The eagle became Akil the cripple, and the little bird—a nightingale who was Vara—became Boy, under the hot sun of midday. She couldn’t remember how she did it. The threaded clouds were still there, seen and not-seen; she could feel them as if they were creatures hunting her. Thunder like shouting voices sounded from afar, telling tales she couldn’t understand.
Where am I, Akil? she cried. It wasn’t her own voice. Who am I?
Glimpses of the hillside across from them glittered between the branches they hid behind, and suddenly she knew where she was. The little boy whose body held Vara’s mind and soul hugged its knees and made itself look about. Think. Remember.
There were workers over there among the olive trees, and they were familiar to her. There was old Emil, his favourite blue hat marking him out. And Luc, and Joan, Luc’s only child, who looked very pregnant. Vara felt a throb of homesickness at seeing them, for they were the ones who had presented her with the biggest, most luscious bunches of grapes they could find, the most perfect peaches and apricots when they were at the peak of ripeness. They had smiled on her from their wise, sun-dark faces and laughed as she stuffed her mouth with sweetness.
They were on family land west of the city, above the Red Kite orchard, which was the highest on this south-facing slope. Family tradition gave bird names to their various fields and orchards, so there was Red Kite, Black Kite, Kestrel, Purple Heron, Oystercatcher, and quite a few more. Jameel ibn Hayyan al-Kindi had always said grape vines would be better on Red Kite, instead of the olives, but the venerable trees had been here many hundreds of years and it would be very unwise to even think of cutting them down.
The Gods would be displeased.
The men and women who today beat and combed the trees for their fruit were whipped by soldiers, and were working without rest. All the bird-fields were under Petru’s control now, and their bounty was being hauled off to feed his armies.
The cripple Akil and the ragged boy sat hidden in the trees as they watched the guards and the workers. Vara, the little urchin lad, had to turn away. Why did she still feel the wrenching pain of sorrow and pity, now that she was a spirit being? The whole miraculous thing was a cheat. She rubbed her throat.
She had to confess the error she’d made to someone, and Akil was the only one around. Her throat was whole, but her tokens were gone. Eye, Owl and Tooth. Around the neck of a dead girl, they’d most likely been stolen, or burned along with her old body. Or tossed into a mass grave. She’d never know what happened. Her own true self, gone. The horror of it bent her double. All her luck was gone. All the lore and love and history held in those three little things, gone. Her hair, her skin, her eyes and lips. All gone. Everything.
Akil watched impassively as the boy hid his face in his hands, wailing. He waited until Vara, whom he knew was inside that scrawny brown body, recovered a bit and sat up again to stare bleakly at the distance.
He didn’t try to comfort her. There was no comfort now.
“Akil,” the boy finally said, “I made a terrible mistake. I chose the wrong form.”
“This little boy, this street beggar? What is wrong with him?”
“No… I mean that one of my shapes was supposed to be a snake. I’m boy, bird, and woman. I was supposed to be a snake so I could kill Petru. The very first thing I did as a resura was stupid and selfish. I’ve betrayed my family!” Again she bent and sobbed.
And knew that her repentance was false. She had known all along that she would never take the form of a snake. Her dutiful intent to do as her mother wished had been at the front of her mouth, but the stubborn knowledge of what she was going to do crouched in the back of her mind like a bear in a cave. And when the time had come to fulfill her intent, the bear had emerged.
Akil poked at the dust with a stick, making lines and circles. He wished Vara would stop crying so much. It was a waste of time. “What’s done is done,” he said at last.
She looked up. “Why should you care, anyway? You have an alanbir who loves you and will forgive you anything! I have no one.” A bitter laugh escaped her, incongruous from the mouth of a child.
“No alanbir? No person or God has taken you?” His eyebrows went up. “This is very odd…consider yourself blessed, if you like. At any rate, it’s too late to lament now. I can help you, if you wish.” He tossed a pebble up and down in his one good hand. “There are many ways to kill a man.”
She wiped her cheeks. After a while, she said, “Akil, why wasn’t I clever enough to think of a name for myself? I can’t be Vara in this body.”
Akil glanced down at her, his tawny eyes half-shielded by his thick black eyelashes. It felt strange to her, to be small, for as Vara the girl she had been as tall as Akil. And proud of it, happy to look down benevolently upon those not so blessed. Now she was a child, and with a boy’s parts under the breech-cloth too. She hadn’t thought of that, before.
Also, she had never noticed the thin wavering above Akil’s head, before. It was like a heat shimmer. Sometimes she could see it, against a dark patch of leaves for instance; most of the time it wasn’t there. The shimmer seemed to rise into the air like a thread, curving in the wind but always pointing east. Toward Perpignan. Toward his alanbir?
She had checked, and there was no shimmering above her own head. She picked up a stick and drew a jagged line in the dust. Then she wiped her small palm across it. The grit and dust didn’t stick to her skin unless she willed it to. “I don’t need a human name any more. I’m not human, and I never have been. And now I look like a boy, but I am a woman.”
Akil said nothing.
Vara contemplated her fate as the shadows of leaves and branches moved across her thin little arms and her bare brown feet. She felt a horrible, welling grief for what she had lost, like hot oil inside her. She must swallow it down before it sickened her.
Akil said, “So, when you awakened as resura, you met an old knife sharpener.”
She nodded glumly. “I think it was my mother, in one of her forms. She didn’t say so, but I… I could tell. She looked at me as if she wanted to stuff words in my head, just as when she was alive.”
For of course she was dead now. Petru must have killed Ragna Svobodová by now… did her mother belong to him? How could she tell? The hot oil rose, and she swallowed it down. “She comforted me, and I was about to talk to her and ask her questions, and then suddenly I was someone else. A Moorish woman, walking along a dusty road. Then I was the little bird you saved.” The visions that had plagued her before her death. After a pause she said, “What would have happened to me if you hadn’t caught me? If I’d fallen to the earth?”
Akil shrugged, tossed his drawing-stick into the bushes, and leaned back. “Nothing, I think. We cannot die.”
“I had thought that would be a good thing.”
Akil smiled sadly. “You are already learning the way of the resura folk.”
She snarled and began to beat him with her small fists, but he changed into an orange cat and crept into her skinny little-boy lap, and began to nuzzle her face as she bent weeping with humiliation and fear. “I don’t want to learn,” she sobbed. “I want to go back! I want to go back!”
Akil kneaded Boy’s bare belly with his paws, purring roughly though his tail lashed back and forth in agitation. “Hush,” he said. “You cannot go back.”
It was odd to hear words from a cat, so strange that she almost laughed. Also, he sounded just like her mother when he said hush. How she hated him! But at the same time she loved him. At least he’d made her stop crying. He sprang off her lap to claw briefly at a tree trunk, shredding off bits of grey bark with his claws, then shifted his form back to human.
Vara couldn’t tell how he did it, it was so fast. She blinked and he was there.
Akil settled himself once more on the ground. “I’m sorry you’re unhappy and afraid. I’m sorry you couldn’t take the form you were assigned.”
Dejectedly she hung her head. “I’m afraid of what is to become of me. Who will be my master? I don’t understand. Have I been claimed by a man or a God, and just don’t know it yet?”
He cocked his head to look at her, and at the air above her head. After a long time he said, “You’d know it if you belonged to a God. For one thing, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.” He eyed her calmly, contemplatively. “You would be in such thrall that you could not speak without permission.”
She began to chew on her fingernails.
Akil continued, relentlessly. “If a man has caught your soul… I also don’t know why you are still here with me. A man would be using you already. A God might bide its time.” He shrugged. “When my life shifted into this magic realm, it was obvious to me right away that Carolina Marsh and I were joined.” He thought for a while. “I can’t describe it… I simply always knew where she was, and how far away. If too far, I felt compelled to reach her, and to listen to everything she said. For a long time I clung to her as if I were drowning, mostly in my cat shape.” He snorted, remembering the sick, damaged little being he once was, who had at last found a mother he could love. She had carried him around in her arms as he purred and mewled. He must obey her, but he could also love her. “It could be that you are a free resura.”
She stopped fidgeting and sat still. “I didn’t know there could be such a thing. Free… I have never really been free. I belong to my parents, my family. My home.”
The tears she had shed had vanished, into the air or into her resura skin. She looked up at him and, squinting, saw the tiny glimmers above him, the little shreds of sun-glitter that made it appear as though he was attached by an ephemeral thread to something. A puppet-master. A thought, a wish, a command that would make him dance. She tried to keep her breathing steady.
“What does it mean to be free?”
Akil looked away. “I’m the wrong person to ask.”
*
Later Akil changed to an eagle and flew away, and the boy Vara sat hugging her knobby knees trying to imagine what it would feel like to be permanently bound to someone she didn’t even know. Or something. A God. Akil had told her, when she’d still been human and had been relentlessly questioning him, “As I lay dying, Miss Marsh warned me that a God might get me. I said I hoped it would be the God of Ennui, for then it would get bored and leave me alone.” She had laughed at his remark, and been rewarded with a slight curve of his lips.
Most people believed that the Great Gods were so unlike people as to be unknowable, and some denied that they even existed, deriding those who claimed to see or feel them, so Vara gave up thinking about them. Instead she tried to remember how to make herself turn into a bird again. How had she done it last time?
She had to find out what had happened after her own death. If the resura Knife Woman was indeed Ragna Svobodová, as Vara believed, then to whom did she belong? Petru? Some crazy God?
She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the resura lore her mother had so doggedly driven into her head. It had been dismayingly sparse. “I have these three forms,” Vara whispered to her small knobby knees. “I can use them. Boy can run and climb, and steal things, and pass unnoticed almost anywhere. Freewoman can converse and negotiate—men will listen to her, and soldiers will be afraid to kill or imprison her. Either of them could carry poison, and Freewoman has a knife.”
She opened her eyes and looked to the sky. “And Bird can fly above everything, and peer in windows, and hop and creep close to anyone she wants. For who will fear a tiny bird?”
But a falci adept could sniff out the truth.
A sudden vision of Petru Dominus thrusting her into a stone box and clapping the lid on it made her heart clench. For a moment she was surprised that she even had a heart, but then thought, well, there is nothing to stop a heart from beating in this realm. No one to say I can’t have one.
But from where did it come? Did she have red blood, and would it spill if she were cut? To test this, she took a thorn from a nearby acacia tree, and after a moment of hesitation, jabbed it into her smallest finger. It hurt only a little, and a tiny drop of blood welled up.
She smeared it away with her thumb, and wondered. I can bleed. I can feel. What is the advantage of being dead?
The advantage was now I can’t be killed anymore.
But then she had a horrible vision of her throat being slit again, and again, always to heal and always there to be opened once more. And she wondered where her real body was now. Perhaps it lay somewhere, cleaned and dressed properly for burial… perhaps someone had managed to get her earthly remains back from Petru. Most likely not.
She might have been burned. Or dumped in a mass grave with lepers and heathens. Did she really want to find out?
She spent the night under the trees, curled like a dog in a pile of leaves. She had thought she would suffer the long dark hours shivering with cold, but the night air didn’t seem to affect her. She didn’t even feel hungry. She prodded herself with the acacia thorn now and then, not enough to break the skin, just to prove to herself that she still existed.
One thing she vowed: she would find her necklace and its three tokens. The only thing that would stop her was if it had been burned. But most likely someone had taken it. Stolen it. She would find her necklace and somehow keep it close.
Akil flew back at last, shortly after dawn, landed heavily beside her and did his magic shift to human form. She had clapped a hand over her eyes against the dust his huge wings had kicked up, but peeped between her fingers to watch him change. It was as her mother had said. He became a whirl of darkness, a dizzying centre that sucked her vision down and around, then back again to see his familiar form: the homely cripple.
He didn’t seem so homely now that he was her only friend. She reached out her small brown hand for his one good one. His long, strong fingers twined with hers, and suddenly she became very conscious of her flat bare chest, complete with tiny brown nipples. Quickly she let his hand drop. When she’d fixed upon this form, the boy she envisioned had been clad as usual for street-urchins in hot weather: a close-wrapped breech-cloth and nothing else.
That had been another mistake, and Vara vowed to remedy it if she could, though a little boy draped modestly in a shawl would be ridiculous. Right now she was too confused and dispirited to try changing to her Freewoman form. Perhaps her forms could be changed, improved upon… though she’d never regain her true human body.
But this was a stupid thing to worry about now.
“Where have you been, Akil?”
“I went to Miss Marsh,” he said. “She called me, but I would have gone to see what was happening anyway.”
“Well? Tell me!”
“War is happening, that’s what. Petru left the city two nights ago—”
“I don’t care about war! Tell me what happened to my mother—tell me of Jameel-my-father!”
“I know only what my alanbir told me, and what I could see as first I flew, then crept as a cat into the city. I know nothing of your parents.” He looked away from her, frowning as if annoyed, and Vara wanted to slap him. But it would look idiotic for a small urchin boy to strike a man, no matter how petulant he was. Not that anyone was watching.
But, she reasoned, trying to still her urge to scream, she must learn to act the part she resembled. She steadied herself. “What of Miss Marsh? She’s my friend as well as your mistress.”
When he turned his eyes on her again, with a warmer look, she was surprised at how that meagre comfort lit her spirits, like a beam of sun. How pathetic, she reflected, that I’ve come to this.
“She has left your villa, along with Miss Saskia and Kai and some others, and found temporary shelter among the Uzmite Sisters. They do not intend to flee unless the fighting washes back from the north and Perpignan is threatened. She will earn her keep with them—and a place for the few relics she managed to carry away—by helping them tend the sick and old.”
Vara smiled and clasped her hands together. “Ah! I knew she wouldn’t run away. But she’s wise to leave our home… and I am relieved to hear that Saskia and Kai are safe.”
Her smile faded. Her home was probably being looted right now, though it seemed to matter less than she’d thought it would. You didn’t love things, you loved people.
The next question would be very difficult. “What… what happened to my grandfather’s body? Do you know?” She couldn’t bear to think of the old man, all his learning and wit mashed to nothing by booted feet, and his frail old bones tossed in an unmarked grave. Her body, she knew from the vision, had been taken to Petru, a thought that made her shudder. What he’d done with it she might never know.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, no. But I overheard Saskia and Kai whispering about pooling their money and buying his body back, should anyone admit to having it. And then seeing to his placement in your family’s burial ground.”
“Our crypt. We have a crypt.” Sorrow was a heavy weight, like stones holding a soul close to those who loved it. Poor old Saskia, how red her eyes must be by now. “He gave his life for mine, Akil. He knew he’d be killed for what he did.” Josef must have learned that Petru was after her that very night. And her mother too. Had Ragna experienced visions of her death too?
She remembered her grandfather’s triumphant laugh, which was probably what earned him the sword in his belly, and bared her teeth at the sky and the vicious Gods who dwelt there. Perhaps she really was free. If so, it was Josef, Count von Svobodá who’d assured it.
She didn’t want to think of her mother’s body. For she was dead now.
Akil let her sit silent for a while, for which she was grateful, but he kept glancing at her. Finally she asked, “What is it? Why do you look at me so?” She should be trying her skill at changing form, trying to fly again.
He dropped his head as if caught peeping through a window, but then he looked directly at her again. For a moment she wondered if he was brave and honest, or merely clever. “You,” he said, “the little boy, appear to be about the same age I was when I first met Miss Carolina Marsh. Perhaps nine or ten years old. I was remembering myself as I was then.”
“What were you like? Do you remember very much?”
His eyebrows rose in a sort of half-grimace. “Unfortunately I do. I think I don’t want to talk about it after all.” He looked away. “It’s just… you are such an innocent. You know nothing of the world.”
At this she bristled. “That’s not true! I know all sorts of things—languages, geography…”
“That’s not what I mean. You can have a head stuffed with facts and still be as ignorant as a kitten. And as easily swallowed up by the dogs you’ll soon find are out there waiting to tear you to bits.”
“Well, they can’t. I’ll fly away. Or I’ll be Freewoman—her arms are so strong, she could kill any dog.”
“You know when I say dogs, I mean men.”
“I don’t fear men.” That was an outright lie. She feared Petru, and she had feared the two scoundrels who had almost ravaged her. But Freewoman could best the likes of them. The Freemen and Women had gods above them, watching and ready to smite any so foolish as to attack them.
But then she wondered whether that divine protection extended to one who was not really what she seemed. Freewoman was an image that might fool a human, but not a God. Would they punish her for her deception?
And why, now that she was in the realm of the dead, did life seem to be going on as normal? Men picked fruit, other men went to war, ordinary little birds chirped overhead. The ordinary sun beat down, and the grit of dust dragged under her fingers.
Akil saw the look on her face, and instead of baiting her into further displays of the ignorance she so hotly denied, got up and pulled her to her feet. “You had better learn to fly, little bird. I won’t carry you anymore.”
She felt a shrinking reluctance, remembering her panic when she’d fallen from the sky. To be so high, with only feathers to sustain her… she had thought herself unafraid of heights.
“How should I do it? How did I do it before? I can’t remember!” Her teeth chattered as she hopped around in the dappled sunlight, tentatively flapping her arms.
“Stop doing that. It looks stupid.” He grabbed her arms and made her stand still. “Just focus. Turn your mind to what you want… close your eyes if it helps. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
Perhaps not the right things. She focused. A bird. A small, insignificant bird. With the soul of an ancient shark… she started to feel a hollowness inside, and opened her eyes.
Akil scowled at her and she closed them again. The hollowness spread, sucking at her belly like hunger. She started to fall, and flailed her arms uselessly, but kept her eyes shut. The hollow blackness increased from the inside out, and shrank her into a tiny fleck of life crouched on the dusty ground. A bit of chaff tossed from a pan of grain. She opened her eyes. Everything was huge and moving around her, and everywhere she saw danger.
Panic at being so exposed sent her springing upward and in an instant she found herself looking down at the treetops.
She was flying. She let out a squeak, her wings beating raggedly. She managed to flutter down and cling to a branch. Akil was looking up at her, grinning like a fool. Damn him.
She let go of the branch and tried again.
Without the slightest grace, she fluttered in a drunken circle and landed on Akil’s shoulder. He looked at her, and grinned, and the size of his big crooked teeth almost made her fall to the earth again. He took her upon his finger and drew her close to place a tiny, careful kiss upon her beak.
She hopped away and found herself Boy again, sprawled on the ground panting.
Akil flopped down beside her and prodded her with a finger as if she were truly a boy, a little brother perhaps.
“Don’t touch me, you, you—”
“Unnatural being? Spawn of Loki? What?”
The dirt she lay upon wouldn’t even sully her skin, which should be sweaty. She could smell things, like the clean dark pine needles above her, and the coppery dirt under her hands. She could smell Akil too, with his comforting scent of oats and stone dust. She remembered when he’d held her close, on the road home, and how she’d felt the strangeness of his resura body. Formed of nothing but dust and air, it wanted to draw her in, use her substance in making his own. It had felt dangerous, seductive, and she knew she must not touch him without awareness of that danger. For her new body would seek to engulf his, just as his did to her.
She should be able to taste things. Last night she had tried chewing on pine needles, which should be astringent and bitter but were not. She’d found some sheep’s sorrel, which normally was tangy as a lemon, but even it had no flavor. She wasn’t hungry, nor was she tired.
If she were tired, she could sleep, and escape this strange new life for just a while.
What if she could never sleep again?
She bit her tongue to keep from crying. This is what I was born and bred for; I must embrace my life as if it were a treasure brought to me in the hold of a vast ship, across seas filled with eight-armed monsters.
She had done it, though. She had flown, and managed to land.
She knew where she must go next.
*
His pain seemed to have drained from him into the floor and away. Somewhere below, in the netherworld, a dark God was eating it.
Eneko’s thoughts drifted to the girl again, as it did more and more. Guilt, sorrow. A grinding regret. At least the scorpion was leaving him alone.
The cat who turned into a man had come and gone, speaking soft, useless words. Yet he’d been heartened and soothed, momentarily.
What was the girl’s name? Daughter to the estimable and rather frightening Ragna Svobodová… how lovely that girl had been. She had liked him, he’d seen it in her eyes and her blushing cheeks. He’d claimed a chaste little kiss from her. He hoped that Valkyrie mother of hers was guarding such a treasure. Vara, that was it. Though his eyes were gone, he still had his memories, supple and gleaming, falling like that girl’s raven hair in strands that thinned and drew out into quavering lines of night-dark. The air was moving around him, hot and then cold, and he shivered.
A nightingale was singing, very close. It must be right outside the window. How soothing it was, to hear the little creature; he could almost imagine he was home, where birds sang all the time.
And then the liquid warble was right there, by his ear, as if the nightingale sang for him alone.
He could almost make out words in the song, but they drifted away. He thought of his mother and the songs she loved to sing, and he thought of that black-haired girl in the mountains, and he thought of the sugared almonds his father brought sometimes from the market… The pain wasn’t nearly so bad now. He didn’t even feel thirsty. And in his eyes were flashes of light, golden and quick, though he thought that couldn’t be so, considering his eyes were gone. Then there was no more pain and no more darkness at all, and in his ears was the sweetest song he had ever heard.
And then he fell into soft white light, as if his eyes had grown back and could see the sun sail forth from the mist. He had his tongue and his voice again, and he sang out an answer to the nightingale.