A Gathering of Wings (14 page)

The server sets down cups of sea broth, then slips Honus a small sheet of paper and bustles away. Neal leans in to read what is written on the sheet, shaking his head in disgust.

“What is it?” Malora asks.

“A small setback,” Honus says. “We made an inquiry at the desk earlier, and this is our response. It seems that Shrouk has radically reduced her custom.”

“What does that mean?” Malora asks, setting her cup down so hard that broth sloshes onto the table.

“It means we will not be able to see her until the day
after
tomorrow,” Neal says. “She now limits her practice to once a week.”

Malora sits back. She feels their eyes on her, sympathetic but helpless.

“Is there no other recourse?” Orion asks Honus.

Honus says, “I’m afraid not. She is ancient. We are lucky she is still alive and practicing.”

“The day after tomorrow will have to do,” Malora says, even though inwardly she is screaming. The day after tomorrow, Sky could be dead! I should not have listened to them. I should have insisted on going into the Downs.

Malora folds her hands to keep them from shaking. She wants to pound them on the table. To have come this far, to have traveled all these many days, only to have to wait one more day, is nearly intolerable.

Zephele rises from the bench and wraps her arms around Malora’s shoulders. “Please don’t fret,” she says softly. “We will find Sky and all will be well. And in the meantime, we will go shopping in the marketplace of Kahiro.”

Malora sighs. How can she explain to her friend that the idea of shopping instead of visiting Shrouk makes her want to pick up the table and heave it into the fountain? But she says nothing. She doesn’t trust herself to speak. She passes the rest of the meal in silence. The seafood, which she might under other circumstances have enjoyed sampling, is gritty and tasteless. Although Honus makes an effort to explain what each dish is, Malora doesn’t really listen, and most of it she leaves on her plate.

Dock, whose own plate goes largely untouched, growls, “I don’t blame you. Slimy grub’s not fit for scavengers.”

The others carry on, a forced fellowship in which Malora takes no part. She misses the horses. Not just the horses they left in the Dromadi stable but the ones in Mount Kheiron. She misses the warmth of Max’s long, faintly rank head. And she misses Mount Kheiron itself.

When she expresses these thoughts to Honus, he says, “Ha! Mount Kheiron and its centaurean homogeneity. Yes, indeed. I do believe you are suffering from Kahiro Syndrome.”

“What’s that?” she asks.

“A temporary condition that comes about as a result of being exposed to a surfeit of strange food, strange language,
and strange hibes. You want to curl up in a ball and breathe only the air from your own lungs and shut out all this jarring strangeness. Is that how you feel, my dear?”

“A little,” she says, just to humor him. It is Zephele who suffers from the syndrome. Malora’s suffering has a different cause. It is Sky’s suffering she feels in her very bones.

Honus pats her hand. “You’ll see. Your mind will widen again to encompass all this. Everything will seem much more acceptable in the morning. You’ll get a good night’s sleep and face tomorrow refreshed and once again open to new things.”

Later, in her room, Malora removes the horns and rubs her scalp, then her calves, sore from walking on the balls of her feet. She looks around. Tucked up under the eaves, the room is small and modest by centaurean standards. There is a rectangular box of netting encasing a narrow bed and a wooden stand with a white bowl filled with water for washing. Once the home of a sea creature, Honus has told her, the bowl is called a seashell. She will find more seashells, of all shapes and sizes, on the shores of the sea tomorrow, where Neal has promised to take them
after
Zephele has sated herself shopping. She takes the sea sponge and drops it into the bowl. Then she strips and washes everything but her hair. Dirty hair is wild hair, and the more wild her hair, the more successfully it will conceal the tortoiseshell band.

Drying herself and slipping on only a tunic, she goes over to the window, parts the blue-glass beads, and looks down. The street below is in near-darkness and, except for the cats flowing in and out of the shadows, deserted. A few streets over to the east, she can see the aura of blazing torches and hear the endless shuffling of feet, the constant murmuring of many
strange tongues punctuated by an occasional wild hoot of laughter. Somewhere, farther off, she hears music, as strange-sounding as the babble.

Honus has told her that the city, its streets and clubs and eateries, stays awake until sunrise. She should be out there prowling, asking everyone she sees about Sky, holding up the charcoal portrait Zephele drew of him—with the eyes rendered in the same vivid blue paint Zephele uses to accent her own eyes. But the thought of the scouts keeps her indoors. It isn’t fear so much as if something were to happen to her, there would be no one to save Sky.

She stands up, letting the beads fall back over the window. Dousing her lantern, she climbs into the narrow bed. The net and the walls of the small room press in upon her. She closes her eyes and imagines she is in the tent, a closeness that is comforting rather than oppressive. But she isn’t sleepy even though she needs to sleep. A day in the marketplace, her friends have told her, will be far more exhausting than any of their days in the bush. In the darkness, her hand wound throbs. She sits up and tears away the coverlet. She will never be able to sleep here! Then she remembers the ladder in the hallway that Honus told her led to the roof. She rips aside the netting, claps the horns back on her head, and slips on her boots. Rolling up the mattress and bedding, she carries them into the hall.

One-handed, she climbs the ladder and eases the hatch open with her horns. As she emerges onto the roof, she inhales the pungent sea air, an instant balm to her frazzled nerves. She looks around. White wisps ride the breeze like trailing scarves. The roof is an enormous square, the tiles still
warm from the day’s sun, surrounded by low walls with, here and there, a potted palm. She sees a figure in the mist and is glad of the knife in her boot, then realizes it is Honus. He is leaning against the wall, smoking a pipe. Choosing a spot between two palms, she lays out her bedroll on the tiles, then joins Honus.

He speaks without turning his gaze to her. “I knew you’d choose the roof over the room. The air is close down there.”

Malora rests her elbows on the wall and looks out. Holes in the mist reveal the water below, black as oil. “So that’s the sea,” she says, feeling oddly disappointed.

“Wait until the mist blows off,” Honus says. The next moment, as if on cue, a brisk wind scatters the mist to reveal an enormous, craggy mountain rising up out of the sea, etched in torchlight.

“Behold,” says Honus, “the
true
Backbone of Heaven!”

“Why do they call it that?”

“Because it fell from the heavens and landed on the earth. The Scienticians predicted the occurrence hundreds of years before it happened. The Prophecy unhinged the People, even more than the proliferation of the hibes. They thought it boded the world’s end. Knowing that the world might be ending made them half mad at worst, heedless of their welfare at best. The Scienticians built massive subterranean shelters all over the earth. They were intended originally for the People, but by the time they were finally put to use, there were more hibes than People and the hibes took most of them.

“There is a story in an ancient book called the Bible about a flood that once covered the earth and a man named Noah who was told by his god to build a great boat called an ark to
hold two each of every animal on the earth. Aptly enough, the Scienticians called these shelters arks. Ironically, there was no room on the arks for the animals, which were left to fend for themselves. Many of them, the ones on this continent, went unscathed. On other continents they were rendered extinct and live on only through the surviving hibes. In the north, the impact of the rock colliding with the earth caused a deep freeze called the Great Ice. A vast sheet of ice covered the northern half of the world—and still does, or so the sailors say. Elsewhere, volcanoes erupted, the earth heaved, tidal waves swallowed whole coastlines, and great cities were buried. It is even said that on other continents, the land dissolved into great lakes of molten fire. Kahiro, which had once been an inland city, instantly became a seaside one with this great rock lying in the middle of its harbor.”

“That rock out there caused all that destruction?” Malora asks.

“That rock is probably only a chip off the one that crashed to earth. Still, it was impressive enough to inspire the hibes of Kahiro, and all of the surrounding territories, to found the Church of the Latter Day Scienticians.”

“Why?” Malora asks. “Because the Scienticians predicted the disaster and built the arks?”

“Not that so much as that the Scienticians were People and the hibes believed that their centuries-long persecution of the People had angered their god and caused him to bring down the very spine of heaven. Hence … the Backbone you see here before you.”

Malora was not raised to worship. Except for a reverence for the Grandparents, the Settlement had been godless. The
concept of gods—Kheiron, the god of the centaurs, and these bespectacled Doctors—is alien to her. “Do you think it’s true,” she asks Honus, “that their god punished the hibes?”

Honus taps out his pipe on the edge of the wall. Sparks fly toward the sea. “I believe that a great rock hurtling randomly through space collided with the earth, upsetting the balance of a planet that was already in calamitous imbalance. Hibes, just as the People did before them, need to find reasons for occurrences. The bigger the occurrence, the more powerful and compelling the reason.”

The mist rises, revealing a sky full of stars. Looking up, Honus points. “Centaurus,” he says.

He has pointed out the star picture to her on previous occasions, but this is the first time she can actually see, in the collection of stars, the outline of the body of a centaur. “I see it!” she says softly.

“Just as the ancient astronomer Ptolemy saw it thirty centuries ago,” Honus says.

“I don’t understand,” Malora says. “That was long before the hibes. Were there once
natural
centaurs on earth?”

“It’s hard to say,” Honus says. “But I’m much more inclined to believe that the centaur sprang from the imagination of mankind, along with fauns and the Ka and so many of the other hibes you saw today. The Scienticians simply made flesh and blood what had once existed only in the deepest, darkest recesses of the human consciousness. You might say that we, the hibes, are a dream made real.” Honus shivers and then stifles a yawn with his hand. “And speaking of dreams, it’s time you got some sleep. Apologies, my daughter, if what I have just told you makes for a poor bedtime story.” He turns
to her and takes her arm. “Walk me to the door and then shut it and lock it behind me. That way no one will bother you tonight.”

Before he descends the ladder, he plants a kiss on Malora’s forehead. “Sleep well, my child.”

Malora smiles at him. “I enjoyed my bedtime story,” she says. For that is all it is to her: something that happened long ago and far away. Her own story, rolling out before her like one of the scrolls in Honus’s library, is what interests her.

On the way to the marketplace the next morning, they pass no less than a dozen altars to the Doctors. They cross a square dominated by a marble temple, with a blue-robed statue of Adam standing on one side of its entryway and one of Eve on the other, both wearing the same dim-witted smiles. A steady stream of hibes, all wearing white jackets, pours through the doorway.

“The garb is called lab coats,” Honus explains. “They are worn out of respect for the humble, everyday attire of the Scienticians.”

Malora looks up at a big round stained-glass window above the door of the temple, the colors vibrant in the morning sun, depicting a river of hibes fleeing before a giant flaming ball.

“If you’d care to observe the service …?” Honus says, indicating the doorway.

“No!” Malora says emphatically. Last night, she dreamed
that the Doctors Adam and Eve had stepped off their pedestals to scold her for marring her human head with horns. She had torn off the horns, leaving bloody stumps. Her head still aches this morning.

“The marketplace is a city unto itself,” Honus explains as they approach the gateway. “It has its own laws, its own security force—dedicated to keeping beggars out—and many of the vendors never leave its jurisdiction, living out their lives in tents set up behind their booths.”

They pass through a set of iron gates whose Ka attendant takes his time examining their Eyes before permitting them to enter. Overhead, the sun hangs like an orange suspended in the haze of dust kicked up by the browsers who have arrived well ahead of them, wandering the aisles of booths and stands that run from west to east. Malora is astounded at the sheer size of it. The marketplace of Mount Kheiron occupies a town square. This seems as big as all of Mount Kheiron and the Flatlands combined.

“It is all too easy to get lost in here,” Honus says.

He is on one side of Malora and Orion on the other. Behind them, Sunshine and Lemon push the empty cart, which Zephele has sworn, by the end of the day, to fill to the brim with her purchases. Ahead of them, Dock and Neal have a firm lock on Zephele’s arms. She manages to drag them from one side of the aisle to the other as she examines the wares on display. Still dressed for the road in a plain khaki wrap and boots and a matching cloth wrapping her head, Zephele looks radiant this morning. The marketplace of Kahiro is truly her element. Any revulsion Zephele might have had yesterday
about the other hibes seems to have been obliterated by her enthusiasm for their wares.

“Oh, look!” she says. “An entire
aisle
of essential oils!”

Malora hangs back, knowing that experiencing the gamut of glass vials will wreak havoc on her heightened senses. Dock takes Orion’s place as Orion joins Zephele, apologizing to Malora. “I’m sorry but this is the only aisle that interests me,” he says.