“You always claim not to be Ghoss, but you obviously are!” said Rei-agern, a middling old one, with an interestingly ugly face.
“I am a bondservant from Earth. None of my family ever were Ghoss, there are no Ghoss on Earth.”
“Well, there obviously were sometime, because that’s where we came from originally, some thousands of years ago.”
“Captured and enslaved,” said I sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”
“No such thing,” cried the other. “We were never slaves of the Gibbekot! We were their friends, their coworkers. We stayed at their invitation, true, but it was not into slavery! Many of us went with them when the Frossians came, and those who did are still with the Gibbekot, back in the hills.”
I thought the talent they had might have been a gift from the Gibbekot, for they were something other than merely human now. Perhaps they had mutated, or evolved.
I soon learned the routine. Rise early, go to the privy, wash in the bucket, go to the kitchen, take whatever food was offered, return to the barn, open the big door, and urge the plether to get up and move. The umoxen seemed to take a perverse pleasure in being difficult to rouse, and it was days before I realized they were playing with me. When I stopped chivvying them and took to leaning on the doorpost, chewing a straw, careless of whether they moved or not, they moved. The same ones always led, the others followed with one small, brown one at the rear, and I walked by that one, soon enough with my arm across the creature’s shoulder, feeling through the wool for any sharp seed or spine that might fret an umox.
As I walked I watched everything, looked at everything, attentive to the presence of continuous miracle. There had been no grass, no fog on Earth. I had suppose these things to be of one kind. Grass was green. Fog was gray. Instead, neither was ever a single color, ever a single thing. The umoxen relished the fog, murmuring their way through it, the moisture condensing on their wool so that when the sun broke through, it lit a procession of jeweled chimeras, garbed in rainbow.
Sometimes an umox would come up behind me, so softly I did not hear it, then suddenly whuff at me from behind, frightening a yelp from my throat, and at that they laughed. I knew it was laughter, though silent, for their shoulders shook with it.
“You are naughty animals,” I told them. “Shame on you.” At which they laughed the harder. They had voices that ranged from that same high, fluting call I had heard the first time I met them to a low, satisfied rumble I could hear through the soles of my feet.
“Can you get me some brushes?” I asked the Ghoss. “Some brushes, a pair of pliers, maybe a large comb.”
“We can,” they said. “But the herdsman won’t let you keep them.”
“I’m going to hide them in the pasture,” I confessed. “In a hollow fence post.”
So equipped, I began grooming my charges. First the little brown one that I walked with to the pasture each day. I worked the comb through its wool, slowly, carefully. I brushed the long wool of its tail, strand by strand, not hurrying. It was a way to pass the time, not something I had been told to do. Soon the little umox began to rumble-hum, the sound of a deep-toned stringed instrument, stroked with an endless bow. The next umox added a tone, then the one next to it, and soon there were twenty humming, one vast, endless harmonic chord that sounded upward, through my bones.
When I had finished with the little brown one, I turned to find my next victim and was confronted by the leader of the plether, who looked at me significantly and turned, offering its tail. From that day on, I spent my days grooming the plether, two days per umox, strictly in rotation. I hid my implements in the hollow post each night. Before long, I was telling them stories of Queen Wilvia and the nazeemi and the yaboons while they rumble-hummed along, not only my own plether but all those within hearing, a vast harmonic sound that continued until my brain sang with them, and time went by without my noticing it.
The pliers the Ghoss had found for me were useful in reaching seeds that had worked their way back inside the long, sensitive ears or pulling thorns from their strange feet: an almost complete circle of hoof surrounding a soft center made up of four stubby fingers that curled up, out of the way. Usually they could pull thorns from one foot with the fingers of another, but sometimes, especially among the old ones, their ankles had stiffened, and they could no longer do it for themselves. They came to me from all the plethers around, flopping down on their sides with a great whoosh of expelled air, holding up the painful hooves. Sometimes, also, they caught something in their teeth that their long, flexible tongues could not retrieve: a piece of fencing wire or a short length of the cord used to bind the hay. I asked the Ghoss to get me scissors and pliers that were more pointed. Time went on as I told endless stories of my worlds, of Naumi the warrior, and Margy the shaman, of the nameless spy
