Shadow

    'I must go,' Shadow said. 'The proclamations will have been read--Vindax as king and no fighting against eagles, no more slave birds, elect a local mayor. I must be on my way.'

    'Why the hurry?' Ukarres demanded, his warrior's curiosity aroused in spite of himself. 'Tell me what you think you can do.'

    Shadow hid a smile. 'We are going leftward along the Rand as fast as we can, and that will be very fast. Every aerie will be emptied as this one was. I have shown the way; a few men left at each castle or town can handle it and then hurry on to catch up. Ramo will not know what is happening before we are upon them.

    'I stopped the messenger Vak sent,' he added sadly. 'It was young Rorin. He was the only casualty, apart from Vonimor's broken ribs.'

    'No warnings?' Ukarres mused. 'What of the singles? Jarkadon has good advisers--probably the duke, of course. He has scattered singles all along the Rand. Communications have never been better in my lifetime. You can't stop the Ramo singles going back.'

    'That's good!' Shadow said. 'As long as they carry no messages. Jarkadon will be able to map our progress. There are two things he can do--and I want him to do the wrong one.'

    'So they will be waiting for you,' Ukarres said. He closed his eye as though imagining the battle. 'And you offer terms: Put Vindax on the throne and you won't release the rest of the birds. The Rand will be lost, of course, but the Range safe. I don't think you'll get very far with that ploy.' He looked up with a satisfied smile.

    'You're wrong,' Shadow said, content to discover that Ukarres had worked it out as he had expected him to. 'What they must not know, and what you don't know, ishowwe are doing it.'

    He stayed quiet until Ukarres demanded, 'Well? Howareyou doing it?'

    Shadow told him, and his shock was obvious.

    'It isn't possible!' he whispered.

    'It is! Karaman went back to the old books. He discovered that the First Ones blunted the birds' talons. They used metal helmets--the birds could not remove those. When the war was won, men started using the birds for hunting and left their talons alone. He isn't sure. But over the ages the equipment has been perfected and made lighter, and the eagles never thought to try again. They were too smart! They thought they knew better.' Eagles did not experiment--their thinking was even more rigid than Ninomar's.

    The old cynical smile briefly flickered on the pillow. 'And over the ages we bred larger birds and smaller men! Do I detect an irony there?'

    'Possibly.' Shadow smiled also. 'It was just something very obvious that no one had seen. The birds never preen their own heads--they do each other's. But I knew that NailBiter could reach his beak with a talon, and I knew that the helmet had only the two straps and certainly the neck strap alone could not hold it firm in a strong wind.'

    A helmet had to be a flimsy, pliable thing, for it had to slide up under the hood and fit around the comb and beak. So a helmet was only two pads of leather, joined by two straps at the top and fastened by two buckles below.

    Ukarres was staring in horror. 'You cannot stop this thing, then? It is already too late?'

    'Yes,' Shadow said. 'The days of the skymen are over. The eagles will be freed, and they will take good care that no one ever enslaves another, by any means.'

    Ukarres gave him a skeptical glare, then his gaze wandered away to the far distance. It was a while before he spoke.

    'The keeper of the Rand is the last of the skymen,' he said quietly. 'Did you get that lecture from Karaman?'

    'No. I thought I was a skyman.'

    'No.' Ukarres sighed. 'You were a trooper, and the troopers are tax collectors. The real skymen were rulers. Once all the local lords ruled their own fiefs and defended the men against the eagles. But they were always quarreling and having little wars. The kings gradually pulled them all into Ramo and made courtiers out of them. Taught them revelry instead of rebellion, finery instead of fighting, madrigals instead of mayhem.'

    'They are parasites!' Shadow said.

    'Yes, they are now,' Ukarres agreed. 'Only the keeper of the Rand remained. He is the last of the skymen. And the kings did all the ruling and became tyrants. That's what Karaman says.'

    'I think I agree with that,' Shadow said. 'Perhaps you do?'

    'Perhaps a little. Why did you come to see me?'

    'I...to say good-bye.'

    The creaky voice rose in fury. 'Wanted to talk to a skyman, didn't you? Not many in Allaban! Tired of farmers and priests?'

    That might well be true; Shadow had not thought of it.

    'And you wanted my approval!' Ukarres said angrily. 'You wanted to confess to me what you've done and see if I approve. Well, I don't. You've swallowed Ryl's rubbish about being nice to those killer flying monsters, and you've betrayed your own kind. You've freed the birds and taught them to throw rocks, and now they're going to rule us, instead of the other way around.'

    'Most of the folk in Allaban seem to be friendly with the birds,' Shadow protested. 'They have a feathered friend or two who drops in and gives them a leg of mutton once in a while.'

    'For what? Just for chat? You're saying that the birds are amused by the humans?'

    'Well...'

    'That's it, isn't it? Entertainment! Curiosities? In Allaban the humans are pets now?'

    Shadow rose. 'I would rather be a pet for a bird than a slave to Jarkadon. Karaman is right: We were wrong to enslave the birds, and we paid for it. I hope you recover, Sir Ukarres.'

    'Shut the door and let me die in peace,' the old man said, and closed his single eye.

Chapter 18

'An eagle never forgets.'

--Skyman proverb

    BETWEEN the Rand and the Range lay a gap which the skymen called the 'Big Jump.' It was not especially deep--a drover road crossed it, snaking over the great monoliths, the cinder cones, and the jagged fault blocks like a snail track through a garbage tip, spanning chasms on ramshackle bridges and seeking always the highest ground. The herds and the ox carts crawled painfully along there, the men gasping in the heat and thick air, and they had another name for it.

    To the skymen, though, it was the Big Jump, and its width was always a challenge. The sunward crossing--from Rand to Range--was the easier, aided by the cold wind. For both mounts and wilds the technique was the same: Climb in the strong thermal which poured upward from a great sun-blasted cliff below Krant, and then glide. Ridden birds had a steeper angle of glide than wilds or spares, but in most cases they could all arrive safely at the little mountain called Rakarr, which marked the start of the Range.

    Against the darkward face of Rakarr, of course, the cold wind rose in an updraft, and skill was needed there: The rider had to gain altitude to be able to circle the peak and reach the thermal above the sunward face. After that his road to the Range was open, an easy line of thermals to Ramo and beyond, all the way to the end. But with too little altitude he would not reach the thermal, while too much would sweep him up into the turbulence of rain and storm that lay on the darkward side of every mountain in the Range. It was those clouds which kept the Range fertile, their precious rainfall seeping through the volcanic rock to emerge as springs on the sunward side, but they could be death for a bird and its rider.

    The darkward crossing from Range to Rand was harder, at least for the skymen. The wilds merely rode a