The August Birds Read online

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  Above them, Huginn flew in giant, glorious circles and refused to come down.

  “I think this is where he is happiest,” said Muninn, and her iron feathers were flat to her back.

  “How can anyone be happy here?” said August. “It’s nothing but burning and ashes and it smells of meat.”

  “You are meat,” said Muninn. “Do you not like the way that you smell?”

  “It’s not the same,” said August. “This is... burnt. It smells like death. I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it either,” said Muninn.

  “Huginn does,” said August, and shivered. “Why?”

  “Huginn is thought,” said Muninn. “For thought, a place like this is life. Life like a pulse point, just beneath the surface and bright with blood. All the places you are visiting are pulse points. Most of them are small; brief little candle flickers of excitement and discovery, little thought-sparks of eureka. But this... for Huginn, this isn’t a candle. It’s a sun.”

  Above them Huginn circled, wings spread wide and whirling in dizzy spirals, the hot air currents, the sifting ashes and red clouds of smoke and burning making of the air a maelstrom. Shivering, ecstatic, he rode the air above Hiroshima, and in his wings he felt it. Each feather was erect, wire barbs and barbules and hooklets and each hummed with conversation and theories and experiments, with plays and poetry and gypsum sands.

  There was Kurihara, writing her verses in the ashes, writing of birth and death and bringing forth new life, writing of a midwife so scalded by radiation that the baby she helped birth in a basement, in rubble, saw a new day that she did not. There was Lilienthal, working to harness horror for peace, and Teller working to build a bigger bomb, a better destruction. There was Meitner, looking ahead from her walks in the Swedish winter and turning aside, and there was little Sadako folding paper cranes so that others would turn aside as well. There were evacuations and tests and mushroom clouds, there were green shards of glass and school children sheltering under their desks in mad drills, there were wars and waste and people crying out for water when all their skin had been burnt away. And Huginn felt it all, felt it forwards and backwards, all the clues and quests and consequences for generations fore and aft, a white-hot burst of information, of ideas, that collected and quarrelled, spiralling out from one giant maelstrom-node of Hiroshima ash. He flew above in sparks, and saw below him bright lines on the landscape, superimposed, speeding out in all directions, space and time both, a gleaming network that spun out like cobwebs, like the quick, fish-slick ripples of disturbed water.

  And in his iron head he felt it: the great coalescing weight of thought, and how it came together in him.