Bravelands, page 16
Flicker tilted her head. “Well, I’ve never seen one fly, only run,” she said. “And not that fast—well, fast for a bird that can’t fly, but not compared to us. My mother said they’re so greedy, they’ll even eat rocks. But you have to watch out for the claws, they kick like an angry zebra.”
“So . . . it’s huntable?”
“Oh yes. Tasty, too.”
Stride gave Flicker a grin, already starting to drool. “Then let’s go!”
Sneaking up on birds was always hard. They were jumpy, and what they seemed to lack in sense of smell, they usually made up for in eyesight and hearing. But together, watching the bobbing head and alert for each other’s tiny signals—the twitch of an ear, a hesitation before placing a paw down—they got within a few cheetah-lengths of the ostrich without it spooking. Stride’s mouth watered. Nothing but the wind could outrun a cheetah from this distance.
Finally the ostrich looked up, its black eyes widening in panic, and turned to flee, the cheetahs springing into pursuit. It was faster than Stride had expected, and now that he could see it running, he could understand what Flicker had said about its kicks. Instead of the short or spindly legs most birds had, its legs were long and muscular, and it had cleared several cheetah-lengths before Stride had found his rhythm.
Stride caught up to it quickly, but then he lost ground again, ducking to the side to avoid a desperate stomping from the ostrich, which flapped its useless wings as it hopped, jumped, and kicked out at Stride. Flicker came streaking up from the other side of it, growled, and leaped at the bird’s throat, claws out, in a pounce that would have taken down a creature twice its size—except that the ostrich’s neck turned boneless and flopped to one side. Flicker couldn’t get a good grip, overshot, and ended up sprawled on the ground in front of Stride. He couldn’t stop in time, so he leaped over her, trying to keep pace with the big stupid bird.
But Flicker’s attack had made the ostrich dizzy, and it stumbled and lost speed. In a few more leaps Stride was on it, claws sinking deep into the thick feathers. It kicked and pecked at him, but it went down, and Stride finally got his teeth into its neck, biting down hard until it finally stopped writhing.
Flicker hurried up behind him, panting.
“Whoo,” she breathed. “That was fun!”
“Mff!” said Stride, looking up with his jaws full of black feathers. Flicker laughed as he spat them out. “This thing’s tough!”
“Tough but tasty,” said Flicker, nosing in around the ostrich’s legs and tearing off a strip of feathery skin.
They began to feast, laughing and joking over the feathers that kept sticking to Stride’s nose. The scent of ostrich meat and the joy of Flicker’s company filled Stride’s world.
Until suddenly, there was another scent. An unwelcome stench of hot breath and fur and dried blood. Stride sat bolt upright and saw them at once, coming over the muddy stream.
Lions.
“Flicker,” he warned, and Flicker looked around and saw them too. She yowled in anger and disappointment as they approached.
Stride wasn’t sure if it was the same pride they’d encountered before, but if so, something had gone wrong for them in the time between. Most of them carried recent wounds or scars, and patchy or missing hair on sagging skin. They looked hungry and angry.
For a moment, once again, Flicker looked like she might try to fight them. Stride almost wondered if they could—but even in this state, there were too many.
“Come on,” he sighed. Flicker backed away, reluctantly, growling, and they made their way back into the long grass they had chased the ostrich through.
But when Stride glanced over his shoulder, the lions hadn’t fallen upon their prey. One lion was standing protectively over it, but the others—four of them—were still advancing on the cheetahs.
He nudged Flicker, and she looked around too, then let out an aggrieved huff and spun to face the lions.
“We’re going,” she spat. “You have our kill. What else do you want?”
“We want you off this territory,” said one of the lions, a female with one mangled ear. “There’s no room for cheetahs here.”
“That’s not true,” Stride called back. “We didn’t even scent you here before.”
But his heart was already racing, and the tips of his paw pads tingling, even as Flicker said, “Right, this is our territory, not yours!”
The lions roared and charged.
“Run!” Stride gasped. There was something in their eyes that made him think that had been the wrong thing for Flicker to say. They seemed furious, beyond the natural anger of predators who thought they owned the whole world.
The two cheetahs turned and went into another sprint, through the long grass, over rocks, alongside the slowly flowing muddy river. Stride’s muscles already ached a little from the chase with the ostrich, but he was sure they could still outrun the lions. The bigger cats would get tired, or bored, any moment now. . . .
Except then he pulled up short, the shock of the sudden stop vibrating up through his bones, as another lion lurched out of the undergrowth to his left. He cried out to Flicker, and a second later heard her do the same. Two lions were coming out from behind a big rock on her right.
It was an ambush.
Why?! Stride thought, but he saved his breath for putting on an extra burst of speed. This isn’t even their territory, all I could smell before was hyena. . . .
The lion to his left swiped at him as he passed it, missing by a cheetah-length. In fact, it never had a hope of catching him with its claws, it was too far away . . . but perhaps it hadn’t needed to. As Stride threw himself to the right, and Flicker went to the left, he saw even more lions ahead, closing in. The lions they had left behind were still coming.
If they make us stop, there’s no hope for us. We have to keep going!
“There!” Flicker gasped out. “The rock!”
Stride saw it. The lions had parted around a jutting rock. There wasn’t room for the two cheetahs to jump it side by side, but if they went one at a time, they might make it. . . .
“Go!” Flicker said. Stride wanted her to go first, to be safe—but he knew if he so much as paused to think about disagreeing, the lions could be on them. So instead he nodded and sped up, aiming for the rock. The lions were too close. He felt one of them catch the fur of his tail with their teeth, but apart from a prickling sensation as a clump of hair came free, he sailed over the jutting rock and landed back on flat, brown earth.
He didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. Their only hope was to keep running. But he couldn’t help looking back over his shoulder, even though it cost him balance and made him stub one paw on a rock and stumble. His heart gave a painful judder, remembering Fleet, knowing if he tripped now, it would be the end of his life. . . .
And there was no sign of Flicker.
A lion roared, and Stride’s paws faltered.
Then a dark shape flew up and over the rock. Her eyes wide, pupils so huge her eyes looked black, Flicker soared through the air. She landed on paws that were already moving, barely seeming to touch the ground, and was past Stride in a flash of spots. Stride took a deep, relieved breath and followed her, though he could barely keep up even when he was almost flying across the plain. She was just a blur, running faster than Stride had ever seen.
The lions still gave chase, for a while. He could hear the scrambling and furious roars behind him. But now that they had escaped the ambush, the cheetahs finally outpaced them. At last, Stride was sure that they could stop, and he began to slow. His breath was rasping in his throat, his head pounding.
Ahead of him, Flicker was still soaring over the grass. He wanted to call out to her, but he couldn’t gather the breath.
Then she looked back at him over her shoulder. Her ears pinned back, her mouth open in terror and something like grief.
A trickle of dark blood spilled out of the corner of her eye.
Then she fell, hitting the ground, sliding, and rolling over in a spray of dust and grass.
“Flicker!” Stride screamed, pushing himself into a dash. He stumbled to a halt at her side.
She was breathing, but her eyes were filmed over with blood. It was coming out of her ears, too, and a pink foam collected at the corner of her mouth.
“Stride . . . ,” she gasped. Her voice bubbled in her throat. “I saw it . . . I saw . . .”
“Get up,” Stride said. “It’s okay, Flicker. We got away. We . . .”
Stride nosed desperately at Flicker’s side. If she could get up, if she could keep walking, maybe it wouldn’t have caught her. She could get better. She could . . .
Flicker tried to lick her lips. She blinked and for a moment seemed to focus on him.
“My life . . . has run out,” she whispered. “My future was with you. My future . . . was you.” Then her eyes went wide and glassy again, and she seemed to be looking at something over Stride’s shoulder. He saw, one last time, the look of defiance he had fallen in love with cross her face.
Then all the light left her bloodied eyes, her tongue lolled from her mouth, and Flicker died.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The sun had set, and the light in the clearing turned from the green of the afternoon to a soft pinkish glow, and finally to a silvery moonlight. Fireflies danced between the trees, in and out of the roots of tree stumps that had seemingly been torn from the earth and rolled aside to make more space. It was as if the stars themselves had come down to earth to be with the Great Mother. One of them landed on Whisper’s nose and sat there, blinking softly, for a few moments, before Whisper’s oxpecker grew a little too interested and it flew away.
Great Mother Starlight herself stood in the center of the clearing, her enormous trunk swaying gently before the three buffalo. Whisper looked up into her deep brown eyes and felt something stir in her heart. Starlight’s presence was like a warm sunbeam on a chilly day.
“It is rare for a buffalo to seek my help,” said Starlight. Her voice was low and rumbly, but gentle. “But I have some sense of why you have come. I sent a vulture to your herd not long ago, and when she returned she told me that the choice of leader was . . . controversial. Do you come to me to question the oxpeckers’ choice?”
Whisper swallowed, her throat suddenly closing with grief. She tried to speak but could not seem to form words.
Murmur came to her rescue. “No, Great Mother,” she said. “I’m afraid that Echo, the calf who was chosen, he . . . he died.”
A look of alarm crossed Starlight’s face, her large ears flapping. Whisper felt a chill under her hide: the smallest hint of anger or agitation from such a huge creature was terrifying, no matter how gently she spoke.
“The vultures did not tell me of this,” the Great Mother said, her low voice louder in the quiet clearing. She looked up to a tree branch, where a vulture sat. It leaned down but made no noise.
“He . . .” Whisper cleared her throat. “They wouldn’t have found . . . he was washed away in the Grandmother river. The hyenas pushed him in. His . . . his body might be lost for good.”
Starlight turned her gaze on Whisper, and her ears sagged a little.
“I am so sorry,” she said. She reached out her trunk and touched Whisper gently on the top of the head, just for a moment. “He was dear to you.”
“He was my little brother,” Whisper managed to say.
“Oh, my poor calf. It must have been hard on all of you,” she added, looking at Murmur and Quake.
Whisper glanced at Quake too. His head was lowered, humbly, and Whisper wondered if coming into the presence of the Great Mother had changed his mind.
“I had a brother,” Starlight said, and Whisper looked up at her again in surprise. “He was killed when we were young. Bravelands can be a cruel place. We walk in the presence of death every day, but that doesn’t make it easier when we lose someone we love—or when the Code is broken.”
Whisper took a deep breath. This was her chance. “We didn’t come just because we need a new leader,” she said. She could feel the others staring at her, but she hurried on before she could second-guess herself. “I heard that the vultures can taste when a death was natural, and when it went against the Code. I . . . I want to know if Echo died because the hyenas were hungry, or . . . or for another reason.”
Quake made a noise in the back of his throat, like a snigger quickly masked with a cough. Whisper glared at him. Apparently he wasn’t cowed by the presence of the Great Mother at all; he was just stifling his derision. Whisper wanted to stomp on his tail.
“It is true,” said Starlight, seemingly ignoring Quake. “As I said, the vultures have not brought me any news yet, but I will send more birds, at once. They will find him, and if there was anything improper about his death, the whole herd will know it.”
“Thank you,” Whisper breathed.
“In the meantime, we did actually come about the leader,” Quake said. “We need a strong leader to take us on migration. The one the oxpeckers picked was a bad choice, and now he’s gone. So now we need you to tell us who should lead, or tell us we should choose someone, or something.”
The Great Mother’s trunk swished impatiently for a moment, before she stilled it.
“It is not my place to choose a leader for the buffalo,” she said. “But nor is it yours, young calf.”
Quake visibly bristled at being called a calf, and Whisper tried to hide her smile.
“It is for the Great Spirit to decide. I am merely a vessel. The Spirit has told me nothing of your plight, so I cannot appoint a new leader for you.”
“Well, this was a waste of time,” said Quake. Whisper and Murmur both gasped at his open dismissal of the Great Mother. Starlight herself remained calm but looked down her trunk at him as he went on. “You’re no leader. You probably can’t even punish the hyenas who killed Echo, can you?”
“I guide,” said Starlight, a chill in her voice. “I do not punish. And in any case, as I suspect you know, most hyenas do not follow the Great Spirit. They have their own ways. The Great Devourer is a spirit of the earth, not the stars.”
“So I was right,” said Quake. “There’s nothing you can do, and we shouldn’t have come here.”
“What should we tell Bellow and the others?” Whisper put in, willing Quake to shut up before the Great Mother really did lose her temper. “What should we do about the migration?”
The Great Mother took a deep breath. She looked to the vulture in the tree again and then turned her face to the sky, letting the moonlight wash over her.
“I suggest the herd stay put, for now,” she said. “The migration cannot wait, but it must not fail, and that is what will happen if it takes place under a leader who does not know how to lead it.”
“But couldn’t Bellow teach Hol—teach another buffalo the secrets, just for this year?” Murmur asked in a small voice. “We have to go. That’s what my mother always taught me. Staying put means . . . death.”
“He could teach another,” said Starlight slowly. “And perhaps he will have to. But I do not know what would happen if the secrets were bestowed upon the wrong buffalo. No, tell Bellow not to do this, not yet. I do not like the news that the Great Spirit’s chosen one—a young calf, with his whole life ahead of him—has been killed like this. I suggest you wait while I learn more of Echo’s fate and what it means. I will send word as soon as I know anything. Be patient, my dear calves, and the Great Spirit will answer all questions in time.”
With that, the other elephants appeared again, out of the darkness, and ushered the three buffalo away.
“Be patient,” Quake sneered. “What a load of nonsense.”
“Quake, by the Great Spirit, if you don’t shut up . . . ,” Whisper hissed back.
They had decided to travel straight home to the herd, even though that meant crossing the plains by night, with exhaustion creeping up on them. Whisper’s knees ached, and she longed to lie down and sleep, but that would be madness now.
Their ears were pricked and their noses always sniffing for any sign of predators, as they tried to hurry without making too much noise in the dry grass. The nighttime sounds of Bravelands were loud in Whisper’s ears, the hooting of owls and chittering of insects, and she was certain she had heard scrabbling in the undergrowth a little way back that sounded like something roughly lion-sized. But it hadn’t attacked them.
They had been walking in tense silence, until Quake started to complain, yet again.
“Well, it is nonsense. What if it takes her too long to figure out that the hyenas were just trying to eat Echo, and all of Bravelands dies of thirst because the rains don’t come? It’s insane to risk that just because you’re sad about your brother. You shouldn’t have said anything.”
Whisper’s throat burned with anger, and she couldn’t reply. How could he make this her fault?
“Hey, leave Whisper alone,” Murmur muttered. “You heard the Great Mother—the wrong leader on a migration might be worse than no leader! We’ll wait, like she told us.”
“She didn’t tell us anything,” Quake said. “She was just covering for herself, because she doesn’t know what to do either. We’re buffalo! We can make our own destiny.”
“That is ridiculous,” said Whisper.
“We can’t make rash decisions right now,” Murmur said.
“Hmm,” said Quake. But he didn’t argue, and the three buffalo fell back into silence.
They trudged on through the night, under the stars, listening for danger and trying to ignore each other. Whisper began to shiver as the last of the searing heat of the day finally seeped out of the ground, and a cold mist began to rise up around them. The noises of birds and small mammals seemed to quiet, even as the stars began to fade and the sky took on a strange blank, gray hue.
It had to be almost dawn.
“This way,” Quake said suddenly. “Over here. I know a shorter way back.”
“Really?” asked Murmur. Her tone was bright and eager. Whisper followed the dim shape of her as she followed Quake.
