For a moment Benabe's face looked hard, and Kelis thought she might lash out as she had done in their first days of travel. "I want her to live. Live and be happy, and I hate the world for making that hard for her."
"Cousin, your daughter does seem happy. Listen to her laughter."
Benabe did, and then said, "That comforts you, doesn't it?" She did not wait for his answer but stepped away before he could respond.
The next day they began the ascent.
Or they intended to begin the ascent. They looked at the looming barricade before them and strode toward it. Kelis measured his strides, already trying to use his legs efficiently, knowing that he might soon have Shen's weight to bear. It was there, in the muscles of his thighs, that he first knew something very strange was happening. Though they entered the foothills and soon the mountains, though by midday they could look back and see the plains dropping away behind them, though all around them were inclines above and ravines below and though they went around boulders and over ridges and intentionally sought the easiest passes upward-despite all the physical signs…
"Does this feel strange to you?" Kelis whispered to Naamen, drawing him back as Benabe and Shen led the way.
The younger man stood a moment, taking in the terrain, rubbing the elbow of his small arm with the palm of his other. "We're not climbing," he pronounced.
And that was exactly what Kelis had been thinking. His legs, which knew well the burden of carrying his body, were not feeling the strain of ascending. From what they could see, they seemed to have ascended several thousand feet, and yet not even Shen breathed heavily as she skipped forward, chatting with her mother.
"We are looking for sorcerers," Naamen added, shrugging and walking again. "Perhaps finding sorcery is a good sign."
They camped that evening near a small stream beside a copse of acacia trees. Kelis would normally have worried about their dwindling supplies. They had little more than roots and dried fruits and a few twists of oryx meat. But there were more disturbing things to consider-details, small ones but as disturbing as these mountains. How had the air grown so cool and moist? How, in southern Talay, had they come across a shallow stream of clear water rippling over white stones? At first the thickness of the trees was strange enough. From a distance, they were lovely to behold, signs of life and abundance they had left behind miles and miles ago.
But as he sat studying them he noticed other things. The thorns were savagely long. Their leaves had a strange look to them, green on one side, a dull gray on the other, veinless and as blank as paper. Their limbs did not curve with the natural lines of most acacias. Instead they bent like the joints of age-twisted fingers, with bulbous knuckles. Though he had commented on the trees when he first saw them, the more he sat near them, the more he wished to be up and moving. Shen, he felt, should not look too closely at them.
The next day they dropped into a lush valley crowded with trees and long-grassed meadows. Marshy ponds spotted the flat areas, connected by a web of streams. It was an eerily silent place, just the burble of water in the air. That was it. No insects or animal calls, no sign of life at all. Unnatural.
Barely had he formed the thought when Shen called out, as if in direct refutation of it, "Look, birds!"
A flock appeared from behind them, thousands of them, a mass of black darts that cut into the air, rising straight into the sky. They turned as one and carved a rough circle in the air above. They moved faster than any birds Kelis had ever seen, their wings tight at their sides and not, as far as he could tell, flapping at all. They looked to be in a great rush. Soundless save their motion through the air, they cut away and dropped over the far edge of the valley.
"Come on!" Shen called, tugging her mother forward. "We should follow them."
As they walked through the valley and rose at the far end of it, Kelis had the most vivid sensation yet of feeling the mountains move around them. The rate of their strides did not match the speed with which even the distant peaks slipped away behind them. He even paused to look back and still felt the sensation of moving. Just the sensation, not actual evidence of something amiss. He darted his eyes from one area to another, as if he would catch the mountains in the act and shame them. He never quite managed it.
When he rejoined the others, he found them studying something on the ground: a bird, black as a raven but with an insect catcher's small frame and beak, dead-its neck snapped, apparently from impact with the ground. Benabe warned Shen not to touch it, but the girl showed no sign she intended to. They all stood staring for a time. Not too long, for the more they looked, the less the bird seemed like a bird. Kelis was sure its wings had been fixed in position, stiff as the gliders he had carved from wood as a boy. Its eyes were blue, the exact color of sky and so striking against the dead black of its plumage.
It was just the first. As they walked on through that day and then another and then several more, the ground and rocks and slopes all around them grew more and more littered with broken bodies. New flocks rose up behind them every so often and charted their way forward. Each valley brought new displays of the dead, and each morning's flock seemed less numerous or vigorous than the first. They were not true birds, Kelis knew. They were sorcery, like everything in these mountains, beautiful yet malformed.
It may have been the strangeness of the mountain terrain, the fatigue of their daily marches, or the workings of the magic so obviously woven in the world around them, but Kelis found his dreams becoming more vivid, crystal clear in a manner they had not been in many years. Often he relived episodes from recent days, altered in some way. Thus, the walk that took up his days stretched into the sleeping hours. In one dream the crumpled bodies of those birds rose from the ground and tried to fly again, their heads swinging wildly from their broken necks, wings crooked and shattered. They danced, leaping again and again, only to twirl back to earth, tiny bones snapping and feathers littering the ground. Another night he started awake, thrashing his arms and legs as he fought to escape the trees that had suddenly reached out their warped limbs and grabbed him.
And then came a night-long dream of a real evening from years before: the womanhood ceremony he and Aliver had participated in just after earning manhood rights themselves. He relived the entire evening in slow detail. As one of the newly established males, he danced with the other young warriors from all the central villages-Aliver among them-in the slow procession that wound them around and around the circle of admiring young women. The drums beat a steady rhythm, into which darted the plucked metallic bursts of thumb instruments. It was a long ceremony, and it was here again in his dream. He relived each step, each jump, each clap and smile and toss of his head, all done at the same time as the other men. They glistened with sweat, each lean from running and training, all chiseled to the perfection the Giver first sang into being.
Aliver may have been lighter hued, but in the contours of his body and his movements he was the same as any of the Talayans. Kelis knew where he was each moment of the dance. He took pleasure in it, at times feeling like he and Aliver danced for each other. Their eyes met often, both flashing smiles when they did so. He knew that Aliver's joy was in the ceremony itself, in anticipation of what was to come and in joy at so completely belonging, but to Kelis there was more to it. Part of the joy for him was in the awareness that-should Aliver wish it-anything could happen between them. No intimacy would be too much, no pleasure one Kelis would turn away from. It was an attraction he felt for no other man, and yet something about it felt right, full and complete and sublime in a manner different from his attraction to women. It could lead to anything.