People of the Sky (20 page)

“The child-warriors are laying out the sling beside Imiya,” said Chamol, peering through the binocular. “Now they lift him onto it, fasten the traces to two aronans and bind him so he won’t fall. I saw his hand twitch. His head is bleeding. Pesquit wraps it with healing-grass.”

“Is there any trace of Haewi Namij?” Kesbe asked.

“No…wait. A child-warrior comes back to the group with something he has found. He shows it. I can see the veining and the black and green…It is a wing, Kesbe-Rohoni. One of Wind Laughing’s forewings, broken away at the base.” Chamol offered her the binocular. “Do you wish to see?”

Kesbe swallowed, waved it away. She rejoiced that Imiya was alive, but the evidence that his aronan had not survived brought a hard hot lump to a place beneath her breastbone. It was too easy to remember a time when she first soared above the canyon on Baqui Iba, how she had tumbled and the aronan had caught her. Now Haewi Namij had fallen from the sky, perhaps saving its young rider at the cost of its own life.

Imiya, why
…

She had no time to agonize. Two aronans were already lifting with the boy lashed into a sling between them. They were riderless to give them more speed and lift. Pesquit, on her own mount, guided the pair upward.

“Tell them to climb above us and dive in order to catch up with the plane,” Kesbe told Chamol. She headed
Gooney
away from the ridge in a slight ascent as the Pai woman put up a sequence of signal banners. She knew she would need plenty of room for this next maneuver.

“Have Pesquit send two riders ahead of her. I want to see if this has any chance of working before we try it with Imiya,” she instructed and again Chamol sent signals.

She told the Pai woman to return to the cargo compartment and lash herself in beside the open door. From the corner of her eye, she saw two child-warriors climb slowly past the airplane to gain height for their dive.

She throttled back the engines and lowered landing gear, knowing the extra wind resistance would slow the C-47. She added full flaps and pulled the nose up, watching her indicated airspeed fall. It reminded her of the first time she had tried this aircraft in a slow-flight configuration. She recalled all too well how she had cut the engines back just a hair too much, letting the C-47 slip over into a full nose-high stall. One wing dropped sharply to the left, rolling the plane onto her back.

It had taken more than the usual fifteen hundred feet to recover from that one. Kesbe wasn’t sure at the time that she’d ever recover her confidence. Or her stomach, for that matter. The incident gave her great respect for the manual’s warning never to go below minimum flying speed.

The airspeed indicator slipped past the 70-knot mark as the engines grumbled, protesting the additional drag. The rubbery feel of the aileron controls became mushy and Kesbe had to be exceedingly careful not to overcorrect. The stall warning horn wailed intermittently as the plane wallowed and lumbered.

The intercom’s static crackled in her headset, then she heard Chamois voice announcing that the two riders had dived and were streaking alongside the aircraft. It looked as though they could catch up if Kesbe could hold her current speed. The airspeed indicator danced around 60 knots, threatened to bounce lower. She held the plane nose-high, praying that both wings would somehow stay level.

Over the intercom, she heard bangs and scratches, then Chamois, “Both riders are inside, Kesbe-Rohoni!”

With a huge sigh of relief, she lowered the nose, letting
Gooney
pick up some speed and stability. She had done it once, she would be able to do it again.

“Pesquit and the aronans carrying Imiya are above us, ready to dive,” came Chamois voice on
the intercom. Kesbe knew her respite was over. Again she hauled back the nose, feeling the plane begin to mush and wallow. It was at such times that one really became aware of how much weight was hanging there in the sky. Indicated airspeed slid down toward the 60-knot mark once again. Kesbe held the plane steady, waited for Chamois report that Pesquit and the sling-carriers had made it aboard.

Instead the Pai woman’s voice came on the intercom, filled with dismay. “Kesbe-Rohoni, they are close, but they can’t catch us. Can you slow Grandmother Aronan down any more?”

Kesbe felt sweat bead on her forehead. Could she risk a full stall? Slowly she pulled the yoke back until she felt as if the plane were standing on its tail. Airspeed crept down. Fifty-nine knots indicated. Fifty-eight was flaps-down stall speed according to the manuals. The warning horn was wailing like a banshee. She felt the nose begin to buffet. Fifty-seven, fifty-six and still somehow the plane kept flying.

“They are catching up, they are close,” came Chamois voice on the intercom. “Pesquit has caught the edge of the door and now she and her aronan are in.”

Fifty-five knots indicated airspeed and still the plane refused to stall. Kesbe was beyond questioning it. She could only hold attitude and hope that the miracle continued long enough. She heard only bangs and thumps over the intercom, then the slam of the cargo door. “Chamol?” she said into her headset.

“Hai, Grandmother Aronan has done it! We have the boy.” Chamois jubilant shout was drowned in a chorus of cheers from the child-warriors.

Kesbe shoved the nose down as hard as she could as the stall warning horn shrieked in her ear. The C-47 ended its cooperation by dipping the offside wing sharply. For an instant Kesbe thought she was going over on her back again, but a quick kick to the rudder brought the wing up. She dumped flaps and lifted the gear, getting
Gooney
up to safe flying speed.

“Do we still have everyone?” she asked, resisting the bout of shaking that always followed such intense moments. Chamol reassured her that all passengers were still aboard. Imiya was being settled on a makeshift pallet. He was sufficiently conscious to swallow water dribbled from a skin into his mouth and he looked stable enough to survive the rest of the ride.

Kesbe stared once again at her airspeed indicator. Had she really seen the needle dip to 55 knots and hold steady? If so, that must be a slow-flight record for this type of aircraft. She shook her head. An instrument check would probably show that the indicator was reading high, but something inside her refused to accept the easy answer.

C-47 pilots had often asked their craft for the impossible and the airplanes had responded, exceeding design limits to an extent that baffled the engineers. Perhaps there was something in this aircraft beyond her sheet metal panels and the rivets that held her together.

Kesbe put her thoughts away, got out a map and began to lay out a course to Canaback Base. Imiya would get the best medical treatment there.

Footsteps on the companionway interrupted her. She glanced back at Chamol. The Pai woman took the copilot’s seat. She glanced at the line Kesbe was plotting and knitted her brows. “We go away from the Pai mesa?” she asked.

Surprised by Chamois sharp observation, Kesbe looked up. “We don’t know how badly Imiya is hurt. There is a place in my world where healers exist. They have great skill in handling such injuries.”

“They have no knowledge of the Pai people,” Chamol said softly. “I think it would be better to take him back to Tuwayhoima. Our healers also have skill. You felt Sahacat’s power”

Perhaps the power of Pai medicine might be due to the ability of their healers to find natural
analogs to the synthetic drugs their ancestors had once used. She wondered briefly how they had done it, then turned her attention back to Chamois argument.

Kesbe had to admit that whatever she might think of the shaman, Sahacat had certainly done an amazing job of repairing the
wuwuchpi’s
bite on her knee.

“But you said yourself that the council has declared the boy to be dead in the eyes of the tribe,” she argued. “Would any Pai healer be willing to treat him?

“A healer is obliged to preserve life regardless of any judgment that might be passed upon an individual,” said Chamol. “It is a duty as sacred as any other.” She paused. “Please. It would not be right to take my brother to a place outside the one he knows. It is best to return to Tuwayhoima.”

Kesbe heaved a sigh. In some ways Chamol was right. Subjecting the injured Pai youth to the shock of an alien world might counterbalance the advantage of treatment in a modern medical facility. And Tuwayhoima was closer.

“All right,” she said at last, “but I’m not sure I want to hand your brother back over to Sahacat.”

“We will find someone else,” said Chamol firmly.

Well, I’ll have to return to Tuwayhoima anyway if I want to get to the bottom of this
, Kesbe thought to herself. She laid the lap-board on her knees and plotted a new course.

She was already well on her way when Chamol, who had returned to the cargo bay, called up on the intercom. “Kesbe-Rohoni, an aronan follows us. It isn’t one of the child-warriors’ mounts.”

She put
Gooney
into a slight turn so she could catch a glimpse of the creature through the electronic viewer. What she saw made her heart leap. It was the rogue Baqui Iba, its wings stroking hard to intercept the plane. Even as it came close, it veered away again, retracting its antennae in alarm at the noise from the C-47’s engines.

Irrationally she wanted to fling the side-window aside and yell at the creature that its human friend was indeed there in the nose of this roaring monster. She felt dismay sink her feelings as the aronan began to fly a diverging course. How could she tell it to follow? Perhaps if it caught her smell…

The pile of signal banners lay on the copilot’s seat. Putting the aircraft on autopilot, she tore a wide strip from the foot of one, then unzipped her coverall. She mopped her breast and underneath her arms where the sweat was redolent and plentiful, then jammed the rag in the side window, letting it flutter a trail of scent into the wind.

Training the binocular on Baqui Iba, she saw it pull up in flight, extending its antennae. It tossed its head, as if making a decision, and headed after the plane. Kesbe sat back, relief washing over her. She had found her aronan again. It wouldn’t be able to keep up with the plane at cruise speed, but it would follow her scent trail through the air back to Tuwayhoima.

During the first part of the flight back, Imiya seemed alert, though weak and dizzy. Then Chamois reports from the cargo bay began to worry Kesbe. The youth became lethargic, and disoriented. He slid in and out of a heavy sleep from which it was hard to wake him.

Kesbe pushed the throttles up a notch and wondered if she had made the right choice in choosing the skills of Pai healers over the facilities available at Canaback. It was beginning to look as if Imiya had suffered a severe concussion, or possibly a fractured skull A
wuwuchpi
bite on an extremity was one thing, a subdural hematoma, another. What swayed her in the end was the fact that Tuwayhoima was close.

Several hours after
Gooney
landed on the Pai Yinaye mesa, Imiya lay on a pine-bough pallet in Chamois house, tended by a healer of the Blue-Green Water Clan. No one had been at the landing site to bar Kesbe’s return to Tuwayhoima, and no one had offered to help carry the injured youth from the plane. Kesbe, Chamol and the child-warriors had formed their own isolated procession to the village.

A startled Nabamida had joined them on the trail, staring down at his nephew with joy and disbelief so intermingled that his face seemed to writhe in pain. It was he who brought the healer, a maternal relative of his clan. It was through Nabamida that Kesbe sent word to Nyentiwakay to ask that Baqui Iba be taken to Aronan House and cared for, since she could not yet give the time to be with it.

Now she sat against the lamplit wall of Chamois house, watching a wizened grandmother dribbling another potion into the boy’s slack lips. He barely reacted enough to cough it out. The old woman shook her carapace-rattles over him vehemently, recited again all the names of the spirits that could cause such ill-fortune and then admitted that this was beyond her curative powers.

Casting a despairing look at Imiya, Chamol rose and went to her loom. With trembling hands she began once again to weave the burial blanket. Kesbe came up behind her.

“You have tried, Kesbe-Rohoni, but Mother Canyon keeps those she claims. There will be need for my work after all.”

Kesbe wondered if she could still fly the boy to Canaback before he slipped from stupor into death. No. She had let that possibility go. Was there any other healer among the Pai who might have the ability to save Imiya? Her mind whispered the one name she didn’t want to hear.

She turned. Nabamida was helping the crone to the door, paying her with a string of jerked meat and sapiki bread for her efforts. The loom began its ominous clack, clack, thump rhythm, as if a death-spirit were walking the path toward the house.

“Sahacat,” she said. Chamois hands lifted to work the shuttle, remained suspended. “You cannot, Kesbe-Rohoni. It is too dangerous. She sees you as an enemy.”

“You said she must come if she is summoned to save a life,” Kesbe argued. “Take me to her.”

“Even a life may not be worth the cost the shaman may exact,” said Chamol dully, letting her head fall forward so that the lamplight cast a strange shadow from her butterfly-wing headdress onto the burial blanket.

“The shaman herself will decide that cost,” said a husky voice from the doorway, where Nabamida was retreating away from a tall figure in fringed robes. “I would expect better judgment of you, warrior-woman,” she said, rounding on Kesbe. “To have pulled the boy from the embrace of Mother Canyon is a great thing. To place his care in the hands of a mere hearth-
healer is throwing away his life.”

“You nearly threw away his life when you refused to search for him,” Kesbe could not help retorting.

“Of what use would it have been to search for the boy’s body when his spirit has chosen to flee from his people? You have brought back a handful of clay and I will keep the breath moving in it. I will give the boy’s body back sight, motion, speech, but, unless the spirit chooses to redeem itself, I cannot give life.”

Kesbe felt herself go white with anger, but Sahacat was already beyond her. The shaman strode into the room where Imiya lay. Chamol followed. Sahacat untied a large pouch at her waist and called sharply for a brazier of heated stones.

Kesbe saw her kneel beside the youth, open his eyelids, take note of the disparate sizes of the two pupils. She grunted, knocked aside the earthenware jug holding the remains of the medicine used by the Blue-Green-Water Clan healer. “The gods of healing give better assistance to one who practices with knowledge as well as faith,” she muttered. “How often have I taught that one must understand everything there is to know about a sick person before giving treatment? To dribble potions on the lips of one unconscious, that is worse than foolish!”

She worked quickly, grinding medicinal roots in a small mortar, then making an infusion with water. While it steeped, she examined Imiya thoroughly, going over him from head to toe. Not only did she touch, feel and examine, she smelled. She crept around him in almost an animal fashion, dipping her head to inhale his scent.

“The flesh of the brain has been injured,” she murmured, eyes closed. “It swells, pressing against the bone vessel that encloses it, worsening the hurt. It is the swelling inside that will kill.” She jerked her head around, fixed Kesbe with intense eyes. “Was water given?”

It was Chamol who answered. “Only a little. After a while, he would no longer drink.”

“Hai, that has saved him. His body has dried. Without water, abused flesh cannot swell. Give me the heated stones.”

She dumped the brazier’s contents into the gourd holding her infusion. The stones sizzled and steamed, sending up clouds of strong-smelling vapor. Sahacat seized Imiya, sat him up, forced him to breathe it.

Kesbe was skeptical. To her this looked more like a cure for bronchitis than an effective way to treat a head injury. She stooped near the fuming pot, examined its contents, which now looked like rough porridge. “Do not inhale too much of the
hishi
,’ said the shaman. “It can stop your woman’s cycle or make you lose any child you might be carrying.”

Wordlessly, Kesbe retreated. Whatever it was, it smelled powerful. Some sort of botanical steroid, perhaps. It made sense. She remembered a discussion on steroids that had been given in a course on emergency medicine she’d taken during her space pilot training. Anything that would disrupt human hormones would be a steroid or steroid-based and she had no doubt that the drug would do exactly what Sahacat said it would.

Sahacat kept the boy inhaling the vapor, nearly pushing his face into the frothing liquid. When the potion cooled, she called for more heated stones and added more of the ground root. The vapor belching from the vessel grew even thicker and more pungent, wreathing the boy’s head and shoulders.

She kept his face buried in it for what seemed like hours and then at last took the bowl away, letting him lie back. “The swelling inside is departing,” she said, thumbing open both eyes and displaying equal size pupils. With a murmur of annoyance, the patient pulled away from her fingers, fluttering his eyelids.

He looked better. Something told Kesbe that Sahacat’s treatment had taken effect. As the vapor cleared, she looked down at the boy. Now he appeared like someone in a light sleep rather than a victim dragged down into coma. Sahacat, however, hadn’t finished. From the pouch bound to her waist, she drew out a pair of rattles that were similar to the ones used by the old medicine-woman.

“Go now,” she said to Kesbe and Chamol. “I call the gods with dance and chanting to pray that the boy’s spirit will also be healed.” Immediately she leaped into a frenzied whirl, moaning out words that had not meaning.

“Leave her,” Chamol said softly. “She will dance until she is exhausted, then fall into trance.”

Kesbe wanted to argue that Imiya needed rest more than shaman’s dancing, but she let herself be steered out of the room. She yawned, blinked as she saw that daylight had turned once again to night. Her stomach reminded her forcefully that she had not eaten since a hastily-snatched bite aboard the plane. When Chamol ducked away and appeared with steaming bowls of
wuwuchpi
stew, she did not even think about hesitating. The food was gone before she knew it and she was letting herself sink onto a pine-branch pallet in another room while the shaman’s chanting faded from her ears.

Haewi. Haewi! I cry out but no answer comes. Where is the wet stiffness of aronan-hristles against my legs? Where is the powerful heat of wings against wind and rain? Where is the one who fought to hear me even to the end of strength and life…Haewi.

It returns to me. The fall. The rain beating down. The breaking of the wing shaft from my flier’s body. Mahana’s hands on her aronan’s forewing, twisting, tearing…I did not do this to Haewi. I flew Haewi away to escape such mutilation. Again and again I feel, I see, I feel the wingspar splintering, the wing tearing away and again I know the terror of falling and a shock so great it is beyond pain. Oh gods it is with me and I shall live it again and again without end forever…

I fall with despair into sleep and then I wake, finding the dark soft and the same all around me. Once it hissed like the wind on the ridges, sometimes it roared. Now it is Quiet and parts of the dark have become hard beneath me. Pain beats in my head and thirst in my throat. There is singing. I do not want to wake, for this is a different world, one without Haewi.

A shaman chants, bringing me back from the dark turning of the Road of Life. Her magic is strong. I have no choice but to return.

I know that this is Chamois house and I lie on a pallet of pine boughs. The shaman who brought me back kneels hunched over beside me. The sobbing breaths tell me the shaman has danced to exhaustion. The shape of the body and the sweat-streaked bare back tell me who the shaman is.

She sits up wearily, flinging back her hair. I do not want to meet her eyes, yet I find my gaze fixing on them.

“You have traveled far, child-warrior,” she says. “Along paths many do not venture until they are much older. Have you gained wisdom by it?”

I try to turn my face away, but she seizes my chin. “What did you see when you profaned the adulthood ritual of the girl Mahana?”

Again there comes the image of hands twisting a wingspar, of a mutilated creature stripped of flight. “No…’ I moan.

“Yes, you see the vision again. And you shall continue to see it and it shall be evil to you because you saw it through eyes that were touched with wrongness.”

“I wanted—to know.”

“To know that which was sacred. To know that which would have been given to you at the right time in the right way.”

I feel my heart become stone within my body and wish only that the rest could follow. “What will happen to me now?”

“I can tell you only what will not happen. You will not become kekel. You will not become
lomuqualt.
Your disobedience and arrogance has angered the gods so that they will withhold the gifts they bestow on youths of the Pai.”

I trembled. “No…”

She continues relentlessly. “You have chosen to remain a child, and a child you will be, even when your face is shrivelled and your hair is gray. None among our people will pay notice to what you speak, nor will you sit in council.”

The pain batters my head along with the harshness of her words. Life without Haewi seems bitter enough, but to have such punishment heaped atop it—that I can not bear. I thought those tears I shed on the rain-swept rock would be my last, but more spill down my face.

She is silent, watching me. “Would you turn this fate aside?”

“Is there a way?”

“The gods may yet be placated,” she says softly. “If one who is willful becomes obedient and learns to place his trust in his elders and teachers. If that is proven, then, child-warrior, you may walk another path.”

“How?”

She laughs, her eyes narrow. “Not yet. I will leave you to think about the choices. If you are worthy of a better fate than the one that lies ahead, then I will know.”

She rises, passing a hand across my eyes that makes them suddenly heavy. The throbbing pain dies and everything else slides into the nothingness from which it came.

The morning sun streaming in the window near Kesbe’s pallet painted a warm stripe across her cheek. It teased her eyelids, coaxing them open. She was about to bury her head in the crook of her arm to block out the sunlight when the memory of the previous evening broke in on her drowsiness.

Imiya! Was he all right
? She thrust herself up from the bed, ignoring the aching in her back from too many hours in the pilot’s seat. She blinked in the morning dazzle, groping for her boots. Chamol appeared in the doorway, her little son Jolo on her hip. His aronan-nymph scuttled around the hem of Chamois dress, peering up at her as if it too wanted to be carried.

It was such a sweet ordinary domestic scene that Kesbe couldn’t help wondering if all the events of the past few days weren’t just a bad dream.

“My brother is in a healing sleep,” Chamol said. “It is the best thing for him now. Come. There is food.”

Kesbe followed the Pai woman, marveling how her partner in a daring aerial rescue had become once more a mother. Squatting on a mat in the central room, she ate hot waferbread while watching Chamol feed cornmeal mush to Jolo and pinyon seeds to the aronan nymph. She took a closer look at the small creature and saw the outlines of developing wings beneath the transparent cuticle of its back.

The Pai woman smiled proudly as Kesbe stroked the nymph. “This one will moult soon and then it will be able to fly. Jolo will take his first ride. Perhaps you will be here for the celebration.” She finished feeding her son and let him crawl off her lap. He toddled over to the
nymph, which gleefully knocked him down and rough-housed with him like a big dog.

So that is bow the partnership starts
, she thought, watching them.
Imiya and Haewi were probably raised this way
. That thought prompted others that she did not want intruding on her precariously cheerful state of mind, at least not this early in the morning.