The cat purred comfortably.
They were still all staring at me. I turned and carried the cat away. Anju walked beside me without a word, but when we finally reached the air-conditioned relief of the building, she said, “So, do you have a secret way of taming feral cats that I don’t know about?”
I shook my head and sat down cross-legged right in the middle of the corridor (I was a good student, I could get away with it) while Anju, never very interested in stray animals, drifted off to the side, flipping through my timetable.
“You,” I said to the cat. “What did you scratch that kid for?”
He put his paws on my shoulder and leaned in so that his head was beside my ear. He was big enough that he could do this while standing on my lap. From where Anju stood, I must have been completely hidden behind warm black fur. “They were annoying me,” he whispered.
“You didn’t have to scratch him.”
“He was trying to pull my tail. I could have done much worse, you know. I’m not a housecat . . .” he grumbled. I could feel his weight against me. I wondered if that was okay, if he was still a cat.
“Frenenqer,” said Anju, “are you whispering to the cat?” She didn’t sound very surprised. Anju had seen me act much more strangely before.
“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t mind if Anju thought I was a lunatic. “See, I’ve met this cat before. His name is Sangris.”
“Not bad,” he murmured.
“Okay. You can get off me now.” I lowered him to the floor. “Sangris, this is Anju.”
Unflappable Anju said, “Whatever. Look, the bell will ring in five minutes. I’m going to the room where the Indian stall will be. Okay? You should start heading to the Thai room too.”
Ever the dependable secretary. “Sure. See you later,” I said.
We both watched her walk off.
“Not very cheerful, is she?” Sangris said.
“No. She’s very patient with me, though.”
“Good—if that’s what you look for in a friend,” he said. “What did she mean, the Thai room?”
I was already getting to my feet. “Oh, that,” I said. “I’ll explain later. Anju’s right, I have to go. They take attendance, you know.”
He demanded, “What if those grubby little kids come after me again?”
“I’ll only be ten minutes,” I said. “I’m done organizing stuff for the Thai room anyway. I’ll be right back.” Without waiting for a reply, I took my bag and hurried up the stairs, leaving him to look after me in exasperation.
Good. Let him wait for a change.
CHAPTER FIVE
In Which Sangris Becomes a Poet
When I returned, I looked down the silent corridor. Empty. Everyone else was busy preparing for Heritage. Lockers pressed in on both sides, wooden, painted a garish green that had already begun to fade to khaki. At the end of the corridor was the exit. Two closed doors, with squares of glass glowing from the sunlight outside. The glass on the right was cracked from that time when Hassan had bashed his head against it because Jamila had refused to go out with him. (She was one of the girls who were allowed to date.) No cat. No cat anywhere.
I’m going to slap him, I thought. He did say I could.
At that exact moment, Sangris sauntered in from the direction of the stairwell. He was in human form, and he was impeccably dressed in the school uniform. “Hey, Nenner,” he said.
A nickname. Really?
And just like that, I snapped back into an eighty-year-old saint.
“Did you know they have a uniform shop in the basement?” he continued enthusiastically.
Somehow, the uniform suited him. He could have been a student. A student from a bizarre faraway school with no regard for protocol, sure, where everyone was suspiciously attractive, but still . . .
“Wait a minute,” I said, walking closer. I studied him with a frown. “Where were you keeping the money?”
“What?”
“You were a cat. Where were you keeping the money?”
“What money?”
“To buy the uniform.”
“Buy?” He seemed genuinely surprised at the idea.
“You didn’t!” I cried.
“They had plenty,” he said. “They won’t miss it.”
“That’s not the way it works!” I spoke too loudly. A door opened at the end of the corridor, and the incongruously British, tousled head of a teacher poked out.
“Frenenqer?” he said.
“Ah . . . yes.”
His eyes turned, inevitably, to Sangris. “And . . . I don’t believe I’ve met you before?” He came out into the corridor. That was a bad sign. “You’re not a student here, are you?”
“This is my friend,” I said quickly. “He’s a guest. He wanted to see the school. He’s thinking about coming here next year.”
It turns out that I’m a pretty good liar.
“But . . .” The teacher looked Sangris up and down with a mildly bemused expression. I didn’t blame him. “Yes, I’m aware that we allow guests to sit in on classes. But . . . why are you wearing the school uniform?”
“He’s very excited about coming here,” I said.
“But . . .”
“Very excited.”
“Ah . . .”
“And he likes to dress up,” I added.
Sangris went into a sudden coughing fit.
“Right, well . . .” The teacher backed away.
I watched until he had returned to the classroom.
Beside me, Sangris said plaintively, “Why did you make it sound as if I’m a cross-dresser?”
I ignored that. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“It’s the only school in the area. Where else could you be? So I came to give you another chance,” he said. Cheerfully. Fixing the collar of his shirt.
I took a step away from him. “What chance?”
“To take you flying somewhere.”
I just stared at him.
“Don’t you know that you’re supposed to scream ‘yippee’ and throw your arms around my neck? You must have a heart made of sludge. Don’t you have any sense of adventure at all?” He fixed his keen, slanted eyes on me. “When does school end for you?”
“Three forty-five,” I said.
“I can have you back by then.” He took a step closer, so that we were the same distance apart as before. He looked serious for once. “Do you want to go or not?”
He didn’t know that there was a full-fledged battle being fought on my back, between the imaginary wings and the itch where I could feel my father’s eternally pointing finger digging into my skin. Beating, searing, flapping, itching: I was the battlefield that bombs exploded across. I was sick of them by now, and I wanted them to stop, but I was only the ground over which the armies marched—I didn’t have any part in the battle myself. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t say anything. I kept my eyes fixed on his. Couldn’t he see that I was trying to say yes? Why couldn’t he take my silence as assent?
But that was no good. I had to say it myself. Otherwise it would be no different from my parents driving me to school and back. Being driven, being flown, being taken here and there . . . Answer, I ordered myself.
“Yeah,” I said, mouth dry.
His face split into a grin. I liked his grin. It was disturbing, but in a good way, a way that made my un-wings flutter at my back.
“Is there somewhere in particular you want to go?”
“Anywhere.” I spoke quickly, before common sense could catch up and drag me down again. I was afraid I’d have second thoughts, so I ran ahead of them. “Anywhere, but let’s go now.”
He took my hand and led me over to the door. I didn’t resist. I allowed him to touch me. On the fingers. I wondered if that meant I was already compromised.
When he opened the door for me, a blaze of sunlight streamed in, illuminating the corridor like the flash from a camera. I stepped through into the heat. Grainy sand underfoot, the low wall that surrounded t
he school up ahead, the deathly blue sky above. We went around the back of the building, where no one could see us. “But I’d prefer it if you would turn into an animal,” I added. I was still my father’s daughter.
There was a pause. He looked at me for a long time with an expression of intense concentration, as if I were speaking a language he’d never heard before. He seemed to be puzzling out something very difficult.
Finally, he said, “Why do I have to turn into an animal? I thought we were leaving.”
“We are, you idiot.”
“I’m glad we’re already close enough that you can call me an idiot with impunity,” he said politely, “but I don’t understand your logic.”
“How do you plan on carrying me?”
“While we fly? Ah . . . in my arms, I guess.”
“Now, see, that’s far too intimate,” I said. I got uncomfortable just thinking about it.
“Oh. I see. Well, that is a problem.” The corners of his mouth twitched. “What do you propose to do about it?”
“First, you stop smirking.”
“I’m not laughing at you,” he said. “I’m just flattered.”
That horrified me more than anything. “Don’t be.”
“Fine. I’m not. You just want me to turn into some hideous winged creature that you can ride on without feeling immodest.”
That was a pretty fair summary of the situation. “Yes,” I said.
“Huh,” he said. “Hideous isn’t usually my goal, but I’ll see what I can do. Turn away.”
“Why?”
“Well, I just thought I ought to take off these clothes—”
I whipped around, staring squarely at the blank white wall of the school. After a long moment, he said, “Okay, how’s this?”
I turned back.
He had chosen a sleek, dragon-like form. Long yellow-gold eyes. Gray scales. He was on all fours, talons curled into the ground, and I had to look upward to meet his gaze. He would have reminded me of a lizard if his face hadn’t been artistically framed by a few golden feathers. His tail and his wings were feathered too, with the same lush flame-gold plumage that blossomed smoothly out of the scales. I had no idea what he was supposed to be, but I didn’t think he had made much of an effort to appear hideous.
“What are you?”
He blinked at me. “I don’t know. I just made it up.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that.
Then, carefully, I put out my hands onto the most innocuous area I could find, on his side, just below the ridge of his spine. The scales felt small and rough beneath my fingertips. And the world didn’t crack apart, my mother’s voice didn’t hiss into my ear, my father did not dig his finger harder into my back. I pulled myself up easily.
A wave of adrenaline—something I hadn’t felt for a long time, not once since my short-lived walks—surged through my stomach. The blood that had settled sluggishly somewhere around my feet for the last five years began to beat through my body again. It was like a fizz in my veins. “Let’s go,” I said quickly, giddily.
“You might have to hold on to something,” he said. “I told you, I’m fast.”
I looked at my hands. They were resting lightly on the hollow between his shoulder blades, the fingers nicely folded, the way my father had trained me at the dinner table. That was no good. But no obvious places to grip came to mind. His shoulders were too sleek. There was a mane of feathers higher up, but it might hurt him if I grabbed those. And I wasn’t willing to touch anything else. “Just go slowly then,” I told him.
He sighed in disappointment. I couldn’t hear it, but I could feel his sides move. For a split second I enjoyed the intimacy of being able to tell what he was doing without needing to hear or see; it was as if we were connected. Then I realized I could feel him breathe normally too—it was a rhythm between my legs. And that was so intimate that all at once there were nervous sparkles dissolving in my stomach. I almost jumped off.
But Sangris lifted his wings first.
Wings.
A lurch with the first, slow beat.
With the golden feathers rising on either side of me, I could pretend that they were mine.
They came down for a second time.
And a third.
Then the world fell away.
The school, the dirty sand, the stone wall, the dust, the spiky palm trees, the hard, glinting cars with sunlight on their windows, all sinking away. The long sun-bleached roads, gone. The scaly networks of wadis, gone. The white-domed roofs of the mosques, gone too. The weight of the heat, the claustrophobia, the little pockets of cold air that contained me as if I were a goldfish in a bowl—gone. And my parents—gone. I watched everything slide away. Only the itch on my back, no more than a pinprick, like the very tip of my father’s nail, remained, an invisible fishing line linking me to him.
We were lifting, lifting. Pushing against the heat that fell from the sky. Then faster, finally, picking up speed, slicing through the blueness and the stiff folds of air. The sun stung on my back. Heat curled through my hair. Instinctively, I threw myself forward and wrapped my arms around his neck, bending into that hollow between his shoulder blades. “Faster!” I said.
“Really?” Sangris said. But the world blurred before I could reply. He took off, so fast that I couldn’t open my eyes against the wind, but I didn’t care. In the dark world behind my eyelids, I saw bursts of red excitement blossom in the blackness whenever his wings rose and fell, and the pit of my stomach rose and fell with them.
It seemed to take only a few minutes. Not nearly long enough. When I opened my eyes next, it was because leaves were brushing my face, and the air smelled new. Damp. “We’re here,” he said as I unpeeled myself from him.
When my legs recovered, I slid down, squinting. All around us was a network of curly, complicated shadows. Crowded trees, frizzy with twigs, leaned over my head. Branches blocked out the sky, like a roof; the place we’d come through had already closed over. It was so black up there that, where the layers of leaves happened to thin, a few unexpected edges of yellow, or a single warm patch suggesting green, shone out lovelier than any flowers. The only threads of light that managed to pierce straight through the foliage were needle-thin, hanging in the darkness like solitary, glowing white hairs.
Sangris bent his head down until it hovered over my shoulder. I didn’t notice at first, because I was too busy gazing around the dimness, moving my hands through the needles of light, watching them splice between my fingers. Then I felt feathers brushing my cheek and jumped.
“Can I turn human now?” he asked.
“Have you got clothes?”
“No.”
“Then no.”
Sangris rolled his eyes and shrank into a cat somewhere around my feet. Then I relaxed.
“Where are we?” I said.
“Somewhere completely different,” he said. “This isn’t any country you could name. The people who live here call it Ae.”
“Ae?”
“It means ‘everything.’ They’re a bit limited—they don’t know that anywhere else exists.”
“And you speak their language?”
“I speak all languages,” he said, flicking his tail. “Anything I choose. I’m a Free person, remember.” He paused, then added, “I lived here when I was small. I liked it because it would be hard for anybody to find me in the forest. There are too many trees, branches, nooks, crannies . . . hiding places, basically. Ae is notorious for that. The people who don’t live here call it Gans’ves, which means something like ‘barely there,’ or ‘a place where things are lost.’”
“And you wanted to be lost?”
He didn’t answer. “This place, here—I don’t know what you’d call it—sort of a gap beneath the trees—was where I lived. You can’t imagine what sorts of creatures are hiding in the branches, or wander in and then can’t get out again. For instance, the forest seems empty right now, but I can assure you that at least ten things are eavesdropping o
n us. I say things because they might not be people—but don’t worry,” he added. “They probably aren’t dangerous. Or if they are, they aren’t looking for a fight—because they’re hiding, see? And anyway, I—you might be surprised to hear this, but I actually am kind of deadly,” he said modestly, “and I’m on your side, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I wasn’t worried,” I said. The situation was too unreal for me to worry about it. My head was still floating in the sky, and I, in my starched school shirt and proper shoes that remained warm from the heat of the oasis, touched a few scaly branches just to see if they were solid.
Right beside the place we’d landed, a couple of trees arched together in the crowded gloom, moss streaming down like gray mermaid-hair, to conceal the gap between their trunks. Sangris ducked beneath. I followed, pushing the moss apart and squeezing through, and was blinded momentarily by the sun at high noon.
I’d unfolded into another country. The forest had ended—abruptly, as if it had been slashed away with a knife.
A line ran through this world. On one side, the confused forest; on the other, this endless grassland. It must have just rained, because the sky was a living, breathing gray, and the ground shone intense green. Not khaki, but real green. Hills rolled over the distance. Light and shadows rippled down their sides, according to the clouds. Where sunshine billowed through, a few shallow puddles flashed like isolated spots of light.
This was a country of space and cool air and emptiness, different from the forest, though so close, and unimaginably different from the desert. The sky was open wide. Above me, a bird wheeled round and round with a high, piercing cry. Every time it came directly overhead, the light of the low sun hit the underside of its wings, and for a split second it seemed to be struck motionless, in full display, the bones glowing gold through its feathers. Then it would swing away again.
I felt some part of me lift right out of my body. A breeze blew in my face.
“Moorland. This is the other side of Ae,” Sangris was saying, “but nobody lives here. They’re all packed into the forest because they’re afraid to be seen. Only the birds—”
“Let’s run,” I said breathlessly.
The Girl With Borrowed Wings Page 5