Shadowed By Wings

by Janine Cross

  I sat down on the worn verandah and immediately set to fashioning myself a tunic. As long as the garment covered me from neck to knee, I felt it would suffice.

  I was never clever with a needle and thread, so my work was clumsy. More than once I stabbed a palm or finger with the bodkin. The flare of pain each time ignited the venom in my veins anew, sending my senses spinning so that my eyesight blurred, my ears were filled with a spiraling whine, and the verandah briefly swooped from my bottom, leaving me suspended in vertigo.

  The chaos ended each time within heartbeats, leaving me swelled with a glowing puissance.

  The garment, when I was done, hung off me askew but concealed far more of my skin than Kratt’s cape had. Pleased, I fumbled beneath my new tunic, undid Kratt’s cape, and stepped out of it. So I wouldn’t be accused of lying to Egg, I then darned and patched the remaining blankets and folded them neatly back into a stack.

  Just as I was about to enter the Tack Hall again with needle and mended blankets, a muted cheer rose up from somewhere in the stables. I looked in the direction of the noise and saw, some ways off, two destriers rising into the sky.

  With pellucid, tawny wings beating down the air, and scales the color of wet rust and ivy glimmering in the sunlight, the two beasts riveted me to the spot. The power inherent in those muscle-corded shoulders as wings flexed and stretched filled me with an empathetic tension and exhilaration.

  Turning my back on the sight, I entered the Tack Hall and joined my fellow inductees.

  There is a joy to be found in polishing fine, sturdy leather, as if by rubbing wax into the grain, one is breathing life into the object, soul back into the empty hide. I worked steadily throughout the early hours of morn alongside my fellow inductees, polishing leather until my fingers were glossy and soft with beeswax, and as the sun shone madly at itself, unable to touch us in the shadowed Hall, a feeling of camaraderie settled upon us all.

  Like all women, I knew the art of braiding, and by late morn it had fallen upon me to teach the inductees how to do such, for the parade saddles were heavily garnished with tassels, braiding, and fist-sized flower knots made of looped leather tethers, many of which needed repair. Although Egg knew how to mend them, his brawny fingers worked clumsily, and his attempts to help the inductees learn the skill often ended messily.

  At first, the hands I corrected skittered out from under mine and the shoulders I looked over crouched low, to avoid my touch. But as the morning progressed, such recoiling decreased, and although I was never directly addressed during the occasional bouts of chatter and banter that crept into our midst before Egg squelched it with a bellow, I wasn’t excluded from conversation by turned backs, either.

  And then came a moment when one of the inductees mentioned that he’d heard a rumor that several Hamlets of Forsaken had joined forces and attacked Clutch Cuhan.

  “Can’t be true,” said one sable-eyed boy of about nine. “The Forsaken don’t have dragons, so what’re they gonna use as weapons? Pitchforks?”

  Scorn from a clawful of his peers:

  “Don’t be yolk-brained; they have scimitars and dirks and things.”

  “Axes, too, and crossbows alight with fire.”

  “I’ve heard they even use Djimbi blow darts dipped in poison.”

  The sable-eyed boy shook his head and said with great conviction, “Doesn’t matter, hey. No one attacks a Clutch. Ever.”

  “Not true,” I murmured, tying tight a tassel I’d reshaped upon a saddle. “The Komikon himself mentioned such an uprising to me.”

  Silence, and every eye in the place looked at me. A few mouths opened, wanting to ask questions, but then closed again, the would-be speakers uncertain of whether they should acknowledge me or not. Egg solved their dilemma.

  “When did he say that?” he demanded.

  “Yesterday morning. After flicking his whip at me for turning my back on him,” I added with artful rue.

  Fleeting empathy crossed a clawful of faces.

  “An’ is it true, then?” Egg asked, a touch of belligerence in his tone. “Clutch Cuhan’s been attacked?”

  “Clutch Maht, he said.”

  Egg grunted. “That makes more sense. Maht ain’t as big as Cuhan.”

  “But why?” asked Sable-eyes. “It’s stupid. The Emperor’ll just crush them.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” I said.

  “It’s most likely,” said another boy. “The odds of the Forsaken taking over Maht have to be one in a thousand.”

  “But is that a reason for not trying?” I asked. “Don’t we sometimes have to try, despite the odds?”

  “Not against those kind of odds.”

  “Well, I dunno,” Egg said slowly, a deep frown furrowing his great forehead. “We face pretty big odds each time we go into Arena, hey.”

  “That’s different,” Sable-eyes stubbornly insisted. “We ain’t Forsaken.”

  “No,” Egg growled. “That ain’t what I meant. All I was sayin’ was, we face big odds too.”

  “Especially us,” one boy muttered glumly. “The inductees.”

  “Exactly,” Egg said, pleased someone had understood him.

  “That’s what our apprenticeship is all about,” I added quietly. “Trying against the odds to survive Arena, to attain servitor, then veteran, then one day dragonmaster status. Not a one of us would be here if we didn’t harbor the hope we could attain such.”

  A moment of silence as young minds digested that. Expressions changed subtly.

  “Maybe it’s that way for the Forsaken,” I continued. “They fight because they believe, because they have to believe. Despite the odds.”

  “Like us,” Egg grunted. “Yeah. Like us.”

  My debate with the sable-eyed boy preyed on my mind for the rest of the morn with as much venom-induced insistence as had my previous fear that the cape I’d been wearing would earn me a stoning by a visiting Holy Warden. See, even though I’d convinced Sable-eyes that the Forsaken’s rebellion may have met with success, he’d convinced me that of course it would have ended as an utter failure. The thing that worried me concerning such a failure was the expedient return of the Ranreeb to the Jungle Crown and Daron Re to our Clutch. Once back, their thoughts would naturally return to me, and, their bloodlust whetted by the rebellion of the Forsaken, they’d press for my immediate execution.

  Or so I became convinced.

  So feverish grew this belief, and so numerous and logical the reasons supporting it, that by noon I’d persuaded myself with venom’s typical frantic conviction that neither the dragonmaster’s fervent pleas on my behalf, nor Kratt’s intervention, could save me. One thing and one thing alone would prevent the executioner’s axe from decapitating me: proof positive that one such as I could serve as a dragonmaster’s apprentice.

  And that, I knew, meant a journey to the Zone of the Dead to procure the Scroll of the Right-Headed Crane.

  Understand, I’d only but once glimpsed the crumbling scroll upon which was written, in exquisite, ancient hieroglyphs, the stanza that stated that a circumcised woman, chosen by a Temple-endorsed dragonmaster, could serve a Clutch bull. That scroll had been in Geesamus Ir Cinai Ornisak, Clutch Re’s dragon-sanctioned Zone of the Dead, in a decrepit temple mismanaged by Daronpu Gen, an eccentric giant of a Holy Warden.

  As the heat of noon began to penetrate the Tack Hall, I grew increasingly restless, convinced I needed to obtain that unique and ancient scroll lest Temple, in its determination to be rid of me, discover it and destroy the only extant copy of a two-hundred-year-old decree that unequivocally stated who could serve a bull.

  I’d like to believe that this rationale was sound, regardless of it springing from a font of venom. To this day, I insist on believing such.

  As I knotted and braided leather thongs, as I sewed and stitched horny saddle leather together, I reasoned that if I slipped out of the Tack Hall soon, I could run the distance to the Dead Zone, locate and steal the scroll, and return before nig
htfall. Perchance I would not be missed. If I were … Well. I would fabricate some story or another, say I was working or training elsewhere in the stables. And if I were not believed, I would, quite simply, be whipped as punishment.

  While the prospect of a whipping appealed not in the least to me, far greater was my fear that should I leave my fate in the hands of the dragonmaster—a man conspicuously struggling to retain a hold on his sanity—I would be dead before the full moon.

  No. I needed to secure the Scroll of the Right-Headed Crane, even at the cost of a flogging.

  My chance to slip out of the Tack Hall came suddenly and unexpectedly: While awkwardly returning a saddle to its wall rack, two inductees jarred said wall rack loose. The weight of the saddle pulled it away from the wall with a soft, papery sound, and after the briefest of pauses, a swarm of bees poured into the hall, buzzing furiously from a hive located, apparently, in the wall itself, directly behind the torn-out rack.

  Chaos as we all stampeded for the single door. Chaos as nineteen frenzied inductees capered about outside, flailing limbs and swatting themselves, shrieking. I ran just like my peers. Only, I didn’t stop running.

  Under the cover of the noise and confusion, I once again slipped out of the Tack Hall courtyard unnoticed.

  How foolish I had been to have thought I could walk to Temple Ornisak in the Zone of the Dead, find what I sought, and return to the stable domain by nightfall.

  Late noon found me staggering down the dust-thick tiers of the Dead Zone’s decrepit temple. I was focused to the exclusion of all else on reaching the antechamber where Daronpu Gen stored his scrolls. Though the venom I’d drunk with Dono had worn off, the swelling around my neck from my throat injury had receded just enough to permit me to swallow without choking, to breathe without feeling as if at any moment I might suffocate, and to walk without each footfall causing an agony of reverberations through my bruises. I’d slowly slaked my thirst at the Dead Zone’s Deep Well not long ago—the sodden front of my crude tunic attested to that—and I was somewhat revived. Several times during my journey, the heat and my injury had forced me to rest by the shade of a sunbaked wall. Not just once had I wondered whether I would reach my destination before nightfall.

  I had.

  I was unprepared for the emotion that flooded over me when I entered the Dead Zone, though. I stopped, throat tight with sudden tears, as I looked upon the charred acres crowded with the huge sepulchral towers of Clutch Re’s bayen dead.

  Thrice I’d sought sanctuary in the Zone of the Dead, and each time it had been granted. The first time had been with my mother, when I was but nine: We’d lived as hidden, working tenants in a disintegrating sepulchral tower whose caretakers were brothers, brothers who’d loved each other much more than brothers should. The second time I’d sought sanctuary within the Dead Zone, I’d been fleeing a Temple purge in Convent Tieron many mountains and jungle-clotted miles away from Clutch Re. That time, I’d not been alone, though my mother had been many years dead; I’d traveled with Kiz-dan and her babe.

  The third time I’d sought sanctuary in the eerie silence of the Dead Zone, I’d been wounded by a Cafar guard’s sword. I’d received the wound when, in a fit of venom inebriation, I’d attacked a bayen woman, mistaking her for Kratt. The subsequent retaliation from the aristocrats of Clutch Re led to the razing of the Zone of the Dead. Dozens had died in the flames, and Kiz-dan and her babe had disappeared.

  As I stood there, swooning in the heat, I felt anew the guilt of my past actions and the wrenching loss of Kiz-dan and her child. I’d loved them both fiercely, had vowed to the holy sisters in Convent Tieron that I would protect them always.

  And here I was, in the Dead Zone once more. Not seeking Kiz-dan and child, though part of my heart wanted that, but seeking a scroll that could save my life.

  Why is it that so often that which we want to do lies so far from that which we are actually doing?

  Temple Ornisak was empty, of course. The dilapidated building with its dust-thick tiers descending to a sunken floor had rarely been attended, even before the razing. Since the fires, the inhabitants of the Dead Zone were too concerned with rebuilding their lives to be pious.

  The temple’s ground floor was smooth and cool beneath my bare feet as I staggered over to the burrowlike hole in the far wall, where the first few rows of tiers bluntly ended to accommodate the antechamber’s entrance. With one hand braced against the stone wall, I descended three small, hardpan steps into the dense dark of the unlit antechamber.

  I stood there a moment, inhaling the familiar ashy air as my eyes adjusted to the dark. A shudder swept over me, from chill or memory or anticipation I could not say. Probably all three.

  Nothing had changed since I’d last been there. Of course not. Though so much had occurred to me since I’d slept upon one of the two grimy hammocks slung from the antechamber’s low stone ceiling, less than a clawful of days had actually passed since I’d left.

  Nothing had changed. Nothing, that is, except that the scroll I sought was not in its place.

  Understand, there were scrolls everywhere. Underfoot. Piled atop the heavy potbellied oven that squatted in the chamber’s center, awaiting use during the Wet to prevent the scrolls from spoiling with damp. Scrolls littered the hammocks and crowded the antechamber’s sole desk, vying for space with inkstone, quill, fresh parchment, and unlit candle. A weevil-ridden cabinet that almost touched the antechamber’s low ceiling was stuffed to spilling with scrolls corked within bamboo casings. Atop the cabinet, a clackron mask leered at me, the protruding red tongue a taunt.

  The holy mask, which was vaguely fashioned in the shape of a dragon’s muzzle, was the kind routinely worn by Holy Wardens while they recited stanzas in their temples; the mask’s large, flared mouth amplified the daronpu’s voice so that all could hear his holy words. But this clackron mask, though similar to all others I’d seen while attending various Temple ceremonies in my youth, set my pulse skittering like a hunted cockroach. Not because of how it looked, understand, but because of what it did not look like.

  I shall be clear: The scroll that I sought was not in the place where I’d last seen it, was not resting upon the protruding tongue of the clackron mask that sat atop the weevil-ridden cabinet.

  Indeed, no scrolls were piled atop the cabinet, which was odd in itself, as every other surface of the antechamber was littered with them, loose or encased in bamboo.

  Hands trembling, I lit a candle from the desk and stiffly approached the cabinet. I stood on my toes, lifted the clackron mask, and shook it. Insects fell out and skittered away. I thumped the mask back into place.

  Slowly, I surveyed the room, not daring to move too fast, lest by moving quickly I’d unleash the panic building like a thunderhead within me.

  Reining in my panic, I turned back to the cabinet and began methodically checking each scroll and casing that was stuffed into the cabinet’s compartments.

  None of the scrolls, encased or not, bore the hieratic I sought: the Scroll of the Right-Headed Crane.

  Heart pounding, I finished examining the last scroll in the cabinet. I turned in disbelief and growing horror to survey the mess of scrolls littered about the antechamber.

  It would take me days to search through all of it. Days.

  The candle burned down to its midriff. My eyes felt engorged with thistle. My head threatened to fall like a rock from my shoulders.

  It was evening. I could tell so by my exhaustion and the warm, humid smells wafting in from outside. Daronpu Gen and his acolyte, Oteul, would be returning any moment.

  Stiff and cramped and dull witted, I rose to my feet and snuffed the candle. I staggered out of the antechamber into the circular, tiered ground floor of the decrepit temple. At once, I was surrounded by the sounds and smells of the jungle at twilight, for the jungle surrounded the Zone of the Dead like the arms of an unwanted lover. The earthy scent of fungus, decaying wood, and decomposing bract and vine was as thick and warm about me as i
f I were embedded in compost. The sap-tart scent of new growth lay like a foundation beneath it all, and another smell lay like a blanket over everything: the dry, smoky smell of charred wood, of old fires. That odor belonged not to the jungle, yet it would linger long in the Zone of the Dead, day and night, year after year. The smell had been present ever since the razing.

  From where I stood on the ground floor of Temple Ornisak, looking up its bleak tiers, I could see bats flittering about the maroon-shot twilight sky, could hear their chirrs of triumph as they caught insects with their tiny clawed feet and stuffed the bugs into their little mouths while in flight.

  I would wait for Daronpu Gen to return, I wearily decided. I would beg him to give me the scroll. Surely he would, surely. He’d be executed for treason and blasphemy if any of his Temple colleagues ever learned how in the past he’d hidden and disguised me. If need be, I’d threaten him with such.

  I crossed the ground floor of the neglected temple, skirted the crumbling stone altar at its center, and sat upon the bottommost tier in the women’s section, to await the Holy Warden’s arrival.

  Oteul, his acolyte, arrived first.

  Understand, Oteul had never liked me. He had regarded me charily throughout the months that I’d worked disguised as an acolyte alongside him and Daronpu Gen, finding homes for the children orphaned in the Dead Zone’s razing, healing bones and welts, extinguishing fires that flared up from the smoldering wreckage strewn about the zone.

  Oteul’s aversion toward me stemmed not just from my gender and the sacrilege of my disguise, but because he’d witnessed how the fatal wound I’d suffered from a Cafar guard had healed impossibly overnight. The day after my arrival at Temple Ornisak, he’d stared in consternation at the otherworldly scar as it cast a faint, luminescent blue upon his cheeks. From that moment onward, he’d regarded me with mistrust.

  I, in turn, had regarded him warily.

  Given that he’d seen my wound prior to its miraculous healing—a wound so obviously made by a Cafar guard’s sword—and given Daronpu Gen’s eagerness to disguise me from the eyes of Temple interrogators, I was certain Oteul suspected that I had been the one who’d attacked a bayen lady (mistaking her for Kratt), and that I was therefore responsible for the retaliatory razing of the Zone of the Dead.