Time of the Eagle (22 page)

“T
his is my healing tent,” said Chimaki, taking me into the small tent that stood alone under the trees at the far end of the lake. “I wash soiled bindings in the rapids, far from where people take their drinking water, and I keep everything clean, as you taught me to. It is your tent now.”

“No, I'm not taking away your work, Chimaki,” I said. “You're a good healer. Without your medicines Mudiwar would have died long ago. I will be happy just to help you, if you need me.”

So we became healers together, and although I could not teach her the secret healings I had learned in Ravinath, I did show her better ways to do minor surgery and to mix medicines. Together we made pots from river clay and planted the seeds Amael had given me. The tiny silken bags of seeds were as mysterious to Chimaki as were my Navoran healing instruments, but I had asked her not to question me, and she never did. For that I loved her, and for much besides. Everything I had taught her about healing and cleanliness, she had remembered and followed, and it was a joy working with her.

Mudiwar improved rapidly. One day, when I had given him his medicine and was sitting beside him afterward while he dozed, he opened one cunning eye and looked at me suspiciously under the lowered lid. “That wasn't poison you just gave me, was it, Shinali woman?” he muttered.

“If I gave you poison, my chieftain,” I replied, trying not to smile, “you'd be greeting your ancestors by now.”

He grunted and closed his eye again. I thought he slept, but he said, after a while, “By Shimit, there must be many times you wish me dead.”

“I never wish that,” I said.

“Why not? Have you given up your mad idea to go and do battle with the Navorans? Ramakoda would go with you, if I was dead.”

“I've not given it up, Mudiwar,” I said. “I believe in it more strongly than ever. When the time is right the Eagle will fly, and whether you lead your people, or Ramakoda leads them, is a small matter.”

“True, since we'd all be dead at the end of it,” he said. “My first responsibility as chieftain is to keep my people alive, Avala. Some of us may be enslaved, some slain by Navorans, but most of us are free, and we're still a great nation—which is more than your pathetic bunch of Shinali can say.”

“You may be a great nation,” I said, “but you are a people oppressed, living in fear.”

“You're wasting your breath. Go and do some work. Heal someone.”

I obeyed.

Chimaki and I were busy those first days of my return to the
Igaal camp, for Mudiwar's rapid improvement seemed like a miracle to his tribe, and many came who had gangrene and major illnesses Chimaki alone could not have cured. Together we amputated feet and fingers too gone with gangrene to save, and we removed a tumor from a woman's abdomen, and mended the ruptured spleen of a youth who had been kicked by a horse. All our patients survived, and felt no pain, and slowly the tribe's suspicion and hate toward me melted to a kind of grudging gratitude.

It was a peaceful spring, there in the circle of mountains in the great Himeko Ranges. On my free days, when Chimaki and I were not busy in the healing tent, Ishtok taught me to ride. One day, when I could ride well enough to go for several miles, we went out onto the plains north of the Himeko Mountains and lay in the long grass, watching the herds of wandering deer. I had taken my telescope, and Ishtok was intrigued by it, as he was by all things new and different.

“It is Navoran, isn't it?” he said, lying on his back, examining the telescope closely.

“You spend more time looking at it than through it,” I said, smiling, lying beside him, looking up at the sky. “Yes, it is Navoran.”

“Do they have other things like this, the Navorans?”

So I told him of some of the wonders of Ravinath, without giving away too much about that place. I told him of the machines that measured time, of the great telescope, of the paintings and artworks, the carvings. “You'll see it all one day,” I said. “We'll walk the streets of the stone city, you and I, and I'll show you the marvels I've seen.”

“Ah—you
were
there!”

“No. I've never been in the stone city.”

“You're a mystery, Shinali woman,” he said, moving until his arm was about my neck, and I was lying with my head on his shoulder. “A worrying, maddening mystery. Lovable, though.”

“I'm glad you added that last,” I said.

“If it's true that we're to walk in the stone city one day, you'd better teach me Navoran words. I want to be able to talk with your blue-eyed kinsfolk. Tell me the Navoran words for the things around us. Begin with my favorite thing, the sun.”

So I did. I also told him what Zuleman had told me about our sun, that it was a star, our day-star. Ishtok thought about that a long time, then said, “If the night stars are also suns, why is the night dark?”

“The night stars are too far away to light our sky,” I said.

“Who told you these things?”

“A wise man. You'll meet him one day.”

“Then I'll need to talk to him, for I have as many questions for him as a bird has feathers. Tell me the Navoran words for
sky
, and
day
, and
light
.”

Three-and-twenty Navoran words he learned that afternoon, but still wanted to know more. As the sun went down he lay with his lips against my cheek, and asked, “Now tell me the words for
you
, and
I
, and
love
.”

I told them, and he repeated them to me in perfect Navoran, and then kissed my eyes and said the words, also in Navoran, “Blue skies I love.”

Until the sun set we lay there in the sweet-scented grass,
holding each other, and he stroked my face and hair, but went no further.

It was dark when we got back to camp. We found that we had missed the evening meal, but Chimaki had kept some bowls of meat aside for us. While we ate, Mudiwar frowned and said that the next time we missed the meal, we could starve. Ishtok smiled and said, low so his father would not hear, that one kiss with me was worth starving for.

When I was not helping Chimaki in the healing tent or out riding with Ishtok, I had long talks with Ramakoda, and realized how deeply he longed to unite all the tribes and to put an end to Navoran oppression.

“Could you not do it, without your father?” I asked.

He shook his head. “To defy a chieftain, even if that chieftain is old and beyond reason,” he said, “is to commit the worst crime by Igaal law. We will have to be patient, Avala. But you will be pleased to know that I talked with the chieftain of Ishtok's Hena tribe, when they were here, and the Hena are willing to rise up and strike back at Navora. The Navorans have captured many of the wild horses in the far north, leaving few for the Hena. It affects us, too, for we trade for horses from the Hena. It seems that Navoran greed is never satisfied. Now they want our horses, as well as our people.”

A pain passed through him, and he sighed deeply, his eyes searching my face. “I trust you with my life, Avala,” he said, “yet I suspect you visited the place of our enemies while you were gone from us. I've seen the thing you call a telescope, and Ishtok
tells me it is Navoran. Tell me, were you there, in the stone city? Did you see my sons?”

“No, I was not there, Ramakoda. I can't give you news of your sons, I'm sorry.”

“But you won't say where you were?”

“No.”

He looked out across the lake, for we were sitting on the stony shore, watching some of the children play on floating logs. “My father thinks you were with the gods in the mountains,” he said. “You've come back with strong
munakshi.
My wife says you warned her yesterday not to eat the fresh pot of soup she had made. She gave some of the soup to a dog, and it died soon after. You saved many lives. The whole tribe is talking about it. You have a seer's powers.”

“It was just a feeling I had, about the soup,” I said. “I think one of the herbs she put in it was not what she thought it was. Our plants are different from the northern ones she is used to. This morning I went gathering with her and showed her which herbs we use that are safe.”

He looked at me again and lifted his right hand and touched my sleeve in the sign of gratitude. “Then I thank Shimit for your feelings,” he said. “May you always heed them. And may we always listen.”

Spring blazed into summer, and Mudiwar began to talk of moving the camp to a far place by the Nyranjeera Lakes. But before he made his final decision, I had a dream that changed things for us all.

It was a dream of a bowl of bread. The bread was fresh and
good, but the clay bowl was old and cracked, with jagged bits about the rim. One of the cracks was very deep, and ants came through it and soon were crawling all over the bread. Then the ants went away, and the bread was left crumbling. Soon there were only fragments left, and birds came and ate them. I thought the birds were crows at first, but then I saw that they were the death buzzards, and the bowl was not a bowl at all, but a hollow in the earth, and what I had thought were pale bits of bread were human bones.

I woke sweating, breathless. I knew, within five heartbeats, that the dream was a warning of death, that the hollow in the earth was the valley ringed by mountains, where we camped, and the crack in the bowl was the one narrow gorge leading in; and I knew that the bread was the tribe, and the ants were an invading army. But how close was that army?

Without waking anyone, I pulled on my dress, got the map I had made in Ravinath, and crept outside. The eastern skies were growing light, and the lake lay like a sheet of steel under the dark mountains. On the stones near the water's edge, facing west, I spread the map. For a while I sat in front of it, my eyes half closed. The lines I had drawn, the mountains and territories and rivers, were vague images in the growing dawn. My breath slowed, and I entered that state close to dreaming, though I was awake and alert. I saw through the map, beyond it, and was as a bird flying high, looking down on the great Himeko Mountains, speeding along the gleaming Ekiya, southward. And I saw them, small and numerous as ants: soldiers, riding hard. And with them came a coldness, a sense of impending death. I withdrew, breathed deep again, flew in my mind back to the shore of the lake, to
Mudiwar's camp. My heart was thundering. Midmorning the soldiers would be here.

Trying to be calm, I lifted the amulet from Sheel Chandra, and pressed it to my brow. The gold was cool, but the stone between the eagle's wings was warm. All my mind turned to that great man and the tower in which we used to sit together. I saw it clearly, the glass roof above, the carved stone walls, the window that would be open now, to the dawn skies. I saw his chair, and him there, waiting. He looked as he had the first time I ever saw him, beautiful as carven stone, his long mustache and hair silver, his face utterly majestic and tranquil. His eyes were closed, his hands turned palm upward on his knees. I knelt before him and laid one of my hands upon one of his, palm to palm. He did not move, but I felt the warmth of him.

“Master?” I whispered, wondering if I was as real to him as he was to me.

“What is it, dear heart?” he said. His lips did not move, but I heard his words clearly. Perhaps I heard them only with the ears of my heart.

“Soldiers are coming, Master,” I said. “Will you help me shield us, please? To make our tribe invisible?”

“This is not a time for shielding,” he said. “This is a time for battle. Many will die, but great good will come of the evil. Do not take up a weapon yourself. Remember all I taught you.”

“Will you protect us?”

“You are already protected, beloved, and many will live who otherwise would have died. Go. Do not be distracted. Make haste to Mudiwar.”

“Thank you, Master.” I bent my head and kissed his open
palm. The room grew dim; my sight of him diminished. There was wind, the feeling of cold streaming by, the grayness of the coming dawn. Then I saw the map before me and felt the hardness of the amulet pressed too close, now, against my brow. I lowered it, placed it within my dress. Quickly, I began to roll up the map. But suddenly, in the space of a single heart pulse, I glimpsed something else on the map. There was a flash of gray light, a vision as from high above, an image of a company of men farther north, also riding hard. No coldness this time, but still a sense of urgency. Mystified, I would have searched farther, found out more, but Sheel Chandra's words came back to me: “Do not be distracted. Make haste to Mudiwar.” So I finished rolling up the map, and ran back to the chieftain's tent.

I put the map in the chest of my belongings and stepped over the sleeping people to Mudiwar's bed. Kneeling, I shook his shoulder. “I've had a dream!” I whispered. “A warning. Soldiers are coming.”

He sat up, instantly awake. Those nearest his bed, hearing my voice, the urgency in it, sat up blinking, scrambling for their clothes. Others fumbled to light the lamps.