Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

“Within the bounds of possibility. Cyan, lots of people who live in Awia don’t have wings. The Emperor doesn’t, either; it’s not important that you take after your mother.”

She gave the concept serious consideration. “I like it when Daddy teaches me archery. I wish he was here more, but he’s very busy and now he’s hurt. Everything’s collapidated again. I like talking to him-he brings me presents-but he says I should do what Swallow tells me.”

I waved my hands emphatically. “You don’t have to believe anyone, no matter who they are-not Lord Daddy and not Diva Fatbottom. Think things through for yourself instead. Swallow isn’t teaching you the right subjects, for a powerful governor-to-be, so you will have to observe and question. Remember, brother Jant is at your command; all the Eszai are. Governors don’t seem to realize their power, and we need you to keep us in check with Zascai reality. That’s what’s been going wrong recently.”

She scowled, slightly resembling Lightning. Her tattered socks were rucked round her ankles and her shoes were scuffed with the gray-green mold found on tree trunks. She clenched her jaw to stop her teeth chattering; her breath hung in the cold night air.

“Goodbye, Cyan; look after yourself.”

“Are you going to fly? Why can’t I fly?”

“Because you’re normal.”

“Why can’t I see this island?”

“Soon you will, sister. Soon everybody will.” I ran on the wet grass and took off, bound for the harbor.

Many humans envy wings. A few years ago, a serial killer murdered only Awians, chopped their wings off and wore them. But it doesn’t matter whether one has wings or not when none of them can get off the ground. Cyan was more perspicacious; she envied flight. I worried about her as I remembered the Carniss saying: Wolves track lonely people.

When I was her age, in 1807, I was solitary too. No child wants to be left alone, but Rhydanne children grow up quickly. When they fall, they don’t cry; when abandoned, they’re independent.

My childhood in Darkling came to an abrupt end in my fifteenth year. Eilean insisted we remain every winter in our scanty summer dwellings in the high peaks. She said it was for my own protection that we did not go down to Scree pueblo with the other herders, although winter storms brewed and raged in the cirque every night.

Eilean Dara, my grandmother, was forty years old. She was a good runner; she had only ever let herself be caught by one man, who married her and treated her gently, but he died shortly after their daughter was born-my mother inherited a very fast speed indeed. I never understood how my rapist father could have caught her and Eilean wouldn’t say.

My presence forced Eilean to change from her beloved hunting way of life to herding. She built our shieling herself, although it looked as if it had grown, part of the uncompromising mountains; an antlered hillock with moss on the roof that the goats ate in summer when the ice thawed. The shieling was a one-room box with bedding on the floor. Every wooden surface was covered in pokerwork designs, my grandmother’s pastime in our desolate world. She burned board games into the low table top-a checkered square for solitaire and trapper’s luck, brown teeth for backgammon, and rectangular patches where packs of cards were placed for telling fortunes. When hunters visited they played games that were fast and simple compared to those I learned later at the Castle.

I discovered the rules of flight from trial and error; no child was ever as covered in cuts and bruises. Eilean made me look after our eight goats; I was good with a sling but I was never taught the bolas so when hunters came to poach them, I had to call her for help.

I left the goats tethered while I improved my gliding, soaring too far to hear their bleats and bells clacking. A pack of white wolves attacked the herd. The goats panicked, leapt high and strained at their ropes but the wolves devoured them in a leisurely fashion. When I landed hours later I found a pile of bones, tethers and bells. I hid from Eilean for days before she gave up trying to throttle me. She then steadily reverted to her previous life, chasing ibex and swigging whiskey to forget the strain of my existence.

I sat cross-legged in front of the hearth and stared at the flames. After a while the door was nosed open and two massive tame wolves slipped through, padding solemnly. I relinquished my space on the mat for them; they lay down and sighed simultaneously. Compacted snow sticking to their pelts became translucent as it melted and dripped. Thunder tumbled down Darkling valley; there was a great sense of waiting in the air. Eilean Dara kicked the door back on its leather hinges and strode in. She hung up her bolas, reclined on the rugs, resting an elbow on the table, and looked around vaguely for me. “Look at you, Jant; why are you still here? You should have left home by now. Have you no sense of shame whatsoever? I think you’re determined to slow me down like powder snow. First, I can’t even marry you off because how do I find someone who wants a deformed Shira as a husband? Second, you remind me of what those vile Awians did to the daughter I loved. Third, then you killed her, with your chunky body and wings trapped in her belly. We had to cut you out with an axe.”

I gathered her plate from the fireplace, pine nut crackers and meat stew cooked for so long it was a stringy paste. Eilean continued: “A full seven-month pregnancy and you were still tiny. I fed you goat milk and raised you despite the fact that of course your birth wasn’t timed and you arrived in the middle of the freeze season. So now you’re grown, the way you show gratitude is by feeding my vicuna to the wolves.”

She reached out and I flinched. “Have you caught anything?”

She carved a chunk off the stew, stuck her fingers in it and licked them. “Nothing,” she taunted. “Not faun not fowl not fuck.”

“Do I go bring them in?”

“Not green sludge in a dead deer’s gut, not frozen milk in a dead girl’s tit. There’s no game this side of Chir Serac anymore. I think we all starve.”

I peered at the whited-out valley. The temperature was plummeting and the sky was fantastically clear. There were more stars above the Darkling Mountains than anywhere else in the Fourlands, because they liked the clear air. Stars gathered there and fell as snow.

Two grouse were strung up on the shack’s wall, their feathers harassed by the wind, purple in the impure light. A llama from Mhadaidh shieling still had a bolas wound around its legs, and a light covering of snow settled on the black antlers of a buck chamois. Its slack tongue was freezing to the ground; it looked at me with yellow teeth.

Eilean’s fingers chased the last shreds of meat around her bowl. “Oh, you are always under my feet. I need some space. Get out! Out!” She shoved a couple of thin skewers into the embers, knocking out sparks onto steamy wolf fur.

There was nowhere to go but the empty goat shed high on the rocks, built around the twisted trunk of a rowan tree that spidered up the cliff as if trying to creep away from me. I had believed Eilean’s gibes that if I ran down to Scree the other Rhydanne would pull my wings off.

I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and nestled in the bothy among the heather hay. Thick cornices hung over the vast black splintered cliffs, looming dark against the snow clouds. Eilean shouted, “And don’t come back in tonight!” She slammed the door, cutting off the firelight abruptly.

I listened, motionless, as from far up on Mhor Darkling, the highest spire of the range, an ominous creaking echoed down the valley. Tabular layers of snow began to slide.

My head was full of its white roar as I flared my wings and landed on the deck of the Stormy Petrel. I shook my head to silence the resounding smashes and splitting, buckling rock. For two centuries the avalanche has echoed in my ears.