“It’s not for me to decide whose faces get scraped or not…”
“No,” said Kynot. He reared up and looked as if he wanted to peck Liir’s eyes out. “No. Leave it in the beak of the Unnamed God, or his mortal avatar, the Emperor. Leave it to the agents of the Emperor, who run the Home Guard for the security of the Emerald City at the expense of all others who live in Oz. Or leave it to the underlings who follow the orders of their superiors. Leave it in the beaks of the dragons themselves. Dragons don’t kill people, people kill people. They kill themselves by walking unprotected in a world where there are dragons. You make me sick.”
“I don’t have any idea why the dragons attacked those maunts—”
“It is increasingly obvious that you don’t have any ideas at all. The dragons attacked the maunts to stir up trouble between the Yunamata and the Scrow. Those human populations had finally positioned themselves to be ripe for treaty making, after ten hundred generations…They had been learning to trust each other. With random attacks on isolated humans, the dragons could keep the tribes suspicious of each other. Tribes are easier to intimidate when they are not united. You said you were in the military: didn’t you learn anything about military strategy?”
Liir thought about the burning bridge. He could see again the letter of burning straw, changing shape as it fell, spelling something fiery and illegible into the vanquishing water.
He thought about Candle, waiting for him to return—having done something. Having completed some action. If Liir assumed he wanted Candle, and how could he know that yet?—he couldn’t have her. Not until he had an alternative against which to make a choice.
“Look,” he said. “Flattering, all this. But I can’t fly anymore. My broom is gone. I risked having my face scraped by coming solo across the Disappointments as far as Kumbricia’s Pass. I came for the wrong reasons—as usual. There’s nothing I can do for you, even if I am a human. I have no talent. My broom had great talent!—if it even was my broom. But it’s gone. Either the dragons took it, or it’s lost.
“Listen. Keep listening. Wipe that squawky look off your faces. Please. Why don’t you band together to fly out of here? A huge clot of you? The dragons couldn’t take you all out—some of you would be bound to get through.”
“Nice,” said a small Barn Owl. “Very nice. I have an irregular left wing and I tend to fly in loops, which slows me down. I’ll be one of the first to go. Gladly shall I sacrifice myself for the great Conference of Birds!” He didn’t sound as if he meant it.
“While there are grubs to eat here in Kumbricia’s Pass, and the dragons can’t see into our hideout, we are imprisoned here,” said Kynot. “But to leave would be to risk even one of us—and that is a risk we don’t take. We won’t. The least little Sparrow that falls diminishes us all. I thought you knew all about that.”
“Yeah, well, my religious instruction was pretty feeble.”
“I wasn’t speaking metaphorically, but of military strategy. You could get to the dragons, couldn’t you? A witch-boy passing as a soldier? You could see if they had your broom, for one. You could get it back. You could be our voice—our ambassador. Our human representative, our agent, our proxy—”
Liir interrupted. “If I could get my broom—what good could I do? They would just attack me again. Last time they were satisfied with my broom and my cape. Maybe this time they’d scrape my face.”
“You just said it’s not up to you to decide whose face gets scraped or not,” said the Cliff Eagle. “If you believe that, put your face out there and deal with what happens.”
“This isn’t going to work,” said Liir. “I can’t do anything for you. I’m not a Bird. I’m not a witch-boy. I don’t even have a broom anymore. And even if I had it, maybe I wasn’t meant to fly. Maybe I shouldn’t even have that liberty.”
“Maybe none of us should have the liberties we have. We keep going as we are, we’ll find out soon enough. But if you help us squelch the dragon threat, we’ll do what you ask. We’ll hunt for that human female you’re seeking.”
The Wren hopped forward again. “You’re going to do it,” she said to Liir. “You’re going to try, ain’t you. I kin tell.”
“You read the future, Dosey?” said Liir.
“Begging your pardon, sir—”
“Dosey!” interrupted Kynot. “No begging!”
“Ooh, sorry I’m sure,” Dosey continued. “No, Mister Broom-boy. You’re going to do it for a perfectly selfish reason—our looking for your lost girl-fing—and that’s okay. Why not? Long as the job gets done.”
The Birds were silent.
“You’ve had a taste of it,” she said in a softer voice. “Not many has, but you has. You’ve tried flying, ain’t you. Now try giving it up.”
She came nearer. “Try giving it up,” she said. “Begging your pardon, sir, you cain’t.”
The Birds began to flap their wings and, one by one, to lift up, making their final argument. They swept counterclockwise around the dead little lake, perhaps in deference to the Owl whose wing anomaly made him list in a particular direction. There were more Birds than Liir had first perceived. Several hundred. The more timid ones must have been hiding higher in the branches, but listening intently: all listening. Now they flew, and as they flew, there could be no leader, no follower: they traced the same track in the air, faster and faster. The very force of their rhythmic pumping made the surface of the lake stand up in waves of its own, higher and higher, till wingtips of white froth were beaten up, and then the clots of pale spume lifted and circled beneath the vortex of birds like a second population, like ghost Birds, like the relatives of the Conference who had been slain. But what were ghosts without voices?
The birds were silent—none of them, even the Geese and Ducks, who liked to honk in flight, dared risk attracting attention to their stronghold.
“Stop,” cried Liir and held up his hands—not out of pity, nor fear, nor a new moral conviction: simply out of the lack of any further reason to resist.
The blind, gimpy Heron hobbled forward and pecked at Liir’s leg to locate him. “I can’t fly either, now my sight’s gone,” the Heron said. “Makes me no less a Bird, though, do it?”
Kumbricia’s Cradle
1
THE WALK BACK WAS FASTER. Now that his bones were knitted, all this trekking was building up muscle again. He hurt, but solidly, recuperatively.
The Disappointments afforded little by way of a blind, so he traveled by night as much as he could, hoping that dragons wouldn’t be abroad then. He tried to keep to clearly marked tracks, goat paths, stream sides, where the going was smoother, though the cover less useful.
Arriving back at Apple Press Farm an hour shy of dawn, he was unwilling to frighten Candle by approaching in the dark. He found an old tree on the edge of the orchard still forcing out small, deformed fruit, and he made a breakfast for himself, shivering with his hands in his armpits. He tried to feel the day warm instant by instant as the sun rose over the horizon, but his apparatus for appreciating such subtlety was too crude.
Then the donkey brayed, and a cock cried out his serrated Confiteor through the rising mist. Where had Candle got a cock from? She must still be roaming the province, releasing creatures from homesteads with impunity. She was lucky she wasn’t caught, as the donkey and the cock weren’t exactly keeping their whereabouts secret. The cock sounded like a tenor.
With all that noise, she’d be stirring by now. Still, he waited till he saw the smoke from the kitchen chimney roll up, and he heard a window shutter bark against the stone. He came toward the house ready to call out, but she was standing in the doorway on one foot, the other foot rubbing against the back of her calf. “What have you been waiting for?” she asked, her head tilted forward. “Isn’t it cold out there in the orchard?”
“You’ve been clearing the undergrowth.”
“The donkey has. Makes my life easier; he’s done enough for a kitchen garden. If we remove a few more trees, we’ll ha
ve a good open space, and fertile, by the look of it. But we’ll need fencing against the donkey and other comers. Why do you loiter, come in, you must be ice.”
He was about to say I was afraid I’d frighten you, and then he remembered: She possessed some sort of a talent for reading the present. She’d probably known he was there; and indeed, she admitted as much when asked.
His fists clenched and opened at the notion of touching her sleep-warm body, of wrapping his arms around her, diving his cold fingers into the folds of her simple broadcloth sleeping tunic. But she ducked into the shadowy doorway before he could embrace her, as if his time away had made them strangers again.
The place was that much straighter, simpler, more pleasant. She’d been busy. Dried flowers set round in cracked terra-cotta pots. Tassels of herbs drying from strings, spooling their fragrance across the kitchen. In the fire nook, the andirons had been polished, and from the trammel hung a fine bulbous kettle with scented water roiling in it. “How did you know I’d be back today?”
“The cock crowed more self-consciously, so I guessed he must have an audience. Anyway, I sensed it would be you. Or maybe that was just hope, who can tell the difference? You must be weary. Rest your bones, Liir, and I’ll fetch some rennety milk pudding from the cold room belowstairs.”
“Don’t move about so. Just sit—here.” He patted a stool near him and smiled. Her hands flexed and met his at the fingertips, and their fingertips bounced gently against one another. Then she took herself off to get the pudding.
“You’ll eat first, and then you’ll sleep,” she said, like a mother, “for I don’t need the skills of divination to know you’ve been walking most of the night.”
She would hear of nothing else. He had to content himself with watching her flit across the kitchen, into the sunlight and out of it again. How is it that she is like a bird, too, he thought, and felt he was on to something, but then the food settled him, and Candle had proven right, for his head was nodding on his spine. She helped him to the room where they had so chastely slept, and after she had taken his shirt off and lightly run a damp cloth under his arms and behind the lengthening mane of hair at his nape, she dropped the cloth on the floor and pressed her hands against his bare chest, as if trying to interpret the arcane language of his heartbeat.
“Later,” she mouthed at him, and kissed the space where his lips would have been if he hadn’t just then begun to keel backward against the pillow.
The sleep was devoid of character. A good sleep.
He awoke well into the heat of the day, such as it was at this time of year. She had set out a tunic and fresh leggings. What a capable scavenger she was. The trousers, cut for a slenderer man, cinched too tightly at his thighs, but they were clean, and the tunic scented of pomander. In new garb he felt a new man, and looked out of the window to find her.
She was hard at work in the patch she’d mentioned. Using a sharp segment of the printing press’s broken iron wheel, she was levering aloft a resistant root of apple tree. Smudged now, where he was pristine, she wiped her face with the back of her hand and in vain tried to scatter a late population of midges who found the smell of her sweat enticing. He called to her, and she waved and fell heavily to her knees as the root chose that moment to yield.
“Let me do that,” he said.
“Done now. But I’ll rest a spell. Come down.”
They walked to the edge of the orchard, by turns sipping sweet well water from a single pipkin. “You’ve done good work here,” he told her gravely.
“I’ve had good reason.” With her little finger she picked at a bit of wax in one ear. “You’re back, now, and there’s one on its way.”
He arched an eyebrow, feeling very Commander Cherrystone-ish. “Company’s coming?”
“You could put it suchly.”
What was she reading out of this sunny hour that he couldn’t see—oh, he couldn’t, but then he could. “It’s not so. You’re not old enough.”
She said, “Though like you I can’t exactly say how old I am, apparently I am old enough, Liir.” Her tone was easy and a bit bored, but he thought he knew her well enough by now to suppose that she was at least a little frightened.
Many of the fellows in the unit had talked about this. They’d shared their observations. Women always knew, and a preternatural calm swept all other earthly considerations aside when it happened. But Candle was hardly a woman!—and not inaugurated into those mysteries. Or not by him.
“I’ve been gone only a few weeks,” he said, trying not to sound cold. “Or had you already charmed a local farmer with your domingon even when I was still recuperating inside? Is that how you got the goat, the cock, the hen—a bartering for your farmyard needs with your farmyard skills? Is that why you encouraged me to leave on a wild Bird chase?”
“You needn’t fuss so.” She bit her lip and looked at him levelly. “It was no other man, Liir.”
“It is not by me. Candle!” He slipped out of Qua’ati for a moment, to spew expletives in the orchard air. “I am a fool and a naïf and a monster, all at once, but I am not stupid about how a girl becomes pregnant. It is not by me. Don’t embarrass me with a hopeless ruse. Do you think I would abandon you over it?”
“I don’t think—”
“Or maybe you want me to? Well, I won’t. I haven’t that crooked a soul. Just don’t lie to me, for that’s intolerable. Candle! The whole thing is beyond belief.”
“Liir. I ask nothing of you. You’re not married to me. You didn’t choose me. I didn’t choose you.”
“You chose to save me,” said Liir despondently, “when I might have slipped away, and a good thing, too.”
“I chose to try to save someone. Someone sick in an infirmary, that is all. I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know you yet. I don’t know you yet.”
“I am not the father,” he said. “Am I required to remind you how it works? I kept my distance, Candle. I never slept with you; I never buried myself in your trove. I thought about it, yes, but thinking’s not doing, and no child is begat by the midnight thoughts of an adult sleeping alone.”
“But you did,” she said. Her shoulders slumped. “It would be easier to pretend you hadn’t, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The infant grows. I won’t turn it out of its nest now.”
“I didn’t!” he insisted, and then she told him how he had, and when, and why.
A small rain came up over the orchard, and in an eddy of chill, the drops turned to snow. The season turned several more notches in an instant, as can happen.
They made their way inside without further remark, and Candle put herself to kitchen tasks. She measured two handfuls of coarse flour and shook it through a boulter of cloth. The light greyed, and faded, and he pulled the shutters tight, and built up the fire. There were the cock and the hen to bring in, and the donkey to stable, and whatever else he could think of to do, he did: shifting firewood, scattering clean straw for the floor, arranging things on shelves. Things with handles and spouts, items with purposes he couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t imagine anything.
They ate, and after eating she said softly, “This is a good thing, Liir.”
“Then it couldn’t have come from me.”
As she prodded, and because it made a distraction if nothing else, he told her about the Conference of the Birds and the charge under which he was laboring—or had so labored, up until this morning upon his return—to find his broom.
She had always seemed unshaken by the notion of flying dragons. When he asked why, she told him that she’d heard rumors of such creatures a few years back. They were involved in an action in the provincial capital.
“Qhoyre,” he filled in. “It figures.”
“If there were going to be troubles, you’d expect them in Qhoyre,” she concurred. “It began as a tax revolt or something. The garrison of the Emerald City military was stormed by Quadlings, and more or less annihilated.”
“I don’t
believe you can be more or less annihilated. You either are or you aren’t.” He thought of the suave, genteel Commander Cherrystone, and hoped that he had been one of the ones who had been killed.
“Don’t look to me for accuracy. I’m a simple soul. I’m merely telling you what I heard my uncle say. Some of the reasons we left.” Candle continued. It was calming for both of them to avoid the matter of her pregnancy. “He said that the Emerald City flared up in reprisal. Overreacted. A small fleet of flying dragons was unleashed against the Quadlings at Qhoyre. It was pretty terrible. There were only a few survivors, and who could trust what those poor traumatized loons said? Flying dragons? Quadlings are so superstitious. No one knew what to believe—so let’s get out of here, said my uncle.”
She folded her hands in her lap. “So I’m not surprised that it has turned out to have been true.”
He put his head in his hands. The other fellows in his squadron. Had any of them survived? Ansonby, Kipper, Somes? Burny, Mibble? The one they called Fathead? Or what about their girlfriends—were they tarred as collaborators?
It wasn’t just the girl slung from the burning bridge—it was all of them. Her parents, their neighbors, the countryfolk. The occupying forces, the officers and the infantry, the support teams, the ambassadors. The repercussions seemed endless and only to grow in force and significance, never to recede.
Candle saw his expression. She took his hand, and he had to work hard not to snatch it away.
“Remember why you went to the Conference,” she said. “Before you save anyone else, you have to save yourself, Liir. Otherwise you’re just a bundle of tics, a stringed puppet manipulated by chance and the insensible wind.”
“I will stay here, whether you’ve been sleeping round the countryside or not. We are called to be as limbs of God,” he said.
“That piety curdles on your tongue, and you know it. If you don’t rescue yourself, Liir, you might just as easily be a limb of evil.”
“One has to admit one’s destiny.”
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