5.

Wings Wide Open

AGH 3 · Requiem City

At dawn, Mira Kearns's chief worry was the bunting.

She had a length of it caught against her sleeve. The feathers had been dyed blue and silver, and someone had taken considerable trouble to make them alternate. A boy on a ladder held the other end while the under-clerk from the Lord Steward's office consulted a drawing that represented the Processional as a straight line. Behind him, the actual street bent around a building that had survived everything anybody had lately done to it.

“That one goes across,” he said.

“I understand where it goes.” Mira lifted the feathers off her cuff. Blue came away on the cloth. “I'm asking you not to put it there.”

“It won't touch their heads.”

“That's not the difficulty.”

The boy shifted on the ladder. She lowered her voice, which made the clerk lean closer and look still more like a man being asked to settle a dispute about taste.

“A molted feather, freely given, can be a mark of very deep regard. These have been taken from somewhere, dyed and strung up by the thousand. We don't know how that will look to the people walking underneath them.”

“They're bought feathers.”

“Yes.”

He studied her. She could see him waiting for the part of the objection that would justify sending the boy down.

“The ambassador has feathers,” she said. “So do several people who'll be coming with the mission. Would you hang locks of hair along the route?”

The boy looked down at her with interest.

“There was no mention of hair in the order,” the clerk said.

“There was no mention of feathers in mine.”

He offered to put this length behind the musicians. It was a fair offer, if she had only wanted the decoration somewhere else. Mira nearly accepted before she looked along the street. The next garland was already up. Beyond it, blue and silver moved against the brightening sky.

“Leave it loose for a moment,” she told the boy. “Please.”

He lowered his arm gratefully.

The clerk had done the lettering beautifully. Even the temporary signs had consistent margins. Mira had spent two years handing people careful explanations and receiving beautiful lettering in return.

At twenty-six she had gone to the crossing-camp as a merchant-house clerk whose gift for languages had mainly earned her more correspondence. She had stood at the rope and watched a raccoon in a gray suit trying to get a crate taken to the correct tent. Everybody around her had been watching him hold the clipboard. He had been explaining, with diminishing patience, that the tent with the broken guy rope was the wrong tent. The person carrying the crate had nodded and continued straight toward it.

She had begun by learning the words. They had verbs, vanity, accounts overdue, jokes that were less funny when explained twice. Under the words ran another language: an ear held at a particular angle, the whiskers drawn back, a wing settling before an answer. A raven clerk had spent an evening teaching her the eleven silences. She had mistaken the fourth for tact. He had told her it was boredom, which had made her ask how long he had been using it on her.

He had used it again.

She wanted today to go well for him, too, although he wasn't coming. She wanted the people who had helped her to be able to ask how the ceremony had gone and receive an answer about something besides spectacles and feathers.

“May I see what you sent the watch?” she asked.

The clerk's expression eased. A document was something he could produce. He opened his case and took out a half-page, folded once.

Mira unfolded it.

There were the names, correctly spelled. There were the titles. There was the instruction not to approach the visitors suddenly, followed by a sentence explaining that they communicated partly through posture.

She turned it over.

“Where's the rest?”

“That's the security copy.”

“I gave you six pages.”

“There were details the watch wouldn't require. The descent of the third house, for instance.”

“The lineage. Where's the passage about the wings?”

He looked at the half-page in her hands, though she had just read it.

“Captain Stroud has been advised about posture.”

Mira folded the paper along its existing crease. She had rehearsed the titles until her landlady struck the wall. She had persuaded an official that the elderly ambassador's request to stand under open sky was a serious condition of his presence. She had gone over the presentation with the visitors until Deputy Burnham could have delivered her instructions back to her with a fair imitation of her accent.

She had not rehearsed with the guards. The guards belonged to Captain Stroud.

“Where will I find him?”

The clerk pointed toward the Old Bourse.

Behind her, the boy asked whether he should come down now. The clerk told him to finish the line. Mira kept walking, the folded paper becoming soft in her hand.

*   *   *

An hour before the expected ceremony, Stroud offered her water from his own canteen.

She had arrived intending to speak before he could dismiss her. The offer left her with a dry mouth she suddenly had to acknowledge. She took a drink while he moved a small weight off the plan spread on a packing case beside the upper steps. The Bourse doors were closed behind him; the place marked for the delegation lay below them on the paving.

He was younger than she had expected, with a neat beard and tired eyes. His collar had been pressed so hard that its edge caught the skin when he turned. He listened to her description of the half-page without looking over her shoulder for someone more important.

“Sixty,” he said, touching the marks on his plan. “Crossbows divided between the plaza line and the Bourse roof. The king here. Your party comes up here.”

“And the men on the roof received this?”

“The section leaders received it.”

She laid the paper on top of the plan.

“There's something missing.”

“We won't approach them suddenly. It's been understood.”

“They may move suddenly. Or look as if they have.”

He stopped moving the weight.

“At the end of the presentation, the ambassador may make a gesture. A large one. It is the opposite of an attack.”

“What gesture?”

“He spreads his wings.” She extended her arms, and knew how inadequate they looked. “Much farther than this. He bares his chest. The flight muscles go slack. It's called varreth-ka. He is showing where he can be hurt because he trusts the person in front of him not to do it.”

Stroud glanced from her hands to the steps.

“Does he move toward the king?”

“He makes room. Then he stays where he is.”

“How much room?”

“More than a cart's width. Captain, it's going to look enormous. Knowing what it means won't make it look small.”

Below the steps a guard tested the purchase of his boot on the stone. Another adjusted his place to let him do it. Mira had watched men make the same adjustments beside the crossing-camp barriers. A hand would be easy on a cup and then close before a sudden noise had finished.

“What should they do?” Stroud asked.

“Nothing. Stand where they are. Let him finish.”

He took up his order slate.

“Wings. Big gesture. Stand fast.”

He wrote it. Mira watched each word appear.

“The roof as well,” she said.

“The roof as well.” He added the direction. “I'll give it to the section leaders at the turn of the hour.”

“Will you say what it means?”

He looked at the three short instructions, then up at her.

“Trust,” he said. “He's showing trust.”

She nodded. He wrote that too.

He offered her the canteen again. This time she refused because she had water in her own bag, and he smiled at the distinction. She disliked him not at all. She left him with her fuller explanation on his slate and the promise that it would reach the men who needed it.

There were still things she could put right. At the foot of the steps she moved the place marked for the visitors back from a raised joint in the paving. Burnham had complained about that joint during rehearsal. She checked that the attendants understood where the credentials would be set, and returned to the beginning of Kerrath's lineage in her head. The third bridge. The line of librarians. A particular falling cadence that did not mean what a human ear first supposed.

The crack came from beyond the mouth of the Processional.

She turned. A loaded cart had tipped onto one side. For a moment the people nearest it moved the same way together, and the crowd barrier took their weight. A man shouted for help with the wheel. Stroud was already going down the steps, calling a section out of its place.

Mira saw the men move. She saw a runner take the slate, turn toward the Bourse and disappear behind a press of shoulders. Then a trumpet sounded from the street, stopped, and began again with another trumpet awkwardly joining it.

The delegation had arrived.

An attendant caught her eye and pointed with both hands toward the approach. She looked once more for the runner. There was only the moving crowd, the lifted pole of a barrier, the bright rim of a helmet where there had been none before.

Stroud had understood. He was sending the order.

Mira went to meet the visitors.

*   *   *

Burnham saw her first.

“They've moved the pole,” he said.

“The paving joint is clear.”

“Good. I had prepared something to say about it.”

“You said it yesterday.”

“I had improved it.”

He adjusted the edge of his formal coat and looked past her toward the steps. The old badger had grumbled through every rehearsal and remembered every instruction, including the ones the people giving them had subsequently changed. Mira was glad to see him. His presence made the preparations seem like preparations again, things done for this actual morning.

Tobin, the young fox attaché, leaned a little toward her from Kerrath's other side.

“Afterward,” he said softly, “if there is time, you'll show me the play with the three kings.”

“It's the same play as the three queens.”

“You said it was rude to explain that until the hand was over.”

“It was.”

“Then I would like to learn it before I play with the king.”

“You are not playing cards with the king,” Burnham said, without turning.

Tobin straightened. His ears settled into their formal position a little later than the rest of him. The night before he had told Mira that his mother would never believe it: himself, here, carrying a part of history. He had whispered the word as though saying it too loudly might make him sound unsuitable for it.

Kerrath waited for her to look at him before he asked his question.

“The welcome is still in the open?”

“Yes.”

His glance traveled over the steps and up into the clear space above them. An owl the height of a tall man, he wore the sash of his office and small round spectacles. The feathers around his gold eyes had begun to whiten. Mira had heard people in the crowd whispering about the spectacles, then falling silent when the old owl turned his head toward them. They could not seem to choose between being charmed by the detail and frightened by the deliberateness with which he looked.

“We can go more slowly,” she said.

“Can they?”

She followed his attention to an attendant beckoning them forward. The man stopped beckoning when he realized the ambassador had seen him.

“I think so.”

Kerrath made the small settling motion that accepted the answer. They went forward at his pace.

The plaza had been noisy all morning. Now the quiet advanced with them. Mira could hear a belt fitting strike a buckle, the drag of cloth against stone, Burnham's breath at the end of a longer step. Someone behind the barrier said, “Those are his own glasses,” and was hushed by someone else.

Clavadin stood above them on the Bourse steps. He was young enough that the effort to appear at ease was visible in the way he kept his hands still. When Mira took her place and looked up, he gave her a quick, grateful nod. She answered it and turned to Kerrath.

The king began with the prepared welcome.

The first sentence came cleanly into Reach. She had been afraid it would not; in her room, with the wall and her landlady beyond it, she had sometimes crowded the courtesy against the title. Here the spaces fell where they should. Kerrath listened. The small feathers beside his eyes eased, and she had the extraordinary pleasure of seeing an expression arrive exactly where she meant it to arrive.

The king welcomed him by office, by name, and by the place from which he had traveled. He acknowledged the envoys who had already carried work between the worlds. He thanked the delegation for coming to present credentials in person.

Mira gave him all of it. There was no need to improve a sentence or rescue it.

Kerrath answered with his lineage.

She knew the opening, the third bridge of the old city and the long line of librarians. She had practiced finding a dignity in her own tongue that didn't make a place under a bridge sound like an apology. Now, as he spoke, she could hear an emphasis she had missed in rehearsal: not the age of the family, but the continuity of its work. He was naming people whose task had been to keep something usable for the next person.

She shifted a word. The next phrase opened properly after it.

Clavadin leaned forward to hear. A man close to the front of the crowd lowered the child he had been holding up, then bent to repeat something into her ear. The child stopped pulling at his collar.

Kerrath finished one section and paused.

Mira did not translate the pause into an ending.

Beside the steps, the attendant who had beckoned opened his mouth. She lifted one finger without looking at him. Kerrath continued, and the man's mouth closed again. Burnham noticed. One corner of his mouth moved.

The next passage named the office he represented and the work he had been authorized to undertake. Mira held the clauses long enough to hear their relation before giving them to the king. She could feel the years of correspondence in her hands, all the sentences she had hated being asked to make clearer, finally doing something she wanted them to do.

Clavadin asked whether the ambassador had found the journey comfortable.

“Don't ask him about the paving,” Burnham murmured to Mira in Reach.

“The journey was well arranged,” Kerrath said. “The last portion has given us an interesting acquaintance with your paving.”

Mira translated it. Burnham looked profoundly innocent.

The king laughed. So did people close enough to hear him.

“I hope the rest of your visit will be easier on your feet,” Clavadin said. “Would you prefer the supper tables outside as well?”

Mira gave Kerrath the question. He turned his head slightly toward her.

“As well as what?”

“The presentation. The open sky.”

“Ah.” He looked back at the king. “No. I asked for the ceremony here because it is how I wished to stand before you. I have no quarrel with your dining room.”

She translated. Clavadin's shoulders eased.

“I'm glad. I had begun to wonder if we had prepared the whole evening wrongly.”

Kerrath waited while she gave him that. The pause stayed open. Nobody rushed to close it for him.

“Has the food been chosen?” he asked.

“It has.”

“Then I suggest we go where you have put it.”

Mira heard the amusement before she found its shape in her own voice. She gave the answer without dressing it in a larger courtesy. Clavadin smiled, and asked her to convey that he looked forward to the ambassador's opinion of the supper. Burnham's mouth moved again. Tobin leaned forward to catch the reply, his tail briefly forgetting the restraint of the occasion. For a while Mira had no spare attention for the bunting or the men on the roof.

The hand on the plaza clock had moved through eleven minutes when Clavadin left his place.

He came down the steps toward them, smiling as though the distance had become an unnecessary discourtesy. Mira shifted to give him room. Behind him a guard moved, stopped, and found another place for his feet. The careful arrangement on Stroud's plan no longer described the space between the king and his visitors.

“We had heard your people were clever,” Clavadin said. “No one told us you were kind.”

There was no prepared version of that. Mira let the warmth remain and gave it to Kerrath plainly.

The ambassador looked at the young man in front of him. He took his time. Clavadin, who had been about to say something else, waited.

Then Kerrath passed his credential scroll to Burnham.

Burnham's hands closed around the scroll. Kerrath took a step into the clear space and lowered his head.

Mira knew that preparation. Her arms were already coming up as the feathers separated.

She looked up.

On the roofline of the Bourse, a crossbow moved with him.

*   *   *

“Wait!”

Mira was already going forward, both arms up. The wings opened above her.

Even knowing, even having rehearsed it, she had not quite carried its size in her mind. Storm-gray, whitening at the edges; the great flight feathers spreading beyond the space her own body could make. The soft breast was bare. The king had stopped smiling. His head tilted back as the feathers rose over him.

“It's a greeting!” she shouted.

Stroud's voice cracked across hers from the steps.

“STAND FAST!”

Two strings sounded from the roof.

Burnham struck Kerrath at the shoulder. The ambassador turned under the weight of his friend. One bolt tore through the outer web of the wing and drove into Burnham's back. The other hit beside it. For an instant the badger remained upright with his head against Kerrath's shoulder. Then his legs gave way.

He kept the scroll lifted as he fell.

Mira saw Tobin move. He was at the edge of her sight, red fur and the pale front of his formal clothes, running up the steps toward the Bourse doors. A third string sounded, lower and nearer.

She reached him at the Bourse door.

He had fallen on his side. The line bolt had passed through him and buried itself in the wood beyond. It was still moving. She knelt, put a hand beneath his head and said his name because the name was there and there was nothing else she could immediately make herself say.

He did not answer.

She had seen his ear turn toward her so many times while he pretended not to be listening. Now she could feel its weight against her wrist. His mouth was open a little. She moved her hand from his collar because she was pulling at it, as if straightening it might be something he needed.

“Tobin.”

Someone shouted for the weapons to be lowered. Across the plaza the line held. Crossbows remained in the hands of men who had not fired them. One guard near the steps stood with his unloaded bow pointing where Tobin had been a moment earlier.

Mira looked back toward the ambassador.

Burnham was down. Kerrath was partly beneath him, his sash caught under the old badger's coat. The injured wing lay spread over the paving. The credential scroll had come to rest against Burnham's forearm, its lower edge clear of the wet ground.

Clavadin stood on the lowest step, one foot below the other.

Mira could hear her own breath. She tried to make it quieter, as though someone might need to speak. The clock hand continued to move above the plaza.

*   *   *

Kerrath got up.

First his head lifted. Then he freed the uninjured wing from beneath his friend, moving with a care that made Mira think of a rehearsal in which he had refused Burnham's assistance with a step. She had been impatient with the delay then. She could remember precisely where she had been standing.

He tried to draw the injured wing close. It would not come. He stopped trying and put his weight under him another way.

Mira began to rise, keeping Tobin's head supported until she could lower it onto her folded bag. A member of the delegation came beside her and knelt. She let him take her place.

Kerrath stood over Burnham.

He did not turn toward the route by which they had come. He looked at Mira. She went to him until she was close enough to hear without making him raise his voice.

“We will need,” he said in Reach.

His breath stopped. She had the beginning of the translation ready and kept it behind her teeth.

The king approached. Kerrath's gaze stayed on her. Mira lifted a hand and Clavadin stopped where he was.

The ambassador began again.

“We will need…”

She waited. There had been silences in lessons that she had wanted to fill because she knew the answer. The old owl's pain was giving her no answer to know.

“…interpreters.”

She gave the king that word, and the beginning that belonged to it.

Kerrath looked down at Burnham. Mira followed his attention to the scroll. It had been carried all this way to be presented, and Burnham had held it away from the ground while two bolts were in his back.

“Not just of words,” Kerrath said.

She translated.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them he asked for his deputy to be lifted carefully. People were coming now with cloth and a board. Someone asked Mira where they should take him, and she turned toward the other members of the delegation because that was theirs to answer.

She could still feel Tobin's ear against her wrist. She looked at the place beside the door. Her bag was under his head, and one strap had fallen across his chest.

*   *   *

The inquiry lasted nine days.

On the first, Mira was asked to describe the warning she had given. On the second, she was asked whether she had given it clearly. By the time Stroud's slate was set on the table, she had begun bringing her own copy of the full brief so that she would not have to ask someone else to find the passage.

“You watched him write it?”

“Yes.”

“And you were satisfied?”

She looked at the slate. His writing was crowded by the additional word she had asked him to put there. Trust.

“I was satisfied that he'd understood me.”

“But you believed the men had been instructed.”

“I believed the order was being taken to them. I didn't see it arrive.”

The official dipped his pen. She waited until he looked up.

“Those are different things.”

“We understand that, Mistress Kearns.”

He had not put down the second sentence. She watched him add it.

The sequence took most of the nine days to establish. The cart axle had broken before the leaders assembled for the amended briefing. The crowd had pressed out of the intended lane. Two sections had been redrawn to hold it, and men had changed positions while the order was being copied and carried. One of the roof guards had come from the crowd line during the redeployment. The position Mira had looked toward appeared on the amended plan. She learned who had occupied it, and when he had moved there, from the record laid beside it.

The delegation had arrived before the stewards were ready for it. The Reach schedule had been precise; the ceremony arrangements on this side had allowed for a delay no one had explained to the visitors. Stroud's runner was still behind the Bourse, trying to get through a crowd that no longer occupied its planned place, when the trumpets sounded.

Mira heard him describe the obstruction. He stood with his hands flat against his legs. She had last seen him moving away with a message she believed would do its work. Now he was being asked how many people had been between him and a doorway, and whether there had been another way round.

She could not answer those questions for him. She had to sit while he answered them himself.

Stroud did not deny the delay. He said when he had written the order, when he had sent it, and what he had shouted at the steps. He could not say that he had received confirmation from every position, because he had not.

Mira confirmed his shout.

“Before the firing?”

“As it happened.”

“Are you certain?”

She had heard it in the same breath as her own voice. It came back without effort, which she had begun to find particularly cruel. She could not always call up Tobin's exact question about the card game. Stroud's order arrived complete.

“Yes.”

The count was also complete. Two bolts from the roof. One from the line. Three men out of sixty had fired. Fifty-seven had stood fast. The line guard described red movement across the king's flank. On the plan he traced the path Tobin had run toward the steps and the door. Mira watched his finger reach the place where she had knelt.

When she was asked whether that meant the precautions had largely succeeded, she wanted to say no. She could feel Tobin's head in her hands again. The men who had not fired were in that memory too, still holding their weapons.

She set her hand flat beside the brief.

“Burnham took both roof bolts,” she said. “One went through the ambassador's wing first. The bolt from the line killed Tobin. The other men did not fire.”

“That was not quite my question.”

“It's what I can tell you.”

Kerrath's statement arrived with the delegation's account. There were passages Mira could render without looking at the translation she had prepared. At others she had to stop, because she remembered Burnham objecting to a word in rehearsal, and the word still needed answering even though he was gone.

The injury to the ambassador's wing would not wholly mend. That fact occupied one line. Mira read it twice, although there was no ambiguity in either language.

On the ninth day, when the inquiry returned to prevention, someone proposed that future guards should receive a fuller glossary.

Mira opened her brief to the passage about varreth-ka. It was the same passage she had written before the ceremony.

“This needs to reach them,” she said. “And they need to have seen it.”

“A drawing?”

“A movement. In front of them. With someone giving the order while the people beside them move.”

Stroud looked up from his place farther down the table.

“At the positions they'll occupy,” he said.

“And after the positions change.”

The official made a note. This one she could see him making.

What followed belonged to more hands than hers. The governments paid for interpreting posts, and people who had been doing the work around other jobs could be appointed to do it. Response rehearsals put large unfamiliar movements in front of armed bodies before the ceremonial day. Routes and crowd space became part of the preparation, with people responsible for checking where a procession could pass and where a crowd could stand.

Mira worked on the language and the training. She argued over where an interpreter had to stand to see what a particular official could not. Sometimes she won. Sometimes she took the plan back and tried to draw the sightline better.

When her bag was returned, she washed it herself. The strap dried twisted. She hung it up again with a weight at the end, then took the weight off because she needed it for her papers.

*   *   *

Around AGH 33

The words above the Interpreters' College doors were cut in both tongues, and in the creole growing between them.

We will need interpreters. Not just of words.

Mira stood under them with a class while another teacher spoke to one of the students. The student answered before the teacher had finished. His translation was correct as far as it went. He had supplied the last clause from the structure he expected.

The teacher went on speaking.

The student's expression changed. Behind him someone shifted, ready to help. Mira held up a hand, and they let the two of them find their way back into the conversation.

Afterward the student asked whether he should have waited longer.

“What was he doing?” she asked.

He looked toward the other teacher.

“I thought he was waiting for me.”

“Ask him.”

He went across. Mira watched them begin again, without her between them, and moved out of the doorway to let another class pass.

*   *   *

At the treaty table

The addendum was in Kerrath's own claw-script. Mira stood behind the table while the interpreters' place as officers of both worlds was entered into the agreement. Around her, people leaned to see where they would sign.

The old owl had grown white through the facial disc. His injured wing rested at a slightly different angle from the other. When he reached for the pen, he paused to settle his weight, and the official waiting beside him drew back enough to give him room.

Kerrath looked across the table at Mira.

Then, slowly and with care, he spread his wings wide open.

The movement traveled farther than she had prepared herself to see. Even now she could feel the urge to step forward. She stayed where she was. Across the table and along both sides of the hall, the humans stood fast.

Kerrath held the gesture. The damaged wing did not quite match the other, but he kept it open until he chose to close it.

His ear-set changed by the smallest degree.

Progress, it said. Of a kind.