“Scram, I said!” he repeated with a cuff in her general direction. She went on chewing, and added a few kicks. Arctanax rolled over and bumped into Selissa, who jumped and gave Fiantha a swat in case she needed it. Fiantha mewed with surprise. Murrhona sprang up, brushing Taph aside; he woke too and made a dash for Selissa’s twitching tail.
“Can’t a person get any rest around here?” grumbled Arctanax. He heaved himself up and walked a few feet away from his by now well-tangled family.
“They’re just playful,” Murrhona murmured.
“If this is play, I’d hate to see a fight/’ said Selissa under her breath. She patted Taph away and he tumbled enthusiastically into a chewing match with Fiantha.
“Go to sleep, children,” Murrhona suggested, stretching out again. “It’s much too hot for games.”
Fiantha rolled obediently away from Taph, and found a good place to curl up, but she wasn’t the least bit sleepy. She leaned her chin on a stone and looked out over the valley. Down there, in the brown-roasted grass, something moved toward a low stony ridge.
There were several of them, and they didn’t walk like waterbuck or unicorn; it was a queer, bobbing gait. They came slowly up the ridge and out of the grass. Now she could see them
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better. They had heads like sphinxes, but with skimpy little manes, and no wings at all; and
and
“Father, look.’” she squeaked in amazement. “What kind of animal is that?”
He got up to see. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Never saw anything like it in all my born days. But then, we’ve had a lot of queer creatures wandering in since the glaciers melted.”
“Is it game?” asked Taph.
“Might be,” Arctanax said. “But I don’t know any game that moves around in the middle of the day like that. It isn’t natural.”
“And the funny way they walk, too,” added Fiantha.
“If they’re silly enough to walk around like that at mid-day,” Arctanax said as he padded back to an extra-cool corner of the cave, “I’m not surprised they go on two legs.”
Karen Anderson
ALPHA, BETA
-Not quite thirteen that famous August, I Learned a, p, -y to compare The blazing secrets troubled atoms share With phoenix stars that die and burn and die. I learned to spell with Ł and p, and IT Mesons cascading from the sills of space In shower on crackling shower at frantic pace Where vacuum softens to electric sky.
Strange when I learned, one winter through, to
spell
With those same symbols in their first design; Haltingly sound out particle and ray, And read past protons ancient tales that tell How heroes praised strong gods and drank strong
wine, And, singing, hoisted sail for Troy one day.
Karen Anderson
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A BLESSEDNESS OF SAINTS
Some years ago, the University of California library had an exhibit of old maps. Colorful things. Modern charts don’t compare. Coordinate grids make a drab substitute for wind gods going oompa, oompa, and contour lines are no fair exchange at all for the actual contours on some of those mermaids. To hell with radicals like Goldwaterlet’s bring back the eighteenth century! But I digress. What I started out to mention was a Spanish map of the western hemisphere, dated 17something and not very detailed. One place they did show was Cape Canaveral. And out in the Pacific they had, neatly labeled, the Islas de San Dwich.
When Anthony Boucher heard about this, he laughed and said that must be a Catalan saint. It’s tempting to develop the hagiography further .. . Dwich, apostle to the Anthropophagi,
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martyred by being sliced very thin and served on rye bread with mustard … he did persuade the cannibals to postpone his execution twenty-four hours, till Saturday . .. But this moving tale had better not be written. There are far too many spurious saints already.
Some of them are etymological too, like that St. Sophia to whom the cathedral in Constantinople was not dedicated. (For the benefit of any barbarians in my audience, though surely there are none, “Hagia Sophia” means “Holy Wisdom.”) I’ve also heard of St. Trinity (Hagia Triada), St. Saviour, and a St. Cross believed to have been a Frenchman. James Branch Cabell mentions a St. Undecimilla whose name gave rise to the legend of the eleven thousand virgins for whom, by the way, the Virgin Islands were namedand say, couldn’t a martini be called a vergin?But I’m digressing again.