Our Kind of Weather
Chapter 5: 5. The King Beasts
Previous Chapter Next ChapterGriffons stood blinking in the sunlight like cublets opening their eyes for the first time.
Occasionally the eerie silence was interrupted by the clatter of a spear rolling down a rocky slope. Sometimes it stopped because the spear had rolled into a body.
Gilda could see their faces. The memory of their faces having been a blur was a blur itself. Now, nothing seemed real. Nothing, except the incredibly bright colors of the rainbow. She wouldn’t ever forget that.
Eventually the screaming started. It was about time, thought Gilda, and joined in as well.
“Gilda!” the foreman cawed harshly. “Quit spacing out!”
Gilda shot a dark look at the foreman, who glared back with bloodshot, sleepless eyes. None of them had slept at all from the cold, the wet, and the persistent shriek of the wind in the distance.
The snow had come as a total surprise. They hadn’t brought any supplies to deal with the snow because according to the Cloudsdale weather schedule, it wasn’t supposed to snow this far northeast. That was the reason they were mining copper here in the northeastern Appaneighchian mountains and not further west.
No snow here—ha! It was white as far as the eye could see, and an eagle’s eye could see pretty far.
The foreman strode over to her, back hunched and his claws trembling. “Get back to work. You don’t get paid to stare at the ground.”
“I don’t get paid,” said Gilda. “I get promissory notes. You mean I don’t get promissoried to stare at the ground.”
The foreman just glared at her. He clearly had too little energy to say anything more.
Gilda hefted her pickaxe, fought back a wave of nausea, and swung it at the rock.
After the Nightmare Moon event, which ponies were calling the Great Succession, Unicorns from one of the new Daughter banks had come up to the Grokky Mountains to do something called a “randomized control trial.” The griffons made good test subjects, apparently, because they had a monetary economy—indeed, it was more monetary than the pony economy, one of the visitors had commented—but were otherwise fairly primitive, contracting with ponies whenever they needed advanced industry.
One of the visitor’s names was Helium Float. She said she came from the Daughter bank in Billet Rouge, and she bore a letter from the Chief Executive Economist, Nova Flare, to prove it. She said she was interested in the health effects the Great Succession was going to have on the fetal health of newly conceived griffon babies.
Most of the visitors stayed in their place, living in makeshift houses they’d assembled out of materials they’d brought with them. Some of them even brought along their spouses and children, as they planned to stay a while. But Helium Float came alone except for that letter, and she used the word (and not, so much, the words) of Nova Flare to cajole, to impress, and sometimes to force her way into places she didn’t belong.
It wasn’t really fetal health she was here to study, Gilda eventually realized. That was for the others to do. Helium Float was here to study them.
Griffons weren’t entirely ignorant, despite what ponies thought. They deduced the monetary nature of the crisis that had driven their society to the point of a state of nature, a war of all against all. Now they had to decide what to do about it.
One set of voices said the obvious thing: get rid of money. Griffons were honorable creatures, or at least they were creatures obsessed with honor. Why not a system of exchange based on debt and promises repaid?
When Gilda had mentioned that idea to Helium Float, she got very excited and started talking way too fast about economies with no money where payments were made by check or credit, how it all worked and what it meant for the quantity of money and the price level. She said that Nova Flare was working on similar ideas. She said it let banks be banks.
But griffons weren’t good at letting things be. They weren’t going to let their banks be banks. They wanted a Bank.
That was the other idea: a griffon Bank to rival the One Bank of the ponies. They would fill it with copper and use it to separate their monetary economy from the pony one. That way, the next time a Nightmare Moon event happened, it wouldn’t affect them.
Gilda didn't told Helium Float about the plan. That would have been a betrayal. But Helium Float found out anyway, and Gilda was relieved that she had.
Because Gilda spent a lot of time talking to Helium Float about the Great Succession. She was surprised to learn that not a single pony had died during the event. Dozens of griffons had died in bloody conflict during those hours.
Within a few days, according to Helium Float, the pony economy had completely recovered. Growth was a bit sluggish, but even Princess Celestia’s critics called the Great Succession a “blip” and “basically unimportant.” Whereas the griffon economy was still reliant on promissory notes. Bits were in rare supply and mostly being hoarded as assets rather than being used as tokens of exchange.
“Your economy is so fascinating,” said Helium Float during one of their conversations. “It’s like you don’t have an informal economy whatsoever. Every exchange is either monetary and contracted, or it doesn’t happen. See, we ponies have this concept called a favor, where you do something for somepony else and just pretend like it’s pure altruism, and it’s sort of understood that they should do something for you later, but you never say that and they never say that, and they don’t actually have to ever do you a favor back, and you actually sometimes prefer that they don’t, and it’s really offensive to offer to pay somepony in bits for the favor they did for you, and…why are you looking at me like that?”
Now Gilda understood. The reason the pony economy had barely suffered from the monetary collapse of the Great Succession was because their economy wasn’t based on money.
They’d been shoveling snow out of the copper mines at the first crack of dawn, working as fast as they could in the numbing cold. The project could not be allowed to fall behind schedule. They all understood that. The project could not be allowed to fall behind schedule.
At mealtime, they made seats of wooden slats and ate with their paws in the snow. Their rations weren’t snow rations. There weren’t enough calories.
“I need a few griffons to travel northeast,” the operations manager said. “Find out if the snow ends somewhere that we can mine.”
“We should complain to Cloudsdale,” Gilbert said. He was a big griffon with wide shoulders. “I checked the weather schedule three times. It’s not supposed to snow here.”
“Well, it did,” the manager said. “And I’m not going to complain to the ponies about this. The last thing we need is them investigating our operation here.”
“Yeah, shut up, Gilbert,” said Gilda, chewing mindlessly on her protein crumble.
“Gilda, thanks for volunteering,” the manager said. Gilda glared at him. “Gilbert, you as well. And—”
“Me,” said Grace, raising her wing into the air.
“Fine. You three. Take some supplies and move fast. Should be only a week’s travel to the shore once you’re at the base of the mountain. Stay out of the ocean, you hear?”
“Ha,” said Gilda.
“What was that?”
“I thought you were telling a joke.”
There were heavy bags under the manager’s eyes as he gave her a hard look. “I wasn’t joking.”
“It seemed funny,” said Gilda.
“I wasn’t joking though.”
“Well, it seemed that way.”
Before they set off, Gilda bought rations and firestarters out of her bonus pay for the mission. Grace and Gilbert did the same. Now, an hour into the journey, she was already wishing she’d negotiated for more pay. The snow was soft and new, but it also came up past her knees. Her talons snagged on clumps of snakeroot that she couldn’t see, and her wings got caught trying to squeeze between maple branches.
It was a day’s travel to the northeastern edge of Equestria by the eagle’s flight. It was close to two weeks if you were trudging down the mountain and through the forest in the snow. Gilda, Gilbert, and Grace chose to walk.
That might have seemed strange. But recent snow meant that weather Pegasi might still be in the area. The griffons couldn’t afford to stand out too much.
There were questions that would have been too difficult to answer.
Questions had been asked of them during the migration from the Grokky Mountains to northeastern Appaneighchia. Pairs of curious Pegasi had flown down to ask why so many griffons were on the move and why they were carrying with them so much heavy equipment.
They’d made up some answer about a once-a-millennium cultural journey that involved the mining equipment of their ancestors. That had satisfied most questions. The uniformed, Cloudsdale-representing Pegasi who had been more inquisitive had been shut down by Helium Float, who explained that this was a real event in Griffon history, she was studying it as a representative of a Daughter Bank, and if the Pegasi reported the griffon movement to Cloudsdale, they risked causing changes to how the event played out and therefore would be interfering with Daughter bank research. She took down each of their badge numbers with a pen that trembled in the glow of her magic.
Gilda wondered what Nova Flare was plotting. She didn’t seem to like ponies very much, according to what Helium Float said. Either she was letting them get away with a rival to the One Bank for reasons of her own…
…or she knew it wasn’t going to work.
Down out of the Appaneighchian mountain proper, they still had the forest to cross. Gilda felt like the ground was punishing her with every step. The cold and wet seemed to have penetrated her fur and skin and was in her bones, making her shake violently at times.
Grace was visibly not okay. Her face was pale and she was slow to respond to words. Gilda wanted to send her back, but then Grace would have to forfeit the mission pay, and she’d already used some of it to buy food and supplies. Grace couldn’t afford to come out of this in the red.
Gilbert seemed to be relatively fine. He was so broad that sometimes the wind was like a wall to him, but Gilbert was built like a wall himself.
The wind was the worst of it. As they trudged through the forest, it only grew more wild, shrieking through the trees like a million angry ghosts. The wind was curious, ruffling their feathers and whipped their fur out of place. And it was violent, blowing against them, battering them back.
The howling wind didn’t stop them from sleeping. Sleeping was easy. Staying awake was the hard part. Sometimes she blinked, and after her eyelids opened, she wasn’t sure whether she was in the past or the present, whether she was marching toward the northeastern edge of Equestria with Grace or facing her with a spear, whether the wind was screaming at her through the forest or if she was talking to Helium Float at night in the Grokky Mountains after the children had gone to bed. Sometimes she was a child herself. Other times she felt old and haggard, and she had no children of her own to take care of her.
One more step, Gilda told herself, but she’d told herself a hundred steps ago, and a hundred steps before that. Her legs burned from the strain and the cold.
One more step, Gilda told herself. How many steps had it been? Now the wind crawled up her back and through the feathers of her face and out. The breezes turned indecisively and skimmed along the snow.
Something about the way the wind pounded between the trees reminded Gilda of a song.
Strange, strange, the windigo ways,
Listen, daughter:
Ah eh ee oh ah
Ah eh ee oh ah.
One more step.
“You know,” said Grace in a ragged voice, “there used to be tourmaline this far northeast.”
Gilbert was broad-shouldered. He had taken the lead, plowing through the snow with his body. It made things a little easier for Gilda and Grace.
“Tourmaline?” he asked.
“It’s a shiny colorful rock,” said Grace. “My great-grandmother had a pretty green necklace made of tourmaline. She said it came from a long way back when the Bank hadn’t pulled things so far Bankward. I think she ended up selling it.”
Gilda nodded. A griffon couldn’t keep anything for long. They always ended up needing to sell it. And there was always less and less to buy.
Three pairs of talons dug into the snow and tore it up in showers of ice when they lifted out. Three pairs of paws trampled the plants left underneath, the sagebrush and ragweed and whatever else.
The wind rushed ahead of them, as if in warning.
One more step.
Business was not good. In the mountains, it never was.
Gilda’s ancestors had been rich farmers. They'd owned vast herds of cows and goats and pigs and elk and even bears. They had been rich enough to hire scores of griffons to guard the herds from the windigos, who liked nothing better than to steal through the fences with the wind and make off with the fattest portions of her ancestors’ living larder. Those had been difficult times, but fair ones. Griffons did the work of keeping the animals fed and safe from predators. In return, the griffons got to eat what they liked.
The windigos used to howl on the wind, and it had sounded, according to Gilda’s grandmother, like this:
Ah eh ee oh ah
Ah eh ee oh ah.
Gilda had worked all kinds of jobs to earn money to buy more stories from her grandmother. Even though the vile old bird had upcharged her because she was a kid and made her pay extra for doing dialogue with the voices.
Gilda’s favorite stories were about the before times, when griffons had been spread out across the snowy plains and not been cramped up in small, isolated mountain villages; when they’d been strong and proud and more than a match for the windigos. They had eaten rich, succulent pork and steaks oozing with fat. Their thick, furry coats had weathered the snow and ice, and the animals had rightly treated them as saviors from the windigos. It had been a golden age, before the current age of gold, which wasn’t a golden age at all….
Before Princess Platinum had taken the farms away.
One more step.
You’d think, Gilda thought ruefully, her rump numb and wet in the snow, that griffons, being part eagle and part lion, would be pretty good hunters. But eagles and lions weren’t good hunters. They were usually scavengers, using their size to bully smaller predators away from their prey.
The three of them rested against separate trees, taking a meal break. Gilda was eating an energy bar.
Eagles were kings. Lions were kings. And griffons had been kings. King Ranch, literally, had been the name of the greatest and wealthiest farm in Equestria.
There was an equality in hunting. The predator chased, and the prey ran away. The prey wasn’t obliged to slow down if it got too far ahead. The predator was allowed to starve. Both envied the other: prey wanted to be strong, and the predator wanted to be rid of its constant hunger. The windigos had been predators.
Kings? Kings didn’t hunt.
And the griffons had learned not to try. Eagle talons and lion paws did not work well together. Their wings were made to soar, their bodies to sprint and swim. They were too fat to glide between trees. Their wings and talons weren’t built for dashing along the ground toward prey.
Griffons didn’t belong in fields, savannahs, or forests. Their natural habitat, Gilda suspected, was the farm, where they could rule.
But if griffons belonged to the farm, then ponies belonged to the bank. And in the contest between Bank and farm...well, it hadn’t even been a contest….
Gilda looked at the wrapper on the Hybrid!! energy bar she had been eating and read the list of ingredients. She shivered at the first word on the list.
Now they farmed bugs.
One more….
It hurt to walk. Grace dragged behind, and even Gilbert was slowing down.
There was no end to the snow. Ponies had never let it snow this close to the ocean. Unlike griffons, ponies could keep promises without being paid to do so. But this time, they hadn’t.
Some of the pony researchers had brought their fillies with them for the duration of the study in the Grokky Mountains. They lived in makeshift houses that were nicer than Gilda’s nest. Gilda remembered a rhyme she had heard the fillies chanting as they played.
Wing and tail, fur and feather,
These things don’t belong to-ge-ther.
Paw and talon, beak and fang,
Why were griffons made so strange?
“We should turn back,” Gilbert said. “Even if the snow ends past the forest, it won’t make a difference.”
“No,” said Gilda. “We go to the edge.”
“We won’t make it there before nightfall at this pace.”
“I didn’t say we’d stop at nightfall.”
Grace didn’t say anything.
Gilda peered at the pale sun in the distance, so weak and faded and small. It was the tail end of December, and for a moment she thought the sun had taken ill.
But that was ridiculous, and she pushed it out of her mind.
Winnette woke before the sun had set. She stretched and yawned in her bed of ice-cold snow before getting up and trotting over to the deer corpse preserved in the bloody pile of snow by the mouth of the cave. She tore off a few frozen chunks of meat. It was more than she might have eaten all night just a few days ago.
She headed out onto the switchbacks, kicking lazily along. Even without trying, she was stronger than she’d ever been. She reached the cliff in no time.
A hard breeze struck her face when she reached the forest. “Turn back!” the voice urged.
Winnette shook her head, spluttering. “What’s going on?”
She pushed forward. More breezes joined the first one, blowing her off-course.
“Will!” she demanded. She felt his breeze sweep up along her side, making her ear flick.
His voice was urgent. “Winnette, you need to hide!”
“Why?” she shouted above the growing roar of the breezes around her. “What’s going on?”
“The breezes further west say that magical creatures are coming through the forest. They’re going in your direction!”
Winnette felt her heart jump into her throat. “Ponies?” she croaked.
“No! We do not know what these things are!”
Ridiculous. She controlled the weather. She had called the wind and ice from over the dead ocean. She had killed a stag with antlers like a dozen spear-points; she had watched bears clamber up trees to escape her. The centuries windigos had spent cowering in caves were over.
Winnette cleaved the many breezes and scythed into the forest, following the sounds of the wind.
Winnette heard them before she saw them. They were big, noisy creatures, crunching through the dense ice and snow with heavy limbs.
She sliced between the trees, watching them with eyes that were, if anything, keener as the sky darkened, though not as keen as she expected. She glanced up and saw the reason: though the sky was a deep purple color, no stars had come out. Even the Moon wasn’t visible.
Was this their magic? She studied the creatures that seemed to bring darkness with them. Their bodies were like mountain lions but much bigger, yet they had wings and beaks like eagles. Were they supposed to run or fly? Why weren't they flying if they were so slow in the snow?
And why were they moving in the direction of the cliff?
In the snow, she was fast and stealthy, and they were loud and slow. Still, they didn’t seem like prey to her. Nor predators. Not really creatures of the forest or the rock at all.
“What are they?” she whispered. The wind whipped around her nervously, until an ancient voice spoke.
“Wê wndryhto wðone ws wengel wnêat.”
“They’re king beasts,” Will translated.
“What does that mean?”
“Wê wfremman wnâteshwôn wteohhian. Wîe wonniman.”
“They’re thieves,” said Will.
The old voice spoke harshly. “Wê wscieppan wðorp wrâd wryht.
Will winced. “Not thieves. They made gardens of animals.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Wnânne.”
“It isn’t,” said Will.
“What do they want?”
The old voice sighed.
“Where are the stars?” Winnette demanded. “Why haven’t they come out yet?”
“Stars always disappear eventually,” said Will. “The Earth keeps moving on. New ones will come, you’ll see.”
“They can’t find us,” Winnette said. She watched two of the king beasts stop against a tree to wait for the third, who was smaller, to catch up. “There are dozens of caves under the cliff. They’ll take whatever they came for, and we’ll watch them leave without ever being spotted.”
Winnette chose a path through the trees, cutting back to the cliff. As long as she warned Welga and Wyna, they would be safe.
Gilda sagged when she reached the cliff. Gilbert had already been there for a few minutes, resting, like a boulder in the snow. Grace still had a ways to go.
Gilbert nodded at the sight of the dead ocean under the cliff, past the beach. “No snow there.”
“Mission accomplished,” Gilda muttered. She barely had the strength to speak loudly enough to be audible to her own ears. The wind had been fighting them the entire way. Now it was shrieking like an alarm all around them. She wondered if the wind was as scared of the dead ocean as she was.
They waited for Grace to join them. When she finally did, she sat, breathing hard. Gilda gave her a couple of minutes.
“I can’t get back,” Grace said.
“You can fly,” Gilbert said.
“No,” said Gilda.
“Just one griffon won’t stand out,” Grace pleaded.
“Then the fate of the project will be on your head.”
“So sue me! I’ll pay!”
“Not a price you can afford.”
Gilbert shifted. A small snowstorm fell off his shoulders. “Maybe it will be easier on the way back.”
“We’re not leaving empty-handed,” Gilda said. “Ponies never let it snow this far northeast, they’d risk losing living water to the dead ocean. They’re hiding something.”
“What do you think you’re going to find?” Grace demanded. “Gilda, please!”
Gilda stood up. “Come on."
They say history is written by the winners. If you win hard enough, you get to write the future as well.
That’s what Princess Platinum had done. She’d used the Bank like a cudgel, enforcing the order she preferred with the threat of economic extinction.
So the ancient pact between griffon and livestock had been shattered. The animals had been set loose beyond the once-safe borders of the disbanded griffon farms, and ponies took over ensuring their survival. Meanwhile, griffons had been forced to the mountains where farms wouldn’t be able to thrive.
They had to hunt instead, and the hunting had been bad. Griffons were imbalanced in the air and ungraceful on the ground. The winters, although warmer than they had been when the windigos used to run wild with the wind, had been especially hard.
And griffons had turned to studying the best available source of protein, the ants and beetles and things, and noticed, in their desperation, certain possibilities.
“There’s caves,” said Gilda, leading the path down the switchbacks. There were slopes rising up and down all along the cliffside, so much and so orderly that they seemed unnatural. “We’ll sleep in one. Maybe catch some grubs holed up where it’s warm. In the morning, we’ll find whatever the ponies are hiding here.”
The griffons had faced two questions after Princess Platinum had conquered the sun and moon. One was resolved by farming bugs.
The other questions griffons had was this: how do we go back to our farms and ranches, our cattle and pigs and goats, the steaks and ribs and the sweet, oozing fat?
Or, more simply:
How do we become rulers once again?
After much deliberation, griffons had concluded that ponies were strong because their society was built around friendship. Across the continent, pony society worked together peaceably to accomplish extraordinary tasks. A pony in Caliponia and a pony in Manehattan had an easier time cooperating than two griffon neighbors did.
This power of cooperation had something to do with money. That was why the One Bank was so strong.
So griffons had decided to copy the ponies. And to copy ponies, they had changed themselves. For generations, griffons had interacted with each other monetarily, or not at all.
Wing and tail, fur and feather….
When Nightmare Moon had returned with a dark fury to the throne, it had been “not at all” for the lucky, and a spear between the ribs for the unlucky.
Paw and talon, beak and fang….
Griffons had made a critical mistake. They had left the money supply, the glue of their societal order, in the hoofs of ponies.
”Your culture is so fascinating,” Helium Float had exclaimed. “It’s like you found a way to increase transaction costs by using markets! We do things the other way around.”
Gilda slid cautiously down a slope.
Never again.
She peered into a cave.
Never again.
Gilbert followed after, bent over with his wings folded in. Grace came too, and sat against the cave wall, shivering.
Gilda took out an incandescent bug attractor she’d bought for the mission and switched it on. Once they had caught enough for a few mouthfuls each, she would light a proper fire.
The harsh blue glow hurt her eyes. Wincing, she turned her face toward the back of the cave.
Never….
“Whoa,” said Gilbert.
Grace looked too. “Oh...oh, wow! Gilda, hey, Gilda! Look!”
Gilda was looking. The back of the cave was piled with old junk. She saw scrolls and quilts and hats and clothes, toys and devices and things, brilliant pink and green gemstones.
And copper.
Lots and lots of copper.
Next Chapter: 6. A Place of Perfect Memory Estimated time remaining: 41 Minutes Return to Story Description