Wheel of the Winds

by M J Engh

  When it was done, they agreed that it had been worth doing. Whenever the signal dot had lit, the Captain had immediately stopped the pod, and then cautiously started it off again in another direction; and the crows had flown around it, as if jealous of this encroachment upon their profession. When she had brought him down at last (landing with only a small thump), the Exile had crawled out well pleased and greeting the Captain with a comradely grin, for it seemed that the pod had skimmed cleanly along the cliff, taking no hurt, and he had seen something of the country beyond it, as also how it sank and curved away from them on their left, so that he was for going left along it and thus rounding its flank.

  This they did, in the course of that same watch. The Exile said no more of his mission and his messages, seeming now quite cheerfully bent on their journey, though the end of it did not promise well for him. They camped on a downward slope at the cliff's shoulder. This time the Warden, without a word spoken, bound the Exile's hands and feet and looped the end of the rope over his own arm before he lay down to sleep; and though the Exile looked grieved at this, he made no objection.

  After that sleep, they went on with the feeling of a journey begun in earnest, as if all before now had been no more than sport. Their torch—their only torch, for the Exile said he had no other—did not penetrate far into that darkness, so that though they saw what lay before their feet, they had to guess by the slope and texture of the land, and the movements of the breezes, what awaited them farther ahead. In this their luck seemed good enough at first. “For,” the Warden said with satisfaction, “we're in a pass, and going down.”

  Repnomar knew nothing of passes; but when this was explained to her as a channel or strait, she was pleased, for it seemed to mean they were coming down out of these snow mountains. And the Exile talked cheerily of the sights and creatures they had met on this journey, of slugs and snow-worms that fed on such slime as they had seen under the ice, and landkelp that fed on worms, and snowfish that fed on landkelp, and the shoveler beasts that scooped up snow by the pailful in their broad jaws and ate whatever they found in it. Only Broz was dissatisfied, sniffing the air suspiciously and nosing at stones with a half-formed growl in his throat.

  They found no game themselves (unless that term could stretch to cover a scrawny landkelp, dead and dried by the wind, which the Captain picked up from a bare rockside); but, as she rightly observed, “We aren't hunting.” To all of them now, Broz included, it seemed that the one important thing was to push on without delay; and their rations, by the Exile's best calculation, were more than enough if they were not greedy. Snow was drifted in the depth of the pass, so that often they took to the slope on one side for better footing; but they traveled warmly enough, having the Exile's stove hung from one of the pods that floated docilely above them, shedding warmth upon them as they went.

  “Your pass may be bringing us down,” the Captain said after a time (speaking indifferently to the Warden and the Exile, both of whom she held answerable for mountains) “but it's taking us off our course.” The Exile looked worried at this, and began to say that it was difficult indeed to hold a course in the darkness, without landmarks, and that he had a little device for the purpose. But the Captain, exchanging glances with the Warden, said that she needed no device to hold a course, so long as she had her senses about her. So when they had slept again, at the bottom of the pass where it widened out into a plain or valley, they turned slantwise to the right at the Captain's direction.

  Now the going was easy—or seemed so after what they had traveled before. The wind that had troubled them, gusting down the pass at their backs and making the pods bob and dance like floats in a mountain stream, had died away, and the rocks were smooth and bare of snow. So for some watches they made good time, trending always downward but sometimes crossing folds and rises of the rock. They were traveling now, for the most part, into a light headwind that the Captain swore was warmer than any wind they had felt before in this country. The Exile was for getting out his device again to measure its warmth, but this the Warden would not allow.

  No one rode in the largest pod; for the Exile seemed to have taken no lasting hurt from their wreck, so that after the second or third sleep he kept up the pace as well as ever, and without the help of medicine; and Broz, though not given to undignified gambols and dashes, was otherwise as eager for the journey as any young dog might have been. Repnomar too was in good humor, saying that it had taken this outlandish journey to show that she and Broz could walk as well as float, and making the pods turn and jog overhead, rising sometimes out of torchlight range or circling around their heads like giant bees.

  They had neither seen nor heard anything of the Quicksilver People and their nets, but they kept up a guard, Repnomar and Lethgro taking it in turn during their stops for sleep, till the Exile offered to take his turn as well. For, as he said, it was not fair that he should have twice the sleep of the others, and though his hands and feet were tied, his eyes and ears were not. The Captain seconded him in this, saying that he had as good reason as any of them to keep honest guard; and the Warden, after a little thought, agreed that there was no likely harm in it, and considerable good.

  But it was Broz who gave the alarm, and during the Exile's turn on guard. Repnomar sat up, demanding to know what was happening; but the Exile, much flustered to find his watch-keeping questioned, maintained that he had neither seen nor heard anything. The crows, too, were undisturbed, asleep with their heads under their wings; and all the Warden's casting of the torchbeam this way and that showed nothing but bare rock, dark and smooth as swells of the Soll transformed into stone.

  “What makes you sure he noticed something, Rep?” he asked at last. “I didn't hear him bark.”

  But Repnomar thought this unworthy of any answer except a snort. It was true that Broz had not barked—indeed she would have been hard put to say exactly how he had waked her—but he stalked now warily at the edge of the torchlight, sniffing the wind and uttering low growls. Lethgro untied the Exile's bonds. But still no sound came to them out of the dark.

  “One thing or the other,” Lethgro said after a time. “We can go on as before, or we can look for another road. What we can't do is stay here forever.” It seemed to him there was no need now to add “or turn back.”

  “Right,” the Captain answered promptly. “And we've no way of knowing that another road would be better. Let's hold our course and meet it head on.”

  Lethgro did not like to consider too closely what that “it” might be; but he took the torch in one hand and his knife in the other. Repnomar was fastening the Exile's folded sheet around Broz's back and sides, in case of darts. The Exile had found a loose stone the size of his fist, that might serve as a weapon for lack of a better, and the Warden did not object. So they started on cautiously, Broz a little in the lead.

  Some hours later they had put away their weapons, for they knew now what had roused Broz; and though they did not well understand what it was they faced, it was clear that knives and rocks would be of little use against it. “I should have known,” the Captain said sourly. “Broz sees no better than we do; but he can smell ten miles farther.”

  It was worse than a smell by now. It was like a redness in the air, that burned and bit, eating at the tender flesh of nostrils and throat, so that they drew every breath reluctantly and held it in pain. The Captain bent her head and plodded straight into the teeth of that evil breeze, with Broz sneezing at her heels. The Warden, with a seared sigh, had pulled the collar of his shirt across his mouth to breath through, which eased his lungs a little. The Exile never faltered; indeed, he gave no sign of any discomfort, except for the wild grimaces into which he continually twisted his face. As for the crows, Repnomar had put them into a pod for safekeeping, not liking the sickly way they had hunched themselves in that unwholesome air.

  They talked little, for the taste of the wind was like acid drizzled on the tongue. From time to time, Lethgro still swung the torch left and right, s
howing still the same blank swells of rock. A dim haze hung in the air and laid a powdery dust on their skin and clothing and all around them, softening that stony countryside a little to the sight, though not to the foot.

  Presently the Captain, looking back and catching sight of the Exile's squinted eyes and puckered mouth, called for a halt and a drink of water all round.

  “It's a nasty wind,” she said. “Barely strong enough to lift a sail, but it has a red taste to it.”

  The Exile ran his finger through the dust on his forehead and looked at it mournfully. He had long since given his opinion, which was that they should turn across the wind, either left or right, in hopes of getting out of its force before a worse thing came upon them. To this the others had not agreed, thinking it better to hold course as long as they could. But the Captain said now, “It doesn't have to be either head-on or broadside. We can tack across the wind and still make headway.”

  So they turned slantwise across that mild and bitter wind, moving now a little uphill along an easy slope. This cheered the Exile somewhat, for he maintained that the dust they walked through was the spitting of some angry mountain, and he feared sadly that it might change to a worse vomiting; so that it was well not to walk straight toward it, and better yet if they could put a rise of ground between it and themselves.

  Some few hours later, by the Captain's estimation, they were all willing to acknowledge that he had been right, at least as to the desirability of shelter. The red wind had died; but they got little good from that. What had been a haze in the air had thickened to a steady snowing of fine, soft stuff like the powdery smoke of puffballs. They sat hunched together under the Exile's sheet and ate their rations, and the crows preened dust out of their feathers with all signs of disdain. The Exile was explaining, with ever greater urgency, what he hoped and what he feared.

  The Warden put out a hand to still the Exile and raised his eyes to the Captain's. “So, Rep,” he said. “I'm not a gambler. But like it or not, we've got to lay our bets. Are we better off slogging through the dust around a mountain that's likely to burst any minute like a rotten egg, or flying through the air with those pods?” For this was what the Exile proposed.

  “I'm ready to lay mine,” Repnomar answered, and stood up, shrugging off the sheet, so that for a few minutes they were all sneezing and coughing in a cloud of dust. By the time Lethgro was able to breathe again (and that only through a handkerchief held to his face) she had already got Broz into one pod and was stowing the crows into another.

  The Exile, his eyes scrunched into slits, bustled about in the ruddy haze, taking gear from the pods. The light of the torch pierced only a little way into that slow rain of ashes, so that, as Repnomar observed, “We might as well be ten feet down in murky water.”

  There was no way of getting themselves into the pods, even if all the gear had been taken out; but what the Exile had now confessed, under the stress of imminent danger and long weariness, was that all this time they could have been flying, not in the pods but with them. “Though these wings,” the Warden said doubtfully, “look a little small for some of us.”

  What he thought, in fact, was that the flying apparatus the Exile was spreading out in the dust might suffice to lift a dog in a high wind, but not a person of his size and gravity. But the Exile made haste to explain that these little wings ("fins,” the Captain suggested tersely) were only to keep them steady in the air while the pods towed them. The only danger, he assured them somewhat doubtfully, would be from the cold, for the pods could pull them at a great rate through the air, faster than an arrow. But when the Warden asked him why, with this safe and rapid means of travel at hand, they had trudged so long through the snow and the choking ash, the Exile admitted that the little wings were not meant for living beings. He had not thought of them before, he said, because they were designed only for towing objects. And when the Warden wanted to know what kind of objects, the Exile seemed not to understand the question, but began to demonstrate how the fins could be attached to the Warden's legs and shoulders.

  To make their flight warmer, the Exile proposed to hang the stove from the first pod in line, and cluster the others (to which they themselves would be tethered like lambs to a wool cart) close behind. This required considerable rearranging of the cables that connected all the pods, and led to a long discussion of cordage between the Exile and the Captain, so that the Warden had to speak severely to them both. “For,” as he said a little testily, “if it's not going to work, we'd better find out before we're too deep in ash to move.”

  Certainly the powdery flakes were falling faster now. The Warden tied his handkerchief over his face, to keep the stuff out of his nose and mouth, and even the Captain had begun to move cautiously, not to stir up the ash. She too had made a mask of her handkerchief. But the Exile had no handkerchief; and the Warden, when he had seen enough of the Exile's grimaces, ripped still another piece from the tail of his own ragged shirt and handed it to the Exile, saying gruffly, “We might as well all look like bandits.”

  “Flying bandits,” the Captain said with a muffled laugh through her handkerchief. “We could pick a prisoner off the highest tower of Sollet Castle, Lethgro, once I get the hang of flying us.”

  For the Warden still refused to put their lives altogether into the Exile's hands, insisting that if the Captain could fly the pods from the ground, she could fly them from the air. So, when they were all three fitted with fins and harnessed to pods with the Exile's ropes, Repnomar took the little box, and saying cheerfully, “Here we go,” pressed a button; and they were hoisted like so many bales at a loading dock. The Captain let out a whoop of joy, and Lethgro gritted his teeth (which in truth were gritty enough, with the ash); but before he had time to mutter more than a scrap of prayer, they were streaming along like banners in a gale, or like birds borne down-Sollet on the wind. Except, as Lethgro reflected, that there was no wind to speak of but the wind of their own passage, so that the cold blast that tore at his ears and tossed his trailing legs like sticks in a torrent was only a measure of their speed through the dirty air.

  That speed was enough to make him wince inwardly as well as outwardly, and he kept an anxious eye on the Captain, for he remembered how she had crashed the largest pod into the cliff. It seemed to him that they must be going even faster now; and in the rushing, ripping wind of their flight he felt as naked and helpless as an unfledged nestling tossed into the highest wind of the year. It was true that in the great pod they had been flying blind, whereas now there were no walls to block their view; but the Exile's torch cut only a short way into the falling ash—enough, the Warden thought darkly, to show how fast they were tearing across country, but not enough to keep them from breaking their necks if another cliff suddenly loomed in front of them. Flying into that ash was like facing into a wind-driven downpour of rain, blinding and stinging and stifling. Lethgro had sometimes the dizzy feeling that he was upside down, for the rocks and snowbanks below, misted with the reddish haze, seemed to fly past like clouds in storm-time. And though, in this desperate and undignified position, he was glad not to be at the Exile's mercy, he was not sure if it was much better to be at the mercy of the Captain, who had started them off with such an unseemly whoop and now seemed bent on shaking them to pieces if she could find no cliff to crash them against.

  But in fact the Captain had settled very soberly to her task. She was glad to have the Exile's stove ahead of them, for it was better to be buffeted by a warm wind than a cold, and it meant she could push their speed higher without too much danger of freezing them all. This she did very determinedly, having made up her mind that her business was to get them through this ashy passage as quickly as possible and so come out into clear air again. Squint her eyes as she might, they burned sorely; and between that and the thick haze, she was hard put to see her course before her. But she pushed on mercilessly, thinking to herself that as long as her fingers were not too stiff to hold the box there was no need either to slow down or t
o stop, for the others had no work to do at all and could ride at their ease. Her hope was that they could fly like this for a full watch, or something near it, before they had to stop to thaw themselves. “And if we're not out of the ash by then,” she thought grimly, “we'll fly till we are.”

  Long before that time, however, she began to think of changing her plans. Lethgro, in the tumult of the wind, could not clearly understand her shouting, and the Exile did no better, but her gestures with the torch showed them which way to look.

  Ahead and to the left, there was a redness that could hardly be called light, for it lit up nothing. It was like the strange colors they had seen in the sky when they crossed the mountains into darkness—or, in the Warden's recollection, like the deadly glow of a burning forest seen through its smoke. But this redness seemed to come from a single spot, near (the Captain thought) to the horizon, if they had been able to see the horizon.

  Careering through the air as they were, with the noise of their own flight in their ears and the Exile's little fins barely sufficing to keep them on an even keel, they were ill-placed for conversation. When Repnomar tried to consult with the Warden by gestures, she came near to flipping upside down, and thrashed wildly for a little before the fins set her straight again. So, thinking that she was captain here and could steer her vessel as she liked (though it was only a cluster of pods), she turned the leading pod in a great curve, and they swept like circling birds toward the redness.

  19

  Of the Indigestion of Mountains

  Warden Lethgro was not an unreasonable man, nor, in general, an ill-tempered one; but to be dragged upside-down through the air in the direction of what might well be a bursting mountain (if it was not the maw of some uncouth and unfriendly god) seemed to him reason enough to feel surly. He had tried, when Repnomar first turned them toward the red glow, to express his disapproval by a vigorous waving of both arms. But that had only flipped him out of balance, and for a time he had spun and wobbled so violently that when his flight steadied again he did not know at first whether he was looking up or down. In the dark there was not much difference; but he saw in a little that the redness, which had been somewhat to his left, was now somewhat to his right. And it was when he had grasped the meaning of this (for his first thought was that there were two spots of redness, one on each side) that the Warden concluded he had a right to lose his temper.