The Summer Palace (10 page)

He looked up. “A thigh, then?” he suggested.

The three Uplanders exchanged glances. “All right,” Dancer said.
“The smallest thigh, if there's a difference. Meat and bone and feathers, not hide.”

Sword glanced at the hides he had already purchased with his efforts. “Fair enough.”

“In the morning, then,” Fist said.

Sword nodded. Then, as the others turned away, he leaned over and murmured to Whistler, “Thank you.”

Whistler nodded in return, but said nothing as he rose and turned to go.

That night, when Sword slipped into the tent, he noticed Bent Ear lying in bed, looking foul-tempered; a thick bandage was wrapped around his left foot. Sword considered saying something sympathetic, then thought better of it—Bent Ear looked in no mood to appreciate sympathy, even if his Barokanese were good enough to recognize it.

In the morning Sword was shaken awake; he unrolled from his carpet to find Fist standing over him. The sky outside the tent's open flap was the dirty gray of pre-dawn.

“Come on,” Fist said.

Sword came, tugging his clothes into place and slinging his sword on his back—he did not dare leave it unattended in camp. The Clan of the Golden Spear had strong proscriptions against theft, but Sword saw no reason to provide needless temptation.

“You carry,” Dancer told him as he emerged from the tent. The hunter was holding out a leather-wrapped bundle with three spears thrust through it, protruding from either end.

Sword accepted the bundle silently and hoisted it onto one shoulder, giving it only a quick glance.

The spearshafts were polished bone, he noticed, with good steel heads—
barbed
steel heads, razor-sharp and broad. These weren't intended for crowd control, like the spears the Wizard Lord's guards carried; these were designed to kill.

The bundle was lighter than he had expected, and he wondered what else was in it, but he didn't ask; instead he followed the other three as they set out eastward, toward the approaching dawn, at a trot.

They were well clear of the camp when Dancer turned and smiled at him. “I'll wager you're glad to be free of Stepmother for the day.”

“I appreciate a little variety,” Sword said.

Fist gave a snort of laughter at that. “Variety!”

“ ‘Freedom' might be a better word,” Dancer said.

Sword just smiled in reply; he wasn't sure just how disrespectful he could be without giving offense.

The others seemed disappointed by that response, though, so he asked, “Why is she called Stepmother, anyway?”

“Because that's what she is,” Fist answered.

“She's been married four times and widowed four times,” Dancer explained. “Each time she married a widowed father, but she never bore any children herself. Sometimes it seems like half the clan is her stepchildren or her stepchildren's children, even though none of us are her blood kin.”

“She always married men much older than she was,” Fist added.

“Which she can't do anymore,” Dancer said. “There aren't any!”

Fist laughed at that, while Whistler and Sword smiled.

“Some people say she just wanted to inherit her husbands' belongings,” Whistler said quietly. “But I never believed it. I don't think she
wanted
any of them to die.”

“No, she wanted to raise her place in the clan,” Dancer said. “Each husband was closer to the Patriarch than the one before. And for that, a live husband is better than a dead one.”

“She likes bossing people around,” Fist said.

Sword nodded. “I had noticed that,” he said.

Dancer laughed.

The conversation waned after that, but still, Sword felt as if he had now been accepted by his tent-mates in a way he hadn't before. He ambled on beside them, enjoying their company.

The sun was just above the horizon when they neared the flock of
ara,
and when they were perhaps thirty paces away Dancer held up a hand to signal a stop. All four men stopped in their tracks.

“Spears,” Fist said quietly, staring at the birds.

Sword quickly slipped the bundle from his shoulder and untied the
leather cords; the wrapper fell open, and the spears tumbled out, along with a tangle of rope and a few pouches. Each of the three Uplanders snatched up a spear, and Dancer grabbed the rope.

Then the three of them stopped and looked at Sword.

“Have you ever hunted
ara
before?” Fist asked.

“Have you ever
seen
anyone hunt
ara
?” Dancer asked before Sword could reply.

“No,” he admitted.

“Do you know how it's done?”

“No.”

The three exchanged glances.

“He's with me, then,” Fist said.

The others nodded an acknowledgment.

“There are actually several ways to hunt them,” Whistler said. “This is ours.” He snagged a loose end of the rope Dancer held; Dancer paid out a few yards. Fist hefted his spear, checking the edge on the head with his thumb.

“Are there any prayers we need to say?” Sword asked.

The three Uplanders all turned to stare at him.

“Prayers?” Fist said.

“To the birds'
ler,
” Sword explained, feeling foolish. “Asking their forgiveness and asking them to let us kill them.”

“Lowlander magic,” Dancer said in disgust.

“We don't talk to
ler,
” Fist said.

“They couldn't hear us if we did,” Whistler said. “They're
ara.
They're immune to magic.”

Whistler's logic was irrefutable. “Of course,” Sword said.

“Whistler and I are going to circle around the flock,” Dancer explained. “We'll wait over there with the rope strung between us.” He pointed. “Then you and Fist chase a few birds to us, and we pull up the rope to block them, and we spear them while they're tangled in the rope.”

“Any that get away, we let go, unless they're wounded,” Fist said. “
Ara
are too fast to run down. If we don't get four the first time, we do it again.”

“Four?”

“Yes, four,” Fist said, baffled at Sword's question.

“We each carry one back with us,” Dancer explained. “That's why you're here. If you weren't, we'd only be able to take three, and it takes four to feed the whole clan a decent meal.”

The Clan of the Golden Spear was composed of roughly two hundred people, by Sword's estimate. Four birds didn't seem very many to fill so many mouths—but then, Sword wasn't sure just how big a full-grown
ara
really was. He hadn't been permitted a close look when hunters brought in their catch. He glanced over at the
ara
.

They were grazing peacefully, seemingly untroubled by the presence of the hunters; there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of them in this one huge flock. In fact, Sword could not see the far side of the flock, and the ground beneath them was thick with shed feathers.

Sword had never been this close to live
ara
before, had never had such a good look at them. Each bird stood roughly the height of a man—no, more, Sword realized, with long thick legs and long tapering necks. Each sleek body was covered in gleaming black feathers; the wings, usually tucked up close to the body, were almost entirely white, but with black along the leading edge, and a tuft of pink at the tip. The long, graceful tails had a black triangle at the base, and the rest was bright white, with a few pure-white three-foot plumes reaching almost to the ground.

A white ring circled each slanting neck, and each face was patterned in black and white, with white rings around the eyes, and that amazing, intensely pink crest rising a foot or more from the top of the head. The beaks were perhaps half a foot long, slightly curved, and looked as if they could tear a man's arm off.

“They can't fly over the rope?” he asked.

“They can't fly,” Dancer replied. “They can't even jump. I know they look as if they ought to be able to, but they can't.”

“But they can run,” Fist said. “I mean,
really
run.”

“Much faster than a man,” Dancer agreed.

“That's why we use a rope,” Fist explained. “Understand?”

Sword nodded. It was easy to believe, looking at them, that they
could move swiftly; those long necks and bodies were gracefully streamlined, and the strong legs looked powerful indeed.

“Then go on, you two,” Fist said, waving at Dancer and Whistler. Whistler nodded, and he and Dancer turned and trotted away to the south, looping around the immense flock.

“Wouldn't it be easier that way?” Sword said, pointing to the northeast.

Fist shook his head. “
Ara
almost always run south when startled,” he said. “No one really knows why.”

“Into the sun, maybe, to blind their pursuers?” Sword suggested.

“At this time of day?” Fist said, gesturing at the rising sun, which was clearly in the east, rather than the south.

“Hm.” Sword acknowledged this disproof of his theory.

“They spend the winters somewhere far to the south,” Fist said. “We think maybe that has something to do with it. Whistler thinks they came from the south thousands of years ago, and still instinctively run for home when they're scared.”

“That makes as much sense as anything,” Sword said.

Fist shrugged, and peered toward their companions, who were still trotting, the rope strung between them. “They're birds,” he said. “Who knows why they do anything?”

Sword blinked.

In Barokan, the priests often knew exactly why birds and beasts did as they did—the
ler
told them. Here in the Uplands, though, there were no priests, and the natural world must be a mystery.

If the Wizard Lord had his way, and magic were stamped out in Barokan, would that mean eliminating the priests, as well? Would people lose touch with the world around them? How would they know where to find game, or when the crops were exactly right for harvest?

The Uplanders seemed to manage, but Sword did not find the idea appealing. Putting an end to wizards and Wizard Lords was one thing, but destroying
all
magic, including priestly magic, seemed like a bad idea. . . .

Or did it? The priests of Bone Garden were monsters who treated
their people as mere things, subject to the whims of bloodthirsty
ler.
There were other towns, perhaps half a dozen, where
ler
sometimes required human sacrifices. And even in towns where no one was ever asked to give up his life, or even just a little blood, there might be demands. The High Priestess of Greenwater, for example, the very first priestess Sword had ever met outside his native town, was required to spend much of her time swimming naked in the lake, and was forbidden to take a husband and raise a family in the normal fashion. The
ler
of Mad Oak did not make any such unreasonable demands, but Sword had realized long ago that they were unusually benign.

The Uplanders were free of any priestly requirements at all—but that meant they had none of the benefits. They could not ask anyone about the future, could rely only on their own limited senses to see and understand their surroundings. Here on the plain, Sword's sword was just a lifeless piece of metal, while back in Barokan he could feel its cold hunger, its fierce power; he could tell from the slightest touch whether it needed sharpening or polishing, whether anything was interfering with its pure swordness.

Didn't it
bother
the Wizard Lord, leaving that awareness of the spirit world behind whenever he came up the Summer Palace?

Didn't it bother the Uplanders, to come back up here after spending the winters in the living realm of Barokan?

“That should do,” Fist said, breaking into Sword's thoughts. He raised one arm and waved.

Sword turned and looked. Dancer and Whistler had rounded one corner of the flock, but were still well west of the flock's center. “Shouldn't they go all the way around?” he asked.

“No,” Fist said, barely hiding his contempt at the question. “We don't want to frighten the entire flock; we just want four. If we scare them all, they may relocate, and then
we'd
have to relocate, and moving camp is far more work than
I
want to do without a better reason than that!”

“Oh,” Sword said. He looked, and saw Dancer waving an acknowledgment of Fist's signal. He and Whistler stretched the rope out—Sword could not see the details from where he stood, since
there were several
ara
and a few hundred feet of distance in between, but Dancer and Whistler moved with the ease of long practice and obviously knew what they were doing.

“You've never seen this, right?” Fist asked, watching the rope-men.

“That's right.”

“Well, the important thing is to make a lot of noise and motion, so the birds don't know what's happening, except that it's scary. I'll be waving my spear around. . . .” He glanced at Sword.

“I could wave my sword,” Sword said.

“That would be good,” Fist said. “It's shiny and unfamiliar. But don't try to
hit
anything with it—at least, not until we have them tangled in the rope.”

Sword nodded. “I understand,” he said. He reached up and unsheathed his blade.

“Good. Then let's go!” And with that he let out a wordless bellow and began running full-tilt toward the grazing
ara,
waving his spear above his head.

Caught off guard, Sword took a second to follow, brandishing his own weapon and yelling.

At first the
ara
ignored the two screaming attackers, but then, as the men came nearer, several heads bobbed up and turned to see what was happening. Then, suddenly, several birds were running, and Sword saw that Dancer and Fist had not exaggerated—they moved with unbelievable speed. They rose up on their toes and sprinted away, their talons tearing up the turf and spraying dirt, dung, and feathers behind them.