on its deck, sitting half-bent with her left knee bandaged, was a strange person. She was more than thrice as tall as your great-great-grandma – who was a very tall woman, as you know – and she was much too blue, not nearly as green as a sailor should be.
So your great-great-grandma and everyone went down to meet her, all at once, and everyone all stood still and stared.
“Hello, small, strange people,” said the strange person. And we all said hello back, and asked her who she was, and if she’d come far, and if she was in trouble.
“I am a voyager, an explorer, a navigator, and a sailor,” she said. “I am my own admiral. And yes, and yes. My mast is destroyed and my knee is crookt, my lenses are shattered and my larder is bare. I will be stuck here ‘till winter storms drive down and dash my ship to splinters. I ask for help to set me on my way.”
And this made everyone very nervous, smallness, because they’d never tried to fix anything so big before, and so fast, and for such a person. They were not bad people, your great-great-grandma and the others, not really that bad at all. They helped their friends, and they would help their neighbours for favours, but they’d never met anyone so strange – and moreover they were much unsure of how they would be able to fix such a large ship.
“Do not fear,” said the strange person. “I will show you how to make repairs. My devices are complex but their mending is not. My needs are as any other, my food is as any other.”
They were still slow to help then, smallness. They weren’t quick to believe this strange person, and she saw that. So she spoke a little more.
“I promise you, your aid will not go unpaid. Restore my boat to me, small, strange people, and I promise that I will give you a great gift in return.”
Now, some of them were a little hesitant still, but many of them – and your great-great-grandma was one – were very interested in this gift, and they argued and argued until everyone agreed to help, although the ship was so very very big that they were nervous. You know how that feels, don’t you? You do.
So they made it smaller by turning it into a list. A list of things to do and fix and patch.
First on the list was the strange person’s belly. Her food was all spoilt or overboard three days now, and she was starving. And what’s more, when they offered her their catches from the dimreefs, she refused them.
“These are too heavy,” she told them. “They click too strongly. I would be bleeding in a week and dying in a month. Is there no other food here? Food from farther inland, away from the reefs?”
No-one was sure. Inland was where the men spent their time, and they were always too busy weaving and timbering to look for food. That wasn’t their job.
…At least, that’s what your great-great-grandma and the other women told the strange person. Then they went home and called a meeting underneath the old steeple with their men because they saw they all looked very uncomfortable, and by wheedle and needle they got it out of them that there were special roots, very small little round ones with green leafy stems, and the men liked to eat them when they were out at work and tired. Oh, those clever, selfish little men – don’t grow up to be that way, will you? Will you? Oooh, you won’t, will you? Good child!
So that afternoon a bunch of the laziest men were sent out with blistered ears and they came back with great baskets of this root, which they baked wrapped in clay and leaves in fires, and the strange person ate them all.
“These do not click,” she said. “They are good.” And the women heard that and gave the men a few more words. You can learn them when you’re bigger, smallness. They’re not good ones. The men were passing sore about that, and they mumbled that they ought to get an extra share of the gift when it came, to pay back for losing their secret snack.
Second on the list were the lenses. They were big and brilliant and there were dozens, all held in a row by a big brass frame that spun them around and around each other and turned the globe they hovered about a thousand shiny colours.
At least, that’s what she said they did. They were all broken, each and every one, and the brass frame was nothing more than a big pile of hinges.
“For finding hot spots that click fast and loud,” she said, and she showed them the slivers of green, red, blue, and more. “They broke on your brightreefs when the storm carried me over. Without them I will have more disasters. What if I were to sail over a far-away place like your brightreefs but bigger, small, strange people?” Brrr, you’re right they all shivered at that. Brrrr. Don’t go imagining places like that, will you? Don’t worry. If there are any, they’re far away and can’t hurt anyone. Brr.
We searched long and hard up and down the town, but we found nothing. Glass is hard to make, smallness. Then a particularly lazy man who’d had a particularly long earful (he was your great-great-grandpa, yes he was) pointed up, up, up at the high rooms of the houses and asked about the windows.
“Yes,” said the strange person. “They should do nicely.”
Well there was a big row and a big huff – no windows for their children made the women awful mad, I can say that much. But they were perfect, just perfect – their shuttering would make the lenses work even better, said the strange person. So in the end the windows came off the high rooms of almost every house in town, and they went into boats, which went to the ship, where their frames were hammered into proper shape by the strange person until they fit the globe as well and as fine as could be. And the men were a bit happier, if the women were a little grumpier.
“This gift had better go a bit more our way than yours now,” they said. “You can find more tubers like that, but where’s our windows? We deserve better things now.”
Third on the list was the strange person’s leg. It hadn’t been there before, but it had been almost a week and her knee still would not bend.
“I cannot sail with one leg crookt, small, strange people,” she said. That’s true, isn’t it? Nobody can, it’ll have you overboard when you hit a bump as quick as blink. Like that – see? “It needs splinting.”
That now – that was right easy, smallness. They took a hammer in the hands of the strongest lumberjack man and they took the strange person’s leg in the arms of the two strongest hauler women and they put them together – BANG until that bad mend snapped. Then the two women splinted the leg with the straightest beam they had – the mast of the tallest boat in the village. They snapped it in two and it was just barely long enough to cradle the strange person’s leg kindly. Oh, your great-great-grandma gritted her teeth long and hard over that! Oh she did! But she took saw to timber herself and cursed great-great-grandpa when he offered to help – did it all in one go. She said the gift held her aim straight. The gift in her head.
Fourth was the bodywork. Oh, that strange person’s ship soaked timber, smallness. They had to haul it off the stones it had settled on with long, long poles – she helped too, one-legged though she was – then they had haul it onto the shore until it was seaworthy, then they had to add more rocks to the dock so it’d be deep enough to hold it. Oh that ship ate days and turned the nights short, like winter and summer come at once! She helped with hammers and with words and as her leg came back under her she spent more and more of it moving, always moving, walking up and down the town and into the hills where women weren’t supposed to be, looking for a new mast for the ship, looking for something that stood tall.
That was the fifth thing, and it was almost winter, child of mine. They had to finish soon, and there were no trees big enough. The strange person was stumped, and everyone was in a fit – all that work for nothing if they couldn’t get the mast ready for her! So they got together under the old steeple and they all agreed to look. All the men went out into the hills and forests and the women put to water and went down the coasts and they hunted all day for two days, and when they came back at night – empty-handed, empty-storied, every one! – they staggered home to meet again, under the old steeple.
And then your great-great-grandma looked up and said this, I remember she said exactly this because she told this story to my grandma a hundred thousand times, she said this: “Hey! We found it!”
So they took down the old steeple, because otherwise they would have helped the strange person for nothing at all, and they shaved off its old decorations and trimmed out its elder carvings and rubbed off the little marks the birds had left on it. And it was a little bit short and a little bit wide, but the strange person said that was good. “It will be sturdier than my last mast,” she said, “and this one has been proven in many gales, even in the same that wrecked me.” And she was right.
Not more than a week from that, all was done. The ship didn’t gleam, smallness, but it still shone there in the early morning. It shone especial bright in the eyes of everyone, because most of them had been up all night waiting in excitement, like you did on your birthday last night. When you became a child, wasn’t that nice? It was like that for all of them. So they were twitching and hopping and wincing in the cool dawn when the strange person walked down from the heights one last time, loading the last basket of the little tubers the men had shown to her. She walked down the steps six at a time, leg straight, and parted the crowd like this – woosh! – like a big fish through little minnows. She walked up the gangplank – boom boom boom – and stood there, her right foot on the boat, her left foot still waiting. And she turned to us.
“Thank you,” she said.
We waited there, all huddled up, and people made that mumbly sound they do in big parties. You know, like mmuururmrmrurmrurm. Murururmrm – yes, like that. And then up stepped your great-great-grandma, and she said what they were all saying a lot clearer, and she said this.
“What about it?”
The strange person tilted her head a little at her. “About what?”
“What about the gift?” asked your great-great-grandpa.
“Yes, the gift!” said your great-great-great-grandpa, who was old and cranky. “What is it? Where is it? Is it in the boat? I know we looked in the boat.”
“It is not in this ship,” said the strange person, “and I do not cheat. Do you wish it now, then?”
“Yes!” said everyone all at once and all past each other, some of them pushing to see properly. “Give it to us! We earned it!”
“Then do not worry, small, strange, kind people, for I have already given it to you, though it took much effort to install – and you yourselves have already repaid it.”
“What is it?” we asked – from the dock, from the windows, from the cliffs. “What is it?”
“Generosity,” she said.
And she kicked the plank loose from the dock with her foot and drifted away, already moving to hoist the sails into the fresh sunlight.

And that’s why your bedroom has no window, smallness, and neither did mine, nor your grandma’s.
So you’ll know how to behave properly when the next stranger comes.