143 - I can't give you just one taste of the sky

It hadn’t felt as if any part had broken, either of the moyawa or me, but Niku checked over everything that might have, at least on the moyawa, with deft hands.

“I must be dreaming!” I said. “This can’t be real!” She came under the wing and sat down beside me, laughing, and touseled my hair. Of course I was like a child to her, learning this. “Any God that answers prayers, please let me live to do this again, somehow, somewhere.”

“You will, love,” she said. “If They are just. I am going to have to tell my people I told you; they won’t kill me out of hand because of the child within and that will give me time to argue that you were meant to know.” Part of that we didn’t plan, I couldn’t help but think.

“You’re Niah in spirit now, anyway,” she said. “Tyromos… I would have guessed, you would be. I never knew it was so much fun to teach someone who’s never thought of flight before. I love it. I want to take you up over my home with me... and show you how I see the world.”

“Maybe some day, somehow, you’ll teach me more. There’s nothing I can imagine wanting more.” My fingers clung to the harness-straps. I never wanted to get out. “Kahara!” My mind was back reading a scrawled line that shook from my fingers holding the paper. “The wing thing! That’s what he meant!”

I explained to her, Jinai’s augury. “The great thing with metal all over, clanking, that I thought would be good for all the world—that was the Great Press!—and then the next thing he said was, ‘The wing thing, that too.’ Kahara, Kahara… the first reading he did for me, he saw me flying, far above the earth! We both thought it was a dream; he’d seen some of my other dreams. Well, it could have been… but with this, it could be real!”

“My moyawa at home, I can do acrobatics with,” she said, grinning.

“Acrobatics? You mean do somersaults in the air… flying… on it?”

“Yes, loops, flips, spins… we have a game we play in the air. Hish-kah… you have a weighted ribbon, and your team has to get it to the other side, and you can pass it from one person to another…”

I had to. I must. Clinging to the idea that somehow, somewhere, there’d be another time, I forced my hand to reach back, to unhook. She helped almost absently, as if I were anyone. “I can’t believe I’m just lying here, talking perfectly reasonably about… flying. Because I’ve just done it. I’m going to doubt this tomorrow morning.”

“The morning of the day after tomorrow, when you are out of Arko, you won’t,” she said. I took a deep breath, and clasped my crystal. Let nothing go wrong.

“You were saying you’d rise on… whatever the words were… you know, in mountains, such as in Yeola-e, there are plenty of upwards winds. You’ll see a hawk rise on them; he’ll fly above the edge of a cliff and be flung straight upwards on his wings.”

“Yes. There is rising air everywhere, if you know how to find it.”

“You know the wind and the sky like the back of your hand, don’t you? All your life, and your ancestors’; it’s in your blood.” We got up. “I’ll carry it,” I said. “Just so I can touch it.” I balanced the moyawa on my shoulders and we walked back downwind.

“Rojhai said, ‘I refuse to let the idea of human flight die, just because some leaders are idiots’,” she said.

“Those whose folly led to the Fire, you mean.” She signed chalk. We’d got into the habit of speaking a mix of Yeoli and Enchian, because I did not know Niah, except for a handful of words I’d picked up from her, and we did not want to make each other hear Arkan.

We walked in silence for a while, her arm around mine on the bar of the wing. I didn’t mean to let my breath quiver, but it did. She reached up and felt my cheek, finding the tears. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“You’re completely tyrpang,” she said. “Sky-mad.”

“Yes, I am. Completely. Well, who wouldn’t be? When I was a child I used to fly in my dreams… that’s what it was, a dream.”

“I’m thinking I am going to be arguing to my people that Yeola-e should become family, so you can learn to fly.”

“Niku… when I get home, I have to fight the Arkans. Your people are fighting Arkans too. You’ve hired yourselves out as scouts before, as for Bodjal City-Breaker… but you kept the secret, how do you do that?”

“Swear the client against spying on us, and take off and land out of sight. There are ways. The darkness of night helps.” And kill anyone, friend or foe, who they catch spying, I thought. No way they’d have kept it secret this long without such ruthlessness.

“You can only scout at night?”

“No, daytime too. We go so high up, you can’t tell we’re not birds.” I laughed through my tears at that, the moyawa bouncing lightly on my shoulders. I wanted never to let it go. “But at night we can count campfires. Oh, and drop things. Fire into tents… or oil stores… ship sails burn well.”

“Especially red sails? As on an Arkan quinquereme?” She smiled, her bared teeth bright in the starlight. “But your people are going to want to kill me.”

“Yes, but I’m going to be fighting for you, love, and I know how to fight well. And I will have the Wasteega Foa on my side, as well, I’m sure.”

“The which?”

“It means… like your augur, seeing into the future, but it’s done differently… there’s a ritual. Remember I told you Si Kampa... S..sou... Lord Friend D—”

I threw my fingers over her lips. “Don’t say it, not when we’re doing something as risky as we’re doing, so soon!”

“All right, I won’t, omores. But remember, Lord Friend came to me in a dream?”

“And told you… yes. You had a reason to live. I thought you were going to tell me, ‘To meet a handsome stranger’.” She looked up at me, pursing her lips a little sideways. “Well, I didn’t know.”

“I will go to the Wasteega Foa and ask… Si Kampa said, ‘It’s time to come out.’ I couldn’t make out what He meant.”

Could her thought be the same as mine? “You are thinking, it was perhaps to make an alliance?”

“I did think it was to meet you. But I don’t understand it yet.”

“To tell someone outside of Niah-lur-ana… come out of the secrecy?”

“I think you needed to know. This war with Arko is the worst, the most vicious, with the cruelest massacres… that we’ve ever had. It feels like they are out to kill us all.”

I spoke what I had never spoken aloud, and yearned to write in letters that I’d never sent. “I want to tell every other head of state: the Arkans plan to pick us all off one by one. That can’t happen, if we are not one by one, but allied together.”

“Yes. And there’s what your augur told you… that ‘the wing thing’ would be good for all the world.”

“Well, it would be! We keep talking about war, but what could you do in peacetime? If you can fly from place to place on the wind, you could be couriers, able to carry true letters, not just pigeon-notes. If Haians learned how to do it, they could fly in to where fast healing help is needed. You could have flyers warning ship-captains of pirates… border-guards of invaders… and all manner of other things that my brain is too palsied with excitement right now to think of.”

“This is a moyawa, a single-wing,” she said. “One person. We have a-moytsva, too, double-wing: bigger ones that can carry two, or one with as much weight as another person.”

“All-Spirit!” I gasped. “Carrying supplies fast to places that need them… and travel, even for people who don’t have the skill…! For war… that means you could drop big things—or a lot of little ones. Or a unit of wings could place a unit of warriors, one each… behind the enemy’s lines or within walls… all the possibilities, Niku, I can’t even begin to imagine!” This was like getting gradually drunker. How would I ever believe it in the morning? I gripped the moyawa hard, making the bamboo grind into my finger-bones, in the hope that feeling it so solid and real would help.

“I’m actually proposing an alliance to you, semanakraseye,” she said, her tone turned more formal.

“Then we are proposing it to each other! Of course I agree; I’m the easy one to persuade.”

“It will be the hardest fight of my life,” she said. “I’ve been praying and thinking about it all eight-day.”

I balanced the moyawa on the point of my shoulder to wrap my arm around her. “I bet you have, love. Life didn’t hand us easy paths, either of us. But remember what Lord Friend told you. And made you imagine what would happen if you tried to die.”

“He is terrifying, even in a dream. I had a week of nightmares in that moment.”

I tightened my arm again. “Yes, but He is only death, love. You’ve fought seventeen fights in the Mezem... maybe the one against the little ones didn’t count, but the others certainly did. Hey… does Lord Friend fly?”

“Of course! Every God flies—what sort of silly question is that?”

“Then there is another similarity.” We’d been counting up all the ways Yeola-e and Niah-lur-ana were the same. They decided things by vote, which was deeply sweet to hear. “The way we see him, he flies, too.” We were close to the downwind end of the faib-field again, and the inevitable moment at which I’d have to let go the moyawa.

“Ha… you must look at the rest of us as groundlings. Earthbound ants… flightless primitives.” She poked me in the ribs, making me jump and the moyawa quiver tightly.

“Well, that’s the way our prejudices go. And the Arkans think we’re all savages, ha ha!”

“I think Yeolis would have an affinity for it,” I said. “At least if this Yeoli is any indication.” I could see Mana leaping at the chance, Krero and Sachara too. Anyone in the elite, really, who wasn’t afraid of heights, and only one or two were.

“As I keep saying,” she said, laying her hand on the side of my cheek. “Tyromos... tyrpang... tyriankatin…” I began to reach for the straps, to unto the harness, though every cell in me itched not to. She stopped my hand under hers. “Chevenga… you know, we can risk it one more time. I can’t give you just one taste of the sky and then take it away from you again.”

I froze. “But… we shouldn’t… so much is at stake…” How it feels like being torn in two, having one’s dearest wish and one’s plain duty so utterly opposed. I felt tears start in the wells of my eyes again, from the pure pain of it.

“You’re getting the feel of it. You just need not to land so hard. And even landing as hard as you did, it didn’t get damaged. The risk is slight.”

“You came down so lightly; how did you do it?”

“You just push out the chamir the full length of your arms, like this.” She mimed it, and I practiced it, making the moyawa lean back on my shoulders, and its tail touch the ground. “That makes you… stop in the air. In fact… let me get something, I’ll be back, if anyone sees you, kill them.” I unclipped Chirel as she ran off.

She was back soon, with a roll of wire. “Enshachik,” she ordered crisply, hooking me back on; obediently, I hung. “You have the sword unclipped? Never leave it like that when you’re flying.” I did it back up again. When I was back on my feet, she fastened the end of wire to the front of the harness.

“What are you doing?” She cackled gleefully. “You’ll see. Enshachik again. Now practice this… if you are turning so the wire goes this way, what do you do?” Shift my weight the same way; I soon got the idea, but she made me practice it thoroughly before I got back to my feet.

Paying it out as she went, she got about ten paces ahead of me. I realized; she was going to fly me, like a kite. “We’ll run together, and when you go up I will keep running and pull you,” she said. “You can’t get all that high this way, but you can get higher than you have.” My heart was trying to pound through my ribs again.

I was indeed getting the feel of it; this time I knew when to switch my grip and how loose to keep my hands, and how to turn when the wind threw me off. The moyawa felt like part of me. I was a bird, two, three, four man-lengths in the air. Tears blinded me again and all I could do was blink and shake them away; I dared not let go the chamir. As I came down I pushed out hard enough to stretch my arms just as she’d said, and landed with running steps.

All the way down the field, she flew me, four more times in all. Then it was truly time to stop—the more time we stayed here in the open the more we risked someone happening by, and we needed our sleep, too—and we flung our arms around each other. I just clung for a while, in the most desperate gratitude. “There,” she breathed into my ear, when we loosened our arms. “You are a flyer, Chevenga.”

“I will never be the same,” I breathed back.

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