Time of the Eagle Read Online Free Page A

turned it over and touched some strange signs I did not understand. “The first letters of his names,” she said. “Gabriel Eshban Vala.”
    For a while I could not speak, for tears. At last I said, “I thank you, with sharleema , for giving me what my father’s hand has touched.”
    My grandmother waited behind her, at the head of the whole tribe in a line, so my mother moved aside. My grandmother’s gift was a set of healing-knives, with bone needles for sewing up wounds. I recognized the knives my mother had been honing that afternoon. “My hands are not steady anymore, for using these,” Grandmother said. “But with them I taught your mother to heal, and she is teaching you. Look after them well, for they mean healing and life.”
    Many gifts there were, some of them treasures people hadsaved all the years of the Wandering. I felt overwhelmed, marveling that they thought so much of me. The final gift was from Yeshi, and always it was the same, in these rituals: he told of the history of our people.
    He was sitting on the edge of his sleeping place, the most important place in our tent, and everyone was sitting before him. Behind him, fixed to a screen of flax woven over wood, hung our tribe’s most valued possessions: the war drums and spears of the old warriors; and suspended above them, steel bright and shining like gold in the firelight, was a fine Navoran sword. A great treasure it was, for it had been left to us by my father. And under the sword, wrapped in leather for safekeeping, was a precious Navoran letter.
    Smiling, Yeshi called me to sit beside him. Everyone became very quiet, even the children, and Yeshi began his story. As if to me alone he told it, though I had heard the story more times than I could count, and all the tribe knew every word, for the story was always exactly the same, so we all would hold it in our knowing. And this is what he told.
    â€œIn the beginning, when the first winds blew across the earth, and the leaves unfurled on the first trees, and the father of all deer grazed the plains, and the first eagles flew, the All-father made us for this land. We increased, walked strong upon the earth, and were at peace with all things. A mighty nation we became. Our lands spread from the sea in the west to the sea in the south, and, in the east, to the great range of the Napangardi Mountains. In the north our lands were bordered by lakes and the long river that runs from themountains to the sea. We called ourselves the Shinali, and wished only to live on the land, fishing and hunting and keeping sheep. But in the far north and east were deserts and marshes, territories of the Igaal and the Hena, and they fought us many times for our pleasant lands.
    â€œThen, two hundred summers gone, a new tribe came to our shores, a tribe with pale skin and hair like wheat and eyes the color of the sea. In big boats they came, with sails like the wings of giant seabirds. The Shinali tribes who lived by the sea became friends with them, and traded with the newcomers, and gave them the white shining pearls from the shells in the sea. But the newcomers desired those pearls above all else, and soon they fought the Shinali for them, and sank the Shinali fishing boats, and drove the shore people far inland, and built their own stone city beside the sea. They called the city Navora.
    â€œMore Navorans came, and the stone city grew, and other cities were built along the coast. The stone city became the center of a great Empire, and the Navorans grew in numbers and in might. Then they wanted more land for crops and for their herds, so they fought us for our inland places. We fought and lost many battles, and over the course of summers and lifetimes all our lands were stolen from us—all but one small plain, between the mountains and the city made of stone.
    â€œIn that hard time we were given a prophecy, a promise from the All-father that a day will come when we