The Nightingale took up a shard of stone in her beak. Knife-sharp, black and wicked as the horn of Abbu, it cut her tongue.
She welcomed the small pain. Drank her own blood.
And the shard became a tooth within her mouth, and the tooth multiplied.
Her arms clutched at nothing. At dust, at the air itself. Someone had been holding her, comforting her while she cried. But why? And who? Part of that someone’s essence stayed with her, in her skin like ointment. An eerie wind whined around her, and a distant thrumming as if thunder rolled around the world, far off at the edges.
Everything was wrong. Her arms were thin and dirty. Her feet were bare, she saw, planted in the dust of a roadway. But where, and how? There was an old woman, she thought, somewhere… she looked around her. Nothing. Had there really been a grey-haired crone possessed of sad blue eyes? That was wrong too. She looked down at herself. A small body, naked but for a filthy breech-cloth. A street-boy. She wore the body of a street-boy.
She fell to her knees. Her neck sang with the slice of steel, the memory of a knife in the hands of an old man who loved her. Who had killed her, and laughed.
*
She fell as if from sleep into wakefulness, with a gasp. Changed. Shifted.
She was walking. Dust and sand clogged her eyes and nostrils. She blinked, feeling the residue of tears, and blew out snot onto the road she trod upon. Her eyes cleared. The sun, silvered by low clouds, was still hot enough to make her sweat.
She had been dreaming of a dirty little boy crying for his mother. It was as if she saw him, ahead of her on this road.
The tears, and the memory, evaporated.
Who am I? She looked down at herself once more and saw that she was a woman now, tall, dark as polished walnut, lithe and slender as a willow but strong as an oak. Was she now fifteen or fifty? It didn’t matter.
She walked a narrow path bordered on one side by poisonous spurge-olive and dry, spiky juniper bushes, and on the other by a steep drop to a desiccated creek bed. Behind her were fields where skinny goats foraged busily for whatever they could wrest from the rocky soil. Her hammered bronze bangles and cuffs, symbols of her status and freedom, jangled at each step. A weight dragged at her side, and she found it to be a long and very sharp knife in a sturdy sheath, its tang wrapped tightly in well-worn leather. A thin woven cord extended from the handle in a short loop. It was the right size for her wrist. Good, she thought. I have a tooth.
The air was dry and full of the juniper’s clean scent.
She knew that the juniper berries could be harvested and sold to midwives and other herbalists. But how did she know it? She could remember no teacher, and no time when she had not been walking along the path… but perhaps there had been an old man who liked to drive facts into her head. Grey-bearded and clever…
The old man had loved her, and taught her all sorts of arcane things which she had assumed were useless. The woman stopped walking, remembering something else. The old man had pressed a knife to her throat.
She clutched her neck, bangles clashing like the sound of distant swords. I am Vara. She collapsed and huddled low in the dust, the smell of juniper stinging her nostrils.
Her own dear Pada was there in her eyes, over her in the darkness, a howl of anguish on his lips. Forgive me…
The winding, dusty path was rarely used, so she was able to cry alone for a nameless time, remembering.
*
She changed. Shifted. Fell again, and kept on falling. No—flying, high in the air. She was a bird. Dreaming again, only dreaming. Remembering a vision. But the sky was close, huge and white, above and around her. She was a bird. She had wings, and they were beating in perfect rhythm to the flutter of a tiny heart in a tiny brown breast.
In the sky were billowing clouds that made shapes of themselves, faces, buttocks, breasts, oxen and dolphins and men, then dissolved only to form again. Relentless, thick and thunder-full, stroked by lightning.
Wind buffeted her. Updrafts from the pale, baked limestone far below, crosswinds from the ocean that she could see if she turned her head. Her bird vision was very sharp. The horizon lay like the rim of a platter all around her, curling into the grey-blue distance. She was flying east, she could tell this easily because birds had a magic stone in their heads that told them north from south, and let them fly to their mates and children without even the need for stars.
But she had no mate or children. She was empty of love, bereft of family and alone here in the sky.
I am Vara. Her wings knew how to work, at least, though she hadn’t always known the art of flight. She had gathered bits of air and cloud and floating dust and made her wings. Her nostrils, edged with the most delicate of hair-like feathers, drew in layered scents from below. Olive groves, thick and warm. Sweet orange trees and grape vines whose gleaming leaves and ripe fruit made her want to plunge into their jewelled branches.
She was a bird, hanging in the middle of the hot dry air.
Panic seized her, and her thrumming heart went cold. She had made a terrible mistake. Her wings suddenly forgot the art of flight.
She fluttered ground-ward, flipping like a leaf, so small and light that the air slowed her, but not so light that she could escape the pull of gravity.
Her wings would not obey her mind. The ground rushed up and she despaired for her life, but suddenly a looming darkness was in the way. She struck it with a gasp of fear and surprise, finding she could cling with her small talons to the crisp, dense blackness. Feathers!
She had landed upon the back of a huge bird. Or perhaps it had flown up to catch her. Had it pitied her? Or was it about to eat her? Panting, she clung to the stiff glossy feathers between the beating wings and rode the huge creature down to land under a pine tree.
A golden head turned and looked at her, its great beak clacking. Feathers ruffled and slid into place as the bird folded its wings and shook her off its back. She hopped down to the needle-carpeted ground.
“Thank you,” she said. Her piping, tiny voice sounded ridiculous in the booming air. Everything was so big.
“You are welcome, Vara.”
She found herself huddling down in a fluff of her own brown feathers. Vara.
Vara is my name.
Oh gods above, oh heavens pity me. It has come to pass.
I am resura.
*
And somewhere in the city of Perpignan, a man lay dying. The pain would not let go. Every jagged, glutinous swallow, every laborious breath, was a shriek in the everlasting night. His hands would not stop groping away at his own miserable body, trying uselessly to rub sight into sightless eyes and pull words from a tongueless mouth.
Eneko Saratxaga was ready to die. He was willing to take his chances with whatever gods were looking down at him, sipping his pain and gnawing at his regret and sorrow. They loved that sort of meal. He was a banquet for the lying gluttons. If he had ever loved the gods, he did so no longer. He had been sorely mistaken about their benevolence.
He hadn’t the strength to turn himself on the thin pallet his keepers had laid him on, days ago. They made desultory efforts to clean and feed him, for which he was not grateful. He knew he was feverish, for delirium had already caught him in its poisoned claws.
It wasn’t really a giant scorpion hanging over him, prodding and stinging him until he begged for death. It was only a man inside the hard, spiny skeleton of the desert creature, bearing its cold insect heart instead of a hot human one. Such a devil-spawned creature cared nothing for pain.
It liked pain.
He’d told the scorpion everything he knew. And more.
And when the cat had come and nudged him so insistently with its small cold nose, he had wanted to tell it everything too. But then it wasn’t a cat, it was a man, a man who told him that, yes, he would die, and very soon. But he would not die in vain.
Eneko doubted that.