People of the Sky Page 5

  Compassion drew Kesbe to her feet and several steps closer before she realized what she was doing. The youth whirled, lunging at her. She scrambled back from the blur of limbs, flying black hair and white teeth. Then he was standing before her, his jaw jutting, his skinny ribcage heaving, muscles bunched in both sinewy arms.

  His face contorted in a startling grimace. The nose wrinkled, the corners of the mouth drew back and the tongue lifted toward the bared upper teeth. She heard a fluid hissing and realized that it came from air the boy sucked over his tongue.

  Kesbe retreated, suppressing an impulse to lash back at the sudden threat, reminding herself that this was only a youth. “I didn’t mean to hurt your aronan,” she protested even though she knew her words in English were nonsense to him. “I didn’t recognize it.”

  “Haewi,” the youngster said angrily. He gestured at the struggling flier.

  She raised both hands palms up in a lifting motion, indicating that she would help him right the aronan. “Haewi,” she repeated, not knowing what the sound meant. It did sound similar to some old Hopi words her grandfather had taught her. Again she made the palms-up lift and this time the youth seemed to understand her purpose. His face lost its snarl, though not its wary expression. She got up. He moved back. He let her take one pace toward the aronan, then two.

  The youth stood aside. For an instant she wanted him there again as a barrier between her and the creature. No. She had offered to help. She wasn’t going to let her fear compound what damage she had already done.

  The aronan lay on its back, its neck crooked up with its head between its front legs. For an instant it looked unpleasantly like a housefly that had been swatted by a giant.

  As Kesbe approached, this impression faded. The aronan’s body was shorter and shaped differently from that of an insect. Its abdomen terminated, not in a wasp-like stinger or ovipositor, but in a fan of pinnate scales that reminded her of a hawk’s tailfeathers.

  She stepped carefully around an outspread wing. It vibrated, filling the air with a low-pitched hum that grew more resonant near the aronan’s thorax. She stooped, touching the long spar on the wing’s leading edge. It was ridged and slightly square in cross-section, its edge silken against her fingers. Muted hues swirled through the black veining on the wing’s translucent underside while iridescent feather-edged scales lay in the gravel at her feet.

  Her senses were captivated by its alien beauty. None of the illustrations in the spaceport exhibit could do the creature justice. Yet these details reminded her of something else she had seen, though it was a poor pale echo of what lay before her now.

  After disembarking from the shuttle at the spaceport, she’d had to wait for entry clearance. While the bureaucrats poked their computer keys and scratched their heads about the antique aircraft she was bringing in, she wandered around the lounge area and happened upon the exhibit. In addition to the illustrations, it also contained some cases with mounted speciments of Oneway’s wildlife. Her curiosity and sense of practicality overcame her distaste and she investigated them.

  The exhibit was located, almost apologetically, in an out-of-the-way corner. It was obvious that whoever had done it would never get a job in the Galactic Smithsonian. Something about the desiccated specimens caught her eye, especially one delicately shrivelled creature perched unconvincingly on a tree limb. It looked like something an entomology student might have cooked up as a hoax. At the time, Kesbe was more than willing to guess that someone had.

  It looked like a five-foot-long grasshopper until one noticed that the middle pair of legs was missing. In place of the usual grasshopper head, the creature had what appeared to be the enlarged dried up head of a Terran sea-horse, although the eyes were recognizably compound. The whole thing looked so spindly that a good-sized sneeze would destroy it. Bugs (or something), had eaten holes in the brittle brown chitin, adding to its generally pathetic appearance. She had wondered whether it looked this dilapidated when it was alive or whether it had been mutilated by a terrible taxidermy job.

  Now, as she knelt beside the aronan, she knew that the display had failed miserably in its attempts to portray the living animal. Putting her first-aid kit to one side, she grasped the aronan’s wingspar and began to ease it back. She felt the powerful vibration from the animal’s flight muscles against her palms. Then, as she tightened her grip, the resonance went into her hands, the bones of her wrists, and up her arms to her shoulders. While she held the wing closed, she clenched her teeth to keep them from buzzing together.

  The wing jerked. Kesbe teetered on her knees, put out one hand to save her balance. Her palm contacted the aronan’s thorax. Her first reaction was to snatch her hand back, but she didn’t. She had expected to touch the cold carapace of an insect. Instead her hand sank into a mat of stiff thick bristles. They were slightly warm, something she didn’t expect. This was not the radiant body heat of a mammal, nor did the creature’s strange fuzz have the moist oiled feel and smell of fur. Its texture was similar to dried grass and a heady sage-like aroma tickled her nose.

  The youth ran around to the other side of the aronan and rolled the animal onto its closed wing. With a fierce grunt, he shoved it over. Its legs flailed near Kesbe’s face. She ducked.

  And then the aronan was on its feet, scuttling back and forth, fluttering its wings. The boy was at its head in an instant, soothing it and stroking its antennae. When it calmed down, he bent and tapped one foreleg. Obediently, the creature lifted its limb, letting the boy handle and inspect each joint, flexing it gently. Kesbe didn’t blame him, Gooney’s prop blade had thrown the aronan a good distance.

  She stood back, wondering if the youth had forgotten her. Perhaps he had, for he went over the aronan meticulously, examining legs, body and wings for signs of injury. The only damage seemed to be a few scales lost from the wings. The boy retrieved several, making sad little clucks as he tried to replace each by working it in among its neighbors.

  She stooped, picking up a small scale he had missed. It was a deep turquoise, with iridescent highlights of dark blue and emerald. In the middle, it felt solid, like a reptile scale, but the edges were finely feathered.

  Dusty fingers plucked it from her hands. The boy scowled at her as he tucked the loose wing-scale carefully into a drawstring pocket in his shoulder-cape. He stood back, arms folded, head lowered. From beneath coarse bangs he peered at her in an odd indirect stare.

  Though his face was sharper and his body lighter in build, there was still the sense of solidity about him that spoke of possible Pueblo ancestry. She felt her eyes grow wide, although she tried not to gape at him in surprise. Could it be that some remnants of the Blue Star colony had survived?

  She remembered again what her grandfather had told her about the Blue Star migration and her own family’s refusal to join in.

  The Temiyas and a few other families who chose to remain on Earth had been a minority within the Pueblo tribes. The majority, intoxicated with the fervor of the Blue Star faith and its promise of a new Fifth World uncontaminated by the presence of the disruptive European culture, had left Earth in 2062. They settled on another world, hoping to revive their ancient tribal life, but the colony disappeared. No survivors or descendants had been found.

  If this boy was a survivor of the lost colony, what were his people like? How did they live? The questions flooded into her mind along with an intense desire to see the boy’s home village. Obviously the boy’s people had made changes to adapt, his winged mount was proof of that.

  Kesbe wondered what the youth saw in her face. Was there that much of the Indian left in her? Only her grandfather had given her any real sense of her past and her people. Again she wished Morning Bird Man could be here now, sharing his wrinkled wisdom. Bajeloga, you would know what to say to this boy.

  As she studied him, he thrust his head forward, his nostrils widening, sniffing at her as if he were a young predator. His face distorted into the unsettling half-snarl that made her want to grimace
back at him. Abruptly he withdrew. His expression shifted back to that of a wary human teenager.

  “Baqui hanakomi?” The boy spoke in a hoarse tenor, his head cocked to one side.

  Kesbe stared at him, her hope growing.

  His word “hanakomi” sounded like the Hopi word “haqumi,” which meant “who are you?” It was a reasonable beginning to a conversation.

  After a moment of unexpected silence she decided to take the initiative and used his greeting back to him. “Baqui hanakomi?” she asked.

  A line formed between his straight brows. His lips pursed pugnaciously and his nostrils flared. “Ba hanakomi,” he said. All right, he was correcting her. “Ba hanakomi,” she replied.

  “Apinu’i.” He clenched his fist emphatically against his chest. Kesbe was about to respond by pointing at him and repeating the sound. She averted her eyes slightly, knowing it was impolite to point or stare. “Apinu,” she said, thinking it was the boy’s name.

  She gestured at the aronan. “Ba hanakomi?”

  “Haewi Namij.” The beginnings of a smile twitched across his lips. He walked to his flier, tossing back a loosely bound horsetail of dusty black hair. “Haewi Namij, chosovi poko.”

  With a surprise, she recognised “chosovi,” from her grandfather’s name for her. And poko she knew from Bajeloga’s stories. It meant an animal who would do things for you.

  The aronan butted its master playfully as he stroked it. Little ripples of metallic gold played across the velvet of its compound eyes, giving life and expression to an otherwise opaque stare. Its head was very unlike that of an insect, having an elongated snout and a slightly dished-in face. It had an attractive elfin shape, with a small muzzle and mothlike proboscis coiled up in a delicate watch-spring beneath its chin.

  Two straight horns sculpted from chitin guarded the hemispheres of its compound eyes. The eyes themselves were slightly recessed beneath a spiny ridge, giving the aronan less of a bug-eyed look than it might otherwise have had. Above the horns were a pair of plumed antennae that continually stroked the air as if searching for something in the breeze. Kesbe watched and forgot herself completely.

  Until the boy looked toward her. He beckoned her to approach. She went forward with both eagerness and trepidation, halting when Haewi Namij turned its head to challenge her with a disconcerting stare from both compound eyes.

  She stood in front of the aronan, extending her hand so that Haewi could smell it, the usual animal-human introduction. It was not the creature’s nose that touched her palm, for Haewi Namij had no nostrils at the end of its narrow muzzle. Instead its antennae fluttered along her hand, gathering her scent.

  A grumble of thunder overhead broke Kesbe out of the little universe of fascination into which she had been drawn with the boy and his creature. Rain began to patter down on the gravel. The boy suddenly squinted, then waved his hand toward the shape of the forgotten C-47. “Ba hanakomi?” he asked.

  Kesbe felt a grin relax the tautness of her face. To him the aircraft must seem as much a living creature as the aronan. “Baqui hanakomi,” she retorted, correcting his assumption just as he had corrected her grammar. She flung her arm out at the aircraft. “Gooney Berg. Come and meet her. She won’t bite.”

  “Gooni Bug,” the boy repeated. He sent a suspicious glance toward the aircraft.

  The sky suddenly let loose in a sheeting deluge. Kesbe decided that continuing the conversation was not worth being drenched. She retreated under Gooney Berg’s wing, waving at the boy to come after.

  It took him some time to decide. Kesbe managed to get several tarps out of the plane and hang them from the underside of the wing to form a makeshift shelter. A few plastic cargo pallets arranged about one wheel strut made a raised floor against rivulets invading the dry ground under the plane. She knew she could be cozier inside the aircraft, but there was no way the boy or his aronan could be coaxed into such a confined area. She didn’t want to leave them or have them leave her. Again she felt a strong wish to go with the boy to his village, but she knew the chances were remote for a stranger such as she.

  She sighed, then got out her survival kit: a portable heater, battery light, blankets, rations and thermos. She lit the light, started the heater and sat down on the tire, staring up into the wheel-well. A dollop of grunge plopped onto her shoulder, reminding her that the C-47’s engines had a habit of dripping oil. She moved her tent to one side of the wheel strut.

  The rain redoubled its assault, beating a frenzied tattoo on the metal airframe. Kesbe was on the point of retreating back inside her aircraft when the boy and his flier came straggling toward her shelter. Carefully she moved herself and her gear to the rear of the tarp-tent, giving them plenty of space. It wasn’t entirely generosity on her part. Both rider and mount left large puddles on the ground beneath the aircraft’s wing.

  At the entrance to the tarp-tent, the boy wiped the water off himself with the edge of one hand. His aronan spread its wings briefly and vibrated them. For a brief minute it was enveloped in a fine cloud of raindrops and the loud pulsed drone it made sounded like a power station transformer going momentarily berserk. When the aronan closed its wings and settled demurely on the tarp, it was nearly dry.

  Nice trick, Haewi Namij, Kesbe thought, shivering in her flightsuit, damp despite the heater. Do you give lessons?

  The boy settled next to his aronan. He eyed Kesbe, but didn’t seem inclined to talk. The little heater warmed the shelter, making her sleepy. She shook her head, trying to drive the drowsiness away. He was just a boy and he seemed friendly, but she’d be a fool to fall asleep with a stranger near, especially one who carried weapons.

  After several attempts to stifle her yawns, Kesbe saw the boy watching her. A slow grin spread across his face. He rose from his seat, taking his bow, spear, arrows and knife and laying them down beside his aronan. Then he turned to Kesbe and spread his palms as if to say that he would not harm her while she slept.

  Again she yawned, knuckling her eyes. Somehow such weariness seemed an injustice, especially when in the presence of fascinating visitors. Kesbe’s last waking reflection was that the world was full of such injustices.

  Haliksa’i.

  This is how it is.

  This is he who sits in the strange tent-house of the woman-spirit while she sleeps.

  This is he who tells his story, though to no other ears hut his own. This is he who wants to understand. The way to understanding is the telling of stories, so say the wise ones oj Tuwayhoima.

  Apinu’i.

  I-am-I, called Imiya by my people, the Pai Yinaye. I will bear another name when I am born into life as a man from the mother-dark of the kiva.

  The kiva has held me since the Season of Flowers. It is now the Season of Rain. I have learned much of the things sacred to my people. I entered as a boy, still clinging to the hand of my uncle, for my mother and father have gone to the spirits. I no longer will cling to the hand of my uncle when I emerge into the new life.

  I have learned in recent days that there is something else I must give up as well. It has not come from my teacher in the kiva, but from watching my friend Nyentiwakay. He is older than I and has gone through the ceremony of adulthood. He went with his aronan to the place where the ceremony is given. When he returned, his aronan did not return with him. I have not seen it since that day.

  The same has happened to other youths, yet they do not sorrow or speak about what has happened. Their feet always touch the ground now and they cannot see the shimmer of light on an aronan’s wings. Could it be that they did not love their flier as I do Wind Laughing?

  Sahacat, the shaman who teaches me, says that this change is something I must accept without Question. She will not tell me what will become of Wind Laughing when I go to the place of ceremony. I cannot have that knowledge yet, she says. I am afraid that Wind Laughing will die.

  I have no choice. If I were to turn from the ceremony of adulthood, I would bring disgrace upon my family. My father was a ra
in-priest. He would be shamed by a son who could not put aside the life of a child-warrior to take up that of a man.

  Sahacat knows the disquiet that troubles me. Perhaps this is why she has sent me out on pilgrimage to seek visions of the spirits. It may he the last journey I make on Wind Laughing.

  When I left my village, I flew far. I searched, but I found only the empty spaces of the canyon. The thunderstorm came, singing with a great voice. A howling came from within the clouds. I saw a creature not in any of the legends of my people. It bore strange stiff wings. It seemed blind, for it wandered in the air and nearly struck a rock-spire.

  I flew up with Wind Laughing, taking no heed of the storm. Within the head of the flying-beast, I saw a woman. I flew close and reached out to her. Though she must be a kachina to have come with the thunder, she was afraid because her sky-beast was blind and falling. I did not want the creature to fall, so I led it to a place where it could come down. It did such a wild noisy dance when it landed that I was frightened. I got off Wind Laughing and hid. Wind Laughing was bad and did not hide. It thought the great flier was another kind of aronan. It flew to the beast and tried to make friends.

  The woman-spirit did not like Wind Laughing dancing on her creature’s head. She made her creature roar and try to hurt Wind Laughing. When she saw me, she stopped. She tore a hole in her creature’s side and came out. She helped me turn Wind Laughing over. She tried to speak to me, though she knows little of my tongue. When it rained, she let me come into a strange lodge beneath the wing of her creature.

  Is she a kachina? She wears no mask. She has the face of a woman of my village, though there is a sharper, harder quality in her eyes. She came on the breast of thunder as the kachinas do, yet she did battle with the winds that brought her. In the old stories, kachinas are always wise, guiding those who meet them. It was I who guided her.

  I thought kachinas danced a slow, sure path through life, yet she stops and starts, does one thing, then another as if she does not know what she wants or cannot take time to think. She struck down my Wind Laughing, then helped me raise my aronan up again. She was afraid of me when I grew angry and leaped at her. Do spirits fear the children of men?