Tyrant Trouble (Mudflat Magic)

by Phoebe Matthews

  The animals followed a path they seemed to know, down an edge of the hillside away from the huts and cook fires, and then across the shadow-dark plain. Pacer slowed to a walk and Black did also. I sat up, trying to retain some pride in front of Nance. She did not laugh. Perhaps she sensed my fury.

  “We need not hurry now,” she said.

  I glanced back at the city, already faded into dusk. A scattering of torches flickered on the hillside.

  “Very clever of you. And suppose I had fallen off this dumb beast? How would you keep your secret then?”

  She shrugged. “A tame horse is not a beast.”

  “I don’t know which of you is worse, you or your cousin,” I sputtered.

  She wrinkled her nose. “He is.”

  She led the way across the valley until we reached the low hills. We moved on steadily, with the horses following a winding path that all but disappeared in the shadows. Low trees brushed at me. The freshness of the evening air filled my lungs, sweet and clean after the smoky temple. I held tightly to the horse's mane and gripped its sides with my legs. When I could no longer see through the dusk, I kept my face close to its neck to avoid being hit in the head by low branches.

  When we stopped I could just about make out a clearing in the dim moonlight. Nance slid off of her horse and ran back to me, reached up to help me down from Black, then held me until my legs steadied. Good thing, because it was that or pick me up after a major sprawl.

  “We'll camp here for the night.”

  What a surprise, lucky me, another camping trip. “And the temple?”

  “No one enters unbidden. If they knock and are not answered, they go away. They think I spend days alone at prayer. But the Daughter never told me to do that. Old Lor protects my secret.”

  While she moved about collecting wood and lighting our fire, then warming our evening meal, Nance chattered happily. “You will see. We will have great fun. I am truly glad to have you as my friend, Stargazer. Always before I have had to journey alone and how I wished I might have a friend but how could I when I am forbidden to leave the temple?”

  “So do you cut out often?”

  “As often as I can. I cannot exist alone within walls forever.”

  “No one sees you ride out?”

  “Wives and daughters of guards are allowed to borrow horses from the stable. I only ride after sundown. In the shadows and from a distance, no one recognizes me. And if they did meet me on the path, who would know me? They have only seen me dressed in temple robes, my face painted and my hair wound with ornaments. Here, stir the pot while I rub down the horses and tether them. How clumsy you are. Do you know nothing of cooking? If you burn our food then we must eat it burnt. We have no extra. Must I teach you everything? See, I have put no meat in the pot, only grain and roots, so you will eat it.”

  “Nance, even in his tent Tarvik had servants to serve meals. How come you're alone in the temple?”

  “I could have slaves. I hate slaves. They never talk and are more depressing than being alone.” Her voice faded in and out as she moved around the horses, tending them. She added, “What about you, Stargazer? You cannot cook, you cannot ride, and you cannot dress your hair.”

  “I'm not a cook. I know how to ride a bus but don't ask what that is. As for hair, I can wash and comb it,” I grumbled as I tried to stir the pot with the stick she had handed me. “Be glad I do wash my hair and the rest of myself.”

  Nance squatted by the fire and dished up our portions. “What do you do in your land besides wash?”

  “Eat and sleep and mind my own business,” I snapped.

  She laughed. “I mean, what do you do while someone else prepares your meals for you?”

  “I am a Stargazer.”

  “I thought that was your name.”

  “Umm, well, it is also my job.”

  “And what is a job?”

  Get me off the horse and fill me with hot food and I turn cheerful. Achy but cheerful.

  How much should I tell her? And if I told her, would she tell Tarvik and would Tarvik in turn tell others? Would I be less safe if anyone knew I was something other than the new priest? There was no way to explain my world to her. But perhaps I could explain astrology. “I study the stars. I know where they are in the sky and how that tells the future, the best choice of career, when to marry, that kind of thing.”

  Nance squealed with delight. “You see the future? So do the magicians, but they do not use stars. They build a fire and in the flame they see answers.”

  “What magicians?”

  “The magicians of Thunder, a crazy lot. They don't come here any more. Kovat locks them in prison cells and forgets them.”

  “Prison cells? Where do you have prison cells?”

  “Under the castle, holes in the ground, cold and dark.”

  Whoa. Didn't like the sound of that.

  Nance pulled sheepskins from the sack she had carried on Pacer. We smoothed them and settled for the night.

  I lay on my back staring at the familiar stars. Nance was a friendly girl and I liked her company but she could not replace my own world. What were they doing now, my friends in Seattle? Oh, right. Probably telling Darryl I had disappeared to who knew where.

  Ah, if they only knew I was now a god. One friend once said that carved on my tombstone would be the words, “She was always late.” Quite true. I didn't do it intentionally, but I did tend to be late. But imagine adding the words, “Nonetheless, she was a god.”

  From her bed roll Nance said, “They see the future poorly, those magicians. If you can truly tell the future, this will give you much power. I think even Kovat the Slayer will accept you if you do that.”

  And if a ruler called Slayer decided not to accept me, what then?

  CHAPTER 5

  In the morning we rode into the foothills to a grassy plateau. After Nance tied the horses near a clump of trees at a stream's edge, she led me to a cave-like shelter above the bank. Beyond the trees leaning out to shade the stream the land sloped upward, and in some distant past the stream must have been a river. Nance pushed aside a cover of broken tree limbs, and pulled out a long, peculiar bundle.

  Picking up one end, she said, “Catch the other end. Help me carry it.”

  The bundle was lighter than it looked. It was longer than I was tall by several times, and as large around as my arms could reach. After we hauled it from the cave and set it down on the grasslands, Nance knelt beside it to undo the fastenings. Her fingers plucked at the cords that bound the blanket wrapping. When she peeled away the dark outer layer, a mound of pale cloth shimmered in the sunlight. There was enough cloth to cover a tent but of a weight that rippled in the light breeze.

  Nance drew out a number of long thin poles that formed the core of the bundle and tied them together. They made an odd shaped frame, triangular, with one side much longer than the other two. As she worked, she chattered orders at me to “hold down that corner, there,” and “look out” and “grab that” and “hand me those.”

  “What is it?”

  “Cannot you see, daughter of a god? When Tarvik told me you flew over a mountain, I thought perhaps you knew my secret.”

  I knelt beside her and stared first at her, then at the frame. “What are you saying?”

  “Can you fly or can't you?”

  “Do I look like a bird?”

  “I can,” she said smugly.

  “You can what?”

  She waved her hands toward the billowing cloud of cloth and raised her chin. Pride glowed in her eyes. She said, “All those years in the temple, my life no freer than a slave's, I would have died of boredom if I kept my thoughts inside the walls. I stayed in that narrow courtyard and watched the only free things I could see, the birds, and envied them. Then one day I dropped a scarf and watched it blow about the yard in a gust of wind. And then I knew that I, too, could be free if I could learn to ride the wind.”

  “Only sea birds ride the wind.” And balloons and kites, but
I wasn’t about to try to explain those things.

  “Sea birds and Nance. Come along.”

  We carried the cloth up an incline above the plateau. Nance shouted directions all the way, warning me to “hold that corner, don't let it catch the wind, keep down, take care,” until I was running out of patience.

  When she finally told me to stop and set it down carefully, I demanded, “What is this thing?”

  Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “My wings, of course.”

  “Wings?”

  “Yes, let me show you.”

  That suited me very well. It was a vast relief that she intended to show me with her own body and didn't grab my wrist and insist that now that I had learned to ride a horse, if poorly, I could also learn to fly.

  Her wings were a canopy of cloth held by a frame of long poles, pretty in its shimmering brightness as the breeze lifted and swayed it, reminding me of ships' sails. Or maybe parachutes.

  Nance positioned her wings with the point of the triangle aimed forward, above and in front of her, then wound her arms through a looped arrangement of straps hung beneath the wings. She stood for a long time turning from one side to another, feeling the wind fill and billow the cloth until it lifted one side into the air, listening to the slight flapping of its edges. She slipped her arms through the straps, her hands grasping a rod that crossed above her, and tilted herself and her wings toward the wind.

  I settled back on the hillside to watch, not really believing the thing would work. Nance pulled the front nose of her wing construction down slightly into the wind and ran as fast as she was able down the hill. To my everlasting awe, Nance and her wings rose slowly skyward and floated lazily out above the plateau.

  Yikes! The girl had built herself a hang glider.

  And she had figured out how to fly it. This child-sized girl could fly, her body angled back now so that one of the straps pulled into a tight position like a belt across her body and helped support her. Her flight was similar to sea gulls, circling slowly on a breeze above a sea of grassland.

  And what could I do with a hang glider? Didn't want to consider it because I tend to break out in a sweat if I have to climb a ladder. But Nance said flight made her free. If she taught me to use her glider, could it carry me out of this place?

  Nance circled slowly downward, the glider shining in the sunlight like a giant flower petal floating on a breeze, until she reached the earth. She crumpled to the grass and the glider collapsed above her. By the time I reached her, running, she had untangled herself from the cloth and stood by the contraption, grinning.

  “Now do you believe?” she cried.

  “I believe! I believe! Teach me to fly, Nance!”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I thought you would be afraid.”

  “Of course I am afraid. But I want to learn.”

  “You must understand how the wings work before you can control them. I began with a scarf, first limp, and then tied to a length of thread. That failed and I almost despaired, but what else was there to do all day? I added sticks to hold the cloth rigid in a frame, then cross-sticks to keep it from collapsing.”

  “Brilliant!”

  “I am the first! I made my small wings fly by tying them to a long string and pulling them rapidly across the courtyard, running until they caught the wind and rose.”

  Like a kite. “And no one saw you?”

  Nance laughed. “Once. And what a commotion followed! They could not see the string, only the wings, blue ones they were, and I had to think quickly of a tale of sending an offering of a blue bird to the Daughter. After that, I worked on my wings only when I was away from the temple, camping here alone. I found I could lift a small bundle of twigs suspended beneath the wings and that is when I began to think of lifting myself.”

  “So you needed only to make the, uh, wings larger?”

  “Making wings that fly when towed on a thread is quite different from making wings that fly when aimed at wind currents by my running body. It took me two years to go from one point to the next. But what else have I to do with my time? Come along, you may as well try.”

  Nance dragged the wings up the hill, walked around them and showed me how to check for any damage. She taught me to position them, grasp the bar properly, throw my weight to control their soar, and oh, a thousand other rules, all confusing and terrifying. Gliding was way down on the bottom of my to-do list, probably not there at all until now, but it might be a way out. At last she let me go and I ran down the hill. I felt the wind catch the contraption, lift a side, drop the other side. I hung on, not sure what to do, and then the whole contraption flipped and tossed me backwards, hard, onto the ground.

  Nance picked me up, brushed me off, ignored my cries of protest, and dragged me and the glider up the hill to try again. I had indeed found a way to end my days in these lands. I would be battered to death on a hillside. Nance laughed at me and continued to pick me up and send me running down the slope. Finally, I floated above the grasslands. My flight lasted only a few moments. Torn between fear and delight I was suspended in the sky.

  If for a few breaths I fancied myself a bird, the crash to earth ended that.

  “Landing is the hardest part,” Nance agreed as she untangled me and helped me to stand.

  She brushed me off, fussed over my cut knees, chattered bits of sympathy, but it was clear her real concern was for the contraption. When she was satisfied that my body was only bruised, not broken, she turned to her wings and carefully inspected every handspan of material.

  “Once I tried to fly with a small tear and the wind ripped it wide open. Now I check and mend everything each time I fly.”

  The cloth was cloud-light, impossibly fragile, felt like silk. “Where did this come from? Is it used for clothing?”

  “No, it is altar cloth brought back by Kovat himself from his wars with the tribes beyond the lands of Thunder. He gives it as a gift to the Daughter of the Sun.”

  “Feels like silk. Silk, right. The Air Force used to make parachutes of silk. Does Kovat know you use it to make your wings?”

  Horror widened her eyes. “You must never tell him, Stargazer, or I swear, I will see you dead.”

  “Girlfriend, stop threatening me. Why should I want to harm you?”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears and her small chin quivered. “I - I am sorry, it is only - if my uncle knew -”

  “Doesn't anyone notice so many altar cloths are missing?”

  As quickly as the tears had come, they were gone and she was laughing. “I tell them that once the cloths are used on the altar, they become sacred. Sacred cloth cannot be washed. Therefore, when they become soiled from the candle drippings, they must be burned. They think I do the burning in the altar fire. And as often as I ask, Kovat provides me with new cloth.”

  “And he never suspects? Huh.”

  I tried a couple more runs, got a few feet off the ground, and maybe could have jumped that far, but Nance was a good kid. She did her best to build my ego after I collapsed in a heap beneath the billowing cloth.

  “Much better,” she cried, as she uncovered me. “We must roll them up now. See where the sun falls? We will camp tonight and fly again in the morning. But tomorrow, when the sun is halfway down, we must start back. We need to return to the city after darkness.”

  We made camp in the woods by the stream. Although we had cooked our noon meal, we ate our evening meal cold. Nance feared wandering hunters might see the light of our fire at night.

  “The shepherds do not come onto this plateau,” she explained. “They are afraid that the monsters and the lifedrainers will come down from the mountains. Still, hunters are less careful. They might follow game here.”

  “What monsters? What are lifedrainers?”

  The only monster I knew was Darryl.

  Lifedrainers, Nance said, were great hairy monsters with huge black wings, and they stole people and sucked the life out of them. In between appearances, they made themselves invisible. Worse yet, sh
e assured me, they carried with them the seeds of fever that wiped out whole cities.

  “You have as much power as the ruler, if you can make shepherds and hunters believe those tales.”

  She shuddered. “They aren't my tales. I came to the plateau before I heard of them. I have seen no monsters, so I hope the tales are wrong, that there are none near here.”

  “Ah. I hope so, too. Nance, how high can the wings fly?”

  “High? Above the plain.”

  “But you can make them go up, like birds?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “High enough to fly over the mountain, Stargazer? No. They only sail on air currents. They will not lift you that much.”

  Guess I already knew that gliders could swoop out and down, but they didn't have engines, they weren't planes, and even if I had one with an engine, I had no idea where I was. What I needed more than height was direction. Bread crumb trails. Great big signs with arrows saying, “This way out.”

  “I would help you if I could.” She wrung her hands and tears trembled on her lashes. “I know how sad you must be, so far from your home. Does anyone search for you, do you think?”

  Well, yes, back in Seattle a troll would be wondering why I hadn't returned home. But search? Uh. He only left his basement to go to work. He'd see the lights on in my place and turn them off and he'd do it because he kept an eye on the place. What can I say, I am careless about forgetting to turn off water and lights, and I never remember to close windows. If it weren't for the troll, who cares a lot more about my house than he does about me, I'd have wet floors after every rain. Also, when I didn't return, he would fill my cat's dish.

  Don't think he actually cares about the cat, but he accepts it as part of the household, like a leaking faucet, and tends to it.

  The bank manager would now have a really good reason to guarantee me unemployment. The head of the Neighborhood Center would worry and ask around. And then she would decide I’d gone off on a trip and forgot to tell her. Hate to put it this way but truth is, my mother and her sisters have all skipped town more than once, usually to avoid a boyfriend or a bill collector.