by Patty Jansen
Love was beautiful. There was far too little of it in the world. There had been far too little of it in his family.
He walked back through the garden, cold and alone, wiping a wet trail off his cheek.
If love is so beautiful, Milleus, why did you ignore all those who loved you?
Sady had been kind enough to think of him as someone worthy of support. Fifty signatures. And what had he done?
There was a soft noise, somewhere in the garden. Footsteps, heels on the paving of the garden path.
Someone stood at the front door, a dark shadow.
There was a hard knock on the door, one of those that made the door rattle in its frame.
“Who is there?” Milleus called out, his heart thudding in his chest.
A gasp. The figure turned. “Is that you, Milleus?” A familiar voice: his neighbour Andreus.
“Yes.”
Milleus half-ran to the front door, trying to draw attention away from the light in the room across the courtyard, and the activity within. He might not mind it, but this was the country, and people in these parts were old-fashioned.
“I . . . I had to check on the goats,” he said. “Wait. Come in.”
Next thing he’d be accused of running a shameful house for fallen youngsters. People in the district talked enough about him already.
Into the kitchen. Milleus turned the wick on the oil lamp up. His hands trembled.
“Now what brings you here at this time of the day?”
His neighbour stood on the doorstep, eyes blazing. “Don’t hide it any longer, Milleus. You’ve got them, don’t you?” His gaze rested pointedly on the table and the three bowls from dinner.
“Got what?”
“Who, not what, and you know very well what I’m talking about. Those two people that creep on the bird was looking for.”
“Mercy, man, what are you talking about?”
For a moment, the man faced him wordlessly, then he said, in a low voice. “This man on a giant bird came to my house. He didn’t wear the uniform, but everything else about him said Eagle Knight. Frightened the wife and children. He said he was looking for some people in the district and said I was going to help him find them. I said I wasn’t going to do nothing of the sort and that I knew nothing about no strangers in the district, and then he did this to me.” He held out an arm, the skin blistered.
“A burn?” Milleus’ skin crawled. He’d seen the bird, but it hadn’t landed, and now he knew that had been because the rider had seen Sady approach.
Something going on in the south.
The man’s eyes flashed. “A burn all right! He had no weapons, Milleus. Fire came from his hand like lightning. But that is not all. I went to the physic emergency practice to have it attended, but I wasn’t allowed in the surgery because I set off the sonorics alarm. When the physic held the sonoric meter to me, it went right up into the red. I had to scrub naked and take decontamination tablets. This creep of a man uses sonoric rays, Milleus.” He dropped his voice and held his hand to his mouth, and added, in a whisper, “As in the war. It’s filthy foreign magic. And here you are: sheltering the people he’s looking for. Why don’t you just hand them over and let them get out of here? Let them sort their own filthy problems in the south.”
“Why should I give refuge to criminals—”
“Milleus, for the sake of the district you proclaim to love, shut up. I know you’re sheltering these people, because I don’t, and my neighbours don’t, and there isn’t anyone else to hide them except on your farm.”
“They could hide in the forest for all I know.”
“And you’re feeding the forest three lots of dinner.”
Point made.
Milleus sighed. “Can you tell me why you have suddenly become so keen to help a man who has crossed our borders illegally? He says the people he’s looking for are criminal, but how do you know if that’s true?”
The neighbour’s eyes flashed. “You’re a windbag, Milleus. You can say all these great noble words, but you know nothing of the struggle of the common people. You say these words, but who suffers for them? I don’t care what the creep’s squabble with those two people is. If we hold out, this man will bring friends and work his magic to harm us. Do you want that? Do you think this foreigner cares who you are? Some has-been member of the doga. He’ll be long gone before anyone from Tiverius knows he’s here. Give them up. Let him take his trouble home.”
Milleus shook his head, while panic filled his chest. He had to protect Isandor and Nila and their young love. Find out who they were, sure enough, but criminals, they weren’t. “They’re innocent. They’re only children.”
“Give them up!”
“No.”
“And I’m telling you you’ll be sorry soon enough, and all of us will suffer for it.”
“If that is a threat, you had better reconsider.”
“Reconsider what? As far as I know, you’re no longer Proctor and you have no power to threaten anyone. I thought, this morning when I heard the rumours that go around the district about you, that you had some guts, but now I see. Get with it, Milleus. You’re an old man and no one listens to you.”
Red anger flashed before Milleus’ eyes.
“Go home, man, before I act on my lack of power to issue threats.”
The man glared at him, then turned on his heel and stomped away to his waiting van.
Milleus stood in the doorway, breathing hard.
In his pocket, he clutched the letter. Fifty signatures . . .
Who was a powerless old man?
Chapter 15
* * *
NOLAN LANDED his bird next to Carro’s on the dusty farm road. The eagle shook itself and folded its wings. Nolan slid off and gave Carro the knotted rope he used as reins. Carro took it from Nolan’s hand. His skin briefly touched Carro’s palm. Nolan looked up and met Carro’s eyes.
Neither said anything. They knew the drill.
Nolan pushed open the creaky farm gate and crossed a vegetable yard to the door of the house. Such strange houses they had here, too. Walls made from stone blocks and straw roofs.
Burns well, Farey had said yesterday, and had proceeded to demonstrate with an old cranky farmer who wouldn’t tell Farey if he’d seen the two fugitives. The farmer’s family was hiding behind one of the windows in the house, and when Farey had taken off, he’d flown over the roof and dropped a burning torch.
Woof. The straw burned almost better than the ancient material that formed the roofs of many houses in the Outer City.
Farey laughed.
The old farmer and his family ran for shelter.
They’d frightened a few more families, and with each further house they came to, Carro was more afraid they’d find Isandor and Jevaithi. They had seen the riderless eagle. The beast had been too far away to recognise for certain, but it could have been Isandor’s. The more he thought about it, the more sure he was that it had been Isandor’s, because there were only few wild eagles left, and even the books said that in the mountains they didn’t grow large enough to carry a man, but that this only happened under influence of icefire in the City of Glass.
So yes, it was likely that they found Isandor soon.
Isandor would recognise him, and would plead forgiveness or some such, and Carro didn’t think he’d be able to look his former friend in the eye while Farey ran a knife through his heart. There were so many times that Isandor had helped him, or saved him . . .
Nolan knocked hard on the farmhouse door.
After the shoving back of bolts and creaking of hinges, a man opened, carrying a sword.
In one movement, Nolan had his staff out and yanked the sword from th
e old man’s hand. It flew through the air and clattered to the ground at Carro’s feet.
Carro slid from the eagle, which looked at him as if it wanted to say Is that all you can get me to eat? Holding both sets of reins, he knelt and retrieved the sword. The weapon was old and blunt, of the type sometimes sold in the antique markets in the Outer City as having belonged to Chevakian soldiers during the Aranian war. The man was a veteran, clearly.
Meanwhile, the man was whimpering and Nolan shouting in Chevakian. The man was crying, shaking his head. A woman was crying, too.
By the skylights, shut up! Carro wanted to clamp his hands over his ears.
A gust of wind brought a chill.
And Carro’s vision faded. He heard, not the cries of the peasants in the farmhouse, but those of fighting youths in the City of Glass. The streets were dark with gloomy pinpricks of light from the odd street lamp. He saw brief glimpses of burning houses and groups of people running through the snow. It had been the night Isandor and Jevaithi escaped.
He tried to banish the memory from his mind.
By the skylights, he thought he’d been cured of this damned infliction.
“Hey, Carro! Carro!” Nolan shouted.
Carro jolted back into full consciousness.
Nolan was running through the yard, pursued by a younger man carrying a powder gun. The peasant stopped, aimed, and there was a loud bang. Something whistled through the air. The eagles pulled on their reins, flapping huge wings over Carro’s head. He was almost dragged up into the air.
Nolan flung himself over the fence, scrabbled up, swung himself on the eagle’s back and kicked the bird into motion. Carro followed, heading into the icy breeze. Thick smoke billowed up behind him. He tried not to think of the farming family, and what Nolan did to them. Once, when he was young, he had seen his father mistreat his mother—
She was crying and yelling at him, while Carro, about six at the time, hid behind the door.
* * *
Carro sits on hands and knees on his sleeping shelf, looking down into the central room of the limpet.
His mother yells, If you do this again, I will tell my family!
To which his father responds, And what do you think they are going do? Admit that their daughter is a selfish seacow and take her back so she can continue to be a selfish seacow?
Carro sniggers, then covers his mouth with his hand, so they won’t realise he’s listening. It’s so entertaining to hear his father yell at someone other than him.
His sister sits next to Carro; she’s crying. Carro grins at her.
His mother yells, My parents will demand to have back their loan. Don’t you dare forget what makes you a successful merchant, whose money it is.
I don’t need your damn money, woman.
No, you just need a sex slave.
* * *
Carro clung onto the reins, his hands sweaty.
He had been way too confident lately. Thought that because the visions were gone, he had been cured of them, but not so. Worse, the only thing that could help him, the ichina herb, was not available to him here and the hunters would cast him out if they found out that he had an illness. They would tell his father. And his father would disown him, like everyone in his life had disowned him.
So he hung onto the saddle, and peered down to the forest, sweating and feeling sick. He must not give in to these visions. He must banish them.
The hunters’ temporary camp was a clearing in the forest big enough for the eagles to land. In the morning, they had piled their camping gear at the base of a tree and put branches on top and covered the fire with dirt and sticks.
It still lay as they had left it; Farey and Jeito were still out.
They went to prepare the camp silently.
Nolan strode to a tree, unhooked a bag from a tree and tossed his bird half a sabre-wolf carcass with the same careless gesture as he had hunted, killed and cut up the animal yesterday. The eagle claimed its prey with a yellow claw. Carro’s eagle got the other half of the beast, which Nolan threw with such force that it bounced over the ground and the eagle had to hop after it, only to find that its tether was too short. It gave an annoyed cry. Carro ran to shift the carcass before the bird decided to try chew through the tether. He glanced at Nolan while he did this, but Nolan looked the other way.
While Carro and Nolan re-lit the fire and uncovered the gear, the birds were ripping up their prey, snapping bones and crunching them in their beaks.
It was so silent that Carro could hear the wind rustle through the trees. Nolan was still not looking at Carro.
Finally, Carro couldn’t stand it any longer. He said, “I did something wrong, didn’t I?”
Nolan looked up. Oh, his eyes were furious.
“That guy almost killed me. I thought you were there on the lookout? Why didn’t you warn me he had a gun?”
Carro had been dreaming, on the verge of getting another spell, but he couldn’t say so. He had no medicine for it.
Carro shrugged. “Sorry. I was . . . looking the other way. Thought I saw something.”
Nolan’s hard stare met his. “I thought you’d look out for me. I thought you cared.”
Carro shrugged. “Sorry,” he said again.
Sorry was hardly appropriate, and he knew it. You could not say sorry so easily to someone who was in love with you. And Nolan was in love. He had said so many times while making love, but Carro hadn’t worked out what he thought. Every time Nolan touched him in intimate places, he thought back to the abuse at the eyrie, and he felt the stone under his hands as he clawed at the wall to get away from the tormentors with their cock up his arse. Nolan didn’t hurt him as much as the abusers had, and for a while, in the middle of it, he could enjoy the pure sensation. But later, he always wanted to wash the filth off. It was when he crouched near the creek, trying to clean the sticky stuff out of his hair down there that he felt that deep inside him grew a seed of hatred for the way men and women used sex to manipulate others.
He raised the water bladder to his mouth and drank deeply. Nolan was still looking at him, but Carro didn’t return his gaze. By the skylights, wasn’t it possible for any adult to have friends while keeping your clothes on? He finished the water and went to re-fill the bladder at the spring.
Here, away from the pile of saddlebags, their makeshift shelters and the firewood, the wind soughed through the pine trees. It was a lot colder than it had been yesterday, and the sky was white, rather than blue. Carro shivered. It seemed the cold had quietened the birds.
The grass rustled.
“No, you’re not getting away from me that quickly.”
He gasped. Nolan blocked his path.
“Looking the other way. That’s rubbish and you know it. You haven’t been the same all day. Is it because something I said?”
Carro shrugged. “Back there, at the house . . . I wasn’t thinking. We’ve done so many of these farm calls that I didn’t expect the fellow to charge at you. I am sorry.” He looked at the ground and felt all the thoughts he had inside seething at him. They were saying come on, coward, do something. “I’m probably not very good at saying it.”
They were standing on the bank of a creek, and the grass here was green and kept short by animals that came in to graze at night. Farey would set his traps and catch the weirdest creatures. Things he called “hares” with soft fur and long ears and strong back legs with lots of muscle that was good to eat.
“Hey.” Nolan reached out and touched Carro’s arm.
Carro fliched.
“It’s all right. The fellow gave me a fright, but I survived. You were dreaming. Come on, confess, what were you thinking about back there?” His eyes were playful.
“Er—nothing.”
“You’re sure?” Nolan’s hand found its way under Carro’s shirt. His fingers caressed the soft skin.
There was just no getting away from it.
* * *
When they returned to the camp in semidarkness, Jeito had returned. A fire blazed in the clearing and a cooking pot stood in the flames.
“Smells good,” Nolan said.
Jeito raised one eyebrow. The light from the flames lit Farey’s face; he stood near the eagles, grooming his bird, listening to every word they said.
Carro didn’t know where to look. These men could see straight through him. Even though he had washed in the creek, he could still smell Nolan on his skin. He had no doubt Jeito would know what he and Nolan did at the creek.
Jeito was holding a map and scanning the camp ground they’d covered so far. Jeito’s hair, tied back in a ponytail, flapped with a gust of wind that nearly tore the map out of his hands.
“Oh, fuck!”
Jeito knelt in the grass and spread the map out there, using stones to keep it in place. Not for the first time, Carro noticed Jeito’s fine, long-fingered hands. In view of Nolan’s clear Chevakian background and Farey’s Aranian heritage, Jeito was an enigma. Small of build and southern in appearance, with a fine face, but ruthless with his dagger. Yet, Farey seemed protective of him. Carro got that they were lovers, and had been for a long time, but neither seemed to mind if the other strayed.
“You still think they’re in the region?” Nolan said, all business, coming to stand behind Jeito.
When Jeito didn’t reply, he continued, “One farmer said he’d been missing things from his garden. That one there . . . The farm with the goats and the big old house. There’s tracks in the grain.”
“An old man lives there,” Farey said from under the trees. “He had a visitor last night. I think it was one of the neighbours, one of the ones we roughed up.”