A Gathering of Wings (19 page)

She opens her eyes and sits up, instantly alert. Across the aisle, Zephele sleeps in her usual state of disheveled abandonment. Malora rises, slips on her boots, and straps on her belt, slinging one flask across each shoulder in a crisscross fashion. She takes up the stick and lays the note on her cot, emerging into the tail end of the night. Up above, the stars are fading. Lightning snorts at the sight of her and nickers softly. Malora rushes over and silences her with a few whispered words, promising to return with Sky. Then she is off to the river.

On the riverbank, she stares across at the Downs, rising up like a range of small mountains made of sand. On the near bank, weaverbirds are up early, busily building nests in the papyrus.

Lifting a big rock, she heaves it into the middle of the river. The rock lands with a deep
gathunk
, making waves that lap at both banks. The weaverbirds rise up and fly away. When neither hippos nor crocodiles surface, Malora deems the river safe to swim across. For a brief moment, she considers removing her knife from her ankle-sheath and clasping it in her teeth as she swims, but she is afraid she might let water into her mouth or cut her lips. She is hampered enough by the flasks and the staff, the clothes on her back, and the boots on her feet. She wades into the shallows and walks until the water
comes up to her chin, the flasks bobbing behind her, the stick held one-handed over her head. Suddenly, something wraps around her ankle and yanks her down into the water and the river grass and the mud.

In the murky water, she makes out a rope net surrounding her, its neck yanked closed by the line around her ankle. She struggles and thrashes but the harder she fights to escape, the more tightly the net binds her. Her Dream Wound bleeds through the bandage, turning the water red. Through the cloud of blood, she sees crocodiles angling toward her through the water.

It is only then, as her lungs throb with the strain, that the sickening understanding comes to her:
This is Shrouk’s prophecy!
Scarcely has she set forth on her rescue mission than she is snared in some hibe hunter’s hippo net. She reaches for her knife, but she is so tangled in the net that she cannot get to her own boot. If only she had held the knife in her teeth, she would already have cut herself loose.
If only
 … Then she goes still, the blackness closing in upon her, until her body convulses as she begins to suck in the water that will flood her lungs and kill her. Her last thought is: Please let me be dead by the time the crocodiles get to me.

Someone is cradling her body as she has not been held since she was a small child. She gasps and stares up into eyes that are huge and burnished and as silver as his hair. He whispers down at her, words she has heard him say before: “Oh good. You’re alive.”

Lume!
She tries to speak, but her throat burns. Water gurgles up and drowns her words. He pulls quickly away as she lurches, heaving up river water. Flipping her onto her belly, he holds her while she continues to convulse until her body is wrung out. Then he rights her and lowers her back onto the riverbank. He rises to his feet and looks down at her, his face flooded with relief.

As she returns his gaze, she thinks, Something is terribly wrong. But before she can put it into words, a tide of exhaustion bears her off.

The next time she opens her eyes, she is lying in a sling between the branches of two scrawny, leafless trees. The remnants of her tunic hang from her shoulders like tattered skin.

Dawn lights the sky.
Or is it dusk?
She climbs out of the sling and pads over to a stone wall. One glance down sends her reeling backward. She steals a second look, her heart thudding.

She is staring down at the tops of mountains so far below her that uncountable layers of clouds float in between. She wonders: How high up must I be? And how did I get here? The sun is setting over the faraway sea. It is dusk, she thinks. But on what day?

She backs away from the treacherous view and warily scans her surroundings. She is on a flat stone terrace—the sheared-off top of a mountain—surrounded by walls that are nowhere near high enough to make her feel secure. In the center of the terrace is something that looks like a large, overturned nest. It is woven from salvage, from sticks of silvery driftwood, scraps of fabric, and hanks of fishnet, all bound together with rope and vines and metallic wire. As she stares at the heavy, intricately carved double doors, they swing open and through them he comes, ducking under the lintel. Her heart lifts at the sight of him.

He is smaller than he was in her dreams—still half a head taller than she is but no giant. Shoulders and arms are roped with muscle, legs long and lithe, skin smooth all over, the color of wild honey. He is naked except for a faded black loincloth. Carrying a chipped blue plate and a cup, he hunches oddly like a peddler beneath a load. That is when she sees it,
the
something wrong
she had detected earlier. She tries to tell herself that he is wearing a white-feathered cape, but she knows better.

Lume has a set of wings neatly folded behind him.

Lume is a hibe.

Lume is not a man.

Honus was right. It was foolish of her to entertain hopes that there could be a human mate for her. Disappointment weighs in her gut like a river rock she has swallowed whole.

“What are you?” she asks in a tight voice.

He sets the plate down on a tree stump, his mouth forming a bitter line. “I knew it,” he says.

Unlike his voice in her dreams, which was soft, whispery, and melodic, his voice now is a flat drone, devoid of all emotion. “What did you know?” she asks.

“That you would be disappointed.” He shoves the plate toward her. “Eat.”

“I’m not hungry. Why should I be disappointed?” She bristles that he should read her mind so easily.

“I could see it in your eyes, when I held you on the riverbank. You thought I was a man, the hero who had rescued you from the crocodiles. But now you know different. I am, as you can see, a Wonder.”

Her mouth gapes. Can he be that pompous?

“No,” he says, with an irritated shake of his head. “That is what I am
called:
I am a Wonder. But I am the last of the Wonders. Just as you are the last of the People.”

“What makes you so sure?” she asks. She hears herself ask this and marvels that she can still hold out hope that she is not
the last. Better to set hope aside and be grateful for all she has: the centaurs and Honus and the boys and girls.

Lume stares off into the distance. She sees now that his silver eyes have flecks of gold in their depths. “I saw my entire colony—father, mother, sisters, brothers, cousins, neighbors—murdered by the Leatherwings, just as I saw the People of your Settlement perish. So you see, whether you like it or not, the two of us have something in common.” He turns his saddened eyes toward her. “You and I, we are the last of our kind. And Leatherwings wiped out our kind. You really should eat. It will make you stronger. And perhaps less cross.”

“I’m not cross,” Malora says.

“Oh, but you are. I am, too, but that is the way I often am,” he says, unperturbed. “I offer no apologies. But you … you have been blessed with a sunnier disposition, especially considering all that you have endured.”

Malora hunkers down before the tree stump and starts to eat. She realizes that Lume is right: she
is
angry. Irrationally so. Is it Lume’s fault that he is not a man?

“As it happens, I am
better
than a man,” he says, crossing his arms across his chest as he watches her eat.

“Oh, really?” She crooks an eyebrow at him.

“Can a man hear from five hundred paces the crack of a lion’s jaw when she yawns and stretches before setting out on her nightly prowl?”

Malora shake her head slowly, chewing.

“Can a man take wing and fly clear around the Narrow Earth, soaring over jungle and plain and ruined city, setting his feet down a mere once a day?” he asks.

Malora continues to shake her head as she washes down the salty fish without taking her eyes off of him.

“Can a man see across vast distances? My eyes are powerful.”

“Really? What can you see with your eyes?” she asks.

“I have used them to watch you for years.”

She nearly spits out a mouthful of fish. “You
watch
me?”

“I have watched you court death since you were a little girl,” he says flatly. “I find it amusing. And sometimes alarming.”

“I
don’t
court death,” she says.

“It seems to me that you do … in so many ways that I have lost count. Let me see now.” He props one foot on the terrace wall and leans on his knee, counting on his fingers. “The stingrays in the sea, the scout on the pier, the lion in the camp, the elephants in the glen, the rhinos under the bluff, the asp by the fire, the army ants, the scorpions, even Sky (at least when you first rode him!), not to mention the Leatherwings. There, I have run out of fingers, but I know there’s more—and so do you.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Why what?”

“Why do you watch me?”

“That’s a fair question,” he says. He sits on the wall and stretches out his legs, staring at his toes. Like her, he has ten of them. Unlike hers, however, the bottoms of his feet are smooth and clean. There is nothing birdlike about him, she thinks. Only the wings destroy the illusion.

His eyes flick over to her, and his mouth forms that same
bitter line, as if silently recording the insult. “If you must know, I watch you because I feel a kinship with you.”

“Or maybe,” she says, looking around the terrace, “you’re just lonely.”

“Not I,” he says, straightening up. He wraps his arms so tightly across his chest, he seems bound by them. “I prefer being alone. I like it up here, above the clouds. I spend days out roaming, beholden to no one, but I am never happier than when I return home. I am my own best companion.”

“How sad,” she says. Home for her is a house on the riverbank, surrounded by friends and horses, not an isolated mountaintop. Malora cannot imagine living in such stark solitude. Even in her loneliest days of wandering, she still had Sky to keep her company. The thought of Sky brings her back to what she had set out to do when she first waded into the river.

“Can you take me back to the Downs?” she asks.

He nods. “I have every intention of doing so, as soon as you are rested and recovered. After all, try as you sometimes might, it’s not every day that you die.”

“I didn’t die,” she scoffs.
“Obviously.”

“Oh, you died,” he said. “The river claimed you before the crocodiles could. I felt your spirit leave your body as I laid you on the riverbank. I breathed the life back into you. I have powerful breath.” He taps his chest. “I can dive under the sea, to the deepest depths in search of the fish that I favor. So I simply put my lips over yours and emptied the air out of me and into you … I actually enjoyed it.” For the first time, he smiles, and it is as if the sun has broken through gray clouds.
His teeth are even and white and a dimple dents his left cheek. It is a smile as beguiling as Zephele’s.

“Thank you,” she says. She is also perversely grateful to know that she did die. She has satisfied Shrouk’s prophecy, and now she can continue to go about her business without the shadow of death looming over her, at least any more than it ever has.

He nods, acknowledging her thanks. Malora is sorry to see his smile fade. “And now,” he says, “you are in a hurry to go and free your horse from the wild centaurs.”

“How did you know?” she asks, then answers her own question. “Of course: you watch.” Then she remembers the white bird she kept Neal from killing on the road to Kahiro.

He holds up a hand. “The centaur’s arrow would never have reached me,” he says. “But thanks for your kind consideration.”

“Do you know
everything
I’m thinking?” she asks.

He shakes his head quickly. “Not at all. Just the odd thought that bobs to the surface, like a fish’s fins flashing on the surface of the water. Anyway, that’s not important. What is important is that you save your horse. Your horse is a living miracle. He survived an attack of the Leatherwings. He continues to survive the wild centaurs. And after you have freed him—if you are so lucky as to do this, and I do believe you are one of the luckiest individuals alive, just as I am—the three of us can work together to defeat the Leatherwings, avenge our kin, and drive this scourge from the face of the Narrow Earth!”

His eyes ablaze, he stands over her. His wings have puffed out, making him seem bigger than a man—if not, as he deems,
better
than a man—and quite formidable.

“You don’t understand,” Malora says. “I have friends. I have people who love me in Mount Kheiron. I want to get my horse back, return to Mount Kheiron, and live a long, happy, peaceful life, free of Leatherwings.”

He heaves a sigh. His wings droop. “I am disappointed but not surprised. Very well, then,” he says, rallying. “It is your privilege to choose not to join me in my crusade. But know this, Malora Thora-Jayke: you may not always have the luxury of a choice in the matter. With each new massacre, the Leatherwings grow stronger. In the meantime, I caution you to beware of the centaurs of Ixion. They are not the docile, civilized centaurs of Mount Kheiron. They are a breed apart.”