The Dark Griffin Read online

  He reached the lip of the nest and perched there, peering at the branches near to him. One looked close enough; he stretched out a talon toward it and could nearly touch it. He sat still, judging the distance, and then jumped. His wings opened instinctively in midair and he landed on the branch, claws scrabbling to get a grip on it. He rested there, talons deep in the bark, and clicked his beak triumphantly. Perfect. From here he could go anywhere he liked.

  He climbed out along the branch, wanting to see how far it went. It was a long one, and spread out into several smaller branches partway along. The chick stuck to the main branch but it grew steadily thinner the further along he went, until he could wrap his front claws all the way around it. Then it began to bend under his weight, and he had to open his wings for balance. Not liking this, he started to turn back. But he couldn’t turn around. The branch was too narrow, and he didn’t want to let go of it. He shuffled backward instead, hoping to get to a spot where he could turn, but it was a mistake.

  Unable to see where he was going, he snagged a hind paw in a fork. He stopped and tried to extricate it, but it slipped out of its new gripping place and kicked out wildly, throwing him off balance. He struggled to save himself for a brief moment, wings flapping, but then he slipped, sliding almost gracefully sideways off the branch and into space. He hung by his front paws, hind legs dangling, and tried to pull himself back up with his beak, but then the branch broke and he fell.

  He thudded into a branch below, but tumbled off before he could grab hold, and for a long heart-stopping instant he was falling, down and down, bouncing from branch to branch and shrieking. He had fallen about halfway down the tree before his flailing foretalons managed to latch onto a branch and halt his descent. He clung to the rough bark for a few moments, quivering with fright.

  He was bruised and winded, and his beak hurt from where it had smacked into something. He chirped his distress, calling yet again for Saekrae, but still she did not come.

  Fear gripped him. He wanted desperately to go back to the nest, but the branch above him was too high to reach. He managed to shuffle back along the branch to where it joined the trunk and tried to haul himself up by digging his talons into the bark, but it was soft and tore away as soon as he put his weight on it. He tried harder and managed to go a short distance, only to come sliding back down again. He was stuck.

  He stayed on the branch for some time, unable or unwilling to go either up or down. He paced back and forth, searching for a way out, but none looked particularly inviting.

  Eventually, though, a strange calm came over him. He crouched on the branch, at the thin end of it, and looked upward, toward the sky, showing blue through the forest canopy. There were birds up there, circling casually on the wind. They had wings and they could fly. Saekrae had wings and she flew.

  The black chick spread his own wings. They were big and wide, with long feathers. A few wisps of babyish down still clung to the vanes, but the strong feathers of adulthood had finished growing.

  He beat them experimentally. They nearly unbalanced him, but he held on tightly and tried again. He could feel them catching the air and lifting him very slightly with each blow. Feeling a little more confident, he flapped them as hard as he could, faster and faster, trying to make them lift him off the branch and into the air. They didn’t, and the violent motion threatened to send him tumbling to his death.

  He gave up—tired, hungry and frustrated—and ripped strips of bark off the branch, growling to himself.

  He calmed down eventually and sat still, thinking. How does his mother do it? She didn’t just beat her wings to fly. She jumped. He remembered that now. He’d seen her do it dozens of times, but never really thought about it.

  He looked upward again. If he could fly, he could get back to the nest and then Saekrae would come and bring him food. He turned to look toward the end of the branch. Suddenly, it didn’t look so daunting. Without another thought or a moment to prepare himself, he braced all four legs on his perch, spread his wings wide, and charged. He ran as fast as he could, claws scattering bits of bark, holding his wings and tail out rigidly as he had seen Saekrae do, and staring straight ahead. As the branch became thinner, it started to bend. He could feel it threatening to break, and for an instant he panicked. Then he jumped.

  The branch acted as a springboard, and the black chick launched himself into space. His wings caught the air and held him up, and he went into a clumsy glide. When he realised he was flying, he panicked and began to beat his wings wildly, terrified that he was about to fall. He didn’t, but not knowing how to steer with his tail, he lurched crazily around in the sky, unable to go in any particular direction or at any particular height. His wings, still too weak and uncoordinated for true flight, started to falter. He managed to stay up for a while, but his wings finally gave out and he careened toward the ground. It wasn’t an outright fall—his wings stayed open and acted as a kind of crude parachute—but he didn’t have the strength to pull up again. He screeched, flailing at the air, and then he hit the branches of the tree below him.

  Leaves and twigs smacked into him from all sides, lashing at him like whips. He had a confused vision of leaves and sky and brown bark before something hit him hard in the head and lights exploded in front of his eyes.

  He did not remember hitting the ground.

  The sun was high overhead and it was hot and wet among the trees when the black chick woke up. He lifted his head dazedly, thinking he was still in the nest, and stilled when he realised he was not.

  He was lying in a crumpled heap on a patch of muddy ground softened with moss. One foreleg was twisted beneath him, and his head hurt. He struggled to get up; the world seemed to be spinning around him and he cheeped pathetically. But despite the pain in his head and sides and the deep scratch in his foreleg, he was all right. His legs and wings were sound, and he hadn’t broken any feathers.

  He tottered off over the forest floor, caught up in a sudden need to explore this strange new world. The light was dim and greenish beneath the trees, and the air was full of the scent of leaf mould and damp earth. The trees and rocks were festooned with moss and lichen, and everywhere insects chirped. The black chick wandered here and there, discovering things he had never seen or imagined before, his fear forgotten.

  He came across a stream, shallow and perfectly clear, flowing among heaps of moss-green boulders. He stopped to drink from it, throwing his head back to swallow, and dabbed at the water with his foreclaws, fascinated by the way it looked and the soft rushing sound it made. It tasted sweet and cool, and he drank deeply and felt much better for it.

  But it did remind him of his hunger, and he moved on in the hopes of finding something he could eat. His instincts helped. He found a rotting log and tore into it with his beak and talons, turning up beetles and wood grubs, which he devoured. The ground beneath yielded earthworms and a small burrowing frog, and he eagerly snapped them up, feeling rather pleased with his own cleverness.

  He spent a good portion of the afternoon foraging for more, and eventually returned to the stream to drink again. It left him feeling a lot stronger.

  He sheltered under a bush that night, curling up to sleep with his head under his wing, more tired out from the stresses and excitement of the day than he had realised. He woke up several times during the night, disturbed by the cold and the unfamiliar sounds, but by the time the moon had risen he was sound asleep.

  He woke up hungry again the next morning, stiff from his exertions on the previous day. This time he did not call for Saekrae.

  He tried digging for worms again but was not so lucky this time, and he knew he needed something more substantial. He struck out determinedly, following the stream, intent on finding another way to feed himself.

  After a while he picked up a scent that made his stomach gurgle in anticipation: the stench—faint but tantalising—of rotting meat.

  The black chick followed it at once, head held high and tail twitching. He lost it several tim
es but always found it again, and it finally led him to the base of a large tree. He sniffed around it and found a hole between two of its roots. The smell was coming from inside. Without a moment’s thought he crawled straight in.

  The hole led to a little cave just big enough to hold him, and inside there was food. The rotting corpses of birds, lizards and small mammals, all piled up and giving off a wonderful, pungent odour. The black chick plunged in, beak first, and ate. He tore off strips of decaying flesh and swallowed them whole, as fast as he could. He ate until his stomach hurt, until all he could do was lie on his side, eyes glazed, and pant. But he was practically delirious with triumph.

  He fell asleep, utterly sated, and slept more peacefully and happily than he had ever done before. When he woke he ate again, and for days he stayed in his new home and gorged himself to his heart’s content. Caught up in this new-found bounty, he had completely forgotten about his mother.

  It was a solid week before the store of food in the burrow began to run out. The chick grew fat and sleek with all this good food so readily available, and was thoroughly disinclined to wander far from his new home. He hadn’t given a thought to where the food had come from; it was just there, and he took all he wanted.

  At around the time that the heap of carrion started to run out, the chick was woken one day by an unfamiliar scent. He opened his eyes and realised that the entrance to the burrow was blocked. The smell filled his nostrils, dry, musky and dangerous.

  A moment later his eyes, adjusting to the gloom, showed him a brief vision of a huge, snarling muzzle, and then pain tore into his flank. He screeched and lashed out, and his talons hit something soft. The thing withdrew and he pulled himself further back into the burrow, still screeching loudly. There was blood on his flank, hot and clinging, but he had no time to feel sorry for himself. His assailant had withdrawn its head when he slashed at it, but it returned a moment later, teeth bared and snapping for him. He struck back, this time with his beak, and bit it on the nose.

  The creature—a pouched, foxlike predator with a striped back—pulled its yellowy head out of its plundered food store and the savage thing it contained and sat back on its haunches, whining. It shook its head and snorted, trying to clear the blood out of its injured nostrils, and then abruptly turned and left. Fighting the thing that had stolen its food simply wasn’t worth it.

  The griffin chick stayed where he was for some time, panting in his distress. His flank had three deep slashes in it, each one bleeding and painful. He nosed at them with his beak, quivering, and huddled back in the burrow, frightened that the creature might come back.

  It didn’t, but he barely slept for the next couple of days. His wounds eventually stopped bleeding and scabbed over, and he rested and ate the last few carcasses slowly, to give himself plenty of time to heal. One of the wounds became infected, but he nipped it open and let the muck drain out, and the swelling went down.

  The last of the food was gone in a few days, but the wounds on his flank were deep and began bleeding again if he moved. He lay still on his side and felt hunger gnawing at him. If he went into the open now he would be slow and vulnerable. If he stayed here, he would starve.

  The black chick was still young and his mind was still simple, but he was more than intelligent enough to understand the situation and how dire it was. But, as he lay there among the damp earth and listened to the sighing of the trees far above, determination hardened in his chest. He would not give up. He would survive. Nothing and nobody would ever take his life away from him. He promised himself this.

  The black chick did not forget his resolution. He waited patiently in the burrow for as long as he dared, eating wet earth and insects to sustain himself, and then left it and struck out into the world once more.

  And he survived. Against all the odds, he survived. He ate worms; he ate carrion. He taught himself how to hunt small animals, which he did mostly at night, given an advantage by his dark coat. He raided birds’ nests and dug mice out of their burrows. Once he even resorted to fishing, waiting patiently by a still pool to snag his prey. He took to climbing into trees to sleep, feeling safer up high, and from these perches he continued his attempts to fly. He only managed a brief unsteady glide at first, and his landings were painful, but he persisted and taught himself how to keep steady and turn by using his tail. After a while he was able to flit from tree to tree and could land neatly on a branch or a rock or on the ground. He began chasing birds on the wing and even started to unconsciously mimic the hunting methods of an adult griffin by dropping out of the sky to snatch up a fleeing animal.

  He continued to grow steadily as the months and years went by, his body thickening and his wings becoming longer. From the size of a cat he grew to the size of a goat, then a horse, and he continued to grow until, at fifteen years old, he was the largest creature in the valley.

  He was heavier in the shoulders and haunches than his mother had been, and the tufts of black feathers above his ears had become long and pointed to indicate his physical maturity and vitality to other griffins. But there were no other griffins in the valley, and his aggressive screeches every evening went unanswered. He would fly up to the mountains that marked the boundaries of his territory, hoping to see another griffin on the other side. He would look out over the huge plains to the north and scream a challenge at them, not liking their strangeness and the unfamiliar scents the wind carried from them. Nothing ever came to answer him, and he eventually lost interest.

  As he grew older and larger, it became harder to find enough food, so he took to ranging further on his hunting trips. The neighbouring valleys were only a little better; he caught enough to avoid starvation, but was not tempted to move to a new territory. For now, the lure of his birthplace was strong enough to keep him coming back.

  And that was how he lived from day to day, alone and unthinking, until he was nineteen years old and had reached his full size. He had chosen to live in a cave on the side of one of the three mountains. Less of a cave than an overhang, its semblance of a roof was only big enough to offer partial shelter for him, though the floor jutted out into a rocky ledge that was more than adequate for him to crouch on.

  He lay on his belly, basking in the afternoon sun, one wing draped over the rock beside him. From here he could see the remains of the nest where he had hatched; time and weather had left large holes in it, and most of the sides had fallen away, leaving only a crude thatch of rotting plant matter lying abandoned on the cut-off treetops, which were steadily regrowing.

  The black griffin, still nameless, yawned and flicked his tail. He was feeling restless just now, though he wasn’t sure why. He had eaten well over the last few days, and it was comfortable enough here on the ledge. Perhaps it was just boredom.

  He glanced idly at the back wall of his home. There were marks on the rock in shades of red, black and brown. They did not look natural, and he had often puzzled over what had made them. Perhaps they were a kind of moss or lichen, but sometimes when he looked at them in the right light he thought some of the shapes looked familiar. Like animals. And, in the midst of them all, there was one that reminded him of a creature he had never seen outside of a pool of still water during his adult life: a griffin. Its wings were spread wide and its beak was open. Something was coming out of its mouth, but he couldn’t tell what it was. It was red, like blood, but it had a shape like a river.

  The black griffin had never completely forgotten his chickhood and the other griffins that had once lived in the valley. He remembered Saekrae, his mother. He had never found her remains, but he knew she was dead. He remembered the strange creatures that had come when she disappeared, though the memory was hazy now. They had flown like griffins and made sounds as if they were, he remembered, but they had not been griffins. He wondered what they were and whether they would ever come back.

  The thought made him irritable. If they did, he would fight them. This was his land now.

  He raised his head and screeched to emph
asise the point, a nameless cry that rang out over the valley. But even as it died away it seemed to strengthen suddenly and swing back toward him, higher and louder.

  The black griffin stood up, bewildered. He screeched again, and again the second screech replied. Not an echo. Another voice.

  He took to the air, silver feathers shining in the sun, and climbed until he was level with the mountains, looking for the stranger. He screeched again and followed the sound of the reply. It was coming from the summit of the northern-most mountain, and as he flew toward it he could see the creature perched there among the bare rocks.

  His heart tugged at his throat. It was another griffin, clear as day, sitting right on the border of his territory. She had seen him coming and was waiting calmly for him. He landed a short distance away and walked toward her.

  She turned to watch him. The sun was behind her, making her feathers glow. She was not black like him, or brown, as Saekrae had been. She was . . . gold. Her fur was tawny yellow and her feathers were pale golden brown. Her eyes, though, were blue, as bright as the sky behind her.

  The black griffin did not know what to do. He sat on his haunches, wings half-open to make himself look bigger, and simply stared at her. She had not entered the valley. His territory was not violated. But she had suddenly appeared like this, seemingly out of nowhere, and he was completely unprepared for it.

  She looked back at him and clicked her beak. “Greetings,” she said. Her voice was strong and clear and did not sound hostile.

  The black griffin knew how to speak. He had talked to himself for most of his life, but did not know many words. Only those he had learnt in the nest. He was silent for some time, trying to marshal his thoughts. “You . . . griff?” he managed.