Harpy's Flight

by Megan Lindholm

  A screamed whistle betrayed the speck that plummeted from the sky. Ki ducked instinctively, crouching against the oncoming fury. The speck became a hawk, an eagle, and finally the unmistakable outline of a diving Harpy. Blue-green plumage and hide glinted against the paler blue sky. The cilia, like hair, blew long and turquoise behind her. She fell on Ki like an arrow from the sun.

  The ledge offered Ki no shelter, no place of concealment, not even a niche to defend. She grasped her knife in both hands, raised it high and straight above her head. She did not doubt that the plunging talons would kill her with the first blow. Ki only hoped that she would feel the metal of her knife in the Harpy’s meat before she died.

  The Harpy veered. Her whistle of outrage changed to a heartrending scream, so human that Ki echoed it. The Harpy opened wide her blue wings, flapping them frantically to break the speed of her dive. Ki was forgotten. The Harpy’s small bony forearms were outstretched instead to the gaunt figure that staggered from the den mouth on stalky legs. He spread wide his wings, showing the seared plumage that dropped from them to smoke on the bare ledge. His dull turtle beak was opened wide, gasping for clean air. His eyes were clouded over with a protective white membrane. As Ki gaped in horror, he dropped to his knees and rolled over, the leathery egg still clutched to his high bird chest. Even as Ki watched, his forearms jerked spasmodically and the egg fell, to split open on the ledge. The ruined infant rode the wave that should have been its birth. Before Ki’s eyes the tiny body jerked, splashed in the egg liquids, and was still.

  The female Harpy landed on the ledge, fanning Ki with the wake of her outstretched wings. Her golden eyes darted from the ruined egg to the still, smoking body of her mate. Dark, foul-smelling smoke poured from the gaping aerie den.

  Her leathery wings were still half spread as she whirled on Ki. “Gone! All gone!â€� A world of loss was in the words she cried.

  “As are mine!â€� Ki shrieked back. Her own grief and agony burst out afresh inside her, like an infected wound that covers itself over only to split and gush anew. The Harpy started for her; Ki rushed to meet her.

  Ki was inside the range of the wide wings before she could be stunned by a blow from them. The top of Ki’s head was not as high as the top of the Harpy’s breastbone. Ki thanked whatever nameless fates had allowed her to meet the creature on the ledge instead of receiving the weight of that body in the ripping force of its talons.

  The Harpy’s bony forearms and clenching hands shot out to close in Ki’s hair and jerk Ki close to her. The wide turtle beak gaped over her skull, the gust of her fetid breath enveloping Ki. Ki saw the single great taloned foot begin to rise, to claw , her entrails from her. Ki did not resist the Harpy’s jerk that I snatched her toward the plumaged chest. Instead, she butted her head into it with a will of her own. Ki’s left hand gripped the Harpy’s right wrist desperately. She sprang to wrap her legs suddenly about the Harpy’s high waist, curling her body up out of reach of the questing talons. Ki’s right hand, with the bare knife in it, rose and fell. The Harpy staggered under the double impact of Ki’s weight and the knife blow. The blade skittered across the Harpy’s ribs, to finally sink into her tough abdomen. Ki clung to the knife haft, tucking her chin into her chest to avoid the Harpy’s snapping beak. Ki dragged down on the knife blade with all the strength of her hatred. It bit slowly through the Harpy’s thick skin and chewed down. The great wings beat angrily against her, but Ki remained curled on the; Harpy’s long belly, hugging her as tightly as a lover.

  The wide wings beat wider. Ki was jerked up. She squeezed her legs tightly about the Harpy’s body, refusing to be shaken off, to have her life dashed out on the rocks below—for now the ledge was gone. They were rising, then suddenly wheeling, down. The hands locked in Ki’s hair rattled her head. She lost her orientation; there was no up or down. The sky rushed past I her, revealed and then hidden by the beating wings. Ki buried her face against the Harpy’s body, trying to avoid the fingers that sought her eyes. Ki could not tell if they climbed or swooped. Ki dug her own nails into the leather and bone wrist of the Harpy. The Harpy drew her free hand clawing down Ki’s face.

  Ki loosened the grip of one leg, drove the knee in a short jolt to the Harpy’s hard belly. The rhythm of the wings paused. Ki quickly locked her leg about the Harpy again. She pulled her knife clear of the creature, reached high, and sank the blade to its hilt in the Harpy’s chest.

  A too-Human scream. The control of the flight faltered. The great wings flapped and battered the sky erratically, not checking the speed of their sudden fall. Ki and the Harpy tumbled together, locked in disaster. Ki shrieked out her final triumph and terror. The Harpy was silent, perhaps dead already, her wings beating only in after-death spasms. Sky and cliff wheeled endlessly about them. One wing tip brushed the cliff face, swinging them about and checking, for an instant, their fall. Ki tasted the Harpy’s warm blood as it spattered against her face. She clutched tightly to the tumbling body.

  Suddenly, rough tree branches reached up and seized them, ripping them apart from one another.

  Ki opened her eyes to evening. Idly she observed her feet and legs where they rested, higher than her head, in a tangled bush. Snapped branches above told the passage of her fall and let in the last of the day’s light. Ki lay still, looking at the moon that was beginning its nightly stroll. The Romni said the moon saw everything there was to be seen, and remembered it all. She grinned up at it foolishly. It need watch her no more. She was finished. The moon had seen all that Ki would ever do. She could think of nothing left in her life that had to be done. She closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, the moon was higher, looking curiously down at her through the snapped branches. Her body wanted water. Ki herself felt immune to such needs, apart from them. But her body would not go away. She listened for a long time to the nagging of her dry mouth and throat. Finally she began to stir herself. She pulled her legs free of the bush so that they fell to the ground. Her left arm seemed to be gone. Ki looked for it, found it still attached to her body. She reached over and picked up its hand and set it gently down between her breasts. She cradled it there. Slowly she rolled to her right shoulder. She waited for a jab of pain from her disjointed arm, but it was silent and numb. The Harpy’s dead eyes stared into Ki’s.

  She was not an armspan away. In death she was a broken thing, a kite of paper and sticks crushed in a gust of wind. Ki looked deep into the ruined golden eyes that had gone rotten brown in death. It was a cold look. She was glad that they had fought, glad that she had had the chance to rend that flesh and scatter its blood. She wondered if the Harpy could remember her death throes in hell. A grim smile set on Ki’s face. She rolled up onto her knees, forced her shaken body to stand. For the moment, she had decided to live.

  Ki read the stars that sprinkled the night sky. They had fallen far from where Ki had begun her climb, and farther still from where Ki had left her wagon and team concealed. She took her bearings, brushed hair and dried blood from her eyes, and limped off through the forest.

  Gray daylight had begun to stain the sky and return color to the leaves when Ki heard the welcoming snorts of her team. They had scented her. She wanted to call out to them, but her throat was too dry. She limped toward the sounds.

  The wagon stood in a small clearing. The unhobbled team raised their heads to gaze at her curiously. Sigurd snorted suspiciously at the smell of Harpy and moved beyond the range of Ki’s touch. Docile Sigmund watched her limping approach calmly. Ki stumbled past him, watching him shy suddenly as he caught the smell of blood on her. She went to the water cask strapped to the side of her wagon. She let the spigot of the cask run wastefully as she wet her hands, her face, and head, then drank in greedy gasps. The coolness of the water awoke her shoulder, and it began to beat in throbs of hot red. Ki forced herself to reach up and
turn the spigot off. She sat limply in the muddy place it had made beside the wagon.

  Her shoulder had begun to swell; her jerkin was tight against it. She would have to find help while she was still capable. She climbed painfully up the tall yellow wheel of the wagon onto the plank seat. Behind the seat rose the small enclosed cuddy that made up the wagon’s living quarters. She tugged loose a little wooden peg from its leather loop and slid the small door open. She clambered in, careful not to let her shoulder brush against the narrow door frame. She could not muster the energy to hop up onto the high sleeping platform. The folded blankets stacked on the straw stuffed mattress beckoned to her, but she could not rest yet. The walls of the cramped cuddy were dominated by cupboards and shelves, hooks and pegs. Ki tugged open a drawer and drew out the ragged remains of an old skirt. With her good hand and her teeth she ripped loose a piece and fastened a support for her arm. Then she snagged a sausage from a string that swung from a hook on the low ceiling. Her teeth sank into the tough, spicy meat. Her stomach awoke, growling, to remind her that a full day and night had passed since last she ate. Her jaws and bruised face ached as she chewed. She remembered again the Harpy’s claws down the side of her face. Ki swallowed, and took another bite.

  A small window in the cuddy let in the gray morning light, but Ki did not need the light to see. She knew the details of the wagon by heart. Sven’s extra tunic still dangled from its peg. The painted wooden puppet, strings tangled by Lars’s awkward young fingers, sprawled upon a shelf. A toy horse, only half-emerged from the coarse block of wood, rested on another shelf, Sven’s carving tools beside it. He would never shape legs for it now. Unbidden, Ki’s mind went to Sven by the fire, his large hands working delicately to bring the horse out of the wood. Little Rissa would be crouched beside him, her blond curly head pressing against his side, her small nose almost under the cautiously moving knife blade.

  Ki climbed out of the cuddy, grunting as she lowered her body to the ground. She picked up the thick harness in one hand, jangling it lightly. The huge gray horses came obediently, puzzled at her croaking voice, and she moved them into their places with soft pushes and begging commands. She arranged each strap and buckle awkwardly with one hand and her teeth. No one worked the other side of the team; she had to move around it to tighten the straps herself.

  She climbed to the seat and gathered up the reins. One foot kicked the brake free. No one scrambled up the wheel to hastily settle beside her. The morning air touched her coldly where a small body might have pressed against her. Ki gave a final weary glance at the sky. Clear and blue. She had freed the sky of wings. She shrugged and shook the reins. Muscles tensed, the grays leaned into the harness. Ki rode alone.

  Two

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  The wind carried to Ki’s ears the sounds of laughter, a snatch of one of the old songs. She grinned in spite of herself. Her horses pricked up their ears, moved their ponderous hooves a little faster. Ahead, they knew, would be bright firelight, cool water, and fresh green grass. There would be other wagons, children with small lightly patting hands, and other horses freed of their harnesses for the night. Ki marked their sudden freshening and felt rebuked by it. She would not pull Sigurd and Sigmund into a ring of Romni wagons tonight. She did not know when, if ever again, she would rejoin their crowded campsites and noisy convivial evenings. Perhaps never. The ghosts that rode in her wagon seemed to crowd forward, to peer with her through the trees at the flickering camp fires that dotted the area.

  Ki neared the turnoff where a narrow wagon trail left the main road to seek out a stump-dotted clearing. There Romni might camp unmolested for a night. The grays slowed, tried to turn. Ki tugged their heads back to her chosen path, tried not to hear the welcoming nickers of the camped horses calling to her team. She heard a rise in the tide of Romni voices by the fires. They would know she had passed. Some would be wondering who it was, and others would be telling in hushed voices. If she kept to her solitary ways, she might become a legend for them. Ki, the lone rider with her wagon full of ghosts. She smiled sourly. Ki, who had chosen to be alone over the customs of her adopted people.

  The year had turned twice since Ki made her choice. Children were learning to speak that had been but belly bulges the night she had ridden swaying, into a bright circle of firelight and wagons…

  Big Oscar came at a run to catch her as she sagged off the wagon seat. Rifa took Ki’s light body from his arms and put her on soft skins by a small fire. With a jerk and a twist, Rifa brought Ki’s arm back to painful life; she adjusted the crude sling and gave Ki a hot spicy tea to drink, with herbs of healing steeped into it. Limp on the skins by the fire, Ki watched the big burly Romni men unharness and lead off her team. Children ran to do what they knew was needed: to refill the drained water casks, to bring out onto the grassy sward Ki’s own sleeping-skins and weavings. They let her sleep a full night. She spent the next day watching the large women in their bright flowing skirts and loose blouses, the dark, bird-eyed children in their bits and rags of clothing as they ran and shrieked at play. Among all the peoples of the world, here Ki felt most at home.

  There were seven wagons at this encampment, a large group of Romni. The women were large, dark, heavy-breasted creatures. The beauty of their size and strength reminded Ki of their teams—tall, heavy horses with thick falling manes and bobbed tails. The men were thick, age making them burly as old tree stumps. The children played the ageless games of childhood, rolling and tumbling on the moss under the trees. People moved among the wagons, spreading bedding to air on the clean moss, putting flat slabs of dough to rise and bake on hot stones by the fire embers. A young couple entered the clearing from the trees, a brace of fat rabbits swinging from the woman’s belt, the basket of wild plums they had gathered filling the man’s arms. Oscar’s hands were black with the gooey mix he was spreading on a beast’s split hoof. Rifa was ever busy, oiling harness, nursing her latest baby, patching a worn coverlet, but somehow never far from Ki. She brought Ki tea and food before she could think to ask for it, smoothed a cool salve into the ragged gashes on Ki’s face. No questions were asked of her. To the Romni, it was an old story. The man and the children missing, the woman battered and bruised. The Romni were not a people that shared and savored their hurts. They were a folk that lived their lives around the bad times, cauterizing their wounds with silence.

  Night fell softly around them, the fires blossoming higher in the darkness. The dark of the trees became soft black walls enclosing an airy room roofed by the star-sprinkled sky. There was a coziness to children curling up on blankets by fires. A peace as palpable as the warm night air pressed down on the gathering. Slowly the adults began to gather at Oscar and Rifa’s fire, drifting over to it after children were settled in sleepy rows on bedding by their own fires. The adults all brought firewood, piling it up on Rifa’s fire until it became a blaze too hot to be enjoyed. Ki sat slightly apart from them all, one of her own sleeping furs slung across her shoulders. Her arm ached with a dull, unceasing pain. She could not blink an eye or move her mouth without the scabs on her face pulling at her skin. But the physical pains were only the shadow of the emptiness inside her and the knowledge that tonight her disjointed life would take another turn for the worse.

  They spoke no word to her. She knew the custom they waited for her to follow. They expected her to go to her wagon, to bring out from it every thing that had belonged to Sven and the children. The possessions of the dead must not be kept by the mourner. They must be gifted out among friends so that the spirits of the dead could be free of them. Things too personal for Ki to give away she would place on the blaze for the fire to consume. And when the wagon was empty of all save Ki’s own possessions, the women would help her unbind her hair from the knots and weavings that proclaimed her mourning. The time of grief would be over. Little mention of the dead would ever be made again, lest it trouble their s
pirits in the world they had passed on to.

  Ki watched the tall flames of the fire reaching. The tips of the flames seemed to rip free of the fire, to blink into nothingness in the dark above the flames. Ki did not move. The Romni waited.

  Rifa it was who took her courage in her hands and approached Ki. “It is time, sister,â€� she said firmly. “You know how it must be done. When Aethan, your father, went on before you, you did not shrink from what you had to do. Come, Ki. It is time. Let the grieving be over.â€�

  “No.â€� Ki breathed the word. Then she rose, to stand beside Rifa, facing the other Romni who stood waiting by the fire. She let the fur drop from her shoulders. The cool of the night prodded her injured shoulder, making it leap to fresh complaints. As she spoke, she felt the drag and pull of the dried cuts on her face.

  “No. â€�She said it clearly, loud enough to carry to all ears. “I am not yet ready to do this thing, my friends. My grieving is not yet over. I respect your ways. I have made them my own since I was a tiny child, playmate to many of you. But I must respect my heart’s counsel as well. And I am not ready, yet, to bid them farewell. I am not ready.“