The Eagle Games

The marshrutka from Bishkek smelled of hot plastic, sunflower seeds and somebody's dried fish, and it took seven hours to reach the lake.

Elias spent most of them with his forehead against the window, watching the country change. The flat, dusty outskirts of the city, with their car washes and their half-built houses. The long climb through the Boom gorge, the river beside the road running fast and grey-green over boulders. And then, all at once, coming over the last rise, the lake.

Issyk-Kul. Everybody in Kyrgyzstan said it like that, with a little pause before it, as if it were the name of a person who deserved respect. It filled the whole of the valley, from one range of mountains to the other, so wide that the far shore was only a pale line under the snow peaks, and so blue that it did not look real. Not the blue of a sky, or a swimming pool, or a postcard. A deep, cold, impossible blue, like the inside of a glacier, going down and down.

Elias got off at a bus stop that was a concrete shelter with a faded mosaic of a cosmonaut on it, in the middle of nowhere, at four in the afternoon, with one bag and a dry mouth.

Grandmother was waiting.

She was standing beside an old white Lada Niva, dusty to the windows, with her arms folded. Small, straight-backed, in a long dark skirt and a quilted waistcoat and a headscarf knotted at the back of her neck, the way the old women wore them. Her face was brown and creased as a walnut, and her eyes were narrow and black and very sharp, and she looked at Elias getting down from the marshrutka the way Elias imagined a buyer might look at a horse.

"You've grown," she said. It did not sound like a compliment. It did not sound like anything. It sounded like a fact she was writing down.

"Hello, apa," said Elias.

She nodded, once, and opened the back of the Niva for the bag. There was a sheepskin in the back, and a coil of rope, and a leather bag, and a smell that Elias remembered from every summer since Elias was small, and had never quite been able to name. Leather, and meat, and dust, and something else. Something wild.

Grandmother drove the way she did everything: fast, without speaking, as if the Niva were a bad-tempered horse. Elias held on to the door handle.

"Aibek is in the hospital in Bokonbaevo," she said, after a while, without taking her eyes off the track. "Since Tuesday. Your aunt didn't tell your mother. She didn't want to worry her."

Elias stared at her. "What happened?"

"Kok-boru." Grandmother's mouth went thin. "He went for the goat under three horses at once, like a fool. They brought him home with his collarbone in two pieces." She turned the Niva hard into a gateway. "He comes home tomorrow. He'll be fine. In six weeks."

Six weeks. Elias counted, without meaning to. The nomad games, on the north shore, were in five.

Aibek had talked about nothing else all winter. On the phone, in messages, in videos he sent at two in the morning. The games, and the eagle contest, and his eagle. The eaglet he had taken from a nest on a cliff in the mountains last summer, with his father, before his father went back to Russia for work. Fed her by hand. Trained her, all autumn and winter and spring, with grandmother watching and saying nothing. Videos of her screaming at the camera with her feathers up, like a small furious dragon. She's going to win, he had written, in April. Watch. The youngest bird there, and she'll beat them all.

The Niva stopped in a yard. A house, white, with blue window frames, the way Elias remembered it. An apricot tree. A vegetable garden. A shed. A row of tall wooden perches, like gallows, at the end of the yard, by the wall.

And on one of them, an eagle.

Elias had seen her in the videos a hundred times. It did not prepare Elias at all.

She was enormous. That was the first thing. Nobody had ever told Elias that eagles were that big. She sat on the top bar of the perch, with a leather strap on each leg, tied to a ring, and even sitting she came up to Elias's chest. Her feathers were a dark brown, almost black, with gold on the back of her head and neck that caught the late sun and glowed. Her feet were yellow, scaled, thick as a man's wrist, with black talons as long as fingers. And her eyes. Huge, dark, gold-rimmed, in a face that was all hooked beak and frowning brow.

She turned her head and looked at Elias. Straight at Elias. And Elias felt it go right through Elias, cold and sharp, like the lake water.

Then she opened her wings. All of them, at once, with a sound like a sheet shaken out, wider than Elias was tall, and screamed.

"Altyn," said grandmother, behind Elias, without raising her voice. "Enough."

The eagle did not stop. She bated, throwing herself off the perch, wings beating, until the straps on her legs pulled her up short and she hung upside down in the air for a moment, screaming, flapping, furious. Then she righted herself, somehow, and scrambled back up onto the bar, and shook out every feather, and sat glaring at them both as if the whole thing had been their fault.

Grandmother sighed.

"That," she said, "is your cousin's champion."

She went into the house. Elias stood in the yard, alone, with the eagle.