I growled, long and low, gliding in wide, aimless circles above that filth-choked pit. The thought of the boy peering out from behind my eyes was an unwelcome one. A frightful one. All this new to me. I had never left the Four Sisters before and now, here I was, some mad, blind boychild astride my back, buoyed by some insane notion of prophecy. A city full of lice below me, probably the same source of sickness that killed my kin. And I was about to dive down into it?
The boy pressed his hands to my feathers, stroked as gentle as a cub’s first breath.
I growled again. Ashamed of my fear. Ashamed I had flown all this way and balked at the last. And so I breathed deep, heart all a-thunder against my ribs. Nodding assent.
I felt nothing, just as he promised; no sensation of intrusion or invasion. But I heard the boy gasp, felt his breath come quicker, a warm spice of joy and thrill in his thoughts spilling out into my own. I realized this would have been the first he had seen of the world from the air. The first moment he had witnessed all there was laid out below him, stretched from the end of one horizon to the other. The vastness of it all, the tiny lives and tiny moments caught beneath the burning sun, all washing away between the permanence of sky and earth.
All.
He ran his hands down my neck, a blinding smile in his thoughts.
I dipped my wings, dropping as a stone, feeling the boy’s fear and exhilaration, fingers sunk to the knuckles in the feathers at my neck, a cry boiling inside his belly and finally spilling up over his teeth. A whoop of joy, snatched from his mouth by the rushing wind, lingering long enough to spill over into me. I cannot explain it. Perhaps it was the link of thought between us. Perhaps I had forgotten the simple joy of the skies. But somehow, if only for a moment, his joy became mine.
We swooped into the thing the boy named palace—a towering nest of stone stained by the blue-black pall lingering in the streets. Gardens with a vague and sickly air, a brook babbling somewhere amidst the graying green. Monkey-samurai with metal skins and shiny sticks rushing from the surrounding walls, from within the structure itself, aiming their pointed steel twigs in our direction. I roared once in warning as we came in to land, gravel crunching beneath my talons. Wings spread, hackles raised in threat, tail lashing as a whip before frightened livestock. And I felt the boy in my mind again, calm as summer dawn, filling me with the same.
The boy slipped off my back, spoke with loud and clear voice. I could not understand the shaping of his words. Twisting and snarled in my ears; the language of bleating goats and filth-clad hogs. He spoke long, back and forth with the little samurai, voices rising and falling. It seemed the boy grew distressed for a time, thoughts filled with pleading, but finally some understanding filled the place where the jabber-words had rung. And the boy fell still, watching through my eyes as a handful of the men in their flimsy tin suits slipped back inside the nest, leaving us beneath the watchful stare of perhaps two dozen more.
The doors to the monkey-child nest groaned wide, revealing a cadre of samurai in tabards the color of blood, armor the hue of midnight, hard, narrowed eyes. Long sticks of folded steel, bows and quivers brimming to burst with arrows. Marching four by four by four. And behind them walked a monkey-child female, smaller and sleeker, long hair blacker than the warrior’s armor bound in needlessly complicated knots and braids.
She looked soft. Weak. Adorned and decorated, paint upon her face. I noted all the male monkey-children wore iron, carried steel, and yet the only weapon she bore was a fan fashioned of gold. And yet, in Jun’s chest, still I felt the twist of a blade, as surely as she had thrust one between his ribs. A sudden catch in his breath, a surge of butterflies in his stomach murmuring to mine. A sense of recollection, dusty with the weight of years. As he looked upon the monkey-child woman through my eyes, sharp as eagles, hungry as tigers, I think at last he remembered what true beauty was.
He had seen it before.
The woman stood atop stone stairs leading up into the nest, robes embroidered with prowling tigers. There was something akin to those jungle cats in her bearing; the way she looked us over, we two. Not astonished and bewildered as all the men about her, slack-jawed in their metal suits. No, she was predatory. Calculating. Perhaps even hungry.
They spoke then. The boy and the woman. Words I did not understand. At one point, Jun laughed, bowed so low he nearly fell forward on his face. I could not fathom why. But the female spoke with a voice of strength, hiding a blood-red smile behind the fan of gold. And finally, she stepped aside, and gestured to her nest of stone and clay.
I snorted, snarled; a noise as close to laughter as my kind know. Looking him over, wondering if he saw himself as I did—small and pale and eyeless. Knowing all about his future, and yet knowing nothing at all.
The Junsei bridge rumbled as a fat man with a bellyful of bad clams. Trembling in its boots, the water about it rippling with bone-deep vibrations. And with no more warning, the stone supports blew apart like fireworks on a feast day, flame surging magnesium bright in the predawn still. Stone and mortar and dust spraying hundreds of feet skyward, illuminated by the brief flame screaming its birthsong below. Yawning, moaning, sighing, the arches collapsed, one by one by one, crashing into the mud-brown flow with a sodden roar.
Tatsuya watched from a small hill beside his command tent, turned his spyglass to his brother’s encampment on the hill. A flurry of motion, distant cries, a thousand fingers pointing to the column of smoke marking the beginning of their ends.
