Weekly Writing

Animal Taming: A Practical Guide

Chapter 1

All manner of beast can be tamed, but not forever, and not without a cost.

A line of Condor Riders swoops low, just above where I lay at the bottom of the ships mizzenmast, no doubt escorting the last flotilla of rafts over the falls.

Forever I am forced watch. To stand witness to the deaths of my people. But the more I watch, the more I see the ships look as enormous floating flour beds. Or like a freshly dug grave filled to the brim with dirty, writhing earthworms.

I watch the way they wiggle and squirm and fight against their restraints. I watch them paddle until their hearts give out, against certain and inevitable death they still paddle and fight and claw as they're yanked around and around, ever closer, with no way out. Trapped like a worm on a hook waiting to be eaten whole.

I know the feeling well all too well. These are my people. My worms. And I know their pain. I hear their screams. Tens of thousands of cries in the night. They ring in his ears throughout every moment of my existence, all simultaneously stacked upon one another on a continuous loop.

Another ship full of my countrymen cascades over the falls at the center of all things, and are swallowed up, and Cartegus--studious, sleazy, rat-faced Cartegus--scribbles down another tally in his big brown ledger. As if it were possible for me to forget the count.

"We'll make it, your majesty," Cartegus sputters. He doesn't look back, just stares out over the water at the setting sun as it dips behind the rig tower of platform four. He compares that its position to that of the remaining raft, a few minutes from death, and mops his sideburns and the back of his neck with a handkerchief. "We've been father away with less time before," Cartegus says in a plea of reassurance, but I am not sure we ever have.

***

Truth eases out of a spindly patch of whitevine brush, her hands up in surrender. "Woah. Hey now. It's just me. You remember me, right boy?"

The beast towers over the small girl, rearing back, stamping its hooves.

Truth scoops up the wooden pale at her feet and retreats back a step. She dunks her hand in. "You remember this though, don't ya?" Truth pulls a hunk of corned beef drenched in thick brown gravy. She dangled it between her fingers like a freshly caught fish.

The monster of a horse, fierce even an inch from starvation, turned to butter at the smell of it.

"Yeah, smells good right. Come on. Come and get it." She rings out the hunk of meat in little hands like a wet rag and spills a trail of brown gravy into the cracks of the sun-bleached earth.

"Not too quick, okay?" Truth takes a step backwards to give the him some room to limp forward and lap up a much as he needed. "It'll hurt your belly like last time, remember?" She dunked the meat back into bucket and dripped down some more of the good stuff.

At least the horse's tongue worked fine, she thought. She watches in weird fascination as the enormous slimy slug of a tongue formed to fit every crack, however jagged, he managed to slurp up every drop, no matter how far down in the cracks it was.

The horse would've been way too big for Truth on account of her age, but being small for it didn't help neither. Still, she figured this was likely the scrawniest and sickliest looking Shire she'd ever seen. Normally they stood about a fathom and a half tall and weighed a good ten anchors or so--supposed to be so big you can't barely get them in a door even with their head bowed. But this one was worse for wear.

Truth tried to imagine how such an enormous animal could have survived out here long. It was starving, definitely, but with the amount of what Truth was sure had to be blood matted to the horse's back, she figured there had to be a wound or two under the gore as well.

The poor creature looked just as likely to keel over and die on her as to be of use to anybody, but the village always needed strong animal to draw up nets and plough paddies, and one can't be too choosey on the tundra, gran would say.

Truth had been lucky to find the mare's tracks the week before, and even luckier The Great Tide held off long enough to track him down again today.

The big lunk had been too stubborn to follow her home before, but Truth had determined, deep down in herself, that she could not possibly live with herself if she just leave him out here to drown.

She'd told Gran and Grampa about the horse, and the stableman, and multiple town watchmen too. Nobody cared. The only person who took any interest at all was Karn Hawkings, the village butcher, and there wasn't a change in hell I was letting him go that way.

So Truth had set out to on her own, this time prepared with her secret weapon. Meat and gravy. She figured she wasn't likely to get third shot it at. Although, who knows with the water acting the way it was these days.

The Great Tide had been more and more erratically every year, to the point where it was becoming darn near impossible to predict when it might come in, and even harder to know when it might go again. The year before last it'd stayed through the first five seasons without leaving once, drowning the crops and causing torrential rainfall that lasted for weeks on end, while this year they hadn't had a single flood and folks were starting to worry they'd go all twelve phases without seeing a drop.

"You gotta name, boy?" the girl asked, flopping down a strip of soggy meat. "My name is Truth, and that's the truth!" she said with waning enthusiasm. "That's what my mom would say..." She smiles, a twinge of pain in remembering. "I'm thinking... Chomper," she says as the horse gnaws on the meat. "Or maybe, Bitey..." She considered it. "Hmm."

She looks closer. "What's wrong, buddy? Too thick?" The horse gums the hunk of meat, sucking on it with a toothless, bloody mouth. "Oh, Tide... You poor thing." Whitevine burrs cling to the dry sockets and she hadn't the tools to remove them, not without losing a hand at least. If the horse was any stronger, Truth might worry about become his lunch. A full grown Shine had made quick work of many-a-stable boy her Grandpa'd said, but a ten year old girl--? And a scrawny one at that--? Well... she'd barely be a snack.

Without really thinking--Truth's natural state--she reaches out and strokes the horse's mane, pulling out knots and sweeping away a few brambles before she realizes the horse was letting her touch him for the first time. He liked her, she supposed. Well, that or Grandpa's yak gravy; it was known to have that effect on most living things.

"I'mma go with Slurpy!" She says, beaming down at the beast as he nuzzles his nose down into the gravy pale and embodies his namesake. "Easy boy," she strokes, "Don't wanna have to rename you Barf!" She giggles. "Or, or, or... Ralph!" Truth reaches up and pats him on the butt, feeling better, rejuvenated.

Truth scoops up the bucket, empty now except a few strips of meat that had been licked clean. "Come on, boy. I got more where this came from," she said, tantalizingly, but after a few steps this way and that it appears the horse had other plans. "Come on you big lump! You want to get stuck out here during a High Tide? I don't think so, so come on!"

She yanks on the horses bit and bridle, which were elegantly made with an intricate, scrolling design," but the horse doesn't move an inch. "Pretty fancy digs you got here, Slurps." She looks him over. There was no saddle, but by the line of discolored fur, Truth could tell the horse's owner must've used one, and not long ago.

She scans the constant, flat horizon. Nothing but broken earth, barren trees, and spindly, lifeless brush for as far as you could see, even with alchemist's glass--not that she had a piece clear enough to see through anyway. If she did, she sure as heck wouldn't be out here fishing for salt worms.

Truth eyes the horse, suspiciously, "Who are you, huh? Ain't like no wild horse I ever seen." She waited, staring at the horse, as if expecting a reply, preferably in clear, common Allerian if he could manage. "Hmm. Welp, you're mine now. 'Peeper keeper, sleeper weeper!' Grampa'd say." She pulls the length of broken rein over Slurpy's head, wondering what could have snapped such a thick piece of gully leather, and so cleanly. Not even sword or scythe could of cut through the thick hide of Gullers. She'd never seen one herself, but Gran had told her stories of when she was a little girl and the Gullers roamed free across the land, before the Tide starting acting up.

She pulls the horse in the direction of her , but the beast doesn't move. She heaves with all ninety or so pounds of her, but he doesn't budge even an inch, instead dips his head down to lick bait pale again, as if he hadn't even noticed the weight pulling on his head forward.

Chapter 1



All manner of beast can be tamed, but not forever, and not without a cost.



Day 16, Third Winter, Year of the Ow



A line of Condor Riders dive low and sweep between the sails just above where I sit and write atop the captain's deck. Oh, how I miss the skies. To fly is to be free. Truly free.



They escort the last flotilla of rafts over the falls and I am to sit and watch them die. Burdened, for all mankind's sake, to stand witness to the death of my people. To give of my them freely, with open eyes. r the last flotilla of rafts over the falls and I am to sit and watch them die. Burdened, for all mankind's sake, to stand witness to the death of my people. To give of my them freely, with open eyes.



Only, the more I stare at them, the more I see the ships as enormous floating flour beds filled with dirty, writhing worms. Sometimes they appear to me as freshly dug graves, and my people maggots.



I am ashamed at how I am, how I watch and what I write, and yet, I watch and I write, over and over until my eyes feel like falling out and my fingers bleed to the nub, still, I watch. Isn't that enough? Is it not enough? Isn't it?



I can't help it. But to stare with sick fascination as they wiggle and squirm and fight against their restraints. How they paddle until their weak little hearts give out. How the struggle against certain and insurmountable death. Still they paddle and fight and claw as the current draws them in, around and around, ever closer, no way out. Trapped like a worm on a hook.



I know the feeling all too well. I know my people's pain. I hear their screams. Tens of thousands of cries. They ring in my ears throughout every moment of my day, all simultaneously stacked upon one another on a continuous loop.



As I write this very moment the souls for which I am responsible scream, each a different pitch and tone. Some screams are hoarse and raspy, burly. While others high and feminine, shrills and shrieks, piercing. And then there are some that ring even higher still, the screams of the young. Of children, I hear them the clearest. They soloists



Whole families up and down both sides all join together in a chorus death howls, but it's as if the children stand out in front of the others, as if they were soloists, each taking their own aria, each crying for the person they would never get be.



I watch as another ship full of my countrymen cascades into the gaping maw at the center of all things, and I hear Cartegus--studious, sleazy, rat-faced Cartegus--scratching down another tally of ink in his big brown ledger. As if I could ever forget the count.



"We'll make it, your majesty," Cartegus sputters, nervous sweat running down his gaunt, angular cheeks. He doesn't look back, just stares out over the water at the sun as it begins to set behind the rig tower of platform four. He compares its position to that of the remaining raft, a few minutes from the falls, calculating, seemingly counting the seconds in his mind.



Cartegus mops his sideburns and the back of his neck with a handkerchief. "We've been father away with less time before," he says in a plea of reassurance, but I know its a lie.



Maybe this time we'll fail. And it can all be over. I can stop all this, and maybe then the voices will stop. Maybe if we don't make it in time, I can just fly away from this place, from it all. Live on the wind and be free again. Maybe.



~ From the journal of His Royal Highness, Alk Haleem, The Eternal Child, Keeper of The Taming Stone, He Who Saved Us All.



***



Truth eases out of a spindly patch of whitevine brush, hands up in a sign of surrender. "Woah. Hey now. It's just me. You remember me, right boy?"



A fierce shadow is cast over the small girl. A cloud of steam and snot erupts from its nostrils and it rears back on its hind legs, stamping its hooves.



"Woah, boy! Woah!" Truth scoops up the wooden pale at her feet and retreats back a step.



She dunks her hand in the bucket. "Okay, okay! But you remember this though, don't ya?" She pulls a hunk of corned beef drenched in thick brown gravy and dangled it between her fingers like a freshly caught fish.



The enormous mustang, fierce even an inch from starvation, turns to butter at the smell of the salted beef.



"Yeah, smells good right. Come on. Come and get it." She rings out the hunk of meat in little hands like a wet rag and spills a trail of brown gravy into the cracks of the sun-bleached earth.



"Not too quick, okay?" Truth takes a step backwards to give the him some room to limp forward and lap up a much as he needed. "It'll hurt your belly like last time, remember?"



She dunked the meat back into bucket and dripped down some more of the good stuff.



At least the horse's tongue worked fine, she thinks. She watches with a weird fascination as the enormous slimy slug of a tongue forms to fit into every crack, no matter how jagged, and manages to slurp up every single solitary drop of gravy.



The stallion of this size is way too big for Truth to ride comfortably, on account of her age and for her being small for it.

Still, she figured this was likely the scrawniest and sickliest looking Shire she'd ever seen. Normally those monsters stood about a fathom and a half tall and weighed a good ten anchors or so.



When Grampa'd tell stories knights and kings, they always said their Shire's stood so tall you couldn't getting them through doorways without tucking their heads between their tail.



This one though looked bad. Truth tried to imagine how such an enormous animal could have survived out here long. It was starving, definitely, but with the amount of what Truth was sure had to be blood matted to the horse's back, she figured there had to be a wound or two under the gore as well.



The creature looked as likely to keel over and die as to be of use to anybody, but the village will needed animals to draw up nets and plough paddies come the Trickling, and one can't be too choosey on the tundra.



Truth had been lucky to find the horse's tracks the week before, and even luckier The Great Tide held off long enough to track him down again today.



The big lunk had been too stubborn to follow her home before, and the guilt of leaving him out here to drown all alone had eaten Truth up every moment since.



She'd told Gran and Grampa, and the stableman, and multiple town watchmen. Anyone that would listen, but nobody cared about a half dead horse way out in the open tundra.



The only person who took any interest at all was Karn Hawkings, the village butcher, and there wasn't a chance in hell she was letting him go that way.



So, Truth decided she would save him herself. She swore that if she could find him again she wouldn't leave his side until he would follow her home, or at least let himself be dragged there before the tide came in.



She had set out to on her own, this time prepared with her secret weapon, meat and gravy. She figured she wasn't likely to get third shot to at rescuing him, so she pulled out all the stops. Although, who knows with the water acting the way it was these days. She could have a two seasons, or two hours.



The Great Tide had been more and more erratically every year, to the point where it was becoming near impossible to predict when it might come in, and even harder to know when it might go again.



The year before last the the tide stayed through the first five seasons without leaving once, drowning the crops and causing torrential rainfall that lasted for weeks on end, while this year they hadn't had a single flood and folks were starting to worry they'd go all twelve phases without seeing a drop.



"You gotta name, boy?" Truth flops down a strip of soggy meat.



"My name is Truth, and that's the truth!" she said with waning enthusiasm.



"That's what my mom would say..." She smiles, a twinge of pain in remembering.



"For you, I'm thinking... Chomper," she says, watching the horse gnaws on the meat. "Or maybe, Bitey," she considers. "Hmm."



She cocks her head, her short, blade-cut blonde hair falls into her youthful face. She scrunches her nose and reveals a gap in her two front teeth. "What's wrong, buddy? Too thick?"



The horse gums the hunk of meat, sucking on it with a toothless, bloody mouth.



"Oh, Tide... You poor thing," she says, reaching a hand up to the its mouth, but the horse pulls away with nah.





"Okay! Hey, it's okay!" She throws her hands up again and the creature calms. It's heavy set back eyes open wide, staring at her.



She stares back, afraid to blink. "It's okay... Yes, that's right..." She places her hand on the ridge of his nose and rubs down, slowly, easy.



She runs her other hand up from chest to his neck and eventually down the line of his jaw.



Truth gently pulled open the horses enormous jaws and her heart dropped in her chest.



Whitevine burrs coat the inside of his mouth, clinging to the dry sockets where its teeth use to be. And she couldn't think of any way remove them without sticking a hand in the lions mouth and picking them out one by one, but she was likely to only lose an arm pulling a stunt like that.



If the horse has been any stronger, Truth might've been worried about becoming this thing's lunch.



When she was younger, Grampa would a story about a full grown Shine that made quick work of a stable boy two villages over, and he'd tease that, "a ten year old girl though, and a scrawny one at that, well... she'd barely be a snack." And then he'd gobbler her up between the clamping jaws of a hug and a bad case of the tickles.



Seeing one in person now though, Truth figured the gobbling up part might not have been too far off.



Without really thinking--Truth's natural state--she plunges her hand into the horse's mouth and pries a spiked ball with what look like hundreds of tiny fishhooks until the soft tissue tears away and frees it.



Truth tosses the first bramble aside and it bounces to a stop on in the dirt, trailing behind a line of red behind it.



She looks down and the tips of her middle finger and thumb are spotted with blood. She rubs them together and smears the blood in with the dirt on her fingers and goes in for another bramble.



Nearly an hour passes before Truth has the horses mouth cleaned out. And all the while, he jerked his head, and neighed, and snorted, but he never bit her. He didn't need to have teeth to rip her arm out of the socket or throw her, but he didn't. Like he knew what she was doing.



Now with the surgery complete, he seemed more comfortable with her, she thought. Not as skittish. He let her run her hands down his side before backing away from her, pivoting around the bucket of gravy.



They continued that dance for the better part of the rest of the day. She'd step forward and get a few good strokes in on his back or a couple nuzzles between the ears, then he'd trot his back side around away from her in a never ending circle.



Truth liked to imagine that they were dancing.



"So I was thinking--" Truth starts, nervous in a weird kinda way. She looks the horse in the eye, then looks away again.



"What do you think about the name... Slurpy?" She says, timidly.



She chuckled to herself, realizing she'd just asked a horse a question and truly look back at it to answer.



She beams down at the beast as he nuzzles his nose down into the gravy pale and embodies his namesake. "Well, what do you think? Maybe Slurps for short?"



Slurpy stops licking long enough to neigh, then dives back in for more. He shook his head no, but Truth knew he meant yes. She let out an "Eek!" of excitement.



"Easy boy," Truth says, "Don't wanna have to rename you BARF!" She gurgling up puke. "Or, or, or... Raaalph!"



Truth giggles herself tickled. She sighs romantically and lays her head against her stallion's side, feeling better, rejuvenated. "I love you, Slurpy-burb."



Slurpy the horse feels the small girl lean against him, and trots sideways away from her.



Truth stubmles forward. "Hey!" Truth stands straight-backed. "You did that on purpose!"



It isn't long until Truth scoops up the bucket, empty now except a for dehydrated strips of meat that had been licked clean.



"Come on, boy. I got more where this came from," Truth says, but after a few steps back east in the direction of her village, it becomes apparent that Slurps had other plans. He planted himself in the dirt and wouldn't move an inch for anything.



"Come on you big lump!" Truth yells, pushing with her back press up against the horses butt. "You want to get stuck out here during a High Tide? I don't think so, so come! On! Move! Now! Go!" She heaved and huffed, but the horse was nailed to the spot.



She yanks on the horses bit and bridle, which she noticed were elegantly made with an intricate, scrolling design, but the horse doesn't move.



"Pretty fancy digs you got here, Slurps!" She spits in a tantrum. Her pettiest of scowls is interrupted a line of discolored fur on Slurpy's back. By the look of it, his old owner must've used a saddle, and not long ago.



Truth had never actually seen someone riding a horse before. They had horses in the village of course, but they never grew much taller than Truth was now and were mostly for moving stuff, not people.



Truth eyes the horse, "Who are you really, Slurps? Huh, buddy? What're you running from?"



She scans the horizon, a flat, expansive sea of smooth, shimmering rock, worn down by gale force winds. Nothing grows on the face of the earth but spindly, lifeless brush for as far as you could see, even with the shard of salt glass she'd swiped from her grandfather's drawer.



Truth didn't spot Slurpy's previous owner, but she now realized that had drawn the attention of another someone. She jerks her head around. Several more someones, in fact.



She shrieks, "Wolves!" and stumbles backwards into Slurpy, scared. But instead of running, she presses her back up against him and fling her arms out wide, a tiny human shield. She's scared for Slurpy.



The Shire lifts its big black beady eyes from the bucket, and meets those of a hungry pack of timber wolves moving in around them, circling. Cutting off any chance of escape.