The August Birds Read online

THE AUGUST BIRDS

  By Octavia Cade

  Copyright 2015 Octavia Cade

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  Note on this edition: Cover design by Derek Murphy. Corvus illustration by natsmith1 (istock).

  Table of Contents

  July 31, 20--: Oamaru, New Zealand

  August 1, 1786: Slough, England

  August 2, 1939: Long Island, USA

  August 3, 1908: La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France

  August 4, 2013: Istanbul, Turkey

  August 5, 1948: Sydney, Australia

  August 6, 1945: Hiroshima, Japan

  August 7, 1946: Raroia Atoll, Polynesia

  August 8, 1709: Lisbon, Portugal

  August 9, 1945: Leksand, Sweden

  August 10, 1916: Elephant Island, Antarctica

  August 11, 1909: SS Arapahoe, Atlantic Ocean

  August 12, 1883: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  August 13, 1952: Moscow, Russia

  August 14, 1894: Oxford, England

  August 15, 1914: Gatun Lake, Panama

  August 16, 1960: Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania

  August 17, 1834: Cerro La Campana, Chile

  August 18, 1868: Guntur, India

  August 19, 1887: Klin, Russia

  August 20, 1977: Cape Canaveral, USA

  August 21, 1609: Venice, Italy

  August 22, 1984: Nariokotome, Kenya

  August 23, 1966: Robledo de Chavela, Spain

  August 24, 20--: Pompeii, Italy

  August 25, 1894: Hong Kong, China

  August 26, 2002: Johannesburg, South Africa

  August 27, 1883: Krakatoa, Indonesia

  August 28, 1965: Sealab II, Pacific Ocean

  August 29, 2010: General Assembly, United Nations

  August 30, 1871: Spring Grove, New Zealand

  August 31, 20--: Stockholm, Sweden

  About Octavia Cade

  JULY 31, 20—

  OAMARU, NEW ZEALAND

  August September would never grow up to be a scientist. He wanted to, very badly, although he couldn’t decide if he wanted more to be an astronomer or a marine biologist or a chemist, if he wanted to study rocks or viruses or walruses. But August would never grow up to be a scientist, because August would never grow up.

  He was nine years old, and he was dying, and he knew it.

  He tried very hard to get used to the idea. August had been sick for as long as he could remember, sick since he was a baby, and although the doctors were kind he had hidden behind a door once and heard the phrase “lucky to have lasted this long” so there were no illusions left. There wasn’t going to be any miracle cure, no last-minute reprieve, and soon, very soon, his Mum and his Dad and his sister would put him in the ground and it would all be over for him.

  After he had heard how lucky he was, August had lain in his room, night after night, looking at the fossils on his shelves and the great picture books of dinosaurs, the posters of atoms and planets and robots, the telescope that April had loaned him, the tank full of fish that he had gotten for his sixth Christmas. He had looked at them and known them for his dreams and tried to give them up, tried so that he wouldn’t feel bad at the thought that they were beyond him. He felt bad enough as it was, sicker all the time and his days were spent in bed, mostly, so he could look at the things that he loved and learn not to feel bad, or he could have them all taken away and look at nothing at all, at the blank walls, and that would have given him too much time to think about how much he missed them. So he stuffed them down as hard as he could, all the old dreams, and replaced them with another.

  August asked for a calendar, to sit by his bed. He was only interested in one month: the month that he was named after, because on the last day of that month was his birthday.

  “Double figures,” said Dad. “You’ll really be grown up then, eh?” And he had smiled as hard he could, and the smile was so determined and so sad at once that August knew that he would be lucky again if he could make it that far. He had known it anyway, deep down, feeling worse than ever and with the nurses coming every day, his doctor on call and the machines about his bed piling up like his bedroom was a scrap yard for plastic and metal and broken things.

  “Double figures!” said April, plumped on the end of his bed with her knees drawn up under her. “I remember when Mum and Dad brought you home. You were a nasty, squalling little thing.” And she had grinned at him and tickled, though only gently, and it was hard for him to look at her. April was older than him, fifteen, and she would be a scientist when she grew up, and August thought that she would be the person he would miss most, if he could miss other people when he was dead.

  He would not miss having to watch her live the life that he had wanted to live.

  “It was her life first,” someone said to him then, but August had been lying in his bed with his head turned to the door, and he had seen no-one come in.

  “Who’s there?” he said, and there was a heavy flutter from the end of the bed, a shifting on the blanket by his feet. When August levered himself up on his pillows–the bed moved for him, with a button he could use to raise himself up or lie flat again–he saw at the foot two birds, and their feathers glinted oddly in the winter sunlight. Large birds, and so black that there was no other colour in them, not like the tui who had purple and green in their black, but a flat, dull emptiness of colour. And when one of the ravens–for that’s what they were, he realised, with their big blunt beaks and their muscular bodies–hopped onto his leg, the weight of it told him that it was no ordinary bird. Instead, it was all iron in the place of flesh. The pair of them were iron, with polished clockwork eyes and gleaming claws and feathers full of filaments that could barely bend.

  “Am I dreaming?” said August. He pinched himself, not hard, but still it hurt him. The birds remained.

  “Your dreams are not of ravens,” said the bird upon his leg, the bird who had reached his knee and perched there, her claws digging into the covering blanket and her hoarse raven voice certain. “You have your sister’s dreams, and they were hers before they were yours.”

  “They’re mine too,” said August, and at his feet the second raven gave a harsh, scoffing caw, and although August did not know what derision meant he knew then what it sounded like, and reddened.

  “Dreams can be shared,” the raven on his leg acknowledged, and her tone was kinder.

  There was nothing August could say to that, nothing that wouldn’t sound like a lie. The truth was, they had been April’s dreams first, and she had come to his room for years to share them, to cuddle with him under the blankets and tell him about the things that she had learned and the future that she would make for herself. It was something to entertain him, to make him feel involved, and if it had given him interest and excitement and dreams of his own it didn’t change the fact that deep down, in the most secret part of himself, he knew that he was overshadowed. April was his counter-balance, born first and brighter, more beautiful, and she was brilliant too, everybody said so. Had he been as healthy as April, had he the same length of future, still he would be secondary.

  (August felt he could have lived with secondary, if he were only able to live.)

  “And you have dreams of your own,” the raven continued. “That is important.”

  “My birthday,” said August. “It’s still a month away. A month
today.” He was silent for a moment, and then he couldn’t help himself. He had to tell someone, someone that wasn’t Mum or Dad or someone who would report to them, someone who could not be hurt by him. It was too much to keep inside himself, when he was only nine years old and even so, so very tired. “I don’t think I can make it.”

  “You can,” said the bird. “I will help you. But you will have to make an effort.”

  If August had been older, or been sick less long, he would have asked her why she would help him, but all he had known was sickness and people who had been kind to him because of it. And the bird’s last astringent comment reminded him of Mum, sometimes, when she forgot herself and scolded him for failing to feed his fish. (He almost enjoyed being scolded. It made him feel as if he were normal.) So August assumed kindness, and asked other questions instead.

  “Who are you?” he said. “And how can you help me?”

  “I can give you an interest,” said the raven. “Something to live for. I am Muninn, sometimes called Memory, and the other is Huginn, who is also Thought.”

  Behind her, Huginn croaked once, and began to preen.

  “He doesn’t say much,” said August.

  “He never does,” said Muninn. “But Huginn and Muninn we are, and you are August, who would be a scientist if you could. We can show you science, August. A piece of science for every day to match your calendar, to lighten your way. All you have to do is let us.”

  “How?” said August.

  “Look there,” said Muninn, and one iron wing flicked towards his bedside clock. It read 11.59–August spent so much of his day drowsy and sleeping that he often woke late.

  “Almost midnight,” he said, and then the clock ticked over and it was a new day.

  “The first of August,” said Muninn. “Would you like to see another first?”

  “Yes, please,” said August. It was better than lying alone in his bed, or calling for his parents to come play another board game with him and while away the dark hours thereby.

  Muninn hopped up the bed towards his head. “Touch me, August,” she said, and when he put his thin little hand on her hard black back the feathers expanded under his touch and Muninn with them, and he was on her back and flying without quite knowing how, flying through a dark night all lit with stars and Huginn winging silently beside them.

  AUGUST 1, 1786

  SLOUGH, ENGLAND

  August was able to bring his blanket with him. It was a jungle blanket, with a tiger on it. “Where are we?” he said, huddling under it. “I can’t see, and it’s cold.”

  “Let your eyes adjust,” said Muninn. “You will make it out soon enough.”

  August was outside, that much he knew. There were stars out, and as his eyes opened to the darkness, to the little lights above, he saw that he was in a garden. There was a dark pathway that crunched under his feet, crunched as gravel crunched, and stumps as seats about him. He sat on one, felt faint ridges like rings beneath his fingers.

  “Elm,” said Muninn. “All elm trees, or they were. And all cut down, so that she could see the stars.”

  “So who could see?” said August, and Muninn tilted her big blunt beak towards a patch of lawn like a piece of empty sky. In it August could see a long, slanting shape. It was pointing upwards, diagonal on a frame, and he thought it looked nearly six metres long. “What’s that?” he said, pointing.

  “It’s a telescope,” said Muninn. “A reflecting telescope.”

  “It doesn’t look much like my telescope,” said August. He paused. “Well, it’s April’s really. She’s letting me borrow it.”

  “If you were older you’d remember when telescopes were older too,” said Muninn. “This is what they were like when her brother was learning to make them.” Small again, raven-sized, she nudged August with her cold, hard head, nudged him away from the long, lean lines of scope and towards a smaller model nearby, and the little woman perched in front of it. She was not very much taller than August.

  “Watch carefully, August,” said Muninn. “Her name is Caroline, and she is about to be happy.”

  “Doesn’t she know we’re here?” said August. Caroline didn’t seem to be paying them any attention, even though he wasn’t whispering and nor was Muninn, and she didn’t seem to see Huginn either. The other bird was walking up and down the length of her telescope, walking carefully, placing his feet so his sudden, shifting weight didn’t knock it out of position.

  “It’s hard to see thought, or memory,” said Muninn. “Most people can’t manage it.”

  “I can,” said August.

  “That’s because you’re mostly memory yourself now,” said Muninn, and August was quiet, a hurt, stunned quiet, because that was most of what he heard about his bed. April, and Remember when we went camping in the back garden, and toasted all the marshmallows? and Dad, with Remember when all you wanted was hokey-pokey ice cream and I sneaked it into the ward, past the nurses and we had a midnight feast? And Mum. I remember when you were born, she said, and you were the most perfect, most beautiful baby, and I was so glad that you were mine. And it was all the same, and all unending, this parade of his life, while they all tried to forget that soon memories would be all that they would have. We’ve got plenty of time for some new ones, still, Dad had said, looking August straight in the eye and lying, like the memory source wasn’t about to be cut off at the roots.

  “That’s elm for you,” said Muninn. “It’s a tree of firsts and women. Some say the first woman was fashioned from an elm. I remember the stories. The tree must have died, of course, the parts of it that didn’t change, but what a change it would have been.”

  “I’m sorry,” said August. He’d retreated inside himself for a moment, because it was easier than remembering Dad’s face and growing easier still. “What are you talking about?”

  “Her,” said Muninn. “Caroline. Her brother had the elms cut down so that they could see the sky better, and Caroline is about to see something no-one else has seen before.”

  The woman was hunched, briefly, over the telescope, her face pressed to it as if they were kissing, and then she pulled her head back and stared at the night sky with her own eyes, her own lenses, and her face, pocked so that August could see the scars even in moonlight, shone for a moment brighter than the stars.

  “What is it?” he said, sitting straight up on his elm stump, shivering with excited curiosity. “What did she see?”

  “Your eyes aren’t strong enough,” said Muninn. “But I remember what she saw. I can show you, if you like.” And when August nodded it was if a section of the sky opened up before him, as if a star streaked overhead.

  “It’s not actually a star,” said Muninn. “It’s a comet.”

  “I know what a comet is,” said August. “I’ve read about them.” He was silent a moment, staring up at the stars, almost squinting, trying to see it with his own eyes and not just the iron eyes of a raven. “People used to think they were a sign of bad luck. In the olden days, I mean. They saw a comet and thought something bad was going to happen. They thought that someone was going to die.”

  “Caroline didn’t think so,” said Muninn. “Look at her. Look how happy she is. The first to see it, and the first woman ever to discover a comet. That’s what the elms bought her, it is.” Beside her, August looked away, looked at his thin, tired hands holding jealously to his jungle blanket.

  “I’m never going to discover a comet, am I?” he said.

  “No,” said Muninn.

  “Did you bring me here to show me what I can’t have?” said August. He didn’t look at her, didn’t look at Caroline or her telescope. She was gazing through it again, rapt, and Huginn had shoved his face right into the other end, head bent over the opening, and was gazing back with a black, beady eye but August turned his head away and would not watch.

  “No,” said Muninn, again.

  “Bede,” croaked Huginn, from his place on the telescope. He cocked his head and stared at August. “Be
de.”

  “I don’t have any beads,” said August, listless. His hands were cold, and he tucked them more securely under the blanket. “There are some back in my room.” He got them at the hospital. All the children did–a bead for every procedure, every blood draw and x-ray and operation. August knew kids who made necklaces out of theirs–great, bright loops like medals–but he was too old for necklaces now, and it made him sad to look at them. All those beads, all those colours, and they weren’t enough.

  “Huginn doesn’t mean those beads,” said Muninn. “He’s talking about a man. He lived a very long time ago and his name was Bede. He said that being alive was like being a sparrow flying through a great hall in winter. It was all empty outside, just snow and storms and darkness, but the sparrow flew out of the winter and into the warmth, and then it left again. No-one could tell, said Bede, where it came from or where it was going, and what the winter was. They could only see it when it flew alongside the fire, and only for a short space.”

  “Comets melt down,” said August, and his bald head gleamed pale in the dark. “They get too close to the sun, or they get caught in an atmosphere and all burn up to nothing. Bits break off, and they get weaker and weaker and then there’s nothing left.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Muninn,” said August. “Do you think comets get tired?”

  “I think everything gets tired,” said Muninn. “I think everything winds down eventually.”

  “I thought you were going to try and tell me that a comet is just a piece of ice,” said August.

  “And I am just a piece of iron,” said Muninn. “But I have travelled far, far. Like a comet, like a sparrow. Like you.”

  August reached for a black wing, laid his little hand gently upon it. There was no give in it, in either of them. Muninn was iron, mostly, and by now August was bone, mostly, with a little skin scraped over the top. “Are you tired too, Muninn?” he said.

  “I have a lot to remember,” said Muninn. “And memories make people tired.”

  August’s hand tightened on her wing. “Muninn,” he said. “What happens to the sparrow?”

  The raven turned to him for a moment, her great black eyes oiled and gleaming. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it flies into another hall. Maybe it remembers something of what it was before. I think Embla must have remembered gardens, sometimes, and how it felt to stand outside in the night, with her roots in the earth and her leaves in the stars. And maybe the sparrow is like a comet, and when it breaks down there’s nothing left.”

  “I suppose it was good to see it while it lasted,” said August, and though Muninn did not look at him his voice wobbled next to her, as if he were crying.

  AUGUST 2, 1939

  LONG ISLAND, U.S.A.

  “I’ve been reading up on you,” said August. He was balanced on her body, his legs held in place by her wings and dangling down, his hands filled with feathers and imprinted with iron. Huginn flew beside them, his eyes half closed as he hovered with them in silence, high over the island and circling to keep in place, a slow and gentle movement that allowed August to inch closer to Muninn’s head and whisper where he thought her ear would be.

  “What have you read?” said Muninn, her wings lazy in the air and so very black against the blue.

  “You don’t just fly about to know things,” said August, remembering the weight on his bed, the raven declaration. I am Muninn, sometimes called Memory, and the other is Huginn, who is also Thought. “You’re like spies, you report back. Are you reporting back on me, Muninn?”

  “Who do you think we are reporting back to?”

  “Odin,” said August, confident in his assumptions. “From Norse mythology, my book says.”

  “You think very highly of yourself,” said Muninn. “Assuming you are right, what would Odin want with you?”

  “I don’t know,” said August. He wasn’t particularly clever, or brave. He knew there were a lot of kids in the world, and a lot of them were sick. It didn’t exactly make him special. He would never grow up to be a warrior, some sort of giant berserker with a funny helmet. That was alright with him. He didn’t really want to be a warrior anyway.

  “Science is more exciting,” Muninn acknowledged. “Though it has its place in wars as well.”

  “Not the sort of science I want to do,” said August, who hadn’t managed to decide what he wanted to be but knew what he did not. His science was green and blue and gold, the science of oceans and suns and the many colours of polar ice. He didn’t like to think of it khaki-coloured and in trenches, breaking down instead of building up and with blood all down its front.

  “Just because you don’t like to think about it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t,” said Muninn. “Some things are inevitable. It does no good to ignore them.”

  “I wish I could ignore them,” said August, who thought more than he wanted to about things he could not change and things he did not like, and those thoughts were of sickness and failing and death. Of there being no-one who could help him, not really. “It’s easier to be happy when I forget,” he said, knowing as he said it that the forgetting was a fragile thing, a thin surface over the truths he never really lost, not deep down, but just pretended that he did.

  “What would that ignorance get you, though?” said Muninn. “If you want to imagine that you’re going to die in your own bed, a hundred years old and having achieved everything you set out to do then no-one can stop you. If you want to convince your family to do the same then no-one could stop them either. You could be pretend to be happy together–but you would miss the time you have, August, and you do not have the time to spare. And should the world change around you in your ignorance, it will change without you.”

  “It’s going to change without me anyway,” said August, and the knowledge of his own mortality was heavy then, as it had ever been and growing heavier still.

  “You are missing the point,” said Muninn.

  “What did you expect?” said August, frustrated and clinging tighter to feathers in his frustration. “I’m only ten.” And it was a lie and an excuse both, for August was not ten yet and still he was old enough to understand comets.

  “Some things we wish we did not have to understand,” said Muninn. “Some things we wish we never knew about. The men I have brought you to see are familiar with such knowing, or will be when they are done.”

  “I don’t see any men,” said August, but before he had finished speaking the ravens were dropping lower and lower still until they were skimming over roads, above and behind an old-fashioned motor car that slowed eventually, pulling up to a door that August did not know.

  “Leo is in that car,” said Muninn, winging to a cottage with a screened porch and Huginn beside her and settling into corners. On the porch was someone August did know, knew from hair and face if not from voice and then the man Muninn called Leo stepped onto the porch and Albert was there to meet him, dressed in an old robe and slippers, dishevelled.

  “Today they write a letter,” said Muninn, perched beside August as he sat on the floor, with Huginn flown forward to the chairs and standing between. The men were speaking then, Albert’s hair wild upon his head and him ruffling it as they talked, a mixture of English and German and dread. And then it was Albert talking, Albert alone in the language that August could not understand and his words were written as he spoke.

  “It is an exercise in recording,” said Muninn. “The first of the day. When he is done Leo will take it back to the city and make a recording of his own in a language meant for this new country, and not the old. He will dictate to his secretary, and she will think he is mad, wanting her to take down letters to a President from Albert instead of himself. Though it is from both of them really, looking ahead to knowledge they are afraid of, to things they would rather not be known.”

  “What does the letter say?”

  “The short one, the one they are working on now, talks of war and uranium and bombs, bombs that are more
destructive than any yet made. They have come from Europe, Leo and Albert, both of them come from a continent made unhealthy for them, and both able to see the future. To see what happens if the bomb is made by other than them.”

  On the porch, close enough so that August could see every tense expression, every gesture, Albert and Leo drank tea and talked. It was quick and earnest and then measured again, slowed with silences for more than tea, for more than liquid that tanned and cooled in cups. If August did not understand all the words he understood the worry. He had seen worry before, seen it on more faces than he wanted to count and on those closest to him as they braced for an apocalypse that would settle in their smallest bed and would not be turned aside.

  “Why are they sending it to the President?” August asked. “Are they trying to get him to make one first?” It wouldn’t surprise him. That worried look he had seen on his parents’ faces came before questions, usually, and plans and response and direction.

  “Sometimes reacting to something is all you can do,” said Muninn. “Even if that reaction might make things worse. That is the price of knowledge, August: you can take it in your hands and recognise it and know that your recognition comes with taint, and still not help yourself. Because sometimes that taint is necessary, though it is hard to tell the difference. That is why they are writing.”

  “They’re reporting,” said August. “They’re telling him things that they know. Like you, Muninn. Like Huginn. You go out and you learn things and then you pass them on to everyone.”

  “Do I look like I am passing information to anyone other than you?” said Muninn, and her voice sounded amused somehow, as if she were humouring a very small child.

  “But the books say,” August began, and Muninn interrupted him.

  “Books say a lot of things. They are almost as much memory as I am. As much thought as Huginn. And not only books... all that writing, passing on.” Before them, Huginn stabbed at papers with his beak, stabbed at the shaping of letters, the consideration and the response. “Huginn and I,” Muninn continued, “have always existed. And if we send out what we have as letters, as Leo and Albert are doing before the dark, it is rarely and to more than story.”

  “Do you do it because you see a bad thing coming?” said August. “Like they do?” Like he did, with his slow dissolution, with his incipient death.

  “In a way,” said Muninn. “Though my horrors are not yours, they exist even so, and there are no Presidents to ask for aid.”

  “That doesn’t sound very nice to think about.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “But you think about it anyway?” About flowers and coffins and headstones, about being gone. About agony and abandonment and grief.

  “I do.”

  AUGUST 3, 1908

  LA CHAPELLE-AUX-SAINTS, FRANCE

  “How would you like to be buried, August?”

  “I wouldn’t,” said August, but there wasn’t much chance of that. He knew that some people helped to plan their own burials, picking the music that they wanted played or the stories that they wanted told, but August did not want to plan. He had spent too long considering his own death to want to spend longer. His parents would pick for him, and he wouldn’t have to think about it.

  “There is always burning,” said Muninn, but August was afraid of fire, a little, and he did not want to be burnt. “Not even put on a boat and sent out to sea and set alight?” said Muninn, and August shook his head.

  “I don’t think it would be allowed,” he said, and that was excuse enough.

  “A pity,” said Muninn. “It does look so very fine.” She cocked her head to one side, considering the scramble in front of them. “And a cave does not appeal?”

  “That could be okay,” August conceded. “But it might not be very private.” He had heard stories from April, sometimes, when she and her friends had gone on field trips–“very educational”, she had told their parents, who had smiled and not believed a word of it, knowing that there was more likely to be giggling and ghost stories and exploring than actual geological endeavour. “Imagine having all that on top of you.”

  April was not with them, pressed into a corner of the cave as they were, watching as a small group of excited men uncovered a body curled into a depression in the floor of cave. The bones were all tucked up and twisted, with Huginn perched on the skull and supervising, and there were little pieces of stone and not-bone scattered about the skeleton.

  “What are those bits, Muninn?” August asked.

  “They are grave goods,” said Muninn. “Stone tools and animal bones. Buried with the dead, so that they can be taken with them into the afterlife.”

  “I’ve heard of those,” said August. Mostly he had heard of them in places like the pyramids, but there had been other children in the hospital who were as sick as he was, and he had gone to the funeral, once, of a little girl who he had shared a ward with for a while. She had been buried with her rabbit. Not a real rabbit, but a stuffed toy that was her favourite, and August had seen her in her coffin with the bunny tucked under one arm and he had asked his parents if he too would have a rabbit when he died, and that had been the end of going to other people’s funerals for him.

  “It was a very nice rabbit,” said Muninn. “She called it Casper, if I remember correctly–and I do.”

  “I’d forgotten,” said August. “Do you think that I’ll be able to have some grave goods, Muninn?” Not that he wanted a bunny rabbit. They were for babies, but he always slept better with his blanket. He wouldn’t need books or posters or geodes. He wouldn’t even need the telescope, and it would be unkind to bury his fish with him, with no-one to feed them and with nothing for them to do but swim in the dark until they died. But he could have his blanket, perhaps. The tiger would keep him company.

  “If you like,” said Muninn.

  Even for his blanket, though, August could not get as excited as the men in front of him. He couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the tone of their voices, the quick, darting expressions of their faces, of their hands, made him think that they were animated by something else he could not understand.

  “Why are they so excited?” he said to Muninn.

  “This is the first burial that has been found,” said Muninn. “The first time that there is proof that Neanderthals buried their dead. That man is a Neanderthal, buried sixty thousand years ago, buried by those who cared about him. And like you, he had been sick for a long time, with people to take care of him–though he was a grown man and you are only a little boy.”

  She hopped a pace or two towards the group, encouraging August to take a closer look. “Do you see the skull?” she said.

  August peered over her iron head. He had to be patient, because the men who were bunched close around the body blocked the view sometimes, and Huginn’s feet obscured the head, but after a few minutes he managed to make it out. He saw the heavy brow ridges, the way the forehead sloped back, and reached up to cup his own forehead in comparison, felt the curve in his palm so different from the curve he saw in the grave. Yet there was another difference, and though he did not see it straight away it was obvious when he did. “He missing a lot of teeth, isn’t he?”

  “It would have been difficult for him to eat,” said Muninn. “His food needed to be made softer, easier for him to chew.” Like August, on the days when he felt his sickest and Mum brought him plain soup and custard that slid down easily and did not upset his stomach. “And there were problems with arthritis. He needed someone to look after him.”

  “We’ve got something in common, then,” said August, who had been taken care of his whole life, who would be taken care of when it ended.

  “A commonality that comes from more than burial,” said Muninn. “Although burial was what brought this man attention. It was common, at this time of excavation, to consider his species no more than simple animals. To make them dull and brutish so that your own kind would seem superior by comparison.”

  Hug
inn squawked then, a low, hoarse noise of disgust that seemed to fix inferiority in another place entirely, in a place that pinned posture to hunches and hulking, to the substandard and second-rate and apish. It was a distinctly unsympathetic sound, and August suspected it was a sound that Huginn probably made a lot.

  “Huginn is a creature of thought,” said Muninn. “He finds it tiresome to be mired in preconception.”

  “I don’t think he likes me,” said August, and although he said it under his breath, as quietly as possible, the second raven shot him a supercilious look that made it quite plain that he had hit upon the truth.

  “Huginn’s liking is not a common thing,” said Muninn. “And his temperament a product of impatience. He knows that science can come from false leads, from making pictures from bones that are not correct and then improving on them. But because he takes no pleasure in that knowing he forgets, sometimes, that the false trail can be an important thing.” She refolded her wings carefully against her body, smoothed down one stray feather. “I do not forget.”

  “I bet you remind him,” said August, and smothered a giggle when Huginn turned his back upon them both. His dismissal was conspicuous, his black iron body rigid with offended dignity. “I bet you remind him a lot.”

  “Memory is my function,” said Muninn, and if there was a trace of smugness in her voice it was only a trace–not even enough to echo. “The past must be understood before the future can be so,” she continued. “Why do you think Huginn and I are paired together as we are? I am Memory, the sum of past experience. And Huginn is Thought, or Knowledge. He is the raven of future days, as I am come from the past.”

  “You’re opposites,” said August.

  “Opposites, and yet linked. No-one can learn without memory. If that Neanderthal before us were to suddenly come back to life, the flesh reborn on his bones, and yet with no memory of his life, the gifts in his grave would mean nothing to him. He would not know their function, and they would be useless to him.”

  “You belong together,” said August. He could understand that, if he did not understand what his place was, carried by ravens into history, into science. You’re mostly memory yourself, now, Muninn had told him, but she was Memory, more than him and better. She did not need him. “So where does that leave me?” he said.

  “In a place of kinship,” said Muninn, and the dust from the grave, from the man who had been buried by kin and kind, settled on her wings and coated them with a patina of age and of similarity.

  AUGUST 4, 2013

  ISTANBUL, TURKEY

  August perched on his seat at the cafe pavement, his legs swinging down and the ravens on the table top. Their iron claws left scratches in the surface. Around him, people were drinking apple tea in little glass cups, mint tea that wasn’t green at all, as August had expected when he saw the leaves–but the tea made the air smell green regardless, a fresh sweet scent shot through with honey, with flaked pastry and almonds and orange water. It actually made him feel hungry.

  “You should have eaten before you came,” said Muninn, breaking in.

  “I wasn’t hungry then,” August replied. And he hadn’t been–his hunger was a living thing now, and freakish. It came and went seemingly without reason. Sometimes he was ravenous. More and more often he was indifferent. He spent so much time lying about, without the energy to do much of anything that he felt little need to eat and nothing his Mum made was tempting to him. He tried to eat what she made anyway, because it made her feel better, but both of them knew that what he was eating was not enough. He saw Muninn eyeing the baklava and for a moment he was tempted to ask, but there was no place on the ravens for keeping coin and he would not ask her to steal for him. Besides, if he was still hungry when he got home it would make his Mum happy if he asked for honey and apples and layer slices so August breathed deeply, breathed in the scent of cooking mixed with salt, and refrained.

  The cafe looked down over the water, over a sea that was crowded with boats–big boats and little boats and some with strange sails that August did not recognise, moving up and down the Bosporus, through the strait that split the city, past giant domes and island towers, past skyscrapers and train stations.

  “I am taking you to a train station,” Muninn had said. “A place of departures, a point of travel. But not yet.” She had taken him to gardens and cottages and graves, and although Muninn had flown with him over a great city she had not landed there. Istanbul was different, a place for landing, for disembarking, and it was nearly too much for him. If August was a sick little boy he was still a little boy for all that, and curious, and the ravens could not have dragged him through the streets without acclimation, without the chance to stop and settle into himself, to see the city before him if only from a chair. To absorb the strangeness of it, the old and new together and so much of it alive around him. He had nearly tripped while sitting, trying to spin in place as he sat and by spinning encircle himself with sights and sounds and smells that he had never thought that he would have, all bound together and on top of each other until there was no separating them.

  And then the shock of it was over and August could function again without tripping, could rise from his chair into an immersion he had begun to tolerate and then it was time for the train station. “I can fly you if you wish,” said Muninn, but August shook his head.

  “It’s only a short walk,” he said, wanting the experience. Wanting to drag it out, to stretch the time he was given before he had to return to his bed, to familiar streets and scenes and sickness. “I can do it.” He walked slowly, for Muninn had allowed the time, and his legs were steady beneath him. They weren’t always, but August was having a good day, a marvellous one, and if his chest worked harder than it was used to then that was alright, because only living things could breathe and August was alive and walking through streets of people who were also alive, like him. They were like each other.

  “You know,” he said, stopping to rest for a few moments at a corner and watching the people move around him, as unconscious of their movement as if they were water streaming about a river rock, “when I was little I wanted to be a train driver.” There’d been a railway track and carriages and a bright engine set all along his floor, and he would lie with it and pretend it was steam coming out of the chimney, real steam instead of bubbles.

  “What changed?” said Muninn, and August smiled. It had been April, he did not say, April who’d crouched down next to him and talked about James Watt and monorails and maglevs. Who’d helped him to build tracks all through his room, up as well as along, across the windowsill and so close to the door that everyone but them had had to turn sideways to get in.

  “I thought I’d like building things more,” he said, and as he said it he knew that Muninn already knew the answer. She was Memory, all memory and all of his as well as others, and she knew April as he knew her, knew her as she knew herself.

  “Why did you even ask?” he said, smiling. “You know the answer.”

  “I do,” said the raven. “But I do not always ask for my own benefit. It is good for you to remember your own stories.”

  “There’ll be more of them to remember after today,” said August, starting forward again with the station in sight now, the station with the long name he could not pronounce and would not remember. “Just because I stopped wanting to be a train driver doesn’t mean I stopped liking trains.”

  “Take your time,” said Muninn, navigating the pavement alongside him, a quick loping run, and effortless. She and Huginn had heavier footsteps than he did: a dull, slipperless ring of metal on stone. “You need not hurry. I will not let you miss it.”

  They did not miss it, and when Muninn and Huginn went before him the train doors opened for him and did not keep him out and there was a seat waiting by a window that no-one else seemed to see, blinded as they were by ravens and unable to remember his presence, to think that a small boy would stow away so baldly.

  “This is the first ride, the test ride,
” said Muninn. “The public will not be allowed to ride for a few more months yet. You are lucky.”

  “I know,” said August. “Where are we going?”

  “Not very far at all,” said the raven. “But deeper than you imagine–through the Marmaray, all the way beneath the strait.” All the way beneath the waters that August had been watching, a journey underground. “The tunnel is nearly sixty metres below sea level, the deepest immersed tube tunnel in the world. It connects continents, August.” And August, whose body was being stretched now between continents of a different type, pressed his nose to the glass and felt the train move, felt it glide smoothly over tracks as if flying, until it sank beneath the surface of the city and took him into darkness. Beneath the sea, he could see his own dim reflection in the glass. Beside him, Huginn was also reflected in the window but his reflection was clear and bright, and August could see every detail of every feather.

  “It must have been very hard to build,” he said. “It must have taken a long time.”

  “Yes,” said Muninn. “There were earthquakes, for one. The tunnel is built close to a fault zone, very close.”

  “It must be very strong,” said August, and even though he was dying anyway he felt a little nervous, as if the shock were coming and resilience beyond him.

  “They say it will withstand very large quakes, magnitude nine even. But that was not the only difficulty, not the only delay, and not the one I brought you to see.” And the darkness was lifting then, the light seeping through from the other side of the tunnel as the train came out into the city again, and the next station opened up before them.

  “It was here they found it,” said Muninn, and August pressed his face back to the window, the city rising up before him. “They had to dig deeply here for the station, and beneath the surface were many things–pottery and skulls and bones, a galley ship and a city wall and the remains of a great harbour. The archaeologists were very busy. That often happens when we travel, though. When we make preparations for travel. We end up excavating things we never knew were there; things we didn’t know had been forgotten.”

  “You never forget anything, though,” said August, and there were train tracks in his head and a journey before him over ground less smooth than he thought, more lumpen and full of things he did not know he was covering up and hungry for.

  “No,” said Muninn. “I don’t.”

  AUGUST 5, 1948

  SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

  The woman fiddled with her instruments, checking connections and signals and spectra. A band around her head kept short hair from falling into her face, and her mouth was pursed in concentration as she worked around Huginn, oblivious to his presence in the middle of her tools. “Her name is Ruby,” said Muninn. “She is like you–waiting, although it is not a birthday cake that she waits for.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with cake,” said August. It was going to be his last one; there would never be another to look forward to so he took extra pleasure in the waiting. “I’m going to have them make a really special one this year.”

  “A tiger?” said Muninn, amused, eyeing the blanket. It was just a little chilly, though not so bad as home, and August kept it tucked well around.

  “Maybe,” said August. “But maybe I could have a walrus, or a fish. Like my fish. Maybe I could have all three.” His parents would hardly say no, even if it meant they ate cake for days.

  “Perhaps you could have a sun,” said Muninn.

  “That sounds pretty boring,” August replied, picturing a plain round cake with bright icing, and banana flavoured.

  “Ruby does not think so, but then she is older than you, and sees suns differently,” said Muninn. “It is hard to see a thing, sometimes.” She did not look at him as she spoke, rather fixed her iron eyes on Ruby and on her observations. “I can look at the sun; it will not hurt me. I remember when others looked at it and blinded themselves thereby, the brilliance turning to blackness and all other colours left behind. But there are other ways to look, when the eyes that must do the looking are as soft as yours.” She turned to him. “Have you ever seen an eclipse, August?”

  “I’ve seen a lunar eclipse,” said August. He had been bundled up and taken into the garden to watch the full moon turn a strange mixture of orange and pink and red, the colours of Earth shadow. “Never a solar one. I would have liked to see one, though.”

  “If you had, you would have seen it through filters,” said the raven. “Or projection. Sometimes the only way to understand a thing is not to look at it directly.”

  “Seems funny though, doesn’t it?” said August. He did not make a habit of looking away; he could not afford it. He had hidden behind doors to hear of his luck, a luck that kept him alive for short spaces and would not hold to let him study stars at close quarters and shining. “Though I suppose you can look straight on sometimes and it makes no difference.” The death that was coming for him, coming with birthday cake and candles, was something he had steeled himself for staring at and still it made no sense. If he were able to wear a special set of glasses like filters over his own eyes, or project his death through a tiny pinhole onto a wall of his bedroom so that he could study it, he might have been able to understand–but it loomed before him, incomprehensible and too bright to look at and his heart was over-heated by it, burned up and turned all to ash.

  “Ruby is doing something similar, but instead she sees the sun indirectly by radio waves, by electromagnetism and emissions and radiation. Her interest came from the war.”

  “What’s war got to do with suns?” said August. “It’s so far away, there’s nothing it can do.”

  “Ruby spent her time during the war–and that’s World War II, August, not any of the others–working on radar. It was an important invention of the time. A way to detect distant objects, to look at things that could not be seen directly. But if some things can be clearer with indirection, then looking away can sometimes make seeing harder. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said August, who had tried looking away, who turned his head when needles went into his arm, when he saw himself fragmenting in mirrors, and frail. Who still saw, regardless, from the corners of his eyes and the shapes and shadows there were sometimes real and sometimes made by his mind into frights and fearful things, worse than they might have been had he turned to face them.

  “Using radio to look away meant that misdirection came with indirection–false readings and white noise and static that told of ghost raids and jamming devices. Background noise, the kind that was usually ignored, set aside as not important. Then one day someone looked aside and saw that there was another correlation: that the static rose with sunspots, that the reception was disrupted.”

  “Is that why Ruby’s here? Is she waiting for sunspots?”

  “Yes. The war was over but research remained, and Ruby liked the physics, the radio astronomy, so she kept her search for sunspots. But they are fluctuating things, and hard for her to find. Ruby has to wait, to find her sunspots when they come to her. This isn’t the first time she has found them, but she has been waiting some weeks. Today the waiting will be over.”

  “Can I see them?” said August, and promptly shut his mouth when Muninn gave him a withering look. He did not understand how a raven could look withering, but there was something about the eyes, about the set of her iron head that was rather repressive. Huginn was less contained–he gave one loud, rude caw as if he were laughing. It was a nasty sound and it made August jump, although Ruby did not notice it. “Alright,” he mumbled. “Don’t look directly at the sun, I get it.”

  “You would burn blindness into you,” said Muninn, severe. “And you are not so whole as to have no need of the parts of you that work, still. Indirection, August. Try to remember.”

  “I suppose it was a very small spot?” said August, trying to change the subject and succeeding only, he saw, because Muninn had seen though his attempts to shift focus and decided to honour them.

  “A large g
roup of them, actually. The noise the radio receiver picked up from the sun was fourteen times that of the background.”

  “The sun is very big,” said August. “It would probably be very loud.” He was used to loud, used to clamour and the way that a bright, immense focus could drown out all else, could leave him pinned to his bed and unable to think of anything else, unable to quell the little voices in his head that were only ever one step from screaming with fear and the whole terrible unfairness of it.

  “Yes,” said Muninn, and she looked at him with an expression that he would have thought was near pity if it didn’t seem so out of place. “The sun is very big.”

  “So what was she trying to find out?”

  “Ruby was looking to see if the radiation from sunspots was the same as normal background noise. If she could see a difference between them.”

  “You said it was louder.”

  “Louder does not mean different, August.” And August thought of his own approaching loudness, the one that drowned out all others. It was louder to him, and to Mum and Dad and April, he knew, but he wasn’t the only one. People died every day. Most of them were people he didn’t know but occasionally there was someone he did and they were buried with grave goods and rabbits and that was the same thing really, but softer, because it interfered with him less, a backdrop to his life that he’d notice sometimes when it intruded, and then forget about again because it wasn’t important.

  “But it looks the same, doesn’t it,” he said, knowing the answer before it was given him. Knowing that the distribution of the dead, the leavings of grief, were the same the world over and all the looking away in the world, all the indirection, would not show him different. He would be eclipsed, and people would look away from it, mostly, lest his death be blinding without filters, and without projection he would be as their background, no louder than the rest and static.

  AUGUST 6, 1945

  HIROSHIMA, JAPAN

  There were shadows on the walls, and shadows on the rock. They weren’t like the shadows that August had seen not a week past on a cottage porch, and not like the shadows that he made on the walls of his bedroom, or on the walls of the hospital. He was good at shadow creatures–there wasn’t a lot he could do, lying about so much, but he could make rabbits and birds and dogs and it helped him to forget, sometimes.

  These shadows didn’t look like rabbits or birds or dogs. They looked like people. August tried to twist his body so that he made a shadow that looked like theirs, but it was hard to see them both at the same time, and he couldn’t hold his position very long without aching.

  Still, it was easier to look at the shadows than it was to look at the city. It sagged around them, black and burning, and parts were pulverised into dust. The worst part of it was the creaking: there were no people and no birds, not even an insect. There was nothing alive to make a noise, but August could hear the burning and crumbling, the way that girders in the distance toppled unbalanced to the ground.

  On his worst days, when he felt his sickest, when he felt all ruined inside himself, August thought he might look like this city. If April looked close enough, if she had lenses powerful enough, he thought she could put a camera so close to his eyeballs he could feel it with his lashes, and the picture that she took would be of this place.

  It was too hard to look at it, like it was too hard, now, to have mirrors about him. The shadows were easier. He could still tell they had been alive. He could still tell that they had been human. His own shadow looked normal, next to them. It looked as if it fitted in.

  “Of course you don’t look the same, exactly,” said Muninn, who saw deeper and farther than he did. “Your shadow comes from your body. Those shadows are what’s left when their owners are gone. They’re all that’s left of the people who used to live here after their bodies were burned away.”

  “Burned?” said August. His mouth felt dry, his tongue too big for him. “They were burned?” And he thought of Albert with his funny hair and Leo with his friendly face and how they had helped to light the fire and all their shadows were burning.

  “In a great and terrible fire,” said Muninn. “There was a war, and this was a way to end it. Scientists, far away, lived together on a mesa and learned to build a weapon that could end the war, that could end everything.”

  “Do you think it hurt?” said August. He had been camping once. It wasn’t a very adventurous camp, only in the back garden with April, with their parents bringing them warm cups of Milo and marshmallows on sticks for toasting. There had been a school camp he hadn’t been well enough to go on, and tents and blankets in the back garden was supposed to be compensation, of a sort. He had burned his finger on melted marshmallow, and it hurt in a way that needles and operations and therapy did not, a little burn on a little finger instead of a burning all-over-everything, but April had wrapped him up tight and done his marshmallows for him and told him scary stories, and it was enough, almost, for him to forget. “I don’t like fire,” he said, almost under his breath. He didn’t want Muninn to think he was a baby.

  “I think here, where we’re standing, it was so quick they probably felt nothing,” said Muninn. “But other people... they hurt a lot.”

  August was silent. He looked at the shadow, again, ground into and black against the rock and not much taller than himself. “Do you think it was a boy like me?” he said.

  “Maybe,” said Muninn. “Would you feel better if it wasn’t?”

  “Yes,” said August.