187 - We are the flying family

I told her… she asked me to marry her anyway… rather emphatically… did I dream that? Am I dreaming still? The sun hung low in the sky, golden yellow. We had dozed; the pig was probably ready and people wondering where we were. We heaved ourselves up and put ourselves back in as close as we could get to order.

The clearing wasn’t as far away from the gathering as I’d thought. Talk could not be heard, but raised voices could. “Oh, there are the lovebirds!” Sach said.

“Lovebirds who sing loudly,” Krero said.

“What? Where?” Niku said, blinking innocently. “I’m sure we were sparring.”

“Obviously,” Sach grinned. “I know I grunt in perfect rhythm whenever I spar.”

“I’ve never had a complaint about my song, I’ll have you know,” I said. Vriah was awake, and rooting, so Niku took her to the breast again. “Our chocolate child, conceived from love in the halls of death.” I felt happier than I had for a long time, perhaps ever, right down to my bones.

The pig had been disinterred and lay on a trestle, red-brown, gleaming and smelling indescribably good, charred tree-leaves folded back from it. Everyone got handed a banana-leaf with a big piece of pork, an opened bundle of spiced earth-apples and mangoes and a polished sea-shell full of roasted cormorant egg, the white cooked hard, the yolk a thick yellow soup. Cormorant meat and oil are both inedible, apparently, but the eggs have a delicious, delicate flavour, a bit like shellfish.

As we finished eating, the sun sank towards the sea, turning orange. It was time to go, before the wind died completely. I had to stand on rank with Krero.

Sent by the breeze caught in the windboard’s sail by Niku’s skilled hands, we skimmed standing across orange-sparkled water, my weight joined to hers by my arms around her, the baby slung happily on her shoulder. The main island of Niah-lur-ana, Ibresi, had good cliffs to launch from, she told me. “We have to climb fast to catch the last of the light, omores.”

A-niah have moyawa-bases at the top of good cliffs, I learned, with buildings in which the wings are stored. As we climbed, my heart began to pound, as I saw wings in the air, here and there, like square-winged birds. We went inside to get one; Niku said, smiling, “Maybe this looks familiar,” and touched her hand affectionately to one of the rolled bundles on the pole-shelves. I recognized the blue silk that I had helped sew together in Arko. The wing that was your and Vriah’s freedom, and my first taste of flying. My eyes burned, just a little.

“Hah,” she said, moving on. “What you did there was… elegant leaping. Now, my love, you are truly going to fly.” She picked a larger one, and we put it together near the cliff edge, the wind still strong enough up here to whip our hair. Vriah cooed and burbled happily. A few other people were around, some jumping in startlement when they saw me, some just staring.

We harnessed in, Vriah slung tightly on Niku’s back, and squeaking excitedly, knowing what came next. “Now I know you are not used to running off cliffs, love,” she said when we’d done the enshachik, the test of the harness while we hung. “Because it seems like death. But what you must understand is that now it’s the opposite. You stop running as we’re about to go over, and that is death. For all three of us. Got it?”

“Second Fire come, I won’t stop,” I said. Having felt a wing lift me when I’d entrusted myself to it before would help.

“Hold tight,” she said. “Your body is one with mine, else we are a ship with no rudder; got it?”

“And death for all three of us again, got it,” I said.

“Good. Go!”

It happens faster than should be possible, for something so wonderful. A few steps of that most mundane thing, running, and then the ground is gone, your weight is on the harness instead of your feet, and you are a bird, a hundred man-lengths high, the world suddenly turned into the place of dreams. The sun had sunk beneath the sea, leaving the sky a band of orange across the western horizon and purple at its apex, with a few high curving clouds touched with orange, like frozen flames. Land distant, the tree-tops hazy black below us, we were of the sky.

With unthinking skill, she steered us seaward. Look back, I saw we were not falling, but rising, the cliff-edge now below, an updraft like in mountains lifting us. “The sun always rises in the east?” she said smiling. “Watch this.” As we went higher, its brilliant scarlet edge came back up over the horizon, like dawn. Red light caught each strand of Niku’s black hair, ruffling in the wind, and the curly golden wisps of Vriah, who giggled in ecstasy.

The ground so far below, all our lives entrusted to this tiny craft, and not a shred of fear in either of them… again I felt the mind’s protest, I can’t believe this is happening, as I had in Arko, while reality flew, so to speak, in its face. “Here, omores,” she said. “You take the chamir. You know enough.” I put my hands on it, and she let go. My body still had the feel of it, from the grass-faib field in Arko. She laid her hand on my cheek.

We are the flying family, I thought. She will marry me though she knows. I was suddenly blinded with tears. Life was too perfect to bear dry-eyed.

†

It was almost pitch-dark when we came to the council fire, which was on a beach held as sacred on Ibresi. She had handed Vriah off to Baska, again, for this. The Oracle and the Speakers were all there, as were many more officials I had not met, many of them obviously military. One hard-eyed woman who wore armour with the sigil of a wing on one shoulder and a windboard on the other, a longsword, a shortsword and two Niah axes, looked me up and down without pretending to hide it. I had come unarmed, to show trust; they far outnumbered me anyway. “That is Breicia aht Krashna, nar sept Maekun, Speaker to Armies,” Niku whispered to me, “our high commander.”

The flames of the fire suddenly turned blue for a moment, and all talk ceased. They have a powder which does this when you throw it on a fire, I learned later; it was the sign that the council would start. There were some ritual words, and then Riahla stood, and said something coldly to me, which Niku translated.

“So here you are. The first stranger to own our secret, after thousands of years.”

I had not sat down. “I don’t consider myself owning it,” I said in Yeoli, and Niku translated to them. “But I know that I have been extraordinarily honoured.”

“It was our charge to keep, our safety, our strength,” Riahla said, her voice thick with emotion. “And now we are told it is no longer. The Oracle spoke… but who are you, that our Gods know you?”

“What I am to Them, I cannot say. I do not know Their minds. I know what I will be to Arko, though.” How would they take that? There was silence; many had their eyes closed, giving my words, or Niku’s translation of them, full attention. I moved closer to the fire, to let those who were watching see me better.

“Best if I don’t say my plans in detail; but I see a way to drive Arko entirely out of Yeola-e. It will be costly to them, of course, in lives, which means a relief for every other nation that is beset by them.”

“So you are saying that it would be better for us if we sent our warriors to fight with you rather than stay here and fight for ourselves?”

“I am saying, do both. It will take only a few of you fighting with my army to make the difference an army has with wings. Scouting, breaking sieges, these things take only a few. I broke a siege as one of ten once.” Again, I shouldn’t be too modest, as I asked them to entrust themselves to my command. “There’s no way that few can be more effective against Arko than by being the eyes, as it were, of a great army, as well as the instant siege-breakers. You know better than I, for serving Bodjal City Breaker and the others. I will see where the Arkans are blind. Say a hundred of you join me; how great a loss is that, when you can muster thousands here? But it would be like having thousands added to my army.”

Breicia spoke, in a firm voice that reminded me of Emao-e. “Sometimes that hundred can be very important in the right place.”

“Exactly. That’s what I mean. But if you mean here, you have another hundred. Speakers and commanders of Niah-lur-ana, even if only ten of you joined me, I would still have eyes where the Arkans were blind.” No one argued with that. “Another possibility: the Yeoli navy was not entirely destroyed, though all our harbours are in Arkan hands. We have more than a hundred, now, sailing as privateers. Perhaps part of our alliance pact can be their aid here.”

Breicia snorted, raising her chin. “We need no aid from ships.” And groundlings, I heard between the lines. Well, no harm in offering.

“You’ve been given something no commander we’ve ever worked with before ever had,” Riahla said. “Knowledge of the wing.”

“Yes, and I think because of that I could do things with it that no groundling general has ever done. I want to learn to fly myself. I already have, some.” Riahla’s mouth thinned into a taut line, paling her brown chin.

“Here is what I want to know, Chevenga.” A clear-voiced middle-aged man, who by his headdress looked like he might be the next rank down from Breicia. “Niku affirms the Arkans do not have the secret. But we also know that you were truth-drug-scraped in Arko, after she left. How can that be?” A deeper silence fell.

I told them, as close to verbatim as I could, how the Mahid had refused to believe it. Smiles began twitching at solemn faces; then the Oracle laughed, and most of the others took that as permission. “Later when they wanted truth out of me again, a Sereniteer took a tool to my privates. I asked him why couldn’t he just truth-drug me. He said, ‘It doesn’t work on you.’” I felt at ease enough now to say, “Oh, sure, go ahead and laugh! It wasn’t so funny for me.”

But Riahla was still standing, stiff with anger. “How do we know you will cherish it as we do?” she said.

I spoke from my heart, still singing from flying. “How could anyone not?” I recounted trying it in Arko, and how I had felt. “Tyromos was what Niku said I was: sky-mad, right?”

Riahla was not mollified. “Cherish it, yes... enough to want it, certainly,” she said. “We’ve killed to keep it from being stolen. Others, and ourselves. Now one of ours has just given it away.” I felt Niku go tense beside me. There was muttering among the others.

“If you were to name the price you wanted,” I said, “what would it be?”

That was a mistake. “Now all those deaths count for nothing, Yeoli Speaker? There is no price! We cannot sell this!” The muttering grew.

“Speaker to Sea,” I said, “if I leap off a cliff so that only A-niah know it again, I take Yeola-e with me. What did the Oracle say? Did I misunderstand?”

“No,” she said, casting her eyes down. “You did not. But I am no Oracle, nor a God. I feel angry as a person, and a Niah.”

The best thing always, with that, is to hear it. “I don’t blame you,” I said. “You had your choice taken away.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What would you endure to make it right for us?” The muttering was suddenly loud again, and I heard the same word several times, shulpiteh.

“What are you proposing?” I said. “I would endure anything except that which harms my people.”

“Because you are their Speaker, I understand,” she said. That was how she and I were most akin; I remembered what Niku had told me about how the A-niah ran things by semana kra.

“Right now, I’m their only hope against Arko, also,” I said. If we were conquered, every nation on the eastern Miyatara was weaker, they knew. I would be banking on that as I sought alliances.

Riahla looked to the Oracle, who, though I wouldn’t have thought she could see well enough in firelight, lifted her chin yes.

“I would be content if our Gods spoke to you,” Riahla said. “If you know more than just one of us emotionally and carnally, then I will be content to have you as family.” In the quieter talk of the others I heard it again, shulpiteh.

I slipped a glance at Niku. She looked as if she hadn’t quite expected this, but was not afraid.

“I agree to that,” I said.

“Good,” Riahla said.

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