by Kate Elliott
“Manage—? Aui! Is that all men think of? I ask you.” But it was true that, being dead, one might start to wonder. “Surely you could have . . .”
He had a way of tightening one side of his face, pulled by shameful thoughts he wished to cut loose. “That would be more than I could endure. Either to know her thoughts, and surely to find in them some thing I wished never to have known. Or to know I was forcing her and share every moment of dread and pain. I am not that sort of man. If you’d seen what Lord Radas had it in him to do, you’d feel as I do.”
The day seemed darker. “You’re right, of course. I’m sorry I made a jest of it, if it seemed I did.”
“It makes me wonder about these Guardians your tales sing of. What manner of folk were they?”
“They were the guardians of justice!” But she faltered. “Surely the gods cannot have meant otherwise.”
Yet Atiratu, the Lady of Beasts, had foreseen that one among the Guardians would betray the others. Marit had always thought it part of the tale only because any tale must include trouble and strife, setbacks and struggles, to make a good story. She had never really thought about it as if the goddess had actually seen as with the sight of eagles into what lay far ahead, and done her best to give warning.
Patrolling out of Copper Hall, she had learned the gullies and ridgetops of Haya and the Haya Gap, the skirts of the Wild, the bays and promontories of the North Shore and the deep reaches of Istria Bay as well as the warrens and canals of Nessumara and the broad delta region with its ancient ruins and fisherman’s reed houses. She had flown patrols over Iliyat and into Herelia. But she did not know Haldia well.
“Look,” said Hari as they pulled up where the land dropped away. From this vista at least a dozen villages surrounded by fields and woodland could be seen, three on the western shore of the river in Farhal and the others in Haldia to the east. What transpired in those villages she could not tell; they were too far away. A dark stain oozed along the road.
“Eiya!” Her heart contracted and her will ebbed.
The army swarmed south, boiling along the road. So huge a force would surely prove impossible to defeat.
“There’s an altar near here.” Rudely, he pointed with a finger across the river. “On a promontory that overlooks this view. Best we take a drink, for strength.”
Warning chafed at the bit, smelling the presence of an altar.
“All right, then. I’ll follow you.”
They approached a rocky hill whose lower reaches were blanketed with flowering thorn and evergreen ghost pine. An abutment of boulders rimmed the crown, and as they dipped to the flat ground, Hari shouted a warning. The horses clattered down to greet another mare, who nipped, forcing them to back off.
“The hells!” Hari swung out of the saddle and ducked away as his horse nipped back.
Warning trotted away from the altercation, and Marit reined her up hard. She dismounted and ran to Hari.
A person was walking the labyrinth. A ghost flickered into view on the straight stretches, vanished where the path took its twists, and shimmered again into existence. A demon’s body might seem substantial walking in the world, but within the labyrinth its true nature was revealed.
Hari grabbed her wrist to stop her. “I don’t recognize her.”
Marit tugged away and stepped into the entrance. She strode, pushing as through water, each angle compressing as the landscapes flashed past: the quiet sea, the ruined tower, the pillar, the dunes, the marsh, and more places she’d had no time to mark and learn. Winded, she staggered into the center.
As she’d thought, she did recognize her.
A girl drank from cupped hands at the spring. Rising, she turned with liquid dripping off her chin. A polished bronze mirror hung from her belt, and she first grasped the mirror but then released it and with practiced skill slid a strung bow from its quiver, nocked an arrow, and drew the string just as Hari bumped into Marit.
“You can’t kill us,” said Hari, with a lopsided smile, “although I admit you can inflict a lot of pain. And I must say, I am cursed sick of the pain.”
She seemed comfortable looking down the arrow at Marit, gaze fixed on target. “He said you were a traitor. He was right about that, at least.”
“No,” said Marit. “You do not know what you are seeing. How can you? My heart is veiled to your sight, as yours is veiled to mine.”
“I want to meet others like me.” She dipped the point so it menaced the ground instead of Marit. “You two are like me. Did you lie to him, about what you mean to do?”
“I did not lie. He rejected my offer of alliance, so I am forced to work on my own. Did he reject you?”
Her body had a woman’s shape, yet there remained something girlish in her speech and aspect, as if the body had grown apace while the mind was trapped and now hurried behind trying to catch up. “No. I left him. I seek to punish those who harm others, but he is afraid to pass judgment. How can he be? I encounter people so twisted in their hearts. They are locusts, eating everything in their path. And I saw a man cloaked as we are, only he was twisted, too, like Uncle Girish. There must be others, like me, who are not afraid to pass judgment on the ones whose hearts are diseased. We are the wolves. It is our obligation to cull the sick ones, so the tribe remains strong.”
Hari laughed bitterly. “The ones you seek are the ones who released the locusts.”
“Best you go home, lass,” said Marit, trying to sound kind, although the girl’s words disturbed her. “Find your companion and return to him. He is wiser than you know.”
But after they watered their horses and drank their fill, the girl followed them.
45
To fly lifted Nallo’s spirits. To skim through low-lying clouds and get soaked to the skin with unshed moisture made her laugh. To glide on the wind—currents and thermals, which Volias told her she would learn to identify and anticipate—while the earth rolled away on all sides gave her joy. No chanter or tale-spinner, she could think of no better way to describe the earth from her harness than that it was like a textured carpet of greens and browns and yellows, ribboned and splotched with the variegated blues of water. Glorious!
Volias took them in easy stages so she would not get too badly chafed by the harness. Even so, the mey fell away with breathtaking speed. They could cover a day’s journey in half a morning, and Volias said that they were going slow.
They flew upriver along the River Olo with the Lend rising to the south, its mysterious grasslands wavering like a dream in the distance. Then westward upriver along the River Hayi, with the Soha Hills rumpling the land to the north, air currents tangled. Surely they flew over the village where she had lived with her husband, but she could not pick out earth-bound landmarks from the air. Mount Aua reared his gleaming pate, and they were buffeted through the Aua Gap with the city of Horn seen below to resemble an onion chopped in half, its nested circles climbing the slope of a ridge that marked the terminus of a prominent range of hills whose name she did not know.
There was so much she did not know!
She’d never thought about it before.
Pil flew a ways off to her left and Volias to the right and out in front. Tumna kekked as they glided down the long descent to the Istrian Plain, known to Nallo only in the tales. She twisted in the harness, trying to see what Tumna had spotted. She kept her feet fixed on the training bar, while Volias hung with feet dangling, perfectly at his ease, and after a moment she realized something was moving where her feet blocked her view. Now it was behind them.
It was hard to know what Tumna might spy out: a deer, a bandit, an honest traveler. She tucked her knees up to her chest and scanned the earth. There sparkled a pond lined with mulberry trees, and a neighboring settlement, not more than six houses, storehouses and sheds flanked by an orchard and rice fields. This time of year the fields should have shone with green shoots working up through muddy water, but the fields lay brown and untended. No one had planted. From the air, the place looke
d abandoned.
Tumna dropped, and she shrieked and planted her feet on the training bar even though the harness held her. Aui! So far to fall!
Color flashed where the trees thinned by a stream. She knew in the crudest sense how to rein the eagle; she tugged the right jess, and Tumna responded with a tight circle that attracted Volias’s attention. Fumbling in the pouch strapped to the harness, she got a hand around the red flag. As she yanked it free, her grip slipped, and it fell, brought up short by a leash.
She cursed, grabbed and waved it clumsily, trying to show where she had seen a person moving in the forest. Volias and Trouble plunged past her like a dropped stone, and Tumna’s circling movement cut off her view. As she turned in her harness trying to get a clear line of sight, something happened because as they came around she saw Volias and Trouble had set down in a narrow patch of cleared ground stream-side and he was gesticulating to a person—a woman with a baby—who was possibly hysterical or furious.
Pil had gotten Sweet to come around at an altitude rather higher than Nallo and Trouble; he had a far better grasp of reining and leashing. He had barely settled into a holding pattern when Volias launched, the eagle beating upward until she found a rising current that would lift her. Volias set a course eastward over countryside smoothing into a plain that stretched to a cloudy horizon.
It was going to rain soon. She shivered, wondering what had happened below.
Volias stayed aloft late into the afternoon, not stopping as he usually did for an early camp and a lesson in short-range maneuvers. They passed over extensive forest lands and, increasingly, villages set amid fields and ponds and orchards and attended by the occasional temple building or compound. Every one of these had thrown up around it an earthwork or palisade, flimsy-looking barriers from this height. Folk worked in the closer fields, or hauled dirt as others shoveled.
According to the tales, fertile Istria boasted ten and a thousand villages, and it looked to Nallo like every one of them was surrounded by fresh fortifications.
Late in the afternoon, they set down in a clearing well away from village or temple. She followed Volias in checking her eagle’s harness and feathers and then, like Pil, hooding the bird for the night, making sure the two raptors remained at opposite sides of the open space. Volias released Trouble to hunt. Nallo trudged farther into the woods.
Her arms were sore, her legs and hip aching, and when she slipped down her leather trousers to pee, she saw that the harness had rubbed her right hip raw where the strap was too tight over her hip bone.
Finishing her business, she walked back to camp, wincing as her leathers rubbed the same raw spot. Eiya! Next thing you knew it would start bleeding.
Pil already had a fire going. Crouched beside it, he fed sticks into the flames while Volias tied canvas into a lean-to and spread a ground cloth beneath it.
The senior reeve looked up as Nallo approached. “That was good eyesight, spotting her like that.”
“Who was she?”
“Eh, the usual tale. A squad of bandits hit her village, but fortunately they had a watch out and a palisade to slow the outlaws, so everyone escaped. But the houses took damage, and tools and food and the local temple’s silk banners and silver altar settings were stolen.”
“Desecrating the temple . . .” She shook her head. “That’s the work of savages.”
Pil glanced at them, then turned back to the fire.
“I won’t argue with you,” said Volias. “Here, hold this end while I tighten it.”
“Where was she going? She had a baby.”
“Eihi! You do have good eyesight. Maybe that’s why.”
“Why that woman was alone in the forest?”
“Neh, neh. Why the eagle chose you. It’s as good an explanation as any, and we’ve all wondered. Not every reeve is a decent person. Some were murderers or become murderers, some have a thievish bent, or complain all the time. Envy, jealousy, spite, anger, vanity. Reeves boast of all these fine traits. Yet what manner of heart we have makes no difference in the choosing. Sure it is, if you eat far too much, your eagle can’t carry you, but otherwise our bad behaviors don’t really limit our ability to be reeves, they only limit our ability to be good reeves. So why one person over another? Why choose a reluctant recruit—” He gestured to her and then to Pil. “—over some poor lad who’s dreamed of being a reeve all his young life? Maybe it’s just the cursed eyesight.”
Pil grabbed the iron traveling pot and walked to the stream that snaked through the clearing. The two eagles had tucked their heads under their wings, readying for sleep. Trouble chirped nearby, but Nallo could not see her.
“She’s got her dinner,” said Volias with a smile. He fished in his travel pouch for their leather bottle of rice. When Pil returned with the pot half full of water, Volias dumped in a double handful of rice and over the top crumbled two wafers of traveler’s cake, a pungent blend of spices and dried, mashed nai. Pil set the pot on a tripod over the fire and settled back on his heels to watch it heat.
“What about that woman?” asked Nallo, thinking of her own journey with Avisha and the children.
He tucked his chin like the eagles readying for sleep, and the gesture made him seem, for an instant, ashamed. “She was angry at me for giving away her position. In case any folk were nearby to spot me. She’d gone on the forest track to see if the village her sister married into had been hit.”
“Had it?”
“She hadn’t reached it yet.” He grinned. “I think, from certain words that slipped, that she left her own village’s hiding place because she’d gotten into an argument with her kin, or her husband, or the elders. Hard to say. She reminded me a little of you.”
She glared at him, and he laughed. Pil looked at them, and Nallo stalked to the fire and plopped down next to him, promptly soaking her rear as she sat in a hole hidden by a luxuriant growth of spring-beam.
Pil raised an eyebrow.
“You could have warned me!” she said, shifting away.
He shrugged, then dug into his sleeves and handed her a stick of dried meat.
“Thanks.” She chewed. He chewed. There was something about his silence that always got to her. She said, finally, “You’re awfully good with the eagle. Is it a lot like riding a horse?”
He tucked his chin in the gesture she’d come to learn meant no.
“I’ll tell you, I’m no good. I feel so clumsy up there, and thinking all the time how I’m going to fall, and then forgetting all that and just staring because it is so cursed amazing to see the land from the air. I just never knew!”
He chewed, watching the pot. He had exceptionally lovely thick straight black hair, which she had seen once when he let down his topknot to comb it out. Otherwise, as now, it was all gathered up tightly atop his head. He had a pleasant face once you got used to him looking so different, his eyes pulled at the corners and his cheeks broad and his nose a little flattened like someone had punched it down, only it wasn’t crooked as it would have been if it had been broken. Not a bad-looking man, really; just an outlander. Nallo had never met an outlander before; she could count on one hand the times she’d even seen Silver merchants on the road, them being outlanders still with their hidden god despite their people having lived here for almost a full cycle of years and colors according to the clerks at the temple of Sapanasu.
“What temples do your people have?” she asked. “I mean, did your gods come with you, or stay behind?”
At first she thought he would, as usual, say nothing, so she went back to chewing on the tough stick of meat. But after a while, he cleared his throat and forced out words.
“In the upper world,” he gestured toward the sky, “there are tribes. In the lower world there are tribes. They herd, and fish, and fight with each other. We walk the lands of the middle world and try to stay out of the way.”
“Eh, that sounds like where I grew up. We herded our goats and sheep, but there was a bigger village eastbound and a bigger village
westbound, and we got caught in the middle when they had their disputes over tolls, pastures, and contracts.”
Volias walked over. “Hush. Do you hear voices?”
Pil stood and walked to the edge of the clearing, head bent and eyes shut as he listened. A male voice rang faintly in the distance, but after that it was quiet. They held still until the rice was done, and then they ate and, with darkness falling, stretched out under the shelter to sleep, sharing out the watch.
No one disturbed them. Trouble roosted elsewhere, appearing at dawn. She thumped down hard, agitated, and Volias called from the clearing’s edge to Nallo, who was folding up the canvas shelter.
“Nallo! Get to your eagle and hook in. Where’s Pil?”
“Off to do his business, I think. Or pray. I don’t know what the hells he does every morning.”
“Leave everything. Now!”
She dropped the half-folded canvas, abandoned the bedrolls and cooking equipment, but grabbed her gear pouch—fortunately with her gear neatly packed away—and the baton and short sword they had issued her, not that she had the faintest idea of how to use either one effectively. Of how to fight at all, if it came to that.
She ran across the clearing to Tumna, the eagle acting restive, talons digging into the earth, wings half open, neck feathers raised. Shouts broke from the far end of the clearing. Nallo whistled, and Tumna bent her huge head down and raked at the hood with her talons. Got stuck. Nallo released her, tugged off the hood, and hooked in just as three men carrying spears ran into the clearing.
An arrow sprouted—like sorcery!—in the chest of one of the men. His companions faltered as he tipped to his knees with a hand clutched around the shaft.
Volias had his sword drawn, but it was Pil, at the edge of the forest, who had loosed. He drew again, released, and hit a second man in the shoulder.
“Move!” shouted Volias.
A third arrow buried its point in the earth, shaft quivering, as the men grabbed their comrade and scrambled back, calling to fellows hiding in the trees.