140 - To fly

Had the truth slipped out somehow, about us? Or was it merely random? There was Skorsas’s theory, based on his certainty that I could take her: “She’s a draw, so the Director can’t want to get rid of her. He must have got orders from someone upstairs who’s got tired of her.” I saw him bite his tongue on his usual, you can do it.

It says much for the strength of our habit, I suppose, that once the Director announced “Karas Raikas against Niku Wahunai,” and then went on as if the world had not changed, and we could have flung ourselves into each others’ arms right there to no detriment, we still gave each other no more than a glance. Perhaps it was that neither of us truly believed it yet; or else we both knew what a show that would have been, and wanted to deny the buzzards.

That night after I’d crept into her room and we’d seized each other, I asked, “Is there a way it can be done in seven days?”

“Not by one.” Her eyes creased, as if at the shifting of a blade in her. “By two, perhaps.” That meant revealing to me her people’s secret. “Maybe I misunderstood what Lord Friend meant, maybe he will take me now, but child within… Chevenga, hold me, please, omores, hold me—” She clung, as did I, both trembling, and we stayed that way for a while, each being the baby in the mother’s arms and the mother both at once.

When we’d both found calm, I began to see specks of light in the darkness. “Can I help somehow without knowing what it is?” I asked; she answered no, not at this stage; if only I’d suggested this earlier. “It could be worse,” I said. “It could have been two months ago.” She nodded, gathering herself. “You must meditate, or pray, or some such thing, love,” I said, “to settle what is best.” She did, while I held her; I kept still and silent. Finally she whispered, “If this is wrong, may full justice fall on me. I’ll give myself to it, at home. Omores, can you sew, or is that women’s work among your people?” I could join two edges together, I told her, but was no tailor. That was good enough.

We slipped out into the night, meeting at the edge of the forest. She took me to her secret place, in the midst of thickets so deep one had to climb over them through the tree-branches. There was a fairly wide clearing, that she had hewn out; beneath a thatch of branches was a hole she’d dug, with several long bamboo rods and a chest in it. Before she opened it she looked at me, with last doubts, I guessed; so I swore silence, Second Fire come and Lord Friend Death hear me.

That first night, I couldn’t divine what it was anyway; she just had me sew wide pieces of sky-blue silk together, with a strong double stitch like sailmakers use, that she was very careful to see I did properly. She worked on something else that looked like a leather sack with an agglomeration of straps and loops and cords, that I obviously didn’t have the skill for.

All that eight-day our fingers flew, like the rabbit’s legs fleeing the fox. Meanwhile, I had Skorsas converting a goodly amount of the money into jewels, telling him I had someone performing a service for me which I must not tell him, but was not criminal. I must not let slip that it was another escape attempt, or else he’d be punished as Eliras had been for not turning me in; he’d be certain to be truth-drugged this time, now the Marble Palace knew who I was.

Her reckoning of a month had been assuming she’d creep out here as little as she had before, to avoid suspicion; now we ceased to care, and came all day, except for training, and all night except to sleep. Suspicion was roused: in the Pages someone waxed poetic on the tragedy of our love, and someone else on the tragedy of my love triangle. To the good: it was assumed Niku and I went to the woods to spend our last days together in privacy, and when we threatened anyone who followed us with painful death, they thought they knew why. The last two days we skipped training.

I joined the silk pieces into a triangular sheet larger than any garment, and she glued the seams to seal the holes. It looked like a sail; but what sort of boat could float up a cliff? When we had slid the bamboo rods into it, stretched it out to its proper shape with Niah wire, it looked like a giant blue kite, but triangular, with two wings like a bird and a rod for a tail. A kite big enough to lift a person? It would have to have rope for string. But Arko, being in a pit, rarely got a wind strong enough to lift even a child’s kite, by my reckoning.

“Moyawa,” she said. “It means single wing. Now a foreigner knows, Sea Mother…” Her eyes filled with tears. “Sky Father… forgive me…” I didn’t know, actually. “To fly, omores. No, there is no string; only the moyawa, and the wind, and you.”

“Fly?”

“When the Fire fell, the ancestors of my people were in the sky, in a great machine-wing, mid-journey. When they touched down, the world had fallen, so never again could the great wing fly, as was the nature of those things; they ceased to move when the old nations fell. But Rojhai, our first elder, still knew the making of the moyawa, the simple wing, the small wing—the single wing.” She did not stop working as she spoke, her hands lashing a knot on the leathern thing, which I suddenly realized looked, at its core, like a leathern breastplate, but much more complex. A person wore it. I should keep sewing, but I could not move.

“We had no boats. We could only flee from the wars to Niah-lur-ana by wing; all who could not fly fell into the sea and were lost. So flying is in our blood from the start. All through the years we have kept our secret, for it has always served us well against enemies.”

“But…” It was all I could to rouse my jaw from its slackness enough to talk. “How… ? A bird beats its wings; do you flap these somehow?” She laughed. If it was as she said, then every Niah was expert at it from young, as horse-peoples are at riding, so I seemed like a child with my questions.

“No, omores. The wind carries you. From a height, we fly, or on rising winds, as from hot fields, or el brandil sef, from fire. That’s how we’re going to get out of here.”

“The heat of a fire could carry a person above these cliffs?”

“Yes, and the wind much higher than that, if one knows how.”

I sat down, trying to keep my head from spinning long enough to think: of Arkans and the great metal birds they thought were the only things that could fly, of what advantages the A-niah had, being able to get out of impossible places, or in, of how they could scout and carry messages—doesn’t every general wish he had birds that could speak?—or attack from above, or drop things; of how they’d kept it secret, for so many centuries. I suddenly remembered her once saying her island looked like a hand with five fingers. “There must be mountains,” I’d said; one does not think of such shapes, not seeing land from above. She’d said quickly, “Yes,” and I’d thought nothing of it.

She was laughing again. No wonder she’d stayed so free in spirit in this cursed pit; she’d been able to see how to get out from the start. “Ah, mi pehali! I didn’t mean to floor you. We’ve hired ourselves out to generals, now and then, too—without letting them know how we are doing what we do. Remember Bodjal called City-Breaker?” In case you are not a student of military history, he was a Nellan lordling of four centuries or so ago who became king of Nellas, because no city, no matter how well-walled and guarded, could hold against him in a siege for more than a few days. The gate was always somehow opened, and no one ever seemed to discover how.

“That’s how he did it?” I gasped. “Your people?”

She smiled smugly. “Yup. And I’ll tell you no more—that’s too much already. Chevenga, here, put on the gesher, the… there’s no word for it. Harness is the closest, though you’re not doing what a horse does… I have to test it. If it will take your weight, it will take mine.”

I stepped into it carefully, putting my legs into the right loops and straps as she directed me, and she tightened it on me here and there. The cords converged at one carabiner at the back, which she hooked onto a rope that she’d hung from the branch of a tree. “Now lean forward and lift up your legs and hang,” she said, though I wasn’t sure the carabiner looked thick enough to be up to the task. I did anyway, and I was dangling face-down, swinging gently. “Feel like it’s loose anywhere? Hear any stitches ripping? Is it comfortable? Try bouncing up and down.” I did, as best I could. “Good… you see why that carabiner can’t be from just any smith; it’s Zak-wrought. Everything has to be the strongest and the lightest it can be, both.”

“You’d know better than I how this should feel,” I said. “Aside from that, yes, it’s comfortable, and sound, as far as I can tell.” She unhooked me and then tried it herself, making an adjustment here and there with skilled fingers. “I first made one when I was six,” she said. “You have to before you’re allowed to fly by yourself.”

“How… high can you go?” I said. “As high as…” Dare I imagine? “…mountains?”

She laughed again. “Higher! I’ve gone where the blue of the sky is dark, and the air barely thick enough to breathe if you pant like a runner. You just have to know where to find the moy—the rising air. There is one big one over this city—I can tell by the clouds—but it’s not fast enough, so we need fire.”

Now she laid out her plan. “I climb the cliff to the highest point I can—near the Lefaetas Patthine—and we set the fire in the woods near it. I’ve already set the place. You do that—I trust you more, love—while Mana is waiting a quarter turn around the pit, at the Lefaetas Inodem, and makes sure no one’s going to get in our way at the bottom. We then go to that lefaetas, you to the bottom, and I, to the top. I kill the guards”—we had, not easily, procured her a blow-tube and darts like a Mahid’s, and of course she’d have her axes—“and raise the two of you up.” The Inodem was one of the modern lefaeti, with two platforms, that go fast.

On the sixth night, the fight to come the day after tomorrow, the device was finished. But it must be fully tested. Niku was carefree in spirit, but in this she was as rigidly cautious as the oldest schoolmaster, in a way that was so instinctive that I could tell it had been passed down from one Niah generation to the next, for all that time, two millennia.

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