The Other Lands (38 page)

The minute she said this, she knew it was a lie. Even if she could stop the Akaran-led hunting parties, she would never be able to stop others—tribesmen, trophy hunters, any villain looking to make a profit from killing the last of the foulthings. When word got out that Elya was harmless, it would be even worse. Still, Mena said, “You should just go,” not believing it but feeling she must say it. She had to offer it, had to make Elya understand that she was free to choose her fate.

Elya moved her head closer, tilted it, and touched the soft flat of her crown to Mena’s forehead. That was her answer.

“You should just go.”

The creature tapped her head against Mena’s several times. Again, her answer.

Relief washed through Mena, suffusing her with warmth from head to toe, even as worry wrapped her chest like iron ribbons trying to squeeze the air from her lungs. “Okay, love,” she said. “Let’s go introduce you to the world. Let’s make an impression.”

There was one way, she hoped, to present herself and Elya in a manner that could stun her brave soldiers into the moment of hesitation she would need. That was why she rode toward them with her legs over Elya’s shoulders and her thighs clenched tight and her arms wrapped around her neck. For a time she rode blind, letting her mount direct them. She pressed her face against the plumage and loved the touch as greatly as any intimacy she had ever experienced. But when she felt a tremor in the creature’s muscles, she drew herself up so that the eyes of everyone they rushed toward would see her. Elya carried right on toward the soldiers as they formed defensive lines and reached for weapons. She did not slow until just before them.

It was hard to tell whether most of the party saw the creature or saw Mena as well. Mena shouted her name, telling them to drop their weapons, but confusion surged through them so thick and loud she was afraid they did not hear. She found Melio’s face, locked eyes with him, and saw the frantic intensity there. He could not have looked more perplexed. Still, he shouted for the bowmen to be ready. This Elya did not like at all.

So quickly that Mena could do nothing but gasp as it happened, Elya rose on her hind legs. She unfurled her wings with the speed of two whips cracking. The muscles in her neck stiffened to a steely, flowing hardness. Her chest expanded with a great inhalation of air, and then she smacked her wings down as if to break the earth. They were airborne. The force of it smashed Mena against Elya’s back and knocked the wind from her lungs. She clutched the creature’s neck and, as they hovered, she fought to draw in enough breath to speak. She saw how close Melio was to ruining everything with a single command. She did not have the breath yet, so she mouthed the first words that came to her and hoped he would see them and understand.

Silently, she said, “I love her.”

E
arly one evening in southern Talay, Kelis lay staring at the stars, amazed at how his life had taken this new direction so suddenly. He had lived through the string of events, but he had yet to catch up with them completely in his mind. He had been summoned to Bocoum to meet with Sangae and Sinper Ou. Things had still been normal then. He had enjoyed running to the city beside Naamen. In a vague way that he tried not to think about too clearly, it had reminded him of running with Aliver when they were both young and bursting with vigor. And then he had met Ioma Ou and Benabe and Shen. Aliver’s daughter. After that, nothing was the same.

He was still stunned by it. He saw in her features that Aliver went on in living flesh. She was not him, of course. She was Shen. Yet some part of him looked out from her eyes. He could not deny it, nor did he want to. Just a girl, but on meeting her he felt that his purpose in life and all his allegiances were tossed into the air. They still had not yet landed back on the earth.

Nor had he sorted out why the various players had brought her to him. Sangae’s motives could not be questioned, but the Ous were different creatures, with different aspirations. Even though he had not opposed the plan in his presence, Kelis had felt that Sinper did not want to let the girl leave his control. Kelis was sure that if it were not for the mythic reverence Talayans felt for the Santoth, Sinper would never have let them leave, would have found some way to claim that Shen would be safer in his compound. And then what? Could he possibly intend to play the girl in a dance for the throne? Why did rich men always crave more?

It would take an army to win Shen the throne, an entire war against Corinn’s might. That should have made it seem improbable, destructive, mad, but instead the thought filled him with dread. All of Talay would fight in the name of Aliver’s child. Though she be a girl, though she had been born outside of marriage: neither fact would dissuade the people. If they believed Shen was Aliver’s child they would fight. They would say she was of Talay, and that her triumph would be their triumph. The madness might begin again. For this reason, Kelis was relieved to get the girl out of the Ous’ control.

They left Bocoum the very next day. Ioma had offered a small corps of guards to accompany them, but Kelis had argued for the stealth of small numbers. Sangae wished Naamen to accompany Shen and her mother. When Shen approved of him, the party’s number was decided. They shed clothes and jewelry and any accoutrements that would suggest their true identity, dressing instead as a family of migrant laborers.

They walked to a trade depot to the east, and there booked passage on the deck of a fishing boat heading around the Teh Coast in search of yellow fish. They disembarked at Palik, in Balbara territory. Before they left that city they traded their clothes again, looking more like goat herders now. If anyone asked, they were returning from having sold their flock, or were on the way to pick up new stock—depending on the circumstances of who was asking.

Shen seemed to accept all this with equanimity. At times Kelis was nervous in the girl’s presence. She was a child! What did he know of children? What did Naamen know? They were two men, both of them childless, who suddenly found themselves charged with the fate of a nine-year-old girl. He had been less nervous in the company of angry chieftains like Oubadal. How strange, that he had never imagined what a burden of responsibility caring for a child was. Though in ways he felt Benabe was harsh, always looking for fault, he was glad she was there.

That was what he felt when he stood at a distance and saw only the situation. When he sat beside Shen in the morning, preparing food for her over a tiny fire; when she asked him of animal things or of plants; when she found ways to poke fun at him by mimicking the manner in which he chewed so furiously or the way he held his chin high as he looked into the distance; or when she pulled on her earlobe as he sometimes did in thought—well, then he forgot his apprehension and felt himself a child.

One time, a week’s journey into the interior of Talay, they had run into the night to put distance between themselves and the laughing howls of a laryx pack. Kelis had needed to carry the girl. Benabe kept pace with them. Shen was draped around his back and gripped him. He had further tied a wrap around her to help hold her in place. For some time he had been conscious of the weight of her, unnerved by the touch of her skin and innocent intimacy with which her legs wrapped around him, by the friction between their bodies as he ran.

But, again, that was only when he thought about it. Soon he gave himself over to running, watching the land move beneath him, entranced by the motion of his legs over the world, watching the stars hung in the black sky. When the moon rose, it lit the land with bone-white highlights, especially catching in the flowers at bloom on the acacia trees. It was a magnificent country. His legs and arms and lungs and heart were one with it. He forgot completely about Shen and realized he still bore her only when they stopped their flight and Naamen reached to untie the wrap that held her in place.

“That’s a lion, isn’t it?” Shen asked, the first of them to speak for a long time.

“Yes, child,” Benabe whispered.

“Why does she bellow like that?”

“Not she. Only the males roar that way,” her mother said. “Who can say why men complain?”

“Bellyache,” Naamen said. “Belly too full and dragging on the ground.”

Kelis smiled. The embers of a fading fire murmured beside him, crackling and shifting occasionally. He liked listening to it during moments of silence. Those moments never lasted long, though. Shen’s lion made sure of that. From the warped, lonely ferocity of its roar, Kelis could tell it was several miles away. In the back of his mind he had been tracking its movements, but in many ways he would rather have ignored it. He had no fondness for lions. He said, “It roars so that all the world knows it exists. Lions are proud, but they are also fearful.”

Shen propped herself up on her elbow. She lay on a blanket with her mother. It was unlikely that she had spent many nights sleeping in the bush before, but just three weeks of travel beneath the dome of the Talayan sky and she already seemed at home on the hard-packed earth, in simple clothes, eating the frugal fare Talayan runners survived on out here. “What do they fear?” she asked. “Laryx?”

“Yes, laryx attack lions,” Kelis said. “They also fear people, though they don’t like to admit it.”

Benabe huffed. “They fear us? Then why don’t they shut up? Instead, they announce exactly where they are in the world. If I were a hunter, I would set off from here and tell that one”—she paused, pointing in the direction of the most recent blast of sound—”to shut it! That’s what I would do.” She jabbed her fingers under Shen’s arms to punctuate this. The girl writhed a moment, laughing.

“That would be something to fear,” Kelis said, “but it’s not that sort of fear I mean. Lions hunger for glory. They would die in battle gladly, so long as they took a few with them into the night. They forever worry that they will be forgotten or not honored or laughed at. That is why they spend so much of their lives punishing other creatures. They are petty animals. They steal kills from other hunters. They slay the young of lesser cats and leave the bodies for the mothers to find.” Kelis pulled his light robe over his chest, not because he was cold but to fill in the moment when he could have named still more crimes. “They are tyrants. That is why they are such a lure to petty men.”

“Sinper Ou has a lion crest,” the girl said. “Do you think him petty?” “Yes,” Benabe said, grinning, “tell us, Kelis. Do you think the magnificent, rich Sinper Ou is a petty man?”

Kelis cleared his throat. He was not yet used to the many ways Shen caught him off guard, but he had come to believe she meant no mischief by it. He could not say the same about Benabe, but Shen’s questions were asked because she wished to know the answers. She received whatever answer he gave with the same focused interest. In fact, he had already changed the way he spoke to her. He called her “child,” but increasingly he did not think of her as kin to others of her age. Are other children like her? he wondered. Have I not noticed, or is she just different? He said, “I do not think Father Ou knows lions as I do.”

“Lions were not always the ruffians they are now,” Naamen said. He sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire, chewing on peppergrass to clean his teeth. Whatever import hung at the edges of Kelis’s interactions with the girl did not seem to affect him at all. He spoke lightly, falling into the heightened delivery of a storyteller. Shen sat up to listen. “When the Giver was yet on earth, lions and laryx and all other animals had peace together. They all knew that—”

“Hush,” Kelis said. “She has heard these tales before. She should sleep now.”

“No,” Shen protested, “tell me. I want to hear it in Naamen’s voice.” “Go ahead,” Benabe said. “You’ve got a good voice for tales.” Grinning with triumph, the young man continued. “They were the Giver’s creations. They felt his love and knew he shared it equally among them. That was a time of wonder.”

He described the wonders in imaginative detail, drawing scenes with both his normal arm and his stunted one. All sorts of animals bounded along in the Giver’s wake, singing to praise him. All creatures were newly minted and glistened with the freshness of creation. Everything was just born, and in those first days no creature thought of eating another. Instead, they leaped in the air to pull ripe fruit down from the trees. Shiviths raced with gazelles for the pure joy of it. Elephants fenced with rhinoceroses like playful friends. Eagles lifted mice into the air cupped gently in their talons, so that the small creatures might have the joy of seeing from the heights. Lions wrestled with laryx in brotherly competition.

“Can you see these things?” Naamen asked.

“I can,” Shen answered.

“Well, good that you have eyes to imagine it, for it did not last.”

Naamen explained that Elenet, the first man, was born into this. For a time he shared in the rejoicing, but soon he learned enough of the Giver’s tongue that he became vain. He tried to make his own creations, but because he was not the Giver, nothing he tried came out right. It was always twisted. Wanting to make warmth, he made the sun burn too strongly. Fleeing, he sang to cool himself and froze portions of the world in ice. To warm himself, he made fire, not noticing until later that fire consumes all it touches. To put out the fire, he lifted water from the rivers and created storms. To quell the storms, he blew the sky clean and found he had created deserts.

“You see?” Naamen asked. “Everything he did created chaos; nothing he intended came into being as he intended. Wanting to make himself immortal he opened the door to disease. He created death the moment he thought to fear it and to escape it.”

“Nobody had died before that?” Shen asked.

“No,” Naamen said, “this is the time of the first generation of everything. There was first nothing, and then there was life. It might always have been so, if Elenet had not acted so wrongly.”

But he had acted wrongly, and the Giver lost faith in his creatures. He turned away and abandoned his creations, fearing that any of them might be the next to betray him. In no time at all the world changed. The goodness that was the Giver went with him, and the world was left a different place. Creatures who had been friends began to squabble. Strong ones took to bullying weak ones. And it was not long before some creatures began to feast on the flesh of others. Eagles pressed their talons into the mice that had been their friends. Snakes used their stealth to hunt. Lions ate anything they wished. Fearing that they would all vanish, the hunted creatures learned how to mate and make children, but then the hunters learned these things, too. Painful and dangerous as it was, they had their own young, whom they taught to hunt as well.