SSCS 02: Installment 12 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 12 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
“There are oyster bells blooming in the cliff-cracks on the north side of the spire,” gran-Tom’s musty voice cracked out. “They’ll have to do. And they’ll keep until tomorrow, too, so you might as well gather two baskets full when you go.” She gave Mina a sharp-eyed look. “Don’t forget the claw straps for your boots. I won’t hear any excuses about the kelp-weed being too slick to get to the last of them.” Then, “Hedwin, get your lasso. There are still seven pigs on this prickly spire, and I need to see them all back in their pen before moonrise.”
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 12: 19.1126
Not that it was going to take them anywhere close to moonrise, and Mina knew it. Because even though flying pigs can get to nigh on everywhere – and apparently do, if the kraken’s stupid first meal was anything to judge by – they at least tend to stay high up. And on a spire, high up was where pretty much everyone tended to stay most of the time.
Oyster bells, on the other hand, liked the tide line. Which meant a climb for Mina rather greater than the one she usually had to make every morning, even if this one had the down bit coming first. And even if there were stupid stairs. Mina’s chore was definitely going to take longer than theirs, she’d bet next month’s ration of sweet cakes on it. Her legs were already burning – a bit, and mostly in anticipation of the up-climb – when she reached the bottom of the stairs, and that still hadn’t gotten her where she needed to go. There was still plenty of climbing and clambering to come in order to get around to the spire’s north side, because of course oyster bells would rather be where people usually weren’t.
Maybe it was a conspiracy of flowers. Maybe it was the exact same reason why the roses had their thorns. Because they thought stupid holy tea was just as stupid as Mina thought it, and they’d rather have no part in it.
“Yes, yes. Me too,” Mina growled while stepping gingerly from one boulder to the next, one hand clinging tight to a higher one. She was still wearing the awful steel-pig-hide gloves, too, because spire boulders were sharp, especially nearest the sea. While most things got ground down by the constant washing of the waves, spire boulders seemed only to sharpen, as though the sea were a vast whet stone, always rubbing at them.
Just like the steel-pig-hide gloves always rubbed at Mina’s knuckles. They chafed at her wrists, so she always had some scab or other there, but the other day she could have sworn when she looked down at her knuckles that there were fewer wrinkle lines there than there had been before. Not that there’d been many. She wasn’t old. But she was sure she used to have some wrinkle lines. Now her knuckles mostly looked like smooth-rounded pebbles.
A bit like gran-Tom’s – probably the only feature where Mina matched gran-Tom, who was scaly and tentacley and clawed – something mostly from the sea. But maybe she’d been forced to wear stupid steel-pig-hide gloves when she was younger, too. Maybe that was why she so happily inflicted them on Mina now, to get that turn-about satisfaction. Mina gnashed her teeth just thinking about it.
And nearly stepped on the first oyster bell she came across.