Within the Sanctuary of Wings

by Marie Brennan

  Instead I waited. For while I may not be a patient woman, I am quite good at pigheaded determination. I had agreed to three days. And so we passed the time, myself, Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam, waiting for the world to change.

  * * *

  “Are you ready?” Ruzt inquired.

  “That may be the most absurd question anyone has ever asked me,” I said. In Akhian, which meant she understood very little of it; but my tone was clear enough.

  I was dressed in clothing we had made during the winter—for you must not imagine my mountaineering garb would have survived a whole season’s wear without suffering quite a bit, and I would need it when I left the Sanctuary. We had debated the merits of dressing me in my own clothing for this occasion, but ultimately Kahhe’s argument had prevailed, that I would be less intimidating if clad in the familiar furs and yak wool of their own people. My body was sweltering inside the layers, for it was warm inside the house, but my hands and feet were cold with apprehension.

  Zam had brought the word just a little while before: the council of elders was in Imsali. Ruzt had gone to speak with the temple caretakers more than a week ago, begging the council’s presence today; the message was given to them when they woke, and it seemed they had complied. Nine elderly female Draconeans waited for me outside, all without knowing what they waited for.

  Nine elderly female Draconeans—and the entire population of Imsali, who must be wondering what the sisters were up to.

  I forced my thoughts into the Draconean tongue. “Waiting will not make me more ready.”

  Ruzt nodded. I found myself noting her posture and body language, filing it away under “nervousness, Draconean, signs of.” Such things are soothing to me, at moments like that.

  Ruzt opened the door and led me outside.

  Sunlight and cold air came in from the exterior door. Through the gap I could see a crowd of Draconeans, tall and small, waiting. One of them—a juvenile, judging by size—spotted me as I passed through the darkness of the antechamber, and tapped at an adult’s thigh in an unmistakable gesture. Though I could not hear the words through the roaring in my ears, I knew what they must be: “Mama, what’s that?” Or at least the Draconean equivalent.

  I stepped into view, and the world went silent.

  My imagination supplied a thousand Draconeans. In truth, there were less than a hundred. But when every last eye is upon you, the number seems far greater; and then, like a blow, I heard someone hiss a recognizable Draconean word: “Human.”

  Silence broke, and pandemonium reigned.

  * * *

  The sisters bracketed me in a triangle. They had anticipated the rush of bodies that would occur, as the more energetic and warlike of their kin leapt to defend the council from my small, winter-starved self. Zam, who had once seized me and thrown me across the temple, bodily checked another Draconean who seemed bent on doing the same. Ruzt was shouting, her wings furled and her hands raised high. Kahhe stood ready to hurl me back through the doorway if necessary, where they could more easily guard me against attack.

  But it was not necessary. One of the elders snapped her wings open, then another; the rest followed suit in short order. As if that were a gavel pounded upon a judge’s bench, the crowd fell into a muttering hush, and then quiet. A crisp order from one of the elders sent the various Draconeans back to their places, restoring the empty space that had surrounded my entrance.

  I judged this the right time to speak. I had no wings to wrap around my body, but I performed the human approximation, laying both my hands atop my breast in the Draconean gesture of respect. Raising my voice, I spoke the words I had painstakingly rehearsed with the sisters. Only a faint tremor marred them.

  “May the sun bless you and keep you warm. My name is Isabella, and I mean you no harm. I owe my life to these three sisters, who rescued me from certain death in the mountains. If it meets with the approval of you nine, the revered elders of the Sanctuary, I would like to repay their generosity and kindness by assisting your people in any way I can.”

  My listeners could not have been more astonished had one of their yaks reared up on its hind legs and begun speaking. The only sounds were the constant rush of the wind and the dripping of icicles melting off the eaves. Then one of the elders said, stammering, “H-how does she know our language?”

  I was in trickier waters now. My first speech was rehearsed to be fluid and well pronounced, but from here on out I must rely on my ability to comprehend and speak at speed. Since I was still more conversant with the older, religious form of the language than the one spoken in daily life, the potential for error was quite large. But just as my growing skill had caused me to see the sisters as people rather than creatures, so must I use conversation to prove to these elders that I, too, was a person.

  My reply came more slowly than my initial greeting. “I have been studying all winter to learn it. There is a human language that is a little bit the same. My knowledge of that language helps.”

  “You taught that thing?” one of the elders snapped at the sisters.

  “If I had not learned,” I said before Ruzt could reply, “I would not be able to thank you now.” It came out more heavily accented than I would have liked, and more than a little tinged with Akhian elements. I still defaulted to these when my attention slipped. But I made myself understood, and that was enough.

  One of the elders strode forward. Ruzt let her pass, so I stood my ground. This, too, we had expected and prepared for: the elder took me by the chin and tilted my head upward, so she could study my face more closely. To maintain direct eye contact would have been a challenge; to drop my gaze entirely would have made me look weak and vulnerable. Instead I fixed my gaze upon her muzzle, making no attempt to resist.

  She turned my head this way and that, pulling off my hat to finger my hair, which must have been very strange to her. I was abruptly conscious of its ragged, matted state, and the smell it must have carried. (I had washed it a handful of times during the winter, but under the circumstances, a wet head was less than wise.) When she attempted to peel back my lips, however, I pulled away. “If you want to see my teeth,” I said, politely but firmly, “then ask.”

  I could see that my response amused her. This, however, did not prevent her from turning a gimlet eye on Ruzt and the other two. “You know you have broken a law.”

  All three sisters brought their wings forward, around their bodies. Ruzt said, “We know. We would not do so without good reason.”

  “And what is your reason?” This came from one of the other elders, the one I suspected to be the oldest of them all. Draconeans show few signs of aging compared with the grey hair and wrinkled skin of humans, but her eyes were sunken and her bone structure more pronounced, and her movements were slow and cautious.

  My command of the language did not suffice to let me follow Ruzt’s reply in its entirety, but its content was familiar to me. These Draconeans knew themselves to be confined to the Sanctuary, with no place more remote and protected to which they might flee; now she told them they were likely the last of their kind. Contact with humans, she warned them, was inevitable. They could wait for it to happen on our terms—by which I mean those of my species—or take the first steps themselves, in a fashion they might hope to control. And the first step was to acquire a single human, to see whether she could be reasoned with.

  “But why did you hide her?” another elder asked. The one who had examined me was among her peers once more, watching this all with a thoughtful eye. “Why not inform us at once?”

  “We thought she was going to die,” Zam said. The bluntness of it shook me, even though the danger was by then long past—the danger of dying from my ordeal in the mountains, at least. My current peril was still an open question. Ruzt had promised to do her best to help me escape if the situation turned against me, but her best was likely to amount to a temporary stay of execution at most.

  Kahhe intervened before anyone could think too much about the merits of following
through on the notion of my death. “Also, it was almost time for hibernation. We could not ask the revered elders to stay awake, and so nothing could happen before spring at the earliest anyway. We thought we could use the winter as a test—to see whether we could learn to speak with her, and how she would react to us.”

  I thought of my screams and weeping. My first impression could not have been a good one. But no one here needed to hear of that, and so I offered up, “I helped with the yaks.”

  The elder who had examined me laughed at that. Her reaction pleased me, for laughter is a great reducer of tension. A number of Draconeans glared at her, elders and villagers alike, but I had one person here besides the sisters who did not view me as an imminent threat.

  I would need to convince a great many more, though, before we could make anything like progress. “If you please,” I said, “I would like to tell you about the places outside the Sanctuary. Whatever you decide to do, there are things you should know. But it will take me a long time to tell you, because my speech is not as good as I would like.” With a nod toward Ruzt, I said, “This honoured sister’s help would make it easier.”

  That last was my own addition, and it made Ruzt start with surprise. She was not the only one conversant with the religious form of the language; most of the elders spoke it quite well. With that as a bridge, I could manage with them almost as well as I did with her. But she was the one who had started this all, persuading Kahhe and Zam to take the risk of contacting the human world. If it ended in disaster, she was already condemned, and I could do nothing to save her. I wanted to make certain, though, that if it ended in success, she received the credit she deserved. And for that to happen, she must remain a part of what followed.

  As it turned out, however, my comment was based on a foolish optimism. The eldest Draconean said, “All three of them will be coming with us. They must face—”

  Her last word was one I did not know, but I could fill in its meaning for myself: judgment.

  * * *

  I do not know whether it failed to occur to the council of elders that they should take steps to ensure word of my presence in the Sanctuary did not spread, or whether they gave it up as a lost cause from the start. If it was the former, they were foolish; if the latter, quite pragmatically wise.

  To say that the entire Sanctuary knew before the day was out would be an exaggeration, but not much of one. I had not realized that mews, in addition to acting as aerial yak-dogs, could also be trained in the manner of carrier pigeons; they are not used for this during the winter, on account of the cold and the limited need for communication. But now the weather had warmed, and news of a human in Imsali quite literally flew from one settlement to another. In my ignorance of Draconean ways, I had argued for Ruzt’s continued presence without realizing the whole sister-group would be called to accompany us; but all three proved necessary, for my journey from Imsali to the place of the elders was anything but quiet.

  The mountain basin was quite transformed from its appearance earlier that winter, when we chased the yaks of Imsali hither and yon and I trespassed in the temple. Although snow still lay deep in many places, particularly on northern slopes or where trees provided shade, the thaw had begun; the sound of snowmelt streams was as constant as the wind. Six months previously I would never have dreamt of calling the temperature balmy, but after what I had endured, I almost felt I could survive with only three layers on.

  By far the greatest transformation, however, was one of movement. All winter long the Sanctuary had lain quiet, with only the occasional yak herd or accompanying caretaker with mews to disturb its stillness. Now there were Draconeans everywhere: chivvying their livestock along, travelling between villages, assessing the state of their fields and fences, chopping wood to make repairs. Their total numbers were not so large; even the most densely settled parts of the Sanctuary, west of Anshakkar, were still almost uninhabited compared to the Scirling countryside, which is much flatter and more arable. But after months of near-total solitude, I felt as if I were on the busiest street in Falchester—and all the more so because it seemed like every Draconean within five kilometers of our path diverted to see me with their own eyes.

  Our party was not one that could pass in stealth. The nine elders made quite a crowd on their own; and of course they could not be expected to travel in rough fashion, given their advanced age and great status. Compared with an Anthiopean potentate, their entourages were not worth the name; but each had at least one attendant, in many cases two, whose duty was to ease their way. To this we added myself, Ruzt, Kahhe, Zam, and a sister-group of four from Imsali who had volunteered to come as supplemental guards. The dominant one among them, a tall Draconean named Esdarr, made no secret of the fact that they did not trust me in the slightest: along the way I learned that they were the ones who ought to have had winter duty that year, and their relief at being spared the task had soured greatly when they discovered the reason.

  Altogether it made for a cavalcade of thirty—a draconicade, one might more accurately call it, except that is not a proper word. (The Draconeans made no use of ponies, and for good reason. The poor equines come near to dying of fright at the sight or scent of a Draconean.) I travelled in the center of it, insulated from the gawping locals by the ring of the elders and their attendants, and insulated from the elders by the Draconeans of Imsali.

  None of this arrangement did any good when we passed through a narrow defile scarcely ten meters wide.

  I had, on that journey, attempted to rein in my natural curiosity, lest it look like spying. Although I longed to see as much as I could of the Sanctuary—male Draconeans most particularly, as I had been too distracted during the revelation in Imsali to look for them—I kept my eyes fixed on the path ahead of me, gazing no farther than the limits of our group. But when a scrabbling sound came from overhead, I could not stop myself from looking up. I have too often been in wilderness where that sound might herald a predator or a dangerous rockfall to let it pass without suspicion.

  Even as I looked up, wings blotted out the sun.

  They descended upon us with bone-chilling battle cries, leaping from concealment down into our midst. I ducked—the instinctive reaction of a creature faced with an airborne threat—and claws swiped above, close enough to tear my hat from my head. For an instant I was nineteen again and on my way to Drustanev, having my first encounter with a wild dragon.

  Then the present day reasserted itself. My attacker was no rock-wyrm; it was a Draconean, one of several who had launched themselves into our midst. The other sister-group from Imsali had come to protect people against me, and so they were slow to react to this new threat. But Ruzt, Kahhe, and Zam did not hesitate: they instantly formed up around me, correctly guessing that I was the target of this assault.

  I could do no more than crouch in their midst, trying to watch in every direction at once lest an enemy slip through. The attackers wielded curved knives whose blades flashed viciously in the sun. Beyond the mêlée I could hear the elders calling for a halt, but no one was paying them any heed. A scream cut through the snarls: someone fell, and in the chaos I could not see whether it was a friend or a foe. Then the flow shifted, surging away from me, and a Draconean leapt into the air, rowing hard with her wings in an attempt to gain enough altitude to escape our crowd. But someone else leapt after—Zam—and dragged the fleeing one down to earth once more.

  The final tally was three dead out of eight; two sister-groups had banded together for the ambush. Five of ours were wounded to one degree or another, including both Ruzt and Zam. But none on our side had perished, and the sheer relief of that turned my knees to water. I knew very well that if someone had died defending me, the loss would have poisoned minds against my cause, perhaps beyond repair. As it was, the death of three attackers was bad enough, for it was my presence that had provoked them to this extreme.

  One of the elders confronted me after order had been restored. Her name was Tarshi, I thought; I was working ha
rd to familiarize myself with them all. Without preamble, she said, “You did not fight.”

  “I do not know how,” I said. It was more or less true: my brother Andrew had made good on his offer to teach me a few things I might use to defend myself, but they would have been of limited use against Draconeans, who had a tremendous advantage in both height and mass, and claws and knives besides. Honesty prompted me to add, “And if I fought, what would you think of me then?”

  She made no reply to that, simply turning away and rejoining her peers. It was not my most glorious moment; but at that particular moment, glory would have served me ill. The dreadful human, heir to a legacy of murder and rebellion, cowered in the face of Draconean fury. Under the circumstances, it amounted to a diplomatic master stroke—albeit a wholly inadvertent one.

  SIXTEEN

  The place of the elders—A male Draconean—Conversations with the elders—A decision at last

  The ambush shook everyone in the party, I think, for we travelled with a great deal more care after that. The elders were not accustomed to thinking of themselves as the targets of a threat—and they had not been even in this instance, as the attack was directed primarily at me and secondarily toward the three sisters who had brought me there. But their society is agrarian and scattered enough that they rarely if ever face the kinds of conflicts that are familiar to the rulers of more populous and concentrated states, and the realization that my presence might spark an actual rebellion was an unpleasant surprise.

  For my own part, I did not like the feeling that every step I took shook the ground, that simply by existing within the Sanctuary I was spreading fear and discord. But how much worse, I reasoned, would it have been had this first contact happened under different circumstances? Everything that made me vulnerable—my lack of companions, my lack of martial capability—also made me less of a threat. In a sense, I traded my safety for theirs … albeit not by my own choice. This was the decision of Ruzt and Kahhe and Zam, who leapt on the opportunity presented by a lone human, bereft of support.