Lords of the Seventh Swarm

Chapter 10

All the past night, the bright star guttered, like a white flame in the sky, outshining the moon and all other stars. Cooharah stared from his roost through the night, measuring the diameter of Brightstar against the width of Ruin’s single small moon with its three bulges. It would have been difficult to roost on such a bright night. The stars themselves seemed dim under the dome of heaven. But Cooharah was not awake without cause. His was a quest that night, an attempt to discover direction from the stars.

Late in the night, near dawn, the path of the moon finally crossed the path of the distant bright star, and Cooharah saw the blazing white corona around the moon where light from the star leaked beyond the horizon of the moon. Cooharah let out a trill of triumph that split the air and reverberated off the rocks below his aerie, blasted over the tangled jungles below. Then he sang softly an ancient Qualeewooh teachsong,

“Bright star flies larger than the moon hurry the day, the hot drenching day. The bone years lie broken, forgotten, like fragments of shell amid our nests.”

Cooharah leapt from the circle of stones where he roosted, and for a while he floated out over the valleys below. A rich tangle of purplish, bush lay far below him, and in the half-light he saw steam seeping up through the vegetation from the warm waters beneath.

A mistwife broke through the tangle, raising her long white tentacles a hundred meters into the air. From high above, the tentacles were beautiful, almost luminous things, waving in the breeze, tenderly probing the upper limbs of trees. But down in the tangle they would be deadly to anything that slept. The mistwife’s strangling grip would pluck razor-fanged slogs from the trees as easily as Cooharah plucked boring weevils from his feathers when preening.

Indeed, as Cooharah wheeled lower over the tangle, he could hear the whistling cries of a hive of sfuz as they scurried over their webs from tree to tree, seeking escape.

Their cries chilled Cooharah, for their whistles of terror were no different from their whistles of hunting, and all Qualeewoohs feared the sfuz. Crafty creatures, deadly hunters with their webs and snares and their quiet stalking. In a few moments, once Cooharah had circled his aerie a few times and was certain that no sfuz were climbing the treacherous cliffs, Cooharah winged his way to his clog; then dived, flapping his wings twice as he neared the opening, then dropping down to grasp the stone lip of his home with his heavy claws.

The cave was dark inside, but Cooharah could smell the warm spicy scent of decaying trammitroon leaves. Beneath it he detected the rich scent of his mate, Aaw, asleep in her nest. Her soft breathing resonated from the stone walls.

Cooharah tenderly went to his love and tapped her forehead, between her eyes, three times with his lower jaw.

It was a gesture of love that he’d never permitted himself to perform before, in all his long life. Aaw’s eyes snapped open, and Cooharah could see them, large in the darkness, a pale salmon in color. She stared at him in surprise.

He tapped her forehead again. “Open, open,” he trilled the ancient words of ritual. “Two become one.”

If Aaw had not been so surprised, she might have lowered her head and nipped the spirit mask on both Cooharah’s cheeks, playing her part in the ancient ritual.

“Are you certain to the fourth degree?” she trilled instead. “The land lies wasted. The dew trees are drying, and we have only rocks to eat.”

It was true. Both Qualeewoohs were starving. The ancient Take where their ancestors had hunted above the tangle was now dry, and the Qualeewoohs’ prey, the skogs, were dying. There might be food aplenty in the tangles out over Ruin’s shallow seas, but such food was impossible to reach-for the skogs that fed in the tangle above the ocean were so far from safe roosting sites that Cooharah and Aaw dared not hunt them.

“The bone years come to an end,” Cooharah said.

“Brightstar flies large. Soon, storms will wash all hunger from the heavens.”

Aaw stared at him in disbelief, then looked out the oval opening of their cloo. She could see Brightstar flying large, as large as the moon-something her people had waited generations to see. Aaw admitted, “The star is large, but do we dare bring a chick into the world?”

“We are old,” Cooharah warbled. “Our feathers grow brittle. If we do not choose now to become one, we must choose to become empty, like the wind.”

Aaw did not fear her extinction. Such was the curse of being born in the driest of the bone years. For ten generations her people had chosen to decrease their numbers. Aaw had never dared hope she would lay a fertilized egg of her own. But oh, how she yearned for it. With the drying of Stone Lake, and with her increased age, it had seemed that the chance would never come.

But now Cooharah solemnly stepped forward and tapped her forehead with his jaw again, three times. “Open, open, Two become one.”

Tenderly she reached up and nipped the feathers at his cheek, just beneath his spirit mask, in ritual preening. Cooharah danced forward, snaking his long neck up beside hers.

She shook her tail feathers, pretending to lay an egg, and together the two Qualeewoohs began the long dance of life, enacting their hatchings, their years of learning, their hunts in the sky, their choosing of one another as eternal companions: As the dance continued through the long night, unfamiliar hormones flowed into Aaw, making her dizzy, and she felt as if she floated through the room, until at last, just before dawn, she reached up and tapped Cooharah between the eyes with her own chin, saying, “Open, open, I am open.

Thirty years ago, Cooharah and Aaw had chosen one another for mates. Now, in the failing years of their lives, after decades of starvation and struggle, for the first time they consummated their love.

Later, her mate would carve the pictographs that commemorated this day into her spirit mask, then they would fly to the north, to far lands she’d only heard of in story, to look for a safe nesting ground beyond the drylands. But for now, she collapsed in easy joy.