Windhaven - Страница 47

Evan looked at S’Rella. “I’ll walk you to the road,” he volunteered.

“You needn’t bother,” she said. “I know my way.”

“I’d like to see you off.”

Maris stiffened at something undefined in his tone. “Say it here,” she said quietly. “Whatever it is, you may as well tell me.”

“I’ve never lied to you, Maris,” Evan said. He sighed, and his shoulders slumped, and Maris suddenly saw him as an old man.

Evan leaned back in his chair, but looked steadily into Maris’ eyes. “Haven’t you wondered about the dizziness you feel when you stand or sit or turn too suddenly?”

“I’m still weak. I have to be careful. That’s all,” Maris said, already defensive. “My limbs are sound.”

“Yes, yes, we need have no worries about your legs, or your arm. But there is something else wrong with you, something that can’t be reset, splinted and allowed to heal. I think something happened when you hit your head on the rock. There was some damage inside, to your brain. It affected your sense of balance, your depth perception, perhaps your vision. I’m not sure what exactly. I know so little—no one knows much…”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Maris said in a reasonable tone of voice. “I was dizzy and weak at first, but I’m getting better. I can walk now—you have to admit that—and I’ll be able to fly again.”

“You are learning to adjust, to compensate, that’s all,” Evan said. “But your sense of balance was affected. You will probably learn to adjust to life on the ground. But in the air—an ability you need in the air may be gone now. I don’t think you can learn to fly without it. So much depends on your sense of balance—”

“What do you know about flying? How can you tell me what I need to fly?” Her voice was as hard and cold as ice.

“Maris,” whispered S’Rella. She tried to catch Maris’ hand, but the injured woman pulled away.

“I don’t believe you,” Maris said. “There’s nothing wrong with me that won’t heal. I will fly again. I am just a little sick, that’s all. Why should you assume the worst? Why should I?”

Evan sat still, thinking. Then he rose and went to the corner by the back door, where the firewood was kept. Separate from the logs and kindling were some long, flat boards, leftover lumber that Evan cut up to use as splints. He selected one about six feet long, seven inches wide, and two inches thick, and laid it down on the bare boards of the kitchen floor.

He straightened up and looked at Maris. “Can you walk along this?”

Maris raised her eyebrows in mocking surprise. Absurdly, her stomach was tight with nerves. Of course she could do it; she couldn’t imagine failing such a test.

She rose from her chair slowly, one hand gripping the table edge. She walked across the floor smoothly, not too slowly. The floor did not slip or buckle beneath her as it had that first day. Absurd to say there was anything wrong with her sense of balance; she wouldn’t fall on level ground, and she wouldn’t fall from a two-inch height.

“Shall I hop on one foot?” she asked Evan.

“Just walk along it normally.”

Maris stepped upon the plank. It wasn’t quite wide enough to stand normally, feet side by side, so she had to take a second step at once, with no time for consideration. She remembered high cliff ledges she had skipped along as a child, some with paths narrower than this board.

The board wobbled and shifted beneath her feet. Despite herself, Maris cried out as she felt herself falling to one side. Evan caught her.

“You made the board move!” she said in sudden fury. But the words sounded petulant and childish in her ears. Evan only looked at her. Maris tried to calm herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. Let me try again.”

Silently, he let go of her and stepped back.

Tense now, Maris stepped up again and walked three steps. She began to waver. One foot went over the side onto the floor. She cursed and pulled it back, and took another step, and felt the board shift again. Again she missed it. She lifted her foot back onto the board and took another step forward, and lurched to one side, falling.

Evan did not catch her that time. She hit the floor on hands and knees and jumped up, her head spinning from the exertion.

“Maris, enough.” Evan’s firm, gentle hands were on her, pulling her away from the treacherous plank. Maris could hear S’Rella weeping softly.

“All right,” Maris said. She tried to keep the anguish out of her voice. “There’s something wrong. All right. I admit it. But I’m still healing. Give me time. I will get well. I will fly again.”

In the morning, Maris began exercising in earnest. Evan brought her a set of stone weights, and she began working out regularly. She was dismayed to find that both her arms, not merely the injured one, were sadly weakened by her time of enforced idleness.

Determined to test the air again as soon as possible, Maris had her wings taken to the keep, to the Landsman’s own metalsmith, for repair. The woman was busy with preparations for the impending war, but a flyer’s request was never to be ignored, and she promised to have the damaged struts straightened and restored within a week. She was true to her word.

Maris checked out her wings carefully on the day they were returned, folding and unfolding each strut in turn, scanning the fabric to make sure it was taut and firmly mounted. Her hands fell to the task as if they had never stopped doing it; they were a flyer’s hands, and there was nothing in all the world they knew how to do better than tend a pair of wings. Almost Maris was tempted to strap on the wings and make the long walk to the flyers’ cliff. Almost, but not quite. Her balance had not yet come to her, she thought, though she was steadier on her feet now. Every night, surreptitiously, she gave herself the plank test. She had not yet passed it, but she was improving. She was not yet ready for wings, but soon, soon.

When she was not working, sometimes she walked with Evan in the forest, when he went abroad to gather herbs or tend to other patients. He taught her the names of the plants he used in his work, and explained what each herb was good for, and when and how to use it. He showed her all manner of animals as well; the beasts of the chilly Eastern forests were not at all like the familiar denizens of Lesser Amberly’s tame woods, and Maris found them fascinating. Evan seemed so at home in the forest that the creatures did not fear him. Strange white crows with scarlet eyes accepted breadcrumbs from his fingers, and he knew the hidden entrances to the tunnel-monkey lairs that honeycombed the wild, and once he caught her arm and pointed out a hooded torturer, gliding sensuously from limb to limb in pursuit of some unseen prey.

Maris told him stories of her adventures in the sky and on other islands. She had been flying for more than forty years, and her head was full of wonders. She told him of life on Lesser Amberly, of Stormtown with its windmills and its wharves, of the vast blue-white glaciers of Artellia and the fire mountains of the Embers. She talked of the loneliness of the Outer Islands, hard up against the Endless Ocean to the east, and the fellowship that had once thrived on the Eyrie before flyers had divided into factions.

Neither ever spoke of what lay between them, dividing them. Evan did not contradict Maris when she spoke of flying, nor did he mention any invisible damage to her head. The subject was like a patch of dangerous ground, no wider than a wooden plank, upon which neither was willing to step. Maris kept her occasional dizzy spells to herself.

One day as they stepped outside Evan’s house, Maris stopped him from turning deeper into the forest. “All those trees make me feel like I’m still inside,” she complained. “I need to see the sky, to smell clean, open air. How far away is the sea?”

Evan gestured to the north. “About two miles that way. You can see where the trees begin to thin.”

Maris grinned at him. “You sound reluctant. Do you feel sad when there aren’t any trees around? You don’t have to come if you can’t bear it—but I don’t understand how you can breathe in that forest. It’s too dim and close. Nothing to smell but dirt and rot and leaf-mold.”

“Wonderful smells,” Evan said, smiling back. They began to walk toward the north. “The sea is too cold and empty and big for my tastes. I feel comfortable and at home in my forest.”

“Ah, Evan, we’re so different, you and I!” She touched his arm and grinned at him, somehow pleased by the contrast. She threw her head back and sniffed the air. “Yes, I can smell the sea already!”

“You could smell it on my doorstep—you can smell the sea all over Thayos,” Evan pointed out.

“The forest disguised it.” Maris felt her heart lightening with the thinning of the forest. All her life had been spent beside the sea, or over it. She had felt the lack every morning waking in Evan’s house, missing the pounding of the waves and the sharp salt smell, but most of all missing the sight of that vast, gray immensity, beneath an equally immense and turbulent sky.

The tree line ended abruptly, and the rocky cliffs began. Maris broke into a run. She stopped on the cliff’s edge, breathing hard, and gazed out over the sea and the sky.

The sky was indigo, filled with rapidly scudding gray clouds. The wind was relatively gentle at this height, but Maris could tell from the patient circling of a pair of scavenger kites that up higher the flying was still good. Not a day for rushing urgent messages, perhaps, but a good day for playing, for swooping and diving and laughing in the cool air.