Unnatural Creatures Read online

  Ozioma, however, stayed where she was. Looking, as the giant snake did, up into the break in the clouds above.

  Something was spiraling through the rain like a fish through coral. She had the body of a snake, a strong feminine torso and the common face of a market woman. Ozioma fell to her knees, her mouth agape as several other people gasped and pointed and called the approaching goddess’s name.

  “Aida-Wedo! It’s Aida-Wedo!”

  “Oh my God, Ozioma has angered the goddess!”

  A rainbow broke around Aida-Wedo as the rain completely stopped. The clouds rushed away like fleeing dogs at her approach. The rainbow spilled and arched over the tree.

  The goddess flew to the chain, grabbed it with one hand and shimmied down to the tree’s top. She wrapped her green-brown lower snake body around one of the thinnest branches as if it were the sturdiest. She leaned to the side to get a better look at Ozioma through the tree. Even her dark brown upper body moved with the power and control of a snake. Her large breasts jiggled like ocean waves.

  “This is a fine tree,” she said in a rich voice that probably carried to all the people in the area hiding, watching, and listening. She pointed at the snake beast and it immediately returned to the tree and began to ascend. Ozioma let out a relieved breath and slowly stood up.

  When the beast reached Aida-Wedo, it leaned close and spoke to the goddess. Ozioma could hear it whispering, but she was too far to understand its words. The beast paused, looking back at Ozioma.

  “Ozioma Ugochukwu Mbagwu, do you know who this is?” Aida-Wedo asked.

  “No,” Ozioma said.

  “This is Ekemini and he is one of my people.” She laughed knowingly and the rainbow in the sky swelled, bathing everything in a marigold, tangerine, soft rose, periwinkle, and wooden green. “And my people are powerful and rather…unpredictable. Do you know that you are fortunate to be alive?”

  “I didn’t want it to kill anyone else,” Ozioma said, hardening her voice. She motioned to the man who’d been writhing on the ground. Indeed he had stopped moving. Ozioma still couldn’t see his face but it didn’t matter. There was no one in her town she didn’t know and who didn’t know her.

  The goddess said nothing as she appraised Ozioma. Ozioma stood tall. She’d just stared death in the eye for ten minutes. Even the goddess had implied it. Ozioma felt like a goddess herself. What was death? She met the goddess’s stare, but then, out of respect, she looked down. Her father taught her that she should always, always, always, respect her elders. And what was older than a goddess?

  “It says that it is impressed with you,” Aida-Wedo said.

  It has a funny way of showing it, she thought. Was it not about to kill me?! She said none of this, of course. It was best not to tell the goddess what she thought of the beast who’d just killed one of her tribesmen. Ozioma was still looking deferentially at the ground when she saw the first one drop into the mud. She gasped, her eye focusing on it. She bent down, picked it up and washed it in a nearby puddle. She held it to her eye. A piece of solid gold shaped just like a raindrop. In the goddess’s rainbow light, it still shined its bright perfect gold. Another fell, then another. None hit Ozioma, and hundreds covered the body of the man who’d died.

  The goddess ascended up the giant iron chain before the shower of solid gold drops ended. But by then, men were running around Ozioma gathering the valuable gifts into their pockets and occasionally touching Ozioma on the shoulder. Respect, awe, apology, and understanding, all wrapped up in those wordless touches. Ozioma gathered her share, too, once she was sure the snake beast and the goddess were gone.

  For the next seventy-five years, not one person in the town of Agwotown was bitten by a snake. Not until a little boy named Nwokeji who could talk to eagles tempted fate. But that is another story.

  5

  I first encountered the bird in this story in the works of E. Nesbit. I wrote the story in the style of a remarkable American writer named R. A. Lafferty, as an eighteenth-birthday present for my daughter Holly. I hope you like it.

  Lightning bugs, dolphinfish, dung beetle, unicorn flank steak…the intrepid members of the Epicurean Society have eaten every kind of animal. Or have they…?

  THEY WERE A RICH AND A ROWDY BUNCH at the Epicurean Club in those days. They certainly knew how to party. There were five of them:

  There was Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, big enough for three men, who ate enough for four men and who drank enough for five. His great-grandfather had founded the Epicurean Club with the proceeds of a tontine which he had taken great pains, in the traditional manner, to ensure that he had collected in full.

  There was Professor Mandalay, small and twitchy and grey as a ghost (and perhaps he was a ghost; stranger things have happened) who drank nothing but water, and who ate doll-portions from plates the size of saucers. Still, you do not need the gusto for the gastronomy, and Mandalay always got to the heart of every dish placed in front of him.

  There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.

  There was Jackie Newhouse, the descendant (on the left-handed route) of the great lover, gourmand, violinist and duelist Giacomo Casanova. Jackie Newhouse had, like his notorious ancestor, both broken his share of hearts and eaten his share of great dishes.

  And there was Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, who was the only one of the Epicureans who was flat-out broke: he shambled in unshaven from the street when they had their meetings, with half a bottle of rotgut in a brown paper bag, hatless and coatless and, too often, partly shirtless, but he ate with more of an appetite than any of them.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy was talking—

  “We have eaten everything that can be eaten,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, and there was regret and glancing sorrow in his voice. “We have eaten vulture, mole, and fruit bat.”

  Mandalay consulted his notebook. “Vulture tasted like rotten pheasant. Mole tasted like carrion slug. Fruit bat tasted remarkably like sweet guinea pig.”

  “We have eaten kakapo, aye-aye, and giant panda—”

  “Oh, that broiled panda steak,” sighed Virginia Boote, her mouth watering at the memory.

  “We have eaten several long-extinct species,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “We have eaten flash- frozen mammoth and Patagonian giant sloth.”

  “If we had but gotten the mammoth a little faster,” sighed Jackie Newhouse. “I could tell why the hairy elephants went so fast, though, once people got a taste of them. I am a man of elegant pleasures, but after but one bite, I found myself thinking only of Kansas City barbecue sauce, and what the ribs on those things would be like, if they were fresh.”

  “Nothing wrong with being on ice for a millennium or two,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. He grinned. His teeth may have been crooked, but they were sharp and strong. “But for real taste you had to go for honest-to-goodness mastodon every time. Mammoth was always what people settled for, when they couldn’t get mastodon.”

  “We’ve eaten squid, and giant squid, and humongous squid,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “We’ve eaten lemmings and Tasmanian tigers. We’ve eaten bowerbird and ortolan and peacock. We’ve eaten the dolphinfish (which is not the mammal dolphin) and the giant sea turtle and the Sumatran rhino. We’ve eaten everything there is to eat.”

  “Nonsense. There are many hundreds of things we have not yet tasted,” said Professor Mandalay. “Thousands perhaps. Think of all the species of beetle there are, still untasted.”

  “Oh, Mandy,” sighed Virginia Boote. “When you’ve tasted one beetle, you’ve tasted them all. And we all tasted several hundred species. At least the dung beetles had a real kick to them.”

  “No,” said Jackie Newhouse, “that was the dung-beetle balls. The beetles themselves were singularly unexceptional. Still, I take your point. We have scaled the heights of gastronomy, we have plunged down into the depths of gustation. We have be
come cosmonauts exploring undreamed-of worlds of delectation and gourmanderie.”

  “True, true, true,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “There has been a meeting of the Epicureans every month for over a hundred and fifty years, in my father’s time, and my grandfather’s time, and my great-grandfather’s time, and now I fear that I must hang it up, for there is nothing left that we, or our predecessors in the club, have not eaten.”

  “I wish I had been here in the twenties,” said Virginia Boote, “when they legally had man on the menu.”

  “Only after it had been electrocuted,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “Half-fried already it was, all char and crackling. It left none of us with a taste for long pig, save for one who was already that way inclined, and he went out pretty soon after that anyway.”

  “Oh, Crusty, why must you pretend that you were there?” asked Virginia Boote, with a yawn. “Anyone can see you aren’t that old. You can’t be more than sixty, even allowing for the ravages of time and the gutter.”

  “Oh, they ravage pretty good,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “But not as good as you’d imagine. Anyway there’s a host of things we’ve not eaten yet.”

  “Name one,” said Mandalay, his pencil poised precisely above his notebook.

  “Well, there’s Suntown Sunbird,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. And he grinned his crookedy grin at them, with his teeth ragged but sharp.

  “I’ve never heard of it,” said Jackie Newhouse. “You’re making it up.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Professor Mandalay. “But in another context. And besides, it is imaginary.”

  “Unicorns are imaginary,” said Virginia Boote. “But gosh, that unicorn flank tartare was tasty. A little bit horsey, a little bit goatish, and all the better for the capers and raw quail eggs.”

  “There’s something about Sunbirds in one of the minutes of the Epicurean Club from bygone years,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “But what it was, I can no longer remember.”

  “Did they say how it tasted?” asked Virginia.

  “I do not believe that they did,” said Augustus, with a frown. “I would need to inspect the bound proceedings, of course.”

  “Nah,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “That’s only in the charred volumes. You’ll never find out about it from there.”

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy scratched his head. He really did have two feathers, which went through the knot of black hair shot with silver at the back of his head, and the feathers had once been golden, although by now they were looking kind of ordinary and yellow and ragged. He had been given them when he was a boy.

  “Beetles,” said Professor Mandalay. “I once calculated that, if a man such as myself were to eat six different species of beetle each day, it would take him more than twenty years to eat every beetle that has been identified. And over that twenty years enough new species of beetle might have been discovered to keep him eating for another five years. And in those five years enough beetles might have been discovered to keep him eating for another two and a half years, and so on, and so on. It is a paradox of inexhaustibility. I call it Mandalay’s Beetle. You would have to enjoy eating beetles, though,” he added, “or it would be a very bad thing indeed.”

  “Nothing wrong with eating beetles if they’re the right kind of beetle,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “Right now, I’ve got a hankering on me for lightning bugs. There’s a kick from the glow of a lightning bug that might be just what I need.”

  “While the lightning bug or firefly (Photinus pyralis) is more of a beetle than it is a glowworm,” said Mandalay, “they are by no stretch of the imagination edible.”

  “They may not be edible,” said Crawcrustle. “But they’ll get you into shape for the stuff that is. I think I’ll roast me some. Fireflies and habanero peppers. Yum.”

  Virginia Boote was an eminently practical woman. She said, “Suppose we did want to eat Suntown Sunbird. Where should we start looking for it?”

  Zebediah T. Crawcrustle scratched the bristling seven-day beard that was sprouting on his chin (it never grew any longer than that; seven-day beards never do). “If it was me,” he told them, “I’d head down to Suntown of a noon in midsummer, and I’d find somewhere comfortable to sit—Mustapha Stroheim’s coffeehouse, for example, and I’d wait for the Sunbird to come by. Then I’d catch him in the traditional manner, and cook him in the traditional manner as well.”

  “And what would the traditional manner of catching him be?” asked Jackie Newhouse.

  “Why, the same way your famous ancestor poached quails and wood grouse,” said Crawcrustle.

  “There’s nothing in Casanova’s memoirs about poaching quail,” said Jackie Newhouse.

  “Your ancestor was a busy man,” said Crawcrustle. “He couldn’t be expected to write everything down. But he poached a good quail nonetheless.”

  “Dried corn and dried blueberries, soaked in whiskey,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “That’s how my folk always did it.”

  “And that was how Casanova did it,” said Crawcrustle, “although he used barley-grains mixed with raisins, and he soaked the raisins in brandy. He taught me himself.”

  Jackie Newhouse ignored this statement. It was easy to ignore much that Zebediah T. Crawcrustle said. Instead, Jackie Newhouse asked, “And where is Mustapha Stroheim’s coffeehouse in Suntown?”

  “Why, where it always is, third lane after the old market in the Suntown district, just before you reach the old drainage ditch that was once an irrigation canal, and if you find yourself in One-eye Khayam’s carpet shop you have gone too far,” began Crawcrustle. “But I see by the expressions of irritation upon your faces that you were expecting a less succinct, less accurate, description. Very well. It is in Suntown, and Suntown is in Cairo, in Egypt, where it always is, or almost always.”

  “And who will pay for an expedition to Suntown?” asked Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “And who will be on this expedition? I ask the question although I already know the answer, and I do not like it.”

  “Why, you will pay for it, Augustus, and we will all come,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “You can deduct it from our Epicurean membership dues. And I shall bring my chef’s apron and my cooking utensils.”

  Augustus knew that Crawcrustle had not paid his Epicurean Club membership in much too long a time, but the Epicurean Club would cover him; Crawcrustle had been a member of the Epicureans in Augustus’s father’s day. He simply said, “And when shall we leave?”

  Crawcrustle fixed him with a mad old eye, and shook his head in disappointment. “Why, Augustus,” he said. “We’re going to Suntown, to catch the Sunbird. When else should we leave?”

  “Sunday!” sang Virginia Boote. “Darlings, we’ll leave on a Sunday!”

  “There’s hope for you yet, young lady,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “We shall leave Sunday indeed. Three Sundays from now. And we shall travel to Egypt. We shall spend several days hunting and trapping the elusive Sunbird of Suntown, and, finally, we shall deal with it in the traditional way.”

  Professor Mandalay blinked a small grey blink. “But,” he said, “I am teaching a class on Monday. On Mondays I teach mythology, on Tuesdays I teach tap dancing, and on Wednesdays, woodwork.”

  “Get a teaching assistant to take your course, Mandalay O Mandalay. On Monday you’ll be hunting the Sunbird,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “And how many other professors can say that?”

  They went, one by one, to see Crawcrustle, in order to discuss the journey ahead of them, and to announce their misgivings.

  Zebediah T. Crawcrustle was a man of no fixed abode. Still, there were places he could be found, if you were of a mind to find him. In the early mornings he slept in the bus terminal, where the benches were comfortable and the transport police were inclined to let him lie; in the heat of the afternoons he hung in the park by the statues of long-forgotten generals, with the dipsos and the winos and the hopheads, sharing their company and the contents of their bottles, a
nd offering his opinion, which was, as that of an Epicurean, always considered and always respected, if not always welcomed.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy sought Crawcrustle out in the park; he had with him his daughter, Hollyberry NoFeathers McCoy. She was small, but she was sharp as a shark’s tooth.

  “You know,” said Augustus, “there is something very familiar about this.”

  “About what?” asked Zebediah.

  “All of this. The expedition to Egypt. The Sunbird. It seemed to me like I heard about it before.”

  Crawcrustle merely nodded. He was crunching something from a brown paper bag.

  Augustus said, “I went to the bound annals of the Epicurean Club, and I looked it up. And there was what I took to be a reference to the Sunbird in the index for forty years ago, but I was unable to learn anything more than that.”

  “And why was that?” asked Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, swallowing noisily.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy sighed. “I found the relevant page in the annals,” he said, “but it was burned away, and afterwards there was some great confusion in the administration of the Epicurean Club.”

  “You’re eating lightning bugs from a paper bag,” said Hollyberry NoFeathers McCoy. “I seen you doing it.”

  “I am indeed, little lady,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle.

  “Do you remember the days of great confusion, Crawcrustle?” asked Augustus.

  “I do indeed,” said Crawcrustle. “And I remember you. You were only the age that young Hollyberry is now. But there is always confusion, Augustus, and then there is no confusion. It is like the rising and the setting of the sun.”

  Jackie Newhouse and Professor Mandalay found Crawcrustle that evening, behind the railroad tracks. He was roasting something in a tin can, over a small charcoal fire.

  “What are you roasting, Crawcrustle?” asked Jackie Newhouse.