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Time of the Eagle
Chapter One
I was the first child born to a hunted people, in the first winter of their flight.
My earliest memory is of being carried on my mother's hip across barren plains, with wild mountains all around, and of rough tents made of skins stretched across sticks planted in the dust, of hunger and thirst and a feeling I did not like or understand, but which I know now was the fear that shadowed my people, as a wolf shadows a wounded deer. Always we were moving on, always looking behind us, always afraid to rest.
My people were called the Shinali, and by the time I was born there were only a few of us left, for we had fought many battles with many enemies and lost much. Early in my life I came to realize that the tribe held me high in their hearts, and I thought it was because my mother, Ashila, was the healer, with skills that meant the difference between life or death. But later my mother told me who my father was, and I knew why I was beloved. My father was Gabriel Eshban Vala, from the stone city of Navora, far to the south of our journey-lands.
Things were not good between my father's people and my mother's, for the all-conquering Navorans had stolen nearly all the Shinali lands and left us only one little plain. When my parents first met, my people still had that plain. Navorans were not allowed on our land, but my father came, for my mother invited him. He, too, was a healer, famous and honored among his own people; but when he chose to sit at the feasting-fires of the Shinali, it cost him dearly. His own people turned against him and against us. In the end they drove us off our last land, imprisonedus in a stone fort, and would have killed us all; but my father saved us and traded for our freedom with his life.
A hard freedom it was, for the Emperor in the stone city wanted us all dead. All my childhood life we wandered, staying only a little season in each place, afraid of the bands of soldiers we saw sometimes, far out in the desert or in the mountain passes, searching for us; again and again we moved, living the life of the hunted, until I was fifteen summers old. And then we found a valley, protected and hidden by a ring of mountains, and there seemed to be a shield of peace; and the awful fear that had hung across my people all the years suddenly lifted, and they knew a kind of contentment. For the first time in my life I stayed in one place for more than six full moons, and the river and mountains and hunting grounds and places of gathering became familiar and loved.
It was there, in that peaceful valley, that the day came for the celebration of my sixteenth summer. It was a day high in importance, for in our tribe when she is sixteen a girl becomes a woman, and the whole tribe rejoices and honors her and welcomes her as a new person. The sixteenth borning-day is always celebrated in summer, when food is plentiful, so there can be a big feast.
Because in our tribe women are the healers, my mother was teaching me her ways, and my work it was to gather herbs along the riverbanks and from the mountains. That afternoon of my sixteenth borning-day I went gathering, leaving the women and children to prepare gifts and special food for my celebration feast. Always I gathered alone, though I knew to be watchful, for battalions of soldiers still searched for us. And the Hena and Igaal peoples—age-long enemies to us—drove us off with arrows and spears when they found us sometimes on the edges of their lands. But I had not seen any enemies during my gathering-times, until that day.
That day I walked beside the great river we call the Ekiya. I went to the very end of the ravine, to the edge of the desert lands, the only growing place for the eysela flowers, from which we make medicines for the wiping out of disease. I had gathered almost half that were there, when I went back to the river for a drink, for the day was hot.
I drank quickly, glancing often across the baked grasslands to my right, for beyond them lay enemy lands, the country of the Igaal. I could see no sign of human life, and the peaceful hills seemed to dance in the haze of heat; yet a feeling of danger swept over me. It was an impulse familiar to my people, and we never ignored it. Quickly I bent to pick up the gathering-bag at my feet, and in that moment heard the throb of many hooves. Then I heard distant shouts. From the south they came, the riders hidden by the rocks guarding the entrance to the gorge. Snatching up my gathering-bag, I looked for a hiding place.
To my left soared the walls of the ravine, the river snaking between them. The nearest bend was far away, with no hiding place between. The hoofbeats were close. Clearly I heard the yells of men racing their horses to the water. Not far into the ravine was a wide rock higher than the others, flatter and sloping upward where it jutted out over a deep pool. I ran to it and, holding my breath, slid over the edge into the still water below.
Silent, icy green engulfed me. I swam under the overhanging rock into the deep shade and found myself in a shallow cave, chest deep in water, the rocky roof close to my head. Even then I was not much afraid, for I thought that they would ride on, following the river as it turned northward. Shivering with cold, I waited.
Time of the Eagle. Copyright © by Sherryl Jordan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
