Soul of an Eagle

by Edwin Skinner

  Heron was given a wooden sword and shield and pitted himself against the younger boy. He was surprised when he was beaten within one minute. He was the best swordsman in his age group at the Aerie and was used to winning. For the next ten minutes he tried to best the other boy but to no avail. It was that extra blade that tripped him up every time. Once he began watching out for it, he would lose concentration on the larger sword and fall to its stroke.

  "Would you like to try it?" Kit finally said. "It takes some getting used to but, as you can see, it's very effective. Let me get you another blade."

  The afternoon wore on as the two boys worked on a common interest together. Heron was quick to learn and did well at the new style for a beginner. They lost complete track of the time.

  Suddenly, in the middle of a flurry of sword strokes, Heron hesitated, a surprised look on his face. Kit quickly moved in for the kill. The other boy seemed confused.

  "Fates preserve us," he exclaimed, "look at the time. I have to go. I'm late getting back to the Aerie."

  "When can we get together again?" shouted Kit as the young Eagle Rider started away at a trot.

  "We'll talk tomorrow at Learning Hogan." The reply was thrown over one shoulder. "Maybe I can come back day after tomorrow."

  Kit followed his new friend to the landing platform. When he got there, the lad had donned his safety wing and was climbing upon the young eagle's back. Kit watched as the great bird launched himself from the cliff's edge with a bound and a flurry of wings. They climbed steadily into the dark blue Randor sky. The young boy stood there until they had flown from sight.

  During the next few weeks, the two boys got together as often as they could. Kit showed his new friend his crossbow and taught him something about using it during the next visit. Heron countered with tales of Ganton McAllister and his prototype, one handed crossbow. The new weapon was just getting into production and might soon become standard equipment for Glider Riders. It had been deemed too dangerous for Eagle Riders as one must always keep at least one hand on the saddle at all times. The few seconds it took to load the new crossbow was too long to be sure that the Rider wouldn't lose his seat.

  On other visits, they went horseback riding or worked with spears but Heron's favorite activity was on the practice field with swords and knives. He had been determined to master the two blade fighting style. Kit, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of hearing about life at the Aerie. Whenever they rested, he would prod the other boy to relate some tale about the Eagle Riders of McAllister Aerie and their famous exploits during Ajax's abortive invasion attempt. Heron had been there at the time, training on the practice slope. He had gotten to know all of the principals of their side of the battle. He had become a good friend of Pip's and had even visited the now famous laboratory of Pip's friend, Naturon.

  As the closing months of winter wore on, the two boys got closer than ever. Heron was expecting to test for battle ready status at any time. He would then begin to train on the glider wings so that he could mount longer patrols than was possible on the back of an eagle. When a Rider was using a glider wing, his eagle could easily fly with him nearly all day long whereas, when the Rider flew on the back of his bird, as they did in combat, the eagle would quickly tire. Before the advent of the glider wing, the most an Eagle Rider team could patrol in one day was two shifts of two hours each separated by a rest period.

  Kit looked forward to his friend's graduation. Once the boy was trained on glider wings, he was allowed to put a novice saddle on his eagle and allow Flash to carry a passenger. Heron had promised that the first to ride Flash besides him was to be his best friend, Kit.

  That happy day arrived without warning. Heron, wanting to surprise his friend, had not told Kit much about his progress in using the glider wing. As in everything else, he had been a quick study on the new wing. Its similarity to the safety wing already mastered by the young Eagle Rider had been enough to enable him to progress within a few days to the point where he was deemed proficient.

  Kit was outside practicing with his crossbow when he heard the familiar cry from the sentry. "Eagle Riders coming in!" He turned his head upwards to see what looked like two great eagles approaching the site of the Guardsmen's barracks. He quickly retrieved his bolts and headed for the landing platform.

  He got there just in time to see Flash land beside his master. Heron was busily unclipping himself from a large wing. The wing was taller than its passenger and half again as wide. The underside was painted with a design that looked like the underside of a soaring eagle. What had earlier looked like two eagles had been Heron under a glider wing followed by an unburdened Flash. Kit rushed forward to help his friend with the large wing.

  "Are you ready to go flying, Kit?" Heron asked with a glint of merriment in his eye. "This is a beautiful day but it gets cold at altitude. You'd better run get a coat to wear and some warmer shoes. Those sandals won't do at all."

  Kit's head was spinning with excitement as he ran to his room in the barracks to change shoes and grab a warm, fleece lined leather jacket. He ran back to the landing area as fast as he could. Heron was busy checking out the saddle strapped to Flash's back as Kit ran up.

  "This is a novice saddle," the young Rider explained. "It's just like a normal saddle except that it has some strong straps that hold the passenger on to the eagle. Your feet go here and here and you hold on at these two points like this." He climbed on and then back down again. "Now, you get on and I'll strap you in."

  Kit climbed gingerly onto the saddle. The traditional position of the eagle rider seemed natural and comfortable to him although he had never tried it before. Heron busied himself in buckling the safety straps around Kit's legs. "This way," he said, "even if you lose your grip, you won't fall off. Now I have to put my wing on and we'll be ready to go."

  Heron was wearing a harness around his body with three metal rings attached to it, one on either shoulder and one in the center of the small of his back. He stepped up to the wing which had been lying on the ground propped up in the air by its control bar and looking for all the world as though it were doing a pushup. Heron easily lifted the wing and pulled it around behind him. Three leather straps hung under it at the appropriate points with spring loaded metal clips on their ends. These were quickly clipped to the rings on the Rider's harness and, gripping the control bar, he stepped forward to the edge of the cliff.

  The end of the tow rope was already there, its bulk coiled up on the ground under the great eagle's massive chest. Heron picked up the hook attached to the end of the tow rope and hooked it to the leading edge of his glider wing. "Hang on," he shouted and projected the command to his eagle that launched them all out into the skies above Washington crater.

  His first takeoff on an eagle was a real rush for Kit. The bird took a large hop and extended his wings. Beneath him, Kit could feel the strong muscles of the enormous bird flexing as Flash struggled for altitude. In about three or four seconds, the boy could feel the tension on the bottom of the saddle as the tow rope, attached at that point, was pulled taut. He could feel, too, the extra strain that the big bird made to compensate.

  Kit twisted his body around to see the stone buildings of the Guardsmen's barracks falling away behind and below him. The bowl of the crater spread out in front of him. In short order, they were crossing over the nearly circular lake at the bottom of the crater's bowl. The waters were high and the lake was at its highest. It had rained two days ago and the farmers had not had to irrigate in several months.

  Heron had discovered a strong thermal which had formed over the lake and he directed Flash into it. As they hit the rising column of air, Kit could feel the bird begin to rise faster. Heron unhooked the tow rope and began climbing on his own.

  As they circled lazily in the rising air of the thermal, Kit relaxed and took in the panorama that was turning slowly below them. Close in, he saw the town along one side of the lake shore. He could easily make out the Headmaster's Hall and the Learning Hog
an, the first and second largest buildings in the crater. On the other side of the lake and upslope a little was the Confederation compound. Washington crater hosted the headquarters for the Confederation of Craters, the loose and fairly powerless central government for the, largely autonomous, crater communities. The decisions of most import that were made in that august body were about the rules and siting of the bi-annual games where Guardsmen and Eagle Riders from all the craters competed to find the ruling Champion in such categories as swordsmanship, archery, battle Riding and patrol Riding. This summer, the games were to be played at nearby O'Malley crater some hundred and fifteen miles to the southeast.

  Looking out farther, Kit recognized other landmarks. To the southwest, about halfway up the crater was the Guardsmen's barracks from which they had launched. By following the road up the crater from there, he found the site of his grandfather's pear orchard. Further to the southeast and up almost to the rim he could just make out the semi-circular shape of the Aerie compound. All around him, the highest point of land seemed to be the barrier rim of the crater, forty two miles in diameter and a minimum of a thousand feet above the surrounding terrain with sheer cliffs and its two narrow passes.

  When they had gained an altitude of nearly five thousand feet, Heron commanded Flash to break out of the thermal. They headed to the northwest. The Eagle Rider knew that the most spectacular scenery was in that direction. There were several high, rugged mountains to be seen out that way, their tops capped by eternal snow at an altitude that even Eagle Riders could not attain. Mountains surrounded two thirds of Washington crater but on the southeast quadrant, a few foothills quickly leveled out into the Great Plains that surrounded O'Malley crater, their nearest neighbor to the south and east.

  The hour long tour that Heron gave to his friend was a joy to Kit. He felt at home in the skies from the very beginning. It was like something within him were being fulfilled that had been bottled up inside for so long that he hadn't even known it was there. Yes, it was a joy but it also brought sorrow. Kit knew that the sky was his element but that he was doomed to watch others take to it and only get an occasional taste himself.

  When they landed, Kit thanked his friend profusely, watched the pair fly away and went to the room that he shared with his father and cried himself to sleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The small sack of food that Chan had found in his saddle pack had been a lifesaver. The short bow was a nomad's principle weapon for gathering food. It had taken over a week for him to shoot a very scrawny grazan. A grazan was a native herbivore with poor eyesight and six short legs, two of which could be used for grasping its food. The meat of a grazan was not a favored dish of nomads and hunters but, by the time one fell to his arrow, Chan was too hungry to care.

  His problem was learning the use of a bow gripped by the clamp in his new hook. The first morning after he left McAllister, he had found it a difficult matter to strap the device on tight enough. When he tried to use the hook, it moved around on the end of his stump and slipped off anything he tried to handle with it. Chan, however, was persistent and determined to learn. It was not in him to give up on anything as long as there was a chance he could succeed. Within a few days, he had licked that problem and was trying to learn how best to grip different objects in Meron's clever device. The proper way to grip a short bow was, perhaps, the most important skill that he had to learn. It had taken two days to learn and two more days to relearn how to aim his arrows with the shorter pull that his modified arm gave him.

  That grazan had tasted so good to the starving nomad that he had taken his time eating it over a two hour period. When he finished, he was stuffed. He found that he was taking his time doing many things now that he had done quickly before. Part of this was due to his clumsiness with his new hook and part was just because he had more time on his hands. There was more than enough time to think.

  Nina had said that his would be a lonely freedom and she could not have known how right she was. Chan had always been a man among men. Women had been attracted to his handsome figure and dark red hair and beard. Men had respected him because of his prowess in all of the arts of a warrior. He had been used to people all around him, listening to his words, soliciting his advice and looking for ways to attract his approbation. He missed the people more than anything.

  The nomad had often been on solo, long range scouts. For weeks at a time, he had traveled with no human company. The loneliness had never bothered him in the past. Perhaps it was the knowledge then that there were friends, wives and children waiting for his return that had made the lack of company only a minor inconvenience to him. Now, he knew that nobody was waiting for him. He knew that he would never again have the pleasure of bouncing his own babies on his knee, of holding one of his own women in his arms or of visiting with another man that can call him "friend."

  Even the company of a crater dweller such as the jailers who had questioned him for long hours, or of the Headmaster, Selevon, who had taken from him his favorite wife, would be welcome to Chan now. Come to think of it, he realized, Selevon would have been especially welcome. The man was deep, honest and wise, perhaps more so than any of Chan's former "friends" had been. Selevon's manner toward his vanquished enemy had given Chan much to think about. His formerly contemptuous attitude toward what he had called "farmers" was getting some radical revisions.

  Another problem of survival for the lone nomad was his inability to ride his pony without the use of his left hand. If he were discovered by other nomads, he had no doubt that he would be attacked. Running battles were won or lost by the use of a sword. Short bows were very undependable in such an encounter. To fire an arrow from horseback and strike a stationary target was something many nomad warriors could do. Chan, himself, had been noted for the skill. To fire from a plunging pony at a target that is also moving across the landscape was a near impossibility. Chan had already detected and hidden from several bands of strange warriors. After mastering the use of a short bow again, he made his next project the ability to control his pony with the device on his left arm, or better still, without the use of reins at all. In the past, when firing his short bow, he had held the pony's reins with the same hand that held the bow.

  First, Chan practiced holding the reins with the device on his hook. He met with some limited success by doing so but felt that something else had been needed. He discovered the answer quite by accident.

  One day, while riding through some brushy land, he had been following one trail when he came upon another. He was holding the reins slack, intending to keep going straight. A slight noise in the bushes to the left caused him to twist in the saddle to look in that direction, driving his right knee into the pony's side with a firm pressure. As though obeying a directional command from the reins, the pony turned onto the left hand trail. Chan was so startled he had not even reacted to the sudden change of direction. Instead, he tried to figure out what had made the intelligent pony react that way.

  When the answer occurred to him, he immediately tested it out, applying pressure first with one knee and then with the other. The pony obediently followed every command. The more urgently he pressed, the quicker the pony turned. Knotting the reins together so they would not fall completely out of reach, Chan tested the control method by maneuvering the pony all around a field completely hands off. The more he worked with the animal, the better his control became.

  "She told me she 'loved this pony,'" he said aloud to his mount. "She must have been riding you all of those months that I was held captive. She taught you well. No wonder the Guardsmen cavalry is so effective if this is their method of controlling their mounts."

  From that day on, Chan controlled his pony more by knee and body position than by use of the reins. Almost every day for two weeks, he discovered some new signal that the animal would respond to. Fire had been taught well by Nina and was, in turn, teaching Chan. Different signals made by knee, leg or foot would tell the pony to speed up, slow down, side step, wheel aro
und, turn or stop. Soon, the nomad's control of his mount was so complete that he began to wonder why he even bothered to put the pony's bridle on him.

  Chan's first test of his new skills came on a bright, sunny morning not five minutes after he had vacated his previous night's campsite. He was crossing a large, reasonably flat, highland meadow and had just about reached the center of the field when a band of three strange nomads suddenly appeared on the far side of the field ahead of him.

  Chan brought his pony to a halt facing them as the three warriors spread out in a line abreast formation and drew their blades. He waited to draw his weapon until they had spurred their mounts toward him, howling their rage as they came. The great iron sword fairly leapt into Chan's hand and he urged Fire forward at a trot.

  He headed for the center of the attacking line of warriors. At the last possible moment, a press of his right knee signaled a turn to his left, so as to meet the nomad on the far right of the attacking formation. In this way, he avoided having to fight two warriors at the exact same moment. The luckless warrior raised his bronze blade in a futile effort to deflect the stroke of Chan's iron one. Chan, however, knew the proper point at which to strike and the blade of his opponent was totally devastated. Chan had signaled Fire to make a complete stop at the point at which they met his opponent and, while the stop was not instantaneous, it did retard the engagement enough to allow Chan to make a second strike at his foe. In a continuous flurry of deadly motion, the iron sword stroked through the enemy's sword and then swung into a backstroke which sliced deeply into the luckless stranger's unprotected back.

  Chan quickly urged Fire away from the engagement and wheeled to meet the remaining two assailants. Had he stayed where he was, he could have been entangled with the falling body of his first victim. The other two strangers had split in opposite directions and were maneuvering to come at him from two sides at the same time. Chan turned Fire away from the warrior to his left when he recognized the silvery glint of iron in the man's hand. Turning right, toward the third nomad, he resolved to dispatch this one first in order to take on the more equally armed second assailant without interference.