So Many Footprints

from THE VOYAGE TO VASS TYYA

Tracking the migration routes of children across the unmapped wastelands, we stumbled often across bleached bones, sad remnants of discarded possessions, keepsakes, the fallen petals of flowers.

The further we went on, and the more often we saw how so many footprints faded into the earth and were lost, the more we were all filled with an awful sorrow that welled up like a fountain. That was the only source of water in those places, hollowed out as they were by the rainless years.

Our exhaustion grew, and in ten days we had not seen a single living child. Our guides whispered together as if they meant to abandon us. And so the party returned to the city without prizes, and due no rewards.

It was Langostas, who had led us on the expedition, who spoke on our behalf when summoned before the court. “What we failed to take into account”, he explained, “was the ability of such rootless children to change shape and colour, hiding themselves like lizards”.

Indeed, Langostas might even have spoken the truth. I have read, in one of the great dusty volumes that can be found in ancient libraries here, that the tails of migrant children will shear off if grasped by a predator, allowing them to escape, and that the tail will in due course grow back of its own accord.

Nature is a great inventor of strangeness; and there is, I think, a surfeit of nature to be observed in these distant lands.