Dieter Mayaguez, nine years old, heard singing in the sky. The sun dazzled him when he looked up. His sheep shifted to left and right down the steep hill pasture as a shadow that might have been an eagle's came out of the sun and raced up along the grass.
Dieter saw, a sling's throw high in the air, a girl wrapped in a long dark-blue coat, singing as she sailed along the rise of the hill's slope. She flew sitting upright, yellow-booted legs crossed beneath her. A curl-brimmed, blue hat was secured with black ribbons tied in a bow under her chin.
She held something across her lap, and flew slowly, steadily over him and away, her coat's cloth ruffling as she went higher… then higher, to cross the ridge.
Dieter could still hear her singing. It was a song he didn't know. 'Mairzy doats… dozy doats…'
Excited, he did a little dance in frost-browned grass. – Certainly a Boston person! He would tell everybody, though only his mother would believe him. People were always saying they saw Boston people, and usually were lying. Now he really had seen one, but only his mother would say it must be true.
The sheep – so stupid – baaa'd and began to scatter. Dieter yelled, ran to circle them and hold the ram. If his father had given him the dogs for high pasture, he wouldn't have to be running after the fools.
A shadow came out of the sun – and he thought for a moment it was the singing girl come back. But this was a much bigger shadow…
Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley, her song ended, settled into herself and Walked-in-air over the hills – that 'pushing the ground away and behind' that fools called flying, as if fine-family New Englanders were birds with wings.
True wings, an occa's, were following her, carrying her strapped baggage-packs and Webster's basket. An occa stupid as all of them, but still an impressive result of mind-work on some debtor woman's fetus. Cambridge-made in Cambridge Laboratory, Harvard Yard…
Patience closed her eyes a moment to better feel the slopes and outcroppings a hundred or so Warm-time feet beneath her. She felt them rumble and bump, rough as she went over. But so much soldier, so much better than the Gulf's shifting surface had been, its waves wobbling below her as she went. That had been uneasy traveling – as had the whole several weeks of air-walking south from Boston Town, when sailing a packet down and around and up into the Gulf would have been easier.
"Safer, too," her Uncle Niles had said. "But you will go the difficult way, and air-walk – or, by Frozen Jesus, ground-walk – every mile south. It'll be good for you, Patience, knock some of the Lodge-Riley hoity-toity out of you."
Her Uncle Niles loved her, just the same. She was his favorite niece.
And it had been good for her, those weeks of air-walking. The first weeks were on the ice-sheet, then off it and down over warmer snowfields and sedge willow, past caribou ranches and little towns. Air-walking, and when her mind grew tired, ground-walking. Then, the occa, too baggage-burdened for her to ride, had circled overhead, hooting and honking as she strode along.
She'd hunted for herself and the occa when the smoked seal was eaten up, swooping – while remaining mindful of the ground she kept away – to snip the heads off wild turkeys or ptarmigan with her scimitar, to hack the necks of deer. Then landing, settling into snowy woods, she'd gathered dry branches for her fire, started it with her flint and steel… then butchered the meat out while the occa landed, loomed beside her, hobbling on knees – and what would have been elbows, otherwise – and poked at her with its long jaw, whining for bird or venison bones and bowels.
In all those weeks, Patience had been troubled only three times. An ice-fisher had refused to exchange her smallest silver coin for a meal, so she'd had to take two char from him – but only sliced him lightly, so as not to cripple, since property rights were sacred.
Later, while ground-walking through lower Map-Pennsylvania, well south of the ice-wall, she'd been chased up a tree by a hungry black bear. Too startled, too suddenly set upon, to push the ground away for rising in the air, she'd risen from the tree limbs soon enough and left the bear snuffling, clinging halfway up its climb to reach her.
Patience had been troubled those two times, and one time more. Deep in Map-Alabama, almost to the Gulf, she'd fluttered down to kill a woman who'd thrown a stone and almost struck her as she sailed over a hedge of holly.
… The hill ridge thumped beneath her in her mind, and Patience thought-stepped… thought-stepped down the western slope, the wind chilly at her hat's brim, lightly buffeting her face. Her face, charming, absolutely pretty by the judgment of everyone who knew her, was reddened, roughened by the weather of travel. But the inherited bit in the brain, that with training allowed a talented few New Englanders – and the very rare exceptions from other places – to air-walk and also keep warm on the ice, was no use in smoothing one's complexion. It seemed unfair.
Before her, across a wide valley to the west, rose mountains harsher than the Map-Smokies had been. The Sierra. A cold wind flowed down from them, and Patience thought heat and caused it to warm her ears, her gloved fingers… the tip of her nose.
She sailed on, out over the valley – sitting properly upright, her sheathed scimitar held across her lap. It was her joy, a present from her mother on her sixteenth birthday – two years ago, now – and a true Peabody of a thousand doublings and hammerings. She called it 'Merriment,' since it had antic curling patterns flowing in the surface of its steel, and also a modest, amusing style of slicing. She'd killed Teresa Bondi with it in a duel, and Tessie's parents had never forgiven her, said she was cruel, a spoiled brat, and bad.
Patience looked back and saw the occa laboring far behind. It appeared to be holding something in its long jaw.
She stopped in the air – a difficult thing to do – and sat waiting for it, rocking slightly in the mountains' breeze. The occa shied and swung on great leathery wings, with the foot-long toothed jaw and bald knob of its idiot head turned away as if not to see her. It did have something in its mouth.
Patience, impatient, whistled it over, and it slowly sidled toward her through the air, its long bat arms and long bat fingers – supporting a skin-membrane's wingspan of almost thirty Warm-time feet – fiddling with wind currents as it came.
Patience whistled again, made a furious face – and the creature came swiftly flapping through the air to her, wind-burned and whining, its wings buffeting alongside. Her baggage duffels and Webster's basket were strapped to its humped back. A sheep's leg hung bleeding from its jaws.
Patience leaned to rap it sharply on the head with her scab-barded sword, and dipped a sudden few feet as her concentration faltered, so she had to recover. "Drop!… Drop!" The creature was getting too fat for good flying as it was.
The occa muttered what was almost a word.
"Drop it!"
The sheep's leg fell away through the air. The occa bent its awkward head to watch it go.
"Now," Patience said, "you fucking fly. And keep up!"
"Signals say company's coming!" Margaret Mosten's round pleasant face appeared beside the tent flap. "From the Say-so mirror, far south slope."
Sam sat up. "What sort of company?"
"Wings." Margaret seemed not to notice the leather vodka flask lying on the floor beside the cot, the squeezed rind of lime from far south. "Some Boston flier, presumably. With winged item following.".
"From McAllen."
"Likely; they've been wanting to send someone down." Margaret watched him with concern. She'd never mentioned his drinking, never would. But twice – when traveling, not on campaign – he'd drunk from his saddle-flask to find the vodka and lime juice gone, replaced with water.
Sam swung off the cot. "What a pain in the ass." It was a Warm-time phrase out of copied books almost five hundred years old, a phrase that had become popular in the army. Too popular, so rankers were now forbidden to use it in reference to orders.
Sam stooped to pick up his sword belt… and had to steady himself, which Margaret appeared not to notice. "Where?"
"Michael Sergeant-Major is waving the thing in to the football pitch."
"Alright." Looping the belted sword over his right shoulder to rest aslant down his back, he followed Margaret out into an afternoon he found too bright for comfort, and cold with Lady Weather's commencing fall into Lord Winter's arms.
The camp was seething like cooking Brunswick at the flier's coming, but soldiers settled down along Sam's way, sensitive as girls to their commander's mood – many recalling duty elsewhere.
Football, the army's sport even in marching camps of war – though some said it was old Warm-time rugby, really – had been marked to be played just south of horse-lines on a stretch of meadow softened by cold-killed grass. The field, already enclosed by dismounted heavy cavalry, had been cleared of all except Michael Sergeant-Major, Margaret Mosten's man, who stood in the center of it waving a troop banner for a landing mark.
Sam saw a formed file of the Heavies' horse-archer squadron had arrows to their longbows. The bows, their lower arms curved short for horseback shooting, were half-raised, arrows nocked. He nodded that way. "Whose orders?"
"Mine," Margaret Mosten said.
"Quiver those arrows." He walked out onto the football field, looked up, and saw a figure high against the blaze of the sun. Didn't have to come out of the sun. Making an entrance.
"The thing's above." Margaret had come out to him. She was carrying one of the Heavy Infantry's crossbows, wound, cocked, and quarreled. "My privilege, sir," she said, as he noticed it. "Look there…"
High above the small human figure sailing down to them in silhouette – perhaps a woman, perhaps not – a larger thing wheeled and flapped.
Soldiers murmured at the edges of the field.
"Silence!"
Their commander's mood confirmed, murmuring ceased.
In that quiet, the soft sound of cloth breezing could be heard. In dark-blue greatcoat and dark-blue hat, the Boston person – certainly a woman – sailed down, sailed down… and settled with no stumble on the ground. She held, sheathed in her right hand, a slender curved scimitar, and was smiling.
"Mountain Jesus," Margaret Mosten said. "She's a baby."
"Clever." Sam smiled to match the visitor's, and went to meet her. He was still drunk, and would have to be careful.
The woman – the girl – had a white face, wind-roughened but beautiful, oval as an egg. Black hair was drawn tightly back under the blue curl-brimmed hat, and her eyes were also black, dark as licorice chews. Sam noticed her gloved hands were fine, but what could be seen of a slender wrist was corded with sword-practice muscle.
The girl was smiling at him as if they were old friends – apparently knew him from description. "I thought I had another day or two to walk to Better-Weather, but then I saw your camp, and said to myself, 'Ah – there's been fighting! So surely there the Captain-General will be.' " She made a little curtsy as a lady might have done south, in the Emperor's court, then took a fold of heavy white parchment from her coat, and handed it to him.
"I'm instructed to serve the Lord Small-Sam Monroe as the voice of New England, at his pleasure of course. Ambassadress." The girl dwelt on the final s's and made a sudden face of glee.
"From McAllen?"
"No, lord. Second-cousin Louis is superseded. I come down from Harvard Yard directly to you… Poor old Cousin Louis; he'll be furious." She spoke a very elegant book-English.
"I see."
There was a spatter of dried blood down her long blue coat.
She saw him notice it. "Travel stains of the travel weary – I walked all the way down."
Walked, Sam thought, and walked in the air… Still, from Boston-in-the-Ice to North Map-Mexico – alone and in however many weeks – was remarkable. And New England's first mistake, to let him know she was remarkable. They should have sent her by ship.
He read – in black squid ink on fine-scraped hide – the submission of Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley's service as go-between (and Voice of the Cambridge Faculty and Town Meeting) to 'the person Small-Sam Monroe, presently Captain-General of North Map-Mexico'… The 'presently' being a good touch.
"Am I accepted?" She had a girl's fluting voice, as free of vibration as a child's.
"For the present." 'The present' being a good touch.
"Then, my baggage?" the ambassadress pointed up into the air. "So, soon I will be out of my stained coat."
"Call the thing down," Sam said, and raised his voice to the troops. "Stand still, and keep silent!" The shouting hurt his head.
The girl looked up, put two fingers into her mouth, and whistled as loud as he'd ever heard it done. That hurt his head, too.
From high… high above, came a distant hooting, a mournful, uneasy sound. The troops shifted in the sunshine, and sergeants called them to order. They were looking up at what slowly circled down, sweep by sweep on great wings, making its low worried noises.
Sam didn't look up. Margaret Mosten watched the Boston girl.
Slow sweeps, slow descending, so the girl put her head back and whistled again. Sam's head throbbed. Fucking vodka – and the wrong day to have drunk it.
Then the thing came swooping in, wings sighing… the sighs turning to thumps of air as it beat the hilltop's wind to slow… hang almost stationary over their heads in heavy flappings, and finally – as the girl stamped her booted foot and pointed at the ground – come down in a collapse and folding of great bat's wings. It folded them once, then again, so it fell forward on what should have been elbows, and crouched huge, hunched, and puffing from exertion or uneasiness. Its body was pale and freckled – smooth skin, no fur – its neck long, wattled, and odd. But it was the head made the troops murmur, no matter what the sergeants ordered.
Sam stayed standing close by an effort, and looked at a toothed thin-lipped jaw almost long as a man's arm, a round bare bulge of skull with human ears, and eyes a suffering woman's tragic and beautiful blue. A pair of little shrunken breasts dangled from the creature's chest.
The Boston girl went to the thing, made soothing puh-puh noises to it, and began to unbuckle its heavy harness. The wide leather straps were difficult to deal with, stiff with wetting and drying.
Sam stepped beside her – heard Margaret grunt behind him – and leaned against the thing's flank, warm and massive as a charger's, to work a big buckle free. The creature smelled of human sweat, its skin smooth from crease to crease, and damp with the effort of flying.
"What have you done?" he said, not a question he would have asked without the vodka.
But the girl understood him.
"Oh" – she patted its hide – "we make these… Persons from beginning babies, inside tribeswomen, or New England ladies who won't be responsible, fall into bad habits, and don't pay their debts." She tugged a second strap loose, then stepped aside so Sam could lift two heavy duffels and a shrouded wicker basket down from the thing's hunched back.
Something rustled in the basket.
"Weather be kind…" Michael Sergeant-Major came and shouldered Sam aside, bent to pick up the baggage. "Sir, where do you want these?" There was sweat on the sergeant-major's forehead.
"Set a tent for the lady. East camp, beside Neckless Peter's, I think. Tent and marquee, camp furniture."
"Canvased tub-bath," Margaret said. "Canvased toilet pit."
Sam turned away, and the Boston girl came with him in quick little steps alongside, the long blue coat whispering. She smelled of nothing but the stone and ice of the high mountain air she'd walked through.
"How are we to keep that sad thing, lady?"
"Call me Patience, please, Lord Monroe; since we'll be camp-mates. I don't keep her; I send her home."
"Home… And it goes all that distance back?"
"Oh, yes. Its mother is there. It will wander a few weeks… but get to home hutch at last."
"Its mother?"
"Occas always rest in their mothers' care."
"Nailed Jesus…"
"May I change the subject – and ask, are you always so sad at your soldiers' dying?"
Sam stopped. "What did you say?"
The girl smiled up at him, her right hand resting at her side, casually on the grip of her scimitar. "I thought you must be sad for the soldiers I saw being buried below me, to be drunk so early in the day. It proves a tender heart."
Margaret had come up behind them. "You mind your fucking manners," she said to the Boston girl, "or we'll kick your ass right out of here. Who are you to dare – "
"Let it go, Margaret," Sam said. Then, to the girl:
"Still, not a bad idea to mind your manners, Patience… or I will kick your ass right out of here."
"Oh, dear. I apologize." The girl curtsied first to him, then to Margaret. "It will take us a while to learn to know each other better." She snapped her fingers at Michael Sergeant-Major, and he led her away, bent beneath the weight of her baggage and basket.
When she was a distance gone, Sam began to laugh. It hurt his head, but was worth it for the pleasure of first laughter since coming down to This'll Do.
"Nothing funny there," Margaret Mosten said.
"Wouldn't want her for a daughter, Margaret?"
"Sir, I would take a quirt to her if she were."
"Mmm… It's interesting that the New England people sent us such a distraction. I wonder, to distract us from what?"
"If necessary," Margaret said, " 'distractions' can have regrettable accidents. And that blood on the coat – 'travel stains.' "
"Yes… See that people are careful with her. She carries to fight left-handed or with both hands. And there're parry-marks on the hilt of that scimitar – but no scars on her face, no scars on her sword arm when she reached up to undo the thing's harness." Salutes from the two cavalrymen guarding his tent. One of them had eased the chain catches on his breastplate slightly.
"Johnson Fass."
"Sir!" A more rigid attention by Corporal Fass.
"Getting too fat for that cuirass?"
"No, sir." Hurried fumbling to tighten the catches.
"If we had a sudden alarm, Corporal, and you mounted to fight with that steel hanging loose on your chest, then one good cut across it with a saber or battle-ax would break your ribs like pick-up sticks."
"Won't happen again, sir."
Sam walked on. The young commander had spoken – unheard, of course, by the hundreds of dead buried beneath the hill. He wondered how many such disasters it would take, before the corporals stopped saluting…
"About our guest, Margaret; I want people mindful that if she kills someone, I can only send her away. And if someone kills her, it means difficulty with Boston. So, no attempted love-making, no insults exchanged, no discourtesies, no duels on duty or on leave. Let the officers know that's an order."
"Too bad," Margaret said, "because it's going to be a temptation. What the fuck do those New Englanders have in mind, sending us a girl like that?"
Sam stopped by his tent's entrance. "What they first had in mind, was to make us wonder what they had in mind."
"Right."
"And Margaret, I thank you for not mentioning it was a bad beginning, for her to find me drunk… Now, I need some sleep. And Lady Weather keep the Second Regiment's dead from visiting my dreams."
He put back the tent's entrance flap, and ducked in.
Margaret started to say, "They would never – they loved you," but Sam was gone inside. And just as well, she thought. My foolish mouth would have hurt him more.
No lost cavalry troopers came to his dreaming.
Sam dreamed of being a boy again in their mountain hut… and his Second-mother, Catania, was reading to him from an old copybook traded out of the south for twenty sheep hides. She read to him often, fearing he might take to the mountains' signs and tribe-talk instead of book-English.
"'… There were a few foreign families come to the prairie, Germans, Baits, Hungarians. But they were not felt as foreign as they might have been in cities or small farming towns, since all of us had come to the prairie as foreigners to it, so in Western-accented English or Eastern English or Southern English – or in English hardly English at all – we made do together, and were Americans.
In time, we were to master the rough grasses, the black earth beneath, though it cost us all our lives to do it. The sky we never mastered. We were too small, too low. We were beneath its notice.
… One Sunday, we took the wagon the long, rutted road to church, and in church, in the last row of benches, I saw for the first time a sturdy, small, blond little girl, her hair in braids. She was wearing a flour-sack dress with little blue blossoms on it – not as nice a dress as my sister's – and she was to become my friend.'"
His Second-mother stopped reading then, and put the top-sewn copybook away. Her eyes, in the dream, were the gray he remembered; the scar down her cheek as savage; her hair was white as winter.
"What happens?" Sam asked her.
"Sweetheart, always the same things happen," his Second-mother said. "Happiness is found… then it is lost… then perhaps found again. And the finding, the losing, and the perhaps, is the story."
…Sam woke, saying, "Wait!" aloud – though for what, he wasn't certain.
A voice from outside and a courteous distance said, "Sir…?"
Sounded like Corporal Fass.
Sam called, "Just a dream, Corporal," and got up off his cot.
There was no more time for mourning, for considering his stupidity in sending a man like Ned Flores to lose a fight. No time for more vodka. The young Captain-General, that almost-never-defeated commander, must get back to work.
Ned wouldn't much mind the missing hand. He'd have a bright steel hook made, to wear and flourish with a piratical air, like the corsairs in that most wonderful of children's Warm-time copybooks.
Sam stepped outside the tent. Afternoon, and the morning wasted. "Fass!" What in hell was the other man's name?
"Sir?"
"Colonel Voss to report to me."
"Sir."
"The Rascobs as well."
"Sir – the brigadiers rode out of camp a while ago. Rode north."
And no good-byes. The old men were still angry. And were about to be made much angrier.