Shadow Gate (81 page)

Tumna dropped, and she shrieked and planted her feet on the training bar even though the harness held her. Aui! So far to fall!

Color flashed where the trees thinned by a stream. She knew in the crudest sense how to rein the eagle; she tugged the right jess, and Tumna responded with a tight circle that attracted Volias's attention. Fumbling in the pouch strapped to the harness, she got a hand around the red flag. As she yanked it free, her grip slipped, and it fell, brought up short by a leash.

She cursed, grabbed and waved it clumsily, trying to show where she had seen a person moving in the forest. Volias and Trouble plunged past her like a dropped stone, and Tumna's circling movement cut off her view. As she turned in her harness trying to get a clear line of sight, something happened because as they came around she saw Volias and Trouble had set down in a narrow patch
of cleared ground stream-side and he was gesticulating to a person—a woman with a baby—who was possibly hysterical or furious.

Pil had gotten Sweet to come around at an altitude rather higher than Nallo and Trouble; he had a far better grasp of reining and leashing. He had barely settled into a holding pattern when Volias launched, the eagle beating upward until she found a rising current that would lift her. Volias set a course eastward over countryside smoothing into a plain that stretched to a cloudy horizon.

It was going to rain soon. She shivered, wondering what had happened below.

Volias stayed aloft late into the afternoon, not stopping as he usually did for an early camp and a lesson in short-range maneuvers. They passed over extensive forest lands and, increasingly, villages set amid fields and ponds and orchards and attended by the occasional temple building or compound. Every one of these had thrown up around it an earthwork or palisade, flimsy-looking barriers from this height. Folk worked in the closer fields, or hauled dirt as others shoveled.

According to the tales, fertile Istria boasted ten and a thousand villages, and it looked to Nallo like every one of them was surrounded by fresh fortifications.

Late in the afternoon, they set down in a clearing well away from village or temple. She followed Volias in checking her eagle's harness and feathers and then, like Pil, hooding the bird for the night, making sure the two raptors remained at opposite sides of the open space. Volias released Trouble to hunt. Nallo trudged farther into the woods.

Her arms were sore, her legs and hip aching, and when she slipped down her leather trousers to pee, she saw that the harness had rubbed her right hip raw where the strap was too tight over her hip bone.

Finishing her business, she walked back to camp, wincing as her leathers rubbed the same raw spot. Eiya! Next thing you knew it would start bleeding.

Pil already had a fire going. Crouched beside it, he fed sticks into the flames while Volias tied canvas into a lean-to and spread a ground cloth beneath it.

The senior reeve looked up as Nallo approached. “That was good eyesight, spotting her like that.”

“Who was she?”

“Eh, the usual tale. A squad of bandits hit her village, but fortunately they had a watch out and a palisade to slow the outlaws, so everyone escaped. But the houses took damage, and tools and food and the local temple's silk banners and silver altar settings were stolen.”

“Desecrating the temple . . .” She shook her head. “That's the work of savages.”

Pil glanced at them, then turned back to the fire.

“I won't argue with you,” said Volias. “Here, hold this end while I tighten it.”

“Where was she going? She had a baby.”

“Eihi! You do have good eyesight. Maybe that's why.”

“Why that woman was alone in the forest?”

“Neh, neh. Why the eagle chose you. It's as good an explanation as any, and we've all wondered. Not every reeve is a decent person. Some were murderers or become murderers, some have a thievish bent, or complain all the time. Envy, jealousy, spite, anger, vanity. Reeves boast of all these fine traits. Yet what manner of heart we have makes no difference in the choosing. Sure it is, if you eat far too much, your eagle can't carry you, but otherwise our bad behaviors don't really limit our ability to be reeves, they only limit our ability to be good reeves. So why one person over another? Why choose a reluctant recruit—” He gestured to her and then to Pil. “—over some poor lad who's dreamed of being a reeve all his young life? Maybe it's just the cursed eyesight.”

Pil grabbed the iron traveling pot and walked to the stream that snaked through the clearing. The two eagles had tucked their heads under their wings, readying for sleep. Trouble chirped nearby, but Nallo could not see her.

“She's got her dinner,” said Volias with a smile. He fished in his travel pouch for their leather bottle of rice. When Pil returned with the pot half full of water, Volias dumped in a double handful of rice and over the top crumbled two wafers of traveler's cake, a pungent blend of spices and dried, mashed nai. Pil set the pot on a tripod over the fire and settled back on his heels to watch it heat.

“What about that woman?” asked Nallo, thinking of her own journey with Avisha and the children.

He tucked his chin like the eagles readying for sleep, and the gesture made him seem, for an instant, ashamed. “She was angry at me for giving away her position. In case any folk were nearby to spot me. She'd gone on the forest track to see if the village her sister married into had been hit.”

“Had it?”

“She hadn't reached it yet.” He grinned. “I think, from certain words that slipped, that she left her own village's hiding place because she'd gotten into an argument with her kin, or her husband, or the elders. Hard to say. She reminded me a little of you.”

She glared at him, and he laughed. Pil looked at them, and Nallo stalked to the fire and plopped down next to him, promptly soaking her rear as she sat in a hole hidden by a luxuriant growth of spring-beam.

Pil raised an eyebrow.

“You could have warned me!” she said, shifting away.

He shrugged, then dug into his sleeves and handed her a stick of dried meat.

“Thanks.” She chewed. He chewed. There was something about his silence that always got to her. She said, finally, “You're awfully good with the eagle. Is it a lot like riding a horse?”

He tucked his chin in the gesture she'd come to learn meant no.

“I'll tell you, I'm no good. I feel so clumsy up there, and thinking all the time how I'm going to fall, and then
forgetting all that and just staring because it is so cursed amazing to see the land from the air. I just never knew!”

He chewed, watching the pot. He had exceptionally lovely thick straight black hair, which she had seen once when he let down his topknot to comb it out. Otherwise, as now, it was all gathered up tightly atop his head. He had a pleasant face once you got used to him looking so different, his eyes pulled at the corners and his cheeks broad and his nose a little flattened like someone had punched it down, only it wasn't crooked as it would have been if it had been broken. Not a bad-looking man, really; just an outlander. Nallo had never met an outlander before; she could count on one hand the times she'd even seen Silver merchants on the road, them being outlanders still with their hidden god despite their people having lived here for almost a full cycle of years and colors according to the clerks at the temple of Sapanasu.

“What temples do your people have?” she asked. “I mean, did your gods come with you, or stay behind?”

At first she thought he would, as usual, say nothing, so she went back to chewing on the tough stick of meat. But after a while, he cleared his throat and forced out words.

“In the upper world,” he gestured toward the sky, “there are tribes. In the lower world there are tribes. They herd, and fish, and fight with each other. We walk the lands of the middle world and try to stay out of the way.”

“Eh, that sounds like where I grew up. We herded our goats and sheep, but there was a bigger village eastbound and a bigger village westbound, and we got caught in the middle when they had their disputes over tolls, pastures, and contracts.”

Volias walked over. “Hush. Do you hear voices?”

Pil stood and walked to the edge of the clearing, head bent and eyes shut as he listened. A male voice rang faintly in the distance, but after that it was quiet. They held still until the rice was done, and then they ate and,
with darkness falling, stretched out under the shelter to sleep, sharing out the watch.

No one disturbed them. Trouble roosted elsewhere, appearing at dawn. She thumped down hard, agitated, and Volias called from the clearing's edge to Nallo, who was folding up the canvas shelter.

“Nallo! Get to your eagle and hook in. Where's Pil?”

“Off to do his business, I think. Or pray. I don't know what the hells he does every morning.”

“Leave everything.
Now!
”

She dropped the half-folded canvas, abandoned the bedrolls and cooking equipment, but grabbed her gear pouch—fortunately with her gear neatly packed away—and the baton and short sword they had issued her, not that she had the faintest idea of how to use either one effectively. Of how to fight at all, if it came to that.

She ran across the clearing to Tumna, the eagle acting restive, talons digging into the earth, wings half open, neck feathers raised. Shouts broke from the far end of the clearing. Nallo whistled, and Tumna bent her huge head down and raked at the hood with her talons. Got stuck. Nallo released her, tugged off the hood, and hooked in just as three men carrying spears ran into the clearing.

An arrow sprouted—like sorcery!—in the chest of one of the men. His companions faltered as he tipped to his knees with a hand clutched around the shaft.

Volias had his sword drawn, but it was Pil, at the edge of the forest, who had loosed. He drew again, released, and hit a second man in the shoulder.

“Move!” shouted Volias.

A third arrow buried its point in the earth, shaft quivering, as the men grabbed their comrade and scrambled back, calling to fellows hiding in the trees.

Pil sprinted across the clearing to Sweet, and cursed if the cunning old bird didn't catch her hood with a talon and yank it off so that as Pil hooked in she was already
thrusting. Volias, in his harness, waited on the ground until Pil and Nallo were aloft.

A shower of arrows painted the air with ghostly stripes. Volias swore, and then he, too, was up, but Trouble had an arrow in her right leg that shook loose and fell away. Blood dribbled earthward. Volias was still cursing, a stream of words less heard as discrete syllables than experienced like a river's flow. A cadre of men gathered in the clearing. Sweet caught an updraft, and the others followed. Nallo's pulse thundered in her ears and, slowly, quieted.

They flew north over the plain. In village after village, folk labored to complete walls and earthworks instead of tending freshly planted fields and gardens. Now and again a cadre of men rode, or marched, along a path, but Volias took no notice. Trouble flew point, but she began to labor. The sun rose higher. The day grew hot and moist. To the southeast, clouds piled up, but there wasn't much wind to move them.

Just when Nallo feared they would have to land to save the eagle, she spotted the glittering line of a river. The roads and tracks swarmed with people walking, riding, carting, draft beasts pulling wagons, all creeping in the same direction. Soon she realized that the strange cast of ground ahead, the red clay and patchwork fields and textured ground, was not a bizarre land-form but actually streets and buildings grown into the land between two rivers. The city had a massive outer wall, reinforced by a berm and ditch, although a straggle of new settlement grew up outside its protection. The main road seemed almost as wide as the river, its tributary roads and paths lined with villages and hamlets like so many beads on a string, each bracketed by green fields and flowering orchards. At the southern tip of the city, where the muddy yellow-brown waters of the larger river were joined by the blue of the smaller, a bold escarpment jutted out, its flat top almost the breadth of Olossi's inner city.

Trouble was dropping fast.

“The hells!” She had never landed in a prescribed space which, if overshot, would dump her into water. She shut her eyes as Tumna swooped. “Thunderer, give me courage, let me die without pissing myself—Oof!”

Tumna chirped interrogatively, and a cheerful voice close beside her said, “heya! Unclip, make room, there's another coming in.”

She slid her feet off the training bar and found hard ground to stand on. Unhooking, she sagged, and was helped away by a young man in reeve leathers. Fawkners ran up to hood Tumna. Off to one side, Volias shouted his wrath into the skies, and Trouble listed
wrong
while fawkners clustered around her with various implements and bindings.

“Heya! Here she comes!” With a grin, the reeve caught Nallo's arm.

Sweet pulled up neat as you please and easily gripped one of the huge perches built into the wide parade ground. That left Pil dangling about his own height off the ground, but he unhooked and let go, catching himself in a deep crouch when he hit dirt, then straightening.

“Eihi!” The reeve had cropped hair, and muscular shoulders and arms revealed by his sleeveless leather vest. Watching Pil, he grinned. “Interesting. What is that?”

“That's Pil,” she said irritably.

“That may be,” agreed the reeve, “but what is he? He doesn't look like any man I've seen before, and I've seen plenty.”

“He's Qin.”

“One of those outlanders that fought the battle of Olossi? We heard rumors, mostly from Volias—” He flicked a glance toward Volias and his stricken eagle, then away as if to stare would be rude. “—but now I see the truth. What's he like?”

“He doesn't talk much.”
Unlike you,
she thought, but held her tongue. “He saved us today from an ambush. He's an amazing archer.”