Zadayi Red (39 page)

He
was
flying! He could lift himself in the air! He could sail back upward!
I can fly! I’m going to live!

He felt his vision change somehow. He didn’t see ahead so well, but to each side he saw with a clarity that seemed incredible. He felt as though a world painted in fuzz was now turned into sharp lines and glowing colors.

He gulped. He saw a wing attached to his body—a wing on each side. He took a chance, tucked his head, turned it sideways, and looked down and back. Talons, and a broad, feathered tail. He studied the markings on his wings.

I am a war eagle.

He looked up at Thunderbird. The great bird laughed. Zeya soared up, and Thunderbird laughed louder.
Only a bird-god,
thought Zeya,
could make a laugh sound like thunder.

I’m flying
. As a child he flew in his dreams.
I’m flying in reality.
He chuckled.
I guess this reality.

“Let’s play!” roared Thunderbird.

Thunderbird whirled and flew at Zeya from the front. An attack!

At the last moment Thunderbird spread his great wings and
stopped in midair in front of Zeya. He held out his talons. “Grab on!”

Incredulous, Zeya reached out and held talons with the great bird.

“In this position we could kiss or kill!” roared Thunder-bird. He blinked, and sheet lightning flashed.

“Close your wings!” said Thunderbird.

They both tucked their wings in and fell, locked together eye to eye.

“Diving!” roared Thunderbird. He let go of Zeya, turned himself beak down, flattened his wings to his body, and sped downward.

Zeya peered after him. “Why not?” he shouted.

He imitated Thunderbird’s form and shot down. The winds were ferocious, and in Thunderbird’s wake the turbulence was intense. Zeya watched his mentor and told himself,
That isn’t a mountaintop rushing up at me—I’m not headed for those trees.

He clutched everything within himself tight and hurtled down.

Just above the summit Thunderbird changed angle and followed the slope of the mountain down.

Doing the same—he hoped!—Zeya didn’t get the movement exactly right and actually brushed a wing tip against a jutting rock. He felt some pin pricks and glanced back to see several of his feathers dart through the air.

Thunderbird flashed down to the river, let his huge wings flap against the water, and flung back a rainstorm at Zeya.

“Let me show you how to climb the easy way,” roared Thunderbird.

He crossed the valley to the next mountain—what freedom they had, covering such distances! There he simply stuck out his wings and began to float upward. How could that happen to Thunderbird’s huge body?

Zeya did the same, and the air lifted him, too.

“Warm winds rise,” Thunderbird cried, “and cool winds sink down. Here the sun is always coming up, so the air’s always getting warmer, and we can go up without working hard. What a deal!”

They rose in perfect quiet, a sublime upward sail without effort. In the time it would have taken to walk across Zeya’s home village, they passed the mountaintops.

Thunderbird flapped out over the valley again and gave Zeya a mischievous look. “Let’s go back to the nest. I have a surprise for you.”

Zeya resisted saying he wanted to keep flying.

He watched Thunderbird and carefully made his first landing as an eagle, wings spread, body weightless, a gentle float onto the nest.

“A fellow might think you’d been an eagle all your life,” said Thunderbird.

Zeya felt like strutting.

“Before the principal business at hand,” Thunderbird said, “a request. Here is the new Cape.”

“Gorgeous,” said Zeya. It glowed with splendor.

“In return for this gift,” said Thunderbird, “I would like the Galayi to initiate a new practice among the warriors. From now on, when a man performs a heroic feat in battle, his comrades will give him a beautiful feather from a war eagle, and the warrior will wear it as an emblem of his courage. From now on this will be the highest sign of honor in war.”

The god-bird cocked an eye at Zeya.

“I will tell everyone,” said Zeya.

“However,” Thunderbird went on, “these feathers must be gathered without killing any eagles.”

“Yes,” says Zeya.

“Very good. You and I, we’ve gotten along famously, haven’t we?” That mischievous look again, with something dark in it.

Zeya answered formally, “I could not be more grateful for what you’ve done for me.”

“Perhaps now you’ll do something small for me.”

“Of course.”

“Change yourself back into a human being, back into the young Soco man who came here as a seeker.”

Zeya felt a thrill of fear. “I don’t know how,” he said.

“Just begin, and you’ll know.”

Zeya cocked his head sideways and looked down at his right talon. Inside himself, he told it,
Change.

Claws fell off. Toes reappeared. The four-part talon started growing skin, and then melded together into a human shape.

Lifted by wonder, Zeya extended his right wing.
Change
, he told it without words. The tip of the wing started reshaping itself into fingers.

Zeya’s eyes got huge, and he had to resist laughing.

Zeya made a mess of one thing. He converted his beak into a nose and accidentally back to a beak. When he thought he’d finished his face, Thunderbird handed him a cloth and said, “Blow your nose.”

When Zeya honked his beak, they both laughed.

Still, Zeya got it done in short order. He looked down at himself in amazement. He studied the body he’d had all his life. Then he looked directly at Thunderbird. “Thank you. For me personally, this is the greatest gift of all.”

“No,” said Thunderbird, “for you personally
this
is the greatest gift.”

Thunderbird seized Zeya with one of his huge talons and held him up to an enormous eye. He blinked, and sheet lightning numbed Zeya’s brain. The bird-god pointed his beak to where Zeya’s ribs met his belly and stabbed him.

Zeya felt warm blood run down. He managed to gasp, “What are you doing?”

“Eating you,” said Thunderbird.

Quickly, the bird-god slit Zeya from sternum to crotch bone. Zeya felt the cold air of the heights seep into his being.

Thunderbird reached deep under Zeya’s ribs with his beak and drew something out. Zeya’s heart. It beat one last time in Thunderbird’s beak, and the bird-god solemnly gulped it down.

Z
eya suddenly lay by the fire in front of them, unconscious.

Tsola reached out and took the Cape from his loose hands. Tenderly, she wrapped it in a painted elk robe. Then she stepped back to Zeya, knelt, and turned his zadayi so that the red side was out.

“Thank you,” said Sunoya.

“That, what Thunderbird did, was terrible to watch,” said Tsola.

“I heard of it, but I never saw it done,” said Sunoya.

Zeya stirred.

“You’re Okay,” Sunoya told him.

Pacing nervously, Klandagi said, “It won’t help, not yet.”

He was right, it wouldn’t. Soon the world would rotate a quarter circle to the left, or some direction, and her son’s mind would click in.

“You’re all right,” she said again.

“Zeya, can you hear me?” This was Tsola. “You’re here with your mother, and me, Tsola, Klandagi, and Su-Li. You’re fine.”

Both medicine women remembered the disorientation of their own first trips across. They looked at each other with the knowledge of how much more awful Thunderbird had made this crossing.

“The greatest gifts call for the greatest sacrifices,” murmured Tsola.

Sunoya gave her mentor a look. She didn’t need lecturing right now. “You’re fine,” said Zeya’s mother, stroking his forearm.

Su-Li said inside her mind,
He will be fine, better than fine.

Still, he lingered in an unconscious or half-conscious state. Sunoya took Su-Li outside. While he looped up the sky, she sat and watched the twilight reflect in the Healing Pool. Tsola’s daughters went about their business quietly. No one was here for healing right now. “Except,” Sunoya said out loud, “for my son, the hero of the people.” A hint of bitterness spiced her words.

And me.
Being apart from Su-Li had weakened her. Her life energy was interwoven with his. She would have to spend time in the Pool. But now her son needed her.

Inside the Cavern Zeya finally woke up enough to reach down and feel his belly. When he didn’t find a wound, he drifted back to sleep.

Later he whispered, “Thirsty.”

Sunoya gave him broth. Klandagi said with a chuckle, “He won’t want any more of that special tea for a while.”

Zeya’s first sentence was, “How long was I gone?”

Tsola spoke up. “Not even long enough for my arm to get tired from drumming.”

Zeya blinked at his companions, the Cavern, and this world that was not beyond the Sky Arch. He shook his head as though to chase memories away. “I went a lot of places. I did a lot of things.”

“I know,” said Tsola, “I was there.”

The panther raised his purr to a hum.

“I told Sunoya and Klandagi everything,” said Tsola.

“I am in awe of what you accomplished,” said the big cat.

Zeya shook his head again. Clearly, he didn’t know what to make of that, or anything else.

“I died,” he said.

“And came back to life a new man,” said Tsola.

Zeya gawked at her. Then he closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.

“We’d best take our time, talk to him only as he’s ready for each part.”

“Yes,” said Tsola. She looked urgently at the Cape. “Waiting is hard. I’m dying to put it on.”

Piecemeal, Zeya came to understand what had happened. Or at least he listened attentively to what they said and marked it in his mind. He would ponder it in his own time.

“I guess I’m all right with the journey across,” he told the two women, his mother and his teacher. “The enemies I met—the dogs, the snakes, all that—I created them myself. They were
my
fears, so I had to deal with them. I got the new cape.” He looked at the bundle. And I got a gift”—the next words were hushed—“I can turn into an eagle.”

Both women nodded. They’d been over and over these things.

“And I had to die to come back?”

“Yes.”

“But when you went, you didn’t die.”

“No.”

“Because . . .?”

Tsola said, “Over time, you will know. You are still called on to do great things in the future.”

“And a better man was needed to do them?”

Tsola chuckled. “You might put it that way.”

“It’s too much.”

“Let’s give him something,” said Klandagi. He looked at
his mother and Sunoya. “Zeya, here’s an idea, this will be good. Change yourself into an eagle. Do it. Right now.”

Zeya looked at the panther hesitantly. He started to speak.

“Just do it,” said Klandagi.

Zeya did, foot to claw, arm to wing, flesh to feather. “I can’t imagine ever getting used to this.” As though to convince himself, he pecked at his neck feathers, looked at his companions, and flashed his wings out.

“And what do you want to do now?”

“Fly!”

“Go to it.”

The eagle hopped toward the cave entrance and launched into the sky. Su-Li flew with him, wing tip to wing tip.

“Bring him back soon,” called Sunoya.

W
inging over his home country was spectacular. He knew the Cheowa village, the path up to the Emerald Cavern, the trails to the Soco and Cusa villages to the south, and to the Tusca village in the east. He knew the mountains, he knew the rivers. But to see them as a pattern, how everything flowed together, was amazing. The landscape came together with a kind of sense he had never known. The river started in the mountains high above the Cheowas, came crashing down to the broad, flat valley where the houses stood, and wandered in snaky curves to the south. Halfway down the valley the stream turned fast and roily. In the distance he could see where the trail from the Tusca village dropped in and the river trail ran on south, with a sharp bend westward and then south again, to the Soco village.