The Golden Lure - Dessert
The Golden Lure - Dessert
Treats of I-cow-us; Wings of Linen and Bone
You’re snacking on In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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Mist streamed by Mr. Grey’s eyes. He felt as if he were diving through cloudy water, so thickly and closely did the vapor flow. Only The Wind - still hot, still sweaty, smacking like oven air against his face - and the bumpy spine of the cowsowhorse mount, grounded him to reality. Mr. Grey, Tom, and Honeydew weren’t swimming, but flying. Flying; far above the unseen skyscrapers. Flying; through the misty sea covering The Lost City of Fountains.
“Nice of the fishes, gifting this shortcut,” said Mr. Grey. The cowsowhorse lowed beneath him, as though agreeing. “We’ll shortly return to camp, deliver the lure, do Jodee’s visa, clear miscommunications - with the Defense Force - and after all that; return to our vacation.”
Honeydew made, Mr. Grey thought, a reluctantly satisfied click. She sat at the front with her legs dangling along the chuck and foreshanks of the broad cow body. Her knees dangled behind the bone-and-linen glider wings harnessed to their mount. She glanced sidelong across the vibrating fabric of one wing. “Not that shortly. We’re hardly swooping and soaring. And how will we know when we’re landing?”
Looking at The Wind dancing beneath the wings, Mr. Grey asked, “How long till we make camp, Wind?”
The Wind shrugged; the bone framework creaked. She said, “Not much farther. Probably. Hard to see in the mist.”
“I hope the crab-things are gone.”
“And our stuff’s intact,” added Honeydew.
They glided in silence for a time; atop their fish-gifted cowsowhorse; through a hot, wet foggy ocean. Tom sat between Honeydew and Mr. Grey. The working Wind’s breath fluttered his robe, so that the cloud zeppelins patterned there seemed to fly within the surrounding mist. As a snow owl might fly through an alpine storm, its alabaster feathers camouflaged, with only a rustle and a warp in the falling flakes to mark its passage; just so did the cloud zeppelins on Tom’s robe fly. Whenever Tom turned his broad, whiskered face sideways, an odd expression of worry wrinkled his brow. Tom broke the silence by saying, “There were many crabs. Maybe we forget the camp; beeline back to town.”
“Our. Stuff. Is. At. Camp.” said Honeydew, emphasizing the words by squeezing them between bared fangs.
“And consider Tom,” Mr. Grey added, “this cowsowhorse only glides. It’s range has limits.”
Tom steadied himself with a palm against the cowsowhorse’s ribs, drew his handkerchief with the other hand, and wiped gathering mist from his brow. He twisted his broad body around and nearly knocked Mr. Grey from his sirloin perch. Tom twitched his cheekbones and twisted his mouth, as if struggling to speak. The spectacle alarmed Mr. Grey.
Just then, they heard a shout - a command - from somewhere ahead and below in the pale murk. All three glanced over the flanks. The tallest skyscrapers slipped up through the mist; columns of grassglass, metal, and stone. The building rose like cliff walls on either side; as though they flew along a deep ravine, with a cloudy sky above, and its mirrored reflection in a river below. A moment passed. The grand facades, misty floor, and circular stone rings of the fountains popped into sight; a dizzy distance down. They heard a second bark - a second command - and the camp of the partisans rushed through the mist-wall.
The Glorious Defense Force held them prisoner.
A row of gun-toting, prawn-armored soldiers stood in duos and trios around the former camp of the partisans. The unmoving tortilla-shells of many lobster-monsters lay in the street like boulders on a flat misty heath. The partisans huddled beside Honeydew’s luggage stack. Their hands were bound in thick seaweed-rope, and a few had been roughly handled, but otherwise they looked unharmed. Nuggets stood out at the edge of the cluster, his rose-tipped shoulders drooping, his hands held to his face, sobbing into his cloth visa. Mr. Grey marked Candlehead’s absence among the prisoners; he wondered if the legendary figure had somehow escaped.
One of the Defense Force soldiers pointed at the three up on their cowsowhorse. They leveled their guns skyward. One soldier however, carrying an all-too-familiar trumpet, waved a fist.
Ordus the Diegeonary yelled up at the gliding three. “‘Not even the Prawn Fish will transgress his swim, but the Diegeonaries, the ministers of justice, overtake him.’ Did you think you’d escaped? That you’d gotten away? From the Defense Force? And the keen light of the Sun Fish? NO WAY, HORDIST SCUM!”
Mr. Grey saw the glider wings quiver with a sudden, second source of vibration. Honeydew, sitting with her knees against the framework, shook with fury. Mr. Grey only saw the back of her head, but he heard how the words she said whistled from her throat, almost a whisper. “All our stuff… All my robes… These… Stupid… Soldiers…”
Before Mr. Grey could think of something soothing he might say, Ordus called up again. “I’m giving you one chance. Just this single one. glide that bull to ground, and submit yourselves to King’s Law. FROM THIS POINT ON, I’M DONE PLAYING NICE!”
Mr. Grey, in a less-wise moment, said, “Perhaps we should consider-”
Honeydew threw her hair back and howled with fury. “MY STUFF!!!” She pumped her shoulders in vain at the empty air; The Wind slipped away from the barrage. Honeydew brought a tight, shuddering fist over her head, her hand mirror clutched between the blanched knuckles. She brought the hand hard against the cowsowhorse’s flank. She wasn’t trying deliberately to hurt the animal; it had the simple misfortune of being the first surface to meet her descending fist.
The cowsowhorse’s cowsow shoulder bucked. It shunted Honeydew sideways. She gasped. Before Mr. Grey or Tom could grab her, she tumbled over the side.
Honeydew fell. The movement seemed slow; the mist covering the ground seemed strangely pillowish. But they all, every one, knew that only unforgiving stone lay beneath. Honeydew screamed and plummeted. Mr. Grey tried to scream, but shock choked the noise in his throat. Far below, Ordus the Diegeonary cried, “Somebody catch her!” The soldiers were too far. None would reach Honeydew before she hit ground. Her fall accelerated. The false mist floor spread its massless arms wide for the catch. Mr. Grey closed his eyes.
A splash. Mr. Grey opened his eyes. Honeydew had landed in the center of a fountain ring. She came up spluttering; wet; but still existing. Mr. Grey pulled air in, breathing for the first time in several tocks. He saw the soldiers move in, guns drawn. His breath caught halfway down his neck.
Then the scene vanished from view. The mist swallowed Honeydew, the partisans, the camp, and the soldiers and their guns. Mr. Grey and Tom’s cowsowhorse glided past the site, deeper into the haze, further along the skyscraper corridor.
Mr. Grey twisted and said, “We need to go back. Wind, can you turn us around?”
Ahead of the Wind’s response, however, Tom scooched forward along the mount’s jagged spine. He took hold of the glider frame and held it steady. The glider continued straight and high over the misty street. He said, “The soldiers abide king’s law. They’ll just arrest her. She’ll be safe with them. We’ll regroup with her later.”
“She’s part of our team. We can’t travel without her,” To Mr. Grey, Ordus’s yells sounded alarmingly distant.
“We traveled to the castle; she wasn’t with us,” Tom countered. “We can shortcut this. We do Jodee’s visa first, handle the lure next, clear our names for thirds, then they’ll release Honeydew.”
“Tom, we can’t abandon her.”
“Will us getting caught help her?”
“But… our stuff is back at camp.”
“You have your fiddle. I have my mallet. We can use the cowsowhorse. It makes a bubble. We’ll walk by its hocks; cross the abyssal dessert. Isn’t that right, Wind?”
The Wind murmured under the glider wings. “Do what pleases you. You will regardless. That bare, broad, sandy sea floor? I’ll not cross alone.”
“But you’ll carry us?” Tom’s voice was pressing. “Fly the glider its farthest?”
“If you feel strongly.”
Tom bent over the cow-neck of their cowsowhorse and held his palms by its eyes like blinders. They glided no faster, nor did their course change, but Mr. Grey heard the beast huff. He said, “Museumtown’s a long way.”
The Wind said, “I’m taking you to the bubble’s other side. The Lost City lies right at Antiquity’s far membrane, on the Panacheward edge. Then you won’t need to cross all of Antiquity and the Abyssal Desert. Just the latter.” The Wind seemed to have warmed to their scheme as she found herself a component. She blew hot, strong currents under their wings, so that the grassglass windows of the skyscrapers flashed by like tenacious curtains of vine draped down a canyon wall.
Mr. Grey, finding his resistance buckling at the knees, asked, “But what about food? Water, bedrolls, fire.”
Tom looked back from his bend over the mount’s neck. He sniffled, and his eyes carried dark, tired bags, but the eyes themselves shone with steel polish. Tom said, “We’ll figure things out. We can rough it for a spell, scavenge off the sand. You should trust me more, I’ve always helped you get by.”
The skyscraper walls vanished into the mist. Their glider broke free of the consumptive misty zone surrounding The Lost City. The edge of Antiquity, the far side from where they’d entered, curved just ahead. The bubble’s membrane held back the crushing sea. Beyond it lay the Abyssal Desert; stretching out of sight; brightly lit in all its vast emptiness by the sweltering Sun Fish’s fickle rays.
Mr. Grey looked with doubt at their ride’s furry flanks. The thought of walking that gulf, in a claustrophobic pocket of air made by a barn chimera, was not comforting. And he hated leaving Honeydew. But Mr. Grey stifled his objections. He let Tom urge on The Wind and the cowsowhorse. He took another big breath through his nose, and readied himself for whatever lay ahead.
After all, he thought; Tom had always helped.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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Thanks
for this dish’s image, the true cowsowhorse: