"Hundreds!" Both children doubled over with helpless laughter, and fell into a leafy bush.
One morning he found the older children sitting in rows in a large room where a wingman in a yellow gown was making them repeat after him sentences which he read out from a book of reeds. Thorinn sat down and let the box tell him what they were saying; it seemed to be a fanciful account of the creation of the world. Presently he noticed that the wingman was speaking briefly, but the box at some length.
"Box, why is everything so much shorter when he says it?"
"In their language there are words which contain the meaning of several words together."
"How can that be? Tell me what he is really saying now."
"He is saying, 'Shéshiru fállana állishi hóloshen—' "
"No, I don't mean that, I mean what are the words that have several words in them?"
"Just now, when he talked about the shell of the Egg, he said, 'Shéshiru,' which means something that lasts a long time; then 'fállana,' meaning early life, then 'állishi,' meaning that time is what the sentence is about; then 'hóloshen,' of years; then 'shirishirishíri,' meaning dozens of dozens of dozens; then 'lun,' which means nine, then 'leshíren,' not yet—"
"But that's nothing like what you said before," Thorinn protested. "It doesn't even make sense. How can they understand each other?"
He forgot to listen to the box's reply, for the children were standing up, bowing to the yellow-gowned man, then marching out the door, glancing at Thorinn out of the corners of their eyes. He heard them take wing a few moments later, fluttering up and down the well.
He still had no idea how he could get through the cataract, even supposing he could reach it; but the first thing was to find a way of getting there. If the wingpeople could fly with their leathery wings, why not he?
In one of the workshops he found two pieces of tanned leather, supple and thin, each more than an ell wide and long. He spread them out on a table and cut them into triangles, each with thongs at intervals—a waste of good leather, but it saved him the trouble of attaching separate thongs to them later. He had contrived the triangular pieces so that he could attach them to his arms at wrist, elbow and shoulder, and to his legs at hip and knee; in this way, he thought, he could improve on the design of the real wings, which extended only to the waist, and make up for the lack of the tail and the leathery flap that went with it.
Standing in a meadow near the city, with an interested audience of children, he leaned forward slightly, raised his arms and lowered them with a strong movement. He felt a surge that lifted him off the ground. Encouraged, he repeated the movement again and again; he felt himself being propelled upward, but the world was tilting; he strove in vain to right himself; now he was looking directly upward at the sky, and now the ground smote him on the back.
After several more attempts, each ending in the same way, to the vast entertainment of the children, he concluded that there must be some reason for the wingmen's tails, although he could not see what it was, and he gave up the idea of flying.
Spring was now well advanced, the crops growing in the fields, the orchard trees in blossom, scenting the air with a powdery piercing sweetness. Drifts of petals rose into the sky when the wind blew. On five successive mornings the wingpeople stood outside the town to watch them; they sang and played music on bone flutes, then swarmed back into the towers.
Several times more he saw the river whipped by the wind into slender waves taller than a man, and he never ceased to marvel that so light a breeze could make the waves so tall. In a way he understood the symmetry of it, that because the water weighed so little the strength of the wind against it was greater: but what if the water weighed nothing at all—how high would the waves be then?
Caged and restless, he spent days wandering in the forest, searching the cliff wall for crevices, staring at the cataract. Somehow he must find his way through it—but then what? He was already too many thousands of leagues from the Midworld to hope ever to get back afoot. The moment he came to any shaft, the geas would force him to go down. It was frustrating to know that he had killed demons and survived many perils, and yet he could not escape the power of that one old man up in Hovenskar. Sometimes he thought he felt Goryat's eyes on him wherever he went: or perhaps not Goryat, but someone even more powerful, some old god crouching at the center of things, with his hands and eyes everywhere.
What if he gave himself no choice but to go up when he came to a shaft? If some engine were to carry him up as irresistibly as an engine had carried him down...
He came back to the thought of the engine the box had shown him, the bladder filled with a gas lighter than air, a basket suspended beneath it, himself in the basket, rising... Clouds were lighter than the air, else they would fall, and so was the smoke from a fire. The bladder could be held open above a fire so that the smoke went in; thus it would rise, but then how to make it come down again? In the normal course of things smoke never came down. Perhaps a hole could be pierced in the top of the bladder, with a cover over it; remove the cover, the smoke escapes, the bladder descends. One morning, surrounded by children as usual, he experimented with a bladder taken from the body of a horned forest animal he had killed the day before. The children watched in fascination as he kindled a fire of twigs, then set to work scraping the bladder clean, drying it, and tying off one end with a bit of cord. He spread the other end open with two crossed twigs and held it above the little fire.
"They want to know what you are doing now," the box said.
"Tell them I want to see if the smoke will make the bladder rise." The box spoke with them briefly and then said, "They say they will make it rise for you if you like."
"Tell them to be quiet." The bladder was growing plump in Thorinn's hands; it trembled, moved; he released it and it ascended slowly an ell or two over his head before it gently capsized in the air and came down again. The children were fluttering around in their excitement, ignoring the light drizzle that had begun to fall. One came to him and grasped his hand earnestly, speaking into his face. "What is she saying?" he asked.
"She is saying that you are a magician, the greatest in the egg. She asks that you bring her pet bird back to life."
"Tell her I know no such magic."
The box spoke; the child, with a sulky face, moved away. Thorinn was looking at the limp bladder. Evidently what it needed was a weight to keep it upright, so that the smoke could not spill out and be lost. After some thought he bent a twig into a circlet and tied it securely with cord; this served to weigh down the bottom of the bladder as well as to hold the mouth of it open. This time he used a smaller fire and held the bladder closer. The bladder filled very satisfactorily with smoke and rose a dozen ells in the air, to Thorinn's delight and the awe of the children; but after a few minutes it took on a wrinkled appearance, sagged, and began to descend. When he picked it up it was flabby; nearly all the smoke had escaped.
He tried again, and this time tied a cord tightly around the neck of the bladder above the ring as soon as it was filled; the bladder rose as before and stayed up much longer, but it came down again just the same. The children were as disappointed as he was.
He examined the bladder carefully for holes and found none; it must be that the smoke was escaping through the tied-off portion at the top, and perhaps through the bottom as well. This was a disappointment; if the smoke could not be kept in the bladder longer than that, the larger version he had in mind would be of no use even to escape from the cavern, let alone to get back to the Midworld. He untied the neck of the bladder and looked at it glumly. The inside of it was moist to the touch, although it had been dry before: had the smoke turned to water when it cooled? Then all the children wanted to feel the bladder too. One of them tugged at his arm and spoke earnestly.