People of the Sky (29 page)
Authors: Clare Bell
Without warning, Pesquite flung herself sideways. The child’s figure fell half the distance in a graceful arc before Dancing Water swooped down and caught her. Pesquit scrambled from the aronan’s forelimbs back to her seat behind its neck, laughing delightedly.
“She has no fear,” said Sahacat. “She trusts her life to her mount because she knows only the Pai Way.”
Baqui Iba curved its neck, bringing its narrow-muzzled face around to nudge its rider. Waves of fear swept through her, each bringing its own cascade of sweat. She remembered how she had fallen from Baqui Iba on the first flight, but the memory only made her fear worse. Yes, Baqui Iba had caught her that time, but would it do so again? She caught the aronan’s muzzle under the chin and stroked it with hands that shook.
I hope you were paying attention, chosovi
, she thought at it.
If you weren’t, I’m going to be spattered all over those rocks.
A question came from the creature in shades of sage and anise. She knew it was asking if she was afraid.
Yes,
I am
, she answered honestly, knowing it would do no good to try and fool the creature or herself. She made her scent carry the message. Immediately the strong warm-leather aroma surrounded her, bringing reassurance that almost spoke in words. It asked for trust.
I will trust you
, she thought in answer to the creature’s query, and found herself speaking the words out loud. Again she stroked Baqui Iba’s neck, feeling the perspiration rub off her hands onto the short dry bristles.
Pesquite fluttered down on Dancing Water. Kesbe readied herself. She didn’t need hand signs to launch Baqui Iba. It knew when to spring skyward. It’s climb was swifter than dancing Water’s, leaving Kesbe less time for second thoughts. Before she knew it, she had made the turn and was gliding back across the amphitheater. Glancing earthwards, she saw the shaman and Pesquit as toylike figures on the stone shelf.
Looking down was a mistake. She knew that even as her body froze and her feet locked behind the chitin plates to keep her seat. She remembered too vividly how she had accidentally tumbled off Baqui Iba in the midst of a steep bank. Again her heart raced as she felt the helpless terror of the rocks rushing up to claim her. It was worse now that she knew what it was like. Her muscles went rigid, refusing to obey such a ridiculous suggestion that she fling herself toward certain destruction.
Baqui Iba reached the end of its glide, wheeled slowly around and started back across. The wind blew her flier’s odor in her face. The old-leather aroma of reassurance was tinged with a bit of spicy impatience. If you don’t trust me now, it seemed to say, you never will.
Kesbe took in a deep gulp of air, breaking the tattoo in her mind that was beating, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…” to the pounding heart. She willed her muscles to thaw. They began a violent quivering, but it at least allowed her some control. She stared straight ahead, set her jaw and forced herself to lean farther and farther out until her weight pulled her off the aronan.
She had scarcely time to feel the drop before forelimbs snagged her and with a jerk, pulled her up. Again the ground swung crazily below her and she felt the downward blast of the aronan’s fanning wings.
She wasn’t agile or light enough to scramble back to her seat from the cradle of Baqui Iba’s forelimbs. The creature had to set her on the ground first before it could land. Her knees turned to jelly and she wiped the back of her hand across her forehead as she sagged against her mount.
She stood up straight as Sahacat approached. She thrust out her lower jaw pugnaciously. The
shaman’s eyes were cool.
“I did it,” Kesbe said shortly.
“You did not perform exactly as requested. You were to jump on the first pass. You waited until the next. Do it again.”
“Are you kidding?” Kesbe lapsed into English and had to translate awkwardly into Pai. “That nearly stopped my heart.”
“That is why you are to do it again,” Sahacat said. “And again and again until you lose this fear. It is something that the Pai do not have.”
Kesbe wondered what would happen if Baqui Iba snatched Sahacat up in the air and dangled her over the unfriendly rocks at a similiar height. Would the shaman discover that she after all had the fear she so easily scorned? Kesbe wished she could be more specific in what she told Baqui fba. The creature bumped its head against her playfully, as if it had caught at least the gist of her thoughts.
You know, you and I are going to get along pretty well together
, she thought at the aronan as she mounted again. She imagined Sahacat getting her comeuppance at the hands…oops…forelimbs of the aronan.
That’ll give me extra incentive to improve the lines of communication with you, chosovi.
She sat up straight, gave the shaman a glare and took off. She did the mid-air dive again, this time on the first pass. And again. And repeatedly until her head was spinning and she was sure Baqui Iba’s wings must be aching. She did it the next day and the next, diving from even greater heights and for longer distances. And each time she dove, she shed a little of the fear that had paralyzed her, while strengthening her bond with Baqui Iba.
Kesbe tossed irritably on her pallet in the windowless adobe room, wishing she could forget about Baqui Iba long enough to get some sleep. But the smell of the aronan’s perfume was still in her nostrils and the feel of its stiff bristled coat still on her fingertips. She was also aroused and the feeling refused to go away.
She was only beginning to fade into sleep when she heard a scratching on the outside wall of her chamber. Again it came, sounding as if someone were scraping the masonry with a twig. She got up, threw her blanket over her shoulders and went outside. As soon as she pushed through the doorflap into the cool night, she caught a whiff of sage mixed with pepper.
Against the night-grayed wall of the pueblo, she saw a shape that she wouldn’t have wanted to approach had she not known what it was. Baqui Ibas foot was lifted to scrape the wall again. Instead the creature scuttled to Kesbe, touching and teasing her with its antennae.
“Sahacat thought I would disobey,” she murmured, her face against the aronan’s muzzle. “It never entered her head that you might. Have you come to seduce me away for a midnight ride?”
The answering swirl of scents and flavors infected Kesbe once again with excitement. Tossing her blanket back behind the doorflap, she placed one foot against the short thick mat of hairs on Baqui Iba’s shoulder and swung on. The aronan maneuvered its way between the adobe buildings until it came to an open plaza fronting the ledge that cradled Tuwayhoima.
Kesbe sat there for a minute, looking up. The sky was moonless, but the sapphire glitter of the stars seemed to light a pathway through it. She saw Baqui Iba’s antennae curl forward, sweeping and tasting the air. She drew back the corners of her mouth and sucked air over her tongue, savoring the clarity and crispness of the night. She shivered, but it was not with cold.
The rising keen of Baqui Iba’s wing vibration rose to a full-throated roar and then suddenly she had plunged into a fast-flowing river of air that pummeled her face and body as Baqui Iba
took a plunge into blackness. For an instant the dark seemed like a wall that they would crash into, for she could not see beyond. Then the moment of fright passed and exhilaration took its place as she supplemented sight with her mastery of
tewalutewi
and was able to look ahead through the night.
She found a wilder and richer world blowing at her. To her eyes, the peaks and canyons were static silhouettes against the backdrop of night as Baqui Iba bore her past. But in the wind hitting her face, everything was alive and moving. She tasted the canyon’s flesh in the smell of granite and sandstone and drank its essence in the aroma of pinyon and other pines. The air itself tasted like glacial meltwater. It had a startling icy purity, yet it was not cold.
The aronan’s own scent, pouring back over her from the wind of its flight, had altered. She had no name for this odor as she had for all the others. It was sharp and clean as the wind, yet as delicate as the faintest floral perfume. It made her want to throw back her head and sing, not caring if she was horrendously off-key. It made her wish she too were an aronan and flying side by side with Baqui Iba in its dance through the sky.
And then, in the rush of wind and soaring sensation of flight, came a strange condensation of perception into language. For the first time the channeling of essences to the receptors high in her nose and her mouth gave birth to words in her mind.
Then she did throw her head back, filled her lungs with wind and sang one of her grandfather’s Hopi songs. Tears spilled from her eyes but were caught and flung away by the headwind before they reached her cheeks. She let her whole body speak her joy, trying to pour forth her message in the same way the aronan had done.
the aronan answered.
Baqui Iba climbed until the stars grew so bright Kesbe might have thought she could pluck them from the vault of the sky. There it flew in a slow triumphant circle, gradually gathering speed until it peeled out and with a wingover, tumbled into a steep dive. Down it plunged until Kesbe felt as though the wind might tear her off. The aronan rocketed up into a wild series of loops, spins and turns and more aerobatics that she had no name for.
She clung tightly, but she had no fear, knowing that if she were unseated, Baqui Iba would have her again before she had fallen several meters. With each powerful stroke of its wings, each turn and twist of its body came the message, I will not let you fall. I love you
And then, after a moment at the top of a loop when canyon and sky seemed to have changed places, the wild flight ended in a long quiet glide with air whispering over the aronan’s wings.
The strange burning ache in Kesbe’s body was gone and she felt only a peaceful quiescence, as if she had indeed been loved deeply and well.
They landed on the mesa above the village just before dawn to rest from the flight. Kesbe, wearing nothing but her short kilt and sash, shivered in the early morning air.
Baqui Iba wafted her a vortex of aromas in shades of mint. It was a question, but not the simple query of a spoken language. Embedded within were many shades of meaning that made a simple translation, even into Pai, seem ridiculous. She could not speak the question, but she
could feel it, smell it and feel her body move to it.
“Yes,” she whispered aloud, finding that speaking helped to focus and direct her message She struggled to bring a more aromatic range of notes into her own musky pungency in order to bring across the intensity of her own answer.
Another message came in a three-dimensional interweaving of odors.
“But yours is so wonderful. Mine must be very drab and dull. Perhaps even unpleasant.”
Kesbe gave a deep happy sigh and fell silent, drawing her finger languidly through the sage-scented fuzz on Baqui Iba’s shoulder. “I don’t want this time to end, beautiful winged one”
Kesbe’s only reply was to snuggle further under the wings.
“I don’t know. I don’t think she had a good reason,” Kesbe murmured, then yawned. “She just wants to show she can control me.”
A cold note of alarm entered Kesbe’s comfortable drowsiness and she spoke louder, though she knew the aronan gathered her meaning not by sounds but by the accompanying scent messages of her body. “You mean she might have had a reason after all? I thought your wings seemed strong enough.”
This was an alien and unsettling thought. She recalled that some species of insects did shed their wings at certain times in their life cycles. And there was the mystery of Haewi Namij, whose one wing was found by the child-warriors apart from the rest of the creature’s remains, as if it had broken off before the aronan fell…
No, that had to have been an accident, she told herself, yet she had to work hard to drive away the remaining doubt.
“Dear winged one, you don’t know what will happen as you grow older?”
“And that uncertainty doesn’t worry you?”
Kesbe was intrigued by this point of view, which was radically different from hers.
<“How do you know that any…change…is right?”>
I can’t explain. Is this different with you?
“Umm…somewhat,” she said carefully. “Sometimes we humans don’t welcome the changes that come.”
How strange…and sad, was Baqui Iba’s answer.
“Never mind,” she said, crawling out from beneath the wings and taking her seat once more on the creature’s forequarters, “Your wings are strong and the flight was beautiful.”
They flew down from the mesa, landing in the crisp pre-dawn on the ledge that held Aronan House. Regretfully Kesbe alighted from the aronan. It startled her by asking,
