To fly lifted Nallo's spirits. To skim through low-lying clouds and get soaked to the skin with unshed moisture made her laugh. To glide on the wind — currents and thermals, which Volias told her she would learn to identify and anticipate — while the earth rolled away on all sides gave her joy. No chanter or tale-spinner, she could think of no better way to describe the earth from her harness than that it was like a textured carpet of greens and browns and yellows, ribboned and splotched with the variegated blues of water. Glorious!
Volias took them in easy stages so she would not get too badly chafed by the harness. Even so, the mey fell away with breathtaking speed. They could cover a day's journey in half a morning, and Volias said that they were going slow.
They flew upriver along the River Olo with the Lend rising to the south, its mysterious grasslands wavering like a dream in the distance. Then westward upriver along the River Hayi, with the Soha I [ills rumpling the land to the north, air currents tangled. Surely they flew over the village where she had lived with her husband, but she could not pick out earth-bound landmarks from the air. Mount Ana reared his gleaming pate, and they were buffeted through the
Aua Gap with the city of Horn seen below to resemble an onion chopped in half, its nested circles climbing the slope of a ridge that marked the terminus of a prominent range of hills whose name she did not know.
There was so much she did not know!
She'd never thought about it before.
Pil flew a ways off to her left and Volias to the right and out in front. Tumna kekked as they glided down the long descent to the Istrian Plain, known to Nallo only in the tales. She twisted in the harness, trying to see what Tumna had spotted. She kept her feet fixed on the training bar, while Volias hung with feet dangling, perfectly at his ease, and after a moment she realized something was moving where her feet blocked her view. Now it was behind them.
It was hard to know what Tumna might spy out: a deer, a bandit, an honest traveler. She tucked her knees up to her chest and scanned the earth. There sparkled a pond lined with mulberry trees, and a neighboring settlement, not more than six houses, storehouses and sheds flanked by an orchard and rice fields. This time of year the fields should have shone with green shoots working up through muddy water, but the fields lay brown and untended. No one had planted. From the air, the place looked abandoned.
Tumna dropped, and she shrieked and planted her feet on the training bar even though the harness held her. Aui! So far to fall!
Color flashed where the trees thinned by a stream. She knew in the crudest sense how to rein the eagle; she tugged the right jess, and Tumna responded with a tight circle that attracted Volias's attention. Fumbling in the pouch strapped to the harness, she got a hand around the red flag. As she yanked it free, her grip slipped, and it fell, brought up short by a leash.
She cursed, grabbed and waved it clumsily, trying to show where she had seen a person moving in the forest. Volias and Trouble plunged past her like a dropped stone, and Tumna's circling movement cut off her view. As she turned in her harness trying to get a clear line of sight, something happened because as they came around she saw Volias and Trouble had set down in a narrow patch of cleared ground stream-side and he was gesticulating to a person — a woman with a baby — who was possibly hysterical or furious.
Pil had gotten Sweet to come around at an altitude rather higher than Nallo and Trouble; he had a far better grasp of reining and leashing. He had barely settled into a holding pattern when Volias launched, the eagle beating upward until she found a rising current that would lift her. Volias set a course eastward over countryside smoothing into a plain that stretched to a cloudy horizon.
It was going to rain soon. She shivered, wondering what had happened below.
Volias stayed aloft late into the afternoon, not stopping as he usually did for an early camp and a lesson in short-range maneuvers. They passed over extensive forest lands and, increasingly, villages set amid fields and ponds and orchards and attended by the occasional temple building or compound. Every one of these had thrown up around it an earthwork or palisade, flimsy-looking barriers from this height. Folk worked in the closer fields, or hauled dirt as others shoveled.
According to the tales, fertile Istria boasted ten and a thousand villages, and it looked to Nallo like every one of them was surrounded by fresh fortifications.
Late in the afternoon, they set down in a clearing well away from village or temple. She followed Volias in checking her eagle's harness and feathers and then, like Pil, hooding the bird for the night, making sure the two raptors remained at opposite sides of the open space. Volias released Trouble to hunt. Nallo trudged farther into the woods.
Her arms were sore, her legs and hip aching, and when she slipped down her leather trousers to pee, she saw that the harness had rubbed her right hip raw where the strap was too tight over her hip bone.
Finishing her business, she walked back to camp, wincing as her leathers rubbed the same raw spot. Eiya! Next thing you knew it would start bleeding.
Pil already had a fire going. Crouched beside it, he fed sticks into the flames while Volias tied canvas into a lean-to and spread a ground cloth beneath it.
The senior reeve looked up as Nallo approached. 'That was good eyesight, spotting her like that.'
'Who was she?'
'Eh, the usual tale. A squad of bandits hit her village, but fortunately they had a watch out and a palisade to slow the outlaws, so everyone escaped. But the houses took damage, and tools and food and the local temple's silk banners and silver altar settings were stolen.'
'Desecrating the temple…' She shook her head. 'That's the work of savages.'
Pil glanced at them, then turned back to the fire.
'I won't argue with you,' said Volias. 'Here, hold this end while I tighten it.'
'Where was she going? She had a baby.'
'Eihi! You do have good eyesight. Maybe that's why.'
'Why that woman was alone in the forest?'
'Neh, neh. Why the eagle chose you. It's as good an explanation as any, and we've all wondered. Not every reeve is a decent person. Some were murderers or become murderers, some have a thievish bent, or complain all the time. Envy, jealousy, spite, anger, vanity. Reeves boast of all these fine traits. Yet what manner of heart we have makes no difference in the choosing. Sure it is, if you eat far too much, your eagle can't carry you, but otherwise our bad behaviors don't really limit our ability to be reeves, they only limit our ability to be good reeves. So why one person over another? Why choose a reluctant recruit-' He gestured to her and then to Pil. '-over some poor lad who's dreamed of being a reeve all his young life? Maybe it's just the cursed eyesight.'
Pil grabbed the iron traveling pot and walked to the stream that snaked through the clearing. The two eagles had tucked their heads under their wings, readying for sleep. Trouble chirped nearby, but Nallo could not see her.
'She's got her dinner,' said Volias with a smile. He fished in his travel pouch for their leather bottle of rice. When Pil returned with the pot half full of water, Volias dumped in a double handful of rice and over the top crumbled two wafers of traveler's cake, a pungent blend of spices and dried, mashed nai. Pil set the pot on a tripod over the fire and settled back on his heels to watch it heat.
'What about that woman?' asked Nallo, thinking of her own journey with Avisha and the children.
He tucked his chin like the eagles readying for sleep, and the
gesture made him seem, for an instant, ashamed. 'She was angry at me for giving away her position. In case any folk were nearby to spot me. She'd gone on the forest track to see if the village her sister married into had been hit.'
'Had it?'
'She hadn't reached yet.' He grinned. 'I think, from certain words that slipped, that she left her own village's hiding place because she'd gotten into an argument with her kin, or her husband, or the elders. Hard to say. She reminded me a little of you.'
She glared at him, and he laughed. Pil looked at them, and Nallo stalked to the fire and plopped down next to him, promptly soaking her rear as she sat in a hole hidden by a luxuriant growth of spring-beam.
Pil raised an eyebrow.
'You could have warned me!' she said, shifting away.
