193 - Too valuable to put on point

I mostly slept off the ill effects of the night before. Pehahkah, surprisingly, doesn’t leave that painful a head. Niku got me all but leaping out of bed when she said, “The sooner you’re up, the sooner we’re in the…” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “…sky.”

We windboarded to Ibresi after noon meal, and she insisted on teaching me technical things first, though, such as all the Niah names for parts of the wing and harness, types of wind and clouds, moves made in flight, and so forth. “Stop looking up as I speak to you, Vaimoy Sala,” she kept saying. It was hard, when hundreds of man-heights above us, people were whirling and looping.

Then she took me to the gently-sloping hill where Ibresian A-niah first learn to fly, which they do just after learning to run. None of the other students was older than three or four; with two older kids or grown-ups clasping thongs fastened to the wing-tips and calling instructions, the tykes would run down the hill, with tiny legs flashing and shrieking giggles, until they and their miniature wings left the ground. Once they could land well, they graduated to wings without thongs. Then they must build one themselves—a simple one—and fly it until they were good enough to use the good ones.

Of course I was a sensation; everyone dropped everything or came down to gather around as I harnessed up, shrilling “Vaimoy Sala!” and “moyiri drakiriar!”, which Niku politely told me meant “the flying foreigner,” when it actually means something more like “the flying mud-creature.” No training wing for me; they don’t make them that big. I’d use one of Niku’s spares. “You don’t need two people hanging onto you, either,” she said. “You’re past that. But you still need to get more of the feel of doing it by yourself.”

So, towering over the other fledglings, I practiced. Like many things, it is about getting the feel, which you cannot lose, once you have it, and which makes everything else possible. It’s much simpler than many other skills, in truth—it’s not like becoming a warrior, for instance, which takes years—making me see that once the secret was out, there would be many people in the air in short order.

I had started to understand how to turn and how to rise and fall in Arko; now, in just a bead or so, I got it down much better. I learned how to seize that moment of lift and leap into the air as I took off; I learned to land on my feet consistently, if not always in the same place, at least in still air. The hardest thing, Niku told me, was to land on an exact point; the best A-niah flyers can come down from a thousand man-lengths and land balanced on one foot on a turtle-shell, and they are always practicing. Even off the bigger hill nearby, I could barely get within twenty paces of last time.

Soon the kids got bored of watching me and wandered off back to their own sky-bound pursuits, including a flying game that involved trying to get a weighted ribbon past a certain line, while the other team tried to take it away and do the same on the opposite end of the designated section of sky. One pair of girls was teaching a dog how to fly, on a specially-rigged wing. “Is that possible?” I asked Niku. Since I’d met her, I’d been less inclined to assume anything was impossible.

“Oh yes, they can fly. We’ve bred them for the ability. They can’t all do it, and they don’t know how to find a moygash”—a rising wind—“so you have to whistle them to you, but they can go high.” I’ve been using that to encourage, or perhaps shame, humans who doubt they can do it ever since.

Next she wanted to teach me more about flying high, how to feel for moygashen and so forth, which is done in a double-wing with a teacher. We leapt off the cliff again and Ibresi sank away beneath us.

There are two kinds of moygashen, she had taught me on the ground: rukamoy, or wind driven upward by mountains or cliffs, and branmoy, wind rising because it is warm. The barren western islands of Niah-lur-ana are very good for that, she told me, because they are made all of black rock, which gets very hot in the south Miyatara sun. There are ways to find moygashen, she told me, both by the feel and look of sky, sea and land. Doing that well enough to fly long distances takes years, as does knowing how to feel in your bones how high you are, or how fast you are moving up or down; she wasn’t even sure that it wasn’t something I could learn, thinking perhaps the A-niah are born with it. “Maybe you’ll be how we find out, omores.”

We flew and she taught and I learned, practicing moves that can’t be done on the hill, wheeling and diving and rising again, embraced by the brilliant blue of sea and sky. I kept thinking, the most sublime imaginings that Arkans have of Celestialis are not so beautiful as this, which is real. Love, if you marry me, you must move away from here, I thought. Are you sure you want to? Do you love me that much? Should you?

Of course she might well be thinking she could move back afterwards; she’d still be young. Would she just take Vriah, and other children we might have, with her? We hadn’t discussed it yet. We have more pressing things on our minds, I thought. For one thing, there’s no certainty we’ll both come through the war alive.

Right about then she gasped, “Oh kak!”, the Niah word for kyash, and pulled the chamir in hard, sending us into a whistling dive. “I have to drop you off and get my moyasef.”

“What? That means—war-wing? Why?” I could feel tension in her, more than from just flying.

“The Arkans are attacking,” she said between her teeth.

“What? Where? How do you know?” I looked all around, and I could see nothing but peacefully sparkling sea. But every other winger, I saw, was diving too. I heard a distant sound like a deep trumpet, then another; below, people were running on the beach, calling others in from the sea, carrying windboards.

“The outer scouts, watching Ro, signaled. There’s a high one above us, flying the news.” The A-niah have patterns of movements in the air that mean things. “Twenty-one ships.”

“Twenty-one ships? All-Spirit… kevyalin...” Now my heart came to my throat. We were still waiting for our cormarenc. Why now? All-Spirit… did they find out I’m here?

“Tell me how can you best use us,” I said.

“We can’t, omores. They’d see the wings.” The other Yeolis, she meant.

“Me, then. Put me on point. I don’t care if I’m a guest.” My war-gear was in the guest house on Stranger’s Island, I remembered. Kyash… I should have been keeping it closer to me.

“You’re too valuable to put on point.”

“Too valuable? Ha ha—that’s a joke, right? You remember I’m going home for the purpose of being on point for my whole nation, yes?”

“Your people would never forgive us if you got killed fighting here.”

“Love, they wouldn’t forgive me no matter where I got killed, so it doesn’t matter where! I fight Arkans on the other side of the Earthsphere, it’s still good for Yeola-e!”

“Ertrank—it’s you! How good are you at shooting a seeshur? How good at a boarding action?”

“Shooting a what? I’m great at it! Boarding action—Niku, how many times have you seen me fight?

“Ertrank, tsunai... you’ll need to swear someone else to silence, the oaths... they’re family and they need to be there...... so you’ll have your own as backup... curse it! Who in your elite could do that so quick?”

“Niku... how many times have you seen me fight by myself? Did I need an escort in the Ring?”

She thought again, her teeth bared and eyes half-closed as the wind beat at us. “No... no... you and I will be able to work together... sure. That will free up Tikur to shoot for someone else.”

You want me with you in this, I thought. As I want you.

“But your gear is on Ibresi and mine is on Strangers’ Island,” I said. “How far away are they? Is there enough time to get mine?” I still saw no sign of ships. We were lower, perhaps half-way down, as far as my drakiriar eyes could tell. The bangs in my ears were bad enough to hurt.

“No metal armour in the air, omores. You miss the ship, you sink...”

“I can swim in mine.”

“But then your people are going to wonder where you’re going to fight without them and you’ll have to come up with some kak-story and Krero won’t want to let you and that’ll take time… omores, it’s either argue with them and have Chirel, or borrow sword and leather from us.”

An easy choice, really. “I’ll borrow sword and leather.” I wanted Chirel, but it wasn’t as if it was the only sword I’d ever fought with. And Krero would forgive me if I came back in one piece.

She brought us down to a place I’d never seen; a high rocky plateau where there were several long low buildings, roofed with cormorant-feather thatching. Many of the other wingers were landing there; people ran carrying rolled-up wings out of the buildings. I saw someone lay one on the ground and lean down from one end, and then the whole thing sprang open instantly, fully rigged as far as I could tell. Other people ran with weapons that looked like small crossbows with multiple arms and strings and some sort of mechanism, and quivers of short bolts.

We came down heart-stopping fast at the end of a row of wings. A girl of about fourteen dashed up with Niku’s two axes and a full sack, as we unharnessed. Her eyes widened white all around when she saw me, but then she was taking fast orders from Niku; I caught my new name among the words, and the girl laid down the things, saying something back, and ran off.

“She’s getting you leathers and axes and a sword.” I had played with Niku’s axes a little in Arko, but not enough to learn much; still, an edged weapon is an edged weapon, and they’d be there if I somehow lost the sword. She’d said nothing about a shield; too heavy to carry on a wing, I guessed.

She pulled on her own shark-skin armour. We were beside a wing coloured to look like an eagle, with a white circle of wave on each wing; the girl had sprung it open, I guessed. One thing it had that I’d never seen on a wing before: a very slender wire rigged tight about a handwidth away from the leading edge. “Don’t touch, it’s sharp,” she said, seeing me looking, though weapon-sense was telling me, too. “And remember it’s there. It’s to cut rigging, if that’s necessary, and take off enemy heads if you crash among them.”

The sword-side spar of the chamir had two of the crossbows fastened onto it, one above the other. They had, I saw, six strings and twelve arms each, “They’re the a-seeshur; six bolts in each, and you can shoot them off as fast as you can pull the trigger. They turn on those points there, see?” The one I touched was attached to the bar by a joint like the shoulder of a skeleton, so it could be turned any way. I tried it; it moved easily, but stayed where I left it. “See these?” She pointed to a row of small bundles of arrows cinched to the bar above the seeshur, with loops of leather attached to their fastenings. “Pull hard on this and they’ll snap into your hand. You nock again by turning this; that moves the machinery. See this too”—a thicker loop of leather attached to my harness—“pull it and it will release your harness with you in it from the wing. Don’t even look at it while we’re high.” I tried these things, and everything else I could, short of a shot, to familiarize my hands with it all.

“We’re going to burn and sink them all but the flagship,” she said. No wonder I was seeing tendrils of torch-smoke here and there among the ranged wings. “My unit is on the flagship, because we’re elite. First we will do shooting runs, to soften them up; I dive, you hit as many as you can. Shoot the deckers, not those in the rigging; you’re a beginner and they’re easier to hit. Twelve shots and then we go back up and you re-load, then we do it again. Until you’re down to twelve. Then we board.”

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