139 - We Can Be to Lainz in a Week

The storm blew itself out in four more days and when Ky woke with a groan and found Hara already up, pulling her shirt on, everything had changed.  The air pressure was gone, the alternate bulging and buffeting, the push and pull of pressure in the caverns was no longer making his eardrums pop and the fluid in his head oscillate.  The headache was gone.

“Is it over?”

She smiled at him and came over to kiss him.  “I think so.  If that’s the case we have to get going.  The Emir-al is going to be running around like a headless warbird to get our surviving birds together with the new ones and get our kulu on the road.”

“Asses, all of us.”

She brayed and reached under the bed for her discarded trousers.

**

Quanat had begun digging out, even as the wind began to drop in the middle of the night, so that by the time the air over their hidey hole was still as set resin, they’d dug out the roof windows so they could be opened, the gates were clear of sand as well and someone had already gotten the Amir out to fetch their stranded birds.

The light was strange in the aftermath of the storm, a coppery tone to the air, making every Terran green thing unearthly bright, as Hara and Ky came up the gate road, blinking at everything as their eyes adjusted.

“You’ve got your packs?”  Ilax was there with their things already saddling a fractious bird, hissing and clawing at the air even though the hood was on tight.  He ducked under a claw strike, hooked the goad into the chain and pulled the bird’s head down.  “I know, you’ve been ready to go for days.  Like this fellow.”

“If we push,” the Emir-al said over his bird’s backside, as he tested the saddle straps, pulled feathers out from under, “We can be in Lainz in a week.”

Most of the village was turned out around the saddling yard, their veils of sand yellows and orange like the vegetation. No one wore a third veil out here when there was no need so you could easily see their eyes and who they were watching.  Kyrus and Ky mostly, it seemed, though the exotic Milari were whispered about.

 

Ky finished strapping his gear onto his new bird, looked over at the funeral cortege that the Quanat 'kulu were putting together.  Zon Pirzifon’s body was going home in style, with Maya to escort him back. Da and Stepda had arranged for that, while the storm raged and someone had gone out to see if there was a body left the moment the wind dropped.  They’d done the Milar memorial, while cooped up, taken up a stone and named it... painted it with his name, rubbed it with ashes and water, in case they didn’t find him.  Since they’d found his body to take back to Milar, it would stay here in their memorial wall that was really a stack of rocks; though Lainz didn’t paint or smear the stones, they just named them and set them up.

The birds for the cortege were black, even legs and beaks.  The shroud was smaller than it should have been.  Though he’d died falling into the sinkhole the flensing storm had been strong enough to reach down and pull part of him away into the sky with it.  His body had been half cleaned of flesh and the smaller exposed bones were just gone, though his head covered by sarband and veil were untouched.

I’ll miss you, Pirzifon.  You taught me a lot.  You saved me.  Fly home, teacher.

“We need to go now, everyone set?”  That was da with Elemfias next to him and the Quanat headman and Emir of the northern reaches on his other side.  Both of them had things they still wanted to say to the new Brilliance, quietly as people mounted up.

He finally nodded at them, caught the Emir-al’s eye and the Amir bellowed.  “Commanded!  Let us move.”

Everybody salaamed once, twice, three times as their birds paced up the road all the way outside, some of the more daring kids waving feathers after them.