Shadowed By Wings

by Janine Cross

  One of my rocks hit the bird square on the breast. She shrieked and shook her head at me. Another struck the roof tiles just behind her. With another cry, she launched into flight.

  I ran after her, hurling expletives and rocks. She rose higher into the air, slowly. Unhurried. She lazily flapped beyond the confines of the stable domain and glided from sight.

  I stood there, panting, one fist clenched around a remaining rock.

  I had to eat. Surely that would fortify me somewhat and help me ignore my mother’s relentless will.

  Surely.

  Something had to help, and it couldn’t be venom. I couldn’t descend into those beguiling, debilitating depths as I had only a short year ago.

  Shuddering, I returned to the pump, to where a pile of fresh fodder sat. I began sifting through it, frantically looking for nuts to eat.

  FOUR

  Sundown.

  A hot, earthen scent hung in the air, as if a huge loaf of mud, wreathed by jungle bracken, was baking in an enormous clay oven. That smell is, understand, peculiar to a Clutch Re twilight during the Fire Season.

  I was precariously balanced atop two of the braced walls I’d constructed during the day, hammering in a rim cap to give my latrine more stability during monsoon gales. As red streaked the gloaming, a lithe, somewhat effeminate servitor returned to the courtyard. I paused in my work to watch him kneel before the battered cauldron that sat in the primitive cooking pit outside the apprentices’ hovel, not far from a great butchering table and a line of hutches, the latter of which were filled with grunting renimgars. Cupping his palms about his mouth, the lithe servitor blew the embers beneath the cauldron to life. My empty stomach torqued at the mere thought of food. I wearily turned back to my work.

  Sometime later, the inductees staggered wordlessly into the courtyard.

  They all crossed the court through its center, keeping a goodly distance between themselves and where I worked. One inductee in particular slunk by as if I were a kwano snake poised to strike. I’d earlier snatched the boy from Egg’s service, without Egg’s knowledge, when I’d needed a pair of hands to hold up the crooked little walls of my latrine while I hammered temporary braces into place. I’d had to press the young inductee into aiding me through use of hissed curses and threats. Only his fear of the Skykeeper had overcome both his fear of Egg and his outrage at obeying a woman, and a deviant one at that.

  As the inductees shuffled toward their hovel, the servitors and veterans likewise returned from their work elsewhere in the stable domain. I felt their eyes upon me as I worked, and I drove in the nails I was pounding harder, ignoring the trembling in my exhausted arms and legs, ignoring the stiffness of aching neck muscles. As my hammer blows rang assertively around the stables, the young men’s astonishment that a woman could possess even my paltry skill with tool and wood tingled against my back like stinging nettles.

  The faggots beneath the great cauldron began to glow as red as the twilight sky, and the broth scent of gruel wafted from its depths. The young man designated as cook stirred the pot vigorously with a great wooden ladle and ordered an inductee to fetch water for him, another to fetch more faggots from the pile stacked under the thatched eaves of the hovel, a third to feed the caged renimgars.

  The veterans eased their scarred, muscled bodies down to the ground while the servitors crouched on their haunches not far from them. Although I wasn’t looking for him, I was acutely aware of where Dono sat, sprawled long-limbed upon the ground.

  Despite his hostility toward me yesterday, part of me was glad to see him, for he was familiar. He was clan.

  Though in truth, I and my mother had been pronounced nas rishi poakin ku when I was but nine, when we were ousted from the pottery clan for her crimes against Temple in her efforts to buy back Waivia. Even if I had been declared an unstable, violent person unable to form kin bonds, neither Dono nor my heart knew it, and I longed for a simple look, a small sign of support, from my former milk-brother.

  Neither was forthcoming.

  Realizing that I was only delaying joining my fellow apprentices for the evening meal, I reluctantly quit my work. I gingerly lowered myself from my perch, praying the while that the walls wouldn’t collapse upon me during my descent; then I stiffly gathered up the tools and replaced them in the crate. My every muscle felt set in mortar.

  As I joined the apprentices, I tried to walk as if I weren’t tired, tried to act as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a woman to be present in the dragonmaster’s stables. Try as I might, I could not ignore the stiff silence that fell upon the crowd of youths at my approach.

  The dregs of crimson from the setting sun melted into the star-speckled sky. The lithe servitor designated as cook banged his ladle upon the great butchering table, and the stacks of wooden bowls upon the table wobbled.

  “S’ready,” he announced, and a two-clawful or so of youths sprang up from the ground, grabbed the wooden bowls from the table, and jostled into a queue before the cauldron. I assumed these industrious youths were all servitors, for the scars upon their backs bespoke previous years’ participation in Mombe Taro, but their ages were too young to mark them as veteran apprentices. The cook ladled gruel into their outstretched bowls, which were then taken to the eldest of the apprentices, clearly the veterans, seated and reclined about the ground. With all the pomp of placing an offering upon a Temple altar, the servitors placed the bowls of food before the veterans.

  I noticed that not one but two servitors vied for the privilege of serving Dono his meal.

  The veterans ate without hurry or grace, demanding that their bowls be filled over and over while the rest of us watched. As a woman, I was accustomed to waiting until men had eaten their fill before partaking of food, but to the new inductees, such subservient attendance was new and awful. Few of them could contain their hunger without shifting about or chewing their nails in agitation.

  At last, the veterans had filled their stomachs.

  “Servitors,” the lithe cook called out, and while the veterans swatted mosquitoes and picked their teeth with sticks, the servitors lined up before the cauldron.

  We inductees waited, slavering like curs, stomachs roiling, eyes riveted on the cauldron. Night encroached on the courtyard. Hands scooped into wooden bowls; gruel was licked slowly from fingers. The sated veterans and servitors began spilling destiny wheels and dice from worn leather sacks carried at their waists. Egg, who’d eaten when the veterans had, finally took the ladle from the cook.

  “Hey-o, inductees,” he growled, standing before the cauldron, poised to ladle out gruel. “Grab a bowl an’ line up.”

  We all scrambled for the bowls that had been dropped with deliberate negligence to the ground when each servitor had finished eating. There were far more inductees than bowls.

  I espied a recently used bowl near the thigh of a veteran and went quickly toward it, wending my way through the sprawled boys and young men. Those I passed stiffened, and all eyes turned upon me, one by one.

  I feared that the veteran beside the bowl would pick it up, would refuse me its use. The same thought must have crossed everyone else’s mind, for the air grew rife with tension the closer I got to the bowl.

  I forced myself not to clench my hands into fists, to walk with chin up.

  The veteran I approached sat rigidly and refused to acknowledge my approach by glancing in my direction. I stopped before him, breath held.

  Stiffly, I bent to pick up the bowl.

  The muscles of his closest forearm twitched.

  I dove, made faster than he by desperation and hunger, and snatched up the bowl before he could knock it out of my reach. I clutched the bowl to my stomach as if it were precious and stepped somewhat smartly away from him.

  Hostile eyes surrounded me. Swallowing hard, I walked to the cauldron, fingers clasped tight about the bowl, looking neither left nor right. A chill sweat broke out on my skin. Behind me, I heard the veteran spit, imagined him flicking his ears
with his thumb to ward off the taint of a deviant.

  By the time I stood at the rear of the queue before the cauldron, I felt drained and limp, as if I’d fought a skirmish.

  The queue moved forward with agonizing slowness. My nervous sweat began cooling in a thin line down my spine. The twilight darkened toward night.

  A young man with an empty bowl approached. I moved aside; a woman always eats after a man has partaken of what has been cooked.

  Another servitor stepped forward, empty bowl in hand. Again I moved aside. A third apprentice, then a fourth, came to have his bowl filled. Each time, I moved aside, though my tension mounted unbearably.

  Finally, it was my turn at the pot.

  Egg smirked at me. “None left.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged his thick shoulders, a little uncertainty creeping into his smirk. “None left.”

  I stared into the blackened cauldron. Nothing but a film of gruel sat hardening about the inside of the dented kettle.

  Sniggers erupted amongst the apprentices.

  My cheeks burned.

  How foolish of me, how utterly stupid, to have stood aside as others ate their fill. By joining the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship, I was defying one of the most time-honored beliefs about what a woman could and could not do. I would have to be aware of the other customs that ruled women’s lives and decisively flout them if I wanted to survive the apprenticeship.

  Furious at myself, I stared into the empty pot as the sliver of waxing moon rose into the black sky.

  And, as is too often the case when in trouble, I let my temper get the better of me. I decided that I would not go hungry that night. No.

  I slammed my bowl down onto the butchering table and stalked over to the renimgar hutches. I fiddled with a latch, wrenched the door open, and snatched at one of the lizardlike mammals within. It writhed and kicked with its back legs, trying to bury its hind claws in me, but I clung to its leathery nape and dragged it out. I slammed the cage door shut again and latched it.

  At Convent Tieron, I’d slaughtered many a renimgar for eating, and snakes, voles, rats, and monkeys, too. Anything that moved had been deemed edible at Tieron.

  I slammed the renimgar down on the table hard enough to stun it, picked up the rusted machete that sat nearby, and drew it across the renimgar’s neck. The squeal of the little animal cut through the night air like a scimitar through the skin of a baby. It was a horrible noise that violated the soul.

  Always was.

  I swiftly moved the writhing animal above the cauldron so it would bleed into the pot.

  “What’re you doin’, hey?” Egg bellowed in front of me. “You can’t help yourself to meat whenever you want!”

  “I’m hungry.” I glared at him, disturbed by the fear of the animal dying beneath my hands and annoyed at myself for letting others eat before me.

  My response to Egg was wholly inappropriate, for a woman should never publicly display anger to a man, and Egg was a man, albeit a yolk-brained one. I felt the crowd stare at my back in astonishment.

  “But you can’t,” Egg spluttered, and with an aggrieved expression, he looked toward the veterans for help.

  A pause. Then:

  “If she wants to cook, she can cook,” a voice said from the gloom. I looked in the direction of the voice: Dono.

  Joy leapt like a tongue of fire through me, for here was the kin support I’d so longed for.

  “That’ll be her job from now on, not Ringus’s,” Dono continued. “Every night, she can cook the meal.”

  The lithe servitor who had heated the slop pursed his lips. He, obviously, was Ringus.

  “Oh?” said a bearded young man reclined on the ground near Ringus. He had shoulder-length brown hair shot with streaks of red, and his thighs were as muscled as a dragon’s, and though there was no anger in his voice, the tone he used was fraught with tension. “And what’ll Ringus do now instead?”

  A moment’s silence from Dono. “Why, he’ll serve you, Eidon. ’Cause that’s what you like. Service from Ringus.”

  Snickers peppered the air, hastily snuffed. Ringus glanced at the ground. Eidon’s shoulders twitched.

  Egg, either oblivious to the tension between the two or too concerned about himself to care, tugged on a curled lock. “But she’s not gonna quit work early just so’s she can cook, right? She’s gonna have to do it when she’s finished, ’cause I ain’t losin’ her work time just so’s she can do Ringus’s job.”

  Dono tossed the dice he was holding onto the ground, making a show of continuing casually with his game. “She’ll do both. That’ll be the price the deviant pays for thinking she can help herself to meat whenever she’s hungry.”

  My heart sank. No support was this, but a punishment for my audacity.

  Eidon rose into a sitting position and draped his arms loosely over his knees. The muscles in his great thighs bulged out, clear even in the rising moon’s weak light. “I don’t recall the Komikon choosing you to speak on behalf of the rest of us, Dono.”

  “Should we put it to a vote, then, Eidon?” Dono said quietly. “Is that what you want, a vote? There are others here who like the way Ringus does what he does best, and I’m sure they’ll be glad he’s got some free time to serve their needs as well as yours. A vote, then?”

  “I think a vote is a good idea,” Eidon replied. “A vote between eating food made by a deviant, or Ringus, who’s been cooking for over a year and not a one of us poisoned by his feed.”

  “She won’t poison us,” Dono said, anger audible through his poise. “Temple would execute her immediately.”

  “They’re going to execute her regardless. It’s just a matter of days.”

  My heart beat faster.

  Dono looked around at the apprentices. “The more work we give her, the quicker she falls. The longer she stays, the more reason Temple’ll have for revoking the Komikon’s status. We’re all out of here then.”

  “You don’t know that for certain, Dono, my friend,” Eidon said. “If they revoke the Komikon’s title, one of us could just as soon be elected Komikon by Temple.”

  “You’re deluded,” Dono snorted. “Temple would purge these stables. If they question the Komikon’s choice of one apprentice, they’ll question his choice of all of us. We’d all be out of here then.”

  Dono stabbed a digit at the inductees clustered together some distance from the veterans. “You know who’ll be first to go when they revoke the Komikon’s title? All of you. You’ll be executed, sure as the sun rises at dawn, because the Komikon chose you the day after he chose her.”

  Fearful looks were exchanged amongst the inductees.

  “Are you saying the Komikon shouldn’t have chosen her, Dono?” Eidon murmured. “Are you questioning the Komikon’s judgment?”

  “Are you protecting the deviant, Eidon?”

  “A vote, hey-o?”

  “A vote.” Dono raised his voice. “All for giving the deviant the extra work of cooking, raise a hand. The sooner she’s out of here, the safer we all are.”

  “Remember what you’re voting for, if you raise a hand,” Eidon interjected. “The risk of poisoned food.”

  Uncertainty rife in the air. More looks exchanged amongst the inductees. Slowly, uneasily, hands went up. Dono counted them silently, as did we all, then he swore under his breath.

  “Looks like you lose, Dono,” Eidon said.

  Dono lurched to his feet. “She’ll be the death of us if she stays.”

  He shot me a malice-honed look, then strode into the darkness, crossing the courtyard and disappearing into the next. One by one, the eyes of every apprentice turned toward me, where I stood holding the lifeless body of the renimgar.

  “Ringus, watch over the deviant while she prepares tomorrow’s meal,” Eidon said in the same voice he’d used on Dono. “I don’t want that meat wasted, and she sure isn’t eating a whole renimgar herself. She’ll cook this once, and that’s it, and don’t you pull this stunt again
, girl, hear? Or there’ll be consequences. Your Skykeeper be damned.”

  I soon learned what a favor Eidon had inadvertently done me by blocking Dono’s move to have me cook, for by the time I had the vast cauldron filled with steaming broth for the next day’s meal, I moved in a stupor of exhaustion.

  Dono had been right: Doing such each evening, on top of the day’s heavy labor, would’ve soon broken me.

  See, cooking a meal meant not only butchering an animal each eve, but fetching water from the stable pump, sifting sufficient featon grit and sesal nuts from the silo located behind the third courtyard, and, once back at the hovel courtyard, coaxing the embers beneath the cauldron to new life. Once the ingredients were all simmering in the cauldron, the thick mess required constant stirring to prevent the bottom from burning and the top from remaining unheated.

  I cursed myself many times for having taken on the project, albeit only for the one night. Hunger would have been preferable, surely. And I’d not elevated my status in the slightest by my show of defiance; it had only underscored how aberrant a creature I was and given Dono the opportunity to emphasize the danger my presence posed to the lives of all present.

  To what lengths would Dono go, I wondered, to rid the stables of me? And how would Temple deal with the dragonmaster, and, by extension, me?

  Ringus followed my every move as I prepared the next day’s meal. He was a slender servitor with lips so pale and glossy, they looked like ribbons of pomegranate-seasoned oil. He had a gentle manner, somewhat nervous, and eyes so wide they looked perpetually awed. I soon discovered that he had an unconscious habit of stroking things, as if ladle and table needed reassurance.

  I stirred the cauldron while Ringus fitfully dozed, leaning against the butchering table and jerking awake every now and then to check my progress. I dozed off twice, too, only to awaken abruptly when my hand that held the ladle slid into the gruel.

  At middle-night, with dew heavy and chill about us, I spoke.

  “It’s cooked enough, yes?”

  Ringus hauled himself upright. He took the ladle from me and stabbed the gruel a few times. With a shrug, he grabbed one of the chipped and unwashed bowls stacked haphazardly upon the butchering table and filled it with the slop. He held it out to me.