Wings of Flame

by Nancy Springer

  There followed a confusing time. When her head cleared, the girl saw Kyrem battling with three adversaries. He had found a long knife, and two of the others, by way of fate, had lost theirs, so the battle was not as uneven as it seemed. And Kyrem seemed to have that strange power in him again, swelling his muscles.… The others surrounded him but could not hold him, like so many jackals harrying a lion. He surged and swirled amid them as though he were an embodied energy, something elemental.… The shuntali watched, sitting up and blinking, wincing when they made him bleed. They might yet tear and worry him down—and there was a vague rustling noise she could not identify, a menacing hiss behind the panting and scrambling of combat. She could see the man she had felled stirring, that would make it four against one—she could see? By the light of flames. The lamp had set the straw afire.

  She scrambled up. Oily smoke stung her eyes and set her to coughing. Among the men there was more blundering than battling now—no one could see. She scarcely could either, but her bare feet knew every inch of the ground she trod. She found Kyrem’s arm and tried to tug him away, but he fought her. She was just another enemy in the smoky chaos to him.

  “Come on,” she urged, as if urging a donkey.

  The soft voice, so soft that only he could hear it. He recognized it and followed it into the cramped maze of pens and stalls. The stableboy knew the way quite surely even in the confusion of dark and smoke and flickering shadow. Wild shouts of men behind and screams of animals all around.… There was Omber, plunging in his place, too frightened to flee, panicked as a horse will be by fire. The stableboy slipped off her ragged shirt and tied it over the lurching, struggling beast’s eyes, and Kyrem laid his hand on the neck. Omber calmed as soon as he felt that touch, for power still flowed in Kyrem.

  “Lead us,” he murmured to the girl.

  They walked one on either side of Omber’s head, coaxing him forward, coughing in the smoke, thinking they would die in the smoke—but in a moment they were outside at last, and the shuntali slipped the blindfold off the steed. Kyrem vaulted onto his mount. The stableboy got back into her shirt, silent and shivering. There was shouting in the darkness all around, pounding of hooves under the trees, and the inn—the inn was going up in flames.

  “You can’t go back there,” said Kyrem. “They’ll kill you. Come on.” He hauled the youngster up onto the horse behind him. She went without question, even though she had never sat a horse before, for she had nothing to lose, and she was used to doing as she was told.

  The other horses were gone from the place she had put them. Kyrem sent Omber plunging away into the darkness, whistling and shouting as he rode. The girl rested against his bare back, hanging on and paying little attention. Her cut head hurt. After a while she drowsed, and when she awoke, it was dawn.

  Chapter Two

  The sun came up at their backs. Straightening, the shuntali vaguely remembered a night of riding in zigzags and circles, Kyrem’s shouting, other shouts answering his across the darkness. But with the dawn they were traveling mostly westward, down the mountain slopes toward Avedon. Half a dozen riders accompanied the youth and the girl now. She recognized the older man who had spoken with Kyrem the previous evening. He was blood-splattered, as were the others, and he looked grim.

  “So much for the local hospitality, Captain,” said Kyrem, breaking a long silence.

  “The fault is all mine, my prince, I admit it,” the other answered bitterly. “I spoke of danger, but I never truly expected—”

  “Stop it,” Kyrem ordered. “How could you possibly imagine that we would be so treacherously attacked? There will be no talk of fault. And do not call me prince.”

  They rode in silence out of budding blackthorn forest and into a high mountain meadow, the thin, rocky, brown soil studded with tiny red flowers, blood-of-Suth, amid moss. Lush new growth of bright green ferns showed where a small spring ran. “Let us stop here and breathe a bit, now that we can see about us,” said the captain when they reached the open ground. “What is that rag you seem to have attached to your back?”

  “That little rag-tag saved my life twice last night.” Kyrem swung a leg lithely over his horse’s neck and dropped to the ground. The girl sat up stiff and dazed on the horse’s rump where he had left her. He helped her down.

  “You are a prince of Deva,” she whispered.

  “Kyrem son of Kyrillos, gratefully at your service.” He set her down on the ground. His men were drinking at the spring by turns; none of them had a flask or a cooking pan or even a hat to hold water in. They had escaped with only scant clothing, a few weapons and their lives. Kyrem still held the long knife he had taken. He sliced a square of cloth from his trousers with it, soaked the makeshift napkin in the spring water and came and plastered it on the shuntali’s head. The cut above her eye was swollen. She reached up under the cloth and touched it, felt the stickiness of congealed blood on her fingers, felt weak and then angry at her weakness. Faintness was a girlish trait, and she was a boy, was she not?

  “But what are you doing in Vashti?” she asked Kyrem sluggishly. “When folk are still roused in wrath about the war?”

  “I am my father’s hostage for peace. I am to take up residence with your King Auron.” Kyrem’s voice hardened. “Evidently someone does not want me to reach Avedon.”

  “But who?” she asked in her soft way, and Kyrem laughed without mirth.

  “That is a very apt question.”

  The men had gathered around, listening. “If you fail to arrive,” the captain said, “Auron will be able to accuse your father of breaking faith. Perhaps he will use the pretext to march.”

  “Then you say it is Auron himself who sets traps for us?”

  “King Auron would not do that,” the girl protested, and all the men laughed.

  “’Tis a tempting theory, Captain,” Kyrem said judiciously. “But in all fairness it ought to be said that Auron has not been one to march in the past. Also, my father seems to trust him, which is odd.”

  “King Kyrillos hardly trusts anyone,” the captain wryly agreed. “Even himself.”

  “But who else could it be but Auron?” a man spoke up.

  “For the present, it scarcely matters,” the captain grumbled. “Here we are, half naked, our comrades slain, here in a wilderness without food or gold or gear, and three weapons among the seven of us. Yonder lad would be better off back with his family.”

  “I have no family,” the shuntali said.

  “None?” All eyes turned on the lad. “What might your name be?” Kyrem inquired.

  “Name?” she repeated stupidly.

  “Yes, your name.” He smiled with genuine friendliness. “You know mine. What is yours?”

  “I have none,” she whispered.

  “No name?” Kyrem sat down by her, dumbfounded. “But how can that be? What was it that they were calling you at the inn?”

  She could not answer, could not bring herself to say the hated word. “Shuntali, my lord,” someone else told him. “It is a sort of curse. Vashtins use it for those they consider unfit to live, beneath regard. The boy is an outcast.”

  “But he is a mere slip of a lad!” Kyrem turned to the girl. “What can you have done at your age to deserve contempt?”

  She kept her eyes turned to the ground. Kyrem raised her chin with two fingers of his right hand.

  “Answer,” he commanded.

  She knew she must have done something. “I was born evil,” she said, and Kyrem sighed with exasperated relief.

  “You’re a bastard, then? Well, so am I. So are we all.” The men roared with laughter and nodded their agreement.

  “I’ll give you a name,” Kyrem said.

  Her eyes widened enormously. Everyone saw, but no one laughed anymore. Her world awaited redemption. Kyrem looked at her carefully, seeing a rather delicate boy, sensing how brashly he had trodden on ground where no man had yet gone. Holy ground or unclean, it made no difference, the risk was the same.…

  H
e thought frantically. The name had to be right.

  In Vashti people were named according to their place in the planets, the family, the clan, the magical chart of seven times seven correspondences. But in Deva folk took the names of things they found lovely or significant—flowers, jewels, birds, the breezes that sifted through the bristling black upland trees, the echoing mountains themselves—

  “Seda,” said Kyrem. “Your name is Seda. That is what the Old Ones would have called you, because you speak softly, like an echo, a whisper. Will that do?”

  A tear brimmed out of one wide eye by way of answer. Kyrem tried to reach out and wipe it away, found that he could not quite do it and turned his back instead.

  “Crazy Vashtins!” he shouted at the distant peaks, and the words came echoing back to him.

  “Are you mad? That will bring all the rabble within hearing after us,” the captain said sharply. “Let us ride.”

  Kyrem and Seda drank at the spring, for Kyrem would not be hurried. Then they mounted, with Seda on Omber behind Kyrem as before. Omber was the largest and strongest stallion of the lot. “Omber,” someone remarked. “That means ‘shadow.’ The echo rides the shadow. You choose strange names, Kyrem.”

  The prince made no comment as they rode to the fern-fringed lower edge of the meadow and into the shadows of the black forest.

  No rabble came after them, for the time. They rode through tree shade and out into yellow sunlight again, into another spring-green mountain meadow, this one contained by shelving red rock. The blue rose of the wilderness grew there. In spite of tense thoughts and an empty belly, Kyrem smiled at the beauty of the place. But as they traversed it, with ominous silence and suddenness a moving shadow swept over them. “Curse you! Curse you all!” a voice rasped from overhead.

  The horses shied, coming dangerously close to the rocky edge, and the riders could not control them, for the riders themselves were staring skyward, as unnerved as their mounts. The horses spun and circled, striking against each other, and great black wings wheeled above them, the wings of a mighty raven larger than any ordinary raven, but the baleful face that glared down was that of—how could it be? A horse, a black bony horse’s head with flaring nostrils and long yellow teeth. The yellow, scaly, reptilian legs of a bird were tucked under the thing’s feathered tail, but instead of claws, the legs ended in two hard black hooves. They hung heavily from the bird’s body, making it lurch and lumber in air, clumsy, ugly.

  “Curse you!” the thing said again quite plainly, eyes rolling whitely in its black equine head.

  “Demon,” Kyrem breathed, gaining control of Omber at last, and he sent his long knife darting up at it like a javelin. The weapon flew both short and wide, out of its element, and came to earth somewhere on the rocks with a clatter. But the weird horse-bird swung away nevertheless and flapped off, lifting itself with difficulty toward Kimiel, the tallest mountain.

  The men quieted their horses, soothing themselves as much as the steeds, and then sat staring at each other, pallid.

  “What in the name of Suth was that?” someone faltered at last, breaking silence. At once a hubbub went up.

  “Watch out how you mention the name of Suth! That might have been Suth himself, come to punish us.”

  “I have heard that Suth is a mighty flying horse, but I never thought of him in such form as that!”

  “But it must have been a god, it was so big it blotted out the sun. Bigger than any natural bird—”

  “Did I see hooves?”

  “I saw blood in its nostril and fire in its eye.”

  “Had we not better pray and make sacrifice? If Suth is angry at us—but we have nothing to sacrifice—”

  “Silence,” Kyrem said, not too loudly, but the babble stopped at the sound of his voice. “You are talking nonsense,” he said fiercely. “What reason could Suth have to curse us? That was some sort of demon, and a paltry one at that, not much bigger than a raven, forsooth! Not nearly grand enough to be a god. Think on what little learning you have, and be silent.” Glowering, he slid down from Omber and marched off to find his knife.

  Likely his men thought more of their own fears than of learning, but if they obeyed him, they remembered the legend.

  In the beginning days the Mare Mother rose up, the brown mare great of girth, she whose black, bristling mane forms the forests of the Kansban, she whose ears are the holy eminence, and this great mother of earth opened herself and was impregnated by the hot, wild waft of the south wind, and out of that union Suth was born.

  And Suth’s first and final form was that of a stallion, the most splendid of horses, of what color men could not agree; the Vashtins said that he was the varicolored horse of the pattern that is or is not, but the Devans scorned the piebald horse as a cousin to the cow, and they called Suth the kumait, the shining and sacred bay. In his broad forehead between his wise and dangerous eyes nestled a jewel, which jewel men could not tell, but all men knew that he carried that treasure between his eyes. And all men agreed that he was winged to fly with his father wind, though the Vashtins sometimes said that the wings were made of flame.

  And the Mare Mother bore daughters as well, the lovely twins Vashti and Deva—and men quarrel still as to which one came first from the womb—and Suth came to his sisters in his holy stallion form and wed them, and they bore him seven sons to fly with him, winged on the wings of wind. The white horse of moonlight and the yellow dun steed of the sun, the red horse of red fire and of the fertile red soil of Vashti (for in Deva the soil is as yellow as the sun), the blue horse of love and leaping water, the sorrel brown of the mountains, the gray horse of the mysteries, and the black horse of death and thunder and the stardark sky.

  And on the flanks of the mother the scurf and small sheddings rose up and became people, men and women, and they had children, and needed barley to feed them. Then lovely Vashti came (said the Vashtins) and lay down as a willing sacrifice, and the hero struck the blow of immolation, he, Auberameron, first priest and first king of Vashti, and out of the wound the red blood flowed, and bright green vegetation sprang up all around it. And ever since that day the good soil of Vashti has been as red as that blood, but the soil beyond the bourne, the boundary river, where no one goes, where magic grows and the melantha, that soil is as black as that black lily flower.

  And in those days all the horses could fly, and they spoke to man as equals, or more than equals, for they were far wiser than men and possessed of prophetic powers. In the fall of all things from the glory of those beginning days, they had lost the wings and the power of speech, but Devans said that they still possessed the wisdom, and Vashtins, that they retained the power of prophecy.

  But how could the horses be called wise and prophets, she wondered, the girl who was a boy who was newly named Seda wondered while sitting on a blue roan rump and waiting. How so wise, when they let the Devans use them so, suffered themselves to be sat upon, and so tamely? Being a horse was a godlike state. It ought not to be at all like being a shuntali.

  Kyrem returned with his knife, and Omber lowered his head and neck to help him vault on. Silently the party rode the length of the meadow and down through the next belt of blackthorn. Shadow-tails moved in the trees—small furry climbing creatures; squirrels, the Devans called them. Thin and famished with springtime hunger, they scurried about to feed on buds, and at each scrape or clatter of the branches, every rider stiffened on his mount. Though none of them would say it, they were each taut and tense, ears alert and eyes roving, watching for the return of the horse-bird. Hunger and human enemies were almost forgotten, except by Seda, who was accustomed to thinking of the many foes at once, the rocks that came hurled from all directions.

  They are not so accursed, she thought, though she did not speak her thought, for she seldom spoke much. To Kyrem she said only, “Look. Devil’s toe.”

  “What?” Startled, Kyrem glanced all around, for she was pointing at what looked like merely a weedy tangle to him.

  “Go
od to eat,” Seda explained. And enough for all, she thought, though again she did not speak.

  “Show us,” Kyrem said, signaling the halt.

  She showed them, pulling the plant up boldly and rubbing the dirt off the fat root with her hands; it was the root that was to be eaten. They all ate after watching her bite into it fearlessly. The root was dull dun in color, crunchy on the outside and mealy within, and they found it oddly satisfying. Vashtins, even beggars, seldom came near this plant because of its fearsome name and its claw-shaped, red-tipped leaves, but Devans thought differently about such things, Seda already surmised. As for herself, she had eaten it many times. A shuntali had to learn to brave superstitious fear.

  “Good,” the captain said judiciously.

  They ate their fill and stuffed their few pockets with more and rode on, their mood somewhat lighter. And as day wore away into afternoon and no ill chanced, they began to feel that they had outridden the curse, and they talked to each other and grew merry.

  Chapter Three

  Evening came on, the dusky melantha of night spreading her black petals in the dome of the sky, and they began to look for a place to stop. No dwellings were near, for they rode far off the track in hopes of avoiding their unknown enemies. Only the mountain wilderness surrounded them, fresh green of ilex and laurel and springtime white of blackthorn bloom—for the season advanced as they descended the slope; red bud had gone to white bloom here, and farther down they would find the green leaf of early summer. But these blackthorns were still bare, deep shade seemed caught in their branches, and twilight brought on again the feeling of danger. Men were shivering, whether from that or the evening chill. Few of them wore so much as a shirt to warm them.