Bhotta's Tears: Book Two of the Black Bead Chronicles (16 page)

Alain danced on his toes, his grip tight on a handle set into the central spine of the wing. The wing wanted to fly, yet the gentle breeze could not have been strong enough to cause the wing to behave so.

“What makes it do that? It looks alive, like it wants to lift out of your hands, Alain.”

“Updrafts,” grunted Finn. “They flow up the sides of the dome during the heat of the day.”

“Yeah,” said Connor. “The dome makes its own weather patterns. Who knew.”

“Learning is not as boring as you thought, eh, young pip?” Finn snorted in amusement. There was that odd scrunched up face again. Finn was happy. Cheobawn laughed in delight.

“Make it do something, Alain,” she begged.

Alain took a double hooked packing cord out of his pocket, snapped one hook into a loop imbedded in the spine, and the other around his own belt at the center of his back. Then he slid both hands wide to a pair of hand grips, sliding each fingertip into a silk sleeve attached to a plasteel thread that ran into the maze of struts. He set the wing edge into the breeze, took two great running leaps, and launched himself into the air. The wing grabbed the air and held it. Alain hovered for a moment, then another. Then he did something with his body and the wing dipped slightly to rise again. Alain was now higher than the eves of the maintenance shed. She watched him, totally entranced. He may not have been flying but he was certainly airborne under his own power.

Too soon, Alain gave a grunt and the front of the wing dipped. He glided heavily to the ground. Cheobawn ran up. Alain had a sheen of sweat on his face as if he had run warmup sprints.

“I wanted you to stay up forever,” she sighed. “Is it difficult?”

“I have been using muscles all week that I didn’t know I had. I am a little sore. The longest I’ve stayed up is about ten minutes.”

“Show me how,” she demanded, holding up her hands.

“OK. Close your eyes.”

“Huh?”

“Trust me, it will make everything I tell you easier to understand.”

Alain placed her fingers in the sleeves and attached the hook to her belt.

“OK. The wing is an extension of your body. You have to use it to feel the wind. Move your hands. Pull down. Push up. Did you feel that?”

“I think so.”

“Move the wing around until you think you can feel the air the strongest and then hop.”

Cheobawn thought she had it. She hopped. The wing grabbed at the air, lifted, and then did a thousand different things at once. She tried to correct a sideways slide, jerking the wing to the side. It had the exact opposite reaction to what she expected. She over-corrected. The tip of one wing dipped
 

toward the ground. She threw her body in the opposite direction. The nose of the wing dipped violently down and slammed into the ground.

“Gah!” she growled.

“OK, that was perfect,” Alain said enthusiastically.

“Perfect?” she spat, glaring at him in disbelief.

“We’ve all been where you are now. Its perfect because now you know. The wing does not fly. You fly. Every position, every motion of your body causes the memory joints to react. The finger controls are only part of the process. Hovering in place is the hardest thing to accomplish. Not even the sky hunters do it well.”

“Let me try it again,” she said, picking the wing up and shaking the dust off. The ribs stiffened, the silk stretching taut, as the joints opened up to the position programmed into their mechanical memory. She lifted it up, closed her eyes, and tried to sink her fingers into the wind. The wing vibrated gently, talking to her. She opened her eyes, took two great hopping leaps, and then launched herself into the sky. She could feel the wing slip and slide through the air this time. She corrected in the opposite direction from the skid. The wing wobbled and then righted itself. The hard part was keeping the motions of her body infinitely small yet still relaxed. She too, after only a few minutes of flight, felt the beads of moisture form on her skin. Tired, she started to lose control of the wing. As she settled closer to the ground, she tried to point the wing upward, hoping to catch more wind. Again, it did the exact opposite of what she wanted. She over-corrected and nosed dived into the ground.

“By all that is …“ she spat, picking herself out of the dust. “Must I do everything in the exact opposite of what my brain thinks is logical?”

Tam, Megan, Connor, and Alain gathered around her grinning. “Yeah. Isn’t it the greatest?” laughed Connor, who was almost sparking with delight.

They took turns practicing with the wing. Tam could already make it do all sort of tricks, like spiraling around one wing tip and then alternating to the other. Alain was the only one with enough control to make it look like levitation, hovering in place only to dip and rise higher. The reason for Connor’s delight became apparent. He, perhaps because he was lighter, had somehow mastered a climbing method which involved flying in a rising spiral. She studied his flight path. It seemed that he used the skin of the dome in some mysterious way. Cheobawn made a mental note of it.

Megan. Megan was a wonder. She had learned how to dance with the air. She would leap up then settle softly, barely touching the ground before she would leap again in a new direction. The wing did things for her that the boys, with all their technical maneuvers, never achieved. It came alive to her touch. Cheobawn watched as Megan did something that nearly collapsed the wing behind her, then with a leap and a twist, it would snap out around her and catch at the air, the silk singing under the stresses, the air humming over the surface, twirling her about like a leaf caught up by the wind.

Cheobawn watched her friend as she danced, her mouth hanging open.

“Yeah,” whispered Tam. “Kinda takes your breath away.”

“How does she do that?” Cheobawn asked. “How does your brain have to be put together to even think like that?”

“Hormones,” grunted Alain, his eyes riveted.

“No,” said Tam softly. “It is more than that. Much more.”

“I could do that,” Connor snorted. “It’s not like the moves are hard or anything.”

Tam punched him in the shoulder. Connor scowled at his nestbrother and rubbed his arm, dutifully falling into silence.

“Not like that, little brother,” Tam said, turning back to watch his Alpha Ear. “Nothing like that.”

Cheobawn looked up at him, at the look of wonder and tenderness on his face.

“Thank you,” she said softly, caressing the back of his hand with her fingertips. He could have insisted his team spend their time on more constructive pursuits this past week. They had so much to learn, so many things to do, before they reached their majority. Perhaps there would come a time when they could take a break from the endless quest for knowledge and skills but Tam’s aspirations did not stop at joining the Elder Conclave. Tam had bigger dreams. Hayrald level dreams. First Prime. It drove him relentlessly, that aspiration, though he would never admit to it. She had thought that after a year of watching Hayrald’s burden through the intimacy of her own eyes that some of Tam’s hunger for control and power would ease. The opposite seemed to be true. Tam had something to prove. To whom, she could never tell. Perhaps just to himself.

Maybe seven was too young an age to wrest young boys away from their nestmates, ship them off to Trade Fairs, and then force them to start life anew in a dome full of strangers. It would not be the first time she thought the methods of the First Mothers were inordinately cruel.

Tam looked down at her, a soft smile on his face. “You’re welcome,” he said, tousling her curls with his hand. She wrapped her arm around his waist and looked back towards Megan, content that he was no longer angry with her.

They practiced all day, taking lunch from the random snacks hidden deep in the thigh pockets of their shorts. The sun was low in the sky when their stomachs warned them that the dinner bell must surely have rung. Cheobawn, taking her last turn in the wing, decided to try Connor’s spiral. There was a current of moving air just above the dome’s surface, she

discovered. If you could get a wingtip into it, it would push you higher. You just had to be careful not to let it flip you over. The real tricky part was judging closing speed and distance as she neared the dome surface. It helped to use a dome rib as a focal point instead of the transparent panels, which could fool the eye. After she got the hang of it, she spiraled as high as she dared and then launched herself out over the now fallow melon fields with her eye on a landing spot on the northerly-running Orchard Trail.

With the sun setting, the rapidly-cooling air seemed full of bumps. One moment a downdraft would drag her down, the next moment she would be caught in an upwelling of air. It took her only a few moments to understand the dynamics involved in cross country flying. It was neither direct nor fast. Rather it involved a process that would entail flying from updraft to updraft, gaining height with one before sailing to the next.

She suddenly remembered why she had built the first kite. She had wanted a quick way of getting to the Escarpment. Reminded of her own unsolved riddles, the exhilaration she felt while flying suddenly diminished. Or maybe she was just tired and hungry. It had been a long day. Her muscles ached. She was starting to regret not warming up before sparring with Tam that morning. She executed a great turn and spiraled down to land neatly in the dust exactly where she had started.

They folded the kite up, wrapped it carefully in its cloth
bag, and stored it safely away before they ran back to the gate. They would not go hungry. Evening meals tended to be long, slow, and relaxed affairs but Nedella’s nightly specialty dishes ran out quickly. Late comers had to be content with serving themselves from the omnipresent stew pot. Not that the stew was not tasty but a kid got tired of it on a steady basis and learned to show up on time for meals.
 

After checking in at the gate, they raced each other down the North Avenue and across the plaza. The lines were thinning around the great doors but the dining hall was still packed, almost every table full. They managed to find five empty spots at a long table against the far wall. The Elders around them shifted to allow them room.

Starving, Cheobawn surveyed the offerings. The platters on the table looked well picked over. The tureen of melon soup had long since been emptied, but they managed to heap their plates with crispy fried hare, piles of steamed roots and vegetables, and a dish made of tender grain seasoned with mushrooms and stinkflowers. Cheobawn sniffed the assorted pots in the center of the table until she found Nedella’s famous spiced sauce made from smoked fire peppers and redball fruit then proceeded to smother everything on her plate with it. A kitchen apprentice wandered by with a basket of freshly baked rolls still hot from the oven. They each took three. After Tam snagged a tub of clotted cream from another table, they settled down to eat.

Around mouths full of food, they discussed the finer points of flying. She was telling them about the columns of air in the sky when Connor suggested leaping off something tall. The Pack’s imagination caught fire and creative ideas flowed like water. Afterward, Cheobawn could not remember whose idea was whose. Was it Alain or Connor who suggested leaping off the small cliffs above scree fields along the North Trail? Tam surprised
them all by not saying no. Instead he smiled a smile that could have almost been called mischievous if it had been on anyone’s face but Tam’s.
 

Tam looked expectantly at Megan. Megan cocked an ear into the ambient and then nodded. There seemed to be nothing inherently life-threatening about flying off the promontories above the rock slides. He purposefully did not ask Cheobawn because he knew from experience that her idea of life-threatening was always suspect - ignoring, as she was wont to do anything short of major mayhem. Come foray day, he would require a more specific threat assessment from her. For now, he chose not to muddy the waters with her opinions about the chaos around them.

Cheobawn let them plan, content to just eat. There was a long discussion about weather and prevailing winds. The coming Firstday was chosen, the timing of the flights set for early morning before breakfast, before the sun had a chance to heat up the air above the forest, and the winds grew chancy.

Tam relegated tasks. They would spend the next day gathering equipment, preparing daypacks with trail rations, emergency kits, and medkits.

Unaccountably, Cheobawn could not bring herself to be excited. Something nagged at the back of her mind, something she could not put her finger on. Firstday defied her probing, remaining effervescently unstable no matter how she tried to see around it.

There was one thing she was positive about, though. They would not go flying.

Chapter Fourteen

Cheobawn stood on the lip of the Escarpment once again. She knew it was the same dream, boring and familiar, and tried make it stop. This time, it would not let her go. She tried stepping away into a different dream only to find herself back where she started. She tried to wake herself but only managed to reset the dream. Was she stuck in a loop, forced to dream this over and over again until she became wizened and stooped over with its burden?

Cheobawn stood on the lip of the Escarpment and looked over the edge. Dream or not, her stomach did a little flip inside her, her mind gone numb as she realized the valley floor was so far away that the air turned the greens of the distant forest canopy into a hazy purple.

She forced herself to look away, looking instead at the sky. Her mind filled with wonder. The sun was high in the sky yet the sky was as black as the darkest night, the stars so bright they seemed to burn holes in the fabric of the world. The two moons,
the large Eiocha and her smaller sister moon, Epona, had somehow managed to break the curse that kept them forever apart. Now they tumbled about in the sky like two truant children. As Cheobawn watched, a handful of stars broke free of their places in the heavens and flew low, streaking across the sky above her head. All of them - the sun, the moons, the stars - paused and looked down, waiting expectantly.