Empty House
We found that Sherlock Holmes was with us still.
Poul and Karen Anderson
LANDSCAPE WITH SPHINXES
The pride was a small one, even as sphinxes go. An arrogant black mane blew back over Arctanax’s shoulders and his beard fluttered against his chest. Ahead and a little below soared Murrhona and Selissa, carrying the remnants of the morning’s kill. It was time the cubs were weaned.
The valley lifted smooth and broad from the river, then leaped suddenly in sandstone cliffs where the shadows seemed more solid then the thorny, gray-green scrub. A shimmer of heat ran along wind-scoured edges.
In the tawny rocks about the eyrie, the cubs played at stalk-the-unicorn. They were big-eyed, dappled, and only half fledged. Taph, the boy, crept stealthily up a sun-hot slab, peeking around it from time to time to be sure that the moly blossom still nodded on the other side. He
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reached the top and shifted his feet excitedly. That moly was about to be a dead unicorn. The tip of his tail twitched at the thought.
His sister Fiantha forgot the blossom at once. Pounce! and his tail was caught between her paws; he rolled back down on top of her, all claws out. They scuffled across baked clay to the edge of a thornbush and backed apart.
Taph was about to attack again when he saw the grownups dip down from above. He leaped across Fiantha and bounded toward the cave mouth. She came a jump and a half behind. They couldn’t kiss Murrhona and Selissa because of the meat in their jaws, so they kissed Father twice instead.
“Easy, there! Easy!” Arctanax coughed, but he was grinning. “Get back into the cave, the two of you. How often do I have to tell you to stay in the cave?” The cubs laughed and bounced inside.
Selissa dropped the meat she had been carrying and settled down to wash her face, but Murrhona called her cubs over to eat. She watched critically as they experimented with their milk-teeth on this unfamiliar substance.
“Hold it down with your paw, Fiantha,” she directed. “If you just tug at it, it’ll follow you all over the floor. Like TaphNo, Taph, use your side teeth. They’re the biggest and sharpest.” And so the lesson went. After a while both cubs got tired of the game and nuzzled for milk.
Selissa licked her right paw carefully and polished the bridge of her broad nose. There was
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still a trace of blood smell; she licked and polished again.
“You can’t rush them,” she said rather smugly. “I remember my first litter. Time and again I thought they’d learned a taste for meat, but even when they could kill for themselvesonly conies and such, but their own killthey still came back to suck.”
“Oh, I remember how put out you were when you realized you still had to hold quiet for nursing,” Murrhona smiled lazily. She licked down a tuft behind Fiantha’s ear and resettled her wings. “But I really hate to see them grow up. They’re so cute with their little spots.”
Selissa shrugged and polished the bridge of her nose again for good measure. If you wanted to call them cute, with their wings all pinfeath-ers and down shedding everywhere! Well, yes, she had to admit they were, in a way. She licked her paw once more, meditatively, put her chin down on it and dozed off.
An hour later Fiantha woke up. Everybody was asleep. She stretched her wings, rolled onto her back, and reached her paws as far as she could. The sun outside was dazzling. She rubbed the back of her head against the cool sandstone floor and closed her eyes, intending to go back to sleep, but her left wing itched. When she licked at it, the itch kept moving around, and bits of down came loose on her tongue.
She rolled over on her stomach, spat out the fluff, and licked again. Therethat did it!
Fully awake now, she noticed the tip of Arctanax’s tail and pounced.
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“Scram,” he muttered without really waking. She pounced again just as the tail-tip flicked out of reach. Once more and she had it, chewing joyously.