by J. D. Lakey
Cheobawn jammed her fork into a smoked chop.
“You dare question my loyalties to my Pack? After all I … we have …”
“We all know that Mora has other plans for you,” Tam hissed, “It has been made perfectly clear. But I thought your rage would keep you safe, keep her from seducing you to her side. But no. Here it is almost a fiveday since we have seen you. Where have you been, wee bit? Off to the courts of the queens, learning how to rule? I chose two Ears that day, not Megan and her tag-along, if you will remember.”
Megan gasped, shocked. Alain had his head down, stirring a congealing puddle of gravy on his tray. Connor sat frozen and wide eyed.
Cheobawn cringed inside. Was he right? Had she enjoyed this week way too much? Had being the center of attention seduced her? Was being listened to for once an intoxicating experience like heady wine? She considered Tam for a moment. He did not flinch from her gaze, feeling righteous in his anger. But there was something more to his displeasure than Dome politics. She let go of her annoyance so that she could better hear what Tam needed her to say.
Again, it occurred to her that Tam carried inside himself a seven-year-old boy who had something to prove to a world full of Mothers bent on judging him.
“Sigrid and you are nothing alike. You know that, right?” she said softly.
Tam’s face became an expressionless mask. She touched close to the center of his hurt, it seemed.
“Sigrid’s Pack is going to Meetpoint not because they are the best but because they are the most expendable. This is how Mora’s mind works. What goes down the cliffs might not ever come back. She would never risk what she can least afford to lose.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better, knowing that Mora loves Sigrid least? The coldness of a Mother’s heart is legendary,” he scoffed.
Megan lifted her head, her nostrils flaring, her eyes wide, insulted, perhaps, by Tam’s blanket condemnation of all Mothers. Tam’s passion, always his greatest asset, could be a sword that cut both ways sometimes. Cheobawn held up her hand, wishing her packsister calm.
“Do you make your heart go cold before you go hunting?” Cheobawn asked him reasonably, leaning over the table to stare intently into Tam’s angry eyes, “Is it a passionless thing, choosing a bow over a bladed stick? Do you love your lance more than your long knife? No. They are tools. Sigrid is a rock. He will stand without protest in the place Mora sets for him. He will let the waves crash against him until they beat him down or Mora releases him. That is why Sigrid was chosen to meet the Lowlanders. You are a tool for a different task. Stoic submission is not in your nature.”
“I will not die for Mora and I will never be her mindless toady,” he said, a dangerous smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
Cheobawn mimicked that smile. What he said rang true in her mind and a few pieces of the puzzle of their lives clicked into place.
“No,” she said with absolute certainty, “ours is the far harder path. Mora expects us to live. Against all odds and beyond reason.”
Alain muttered an oath.
“Why does that sound like a curse instead of a blessing?” he said with a shudder.
“Because it is,” Tam said grimly.
Megan snorted in disgust. “Boys. Always whining about the extra hard work that comes with being the best Pack under the dome. I am not afraid if Cheobawn is not.”
Cheobawn smiled at her friend, grateful for her scathing comment that effectively derailed Tam’s anger.
“Well, boyos,” Tam said dryly, “I think the girls have just challenged our honor. Are we going to prove them wrong?”
“Does this mean we have to work harder than we already are?” Connor asked in despair. “I don’t get enough sleep as it is.”
“No whining!” Alain growled, punching him in the shoulder.
“Ouch. I like whining. It is the only recreation I have time for,” Connor growled sullenly as he rubbed his arm.
Breakfast settled into a comfortable silence as their forks made short work of their mounds of food. As they polished off the last of their cider, Tam looked up at Cheobawn.
“We have a surprise.”
“Wait, what? I thought you were mad at me all week.”
“Mora thinks she can have you but we know what you like more than she does,” he said cryptically as he rose to dispose of his tray. She followed him, intrigued, as her Pack - grins pulling at the corners of their mouths - sauntered after.
Tam led them to the North Gate, exchanging a yellow tag for a red one.
“What have you been doing all week without me?” she asked, curious. When Tam strolled towards the maintenance sheds, she was truly confused. “You hated working for Finn.”
“Hate is a strong word,” Alain said. “There is no glamor in greasing axles and changing batteries, to be sure. But when the outcome has so much promise, who can resist?”
“Nothing you are saying makes any sense,” she said crossly.
“Just wait, silly,” Megan said.
Finn looked up as they filed into his workshop.
“Come to try your hand at flying, have you?” he asked, his face scrunched up oddly. He was smiling, she realized. His face was unsure of itself, the act long forgotten.
Cheobawn stopped at Finn’s side and stood with him as the boys pulled a tightly wrapped bundle off a high shelf. They carried it out to just beyond the edge of the fused ground that surrounded the hut. She followed, trying to suss out the nature of the odd bundle. It did not seem to be extremely heavy and it was not very long, being a head shorter than Tam was tall and about the diameter of a grown man’s arm. Alain untied the cords that held everything in place and dumped the contents of the rough-spun cloth sack out into the dust. With great care, he began to unfold it. The process seemed endless. When it was six times as long as it had been in the sack, he stepped to the midpoint, picked it up with one hand, lifted it high, and shook it roughly above his head. Ribs popped open and silk unfurled. It was her wing only it was now enormous.
Cheobawn let out a whoop of delight as she ran to stand under it, staring up in awe. The spidersilk was colored like hunter’s camo but instead of shades of green and brown, the silk dyes were a bleed of soft blues and creams. It was beautiful. She ran her fingers over it, noting the network of reinforced threads running in a grid through the finer silk.
“Megan, how did you do this so quickly? I thought it would take weeks to reset a loom and gather the right gauge threads. You are amazing!”
“Well, thank you all the same but it turns out we already weave this kind of cloth. I found it in the store rooms. It’s listed in the ledgers as balloon cloth. Finn turned me on to it.”
Finn squatted down beside her and looked up with a critical eye at the spine and ribs of the almost magical creature in Alain’s hand. He did not seem displeased.
“We can make cloth balloons? Is that even possible?” Cheobawn said in wonder. Sunlight, filtered through the silk turned the light under the immense wing into liquid gold. It erased the wrinkles on Finn’s face and made the other children’s skin glow as they all looked up.
“Finn helped us a lot. He pulled your original design out of the extruder memory and helped us improve on it,” Megan said.
Alain danced on his toes, his grip tight on a handle set into the central spine of the wing. The wing wanted to fly, yet the gentle breeze could not have been strong enough to cause the wing to behave so.
“What makes it do that? It looks alive, like it wants to lift out of your hands, Alain.”
“Updrafts,” grunted Finn. “They flow up the sides of the dome during the heat of the day.”
“Yeah,” said Connor. “The dome makes its own weather patterns. Who knew.”
“Learning is not as boring as you thought, eh, young pip?” Finn snorted in amusement. There was that odd scrunched up face again. Finn was happy. Cheobawn laughed in delight.
“Make it do something, Alain,” she begged.
Alain
took a double hooked packing cord out of his pocket, snapped one hook into a loop imbedded in the spine, and the other around his own belt at the center of his back. Then he slid both hands wide to a pair of hand grips, sliding each fingertip into a silk sleeve attached to a plasteel thread that ran into the maze of struts. He set the wing edge into the breeze, took two great running leaps, and launched himself into the air. The wing grabbed the air and held it. Alain hovered for a moment, then another. Then he did something with his body and the wing dipped slightly to rise again. Alain was now higher than the eves of the maintenance shed. She watched him, totally entranced. He may not have been flying but he was certainly airborne under his own power.
Too soon, Alain gave a grunt and the front of the wing dipped. He glided heavily to the ground. Cheobawn ran up. Alain had a sheen of sweat on his face as if he had run warmup sprints.
“I wanted you to stay up forever,” she sighed. “Is it difficult?”
“I have been using muscles all week that I didn’t know I had. I am a little sore. The longest I’ve stayed up is about ten minutes.”
“Show me how,” she demanded, holding up her hands.
“OK. Close your eyes.”
“Huh?”
“Trust me, it will make everything I tell you easier to understand.”
Alain placed her fingers in the sleeves and attached the hook to her belt.
“OK. The wing is an extension of your body. You have to use it to feel the wind. Move your hands. Pull down. Push up. Did you feel that?”
“I think so.”
“Move the wing around until you think you can feel the air the strongest and then hop.”
Cheobawn thought she had it. She hopped. The wing grabbed at the air, lifted, and then did a thousand different things at once. She tried to correct a sideways slide, jerking the wing to the side. It had the exact opposite reaction to what she expected. She over-corrected. The tip of one wing dipped
toward the ground. She threw her body in the opposite direction. The nose of the wing dipped violently down and slammed into the ground.
“Gah!” she growled.
“OK, that was perfect,” Alain said enthusiastically.
“Perfect?” she spat, glaring at him in disbelief.
“We’ve all been where you are now. Its perfect because now you know. The wing does not fly. You fly. Every position, every motion of your body causes the memory joints to react. The finger controls are only part of the process. Hovering in place is the hardest thing to accomplish. Not even the sky hunters do it well.”
“Let me try it again,” she said, picking the wing up and shaking the dust off. The ribs stiffened, the silk stretching taut, as the joints opened up to the position programmed into their mechanical memory. She lifted it up, closed her eyes, and tried to sink her fingers into the wind. The wing vibrated gently, talking to her. She opened her eyes, took two great hopping leaps, and then launched herself into the sky. She could feel the wing slip and slide through the air this time. She corrected in the opposite direction from the skid. The wing wobbled and then righted itself. The hard part was keeping the motions of her body infinitely small yet still relaxed. She too, after only a few minutes of flight, felt the beads of moisture form on her skin. Tired, she started to lose control of the wing. As she settled closer to the ground, she tried to point the wing upward, hoping to catch more wind. Again, it did the exact opposite of what she wanted. She over-corrected and nosed dived into the ground.
“By all that is …“ she spat, picking herself out of the dust. “Must I do everything in the exact opposite of what my brain thinks is logical?”
Tam, Megan, Connor, and Alain gathered around her grinning. “Yeah. Isn’t it the greatest?” laughed Connor, who was almost sparking with delight.
They took turns practicing with the wing. Tam could already make it do all sort of tricks, like spiraling around one wing tip and then alternating to the other. Alain was the only one with enough control to make it look like levitation, hovering in place only to dip and rise higher. The reason for Connor’s delight became apparent. He, perhaps because he was lighter, had somehow mastered a climbing method which involved flying in a rising spiral. She studied his flight path. It seemed that he used the skin of the dome in some mysterious way. Cheobawn made a mental note of it.
Megan. Megan was a wonder. She had learned how to dance with the air. She would leap up then settle softly, barely touching the ground before she would leap again in a new direction. The wing did things for her that the boys, with all their technical maneuvers, never achieved. It came alive to her touch. Cheobawn watched as Megan did something that nearly collapsed the wing behind her, then with a leap and a twist, it would snap out around her and catch at the air, the silk singing under the stresses, the air humming over the surface, twirling her about like a leaf caught up by the wind.
Cheobawn watched her friend as she danced, her mouth hanging open.
“Yeah,” whispered Tam. “Kinda takes your breath away.”
“How does she do that?” Cheobawn asked. “How does your brain have to be put together to even think like that?”
“Hormones,” grunted Alain, his eyes riveted.
“No,” said Tam softly. “It is more than that. Much more.”
“I could do that,” Connor snorted. “It’s not like the moves are hard or anything.”
Tam punched him in the shoulder. Connor scowled at his nestbrother and rubbed his arm, dutifully falling into silence.
“Not like that, little brother,” Tam said, turning back to watch his Alpha Ear. “Nothing like that.”
Cheobawn looked up at him, at the look of wonder and tenderness on his face.
“Thank you,” she said softly, caressing the back of his hand with her fingertips. He could have insisted his team spend their time on more constructive pursuits this past week. They had so much to learn, so many things to do, before they reached their majority. Perhaps there would come a time when they could take a break from the endless quest for knowledge and skills but Tam’s aspirations did not stop at joining the Elder Conclave. Tam had bigger dreams. Hayrald level dreams. First Prime. It drove him relentlessly, that aspiration, though he would never admit to it. She had thought that after a year of watching Hayrald’s burden through the intimacy of her own eyes that some of Tam’s hunger for control and power would ease. The opposite seemed to be true. Tam had something to prove. To whom, she could never tell. Perhaps just to himself.
Maybe seven was too young an age to wrest young boys away from their nestmates, ship them off to Trade Fairs, and then force them to start life anew in a dome full of strangers. It would not be the first time she thought the methods of the First Mothers were inordinately cruel.
Tam looked down at her, a soft smile on his face. “You’re welcome,” he said, tousling her curls with his hand. She wrapped her arm around his waist and looked back towards Megan, content that he was no longer angry with her.
They practiced all day, taking lunch from the random snacks hidden deep in the thigh pockets of their shorts. The sun was low in the sky when their stomachs warned them that the dinner bell must surely have rung. Cheobawn, taking her last turn in the wing, decided to try Connor’s spiral. There was a current of moving air just above the dome’s surface, she
discovered. If you could get a wingtip into it, it would push you higher. You just had to be careful not to let it flip you over. The real tricky part was judging closing speed and distance as she neared the dome surface. It helped to use a dome rib as a focal point instead of the transparent panels, which could fool the eye. After she got the hang of it, she spiraled as high as she dared and then launched herself out over the now fallow melon fields with her eye on a landing spot on the northerly-running Orchard Trail.
With the sun setting, the rapidly-cooling air seemed full of bumps. One moment a downdraft would drag her down, the next moment she would be caught in an upwelling of air. It took her only a few moments to understand the dy
namics involved in cross country flying. It was neither direct nor fast. Rather it involved a process that would entail flying from updraft to updraft, gaining height with one before sailing to the next.
She suddenly remembered why she had built the first kite. She had wanted a quick way of getting to the Escarpment. Reminded of her own unsolved riddles, the exhilaration she felt while flying suddenly diminished. Or maybe she was just tired and hungry. It had been a long day. Her muscles ached. She was starting to regret not warming up before sparring with Tam that morning. She executed a great turn and spiraled down to land neatly in the dust exactly where she had started.
They folded the kite up, wrapped it carefully in its cloth bag, and stored it safely away before they ran back to the gate. They would not go hungry. Evening meals tended to be long, slow, and relaxed affairs but Nedella’s nightly specialty dishes ran out quickly. Late comers had to be content with serving themselves from the omnipresent stew pot. Not that the stew was not tasty but a kid got tired of it on a steady basis and learned to show up on time for meals.
After checking in at the gate, they raced each other down the North Avenue and across the plaza. The lines were thinning around the great doors but the dining hall was still packed, almost every table full. They managed to find five empty spots at a long table against the far wall. The Elders around them shifted to allow them room.
Starving, Cheobawn surveyed the offerings. The platters on the table looked well picked over. The tureen of melon soup had long since been emptied, but they managed to heap their plates with crispy fried hare, piles of steamed roots and vegetables, and a dish made of tender grain seasoned with mushrooms and stinkflowers. Cheobawn sniffed the assorted pots in the center of the table until she found Nedella’s famous spiced sauce made from smoked fire peppers and redball fruit then proceeded to smother everything on her plate with it. A kitchen apprentice wandered by with a basket of freshly baked rolls still hot from the oven. They each took three. After Tam snagged a tub of clotted cream from another table, they settled down to eat.
Around mouths full of food, they discussed the finer points of flying. She was telling them about the columns of air in the sky when Connor suggested leaping off something tall. The Pack’s imagination caught fire and creative ideas flowed like water. Afterward, Cheobawn could not remember whose idea was whose. Was it Alain or Connor who suggested leaping off the small cliffs above scree fields along the North Trail? Tam surprised them all by not saying no. Instead he smiled a smile that could have almost been called mischievous if it had been on anyone’s face but Tam’s.