Marie Brennan - Within the Sanctuary of Wings

Ruzt and Zam were out with portions of the village herd for grazing, which left the two of us to fight the blaze on our own. We first attempted to suffocate the fire with the best material we had to immediate hand—which is to say, yak manure. (Dried, their droppings are often used for fuel. But these were not yet dry.) Had the yaks remained calm, we might have succeeded. Alas for Kahhe and myself, they did not.

The group nearest the fire stampeded first, with their neighbours hard on their heels. The enclosures were not meant to withstand a concerted attempt to break out; the railings splintered and fell. Kahhe bent her knees and sprang upward, snapping her wings out in a desperate attempt to gain altitude; it lifted her high enough to seize one of the overhanging rafters. For my own part, I could only run—sideways to begin with, out of the stream of yak flesh, as if they were an avalanche like the one that had brought me to Imsali; but then onward and out of the barn entirely, for the spreading fire and the stampede soon had the entire place in an uproar.

Kahhe, it must be said, kept her wits rather well. By the time I had steadied my nerves and could re-enter the building without fear of being pulped, she was back at the fire, beating it out with anything that came to hand. This was not only courage at work: without the barn, the sisters could not hope to care for all the herds of Imsali by themselves. And without the herds, their village would starve in the coming year. I had no way of guessing how community-minded the Draconeans were; I did not know whether other villages would contribute bulls and cows to keep their neighbours going. Now was not the time to ask. I tied a rag over my face, seized a bucket, and began dousing one edge of the flames from the nearest water trough.

We got the fire out in time, although it destroyed one corner of the barn. This the sisters could patch after a fashion, with yak hides and bracing beams; the greater damage, in the immediate term, was the near-complete scattering of the herds.

In this I was both a liability and an asset. Although I lacked the physiological adaptations that made the Draconeans of that region better suited to withstanding the cold, I could endure if I had to, and my presence meant the sisters had a fourth pair of hands to help restore order. Four, however, was not enough: multiple people would be necessary to track down the missing beasts and bring them back to the village, but the village itself needed looking after, especially as the yaks returned. The sisters would have to call on the neighbouring villages for help… and that, in turn, risked the revelation of my presence. The only solution was to send me out with two of the sisters on yak-retrieval duty, while a few neighbours from the nearest villages helped keep order at home.

I was not so loath to wander the Sanctuary as you might expect. True, the conditions I would have to endure out there would be dreadful; I did not look forward to any part of that. But my situation, which confined me almost wholly to the sisters’ house, the yak barn, and points between, was beginning to send me mad with claustrophobia. I thought I would be happy to endure some freezing cold, if it meant I could see new surroundings.

(Of course it is easy to think such things from the comfort of a relatively warm building. I did regret that impulse more than a few times in the days to come.)

Three of us therefore set out: myself, Ruzt, and Zam, with Kahhe remaining behind to repair the barn. I spent a miserable night alone in a small snow shelter when reinforcements arrived, lest they see me about the village; then the other two joined me with a pack of mews, and we sallied forth, into the depths of the Sanctuary.

Much of what followed does not make for good telling, unless one is keenly interested in the finer points of herding yaks in mountainous terrain. The yaks, having fled, were safe enough for the moment; they are bred for that kind of environment, and need very little grazing provided they are in good enough health and fatness. But of course they might slip and fall, or fail to find any grass beneath the snow, or simply wander so far afield their owners would never see them again. We therefore spent more than three weeks tramping through the nearby folds of the Sanctuary, following signs of the beasts’ passage, and herding them back toward the village once found.

I was miserably cold, as you might imagine. By my best estimate, we were then in the depths of Messis, which in the southern hemisphere is the nadir of winter. The limited diet on offer in the Sanctuary was beginning to take its toll, with scurvy loosening my teeth and sapping all my energy. My warmest moments came when I was chasing yaks; my coldest came at night, when I had neither movement nor sun to counteract the bitter air. Ruzt and Zam had brought along a tent, into which we all packed—not only the three of us, but also the mews. The little dragons arrayed themselves around the tent’s interior perimeter, and I slept tucked between my Draconean hostesses—an exceedingly odd sensation, I must own, but the only way I had of preserving myself against the weather. They were not nearly as warm to the touch as a human would have been, but they were preferable to the icy wall of the tent.

One of the things that kept me from giving myself wholly over to misery and self-pity was my awareness of how my companions also struggled. Until the fire drove us forth, I had not realized how vital the warmth of their house was to counteracting their hibernation instinct. Deprived of that regular haven, they chewed enormous quantities of their stimulant leaf to remain alert. To complain of my own difficulty seemed like whinging in comparison—especially when I realized they did not have to suffer so much.

We could not wander the Sanctuary in this manner without travelling near other villages. They are widely spaced, as the region will not support a denser population, but we ranged far enough afield that we passed several other settlements. In each instance, Ruzt would lead me in a wide arc around, while Zam went in to speak with the inhabitants. My years in the field had given me some facility for moving with stealth, but I have never been in sharper practice than during that journey; for even when we were not near a village, we often had to be cautious of other caretakers leading their herds out to graze.

The significance of this all sank in after Zam came back from the second village bearing both food and a sullen expression. Her mutter to Ruzt, though too quiet for me to make out, sounded resentful.

In a fit of sudden clarity, I said, “You would be sleeping in the village, if I were not here.”

(What I actually said was “You sleep in the village, if I am not here.” Although by then I could converse passably well on our most common topics, I had not yet figured out either the conditional or subjunctive conjugations of their verbs.)

Zam glared at me. “Yes.”

For once I had no doubt as to why she disliked me. “I am sorry,” I said. Then, floundering for more words: “I will sleep alone in the tent. It will be all right.”

This was sheer bravado, courtesy of my wish to mend fences with Zam. Ruzt shot it down without hesitation. “No, Zabel. We must—” The words that followed were incomprehensible to me; I had never heard them before. But when I asked for clarification, she brushed off my question and returned to the task at hand.

If I could not free them to rest warm and snug in someone else’s house, then at least I could lend every last scrap of energy I had to hunting down the missing yaks. I suspect neither Ruzt nor Zam expected much on that front, though; they had brought me along only to ensure that none of the Draconeans helping Kahhe stumbled upon me by accident. Although by then I had been assisting in the yak barn for two months, I was still a novice herdswoman at best.