Shadow Gate (21 page)

By morning, Zianna was sniffling. They slogged through intermittent rains all day, drying out when the sun shone.

By the next morning, Zianna had started to cough. Although Nallo explained that they had not yet begun to climb into the Soha Hills, this was rugged country, sparsely inhabited, and rough walking on a path that sometimes was smooth and easy and sometimes little more than a gouge barely wide enough for one foot. Several times Nallo stopped and, pointing aloft, marked the passage of an eagle high overhead.

After some days they reached the outlying hills and began climbing. As they toiled up the first slope, slick from the rains, Avisha slipped. She lost her hold on the washtub, and it slid downslope and spilled its contents every which way on the wet hillside among trees and scrub.

She scrambled down through thornbush and prickle-berry to retrieve their belongings and the precious bag of rice while the others huddled under such cover as the woodland gave them. Her father's cordmaking stand—the one special thing of his she had salvaged from the ruins of the house—had broken in half. The fire had weakened it, and the fall snapped it. Just like her life. She sobbed, holding the pieces. Papa had handled this so gently, and now it was gone. It couldn't be fixed. None of it could be fixed.

“Vish! What are you doing down there?”

Of course Nallo had no idea how sharp her voice sounded.

“Almost got everything,” she called back.

A length of bright orange cloth, not theirs, had gotten stuck among prickleberry. She pushed over to it, careful of thorns. The cloth was stained, wet, torn. Below, tumbled
into the bush, lay the corpse of a young woman, freshly killed: blood stained her thighs and belly. She'd been raped and had her abdomen cut open in a jagged line.

“Vish?” Nallo's voice drifted down to her, but she might have been a hundred mey away for all it mattered.

Flies crawled in and out of the gaping mouth. Her fingers had been eaten away, and her eyes were gone, two empty pits. Abruptly, her belly stirred, the skin rippling. A bloody face popped out of the cut. Black eyes stared at Avisha. She shrieked. A small animal darted away into the brush.

“Vish!”

Her throat burned. Her eyes stung. She backed up, tripped, fell rump-first into a tangle of bushes. Her hands brushed a trailing branch of prickleberry, and blood bubbled up on her palm. Scrambling back, she found the washtub. But as she climbed the slope, dragging the washtub behind her, she kept losing her footing and slipping backward. The ghost of that dead woman was trying to drag her into the shadows. Claws bound her ankle, tugging at her. She whimpered, but it was only a vine caught around her foot. She wrenched the vine loose, and climbed. After an eternity she reached the road. She was scratched, soaked, caked in dirt. Blood dripped from her palm. She wiped her hair out of her eyes.

Nallo wasn't even looking at her.
She
was staring up at the sky, mouth open, rain washing her face.

A huge eagle swooped low over them. Avisha ducked. Jerad wailed. Zianna hid her face in her hands, sobbing. The creature banked around and, flaring its wings, struggled to a landing in an open space above them, beside the path. It stared at them with eyes as big as plates and a beak large enough to rip open a poor girl's belly so every manner of vermin could crawl in.

“Is that blood on its feathers?” said Nallo. “Look how it's holding its wing. It's injured.”

“Look at that beak!” sobbed Avisha. “Those talons! We can't walk past it.”

“Have you ever heard of a reeve's eagle killing a human being?” Nallo picked up Zianna and began walking up the path.

“Nallo! I'm afraid!”

Jerad burst into tears. “Won't go. It's so big!”

“Stop it, Vish! Look how you've got him blubbing! That bird isn't going to hurt us.”

That bird was staring at them, deciding which was plumpest. “How can you know?”

“Stop shrieking! Look how it gets your brother and sister scared.”

“C-Can't we just wait until it leaves?”

“No! No! No! No! No!” sobbed Zi.

Nallo set the little girl down roughly. “We'll stand here in the rain until the cursed bird flies off and we'll all be dead by then anyway.” Abruptly, horrifyingly, Nallo, too, began to cry.

The rain pattered over them as they wept. Avisha's clothes were wet, her feet were cold, and her face was muddy, smeared with dirt. Her hand hurt, and that girl down there was dead and mutilated and abandoned, just like she was going to be. Everything was the worst it could be. She wished Papa was alive because he could have fixed it all but he was dead. Why did Papa have to die? Why did everything go so bad? Why couldn't they just all be at home in their good little house all dry, sitting on the porch like they always did when the first rains came and watching the wet over the other houses and over the fields and woodland and sipping on the last of the year's rice wine that Papa always held over for the first day of the rains and the promise of a new year? Now there would be a new year without Papa in it, nothing good at all, everything torn and broken and bloody and hopeless.

She kept gulping, trying to stop crying, but the sobs kept bursting out, shaking her whole body. It wasn't fair.
It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. Why did any of it have to happen?

The eagle chirped, a delicate call at odds with its size.

Jolted out of her misery, Avisha turned to look. The eagle flapped, rose awkwardly, then dove along the path, talons raised and ready to hook them.

Avisha shrieked. She grabbed Jerad and threw herself flat, Jerad squirming beneath her. The heat and roil of the eagle passed over her body.

Below, men yelled out in a panic. Then they screamed.

She lifted her head to see men scattering away from the eagle's attack. The eagle had plunged into a group coming up the path. With talon and beak it slashed and cut and tore.

Avisha pushed Jerad's head down. “Don't look!”

Nallo cried out. “Vish! Those are soldiers like the ones who burned the village. Run!”

Like the ones who burned the village.

Like the ones who could rape and murder a girl in the woods.

She bolted, slipping, cursing, weeping with terror, sprinting into the woods where she might hope to hide. Glancing back, she saw the batting wings, the slash of talons, the flash of gold that ringed its beak. The men's screams drove her on. She ran with trees clawing at her, until her sides heaved and she fell to her knees spitting and retching. Her chest was aflame.

Nallo leaned on a tree, gulping air, holding Zianna. “Where's Jerad?”

Avisha lifted her head. Jerad was not with them.

The ground dropped out from under her. She fell, dizzy, tumbling, helpless. But she was kneeling in the dirt with rain drizzling over her. She hadn't fallen at all.

Nallo said,
“Did you leave him behind?”

Between one ragged breath and the next, the rain ceased falling.

Jerad wasn't with them. She had left him behind.

Someone had to go back and find Jerad. So Nallo didn't wait. She pried Zianna off her body as the girl whimpered and clung, shoved her into Avisha's arms, and stumbled back the way they had come.

She'd recognized what those men were the instant she had seen them. What a fool she'd been! Avisha had stood there blubbering on the path, when they should have kept going despite the eagle. That was how those outlaws had walked up from behind without her hearing.

Eiya! She must watch, observe, keep her eye on the trail they'd tramped through the woodland so she could find her way back. She must listen, to make sure she didn't stagger out like a flailing drunk onto the road, an easy target. The rain gave her cover; the vegetation was damp enough that instead of snapping it merely bent, squooshed, sucked. She marked how the canopy altered where the path cut along the slope as it moved sidelong around the hill. She slowed down, grasped the slender trunk of a pine tree, trying to quiet the surging pound of her heart in her throat and ears.

She heard no sound of men talking. She heard no sound of footfalls, nor press of branches swept aside as they searched into the woodland for the runaways. She eased forward into the cover of a stand of pipe-brush. Her ears stung as the wind picked up. Still nothing. Crouching, she tipped to hands and knees and crawled through the muck to the shelter of a bush from which she could see the path.

Six bodies sprawled on the ground, limp and torn, several still twitching. She forced herself to scan the path.

The eagle chirped.

She slunk along the line of bushes until she could see where the path pushed onward. With wings spread and
head raised, the eagle waited. A bundle of clothing had fallen to the ground beneath it.

It wasn't clothing. The eagle was standing over Jerad, cruel talons fixed on either side of the boy and its gaze pinioned on the dead men it had ravaged.

She found a stout stick on the ground, tested its heft. With this pathetic weapon, she walked onto the path.

“Jerad!”

The eagle flared its wings wider. She halted. Like the eagle she, too, was panting, angry, scared, injured in her own way. When it looked at her, she returned its fierce gaze without fear.

“We're friends, not enemies,” she said, a little testily.

Its mouth gaped, showing its tongue. Was that a good sign, or a bad one? She took another step and a third, by stages moving closer until she could see that Jerad was alive. The eagle was guarding him.

“You saved us,” she said, hoping to sooth it with her voice.

It swiveled its head, measuring her.

“N-Nallo?” His voice was so soft she barely heard it. “I'm scared, Nallo. Did you see what it did to those men? Is it going to kill me?”

“Hush!”

At her agitated tone, the eagle flared again, and Nallo said, more harshly than she intended, “Stop that! He's just frightened! You're scaring him.”

He sobbed, so she grasped the stick more tightly and held it a little above and across her head as if that flimsy stick could ward off the eagle should it strike. She walked at a measured pace right up to the huge eagle. Under its wings and the vicious-looking beak, she knelt beside Jerad and coaxed him to his knees.

“Come on, now, Jer! If the eagle meant to kill you, it would have done it already.”

“It's going to eat m-m-me.”

Really, the boy was impossible. “No, it isn't. Get up.”

“They play with animals, and then eat them alive.”

“Get up!”

He clung to her as she dragged him away from the eagle and off the path. “It tore that man's head off. It stuck that man right through the chest with its claws. Did you see?”

“It protected you, Jerad.”

She shoved the boy down into a heap of sodden leaves ripe with smells released by the rains. Turning, she examined the eagle. The heavy feathered brows made its stare more intense, and naturally the hooked bill with its pointed tip looked daunting. The top of its bill was colored a bright yellow, and yellow rimmed its mouth behind the bill. Its feathers had a golden sheen, shading darker along the wings and breast, patched with white. Its legs, too, were feathered, shaped like leggings. Its talons were skin and claw, big enough to enclose her chest.

As she watched, it began to clean blood and bits of flesh from its bill with one talon. It had a fussy touch, comical until you thought of what the eagle had just done.

Where had the outlaws come from? Were there more of them?

“Jerad, hide in the woods. Take this.” She picked up, and handed to him, the pouch she had dropped in the first steps of their panicked flight.

“It's too heavy.”

“Take it into the trees. I'm coming.”

She found the washtub where Avisha had dropped it. When had that happened? The series of events blurred in her mind: the washtub tumbling down the slope and spilling its contents every which way; Avisha hauling it up again. The eagle had come, and then the outlaws, and she realized that the eagle had surely come because it had seen armed men moving up behind them. It had deliberately saved them.

It lifted its head, looking past her. She heard men tramping up the path, moving in haste. She lugged the washtub off the road, and just in time she and Jerad dropped behind a stand of pipe-brush. She left the wash-tub beside the boy and shimmied forward on her belly through the brush until she could look over the path. The wind was rising again, rippling in the clothing of the dead men as if the cloth had woken and meant to abandon the mutilated husks.

Two men trotted into view. They wore the same leather coats and molded leather helmets she'd seen on the armed men who had marched into her village. One of the men carried a red banner marked with three black waves enclosed in a black circle, similar in cut to the banner she had seen that terrible day, although the banner those men carried had had four stripes.

The soldiers scented death before they saw it. They moved hesitantly forward, then spotted the dead men and, last, the waiting eagle. Backing up hastily, they called to unseen companions. One man hoisted his bow and, hands shaking, fitted an arrow.

Fly. Fly.

As if it heard her thoughts, the eagle spread its wings, thrust, and beat hard. It rose agonizingly slowly, and the archer loosed an arrow. But the shaft went wide, and the eagle was aloft, out of range, as Nallo sucked in a breath, dizzied, her pulse thundering in her ears.

The men shook fists at the sky, then split up to investigate the scene of the battle. As they prodded the corpses, another dozen men came up behind, a straggling, undisciplined line that collapsed into commotion with a lot of shouting and cursing.

“Get on! Get on!” they cried, hurrying forward as if something more dreadful than an eagle was chasing them.

She and Jerad hid as the afternoon wore on, while groups of men passed at erratic intervals, fleeing northeast into the Soha Hills. Those who staggered into sight
panting and exhausted found strength to move on when they spotted the dead. She grinned. They were beaten, whipped, frightened and disoriented, a beast without a head to lead the way.