Taking Flight

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

"All right," he told Asha, "now we go around the block and run for the gate, as fast as we can. Irith has the head."

  "You're sure?" Asha looked up at him doubtfully.

  "Just go," Kelder said, giving her a shove.

  He was destined to be Asha's champion, but that didn't mean he had to like her, and just now, tired and frightened as he was, he did not think much of her at all.

  Chapter 17

  To Kelder the double moonlight on the desert sand looked somehow unnatural. It was brighter than moonlight had any right to be, even when both moons were full and at zenith—and in fact, that wasn't the case. The moons were both past zenith, the lesser descending quickly toward the western horizon, the greater still high overhead, and neither was full—the lesser was close, but the greater was only about three-quarters. The familiar rosy glow of the moons combined with the gold of the sands to make an odd, burnt-orange color that Kelder didn't like at all. "Are you sure we shouldn't wait for sunrise?" he asked.

  "Come on," Irith said. "Let's get out of here!"

  Asha said nothing, but she obviously agreed with Irith; she was tugging at Kelder's sleeve. Reluctantly he came.

  "I can see why you're in a hurry, Asha," he said. "You want to set your brother's soul free. But I don't know why you're rushing so much, Irith."

  She glanced back over her shoulder; the city wall gleamed ruddily in the moonlight, and the open gates were a tangle of torchlight and shadow. She thought she saw something mov­ing, and wasn't sure if it was just a flickering shadow or re­ally someone there.

  "Let's just say I don't much care for Shan on the Desert anymore," the Flyer replied.

  "Is it because that inn was gone?" Asha asked.

  "No," Irith answered.

  "It's that old drunk, isn't it?" Kelder said, "or at least that's part of it. But I don't see why he has you so upset."

  "It's not him, either," Irith said with another glance behind.

  Kelder looked at her, then turned his gaze to his feet and trudged onward through the cool orange sands.

  She was lying, he was sure. It was the drunk.

  They had gone no more than a league when the lesser moon set; the greater moon was working its way toward the horizon, as well. Color faded from their surroundings, and Kelder began to worry.

  "Are we still on the highway?" he asked.

  For several seconds, no one answered. Then Irith said, "I don't know. I can't see that well."

  They stumbled on for a moment longer, and then Kelder re­marked, "Well, if we're not, at least the caravaners won't find us."

  "Those demons could," Irith replied.

  Asha started crying quietly.

  "You would have to say that," Kelder muttered, not really meaning Irith to hear.

  "Oh, shut up," Irith said.

  "We're going to wander around in circles until we die!" Asha wailed.

  "No, we aren't," Irith snapped.

  Kelder took it upon himself to expand on this. "We're all right, Asha," he said, "really. We know we're going south be­cause the greater moon is on our right, see? And look, off to the left." He pointed. "There's light on the horizon, that's the sun coming because it's almost dawn, so that's east. So even if we lose the highway, we'll reach that big cliff eventually, and then we can find the road again."

  "Oh," Asha said, struggling to stifle her tears. A moment later, when they were under control, she whined, "I'm tired."

  "We all are," Kelder said.

  "Then why don't we rest?"

  Kelder halted in his tracks with the intention of making some biting retort, and then stopped. "You're right," he said, "why don't we? They probably aren't going to come after us. Even if they realize we've left the city, why should they go to all that trouble? They have plenty of heads. So what's the hurry?" He sat down on the cool sand. "I'm tired, too, and I'm going to sit here and rest until the sun comes up and we can see what we're doing."

  Asha smiled and plopped down beside him.

  Irith had proceeded a dozen paces farther, but now she stopped, as well, and turned back to look at the others. "Here?" she said. "Out in the middle of the desert?"

  "Why not?" Kelder asked. "What's going to bother us?"

  Irith looked back at Shan, still visible as a dark, uneven line on the horizon and a faint glow in the sky.

  "Besides," Kelder said, "if anything comes after us, we'll see it in plenty of time. You can grow wings and fly away."

  "It'll still get us," Asha said, momentarily concerned.

  "It would," Kelder agreed, "if anything was going to come after us, but nothing is. And besides, if Irith got away, she'd find some way to save us, I'm sure."

  Irith looked at Kelder doubtfully, suspecting—with reason—that he was being sarcastic.

  "All right," she said. "We can rest here for a little while, I guess." She folded her legs and sank to the ground.

  None of them really intended to sleep; the idea was merely to rest for a few minutes.

  On the other hand, none of them had had much more than four hours' sleep in the past twenty-four, and they had walked a very great distance in that time, as well as going through the various excitements in Shan. Kelder had punched an old man, Irith had pried a severed head off the point of a spear, and Asha had participated in the rescue, as she saw it, of her brother's soul.

  Within five minutes, long before the sun rose or the greater moon set, they were all sound asleep.

  Even as he lay sleeping, something nagged at Kelder. He knew he shouldn't be asleep, and that knowledge troubled his dreams.

  Still, exhaustion had a firm grip on him, and he slept on.

  The sun rose, and its warmth on his face, its light on his eyelids discomfited him; he struggled to wake up.

  Something threw a shadow over him briefly, and the sands shifted slightly—the sound of footsteps reached Kelder, even asleep. He stirred slightly and tried to pry his eyes open, tried to make his arms and legs move.

  A low voice spoke, something brushed—and Irith shrieked.

  Kelder was awake at last, scrambling to his feet.

  Irith screamed, long and piercing; she was sitting up, hands out to fend off, and as Kelder's eyes focused her wings ap­peared and spread. She kicked off, flapping, and skittered across the sand for a moment, heels dragging, before she managed to get herself airborne.

  As she did, a dark, ragged shape that Kelder could not im­mediately identify threw itself at her, trying to grab her, hold her down, bring her back—but unsuccessfully. She slipped away and soared upward. Kelder and Asha watched her go.

  She didn't hesitate, didn't slow, didn't look back; she flapped strongly and steadily as she drove southward toward the horizon.

  The ragged creature wailed and wept, calling after her; most of the words, if they were words, were unintelligible, but the name Irith was repeated frequently. It staggered along for a few paces, then collapsed, sobbing, into a miserable, huddled heap. Then it lifted its head. With a shock, Kelder re­alized that the creature was the old drunk who had accosted Irith back in Shan.

  "Irith," the old man called, "come back! I won't hurt you, I swear it, I just want to talk! Please!"

  The distant speck that was Irith the Flyer continued to dwindle.

  "Now what do we do?" Asha asked.

  Kelder looked about. His pack was still lying where he had left it; the bundle containing Abden's head was there, as well. He looked up. It didn't look as if Irith were coming back right away.

  He considered. He knew that he would find her again— Zindré's prediction was that he would marry her and bring her home to Shulara with him, so he knew he would find her again.

  He didn't know when, where, or how, though.

  That would have to take care of itself; there were more im­mediate concerns. "We can go on and build the pyre our­selves," Kelder said. "But first, I want to know just what in the World is going on here!" He stepped forward and grabbed the old man by the shoulder.

  The filthy cloth of hi
s tunic felt greasy and unpleasant under Kelder's hand, but Kelder ignored that. The old man started slightly at the youth's touch, but didn't resist; he didn't even turn to look, but instead kept staring after Irith.

  "Old man," Kelder said, "who are you?"

  The drunk simply stared at the departing Flyer.

  "Talk to me, damn it!" Kelder shouted. "Who are you? Why is she scared of you?"

  That penetrated.

  "Scared of me?" The old man turned and looked up at Kelder, astonishment plain on his face. "Why would she be scared of me?"

  "That's what I want to know!" Kelder snapped. "Who are you?"

  The man blinked, as if considering a new and surprising idea.

  "What's your name?" Asha asked, stepping up beside Kelder.

  "Ezdral," he replied. "My name is Ezdral."

  "Just Ezdral?" Kelder asked.

  The old man shrugged. "Mostly," he said. "Back in Shan they call me Ezdral the Sot, mostly." He blinked. "That'll do. I'm not drunk right now, haven't touched a drop since I saw Irith in the arcade last night, but I've been pretty sodden for a long time, there's no sense in denying it."

  "All right, Ezdral," Kelder said, withdrawing his hand and resisting the temptation to wipe it on his own tunic. "How do you know Irith?"

  The old man looked down, coughed, spat something out, and wiped his mouth on a grubby sleeve. He turned, squatted, then sat down, crossing his legs slowly and carefully.

  Kelder waited.

  Ezdral looked up at him and then gestured at the ground.

  Asha took the hint and dropped down, sitting facing Ezdral. Kelder took a moment longer, but joined them.

  "When I was eighteen," Ezdral began, "I met . . ."

  "When was that?" Asha interrupted.

  Ezdral frowned. "What year is it now?"

  "It's 5222," Kelder told him.

  "Then I'm . . . let me see . . . sixty-two, is it? Born on the first of Thaw, 5159 . . ."

  "Sixty-three . . . no, sixty-two," Kelder agreed.

  "So it would have been forty-four years ago." Ezdral looked at them for agreement.

  Asha nodded. Kelder said, "Go on."

  Ezdral took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  "When I was eighteen," he said again, "I met a girl, a beautiful girl with golden hair, like I'd never seen before. I was working in a stable in Mezgalon, and she was passing through, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. We got to talking, and she said her name was Irith the Flyer, and when I asked how she got a name like that she showed me how she could grow wings and fly."

  Kelder and Asha looked at one another.

  "Forty-four years ago?" Kelder asked.

  Ezdral nodded.

  'It can't be the same one," Kelder said. "She's only fifteen. She said so."

  Ezdral shook his head wearily and peered at Kelder from beneath heavy lids. "She was fifteen then, too," he said.

  Kelder's lips tightened. "Go on with your story," he said.

  "We talked, and I fell in love with her," Ezdral said. "I mean, wildly and madly in love. She was so beautiful, so sweet. And we left Mezgalon together, and we traveled the Small Kingdoms from Shan to Lamum, Fileia to Lurethon." He smiled. "Oh, we had some good times, we did. Filched a jeweler's best stones once in Hlimora just so Irith could play with them. Danced naked in the Forest of Amramion. Got roaring drunk with the crown prince of Tuyoa, and Irith chal­lenged his court wizard to a duel of magic and almost got her­self killed. She could do other magic, not just shapeshifting, you know—had maybe half a dozen spells. Wasn't any match for a real wizard, though." He sighed.

  The recitation paused for a moment, but Kelder and Asha waited without protest this time.

  "We were together a little over a year, I think," Ezdral said, resuming his tale. "I was nineteen, maybe twenty, by then. I started to think about maybe settling down somewhere, maybe having children someday. And one day I woke up and Irith wasn't there. We'd been at her favorite inn in Shan on the Desert, a place called the Crystal Skull, and I still was, but she wasn't."

  Kelder glanced down at Asha; she was sitting rapt, taking this all in. "Why did she leave?" the child asked.

  Ezdral turned up an empty palm. "Who knows?" he said. "Maybe she just got bored with me."

  "So what did you do?"

  "Well, I waited, at first—I waited a month, to see if she would come back. When she didn't, I went out looking for her, going up and down the Great Highway and around to all the places we'd gone together, but I didn't find her. I'd hear about her now and then—how she had flown over Castle Angarossa shouting insults, or been seen playing with the Queen of Ophera's cats—but I never caught up to her, never saw her myself. And after a time I sort of drifted back to Shan, doing odd jobs or begging, and I stayed there and waited for her."

  "Why didn't you just forget about her?" Kelder asked. "Find yourself another girl?"

  "Because I couldn't, damn it!" Ezdral shouted, in the first display of temper Kelder had seen from him. "I couldn't. Don't you think I tried! But I couldn't go to sleep at night without thinking about her, couldn't look at another woman without thinking that Irith was prettier . . . I was in love with her, so damnably in love—and I still am, damn it all to the Nether Void!" He pounded a fist on the sand and then went on more calmly, "I started drinking to try to forget her, I just drank all the time, whenever I could get money, and it was even starting to work, a little, after twenty years or so—and then last night I looked up and there she was, I saw her walk­ing past me, as big as life, looking just as she always had. And at first I thought I was dreaming, or that the wine was giving me visions, though I hadn't drunk that much, and then I thought I was dead and had died and this was her ghost, and I could see her because I was a ghost, and then I finally re­alized it was real, she'd come back, and I called to her."

  He fell silent for a moment, and Kelder remembered the previous night's events, not with satisfaction but with a grow­ing dismay, like a weight in his belly.

  "I called to her," Ezdral repeated, "and she said she didn't know me, she ran away screaming, and then you hit me, and I fell down."

  "I'm sorry," Kelder whispered.

  "You didn't know," Ezdral said, waving it aside. "I knew, though. I knew she had been deliberately avoiding me all these years, that that was why she hadn't come back to Shan, and I knew she'd leave again now that she knew I was there, but I had to talk to her, I had to tell her that I loved her, so I went to the gate and waited, and I hoped she wouldn't just fly over the wall. And she didn't, but you were with her, and I didn't want a fight, so I followed, trying to think of what I could say, what I could do that would make her talk to me, make her stay with me." He let his breath out in a long, shud­dering sigh.

  Asha didn't know what to say. Kelder couldn't say any­thing at all, and Ezdral had finished. For a time they all sat silently on the sand, thinking their own thoughts.

  Chapter 18

  "Maybe it was her mother," Asha suggested. "Or her grandmother."

  Ezdral shook his head.

  "But Irith is only fifteen," Kelder pointed out. The thought that his intended bride was not just a Tintallionese runaway who had visited Shan as a child was deeply disturbing; the idea of his own Irith roaming the Small Kingdoms with an­other man, before Kelder had even been born, was intolerable, and he was groping for a way to deny it.

  "Oh, yes," Ezdral agreed, "she's always been fifteen."

  Kelder sat back and considered that, and considered Ezdral, as well.

  He looked every day of his claimed sixty-two years, and then some—his hair and beard were long, white, thinning, and uncombed; his face was rough and lined, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. His lips were a pale, unhealthy color, his skin yellowish. He wore a tunic that hung loose on his sunken chest; the garment had once been brown but was now blotched, stained, and faded, so that it was black here, gray there, and a washed-out tan elsewhere. His breeches were tanned leather, with large shiny patches
on the knees—and probably, Kelder guessed, on the backside as well. They ended in tatters just below the knee, and from there down, his legs and feet were bare.

  His hands were thin and bony and stayed curled and clawlike at all times, apparently involuntarily; the nails were cracked and blackened, the hairs on the back white and wire­like. When he lifted a hand to gesture, it shook. His wrists were bone and tendon and loose skin, with no fat at all, no muscle tone. He wore no ornaments of any kind, and his gar­ments had no trim or embroidery and were of the plainest possible cut—not only were they decrepit, they hadn't been much to start with. His belt was a twisted strip of rawhide, with a single pouch hung on it, a drawstring bag about the size of Asha's head.

  It was very hard to imagine him as a strong young man, adventuring with Irith.

  On the other hand, why would he have made up such a tale? And he spoke with an unquestionable sincerity.

  But it couldn't be the same Irith as the one Kelder meant to wed. "Her grandmother, it must have been," he said.

  Ezdral shook his head. "I don't think so. She's magic, re­member?"

  "She's only fifteen," Kelder repeated.

  Even as he said it, though, he was remembering all the puzzles and peculiarities about Irith—how she claimed to have done so much since leaving her apprenticeship, even though that couldn't be more than a year or two; how she re­membered an inn in Shan that had obviously been abandoned for years; all the other references to times and places and do­ings that she could scarcely have fit into fifteen years. The Tintallionese theory didn't explain it all; in fact, it hardly ex­plained any of it, really.

  If she was actually sixty or seventy years old, her youth and beauty magically preserved, that would explain it.

  But it wouldn't explain her, Kelder thought. It wouldn't explain the person that Irith was.

  Kelder liked to think of himself as grown up, not a kid any­more; compared to a few years ago, he was grown up. Real­istically, though, he knew he was hardly a mature adult. It wasn't a matter of size or strength, of gray hair or wrinkles— adults acted differently, presumably because they had learned better, had been changed by experience.