Shadowed By Wings (6 page)

“ ’Bout time you woke up,” Egg grumbled petulantly. “You can’t do that, y’know, sleep late while the rest of us work. You can’t. And you can’t walk around like that, neither.” He gestured at me as color burned up his swarthy neck. “Y’ have to wear somethin’ that covers
all
of you—”

He cut himself short and his far-spaced eyes widened.

“What happened to your cuts?” he squealed, no longer sounding the bear but a cornered wild pig. “Turn ’round, turn ’round!”

I did so uneasily.

A strangled noise gargled from his throat and he back-stepped several paces. “Where’d they go? How’d they disappear?”

I gauged his reaction and calculated the possibilities. From the corner of my eye, I saw the carrion bird perched on the sandstone wall.

I said, deliberately, “I’m the Dirwalan Babu.”

“The
what
?”

“The Skykeeper’s Daughter.”

Sure enough, his eyes shot skyward again and he involuntarily flinched, remembering the dreadful appearance of the Skykeeper at the Lashing Lane.

“I heal like this sometimes,” I said with great certainty. “I have that power.”

Egg’s eyes skittered over me like a bead of water dropped upon a hot pan. Slowly, his overlarge face folded in on itself. “Why do inductees have to be assigned to me?” he whined; then he flapped his hands as though shaking out wet laundry. “We got work to do, hey-o. We’ll get no food tonight if our work ain’t done, an’ he’ll flog us after without venom on the whips.”

“I have a latrine to build.”

“You’ve been assigned to me; didn’t you hear what I said?”

“I heard.”

He stared at me, fat lips quivering. I refused to drop my gaze as a woman should before a man.

He grabbed his oily curls and pulled. “You ain’t a veteran, y’know. You can’t do what you like. You ain’t even a servitor. You’re an
inductee
. So you do what I say, an’ I’m tellin’ you: Muck stalls.”

“No.”

His face suffused with the color of crushed pomegranates, and for a moment I thought he’d tuck his great chin to his chest and charge at me, bearlike. But instead, he shuddered, glanced again at the sky, and gurgled, “We’ll all be whipped.”

He turned and lumbered back to the young boys mucking stalls.

“Faster!” he bellowed at them, snatching a pitchfork from a flaxen stack of clean bedding chaff. “You’re too slow; work faster!”

At his cry, a flock of roosting pigeons burst into flight. The carrion bird, perched upon the wall, shook her feathers at me and cackled angrily.

I picked up the shovel and set to work building my latrine.

I worked hard, familiar with the labor that had oft been my lot during my years in Convent Tieron, for of the two sorry latrines we’d boasted in the convent, either one at any given time had needed extensive structural repairs; as the youngest holy woman, I’d always been assigned the task.

By late noon, I’d dug the latrine hole and clumsily framed up two of the latrine’s four walls. Kratt’s cape was my only piece of clothing, and this I wore knotted shut in several places. The garment, however, offered poor protection against the sun. Heat dizzy, famished, and parched, I staggered toward the courtyard’s rusted pump.

Egg and my fellow inductees—the motley assortment of young boys he’d been screaming at all morn while they mucked out stalls—had long since moved into the adjacent courtyard. I was alone, though even now I could hear Egg in the distance, relentlessly badgering the inductees to work faster.

I was alone, that is, save for the dragons the veterans had returned from exercising some time ago; they now stood quietly in their clean stalls, either chewing maht, regurgitated crop food, or eating the fresh fodder in their mangers. A few preened, one membranous wing spread as best it might be in the stall while a scaly muzzle worked under and over the thin leather, rubbing away insects and the omnipresent red dust of our Clutch.

Other than the dragons, one more presence kept me from being alone: my mother’s haunt.

The wretched bird lofted soundlessly into the air and glided after me as I crossed the courtyard to the pump for a drink. I could feel her baleful eyes boring into my back, could feel her will pulsing behind my temples like a headache. She wanted me out of the stable domain, oh, yes. She wanted me to forget all this apprenticeship nonsense and spend my days searching for Waivia, whom I was certain was dead. Kiyu, sex slaves, didn’t oft live long, and Waivia had been sold into such slavery ten years previous.

I stumbled as I approached the pump, as if a gamy hand were trying to turn my feet in a direction different from the one I desired. I hunched my shoulders and resolutely walked on. As I neared the pump I stumbled again, harder, and I staggered the last few paces forward and caught hold of the pump’s cool iron to stop my fall. Behind me, the haunt perched upon the upswept corner eave above a stall.

Her will continued to throb feverishly behind my eyes.
Leave here. Find her
.

My knuckles turned pink as I gripped the pump. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if in doing so I could squeeze out her voice.

Leave here and find her.
Her will was more insistent now, as sharp and invasive as grit stabbing into an abscessed tooth.

With teeth clenched, I wrenched the pump’s handle up and down, then plunged my head under the cool water that gushed forth.

I kept my head under the water, hoping the cascading splash could shield her off, block out her insidious words. But it couldn’t. Of course it couldn’t. Her presence was an unwanted, unseen visitor trickling into my body, occupying me, threatening to entrap me in limbo and suspend me in nothingness.

“No!” I cried, and I flung my soaked head up from the pump. Water droplets arced into the air and scintillated in the sunlight like the shards of a shattered rainbow, flying higher than gravity should have permitted. They splattered against the perched vulture and sizzled like beads of lard dropped on live coals.

The vulture opened its beak and hissed at me.

“Leave me,” I hissed back as water ran from my drenched hair and soaked the neck of Kratt’s cape.

Leave here,
the haunt countered, and its will fell like a hammer blow against my head. I gripped my ears and staggered away from her and the water pump. I didn’t get far before collapsing against the iron gate of a stall.

“Re help me,” I gasped.

I needed venom to stave off the haunt.

I felt new eyes upon me then, and I raised my head and met the gaze of a dragon in her stall. Her horizontally slitted eyes blazed with a feral sentience; I caught my breath. Suspended in amber irises that seemed back-lit by flame, her pupils widened, then swiftly contracted. The forked tip of her tongue slid out between her firm, ivy green gums. A droplet of venom fell from her tongue to the flaxen bedding chaff. It sat there, at the periphery of my gaze, like a nugget of wet obsidian.

The dragon’s opalescent dewlaps began to inflate. Her sienna wings, folded along her flanks, shuddered. The black claws at the tips of her wings twitched once, twice, thrice, clacking together like wooden needles.

If I stayed much longer draped over the gate to her stall, she’d lash out at me with her venom-coated tongue.

The craving that followed that thought thrilled, then horrified, me.

I hurled myself from her stall and staggered backward, away from the dragon. The buzzard perched on the eaves clacked its beak at me.

With a savage cry, I began scooping up rocks, pebbles, and handfuls of grit from the courtyard ground.

“Get out of here; go!” I shrieked, and I hurled the rocks and pebbles at the haunt. “Go, go; leave me!”

One of my rocks hit the bird square on the breast. She shrieked and shook her head at me. Another struck the roof tiles just behind her. With another cry, she launched into flight.

I ran after her, hurling expletives and rocks. She rose higher into the air, slowly. Unhurried. She lazily flapped beyond the confines of the stable domain and glided from sight.

I stood there, panting, one fist clenched around a remaining rock.

I had to eat. Surely that would fortify me somewhat and help me ignore my mother’s relentless will.

Surely.

Something
had to help, and it couldn’t be venom. I couldn’t descend into those beguiling, debilitating depths as I had only a short year ago.

Shuddering, I returned to the pump, to where a pile of fresh fodder sat. I began sifting through it, frantically looking for nuts to eat.

FOUR

S
undown.

A hot, earthen scent hung in the air, as if a huge loaf of mud, wreathed by jungle bracken, was baking in an enormous clay oven. That smell is, understand, peculiar to a Clutch Re twilight during the Fire Season.

I was precariously balanced atop two of the braced walls I’d constructed during the day, hammering in a rim cap to give my latrine more stability during monsoon gales. As red streaked the gloaming, a lithe, somewhat effeminate servitor returned to the courtyard. I paused in my work to watch him kneel before the battered cauldron that sat in the primitive cooking pit outside the apprentices’ hovel, not far from a great butchering table and a line of hutches, the latter of which were filled with grunting renimgars. Cupping his palms about his mouth, the lithe servitor blew the embers beneath the cauldron to life. My empty stomach torqued at the mere thought of food. I wearily turned back to my work.

Sometime later, the inductees staggered wordlessly into the courtyard.

They all crossed the court through its center, keeping a goodly distance between themselves and where I worked. One inductee in particular slunk by as if I were a kwano snake poised to strike. I’d earlier snatched the boy from Egg’s service, without Egg’s knowledge, when I’d needed a pair of hands to hold up the crooked little walls of my latrine while I hammered temporary braces into place. I’d had to press the young inductee into aiding me through use of hissed curses and threats. Only his fear of the Skykeeper had overcome both his fear of Egg and his outrage at obeying a woman, and a deviant one at that.

As the inductees shuffled toward their hovel, the servitors and veterans likewise returned from their work elsewhere in the stable domain. I felt their eyes upon me as I worked, and I drove in the nails I was pounding harder, ignoring the trembling in my exhausted arms and legs, ignoring the stiffness of aching neck muscles. As my hammer blows rang assertively around the stables, the young men’s astonishment that a woman could possess even my paltry skill with tool and wood tingled against my back like stinging nettles.

The faggots beneath the great cauldron began to glow as red as the twilight sky, and the broth scent of gruel wafted from its depths. The young man designated as cook stirred the pot vigorously with a great wooden ladle and ordered an inductee to fetch water for him, another to fetch more faggots from the pile stacked under the thatched eaves of the hovel, a third to feed the caged renimgars.

The veterans eased their scarred, muscled bodies down to the ground while the servitors crouched on their haunches not far from them. Although I wasn’t looking for him, I was acutely aware of where Dono sat, sprawled long-limbed upon the ground.

Despite his hostility toward me yesterday, part of me was glad to see him, for he was familiar. He was clan.

Though in truth, I and my mother had been pronounced nas rishi poakin ku when I was but nine, when we were ousted from the pottery clan for her crimes against Temple in her efforts to buy back Waivia. Even if I
had
been declared an unstable, violent person unable to form kin bonds, neither Dono nor my heart knew it, and I longed for a simple look, a small sign of support, from my former milk-brother.

Neither was forthcoming.

Realizing that I was only delaying joining my fellow apprentices for the evening meal, I reluctantly quit my work. I gingerly lowered myself from my perch, praying the while that the walls wouldn’t collapse upon me during my descent; then I stiffly gathered up the tools and replaced them in the crate. My every muscle felt set in mortar.

As I joined the apprentices, I tried to walk as if I weren’t tired, tried to act as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a woman to be present in the dragonmaster’s stables. Try as I might, I could not ignore the stiff silence that fell upon the crowd of youths at my approach.

The dregs of crimson from the setting sun melted into the star-speckled sky. The lithe servitor designated as cook banged his ladle upon the great butchering table, and the stacks of wooden bowls upon the table wobbled.

“S’ready,” he announced, and a two-clawful or so of youths sprang up from the ground, grabbed the wooden bowls from the table, and jostled into a queue before the cauldron. I assumed these industrious youths were all servitors, for the scars upon their backs bespoke previous years’ participation in Mombe Taro, but their ages were too young to mark them as veteran apprentices. The cook ladled gruel into their outstretched bowls, which were then taken to the eldest of the apprentices, clearly the veterans, seated and reclined about the ground. With all the pomp of placing an offering upon a Temple altar, the servitors placed the bowls of food before the veterans.