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Chapter 25: The Sky Hunter Walks

Chapter 25: The Sky Hunter Walks

The thing he built for Nayra was a stick with a hole in it.

It took him most of the night and four failed versions, and what it came down to in the end was a hollow reed set through a fired clay collar that sat in the neck of the storage jar, with a wooden plug on a cord. You lifted the plug, the water came out, you dropped the plug. Nothing went in. No hand, no shell, no mouth.

Oren improved it before breakfast by adding a second collar so the plug could not be lost, which Leon had not thought of and which was the difference between a device and a device that survives a night shift.

Nayra tested it eleven times, marked it with a cross, and did not thank him.

Then she pointed at the salt jar, which was almost empty, and made the sign that had come to mean and now this.

Nineteen cups a night takes salt. So does drying fish for a lean season, and the flood had taken most of what the settlement had.

The seep was a day away, in the west, where the hadrosaurs had been going.

They left at first light. Tala on point, Leon, and two carriers — Sila, who had been at the water station the day the Urukar came out of the river, and a broad quiet man called Bren whose entire contribution to the first hour was to move Leon’s pack strap two centimetres and make everything better.

Aru was not permitted to come and made his position on that known from the platform until they were out of earshot.

The mineral seep sat in a shallow basin below the ridge, where a pale crust had built up around a slow trickle over what must have been centuries. Trampled ground all around it. Trackways of every size going in and out. It was not a secret place and it was not a safe one, and the Retha had a rule about it that Tala explained on the walk with four words and a lot of hand: take, do not stay.

They took. Sila and Bren went at the crust with antler picks while Tala stood on the high side and Leon filled sample bags and thought about how much of a civilisation runs on one soft white mineral.

It went well for a little over an hour.

Then the small birds left the reeds.

Not all at once. In a ragged line, from the north end of the basin toward the south, low and fast and silent, which was the part Leon noticed — that they were not calling.

Tala was already down off the rock.

She did not say a word. She put one flat hand out toward Sila and Bren, low, and they stopped picking mid-stroke, and the basin went quiet enough for Leon to hear the trickle of the seep.

Nothing moved in the reeds.

He counted the exits without meaning to. The way they had come in was a narrow cut between two shelves, forty metres behind them, uphill. To the south the basin opened onto flat pale ground, dry, cracked, open for three hundred metres. To the north, broken rock and thorn scrub going up the ridge. And in every direction the reeds stood two metres high in a ring around the water, and the wind was going the wrong way.

Then he saw it, and his mouth got ahead of everything else.

It was standing in the reeds at the north end, and it was the height of a house.

Long pale neck held stiff and upright. A head easily as long as Leon was tall, ending in a beak like a thrown spear. The wings were folded and it was standing on all four limbs, the great folded fingers making a knuckle at the shoulder higher than a man could reach. Grey and dust-white, banded faintly across the neck.

It had been there the whole time.

"Aertal," Tala said.

Sky hunter.

And Leon — who had read the papers, who had watched the documentaries, who had stood under a cast of one of these in a hall in Frankfurt at eleven years old with his mouth open — felt the entire shape of the problem click into place, wrong.

"It flies," he said. He said it in his own language because he had no way to say it in hers, and then he said the words he did have. "Sky. Up. Open."

He pointed south, at the flat pale ground. Away from the reeds. Away from the cover.

Every instinct he owned said the same thing: get out from under it. A flier hunts by dropping. Give it no reason to come down, and put yourself where nothing can reach you without being seen for three hundred metres.

Sila and Bren looked at Tala.

Tala looked at Leon for exactly one second, and then at the open ground, and then she made a sound he had never heard her make.

"Na. Na."

And Bren had already taken four steps south.

The Aertal came out of the reeds like a fence post deciding to move.

There was no leap. No wings. It simply walked, and it walked the way a marabou stork walks and covered ground the way a horse does, and by the third stride Leon understood that he had been wrong about every part of it.

It did not go up.

It went along the open flat, on all fours, with its head down and level and its stiff neck driving the beak forward like a man carrying a ladder at a run, and it went straight at the moving thing, because the moving thing was in the open where the walking was good.

Bren stopped and turned.

"Down!" Leon shouted, which was a word they had, and it was the wrong word.

Tala’s word was better. She gave three sharp notes on the reed whistle, high-low-high — and then she ran, not away from the animal, but across it, at an angle, toward the broken rock at the north end.

She was making herself the closer target on the worse ground.

Sila got it immediately. She grabbed the salt sack and went after Tala.

Leon got about two seconds behind everyone, which was the two seconds that mattered, and then he ran at Bren instead of at the rocks, because Bren was standing perfectly still on three hundred metres of open floor exactly as Leon had told him to.

The beak came down at forty metres.

Not a snap. A stab, straight down from that stiff neck, into the ground where a small animal had broken cover — and it missed, and Leon saw dust come off the pale crust and a spray of grit go up, and the head came back to level without the neck bending at all.

That was the thing the documentaries had not given him. The neck did not bend. It went up and it went down and it pointed, and the entire animal was a delivery system for a downward strike.

He hit Bren at the shoulder and put both of them into the dirt.

"Na," Leon said into the man’s ear, holding him flat. "Na. Sha."

Wait. Remain still.

It was Tala’s word, from the second day, and it was the only piece of advice he had that was worth anything, and he had got it from her.

The Aertal came on for another eight strides and then stopped, and stood over them at a distance Leon could not honestly estimate afterwards and refused to estimate at the time, and turned its head sideways to bring one eye down.

It was not a monster. It was a very large animal walking a floodplain looking for things it could swallow, and it had come to check whether these two were among them.

Leon lay in the dust with his arm across Bren’s back and did not move and did not look at it.

Somewhere north, Tala hit two rocks together, hard, four times.

The head came up.

Then the Aertal turned, unhurried, and went after the noise on the broken ground, and got about fifteen metres into the thorn scrub before it discovered what Tala had known since she was a child, which is that four metres of wingspan and a stiff neck are a disaster in dense cover.

It stopped. It shuffled. It made a low grinding call that Leon felt in the ground.

Then it backed out, walked to the far side of the basin, and stood in the reeds again, and became a dead tree.

They came out through the narrow cut, uphill, one at a time.

Bren had a tear across his shoulder blade forty centimetres long where the thorn scrub had taken him on the way through, and he had it because Leon had put him on the ground in the open and then dragged him the fast way instead of the clear way.

Sila had the salt sack. Roughly half of it. The rest was on the basin floor where she had dropped it to get her hands free.

Nobody said anything for the first kilometre.

Then Tala stopped, took Leon’s half of the register out of his pack without asking, and held it up.

"Say."

He said it. He told her what he had thought, in the words he had, which was: sky, up, come down. He drew it in the dirt — the wing shape, the drop from above, the open ground where you can see it coming.

Tala listened all the way to the end.

Then she rubbed it out with her foot and drew it again properly.

The reeds. The animal standing in them. The long walk on four legs. The beak going down into the ground like a pick. And the open flat, marked with a cross.

"Aertal," she said. And then she pointed at the sky, and then at the ground, and said two more words, and Sila supplied the gesture for come from — and Leon finally heard the name correctly.

Sky hunter. Because it arrives from the sky.

Not because it hunts there.

They had named it for the thing you see first. He had heard the name and let it confirm what he already believed, and then he had put a man in the middle of three hundred metres of open ground and told him it was the safe place.

"How long," he said. "You know. How long."

Tala shrugged, which he was fairly sure was not a Retha gesture and which she had picked up off him in nine days.

Always. Everyone knew. It was not knowledge on this river, it was weather.

He wrote it up on the terrace that night, with Bren’s shoulder packed and dressed behind him and Nayra’s opinion of the whole expedition being expressed at length to Kharun.

Book One, in Tala’s half, in her marks:

Aertal. Seen. Stands in reeds without moving. Walks on four. Neck does not bend. Strikes down. Fast on flat ground, useless in rock and thorn. Goes to what moves. Does not go up.

Every line with the dot inside a circle beside it.

Book Two, his half, small, in the corner where nobody could read it:

Azhdarchid. Quetzalcoatlus-grade. Terrestrial forager, not an aerial hunter. Museum posture wrong, documentary behaviour wrong, my model comprehensively wrong.

And beside that one he drew the scouts’ curved line, and then, after a moment, drew it again, twice as large.

He looked at the two pages for a while.

Then he turned back to Book One and added the only line in either of them that had been paid for.

Bren. Shoulder. Because I said open ground.

Behind him, Nayra stopped talking to Kharun.

Leon heard her come across the boards and stop at his shoulder, and he waited for it, because he had earned it and because she had never once let anything go.

She did not say anything at all.

She reached past him, took the charcoal, and put a cross beside the Aertal entry.

Tested.

Then she went back to her patient, and Leon sat in the dark with a book that had one confirmed fact in it, and understood exactly what it had cost to get.