Although he had been preparing himself ever since Keene and Sariena, the tall goddess with long hair, offered to bring him to their own settlement, he found himself numbed and awed by the experience. The sense of the power that was carrying them through the skies exhilarated him, as if part of it were flowing from the body of the bird and into his—unimaginable power, like that which could open the ground itself or throw fire into the sky when the mountains thundered; but the Sky People had tamed it to be used, like the beasts that were tamed to carry him. He began to believe that they might really have built another world beyond the sky.
The terrain below lost any similarity to places he could recognize. They seemed to be following the hills northward, beyond the limits that Rakki’s people had explored. The hills became more consolidated and grew higher, although not as high as the mountains to the east, which now appeared as black ridges and peaks receding away into the clouds. On the opposite side, to the west, the hills opened out onto jumbled plains of red, brown, and occasional green, again vanishing into haze. There was more water than Rakki had realized existed in the region: rivers hemmed in steep-sided valleys in some parts; chains of connected lakes in others. A wide, flat area that they passed over, where fingers of green and winding channels of water entangled among islands and pools, reminded him of the swamps. In just a few minutes, he had learned more about the lands surrounding his domain than a month of slow, arduous expeditions overland could have revealed.
Gap Teeth seemed just as overwhelmed, and even White Head was unusually silent. At intervals, voices spoke seemingly from the walls and from the flat windows that showed colors. In one of them a female face appeared, as sometimes happened with the things the Sky People carried on their arms. Gusts of wind seized the bird continually, causing it to rise and fall violently. Maybe the straps on the seats were there for more practical and mundane reasons than symbolizing unity with the Mother Bird, Rakki decided. The Sky People left them alone to take in all the strangeness and adjust to it in their own time.
Then Rakki noticed that details of the ground below were becoming larger again and took it to mean that they were going down. A sinking feeling in his stomach confirmed it as the bird’s descent steepened. And then he saw what must have been one of the cities that White Head had sometimes tried to describe.
At first it looked something like Joburg, with huts set out in a cluster, rocks and hills all around, and farther off, part of a wide river—running roughly westward, as far as Rakki could judge from the direction of the still-visible mountains. But as the bird came closer, the “huts” gradually revealed themselves as more immense than anything built of thatched boughs and grasses, formed from combinations of sharp lines and curves like the objects inside the bird. And moving around among them were more crawling eggs like the one that had come to Joburg. Rakki made out different kinds of them as the bird came to hover, then resumed sinking slowly. One had a long arm and was lifting something huge, while others nearby were being emptied of things that didn’t mean anything. They were for carrying loads, he realized. The Sky People didn’t need to tame animals to do their work. They made their own—but with capabilities no animal conceivable in his wildest imaginings could ever hope to match.
The sounds that had been present to a greater or lesser extent all through the journey ceased suddenly. A face was talking from one of the windows to the front again, below the bird’s eyes. Naarmegen unfastened his seat straps and stood up, and then did the same for Rakki, White Head, and Gap Teeth, while behind him another of the Sky People opened the bird’s side. “This is our base here,” Naarmegen said. The word was a new one. So perhaps it wasn’t a city, after all. “Name, Serengeti.” He then added something that sounded like “Welcome,” which Rakki didn’t quite get the meaning of either. He stood up, and in response to Naarmegen’s waved directions, followed him down the metal steps to the outside.