At last one of the Crow caught sight of a great gathering of
Plainsfolk and came back to correct their course.
‘Are they mustering for a fight?’ Thunder asked the man, suddenly worried that all this might be for nothing; that they would be too late.
‘I did not see so many spears,’ the Crow said, staring at the Bear from the painted half of his face. ‘Many tired people. Too many. Everyone has fled the Plague.’
‘Who can blame them?’ But the thought gnawed at Thunder as they pressed on. He knew what contact with the Plague People could do. They were well named – not a disease of the body but of the spirit. They sickened the land wherever they set foot. They festered in the imagination. The Plains warriors had been fighting them for longer than anyone. What would be left of them?
He wanted to take counsel, but Two Heads and Quiet When Loud were asleep atop one of the travois the Horse were pulling, having been scouting about, or at least getting into unseen mischief, all day. He could not speak to Mother about it, because he feared that look of hers that was like being beaten with a stick for not knowing the answers. Who else, then? He was only impressed with his willpower, which let him at least exhaust the obvious alternatives before he went to seek out Kailovela.
He sought her in Mother’s shadow, but found only Empty Skin and the little monster there, and Kailovela’s cloak of feathers. Empty Skin held the baby, cradling the sleeping child with an eerie stillness that made Thunder think uncomfortably of death.
‘She flies,’ the Seal girl explained. ‘I could see the wanting in her. I offered.’ She looked down at the child in her arms, and Thunder reckoned that the little monster had more affection on its face than Empty Skin could muster.
‘That was kind of you,’ he rumbled.
Skin shrugged. ‘You want her to be happy. I want her to be happy. Even she does.’ A nod at the diminutive monster. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’
Thunder shrugged, not thinking it was strange for him, at least. He knew exactly where his longings lay. But then Empty Skin snickered at him.
‘You think it’s your man-parts that want her,’ she said. For a moment she was trying to leer, the expression horribly wrong on her normally bland face.
‘What I think and what I want is none of yours,’ Thunder snapped.
‘Everyone wants her,’ Empty Skin went on blithely. ‘Good people want her to be happy. The rest want her to be theirs. You’re half and halfways. But it’s strange, don’t you think? She’s not that pretty.’
Thunder looked up, trying to spot a hovering hawk against the stars. A hawk flying by the moon. But then it was a time for unnatural things. If the end of the world couldn’t have a few good harbingers, what was the point of it?
Hawks were not night-fliers. In the Eyrie, the night was left to the Owl while the Hawk ruled all under the sun and the Crow picked at the boundaries.
But Kailovela hadn’t had much of a chance to go and see the sun. Her flight to Thunder’s cave had only come about after his great battle with her mate Yellow Claw. Even then, wings spread and bearing her unborn child away from the war host and the Bear’s Mother, she had flown in his shadow. But at least she had flown.
She didn’t know what to do with Thunder. He wasn’t going away; nor was he pushing at her to become his – and how could she have refused the war leader of the Crown of the World? He just stood too close and looked too long and could not really help either of those things. She was run ragged waiting for his restraint to break. Thunder had taken it upon himself to be her protector against all the things of the world, but that left nobody to protect her against Loud Thunder.
When she flew, it didn’t matter. With the cool night air coursing beneath her wings she could pretend there were no chains holding her to the ground. In all her life she had never been allowed freedom like this; in all the world perhaps no other Eyriewoman had such liberty. She could shed the weights life had hung her with, the expectations of the Eyrie, Thunder’s wounded love and Claw’s barbed love. Her child.
For whole breaths and heartbeats, here above the Plains, she could forget her child.
She was not the only woman carrying a baby towards the battle. More than a few of the warriors had their family along. Some of those warriors were women. Even the Coyote, Quiet When Loud, had a child within her belly. Life went on, even at the end of the world.
She could not talk to any of them. She could not tell them what gnawed at her when she held her child to her breast or rocked him to sleep. They would see it as a vindication of all the Eyrie ways, that she who had slighted Hawk had been cursed like this. She could look upon her child’s face and feel no instant wave of love binding the two of them together. In her mind she could tell herself, this is mine, but the other part of her, the deep physical part that let the mother wolf know her cubs, the hawk her chicks, it did not move within her.
He is no less my son, she told herself. Part of her wanted to believe that it was because she had never wanted the child – a burden forced on her by the warrior Yellow Claw had killed to possess her. And that dead warrior had himself killed the child his predecessor had planted in her, in the rough business of taking her from her previous mate. Small wonder that the result of their union had come into her arms without touching her. She could tell herself that she was saving her love for a child of her choosing.
Except she knew it was not true. No need to consult a priest, not that she would have dared. What she lacked did not recognize logic or reason. It was simply an absent part of her, a missing piece of hide from a robe or a tent, where only the cold came through.
I will fight for you, she told the child she had left in Empty Skin’s arms, as she winged her way overhead. You are mine and I will give you everything I can wrest from the world. And yet she stood at the brink of a chasm, and she could not call forth that natural automatic love to bridge it. Her thoughts loved; her heart was cold.
And now she was chained again, her thoughts moving inescapably back to that vulnerable mote of life she had left behind. In that moment she hated her son, because otherwise she could just fly away.
Even as the decision was clawing at her, a greater shadow sailed between her and the moon. For a frozen moment she thought it was the flying ship of the Plague People the warriors had spoken of, crept silently up to cast some blight down upon the war host. But no: something even less welcome had come to share the sky with her.
In his Champion’s form, the great eagle, Yellow Claw’s wingspan was five times her own. He filled the sky like weather, yet was nimble as a sparrow. He had been flying all his life, while she had only been chained to her human shape.
He swung low over her, as though buffeted by a breeze. She knew he was in total control of every feather, even when he made himself clumsy to menace her. His hooked talons flicked at her and she lost twenty feet of height, falling away from him before she recovered from his touch. He followed effortlessly, backing his wings for a moment until he almost stood still in the air before lazily recovering himself. She banked left and right but he was always there between her and the moonlight. Never a subtle man, was Yellow Claw. You will always be in my shadow.
Even though she had been about to descend, rebellion flared in her and she fought him – not claw to claw, but trying to find a way past the shade of his wings like a bird trapped in a tent and battering at the least hint of light. There was no out-flying the Champion of the Eyrie though, and now she felt the strain of it. Alone, she could have flown forever, but the mere presence of Yellow Claw seemed to sap her strength and her will until there was nothing for it but to circle down and down, seeking out the snaking line of the war host as it trekked its way across the empty Plains landscape.
For a moment, she seemed to see a shimmer in the earth they trod on, as though the whole strength of the Crown of the World walked a road that gleamed with rainbow scales. She stared, and the colours faded, until she was seeing nothing more than the first grey tints of dawn. T
hen she was down in a flurry of wings, feeling the great leaden weight of the ground recapture her. Overhead, Yellow Claw shrieked in mean triumph, his work done. She Stepped and became human again, not meeting the gazes of the Wolf warband passing her.
Two days later, an emissary came to Loud Thunder.
She had come down at dawn in an undignified battering of great black wings, narrowly avoiding Mother’s shoulder – which roost would not have gone well for her. She had ended up clutching for the edge of the palanquin, a huge dark bird with a bald head and neck and a hooked beak. Until she Stepped, Thunder had not even known there was a Vulture tribe upon the Plains. Certainly the Eyriemen didn’t seem pleased to be sharing the sky with more carrion-eaters.
Because the sun was already starting to bake the earth and the air, Thunder called a halt and the various parts of his host broke away and began to set up their separate camps. Today, Lone Mountain had challenged all comers to wrestle, and that would be a spectacle to keep this band of enemies from one another’s throats for another sunrise.
Thunder went and sat before Mother, the two Coyote on his left hand and on his right the Tiger priestess Aritchaka, because she had been close by. ‘What’s this, then?’ he demanded of the Vulture.
She was not what he would have looked for in an ambassador. Human, she seemed more hunched than ever the bird had been, and the robes she wore were tattered and multi-layered, as though she never replaced them, just threw new garments over the top of the old. Her name was Yaffel.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, staring pop-eyed about her at the war host. ‘What’s this, you ask me? “What’s this” is what they send me to find out. A hundred and five hundred spears come out of the north!’
Loud Thunder had to stop and think through that, before answering. He came to the conclusion that he honestly hadn’t thought how it would look to the Plainsfolk when a war host descended on them from the north.
‘If we’re here to fight, where does that leave you?’ Aritchaka put in, unhelpfully.
‘Dead.’ Yaffel shrugged. ‘No meat on my bones for you proud hunters. I’m ready to pass on under Vulture’s wings anyway.’
‘We’re not here to fight,’ Thunder said, and then, because that was palpably untrue, ‘not here to fight you. Our enemies are everyone’s enemies. We come to fight the Plague People.’
Yaffel made a hacking sound in her throat that might have been a laugh. ‘Oh my, yes. Fight them, yes.’
‘We fought them in the north. We won,’ Thunder told her.
‘Truth?’ A little light came to Yaffel’s eye with that. She looked from face to face, hunting out any deception, and then her gaze drifted to the spreading mass of the war host making its camp.
‘We are coming to where the Plains people gather,’ Aritchaka declared. ‘Will we find warriors there?’
The Vulture ducked her head. ‘Some, some,’ she muttered, but she did not seem enthusiastic about it.
Nearing the Plains camp, Thunder realized his inner picture of it had been hopelessly inadequate. He had seen something like the rest stops of his warband, all the tribes neatly separated out and ready to move on or take up arms at a moment’s notice. He had thought that this gathering of the Plains was for war, not simply heaped together because of it. This was no assembly that the Plainsfolk had ever sought or planned.
He could not count how many of them there were. He simply did not have words for the numbers involved. The advance of the Plague People had killed countless of the Plainsfolk – had obliterated entire tribes, even – but everyone not killed had fled. Some had fled south, some had fled further west or gone to find relatives in other tribes who might take them in – to flee again, if those relatives were in the path of the Plague. But far too many had come here.
The wind was at Thunder’s back as he came close, but every time it wavered he caught the stench of too many people too close together. He smelled sickness,waste and sweat and spoiled food and . . . people, a great olfactory wall built up by those for whom everything else had been torn down. How can they live like this? was his instant thought, but the answer ran close on its heels, Nobody who had any choice would live like this. Nobody wants to be here.
There was some structure to the camp, he could see – some bigger tents, some cleared spaces. Those of the Eyrie who had flown over it said there were storehouses under fierce guard, constantly besieged by crowds of the hungry come to claim their meagre due. Thunder wondered how any human effort could feed so many, and now he came to the outskirts of the camp he could see that such efforts were failing. Plenty of those he saw here looked as though they had not eaten for days. He could count the ribs on them, no matter what shape they took. And there were more women than men, and the majority of those he saw were old or very young, or hearth-keepers whose hands had surely never held a spear.
‘What now?’ he asked aloud, feeling the great line of the war host pile up behind him.
Thankfully, Two Heads Talking was at his elbow. ‘We should make our camp with some clear ground between us,’ the Coyote suggested. ‘They’re looking at us as if we’re here to steal whatever the Plague left them. Then get the old bird woman to find some leader here, so they know why we’ve come.’
* * *
The Iron Wolves had put themselves outside one of the grain stores, lazing about in their Stepped shapes under the hot sun, growling at anyone they didn’t know. They were still strange enough that most of the Plainsfolk gave them a wide berth, despite their hunger. A couple of Lions and a Hyena had tried their bronze knives against the Wolves’ iron skins, and the lesson had been well learned.
Kalameshli Takes Iron had already found a corner of the sprawling Plains camp to make his own. He had fenced it off with sticks, like a child’s idea of a wall, and then he had ordered the Wolves to go find him good stones. Just because he was far from home and probably in no good odour with the Wolf didn’t mean that proper religion just stopped.
They all thought he would pile up rocks in the vague shape of a dog-head and call it an altar of the Wolf, but he had been about something more important than that. Kalameshli had built a forge. It was not a good forge, and of course they had none of the twice-burned wolf-wood here in this dry land with too few trees. He did what he could with dried dung to stoke the flames, even so. He could not have drawn iron from the earth with it, nor tempered that iron into something strong enough to be used, but he could mend a few things, put his tools to use and pretend that the stinking air from the fire was the Wolf’s breath. When he was beating his hammer on his little anvil, the others knew not to disturb him. And of all the people who should not disturb him, Feeds on Dreams headed the list. Kalameshli was no fool: the Crow’s wings brought him news that nobody else could. But at all other times he was a babble of nonsense, and Kalameshli’s rage at interruption ensured he would only ever see the man when word of real import was on the wind. Like now, apparently.
‘They’re here!’ Feeds got out, even as Takes Iron rounded on him. The old priest’s heart jumped. ‘Maniye? Many Tracks is here?’
‘No, no, no, them!’ the Crow got out, withered a little under his glower, and visibly ordered his thoughts. ‘Eyriemen, Wolves, Bears, everyone!’ he managed. ‘Hundreds from the north all come to fight the Plague, they say,’ Feeds said with excitement.
‘Who leads them?’
‘Biggest Bear I ever saw,’ Feeds reported dutifully.
Kalameshli wagered he knew who that must be, but the thought of that oaf leading anyone was . . .
‘Well,’ he said, half to himself, ‘it’s the end of the world, after all. Spear Catcher!’
‘Hoi!’ A moment later, a big wolf bounded into sight and Stepped to the old warrior in his iron-hair shirt.
‘Find me someone else to waste their lives in front of this store,’ Takes Iron told him. ‘What about those Stone Men who came in yesterday – they looked well fed enough. Have them do some work for a change.’ Seeing the unasked question on Spear Cat
cher’s scarred face, he added, ‘We have some old friends to meet.’
Feeds on Dreams stayed around the Iron Wolves until it was plain they had settled in with the other northerners for the duration, talking over what was going on in the crowded, stinking, desperate Plains camp. It was all very distressing, if you thought about it, but Feeds was extremely good at not thinking about anything save in hindsight. For him, the camp was a constant source of surprise and adventure.
Adventure needed someone to share it with, though. What point creeping through the sacred places of the Wild Dogs or stealing bead necklaces from the Hyena unless someone was there to see? And so Feeds took his friend, whistling softly for her and letting her trot at his heels as he headed back into the camp.
Sathewe was his friend, and she was a coyote. Once she had been Coyote, but then she had followed him one place too many, and Feeds on Dreams had found another helping of someone else’s ruined life served up for him. He didn’t mean it; he never meant it. But people always told him, ‘Just think about what you’re doing; just ask yourself if it’s a good idea,’ and somehow, in the moment, he never could. His mind was like a fly in a jar, all the motion in the world and no direction at all.
But Sathewe was still his friend, even though she couldn’t talk to him or laugh at him any more. She still knew him, and she knew the warband and stayed with them, rather than running off into the tall grass of the Plains. Perhaps, if they went north, she would go and find a pack to make mischief with, but here she stayed with people whose shapes she recognized. Most of all she stayed with him.
He talked to her, as they scurried through the winding back ways between tents and fires and bedrolls. There was a great mass of people here, of tribes he had never seen before. They had fascinating customs to watch, fascinating trinkets to play with. And they would chase him away when they found him, but he could fly and Sathewe had nimble paws.
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 21