slept. He only knew that his time became more difficult. He could not avoid touching the youth, who needed to be fed and kept warm and clean, and whose wing's tendons and muscles would contract without massage. He worked hard over the youth, trying to ignore his feelings, trying to control them.
Yet, who would know if he drew his hands along the thin body, half-extended the short silver talons, drew narrow lines of love against the skin? He could embrace the sleeper, extending both his wings, and no one would pull away at the rough contact of tattered webbing. Children fondled and explored each other's androgynous genitals-- why should he restrain himself? Whispered words might influence a decision yet to be made, words and the persuasion of experienced hands, even through sleep. And if the youth awakened, what right could anyone so ugly have to object? Who else but a cripple would take such a mate? Who was left to care?
He opened his eyes against his fantasies, and felt ashamed. The auroras-- his pride, his prison-throbbed just beyond the low stone wall.
When he felt most cynical and most alone, he sometimes calmed himself with assurances that he was the most worthy of his people, strong enough (for was he not alive?) to afford kindness and even mercy. Yet of the few crimes his people recognized, the action he contemplated now was the worst.
He had been lonely for a long time. He had understood his solitude, but never accepted it. He was a proud thing, despite his wounds. He might have been bitter and cruel, or vain and futile, but he had even been too proud for that, too proud to allow despair to change him even when there was no one left to see. Now he began to fear that his strength and pride were near exhausted. Attracted, despite the ugliness of the pastel eyes, the keeper could feel himself falling in love. He forced himself to begin thinking of the youth in the masculine. When the youth... when he awoke, that could be even more influencing than treating him as sexed while he was asleep, but his awakening would force the keeper away from his fantasies.
And perhaps the youth would approach him, in the way that was right and proper, and then the fantasies would no longer be needed.
* * *
He knew the bones had knit, well or badly, when the youth's temperature sank toward normal even while he covered him. He folded his wing and rolled away, unwilling to be so near when the youth awoke. He got up, slowly, and limped into the temple.
Later, finishing his duties before the ancient altar, he heard a stirring outside.
The youth, awake, was pulling at the splint. The keeper squatted down beside him and pushed his hand away.
'I'm healed, aren't I? Or I wouldn't have woken up.'
The keeper, in his fantasies, had forgotten or discounted the youth's hostility; he was taken aback by it now. 'I hope that thou art healed,' he said evenly. He removed the splint and gently stretched the wing. The web was soft, and cool. It was almost as hard to take his hands away, even though the youth was awake. The line of the bone was clean, sharp under skin, light. The bone was unscarred, still hollow. 'Thou must move it several days before requiring it to bear thy weight.'
The youth touched the break with his other hand, stood, and opened his wings to their wide full span, reaching. He smiled, but the keeper could detect a slight sag in his wing, a weakening of unused muscles, a contraction of tendons. 'I think thou wilt fly again,' he said, and it was the truth.
The youth suddenly dropped his wings, staggering, smile gone, weakened by his mild exertion so soon after awakening. All his bones protruded; his body had half-starved itself, and would need time to recover. The keeper reached up, steadied him, but the youth winced when the flap of wing that did not fold brushed against him. The keeper glanced up; after meeting his gaze, the youth looked away.
'We should, perhaps, be tolerant of each other's weaknesses,' the keeper said, cruelly, hurt.
'Why? Nothing forced you to help me. I don't owe you anything.'
The keeper levered himself to his feet, walked a few steps, stopped. 'No,' he said. 'I could have let thee heal with thy bones twisted.' He heard the sweep of wings opening slowly, wing tips brushing the ground.
'I would have died,' the youth said, as if he had committed some crime by living.
'So they thought of me,' the keeper said, facing him, 'when they left me on the hunting plain for the scavengers.'
The youth said nothing for a time. The keeper wondered how he had survived infancy: someone must have cared a great deal, or no one had cared at all. He must have been fiercely protected or virtually ignored until his sentience awoke and he was too old to expose. Letting him die would have been kinder than leaving him to live as an outcast.
'And they left you here. Why do you help, instead of hating?'
'Perhaps I'm weak, and cannot stand the sight of pain.' The youth glanced up, purposely looking straight at the keeper's eyes, holding his own gaze steady. His expression was quizzical. They both knew the keeper would never have lived if he had been weak. It was the youth who looked away first, perhaps from a habit of hiding his eyes so people would tolerate him.
The youth opened his wing, one long finger at a time. The webbing was so smooth, so glossy, that the auroras reflected off it, scarlet and yellow, like flames. 'It hurts,' he said.
'Still, thou must move it. It may help if I aid thee in stretching it.' He opened his own broken wing a little, showing the bones pulled out of shape by shortened tendons. 'I knew what should have been done while I slept.'
The youth looked at the wing for a long moment, fascinated, horrified. 'Please fold it.'
The keeper pulled his fingers against the back of his arm, bending his elbow so they would fit. The torn flap hung loose.
'I'm sorry.'
'Never mind.'
* * *
Their conversations were crystalline. The keeper would have preferred to cease touching the youth completely, but he needed to help with the wing, and he refused to allow himself to takeout his disappointment on a person. He had hoped his own deformities might cease to matter; that they did not was hardly the youth's fault. The revulsion in him was perhaps less than in others, and perhaps growing weaker, but still present, undeniable, unavoidable.
The keeper began to believe that he himself might as well have died. He had been strong enough to break his fall, strong enough to crawl under a thorn bush away from scavengers, strong enough to sleep eleven days and live. He remembered waking up, peering out through barbed twisting branches at the people hunched watching him and listening to his prophetic mutterings. One held laths and another funeral veils, waiting to brace his wings open and launch him if he died. Even then, with his skin stretched taut over his starved bones, he had been strong enough to crawl toward them, to make a purposeful move to tell them that he would live, that they could rightly help him and take him as their seer. But he was not strong enough for this loneliness and desertion.
* * *
A shrill squeal roused him from a doze, leaving him half-awake, confused, exhausted. He heard another sound, a cry abruptly cut off. He folded his wings and moved into the courtyard.
He found the youth sitting against the wall of the temple, sucking the neck vein of a rabbit-deer so freshly dead that one hind foot still trembled in a muscle spasm. 'Where didst thou get that? Animals never come past the auroras.'
The youth began, delicately, to pull the small animal apart at the major joints. 'Maybe it thought you'd tell it its future.' He extended his silver claws and began to shred the meat from a narrow bone.
'I do not mock thee.'
The youth worried the carcass with his hands for a time. He looked up, and the auroras caught his eyes and brightened them horribly. 'Didn't you hate them when you realized they were going to leave you behind? Didn't you want to slash them and tear them and demand what right they had to pretend you didn't matter?'
After a moment, the keeper said, 'I grieved.'
He had walked into the temple and stood near the back wall, before the stone figure that was crumbling with age and neglect. The keeper was the first in centuries to offer it anything even resembling belief. Slowly, painfully, he had relaxed his wing-fingers, until the scarred membranes lay half-folded around him. 'Why did they help me?' he had cried. 'If they did not need an oracle, why did they help me, and if they needed one, why did they leave me
