Law of the Broken Earth(62)
The true source of the river was invisible among the sharp peaks and the drifting mist and the clamor of cold, brilliant light, but a silver thread of moisture ran down the stone beside the cottage. This narrow stream fed a tiny alpine meadow surrounding the cottage, as it fed a string of similar meadows on its meandering route down toward the lake that was its eventual destination. The trickle of water sparkled with more than ordinary brilliance in the sun, and in fact it sparkled more than any water had a right to even when the clouds piled up thick around the tips of the mountains, for the nameless river carried something of the wild magic of the mountains down from the heights.
There was little snow this high in the mountains, for the air was too dry. Even so, ice glittered in the shadow of the cottage. Yet the meadow seemed like a cup into which the brilliance and warmth of the sunlit afternoon had been poured, so the meadow was not, in fact, so terribly cold.
A dozen small, hardy brown hens and one white-feathered cock pecked around the cottage, taking advantage of the relative warmth. A long-legged goat with a tawny coat stood in the sun and gazed, with a meditative expression, into the empty vistas below the cottage. Above the cottage, clinging to a broken edge of stone and singing in a voice that rose through the still air like sparks from a bonfire, perched a bird.
The bird was about the size of a common jay, the gray-and-black jay that sometimes ventured up to these high meadows. But this bird was not a jay, nor anything like one. It was feathered in fire. Its head was orange, with black streaked like ash above its black eyes. Its breast was gold, its wings orange and crimson, the long trailing feathers of its tail crimson and gold. When it sang, its throat vibrated and sparks showered down across the ice that glittered on the stone below its perch. When it flew, which it did suddenly, darting high into the sky and then down again and away to the east and north, flames scattered through the air from the wind of its wings.
The bird did not come to the cottage every day. But sometimes, especially on afternoons such as this, when the air was brilliant and still as glass, it came to sing for him. Jos, who had few visitors, liked to think the bird scattered luck as well as fire from its wings. He regarded any day on which it appeared as a lucky day. And he thought, pausing with his hands full of grain to throw out for the hens, that luck would be a good thing, today.
Far down below the cottage, yet well within sight, stood one end of the Great Wall. Jos thought of it that way: the Great Wall. It was impossible not to set that kind of emphasis on it, if you looked down upon it on every clear day. The Wall dominated his world, even more than the jagged peaks of these wild mountains. It was made of massive granite blocks carved out of the heart of a mountain… more than one mountain, for this Wall wove its way from this place to the other end that anchored it, two hundred miles or more to the east. South of the Great Wall lay the wild wooded hills and great fertile plains and rich, crowded cities of Casmantium, where Jos had been born. To the north lay the desert.
The griffins’ desert was nothing in size compared to Casmantium, but from Jos’s vantage, looking down on both simultaneously, this was not perceptible. The desert ran down the far slopes of the mountains and then away farther than sight could discern: red sand and knife-edged red stone; molten light thick as honey and heavy as gold; winds that hissed with sand and flickered with fire. The northern face of the Wall, its desert side, burned with a hard, brilliant flame so bright it was painful to look directly at it. The other face… on the side of earth, the Wall was glazed with ice and veiled with mist. Above the Wall, all the way to the vault of the sky, the air shimmered, for the Wall was more than a physical barrier. It barred the passage of any winged creature of fire or earth as thoroughly as it barred those that were land-bound.
At two points, where the Wall had cracked through, massive clouds of white steam billowed up into the sky.
Judging by the amount of steam, the cracks had not gotten any worse today, Jos estimated. Or not much worse. Was that luck? Or had Kes found something better to do on this day than pry at the cracks, try to pull down the Great Wall, try to burn through to the country of earth? He peered carefully into the burning sky above the country of fire, but he could see no griffins riding their hot, dangerous winds. Perhaps they had all allowed those winds to carry them back into the heart of their own country. Perhaps Kes had gone with them. Perhaps Kes had called up that wind, a wind that would lead her adopted people away from the Wall that constrained them…
More likely the griffins had simply caught sight of a herd of fire-deer and allowed themselves to be distracted. Most likely they would come back soon. If not before sundown, then probably tomorrow.