My throat clogs while I stand below the sweeping talons and hooked beaks. I press Mirko closer yet. The rapion race along the ground, then shoot high, only to skim down the sides of the curved walls again and again. More and more thrust their heads from the dark crevices and pour out. Some fly with legs lowered and talons outstretched. Others drop fast with tucked feet and folded wings before snapping them open and climbing upward again. I hunker, but there is no attack.
The whirling sand pings my face. Lifting my hair twists, an energy spins through the canyon. Clean hope swirls down inside me. Mirko, however, cowers and soils my poncho pouch.
“I am Signico Mirko’s bearer!” I shout.
The shell is gathered from the stone, piece by piece, by different rapion, until there’s nothing left. Mirko is accepted!
Slowly, the air empties. The birds fly back into the shafts, and the last gold-spotted female Signico beats her great black-tipped wings over the top of the tallest rock face while the tiniest male Miniata zips past my nose into a nearby fissure.
Sand dribbles from my clenched fists. Wobbly, I stand and beat the knees of my trousers clean.
Mirko is a stiff ball when I pull him from my pouch. His eyes blink fast, and he tries to scurry back into the pocket. “It’s all right.” I gulp to steady my voice. “We’re safe, Mirko, and you will be welcomed to your clan when you return!”
He stills and peeks about us. Using the material, I swipe him clean, pull the poncho off, and shake my hair twists free.
Mirko rubs his head against my stomach. I cup a hand to my mouth. “My thanks!” I shout against the rock, returning the power the rapion have poured into me. I kick the sand in celebration, and raise Mirko above my head.
With a shrill, joyful note, he ruffles, leaps, and takes his first flight. He flaps his weak wings hard to circle me. His bold whistle runs high, intricately turns back to a lower register, then rises higher than before.
I hold my breath until it’s obvious — no rapion are returning. They’ve accepted a Singer or have flown beyond hearing, I don’t know which, but my worry is gone. By his song, Mirko pulses his ecstasy through me instead.
“You are a brave Signico!” I proclaim. He chortles and heaves himself to my left shoulder, then grips the leather pad and clicks his beak as his breath rushes in and out. I stroke his back. “You are fantastic, Mirko.”
He trills agreement, and the walls stretch to the beautiful sound. The warm stone and purple shadows twirl his song to the sky. I turn from the cliffs. Proudly, we hike home.
CHAPTER 7
BESPELLED
Having graduated two months ago from Madronian male secondary school, following my five years in their elemental level, it’s a relief to no longer daily drill their catechism, study their oppressive military history, and pretend to believe and understand their complicated superstitions. I’m free of the endless chants and recitations. Now I wait in isolation with Mirko for the call to serve. I’m even excused from Weekly Worship since rapion are a distraction to the Madronian service.
Until we leave, the days are stuffed with household chores. At least with Mirko, his joy and discoveries make even the dullest routine pass quickly. Even now, with a prideful grin, he chortles and drags a crooked pine branch to my kindling stacked behind our round house. “Good work!” I say, and lay my armful of sticks on the pile. He ruffles and noses his wood closer.
A chilled gust whisks a windweed against my leg then carries it off. Mirko flies up into a willow bush. He watches the weed roll past our home and bump down the steep hill toward the village, bumbling along like an old woman with a mouthful of gossip.
I pause, taking in the view I won’t have soon. The town’s busy market square before the marble temple pointing to the sky. Beyond, stone houses dot the combed flat land ready to yield crops along the river Sineck. Farther out, farms with clustered pens squat in isolation.
I know behind the morning haze, three mesas roost about the great valley, circling R’tania along with the Chendon mountain range to our north. Our own mighty Eastern Mesa rises beyond my village, south of the Rapion Cliffs and Scree. Across the village and high desert is the Southern Mesa. I shade my eyes and see it, tucked under a ridge of dark clouds. The Western Mesa is completely hidden right now.
When school ended, Ratho and I rolled the Madronian knuckle bones and found we will work the East. The other boys’ rolls placed them in the two more distant mesas.
Soon, Ratho, with his twined, and Mirko and I will be patrolling this edge of our land against the Triumverate. We will join Perimeter Defense to raise alarm for cat, sand, or invasion in our portion of R’tania.
“Tiadone!” The call breaks my thoughts. It’s Ratho! My centerself hiccups.
“In back!” I answer. We haven’t seen each other in weeks because of the harvest. He hasn’t even met Mirko. I need my best friend’s approval.
Ratho runs past the curve of our house. His trousers are a little short and brush about his goat boots at the ankle. He’s grown again. Have I as well? When he spots me, a huge smile opens his face until a dimple sits deeply in his right cheek.
My hands raise in an informal greeting though I long to hug him as I would Father. “There’s no better friend,” I chant under my breath. “He will accept Mirko.”
A faithful follower of the Madronian beliefs, he gives me the formal salutation for reunion after long separation. His hand passes over his forehead, his chest — which seems broader all of the sudden — and his stomach. I return the greeting to escape his chide. My eyes linger on his lips, holding a secret.
“Tiadone, look!” he shouts and turns. Perched on his pack, his hatched Signico flaps open its wings. The nose plate is yellow. A female! Her brown tail feathers are extra long, and her feather tufts framing her thighs are thick. She hops to his shoulder as Ratho spins back around. He laughs. “Isn’t Thae perfect?”
“She’s beautiful, Ratho! And look at Mirko!”
“Mirko?”
“Yes!” My rapion bounds from the bush to my shoulder. He turns to the side and beats his wings. “Mirko!” I announce, flinging my arms wide.
Ratho’s admiration gleams as he reaches out and seizes my arm. “You are blessed as well, Tiadone! Mirko is a perfect companion to my Thae. Look at his deep color and fierce beak!”
I curl my hand over Ratho’s and draw in his warmth. My other hand brushes my amulet, which is so obvious without my egg wrap. Does it remind Ratho more strongly that I was female? Or maybe with it in plain sight, it reminds him of my greater strength, especially now that I have a twined Signico.
All is perfect until Mirko bugles his joy. Ratho jerks from my palm and stumbles backward. Thae burrows under his hair until only her thin face peers at me through his black hair coils.
“You, you said Mirko’s perfect,” I plead.
“But he is with sound?”
“It’s song. He has song like in … R’tan history. It makes him even more special.” Mirko poses. He’s magnificent, grown to nearly two feet in length from head to tail in a month.
I jump so that Mirko might meet Thae in the air. My rapion crouches and soars as my boots thud back on the ground. Dust rises about my feet. Thae only tracks Mirko, barely moving her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, already knowing but not wanting to believe it.
Ratho pets Thae’s foot. “Nothing,” he mutters, looking away.
I lift my arm, and Mirko floats down to me. “Do you want to practice the javelin?” I try. “All my chores are nearly done.”
“Uh. No.” Ratho kicks at a dirt clump.
“Come on,” I needle. “It will be even more fun with Thae and Mirko. We only have a couple weeks left before Perimeter.” I step forward and grip Ratho’s shoulder. He jerks back, Thae arches out of his hair, and with a whistle, Mirko shoots above my head to defend me.
“Stop it, Mirko,” I say. With an angry, shrill note, he turns and alights next to the kindling. He pecks at the patch of red s
and. “What’s wrong, Ratho?”
He stalls by pulling Thae into his arms, where she buries her head under his arm. Frowning, he finally admits, “Your rapion is bespelled with sound like the Featherless Crow.”
I gulp. “Ratho, that’s ridiculous. The Madronian Four-Winged Condor has sound, and there are many other types of birds with song.”
“Yes, but the Four-Winged Condor has the voice of man, and song birds do not twine with men.” Ratho inches back and lowers his voice. “The Featherless Crow calls men to the grave for the Condor. He’s the one without any strength but his song, and that is what he uses to capture souls.”
“I know of their Featherless Crow, Ratho.” I stamp my foot, and Mirko chortles a rebuke as well. “But my rapion sings like others have in R’tania. If you knew anything about our own history, you’d know that. He is strong. Just look!”
Ratho and Thae barely dart a glance at Mirko, who hisses. “Stop it,” I say to my bird, but he only darts his tongue out in mockery.
“See!” says Ratho. “A singing tongue of evil,” he whispers.
I raise my voice. “You undo those words!” Mirko pierces the air with a screech. I shout, “He’s not evil, and you know strength has nothing to do with song!”
Ratho argues, “All worthy rapion are silent.” And as Mirko’s sound ends, Ratho’s words snip the quiet into my centerself. “That Signico should have been left on the Scree!”
I’m stunned, and Mirko snaps at the air. Holding Thae tightly, Ratho crosses his chest for protection and walks away from me.
“You, you … coward!” I pick up a stone and hurl it at his back, but it flies past his shoulder. “Why don’t you just say it, Ratho? Say I shouldn’t have been declared male. That I should have been left on the Scree and never gotten Mirko in the first place. Maybe he sings because of me, and that scares you!”
His shoulders hunch, but he doesn’t even look back. He turns past my house and is gone.
“What do you know about anything? Stupid Madronian myth.” At the same time my anger bursts out, dread rushes in to take its place.
“Left on the Scree” rings though my mind.
I wipe my nose on my sleeve. “It’s not true,” I whisper. Mirko leans against my leg and hums. “You are worthy to serve,” I tell him, and he blinks up at me. “And so am I.”
And then some part of me pathetically wants my friend. “Please, come back,” I whisper. “Please, Ratho. I need you to believe we can do this.”
Mirko flies into my arms. Chortling, his talons pluck my poncho and snag yarn bits. I ruffle his head feathers. Will we patrol the Perimeter alone? Chamber of Verities! I at least hoped for Ratho’s acceptance.
Mirko nudges his face against mine. My jagged breathing evens out against his soft feathers.
“Ratho will come around, Mirko. He’s just rigid sometimes.” Mirko cocks his head.
I go ahead and give in to the looming hopelessness. “Anyway, for all we know, the Mesa will collapse the second I walk into it to serve since I’m declared.” He chitters and stares incredulously at me.
“Well, it could.” I kick my kindling pile and send the sticks twirling in the dust cloud I’ve raised.
CHAPTER 8
ANY OTHER GIRL
The night wind rustles along our thatched roof and down through the smoke hole. I shiver, scoop the juniper shavings off the table, and squat beside our firepit. Empty, it is like a yawning mouth. Carefully, I stuff the fresh-scented curls between kindling. My pile collapses. “Chamber of — ” I start to say under my breath.
“Don’t swear by the name of our R’tan holy place.” Father wipes our plates dry. He carefully stacks the dishes on the shelf over the clay sink basin.
“Even though the Chamber’s been lost for centuries in the Mesa, I can’t swear by it?” I mutter.
“Not the holy place where the Creator Spirit whispered his Oracles into the rock, Tiadone.”
“I know, I know.” I cut him off before his lecture drones on.
“If reverence doesn’t hold your tongue, how about fear? Just last week Priest Sleene put old Solumo in the box for only mentioning the R’tan Creator Spirit.”
I crumble a brittle twig. “No! Is he all right?”
“I stopped by his farm yesterday, and his daughter told me he’s been released. For his first offense, he only received five lashes. He’s expected to recover.”
My skin pimples.
“Now, stack the kindling again,” Father says, nudging his hair twists out of his eyes. The steam from washing the dishes has freed a few short, wiry gray hairs to rim his head like a faint crown.
I lean the twigs against one another. This time the wood stands in a cone, mimicking the flare of a girl’s dress. Mirko chitters his approval from the rafters and puffs up. I clatter our fire stones together until the wood catches the sparks.
Flames spurt through the kindling while Father settles behind the changing canvas. It is the only place we are safe to worship our Creator Spirit. He lifts his palms in prayer.
Do other R’tan worship privately like us? Do they have sacred R’tan writings hidden in their homes? Or do they all bow to the Madronian Four-Winged Condor like Ratho’s family?
Does anyone hoard any other books? Something to read beyond Madronian history and catechism? If so, I wish I knew them.
I can’t imagine what it was like for Father to grow up with books in reach. And yet he had to watch the Madronians destroy them all. The thought cuts my centerself.
Mirko drops onto the braided rug beside the fire and waddles into a squat. He stares into the light, making his golden-brown face shimmer. I smile and rub his eye ridge until his pale lids slide shut.
Restless, I get up and pace, ending in front of the metal gazing plate hanging on the wall above our shelves of bottled goat remedies. If I were still a girl, I’d be preparing to move into the temple as a visionaire, to be secluded for a year. There, with the help of a tiny Miniata rapion, I’d have foreshadowings of dangers so that I could alert the village. I’d live far from Perimeter, in safety. Well, as safe as one can be near Sleene.
Father has twitched the canvas closed. Rocks clatter as he removes our Oracles from behind the shallow stones.
In one motion, I spin my amulet until the pouch hangs behind me. I pull my brown hair back like Father’s friend, Frana, wears hers. My cheekbones are sharp beneath my light brown skin. What would it be like to be known as a girl? To dress and work as a female? To whisper with friends in tight circles like other girls do?
Before Mirko’s hatching, I used to stand with the villagers in the square during Weekly Ritual and watch the visionaires in service, poised on the roof of the temple. Their long white robes contrasted with the tiny brown rapion flitting around them. I’d ignore Sleene’s sermon and the acolytes’ chants to the Four-Winged Condor while I coveted a Miniata like the visionaries had, even though Mirko’s big Signico egg filled my wrap.
What would Ratho think of me if I hadn’t been declared male and still been allowed to live? Blushing, I trace my arched brow. I’ve seen him relieving himself, his dangling male parts.
Well, it doesn’t matter what he would have thought. All that’s important is that I carry equal or greater power than Ratho in my amulet now; I know in my centerself that the male desert cat’s heart is fierce enough to have frightened away all of my former feminine traits while even now manhood spirals into me through my father’s hair coils. It is at least one thing the Madronians have right. If it wasn’t true, they wouldn’t let me live.
When Father first explained I was formed differently than other males, I denied it. I threw a tantrum and shouted that I was never a female. But even I could look at a goat and see I was lacking. It was then Father began his mantra: Don’t dwell on your past. Live now as any boy and appreciate life.
I try to live without shame that I was a female. I push and press it down when it sneaks in. But there are times when reality snaps and frees it completely, and I tum
ble. Like when I’m near Sleene at Weekly Ritual. With his wings dragging along behind him, sometimes he stops and sniffs me as if he can smell my former, weaker sex. My centerself pounds until he moves past.
If I were a second-born girl, I do know Ratho would never have said such things about my rapion. Comparing Mirko to the stupid Featherless Crow is ludicrous. That thing supposedly reeks of garlic, for Verities’ sake.
But then, as a second-born girl, Ratho would not be permitted to even speak to me — and I would not have Mirko. I let my hair twists swing free and cover much of my face. Turning away, I spin my amulet so the pouch hangs correctly.
“Father, what does the Creator Spirit say of my male declaration?”
The canvas twitches. “The Oracles say living is the greatest honor.”
“I want my life to be honorable,” I whisper.
Mirko yawns and tucks his head beneath his wing. The fire snaps at my hopes.
CHAPTER 9
THE FEAST
My father and I approach the village square in the sunset’s pink blush. Torches flame along the sandy path, and sandalwood incense curls in the air. On my shoulder, Mirko shifts his weight from one foot to the other, anticipating our Initiation Ceremony. This quarter’s secondary school graduates enjoy a celebration tonight with their families. Boys vow their next day’s departure for Perimeter, and girls pledge their dedication to the temple. All will be able to see Mirko and I have twined. Maybe as Father wishes, others might declare their firstborn girls now.
Jitters run down my own legs as noisy chatter knocks against the sandstone buildings. We come round the corner and see the crowd in their most festive tasseled and striped clothes. I straighten my own zigzagged poncho, and Mirko ruffles his feathers into place.
Father boldly leads us into the party. He smiles at a group of married ladies with little hats cocked on their foreheads. The styles mimic the larger brimmed hats of their husbands. Hesitantly, the ladies nod back.
Firstborn Page 3
