IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume VI: The Rift
Chapter 29 The Agony of Flight
Wednesday, January 13, 2709 I’ll skip the wings this
time. I’ll have enough to handle lifting all that lead. Cyran didn’t ask me to survey government
soldiers on this trip, so I shall avoid visibility as much as possible. Ambrette forces on me a bit
of rations that she squirreled away, and I don’t know whether to thank her or
punch her. She gives me every crumb she
has before anyone else can rebuke her, either.
“You’ll bring back more,” she says.
Then they all scrape
together every last dry fragment of their greenfire into a single pouch for me. I accept it more gratefully than I should. I start to assign watches so that the rest
might catch further sleep, but Lufti volunteers to take the whole day
shift. “I can keep the stars at bay as
much as the sun can,” he assures me.
Remembering his insights at Trap Canyon, crazy or no, I let him. As ready, now, as I’ll ever
be, I run across a flat space, faster, leaping longer, till I take off from the
ground completely. I feel so weightless
without those blamed wings! I arc up,
up, tilting my head back, till I loop full circle, my braids streaming black
behind me, and then dive down upon my cheering sibs in arms, skimming over
their upraised fingertips brushing against mine, then zoom forward, rising
high, following the running messenger as I glide across the sky. Oh, she’s a good one, never
breaking her rhythm for bank or gully, leaping smoothly from stone to stone
like water flowing uphill, her arms carelessly outstretched to keep her
balance, weightless on the air, yet she never looks in threat of losing it, she
doesn’t seem to need it, her feet skim the ground so lightly that she hardly
seems to connect. Her hair floats on the
air behind her just like mine, her limbs as long and skinny as my own. I feel as though we fly as sisters, higher
and higher up the mountainside, through a landscape of harsh and tumbled beauty
unfit for men, shaped for giants weather-carved from stone. Deirdre blinked, suddenly aware of her surroundings. No one sat across from her, the old leather
of the seat still hollowed from the thin hips that so recently left it. She wriggled in her own seat to make herself
more comfortable. She heard Justín getting
sick down the hall, and then she heard the flush. Outside the sunlight on the ocean showed them
still in morning. She shook her head;
Justín didn’t last as long as she had hoped. Presently, he came in, glossy with sweat, trying to feign
nonchalance and doing a bad job of it.
The gray complexion and overall tremor didn’t help. Neither did the bloodshot eyes. “You don’t have to prove anything,” she said to him as kindly as
she could. He nodded, regarding her blearily, and left the room again. When he returned he appeared much more
composed, conveying a pretty good illusion of decent health, if a trifle
sleepy. “I never saw her again,” Deirdre said, more to herself than him. “Who–the messenger?” “Yes, her.” “What was her name, anyway?
I missed that part.” “I never learned it. I
never saw her again. She led me to the
cache of supplies and then sped back to Cyran, to report her message
delivered. I supposed she reached
hir. I suppose she died sometime
after. So many did.” He nodded, pulling on his band.
“You’re probably right. She was a
runner, not a fighter. She ran well,
I’ll give her that, but it can only protect you so far.” “How do you know that?” Deirdre asked, returning her hand to the
magentine handle. “It’s in your head. You
picked it up from her, yourself. You
knew even at the time that she didn’t really have what it took to survive for
long in the Revolution—few of the messengers did. You didn’t expect to see her again.” “I wonder why I didn’t pick up her name as well, then?” “People don’t think of themselves as their names,” he said,
reaching for the music switch. “Oh,
agents do, because we drill them in it, as part of holding onto their
identities under the stress of undercover work.
Whatever identity we want them to have.” “But not ‘people’.” She
stared at him. “Time to go back to work,” he said, flipping the switch. Time to go back to
work. I see my guide squeeze into a
crevice between boulders and so I light right behind her and follow into the
passageway that the boulders hide, on up steeply, then more steeply, then
climbing, to a sort of cave of rocks leaned against each other in the
mountainside, open to a steep drop opposite the tunnel. I can only imagine the challenge of getting
supplies into this ideal hiding-place and levitator launch-pad. Enough sun leaks through
the cracks here and there to show me that the ammunition waits in goat-sized saddle-bags
that I can throw over my shoulders. The
larger burlap sacks hold food, bulkier but lighter–I can carry those in my
arms. Two pair of saddlebags, one over
each shoulder, and a large sack in my arms, per band. My guide has no idea where to find them, but
she says I shouldn’t have too much trouble, scouting from the sky. I don’t think she realizes that I do feel the
weight of the things that I carry, that flight doesn’t come from nothing; it’s all
magic to her, and I need her and the others to keep on believing in magic. We have few edges beyond morale. Cyran has apportioned some
food out separately just for me. I force
it down, not tasting any of it. I gather up what I must,
then leap down the sheer side of the mountain, burdened like a pack-mule–no,
for a mule would have dug in his heels and refused to budge under a load like
this. I run till what should have become
a fatal stumble turns instead to flight. I’m another edge—one that
the army can’t match: a woman who can fly, who can get supplies to her
scattered troops, while the enemy must suffer out of reach. A detail like this could turn an entire war. So I do what I have to,
what everybody needs me to do. I tune
out the crushing weight, skimming low, all my senses stretched to find my lost
ones. I chew the bitter leaf when I
must, trying to keep enough left over for us all in the days to come. I should appreciate the sacrifice that the
others made for me, but I just envy them their rest. Haul, find, deliver, scout
on the way back, find, return, stock up, return the other way, deliver,
repeat. Sometimes I find them by the
smell of their tobacco on the air.
Sometimes I hear their voices, faint, muffled. Sometimes I see them, when I get enough
height. Sometimes I just follow a hunch
straight to them. They always effuse
gratitude when I stumble down into their midst with everything they need, and I
try to grin and nod back at them before toppling upward into the sky once more. The pain mounts. These faded bits of shriveled leaf can’t hold
it back, and I can’t get anything stronger.
My muscles, my joints. It burns
cold, the weight of my duty. Now I
grimace when I try to grin to those whom I succor, and my nods threaten to turn
into fainting spells. But I hold
on. My children need me. What did Cyran once say about instinct? Throttle it back when it gets in the way, but
let it have full steam when it suits the business at hand. Mothers can do anything, endure anything, for
their children. The pain increases even
more. It swallows up everything that
duty doesn’t claim. But so far duty
barely keeps the mastery, so I get the job done. I hardly register the landscape anymore. I don’t hear birds, now, only the pounding of
my heart, my labored breath, and the rush of wind around me. I don’t know what steers me anymore. Yet somehow I find the scattered revolutionaries,
deliver what I came to give, and take off for the next. I taste blood. It must come from the chapping of my lips. I think my face might crack some, too, where
the wind makes my eyes water nonstop and then gnaws with ice teeth at the
wetness on my cheeks and sockets. At
least it used to sting like it did, for hours, before my skin went numb. I know that my fingers crack; those I can see. No matter. Fly on. I swoop down on one band
and see Kiril once again. I can’t stay
on my feet. I fall to my knees and let
them pull my burden off me, new tears streaming uncontrollably just to see her
again. By the horror on her face in the
midst of the rejoicing, I must look a sight.
“Oh Deirdre!” she cries, running to embrace me, “What have they done to
you? What have you done to yourself?” I smile through my tears,
though the chapping makes it hard, and I hug her back. “Lufti’s all right,” I manage to gasp. “His lips started to turn blue, so since then
I’ve been carrying him. His heart, you
know. They’re pink again. His lips.
I push him out of danger. I keep
an eye out for him at all times. He’s
all right.” “But what about you?” She cups my face in her hands, so gently that
it almost doesn’t hurt. She dabs at my
wet cheeks with her prayer-cloth and my tears stain it pink. I accept a skin of water
from Hekut and take a deep swallow before I answer her. “I swore to serve Lovequest,” I tell her,
“With the sharpest edge of my mind, with the softest tenderness of my heart,” I
hand back the waterskin, “with the holiest courage of my spirit, and the last
endurance of my flesh.” I stagger back
to my feet, much lighter without my load, grinning with renewed
commitment. “With understanding, or if
necessary without.” I pull myself up as
straight as I can. “So what about
me? I chose this path.” And with that I leap into the sky again,
before I can let her pity weaken me into begging to rest with her, trying to
stop the tears before they freeze to my face again in the gale of my flight. Dark begins to overtake the
land by the time I return to my own command, bearing the last load in the
cave. I don’t land, I crash, and in more
ways than one. They must have pulled the
supplies off of me; I have no way of knowing.
For all my awareness of whatever happens next, I might as well have
died. Thursday, January 14, 2709 (A puzzled man drifts past a campfire where I huddle with others
against the cold, cooking squirrels on skewers.
“Excuse me,” I say when I notice that his feet don’t quite touch the
ground. I get up and follow him to where
he collides with a barbed wire fence. “Easy now,” I say as I help him to disentangle himself. “You’re a levitator, and you’re full of
magentine, and don’t know how to control it, but we have medicine for...” And then I stop. No, we don’t have medicine. I got separated from Dalmar and Pauline and
I...I can’t untangle my knowledge of how to make it myself from recipes for
jams and soufflés and all kinds of formulas projected all around me by the
hungry crowd. Fear wells up in me. I finish freeing the last rag from the barbs, and help the man to
the fire where I can salve and bandage his injuries. I’m still together enough to do that much
good, at least. It’s all Lovequest.) Scrapes on my face. I can feel them burning. I must have touched down on it. Or maybe it’s
the chapping. No, I feel it all the way
to the jaw—rough landing, then. Jarring. That’s the makeshift stretcher underneath me,
bouncing up and down with every weary step.
They must have accounted me too far gone to ride Honeydew, or maybe the
donkey’s too tired by now to carry anything.
Tanjin sees my eyes open, and takes this opportunity to give me water
and biscuits, begging me to stay awake long enough to eat and drink. I do my best.
Noon turns to night the instant that my eyes close. Friday, January 15, 2709 Fighting goes on
somewhere. But blankets tucked tight
around me bind me to my stretcher. I
hear the gunfire, the shouts, the screams, and I cannot do a thing about
it. I feel the ghosts–as worn out as
myself, not too surprised that it should end this way, almost relieved,
really. Almost. Presently my own folk
stumble back. Blood spatters Tanjin, but
none of it is his. He pushes another
biscuit into my mouth, then holds my head up to take more water. “I can sit up,” I tell him,
and do so...barely. “Did I get feverish
again?” “Not one of them looked
anywhere near old enough to be my father,” he informs me. “We treated them all right. We gave them that one day of decency.” I look at him, his face
screwing up on the verge of tears, and I understand. “All dead?” “Every last one. They were starving. They didn’t stand a chance.” I eat more biscuits and some dried fruit,
famished. Ambrette brings over some
cheese, and soon the entire band squats down beside my stretcher to eat the
largess of our sympathizers. Tanjin
repeats, “We gave them that one last day of decency.” “Yes, we did.” |
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