Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

“What is this?” she said with curiosity. Her eyes drilled into me like pale shards of bone.

“He’s an Awian. Stocky as he is, he’s young.”

“Alone?”

They looked around. “If he is an Awian he’s not old enough to be here by himself, I do declare. An orphan, then.”

The woman spoke slowly, “Are you an orphan? Or abandoned?”

I said nothing.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked.

With overwhelming isolation I thought, I do two things: I can keep people company or I can leave them alone.

The woman shot out a wind-burned hand and started pinching my feathers. Her husband gave a laugh and pick, pick, picked at the other wing. I yelped and sprinted away. Why were they doing this to me?

The cold wind lifted my dirty hair. My soaked feet were freezing; my three layers of fur socks had been shredded when I scrambled among the landslide rock shards.

I ran frantically over low outcrops, knocking stones from their frost-shattered surface. The Rhydanne kept pace without quickening their breath and all the time they laughed and plucked my feathers, leaving a trail of the ones they managed to detach. The woman poked me and I staggered; the man shoved me back to ward her. I made a break but she leapt and pushed me; I fell over and broke the ice on a snow patch. I got to my feet whimpering with frustration and the numb pain from last night. The woman teasingly flicked my head and tore the hood from my alpaca wool jacket. The man pulled all the horn buttons off and the belt that kept it closed, since I had long out-grown it. They packed snow down my back. If they stripped all my clothes off, I would die of exposure. I thought that was their intent.

I wish I had realized then that my ability to fly would awe all Rhydanne, because it was faster than they could ever run. If I’d known that I would have armfuls of bangles; if I’d known that I would own the Spider, and remind them of the fact with free drinks every year, then I wouldn’t have sobbed and darted about in vain attempts to escape, tears rolling down my face.

I wrenched free and ran as fast as I could. The man gave a double whistle. The woman whistled once to show she understood and they spread out on either side of me. They’re hunting me, I thought with horror.

I swerved away from her and ran straight. Her mate narrowed the gap and forced me toward her with a laugh of pure joy. The ice inside my collar rubbed my skin raw and was seeping down my neck; the cold air seared my throat.

They easily followed their hunting system and mercilessly passed me between them. For them it was a leisurely pace but I was trembling and close to pissing myself with fear.

The third time around a stack of antlers marking a meat store scraped in the frozen ground I realized that they were deliberately making me run in large circles. I yearned to jump far away from Scree-to leave every one of the Daras and hunters. Blind with tears I swerved abruptly and headed straight for the gorge. They chased me, grinning. The lip of the crevasse loomed far too close. They halted, called, “Stop!” I heard concern in their voices but I wasn’t falling for any tricks.

I spread my wings and glided over the gorge. The ground fell away and I was suddenly one hundred meters in the air above lashing milk-white water.

The Rhydanne clutched each other, their mouths agape. Apart from Eilean, they were the first to see me fly. But I remember terror rather than triumph as I watched their figures shrink into dots. A powerful air current grabbed and hurled me up. The Pentitentes Ridge of Chir Serac lengthened, covered in cone-shaped ice formations. Mhor Darkling’s highest white peak pulled down past my wings; the entire mighty, beautiful massif spread out beneath me.

Above my world, a steady broad slipstream of wind blew to the southeast. I fought for breath in the thinnest air and talked myself calm. “Then that’s the way I’ll go. Wherever I land has to be better than this.” I turned with the wind stream and let it speed me away.

“Jant?” Lightning’s voice sounded amused. “Jant, wake up! Are you all right?”

I sighed. “Yes. Don’t worry about me; how are you?”

“Bearing up. Burning, weak. Snatches of music keep going around and around in my head. You look dazed too.”

“I was just thinking,” I said. “Reminiscing about my childhood.”

The dingy cabin creaked and lurched. The Archer nodded approvingly and said, “Please tell me about it. It must have been wonderful, living in the mountains and being free.”

The ocean was a choppy swell laced with lines of foam, a breathing shape over the back of which the Petrel rolled. The mastheads were beginning to glow, freezing spray cracked from taut sails, and she listed hard to starboard as she slid rather than sailed down into another trough.

A passing squall blew the surface of the waves opaque and slated rain horizontally onto the gleaming deck. Water dripped off the strips of lead nailed over Mist’s cabin door. White rain screamed down so strongly I couldn’t see through it. It pounded the waves flat.

I slid the forecastle hatchway open on its runners and peered down into the sickbay. Lightning’s figure was just visible in the gloom. The bed had been hooked to the padded leather wall and he sat propped up, a glass of brandy cradled in his big hands. He pressed his back to the wall in an attempt to relieve the pain that still immobilized him. I teetered uncertainly on the creaking threshold until he beckoned me down. “Come in. It’s so tedious lying here for weeks. I’ve either been talking to Rayne or listening to my own heartbeat in the pillow. Close the hatch, please; the chill seems to nip into my wound.”

I dangled off the ladder as the ship lurched unexpectedly, and dropped onto a spare sleeping bag by the opposite bulkhead. “I was just on deck getting some fresh air-if you can describe sea air as fresh. We keep sliding down the waves sideways, they’re like black pyramids. Mist’s furious; in the teeth of the storm we’re getting nowhere and Gio is increasing his lead. Wrenn hasn’t stopped being sick yet. Where’s the Doctor?”

“Collecting clean water from the stove. I am in good hands.”

The ship rolled and molten wax poured off the candles in the lantern. The flames jumped up high on their long wicks. Lightning blinked. He winnowed out his uninjured wing to scratch between the contour feathers, then folded it up by hand and tucked it under his voluminous surtout coat. The creamy candlelight cast his face into pallor. He was clean-shaven and, through long practice, fastidiously neat. Living on a ship for three months is like camping at the Front and Lightning knew how boredom, bad conditions and long waiting cause men’s discipline and ultimately their behavior to degenerate. The bandages under his barn-owl-yellow coat were fresh and crisp.

He said, “I worry about Cyan; I need to see her more. I only have a short opportunity to raise her and I can’t depend on Swallow to do it properly. This is such appalling timing; last century the Emperor could have done without me for a decade. Poor Cyan, she always looks delighted when I visit, though she’s different every time, she grows so fast. Jant, one day you might find that you rely on prominent features to recognize people from one decade to the next.”

He veered from Low to High Awian, an outrageously complicated language in which every noun has a case, a tense, one of three genders and one of two social classes. Most of the verbs are irregular, and the least slip in the forms of address can cause offense. I am not sure whether High Awian became so intense through its long evolution in their aristocracy or deliberately to discourage aspiring farmers, tenants and Morenzians.