The Summer Palace

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The one that seemed simplest, and most likely to succeed, though, was for each man to take one end of the rope, and then walk in opposite directions around a bird, entangling it. They might even be able to get more than one at a time that way; after all, he wanted at least four.

  He dropped one rope to the ground and uncoiled a few yards of the other. “You take that end and walk this way, and I’ll go that way,” Sword said, pointing. “We’ll wind it around.”

  Whistler looked at the rope, and the birds, and Sword; he did not look convinced, but he nodded. “All right,” he said. He dropped his own two coils to the ground and grabbed hold of Sword’s rope.

  On their first try their chosen ara started and ran as the rope approached, and they had to wait until the birds had calmed down and resumed eating before making a second attempt. This time they kept the rope almost slack, so that it would be less noticeable, and the ara simply stepped over it.

  “We need to move faster,” Sword said. So they moved faster, and finally managed to whip the rope around a bird.

  Sword had had no idea a bird could be that strong; he was caught off guard by the ara’s ferocious struggles, and the rope pulled out of his hands. Whistler held on, and Sword hurried to grab the dropped end and heave.

  That knocked the ara off its feet, and Whistler jumped on it, throwing a loop of rope around its neck He quickly tied that securely in place, as the captured bird screamed with rage, then threw a loop around its legs as well, and knotted that.

  Finally he straightened up, stood panting over the hobbled and furious creature, and looked at Sword. His shirt was torn, his face smeared with dirt, sweat, and ara spit. He licked his lips, swallowed, caught his breath, and said, “Now what?”

  Sword looked back.

  The rest of the flock had fled, and was already perhaps half a mile to the south; meanwhile, the captured bird was not standing calmly, accepting its situation, as Sword had imagined; instead it was on the ground, thrashing about and glaring at him. As in Sword’s previous encounters with live ara, its dark eyes seemed to gleam with hatred and power—there was no question but that there was a soul in there, a strong one. The bird showed no sign it would ever cooperate with its captor.

  But Sword had no better option. “Now we catch another one,” he said, picking up another rope and uncoiling it.

  Whistler stared at him for a moment, then looked down, first at the hobbled bird, then at his torn shirt. Sword knew now just how precious that shirt was.

  “This time,” Whistler said, “you jump on.”

  “Right,” Sword agreed.

  Together they set out toward the flock, leaving their first captive lying where it was. They had gone perhaps a hundred yards when Sword glanced back and saw the ara pecking at the rope that bound its legs.

  “Damn,” he said, turning back.

  It took perhaps half an hour to get the bird so securely bound that Sword was certain it would not escape. It took another half hour to approach the flock without frightening them away. And it took an hour to bring down another bird; although Sword would not have thought it possible, he realized that they had actually been lucky, very lucky, in catching their first as easily as they had.

  By the time they had the second bird secured, the flock was far away, running southward—but there was something different about the way they were moving this time. This wasn’t the fluttering, disorganized, zigzagging motion of a startled flock fleeing from predators; this was an all-out straight-line run, heading due south at high speed.

  Sword, sweating, panting, and bleeding, got to his feet and stared after them. He waited for them to stop, and then realized what was happening.

  “They’re leaving, aren’t they?” he asked Whistler. “I mean, really leaving?”

  The clansman nodded. “I thought we had another couple of days, but that’s a migration. No question.”

  “Did we do that?”

  Whistler frowned. “I don’t know. They would have gone soon anyway. We might have disturbed them into leaving a little early.”

  “We aren’t going to catch them, are we?”

  Whistler shook his head. “No,” he said. “We aren’t.” He looked down at their panicky second capture. “Are two going to be enough? I know you wanted four.”

  Sword swallowed, and wiped sweat, dirt, and feathers from his forehead with his sleeve. “Two will have to be enough,” he said. “Because it’s what we have.”

  “You could come down to Winterhome with us,” Whistler said. “We could hide you, I’m sure we could.”

  Sword shook his head. “No, I can’t,” he said. “And no, you couldn’t. I’ll be fine with just these.” He wasn’t at all sure that was true, but there was no point in worrying Whistler.

  Whistler looked down at the bird again. “How are we going to get these two back to camp?”

  Ever since he first came up with the notion of capturing ara alive, Sword had envisioned leading them along at the end of a rope, like cattle on the way to market. Now that he had actually handled them, he knew that was never going to happen. Cattle were domesticated; these birds weren’t, and never would be. A glance at their eyes made that obvious.

  The Patriarch had warned him that they couldn’t be tamed, and he had ignored that warning. He sighed.

  “Drag them,” he said.

  [ 8 ]

  The ara were not terribly heavy, perhaps a hundred pounds apiece, but they were astonishingly uncooperative. Slinging a dead one across his shoulders was no great feat for Sword, but moving a live one anywhere was a challenge. Even with four generous lengths of strong rope restraining them, the two continued to struggle, strewing their path with feathers as Sword and Whistler dragged them across the plain.

  Sword had started to suggest carrying the ara at one point, despite their struggles, but then he looked at the nearer bird’s mad dark eyes and thrashing wings, and decided not to say anything. Dragging would do well enough. A cart of some sort would have been better, but he had not thought to bring one.

  The sun was far down the western sky by the time they finally hauled the still-squirming birds into the camp—or what was left of the camp; much of it had already been disassembled for transport. A good portion of the Clan of the Golden Spear stopped what they were doing to stare at this arrival.

  “What do you want with those?” Fist asked.

  “They’re my winter food supply,” Sword explained.

  “Just two of them?”

  “The flock ran south,” Whistler told him. “These two were all we could get.”

  That got the attention of several listeners who had been staring at the bound birds. “They’re gone?” Dancer asked.

  “So soon?” Gnaw Gnaw added.

  Whistler nodded.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Fist said. “We were leaving tomorrow anyway, weren’t we?”

  “Yes, but—it may mean something,” Gnaw Gnaw told him. “It might be a sign of a hard winter.” She glanced at the sky, which was thickly streaked with high clouds. A cold, steady wind was blowing from the east, moving the clouds along.

  “I thought we might have disturbed them by capturing these two,” Whistler said.

  “It’s possible,” said an old man whose name Sword had never learned. “But I think we should be ready for a long, cold winter.”

  “If you want them for food, why didn’t you just kill them?” Fist asked, looking at the squirming ara.

  “I won’t have any way to preserve the meat until we get to . . . until I . . .” Sword hesitated.

  Fist glanced at him. “You’ll have to feed them, then. Once the snow falls, that won’t be easy. And you’ll need to give them water. And two birds won’t last you that long.”

  “I know,” Sword said unhappily. He was beginning to see several flaws in his scheme.

  Of course, he had known there would be difficulties, but he had thought he would see ways to handle them as they arose. Instead, it seemed as if there were more of them th
an he had expected, and fewer solutions.

  But he didn’t really have any better choices at this point. If he went down the cliffs to Winterhaven, the Wizard Lord’s men would almost certainly find him. If he stayed in the Uplands, he would need food and shelter. The Summer Palace was the only possible shelter, and the ara were the obvious food supply.

  If there was another, less obvious food supply, he had not discovered it—but it might yet turn up.

  He very much hoped it would.

  After that exchange he was enlisted to help with the final preparations for departure. By the time the clan retired for the night, everything but the actual tents and bedding was packed up and ready to go. Even the Patriarch’s lavish pavilion was stripped down to bare cloth. When Sword finally curled up on his carpet and pulled one edge over himself, he was exhausted, and fell asleep instantly despite the chill.

  He was rousted out at dawn, and sent to assist in striking the tents.

  He turned aside for a moment before taking up his assigned role, though, to check on his captured birds. He had already noticed that they had finally fallen silent, so he assumed they were asleep, and hoped the ropes had held and they hadn’t escaped in the night.

  Then he saw them.

  The ropes had held; each lay in a broad circle of scattered and broken feathers they had shed in their thrashing about. They were no longer struggling; instead they were both stiff and cold. He could not tell whether they had beaten themselves to death against the hard ground, or burst their hearts in fighting their bonds, or died of cold, but they were clearly dead.

  Before he could do anything more than stare, a hunter grabbed his shoulder and shoved him toward a tent-peg he was supposed to be pulling up. Sword stumbled, then caught himself and grabbed the peg. Stunned, unsure what had become of his plans, he did his share of the work mechanically, doing what he was told with neither objection nor enthusiasm.

  The sun was scarcely clear of the eastern horizon when the Patriarch gave a final command, and the clan began the march toward the cliffs, more than two hundred souls of all ages trudging westward with their possessions on their backs.

  Sword did not join them immediately; first he collected his dead ara, and cut their throats to bleed them out, so that the meat would last longer and he would have that much less weight to carry. Two ordinary dead birds would not keep very well, but he had nothing else; all his efforts at capturing them alive had been wasted.

  He had no household belongings to speak of, no family heirlooms, but he had the pack he had made slung on one shoulder, stuffed to bursting with his extra clothing and the tools and supplies he had gathered. His precious spear was strapped across it. On top of that he bore the two dead ara, which he slung on his back as soon as the bleeding had slowed. He hurried to join the Uplanders with the last bits of the birds’ watery blood still spattering his heels—or hurried as best he could under better than two hundred pounds of burden.

  Those two birds were more than enough to weigh him down; although he had started out just a pace or two behind the young hunters who took the lead, he gradually fell back until he was among the mothers and young children at the rear of the procession, stumbling and panting.

  Now he had the time to think that he had not when he first awoke.

  His birds were dead. While draining the blood would help, he needed to butcher them properly within the next few days if the meat was to be any good to him. He would have to do whatever he could to preserve it, even if he could not find the right herbs to make the traditional jerky. Just finding fuel to smoke the meat would be difficult, if not impossible. There would probably be a fair bit of wastage.

  He was not going to have anywhere near as large a food supply as he had hoped.

  And with that realization he began seeing any number of flaws in his plans that he had steadfastly ignored until now. He had never denied their reality, but he had put them all off, telling himself he would deal with them later.

  Well, this was later, and he would need to deal with them. Water, for example—the Summer Palace had a cistern, he knew that from his previous stay there, but would it be adequate? Would it freeze? Had it been drained for the winter? He had no idea where the cistern was, or how large, only that it fed taps in the palace.

  The palace had been designed to be open to the breeze, for cooling in the summer; while it could be closed up, it wasn’t intended to keep out cold.

  Would it be warm enough?

  He would almost certainly need fires; would the smoke be visible down in Barokan?

  Would he be able to find the fuel he needed?

  And in the spring there would undoubtedly be servants who would come to prepare the palace for the Wizard Lord; if he was still in the palace when they arrived, he would need to hide somewhere from them, and then a way to get past them to get at Artil im Salthir somehow, when the Wizard Lord finally came up the cliff.

  At least there was no magic to worry about. Barokanese magic did not work here—the lowland ler had no power here, could not even come up here, and if the Uplands had any ler of their own, as they surely must, no one seemed to know how to get their attention. The Uplanders actively avoided acknowledging any ler.

  Even if there were any magic up here, Sword could defend against it easily enough—in addition to the protections already sewn into his garments, he had two dead ara to provide him with still more feathers. Ara feathers presumably shielded against magic of all kinds, not just Barokanese.

  Of course, this all meant that he would have no magic of his own to aid him, but he didn’t really see how useful swordsmanship would be in surviving a winter here in any case, and his skills were good enough that he thought they would serve his purposes even without any magic.

  And he really had little choice. He could not see any hope of safety if he descended back to Barokan, and he did not see any way to survive on the plateau other than by taking shelter in the Summer Palace. He would just have to deal with everything as best he could.

  That brought him back to the question of food. Perhaps it was not too late to turn back, to track down another flock of ara that had not yet set out to the south. . . .

  But how could he catch them, alone and unaided? How long would it take? He was no expert. Perhaps he should consult with some of the hunters, who were experts.

  He looked around, and realized that he was surrounded by small children who were staring up at him as they walked, and by the mothers herding those children. Even the children carried tiny packs, he saw, probably holding nothing more than a few favorite toys and perhaps a treat of some kind.

  Ahead of him were some of the oldest men and women in the clan; the younger and healthier adults were farther ahead, and the hunters—the young men who would be clearing the campsite and setting up tents so that the children would find their homes waiting for them—were at the front, easily a mile away. They weren’t hurrying, really; if he tried, he ought to be able to close the gap, even carrying his dead ara.

  But was there any point in doing so? Was there anything he could do about it today? He would ask that night around the campfires; that would be soon enough.

  He shifted the birds on his shoulders, and trudged on.

  Although he never caught up to the young men at the front of the march, at one point Sword and the children found themselves surrounded by other women, who were digging at the hard ground with knives and trowels. They had reached one of the plantings—Sword thought they were too crude to be called gardens, really—where the tribe had planted a few root crops that spring; now they were harvesting the results.

  Some of the children ran to help out, scurrying about collecting beets and carrots. Sword slowed, but did not stop to help—he knew nothing about the clan’s rules and methods, and no one had requested his assistance, so he simply marched on. He had gone perhaps a mile farther when the throng of cheerful, chattering women caught up with him, bags of vegetables slung on their shoulders alongside their packs, and before much long
er he was once again among the mothers and children at the very rear.

  The clan stopped for the night while the sun was still well above the western horizon; the oldest and youngest members could not be expected to continue. Some of the youngest children had been whimpering and complaining for some time, though their older siblings mocked them for it.

  The young adults had arrived well before the stragglers and had pitched tents and readied fire-pits; by the time the last children stumbled into or were carried into the chosen site, it had become a camp, and water was heating to make stew of the freshly harvested vegetables.

  “Are we cooking those?” someone asked, jerking a thumb toward Sword’s two ara.

  “No,” Whistler said, looking up from a cookfire. “Those are his, for his magic. We eat jerky.”

  Several people exchanged glances at that, but no one saw fit to argue.

  And a thought struck Sword.

  “Actually,” he said, “I would trade this meat weight-for-weight for jerky.” That would save him the effort of trying to make his own—and would also remove the risk that he wouldn’t be able to do it at all.

  That drew an enthusiastic response. A butcher was found, and a tradesman’s balance was unpacked. By the time he retired that night Sword’s two birds were gone, and he had better than fifty pounds of jerky packed away, as well as several pounds of feathers.

  Whistler stopped him at the flap of the tent they shared. “That wasn’t what you had intended,” he said.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Sword admitted. “It was better.”

  “I’m sure it was, for you. I’m not sure it was wise on the part of those who gave you their jerky, though.”

  “Perhaps not,” Sword admitted. “But the Patriarch didn’t forbid it, and you should still have enough to get safely to the guesthouse in Winterhome.”