literature

Flying

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It was a clear, blustery day and Falaranx Stormfeather was doing simultaneous equations on the wall of the woodshed. A shrew skittered past one of her slightly grubby hind paws, followed – at a more sedate pace – by a small tabby-and-white cat. Flix carried on finding out what y equalled, and one of her ears flicked slightly at the sound of one cute fluffy animal brutally murdering another cute fluffy animal.
    The cat, whose name was Ailsa, emerged from the pile of wood and settled down to lick blood off her paws and whiskers. She looked over at Flix’s paw with a critical eye.
     “Don’t you ever clean your feet?” enquired the cat. “I keep mine in snowy condition.” She extended one pure white paw to indicate this.
     Flix stopped scratching at the wall and hunkered down, lapsing into the language of purrs, growls, meows and twitches that was Feline.
     “Yes,” she said bluntly. “I fly up to Hartfell Spa to give ’em a wash every third morning.”
     “Chhh!” said Ailsa dismissively. “That’s not cleaning them.”
     “Yes, it is. My people have better things to do than lick ourselves.”
     The little cat stopped cleaning herself at that. “What’s better than licking yourself?”
     Flix folded her talons under her. “Eating. Flying. Maths.”
     “All that fooling about with symbols?”
     “Yes.”
     Ailsa hissed again. “That’s anthro stuff. Arthur and I just kill things and wash ourselves.”
     “And get stuck behind fences.”
     “We were not stuck! We just… didn’t want to come over the fence just then.”
     Flix clacked her beak sharply and got to her feet. Arthur passed by the door as she left.
     “You looking for your sister?” she asked the tabby tomcat.
     “No, I want food,” he replied without looking at her.
     Flix rounded the corner of the house and spotted a large grey and green shape in the grass.
     “Have you seen Thom today?” she asked the reclining Sanston.
     “Over there.” The blind werewolf waved a hand.
     Thom was perching on the edge of the grassy bank, just where it began to slope. Her arms were outstretched and she was standing on her toes. As the gryphon watched, the blue drake leapt into the air and vanished over the edge of the bank with a yell.
     “Hoouuuuuuu-mph!”
     Flix strolled over to where Thom had been standing in the wind and looked down at her, getting up from the lawn where she had landed.
     “What in the name of Skerrith are you doing?” asked the flummoxed Flix.
     “Flying!” Thom made her way back up the bank, picking moss off her woolly polo-neck.
     “It looked more like a fall than a flight. Speaking as someone who has seen and done both.”
     Thom’s next words were lost as a fighter plane screamed overhead.
     “I didn’t hear that.”
     “I said it feels pretty much the same, and it’s the closest I’ll ever get to flying.”
     Flix looked over at the tiny silhouette of the plane. “I’d say that flying is the closest you’ll ever get to flying.”
     “Not in a plane. You don’t feel anything if you’re in a plane.”
     “How so?” asked the gryphon, sitting down couchant on the bank.
     “It’s like… you’ve never been in a plane, have you?”
     “Coa. In my world people leave flying to those that can. Except folk with hippogriffs and the like.”
     “Well, I like it when you take off in a plane, ’cos, like, you can feel it leaving the ground, but once you’re up there… Well, you can’t see what’s under you, ’cos there’s only wee windows, ’bout so big,” Thom indicated the size with her hands, “and you can’t smell anything apart from the food – which isn’t very good, the bread smells funny and everything else tastes funny – and you can’t feel the wind, or hear anything going on outside, and you can’t see anything small when you’re up that high, like people or animals. But it’s like… all artificial. I’d like to fly low over the Cairngorms or the Alps, see glaciers and rivers and folk from above, watch Steinbocke climbing about on the mountains, maybe land somewhere where it’s snowy. But not in a plane, or a helicopter, or any of those flying machines. Like, like how a dragon or a gryphon flies, with wings and feet. Real wings, not rigid like a plane’s.”
     “What’s a Steinbock?” asked Flix.
     “It’s like a kind of mountain goat. Big horns, like this.” Thom held her arms to her head to indicate a pair of huge, sweeping horns. “I saw some in the Innsbruck Zoo. Dunno what they’re called in English. Think I spotted some in a film last year as well.”
     “Which film?”
     “Howl’s Moving Castle, but I’m getting off the point here. What I’m saying is, well, you’ve been earthbound for what, six months out of thirteen hundred years?”
             “That’s about right, yes.”
     “Well, ’part from planes, which don’t really count, like I said, and one helicopter in New York – which doesn’t count either – I’ve been earthbound for my entire life. You can’t even imagine what it’s like to spend almost fifteen years with both-” Thom glanced at her friend’s feet and hastily revised what she was going to say. “All your feet firmly on the ground, can you?”
     Flix shuddered at the thought.
     “Yeah, well, I had a dream the other night.” Thom fell backwards and gazed up at the sky. “I think it was one of the best I’ve ever had. I think I was a dragon in it, and I was flying around this big walled city on a plain. There was an army attacking it, with a huge battering ram like Grond from Lord of the Rings – actually I think it was Grond – and for some reason the White Witch from Narnia was there as well. But the point is,” here she raised both arms and pointed up at the blue, “I was flying. I was wheeling around the battlefield, setting light to siege engines and swooping down to catch soldiers, and I was flying. Flying. And then I woke up, an’ remembered I was still just a drake, no fire, no wings, and… well, it was bloody disappointing. What d’you think of that?”
     “Well, I think it probably says something about you that you evidently killed a large number of people in this dream of yours, but… I see where you’re coming from. Like you said, I haven’t been unable to fly for more than a thousand years. Is that why you like walking home in the wind?”
     “Yeah.”
     Flix looked up, following the progress of a small cloud across the sky. She spread one wing and glanced down at Thom.
     “You see this?”
     “What?”
     “It’s a wing. You generally need at least two of them to fly.”
     “I’ve yet to meet a lung who needed them.”
     “I said generally, not always. Climb on my back.”
     Thom sat up abruptly and stared at her. “Did you just say what I thought you said?”
     “Yes.” Flix bent her forelegs. “Well?”
     Thom scrambled onto the gryphon’s feathery shoulders and held onto her neck plumage.
     “Can you fly with me on your back?” she asked.
     “I weigh two hundred kilos and can fly carrying a dead horse in my talons. You weigh a fair bit less than a horse carcass!”
     Flix sat back on her haunches and unfurled her immense wings. Thom instinctively held tighter to the gryphon’s feathers as the great beast launched herself and her passenger into the sky. She turned her head and saw the ground rapidly falling further away from them with each wingbeat.
     The wind roared in Thom’s ears as Flix soared round in a wide ring over the Southern Uplands. A couple of hikers stopped dead in their tracks and stared in wonder and fear at the huge creature that had just flown not twenty feet over their heads, flattening the ground with the downdraught from its giant wingspan. The gryphon banked alarmingly over a corrie, letting Thom look down the length of her right wing at the ground more than a hundred feet below. A flock of sheep scattered as the shadow passed over them.
     Flix was still gaining height, following the course of the road towards the Devil’s Beef Tub. As the gryphon circled round, heading back towards the house, Thom let go of her neck and, gripping only with her knees, spread her arms out wide.
     “Hooouuuuuuuuuu!”
     Flix half-folded her wings and plunged down towards the heathery hillside, catching herself so close to the ground that her talons ruffled the grass, and swooped back up with a sudden midair corkscrew. Thom quickly took hold of Flix’s neck again.
     The gryphon was hardly beating her wings now, instead gliding for most of the time with only an occasional wingbeat to keep herself aloft. They were over the house now, albeit a couple of hundred metres above it. Flix went a little higher and narrowed her eyes. Thom noticed her pointed ears flatten themselves against her head, and held on tighter.
     Flix folded her wings, and stooped like a hunting falcon. Thom bent over and wrapped both her arms around Flix’s neck as the ground accelerated towards them at a terrifying speed.
     At what seemed like the last possible second, Flix checked her plummet and put her feet down, leaving four deep furrows in the grass as she slowed to a halt.
     “You can let go now,” she told Thom, twisting her head around to look at her rider.
     Thom was wearing a grin that made her appear slightly stoned. This didn’t fade as she fell sideways off Flix’s back and hit the lawn with a thump.
     “Are you all right?”
     Thom picked herself up and brushed some grass and earth off her clothes.
     “Can we do that again sometime?”
The flying dreams are the best ones.
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