A Gathering of Wings (9 page)

Neal spits into the fire. “How about the Ridiculous Five?” he says. “Let’s see … that would be the Sniveling Coward, the Boasting Windbag, the Relentless Expert, the Conniving User, and last but not least, Zephele Silvermane, the Hopelessly Sentimental.”

Zephele narrows her eyes at him. “At least I am not one of the Cruel Five, a Rude and Heartless Brute,” she retorts.

Neal appears to take this as flattery. Zephele’s eyes blaze.

Honus says, “I think I’ll retire before any centaur blood is spilled.”

“Me too,” Malora says, rising to her feet and stretching her saddle-sore muscles.

Zephele follows Malora to their tent. “What if I have to get up to relieve myself in the middle of the night?” she whispers.

“Wake me up and I’ll escort you to the great dirt convenience,” Malora says, yawning.

Just outside the tent, Sunshine has left a flask of water for drinking and a bowl of heated water for washing. Centaur and human share a small bar of soap and huddle over the bowl, washing themselves by lantern light only as far as modesty and the water will take them. Then Malora flings the dirty water into the darkness and leaves the bowl for Sunshine to refill in the morning. They enter the tent.

“Great Hands but this rusticity is extreme, is it not?” Zephele declares, surveying the inside of the tent. “And small. Somehow, it seemed bigger when it was light out.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Malora says, setting the lantern on
the camp table between their cots and stretching out on her own, folding her hands behind her head. “You’ll be so exhausted at night, I promise you won’t even notice the size of your quarters.”

“Are you going to sleep in what you wore today?” Zephele says.

“Why not?” Malora says. “Besides, I didn’t think to bring any nightclothes. I never wore them before I came to Mount Kheiron.”

Zephele nods thoughtfully. “It seems foolish now that I think of it, to change one’s clothes for sleep out here. I mean, what if a herd of wild elephants rampages through the camp in the middle of the night? I wouldn’t want the others to see me in my night wrap.” In the lantern light, she sets up a looking glass on the camp table and bends over it to examine her reflection.

“Why didn’t you tell me I was turning as pink as a boiled beet!” she cries. She puts the back of her hand to her cheek. “My skin is so hot. I never realized the sun had such power.”

She pulls off the head scarf. Malora is surprised to see Zephele’s head bare for the first time, as she tugs a brush through her short but unruly curls. “Such snarls! You’re lucky. You can keep your hair in a braid. One of the problems with wearing a cap or a scarf all the time is that you wind up with the most stubborn tangles in the back of your head at the end of each day.”

“I think your hair is beautiful,” Malora says. “See how it shines!”

“Ha!” Zephele says. “My meager little crop … I wonder
if I should let it grow long like yours. Who would be the wiser?” she muses.

“Wouldn’t it be hard to fit long hair beneath a cap?” Malora asks.

“Maybe I’ll stop wearing a cap altogether!” Zephele says. Then she laughs, “Listen to me: one day in the bush and I’ve turned into an upstart. Herself would say that I am behaving like a small child with a high fever. I feel rather like that. All this
excitement
! I do hope I’ll be able to sleep.”

Zephele is just about to lie down on her cot when she says, “I nearly forgot.” She removes a green flask of scent from her bag and dabs some behind each ear. “Wild jasmine for courage.” Then she lies down and covers herself with the blanket. Malora leans over and douses the lantern.

“I think you’re very brave, even without the aid of the scent,” Malora whispers in the jasmine-scented darkness.

“Do you really?” Zephele asks, her voice weary but eager.

“Yes. My first night in the bush, I slept in a ditch I had dug beneath a mashatu tree. I hid beneath a blanket, and I was terrified.”

“Were you really?” Zephele asks. “You were just a child, though. And alone.”

Just then, something touches the roof of their tent. “What was that?” Zephele asks in a tense voice.

“An insect of some sort. It’s nothing to worry about. I understand how you’re feeling. Nervous and jumpy, like I was. Every time something landed on my blanket I’d start. Sometimes I even screamed. Then Sky would spook. I thought the night would never end.”

“Did you really scream?” Zephele asks in delight. “Or are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

“Oh, I screamed quite loudly,” Malora says. “The first night in the bush is always the hardest.”

“It doesn’t seem so bad to me.…”

From a distance comes a high wheezing
blat
, followed by a succession of
blats
.

“What was that?” Zephele asks, sounding slightly less brave now.

“Elephants,” Malora says, “very far away. From back where we came. We passed a dead one a ways back. The elephants are probably coming to mourn it.”

“What dead elephant?” Zephele says. “I saw no dead elephant.”

“I didn’t either, but I smelled it,” Malora says.

“I wonder why I didn’t smell it?” Zephele says.

“Wild jasmine.”

A little later, they hear a growling snigger. “What’s that?” Zephele asks.

“Baboons.”

The jabbering escalates into a spirited discussion.

“They sound like Flatlander louts, don’t they?” Zephele says. “Thugs and hecklers.”

“They’re just staking out their territory,” Malora says.

“Like the guard at the city gates of Mount Kheiron,” Zephele says.

“I suppose you could say that,” Malora agrees. “Although you can make too much of the similarities of animals and sentient beings.”

“I don’t know … animals speak to each other, just as we speak to one another, don’t they?” Zephele says.

“They
communicate
,” Malora says. “They don’t speak. There is a difference.”

After a brief silence, Zephele says, “When Sky comes to you … in your dreams … does he
speak
to you?”

“Yes, he does, I suppose,” Malora says.

“In words?”

“Yes, but that may be just me, putting his thoughts into words. When we were together, we understood each other without words. We were that close.” She smiles to herself. “I now see … like a centaur separated into two.”

“Did you bring some Breath of the Bush with you so you could conjure him?” Zephele asks.

“No,” says Malora. “I don’t like to use scents in the bush. It interferes with my ability to smell danger.”

“And dead elephants … Orrie doesn’t use them anymore, either, modeling himself on you,” Zephele says. “It’s too bad, because I was thinking that perhaps the next time Sky visits you in a dream he might do you the courtesy of telling you exactly where you might find him. And save us all this time and trouble, if you see what I mean … not that I don’t welcome this opportunity for adventure. And not that Sky isn’t worth any amount of effort on our parts.”

“I couldn’t stand to see him again, hobbled and pegged,” Malora says. “And when he saw me, he thrashed about so wildly I was afraid he would hurt himself. I am trying to remain very calm, hoping that wherever he is, he will remain equally as calm, knowing that I am on my way to free him.”

Zephele doesn’t respond.

A few moments later, Malora hears a familiar bone-jarring roar. She is just about to tell Zephele what the sound is when she realizes that Zephele has dropped off to sleep. It is just as well that Malora doesn’t have to tell Zephele that the roar belongs to a lion. Even though she would delight in adding to her list of the Big Five, Zephele has had enough excitement for one day.

Malora wakes up the next morning to the sound of the ring-necked turtledove calling her name, “Ma-lo-ra! Ma-lo-ra!” In the next cot, Zephele is still fast asleep. The tent smells more of horse than of wild jasmine, as if Zephele’s horse half took over at night.

Sunshine pokes her head into the tent and sets down two cups of steaming mint tea and the tub of heated bathwater. “Good morning, ladies!” she says in a loud clear voice.

“Shhh!” Malora says, pointing to Zephele’s huddled form.

“With respect,” says Sunshine, “the Captain says to make sure you are both up and moving.”

“The Captain,” says Neal, poking his head into the tent, “wants us under way while the sun is still low in the sky. It’s going to be a hot day. Let’s get going, shall we?” He claps his hands loudly. “The rest of us have been up for quite some time.”

Zephele emerges, groaning, from her swaddling of blankets, blinking blearily.

“Is that the nest of a marabou stork or Zephele Silvermane’s curly head that I see?”

Zephele struggles to sit up, scrubbing her face with her
hands. “I am thoroughly awake now, thank you, drummed up from a sound sleep by your insolent patter.”

After a breakfast of cold impala meat and cold nettle soup, the travelers pack up camp and set forth once again.

Except for Neal and Dock, everyone is sore. Requests to stop and rest are frequent. Neal is surprisingly sympathetic. It is Malora who notices, halfway through their second day, that they are being followed.

“It’s nothing more than a swiftly moving cloud,” Orion says, after squinting up at the sky for a long moment.

The sun is bright and the air shimmers with heat. Honus has tied a strip of cloth around his head to keep the sweat from dripping into his eyes. “Surely not,” he says to Orion. “The sky is cloudless.”

“Honus is right,” says Neal. “It looks like some sort of a bird.”

They all stop and look up. Holding the top of her hat, Malora tilts her head back and, squinting against the sun’s glare, sees a creature with enormous white wings wheeling directly overhead, much higher in the sky than most birds venture. And although, as Honus has already pointed out, the sky is cloud-free, Malora feels a cool gust of wind that carries the fresh smell of an oncoming thunderstorm.

“That is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Zephele says. She has appropriated her brother’s straw hat, which she has tied on to her head with the pink scarf. Her nose and her one exposed shoulder are raw with sunburn.

“A raptor of some sort, from the looks of it,” Orion says. “Lord of his own domain and preparing to swoop down on his prey.”

“Yes,” says Honus, “but what order of raptor? Look at the size of him! And not just his wingspan but his body as well.”

“Whatever it is, it’s certainly taking its time,” Neal says. “It’s obviously very choosy about what it eats.”

Honus fumbles for his mother-of-pearl opera glasses and focuses them upward. “Perhaps it’s an oceangoing raptor blown inland off its course. Its wingspan is monumental,” he murmurs. “And I’d give my left horn to have one of those feathers.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Neal says. He pulls his crossbow out of its sling, loads it, cocks it, and draws a bead on his target.

“It’s quite far away. I doubt even
you
could hit it from here,” Orion says, a note of caution in his voice. “What’s more, I suggest that you don’t even try. The arrow may miss its mark, fall back to earth, and wound one of us instead.”

“That would never happen. This is my most powerful bow,” Neal says, his eye still on the target. “If my arrow hits home, I should be able to get Honus and Zephele a whole brace of splendid white feathers.”

“Don’t do so on my account,” Zephele says warily. “Really, Neal, it’s much too beautiful to kill. Please don’t.”

Neal, not taking his eye off his target, says, “Oh, but it’s far too tempting to pass up. It looks like it’s got a lot of meat on its bones, too.”

Malora brings Lightning swiftly up alongside Neal and forces the crossbow down with the full force of her arm. “Do
not
kill it!” she tells him through gritted teeth.

Neal glares at her. “Don’t ever do that again, pet.”

“If you try to kill it again, I promise you I will.”

Neal smiles sadly. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone all sentimental on me, pet. We could have lived off that meat for days. Can’t I at least take a shot at it?”

“No,” Malora says.

“Why?” Neal asks.

“Because if you did, you would be a murderer,” Malora says. “And I can’t be friends with a murderer.”

On their fifth day in the bush, Zephele is collecting wildflowers to sketch for an embroidery design.

With
Pride and Prejudice
propped open on her saddle horn, Malora is reading as she rides.

“I am impressed that you can do that,” Honus says. “It is all I can do to stay on the beast’s back.”

Malora smiles. “If there is trouble, I will toss the book aside and grab the reins with both hands.”

“For the sake of the ancient binding, let us hope trouble remains at bay. Meanwhile, are you enjoying the book?” Honus asks.

“It is very strange,” Malora says. “If this writer, Jane Austen, did not state at the beginning of her book that she writes about humans, I would have thought that her subject was centaurs. Highlanders, mostly.”

Honus, whose face beneath the bandana has darkened to
the color of a hazelnut, closes his eyes and recites from memory, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

“Man and wife being the People and fortune meaning nubs,” Malora says.

“In essence, yes,” says Honus.

“Mrs. Bennet, while much more irritating and meddlesome, is every bit as concerned with her daughters’ making a good match as Herself is about Zephele and Orion marrying well. She has told me that she expects Theon to remain a bachelor.”

“A mother senses these things,” Honus says. “Tell me, does it sadden you to read about a society in which all the humans are engaged in the act of pairing off?”

“Not really,” Malora says. “But maybe that’s because I feel there is someone for me.” She is thinking, of course, of Lume.

Honus wags his head. “Entertaining such hopes can only lead to disappointment in the end.”

Malora feels a flash of anger. “Why are you all so sure I’m the last human? If I exist, then others could.”