The roots were sweet and white and good, the worms less good. They were gritty and revolting raw, but he made a fire and soon learned to clean them of their digestive sacs before broiling them. He made his first satiating meal in many sleeps, rolled back into the wing-tent, and slept soundly and well. He stayed by the river bank for three more sleeps, and then felt strong enough to pack himself with roots and smoked worms and go on again.
He flew steadily and low, saving his wasted energy, careful with the now-worn bands of his harness. He strained his neck with watching, ceaselessly scanning the sky all around for orgs, or Watchers, or for another sight of the small Watcher that had fled from him by the river—all the time searching the forest for food, studying the horizon for signs of updrafts that might help him.
The dully glowing forests sloped sharply upward now. He slept seven times in a belt of fog and rain. With Knife-in-the-Sky now lost in the lowering sky his target was gone. He set his course as much as he could by following the upward slopes. When those signs failed, or were doubtful, he drew from his harness the one gift his mother had given him that had been her father's.
The crystal-cased object that glittered like the small Watcher was the size of the boy's thumb. Inside it a needle spun about, but ever seemed to quiver toward a single direction with the end that was brighter than the other. His mother had not known much about it, except that the wingmen of her people used the devices to mark the direction of flight when landmarks failed.
The air grew cooler as he climbed. When he camped for one sleep on a moss-grown rock he woke shivering and chilled. He crept stiffly from beneath his tented wings and found the low clouds gone.
He looked up and caught his breath.
Knife-in-the-Sky filled all the world ahead. The forests lifted toward it forever, rising piles of pale brown and gray and ivory, splashed with vast black masses of fallen stone.
So high he had to stretch his neck to look, the mountain itself rose out of those broken boulders. Walls of dead rock marched up and at the top of that unclimbable wall, higher than he could imagine, the jagged summit slashed across the rippling colors of the sky.
He studied that summit for a long time, looking for orgs while the damp wind that blew down the slopes of the mountain numbed him with unexpected cold. He knew they were there. They were always there, when they were not sweeping down to the lower slopes and the marsh and the grasslands and forests, seeking their prey. Perhaps those distant black spots, so hard to distinguish from the motes of dust that one sees on the surface of one's own eye, were orgs; he could not tell. Whatever, they were still a long way off. He stepped back to see more clearly over that giddy wall, felt a sudden gust as he was caught off stride; and the ground slid away under him. He grabbed wildly for the anchor rope that secured his tented wings, but his chilled fingers slid off it. The wind spun him off the rock; he flailed his arms, trying to get his balance; the moss was slippery, the cold had made him clumsy and he went sprawling over the edge.
The fall was only twenty times his own height—say, a hundred and fifty feet by Earth measures—so there was no real danger. Even without wings he could glide to some extent, as Earthly sky divers used to direct their fall before allowing their chutes to open. He picked out a landing spot where a bank of crimson moss promised some cushion, stretched out his arms, writhed with his body, spun around like a cat dropped from a table, and landed not too badly, considering the sluggishness of his muscles from the cold. A pink cloud of spores rose around his plowing feet and half blinded him. He sprawled, sneezing and choking, and then stood up and looked around.
The clouds below had shifted, and he could see across the great bowl of marsh and plain almost to the slopes of his own mountain. Past the brown and yellow slopes beneath him, the moss world made an endless sea; past it, the marshes, overhung with cloud, traced with thin black lines of rivers. In the hollows white fog lay.
He had not realized home was so far, but he could spare no thought for it. He turned and looked up the rock to where his tented wings and supplies were. Without wings he could not fly, but he could still climb; unfortunately, the rock was very steep and he could not trust his stiffened fingers to seek out holds in its crevices. He would have to climb the long way around.
The boy had no lack of practice in climbing, but as a wingman he disliked it very much. Without wings it could be dangerous. The combination of low gravity and dense atmosphere that his world possessed made the lifting of mass easy, but unbalanced the equation of wind versus inertia; caught by a gust on a vertical face, it was quite possible he could be flung so far out that even the slow acceleration of his world would crush him when he struck ground again. So he sought an easy way and sprang carefully from point to point, and was concentrating so hard on his task that he almost did not see the small Watcher as it swooped past his head and then spun away upward toward the place where his gear waited for him.
The boy shrank back into a crevice in the moss and waited for attack.
The attack did not come. Actually, he had not thought it would; this small Watcher for some reason did not seem menacing to him. And yet what could it be doing with his gear? He could hear nothing. He could see nothing—then, in a flash, he saw something startling: a bright flare of golden light that washed the side of the mountain and disappeared in a moment.
Cautiously the boy eased his way out of the little fold in the terrain and stretched himself to peer upward. He listened; he looked; he smelled; he reached out with all of his senses toward the top of the rock, but there was nothing.
He knelt on folded legs for a hundred breaths, considering. Strictly speaking, there was nothing on the rock that he could not do without. Food, spear, bow, wings, harness—he could not make them as well as the specialists among his people, but he could make them well enough to get buy. The wings and harness would be the most difficult, but he had seen enough of his brother's work to know that replacing them would not be impossible.
Still ... the thing was, the gear on the top of the rock was his gear, and he wanted it back.
If the small Watchers were the same as the big ones there would be no question. His only option would be to flee, and that would almost certainly be useless, if his brother's stories were halfway true. But he did not think there was any hostility stored in the glittering little cube he had seen.
So with great daring, very slowly and cautiously at first but then more quickly and openly, the boy made his way around a boss on the mountainside, up and over it, and emerged higher than the rock where he had slept, looking down on it, an easy spring from it.
He had not known what to expect, but he had not expected what he saw.
The cube was no longer just a cube. It hung in air a yard above the moss, not far from his wing-tent, steady as if it were nailed there, not dipping or even trembling in the winds. But it was growing something. From one face of it a glowing, filmy bubble of something was spreading to form a sphere almost the height of the boy—then taller, while he watched.
The sphere stopped growing. The boy looked and pondered, wondering whether to approach. For dozens of breaths nothing happened, unless a shadowy sort of movement inside the sphere was real, and was something happening.
The boy could see his gear, waiting for him. He could detect no harm in the cube or in the bubble.