“Yes,” Qualt said absently. “This law that thou spokest of earlier. Now what is this law that you are outside of, as thou sayest?”
But the Winged One just laughed. “I know, groundling! Perhaps we can roll around together on the earth the way we did last night—that was fun too, ’ey? Or would you like to try it in the air? That was a good game, no? Even if it came about only by accident from that awful sound, so that I could not tell where I was when I flew into you! You groundlings do it in the dirt. We Winged Ones do it in the—”
But suddenly Qualt turned, vaulted up on the bench of the garbage cart, and stood erect on the seat while the wheels creaked below them both. “No, my friend, there’ll be a later time for Hi-Vator.” Qualt stepped behind the creature’s great sail, like an object rejoining a shadow that had been momentarily lost to it by a mystery beyond naming. “Yes, like last night, we’ll fly a bit more at Çiron!”
—
By his final three hours at Hi-Vator, Rahm had decided that, no, the Winged Ones were a very, very different people from his—but that it was precisely those differences that made them a people. With each new thought or realization or insight about them, however, there came a moment when Rahm would stand—now for seconds, now for minutes—still as the cliffs rising above him, his mind fallen miles below, turning among memories of the light- and blood-lashed night, trying to hold coherent the idea of a people of his own. When he stood so long like that, some of the Winged Ones watched or listened quietly. Others, better mannered, merely listened and pretended not to watch at all—though more and more mewed about it to one another, out of sight and hearing.
Among the stranger things that had happened to him that afternoon was a conversation he’d had with an old Winged One, whom Vortcir had been eager to have him meet for more than an hour now. The Winged One’s fur was more gray than brown. Her eyes were wrinkled closed.
Rahm and the ancient creature hung together on one of the rope webs above the waterfall while the old Winged One explained to Rahm that one of the most important ideas around which all the Winged Ones’ lives revolved was something called god—apparently a very hard thing to understand, since it was at once the universal love binding all living things and, at the same time, a force that punished evildoers even as it forgave them. Also it was a tree that grew on the bare peak of the world’s highest mountain, a tree older than the world itself, a tree whose roots required neither earth nor water—those roots having secreted the whole of the world under it, including the mountain it perched on. The tree’s leaves were of gold and iron. Its fruit conferred invisibility, immortality, and perfect peace. To make things even more complicated, for just a short while—twenty-nine years to be exact, the old Winged One explained—god had not been a tree at all, but rather a quiet, good, and simple woman with one deformed wing, who therefore could not fly and thus limped about the mountains’ rocks like a groundling. Various and sundry evil Winged Ones would come across her and attempt to cheat her or rob her or—several times—even kill her, only to be shamed by a power she had, called “holiness,” whereupon they repented and often became extremely good, fine, and holy people themselves for the rest of their lives, during which they did nothing but help other Winged Ones.
“There are other peoples,” the old Winged One told Rahm as she stretched over the knotted vines, “who represent god as a silver crow, while for others god is a young man strung up to die on a blasted tree…” which only confused Rahm further.
Still, something about the old Winged One made her comforting to listen to. Something in her manner recalled…Ienbar? The stories of the flightless god were gentle and good and took Rahm’s mind off the cataclysmic images just under memory’s surface.
Rahm climbed down from the rope net, curious as to why he felt better, but not convinced that this idea/tree/cripple was much more than a story with too many impossibilities to believe, so that while it might have had something he couldn’t quite catch to do with the world around him now, he couldn’t believe it had much to say of the world he’d left below.
The afternoon sun had lowered enough to gild the western edge of every crag and rock. At the fire, Winged Ones adjusted three mountain goats on wooden roasting spits. Walking up to another ledge, Rahm saw some others pounding nuts on a large rock with small stones held in their prehensile toes. Still others, on the ledge above that, had gathered hip-high heaps of fruit—yellow, purple, and orange—so that when, a few minutes later, Vortcir’s aunt came up to him and said: “There’s to be a feast tonight!” Rahm was not really surprised.
“In honor of the Handsman’s safe return?” Rahm asked.
“In honor of the groundling who saved him!” she declared, shrill and breathy. Then, with wings wide, she turned to drop over the rocky rim at his feet and crawl down a web.
Winged Ones carried a trestle over, piled with fruit and nut bread. “Have some,” Vortcir urged him. “Some of us have flown leagues and leagues to bring these to the nest.” They brought a chain for Vortcir, who insisted they bring another for Rahm. Vortcir’s aunt herself held it on the spurs of her wings and lowered it around Rahm’s neck with cooling, windy motions. Several Winged Ones made music on a rack of gongs, while youngsters flapped and scrambled over the rocks, flinging the scarlet, cerise, and leaf-green rinds at each other, now at a furry arm, now at a leg jerked back, from which the peel slid away, falling to the stone as the thrower mewed and the target squealed. Caves pitting the cliffside site echoed with chucklings and chitterings. Across the twelve-foot fire troughs, the spitted carcasses rolled above flame, fat dribbling and bubbling along the bottom of each beast.
“Here, Rahm!” Vortcir led him up to a stone rim. “You must make the first cut.” On his spur, Vortcir lifted a great cleaver, long as his thigh. Rahm turned to seize it by a handle carved for a grip wholly different from his own. He planted one foot on the pit stone. Their wings beating up spirals of sparks, the fire tenders swung the first spit out. Rahm raised the blade—
His eyes caught the red light running up the sharpened metal—and as he had done so many times that day, Rahm halted. His chest rose; breath stalled in it.
Some of the Winged Ones fell silent.
One of Vortcir’s wings opened to brush and brush at Rahm’s back, to smear the sweat that had in moments risen on Rahm’s shoulders, his forehead, his belly. “Friend Rahm, this blade is to cut the meat that we will all eat. Use it!”
Rahm swung the cleaver down. Crusted skin split. Juices rilled and bubbled along the metal. And Rahm grinned. The others chittered and laughed and mewed. Some even came up to compliment him on the dexterity with which he carved: “But then, you have so many little fingers….”
Lashed to a wooden fork, a leather sack dripped wine into a stone tub, from which, at one time or another, everyone went to drink. Three times Rahm found himself at the rim beside a female with granite-dark fur, a quick smile, and a sharp way of putting things in an otherwise genial manner. “So,” she said, when the wine had made Rahm feel better and they met again a ways from the food, “I overheard you talking to that blind old fool about god,” though she spoke the word “fool” with such affection as to make Rahm wonder if it meant the same to her as it did to him. “You know what the real center of our life here is? It isn’t god.”
“What is it, then?” Rahm asked.
Behind her, her wings…breathed, in and out of the indigo, out and into the firelight. “Actually, it’s money.”
“Money?” he asked. “Money. Now, what is money?”
Apparently it was more complicated than god. It too, she explained, was fundamentally an idea having to do with value—in this case, represented by the hard hulls of certain nuts treated with certain dyes, with certain symbols carved into them. You gave some of these hulls for everything you received or got some back for everything you gave—Rahm was not sure which; “everything” included food, sex, and entertainment, labor, shelter, and having certain rituals performed for you by the Hand
sman or the Queen.
“I’d like to see some,” he said with polite interest, “of this money.”
She cackled, in a scrit as shrill as that of the beast he’d slain in the cave. “But that’s the whole problem, you understand. Nobody has any anymore!”
He was confused all over.
“We gave it up,” she explained, “years ago. When I was a girl—maybe eight or nine. We had a meeting of the whole nest site, and the Old Queen decided we’d be better off without it. So we went back to barter. But no one’s really forgotten it—I don’t care what the Old One says. Personally, I think it would be better if we had it back again, don’t you?”
Around him the Winged Ones caroused through the deepening evening. Now and again Rahm watched five, six, seven, or more rise from jagged rocks, gone black against the blue, in what, for the first moments, was a single fluttering mass, to shrink in the distance and finally flake apart as single fliers. There, among them, was the young woman who’d just been talking to him about this money. How did he recognize her in silhouette like that? (Had she taken part in the afternoon’s forbidden game? Of that, he couldn’t be sure.) But he did: definitely it was she, among the others, flying away.
With their mysterious and mystic notions—money and god—these folk had again begun to seem wholly foreign. Rahm lifted his hand to finger the chain at his neck that made him, at least honorarily, some sort of personage among these incomprehensible creatures. What, he wondered, would he tell one of the Winged Ones who wanted to know what ideas were most central to his own ground-bound nest site?
Behind him, Vortcir whispered, intensely: “Fly with me, friend Rahm!”
Rahm turned and, with an avidity that surprised him, threw his arms around that powerful neck as Vortcir moved to take him. Rahm bent one arm down across the flexing shoulder. “Watch that thou dost not crash the two of us onto the rocks!” Was Vortcir’s head as full of wine as his?
The feeling—he had almost grown used to it by now—was that the Winged One who carried him took a great breath that finally just lifted his feet from the ground, a breath that didn’t stop—the air itself taking them higher and higher and higher.
“This is a fine night to fly!” Vortcir called back.
Fires flickered below them. A file of Winged Ones flew just above the flame. Wing after wing reddened, darkened. Loosed from it all and looking down on it over the Handsman’s shoulder, Rahm felt the whole nest site and all the flying folk he’d met there, children, adults, and oldsters, to be wondrously and intricately organized—as fine, as rich, and as logical as any folk could be.
“You like the life we lead, don’t you?” came the child-voice.
Rahm nodded, his cheek moving against the Handsman’s flour scoop of an ear—which twitched against him.
“They are good men and women,” Rahm said. They arched away from the cliffside and the water’s rush and the jutting trees, all black below them now. “They have all been kind to me.”
“And you are happy,” Vortcir said. “I can hear it.”
Rahm said: “The wine has dulled thy hearing.”
“For a moment—for several moments…”—Vortcir shook his head in a kind of shiver, though his wings still pumped them steadily across the night—“you were happy. Will you stay with us, friend Rahm?” The only sound was the air, loud in Rahm’s ears—though surely much louder in Vortcir’s. “I have heard your answer.” Beside them, the mountain rose.
Rahm spoke rather to himself than to Vortcir, because he already knew it was not necessary: “I want to go home.”
“I have heard,” Vortcir repeated.
They descended through the night.
—
“Where are we?” Rahm moved his feet in soil that held small rocks, leaves, and twigs. Neither moon nor stars broke the darkness.
“At the edge of the meadow where you bury your dead.” Wide wings beat, not to fly but to enfold him, shaking on him and about him in a manner both affectionate and distressed. “Do not stumble”—the little voice sounded rough and close as the wings parted—“on the corpses.”
“Are there many about?”
“They have brought many. No one has buried them yet. Friend Rahm?”
“Yes, Vortcir?”
“I must go back up now to my own people. But I will listen for you always.” The high, breathy chuckle. “That’s what we say when we leave a friend.”
Rahm put his arms around Vortcir’s shoulders once more, to grasp the creature to him who, in the dark, was only furred muscle, a high voice, a knee against his, a hot breath against his face and a scent more animal than human. Rahm stepped back. “And I will watch and…listen for thee! Vortcir?” Wind struck against him for answer. A little dust blew against his cheeks and got into one eye, making Rahm turn away, rubbing at it with his foreknuckle, so that the beating was at his back. Then it was above, thundering dully. Somewhere, as the sound stilled, a breeze rose over it with its own thunder of leaves and shushing grasses. (It brought with it an unpleasant smell, like rotting vegetables and clogged waters; but Rahm tried not to name it or even pay attention to it.) When it stilled, all sound was gone.
Beneath Rahm’s feet, grass gave way to path dust. He walked. Firelight flickered from inside a window. By one shack, he stopped to look in through a crack between two logs under the sill—a crack he realized he’d peeped through many, many nights one winter, years ago, when someone else entirely had lived there.
A woman sat at the table, her head down, her shoulders hunched high. Two grown sisters had lived in this hut for the past half-dozen years. Rahm pulled away sharply when it struck him what it likely meant that only one was there now.
He turned and hurried across the road and ducked into the darkness between two houses. For a moment he wondered if he was lost, but at the glow from another hut’s shutter, open perhaps three inches, he realized where he was.
Going up to the dim strip of light, he looked through. On a table a lot more rickety than the one in the last hut, a clay lamp burned with a flame more orange than yellow. Sitting on a bench, back against the wall and staring straight ahead, was a man whose name Rahm didn’t know.
But he knew those shoulders and the short, spiky hair and the face. The man, not half a dozen years older than Rahm, worked on one of the quarry crews, sometimes with Abrid and…Kern.
Odd, Rahm thought, that there are people in my town whom I really don’t know—though I’ve seen them now and again all my life. I probably know the names and the names of most of the relatives of practically every field worker. But do I know more than a dozen of those who work in the stone pits?
The surprise, of course, was that the man lived here. But then, Rahm went on thinking, that is what makes this town mine. It still holds for me perfectly simple things to learn, like what the person’s name is or where the house lies of one of its stone workers….
Then the thought interrupted itself: Is he blind? The man’s eyes were open. He looked right at the window. Only inches out in the darkness, Rahm could not believe himself unseen. But the man’s expression was the complete blank of one who slept with his eyes wide. Standing in the darkness, concentrating to read that blankness, Rahm was equally still, equally blank—
The man started forward.
Rahm started back—but something held him.
The man was up, moving to the window. He looked out at Rahm and gave a grunt—the way quarrymen so often did. “I thank thee,” he said softly, roughly—though Rahm had no idea why—and smiled. “But thou hast better go. The patrol comes soon.” He pulled the window closed.
Rahm stood in the dark, bewildered by the exchange. What, he found himself wondering, would I have seen had I looked into this same window last night before the wailing? Two other quarry workers sharing the hut with him? Perhaps a woman, perhaps two?
Some children? What absences in the house today did the blankness—or the smile—mean?
The return from his wander the previous day ha
d started Rahm pondering all he knew of his village. But his return tonight, after the violence of the night before and the wonders of the day, had started him pondering all he did not know of it.
Rahm crossed the dark path. Nearing the common, he walked by more close-set huts.
Old Hara the Weaver’s cottage had never had a shutter—at least not on its back window. But a hanging had been tacked up across it—although, at one edge, it had fallen away so that a little light came through. Within, he could hear the old woman talking—to herself, Rahm realized, as, with his fingertips on the window ledge, he put his eye to the opening between the window edge and the cloth.
“They shall not have it! They shall not! I said it in the council, and I say it now: they shall not have it!” He could see Hara moving about before the fire, a sharp-shouldered figure. Now she put down an armful of cloth—and taking up a cooking blade, she began to slash at one piece and another as she lifted them. “Never for them—they shall not!” With a hard, hard motion, she flung one handful and another of rags into the flames.
Rahm pulled back—even though the pieces did not flare.
He turned from the hut’s sagging wall, to start away, when, from around the corner—
—lights, horses, hooves!
“There, Çironian! What are you doing out?”
Rahm whirled, hands up over his eyes against the light.
“You know the ordinance, Çironian. No windows or doors are to be open after dark! No man, woman, or child is to be on the street! You’re under arrest! Come with us.”
“With you?” Rahm began, squinting between his fingers as he pulled them from his eyes.
“Anyone the patrol catches out past sundown is under arrest, Çironian. Do not make further trouble for yourself.”