The August Birds Read online

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  “He doesn’t see things as we do,” said Muninn. “Huginn is drawn to ideas. He is a creature of abstracts, of linkages.”

  “Doesn’t he have any feelings?” said August. “Doesn’t he care?”

  “The feelings have been burnt out of him,” said Muninn. “Burnt out with electricity and information. That is why there are two of us: thought and memory. Feelings have been burnt out of him, but they have been burnt into me.”

  “Do you want to see the burning?” said Muninn. “I can show you the shadows, August. I can show you what they remembered, what they felt. It’s all in me. Do you want to see it?”

  “No,” said August, and his voice was pale as his face. “I don’t want to see any more. I just want to go home now. Please. I want to go home.”

  He was only a little boy after all. When the birds brought him home, he was tucked under little boy sheets, given his little boy bear to clutch, and hooked up again to all the machines that were too much alien to be adult and sounded lonely in the night. The ravens perched on the end of his bed, claws digging into the quilt and leaving holes there. Muninn cocked her head at him and was silent, as if waiting, but Huginn’s eyes were black and whirling with excitement. His feathers ruffled and would not settle; his feet flexed on the bed. It was as if his intelligence was still at Hiroshima, as if he were just waiting for August to fall asleep so that he could go back and fly over the red and black horror of it, use that shining metal beak to pick out... And that was when August forced himself to stop, forced himself to shy away from the image of the raven come out of the sky for feeding.

  (What did you expect? Muninn had asked him. Do you not remember that we are also birds of war? We belong on battlefields as well, we two, and it is not for stitching up wounds with our beaks that we go to visit the dying.)

  “Go away,” he said. “Go away.” And he hid his bald little head under the pillow until he heard the metal flash of wings, and knew that they were gone.

  AUGUST 7, 1947

  RAROIA ATOLL, POLYNESIA

  “You have come from fire and into water,” said Muninn. Her wings were spread as if she were sunbathing, soaking up the heat, and her iron claws dug into balsa wood. August sat next to her with his legs dangled over the side of the Kon-Tiki, and though they were too short to reach the water they were sprayed sometimes, when waves splashed off the side of the raft, and the water and the sun together were so warm they made him sleepy.

  “I’m glad you came back,” he said. “I’m sorry I told you to leave.”

  “I know,” said Muninn. “It’s alright.”

  “I thought I didn’t want to see you again,” said August. “But then I remembered Caroline and all the rest...” and with that weighted against him he could push down the burning to a little box inside and try his hardest to forget it.

  It was easier for him to look at Huginn today. The bird circled above as he had done at Hiroshima–circled in slow, lazy spirals but the sky was clear, unstained by smoke and debris, and the air smelled of salt and ozone instead of burning flesh.

  August lay back, his body pressed against the warm wood, and after a few minutes he forgot to flinch when a crew-member wandered by. There were six of them, and the raft was open to them, but “Don’t worry,” Muninn had told him. “I did not bring you here to be noticed, and you cannot interfere.” And though he had felt the vibration of footsteps beside his head, none ever touched him, and the men avoided his corner of the raft and were not aware that they did.

  “They have come such a long way,” said Muninn. “It would be a shame for them to trip over you now.” And though the great blunt beak could not twist into humour, August felt the smile she might have made had her body been different.

  “A very long way,” the bird said again, her eyes closing and drowsy in the heat. “All the way from South America.”

  “Why?” said August.

  “Because journeys are important,” said Muninn. “Because they make us change inside ourselves. Because they make us change the way we think.” One out-stretched wing flicked at a tall blond man packing papers into watertight bags, packing to preserve his records. “Because Thor there wanted to see if it could be done.”

  “And it could,” said August.

  “Yes,” said Muninn. “He has sailed for a long time, and this is the last day. He has looked forward to success for a long time.” And she pecked at August then, gentle but insistent, until he raised himself up on his skinny little arms and saw the water ahead, all broken up in long waves of bursting white and the atoll after that, the clean lines of yellow and green against blue.

  “What is it?” said August, squinting. The sun on the water was so very bright it hurt his eyes. He was used to artificial light, to the flat fluorescence of hospitals and the softer shine in his bedroom, with the quiet bulbs and the nightlight and the sticky glowing stars April had set upon his ceiling.

  “That is the end of their journey,” said Muninn.

  “It looks nice,” said August. “Pretty.”

  “To some of them it seems like paradise,” said Muninn. “Restful. A place of peace at the end of a long journey. A place where they can stop after the voyage is done.”

  “Only some of them?” said August, and Muninn glanced again at the tall blond man.

  “A voyage can be a difficult thing,” she said, and August rolled his eyes where she could not see, used now as he was to raven responses that were answers and not-answers at once. “It can take a long time, and there are losses along the way.” Above, them, Huginn squawked as if he were a parrot, and then laughed his hoarse raven laugh and Muninn determinedly did not look at him.

  “It changes you, a voyage,” she continued. “It changes how you think, and your relationships with other people. It changes your body, even,” and August, whose shrinking, failing self was turning under the sun just a little pink at the edges, nodded. He knew about change–about hospital visits and operations and the scars that they left, about loss and lack and prices. His own voyage had left him unfit for one like this, for long days under a hot sun with salt all around and a horizon without end.

  “And sometimes the change is gain, and sometimes it isn’t,” said Muninn. “And sometimes it’s so long and so hard that when it’s over, and when you have reached the atoll at the end of it, there is nothing more you want than to rest, to lie in peace on a strange beach and be still. But sometimes... sometimes when you see that beach, and know that the voyage is nearly over, there are some who picture themselves lying on that sand and wish that the voyage remained to them. Some who wish the atoll further off, in another part of the ocean, and the journey not yet done.”

  “Endings are hard sometimes,” said August, and his eyes were fixed against the glare on the atoll, on the green and yellow of end-times and exhaustion, of trees that stood above the ocean like candles. He didn’t want to look away then, to look at the vast and beautiful breadth of ocean beyond him, the ocean he would never explore because his time upon it was limited, and failing. And the atoll before him was pretty, so pretty, but it was an ending for all that and he could understand, in his way, that for some of the sailors aboard the Kon-Tiki the ending was bittersweet.

  He understood it, and he was only a little boy under a hot sun, wanting to sail away from the atoll, to sail away forever and float in a calm sea with the water peaceful all about him.

  “It is not always calm,” said Muninn, and she was not talking about storms or swells or the hard wash of current, but the broken water ahead, the sharp knives of the reef and the waves that pounded on it as anvils. “And the reef is not peaceful.”

  “Do they have to go over it?” said August, but even as he asked he knew the answer, for he could see no other way to land, no safe path between the churning. And the balsa raft was busy with preparation, with the anchor drawn up and lashed to the mast, with a home-made, make-shift anchor of empty cans and scrap, of mangrove wood and dead batteries, ready to be drawn be
hind. There were life-jackets then, and shoes on sunburned feet, the sail taken down and the cabin all covered in canvas and the bamboo deck taken up in parts to get at the centreboards, to bring them up and make the raft more fit for shallows.

  “That is the way of it,” said Muninn. “The end of a journey is often the hardest. It is where the last struggle comes in, the place of greatest danger, the place of hard roads. And then it is done,” she said, “and over.”

  And August said nothing. There was nothing to say, for he knew the end of journeys and all the hard places. Knew the scraping over rocks, the battle for breath and the difficulty of keeping whole, the final struggle. Knew the way it would get harder and more hurtful for heart and lungs and brain, until he could slip over the final reef and let the journey go.

  “Hold on to me, August,” said Muninn then, and she was in his lap with his arms about her, the iron shape of her warm on his skin, warmer than water, warmer than sunlight. And he was not the only one holding on, for her claws gripped him tightly as the men around him gripped, holding tight to balsa and ready to be broken up and floated ashore, their knuckles wet and white with strain and their eyes alight with hope and with a fear that held as much of excitement as it did of endings.

  And then the reef was before them and under them, the hard red rock of it grating against the bottom of balsa and the raft was screaming and creaking and then Muninn had him, her claws hard around him and they were winging upwards, above the white water and the foam and the fear of wreckage. And they were beyond it then, beyond the men who had sailed an ocean over and had washed up ashore, washed up at a place of resting, of relief and regret both, and August was carried away with his own reef ahead and still to come.

  AUGUST 8, 1709

  LISBON, PORTUGAL

  August tugged at Muninn’s wing. “They can’t see me, can they?” he asked, anxious and a little overwhelmed.

  “You know that they can’t,” said Muninn. “No-on has seen you so far, have they? Not even yesterday, on the raft. It was only a raft, August, and there was nowhere to hide on it. If you were visible to anyone you would have been visible there.”

  “It’s not the same,” August mumbled. The raft was one thing. The men there had been half-dressed, their clothes salt-stained and fraying at the edges. The people in the Casa da Índia were frayed nowhere. They wore silks and satins and lace, with heavy cloaks and giant skirts and they were covered in jewellery. August stood and watched them, awkward in his pyjamas, in his plain little slippers and with his tiger blanket wrapped around. There were stains down his shirt from where he had spilled his dinner.

  “Besides,” said Muninn repressively, “the king has better things to do today than look at little boys with dirty shirts.”

  “It’s not that dirty,” said August, scrubbing at the fabric so as to make the stain less noticeable and succeeding only in wrinkling himself further. “There’s a king?”

  “We are in the Tower of the King,” Muninn replied. “Part of his palace, as the Casa is part of the Tower. It is a place for administration and trade and travel. It is the last that we have come to see, the last which Bartolomeu is concerned with. But there are a few minutes before his presentation. If you are well enough you might want to explore. No-one will bother you.”

  And August, sceptical at first and then with growing curiosity, scampered as quickly as he could, which wasn’t very fast at all, for all he was feeling better than the usual in a brief period of grace that came with excitement and novelty and thoughts of things other than dying. The Casa was like a great museum, with compartments and collections and artifacts: gold and silver and precious stones brought in tall ships from the ends of the earth and laid out with spices and with spoils, and all the time there were people around him talking in words he did not understand, talking and laughing and dressed in outfits too heavy for them, that looked as if they could have stood up on their own.

  “Is it a ball?” he said to Muninn, breathless, when he returned from his wanderings. “Will there be dancing?” Not that he wanted to dance, which was always the least disappointing opinion when dancing was so often beyond him, but he could have watched and tried a few steps, perhaps, where no-one would see him and worry he was exhausting himself.

  “Not a ball,” said Muninn. “But a royal dinner, and an exhibition. See that man there, the one dressed in black with his hands full of paper?”

  “Yes,” said August, although he could see more than paper. There seemed to be a bowl of some sort, almost a ball, and thin little ropes between.

  “His name is Bartolomeu,” said Muninn. “And that is his hot air balloon. He has come to show it to court, to the king. To show that heated air will make it rise.”

  “How’s he going to heat it?”

  “There will be a flame beneath, and tiny pieces of kindling in that container.”

  “But Muninn,” said August, “Muninn, the balloon’s made of paper!”

  “Yes,” said Muninn. “A bold choice, I grant you. He tried this a few days ago and nearly set the palace alight. The fire was put out, but the curtains could not be saved.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to try it outdoors, then?” said August.

  “What if the wind took it away? Or it just kept going up? At least with a ceiling to bump into the balloon is retrievable.”

  And retrievable it was. Bartolomeu crouched on the floor in front of the king, the kindling thin and dry beneath his fingers and soon set alight, and the little paper airship sprang into the air, soaring upwards until it hit the ceiling and hovered, until the kindling burnt out and the air cooled and the balloon came back to earth, came down to applause and commendation and with only a few singed bits.

  “See?” said Muninn. “Success. He has shown the principle as sound.”

  “He’s not going to try and build a real balloon out of paper, is he?” said August, noting the servants circling the room with discreet buckets of water. He braced himself to be told that the small device tested was a real balloon, but he meant something that would carry people, something more than an interesting and slightly dangerous toy. While August liked to believe he was adventurous–not every dying child would consent to fly with ravens–and that he would have been more adventurous still as a grown-up, even he could not picture trusting a paper balloon to hold his weight and avoid combustion. “Because that seems like a bad idea all round.”

  “He wanted to build a bird, actually” said Muninn, musing. “It was to be called Passarola. This was a first step.”

  “A bird like you?” said August, and from across the room Huginn gave a derisive caw as he poked his beak into paper, shuffled amongst it with his iron feet.

  “Nothing like me,” said Muninn, and her wings flattened against her back. “Do I look like I’m made from balloons, an empty thing for carriage?”

  “No,” said August, backpedalling. “It could have been a raven, though,” he said in a small voice. “In the shape of one, I mean.”

  Muninn snorted. “A belly like a ball with a head attached at one end, a tail at the other and a man inside to pull on wires. Mock wings and magnetism. Yes,” she said, sarcastic. “Very like a raven.”

  “Well it’s not like you’re a typical example either, is it?” said August, staring at the paper balloon blackened about the bottom and thinking of goose-pimple flesh beneath warm wings, of feathers that were fragile in the air and never left patterns imprinted in his skin.

  Muninn glared at him in response, frosty, as if he had been impolite and she too well-mannered to correct him, her feathers ruffling despite herself. Feathers that shared a colour with other ravens if they were not fixed to the same fabric, and it struck him then that the Passarola would likely never have been a raven.

  “Look at this lot,” he said, of the bright coloured dresses, of the ribbons and the silk of a royal court that had set him back on seeing them. “They’d want colours all over any airship bird, they would. They’d never paint it black.”
br />   But the change of subject didn’t seem to make a difference, for Muninn’s eyes were still flat and black and their clockwork was stilled, having ground unimpressed to a halt. August supposed he could not blame her, having been set apart his whole life and ringed about with the subjects of his differences. It made him feel like a freak, and he wondered at the comparison and sank inside himself, cast about for something else to say. “It’s not like you can blame him,” he said of Bartolomeu. “Wanting to build a ship like a bird. It’d be like being one himself, almost. He’d get to float about like he was flying. He’d get to leave everything behind.”

  “Some things are worth keeping,” said Muninn, mollified. The frost had left her eyes, the gears starting to move again. She hopped closer to August, laid her head against him, a brief black brush of iron. “And some will not be left behind.”

  “Still,” said August, eyeing the remains of the balloon and then gazing up at the ceiling, at the small point the balloon had bumped up against and come back down to earth. “It’s nice to dream about, isn’t it, that you can just fly off and escape.” Fly off into past and into continents, both a strange country and a stepped one, with August at the peak and no further room to climb. “Sometimes I wish I could fly with you forever,” he said.

  “You can’t,” said Muninn. “Not with me, not forever. Your flights are your own. But they are not over yet.”

  Before them, Bartolomeu was showing off his balloon, the paper and kindling and flame, the rise and fall of it. The way it could be made into Passarola, and take him to the sky.

  AUGUST 9, 1945

  LEKSAND, SWEDEN

  “I like the north, and the snow,” said Muninn. “There was a time I liked deserts better, dunes and dates and palm trees, but the north is where I belong now. Being here is like coming home.”

  “Where is home, Muninn?” August asked.

  “Home is yew trees and ashes and cool clear pools,” said Muninn. “It is workshops and tools and programming. It is a place to come back to.”

  “It’s nice,” said August looking round, but his hands were nervous and he spoke in absence, aware mostly of what home was not. “It’s not burning, at least,” he said, under his breath.

  Beside him, Huginn laughed. At least, it sounded like a laugh, what passed for humour in a raven’s mind, ground out through cogs and clockwork and clarity, and August turned away because even in his sickness he knew amusement and the sound that Huginn made held more of threat than humour. It sounded as if oil were beyond it, as if the cogs were forced together.

  “Did you think we would bring you to burning?” said Muninn, her head cocked and with no curiosity in her eyes. Muninn, who held his memories of the day before, and the days before that.

  “You know that I did,” said August, and if there was no snow, no frozen landscape around him the fire in his chest was damping, loosening a part of him that had been locked rigid with heat. This was not Japan. The light was different, and there was no smell of burning and perhaps he had been brought to a place of healing instead of holocaust, because wasn’t that something that spoke of home and not annihilation?

  “There is no burning here,” said Muninn. “This is a place of aftermaths. Of ashes covered up, of resolution and radio waves.”

  “What have radio waves got to do with it?” said August, and Huginn was laughing again, causing shivers up the fleshy remains covering his spine, the spine that was not iron, that held a pure animal fear instead of thought.

  “Lise is being interviewed today,” said Muninn. “On the radio, with Eleanor.” And she would say no more, but winged gently over countryside, over green land that smelled of fresh earth and leaves and then into a small studio in a country town.

  In that studio was a woman. August thought she might be in her sixties. Her hair was tied back in a small bun and there were dark smudges under her eyes, as if she hadn’t been sleeping, as if she had wanted once to cry but the tears had been blasted from her. August knew that look, had felt it on his own face standing in the ruins of a city not his own, a city that burnt around and inside him.

  She looked, he thought, as if her heart had been broken.

  “It has,” said Muninn, “although it could have been worse and she is glad it was not. She is good at feeling guilty, is Lise, and this is an age where physics hangs heavy upon conscience. But in this hers is clear: she helped to discover fission, working it out in the woods and the winter, with letters and with blood. And when she saw what she had helped to birth, she would not help again. Many scientists worked on the bomb, August, and they worked in good faith, many of them, wanting an end for a war that seemed to have none. But Lise thought that there was more than war to worry for, and the destruction at Hiroshima was one she would not help. And she fled Germany and came here, to a place of refuge. To a home that was not hers, but which became so.”

  “Who’s she talking to?” said August, and the funny feeling in his tummy was back, because if this was not the bomb then it was related, and if he felt some ease in the fact that he was with a woman who did not want it then that ease was unbalanced by raven beaks and laughing.

  “A woman called Eleanor, who is not a scientist but sees what science has done, what it can do, and who doesn’t want it either. Who is married to a president, or was. Now sit quietly, and listen.”

  And August listened, listened to two women reach across boundaries, across continents, to try and make a bridge between them: between science and humanity, over war and into peace. “Women have a great responsibility and they are obliged to try, so far as they can, to prevent another war,” Lise said, and August saw from her face the hope that she sounded stronger than she was, more certain, more composed. It was not an easy interview–set up in haste, with untested equipment and Lise’s hands shook the more she tried to put steadiness into her voice, into the microphone that was either too close or too far and the questions coming through but dimly.

  “I can’t hear all of it,” August whispered, and wondered if it was because Huginn was up close to the microphone, his head alternately pressed against it and against Lise, pressed for communication and for comfort, his presence as much a link as radio waves and more solid.

  “It is a conversation that will go on for many years,” said Muninn. “With many people, with many voices. You will have a chance to hear it again.”

  “Can’t I hear more now?” said August, but he was hauled up into the air by the back of his pyjamas, clawed feet catching him, holding him hard about the middle though gentle enough not to prick the skin but it was Huginn who had caught him up, Huginn for the first time flying with him and Muninn following behind. “Where are we going?” he cried, the wind whipping words away from him and so loud in his ears he could barely hear the phrase dropped down onto him from above, dropped like anchors and lodestone and chains.

  “Home,” Huginn croaked, and his wings beat faster and he climbed higher, and August in his claws was flown into the path of radio waves, and he felt them echo through the iron legs, through the claws and into his chest, up through his throat until his head beat with them, was buzzing. There was the end of the interview in those waves, the breaking of connection between Lise and Eleanor, and then August was passing through other waves, with other conversations of other sorts, and dragged through those currents, through August himself, was the news of the second bomb, the bomb he had so dreaded and hoped not to see. And because it was Huginn, the bird of thought if not of memory, there was more transmitted through those claws than radio waves, more than memory and mourning. There was information, information that was as much Huginn’s home as north and ash trees, and in that glowing stream of data pulsing along the antenna of the bird’s body was the rate of burning flesh, was birth defects and radiation poisoning, the ruined earth, the sears and scarring both. And August felt it all, knew it all, had it burst within him as the bomb burst in Nagasaki and the knowledge burned through him, set his veins alight with horror and fascination both,
a flight of feeling and sickness that appeared unending until he was dumped in his bed, the metal cage of claws taken from his body and the spider’s web of Huginn’s mind removed from his.

  And then August was left alone, his body wet with sweat and heaving, and the absence a scream in his head that was mostly relief, and nearly all revulsion, nearly all dread and anger and the choking, raging fear of ruined cities and abandonment that even the memory of Lise did not dampen or cure.

  AUGUST 10, 1916

  ELEPHANT ISLAND, ANTARCTICA

  “Is this supposed to be a joke?” August snapped, his blanket tight around him and his feet in ice, snow seeping through his slippers and numbing his toes. “First it’s a burning city–again–and now it’s an iceberg?”

  “It is an island, not an iceberg,” said Muninn, tranquil. The temperature seemed to have no effect on her, though her wings were frosted. She did not shiver, and if her iron body was frigid to the touch it still moved smoothly, as if oiled, and her crow feet were easy in the snow. “And you are the one who does not like fire. I thought you would appreciate the change.”

  “I’m not falling for that again,” said August, who had gone from fire into water and found relief in an ocean once before, who had found that relief temporary, and so mocking it cut like coral. “You’re lucky I came at all. Stupid birds.” He hadn’t wanted to come, had thought about staying home and tucked up in bed, fuming on his own and making his family nervous, snarling and angry and with the fire beneath his eyelids always. It had given him a sort of savage pleasure to make them feel as bad as he did, knowing as he did that they would not respond, would not scream back and aim for hurting. They would not because he was sick. Because he was dying.

  It was that turning away that had decided him: his Dad’s bitten lips, the way his Mum looked like she was about to cry, and then Muninn had come, and Huginn, and they were as certain as always and as calm and August was on a roll–more creatures to upset, more to carp at and complain to and find fault with. More to make feel as horrible as he felt himself.

  The ravens had taken him to burning, to a place of apocalypse. It wasn’t right that they should be so unaffected. It wasn’t right that they could still be happy, and August felt the opportunity to see that they were not, to punish them with his presence.

  “You were the one who remembered it,” said Muninn. “Who kept thinking about it.”

  “Because it was horrible,” said August. “How hard is that to understand? You remember everything, don’t you? The bad stuff as well as the good? Or are you just too stupid to tell the difference?”

  “The differences are certainly escaping you,” said Muninn. Her hoarse raven voice was as calm as ever, as if she were talking to a particle of rock, a piece of dust–something small and silent and unimportant, and the lack of reaction August sparked in her made him want to hit something. If he hadn’t know how much iron would hurt his thin, aching little hands he would have hit her, but Muninn was too hard to hit and even if he was other than iron, August would not have dared to hit the other. Huginn, he thought, could very well hit back–and although his beak looked blunt August thought it might be razor-edged.

  “Not all memories are the same,” Muninn was saying, and August surfaced from thoughts of scars and slicing to listen, though he did not understand and would not question and the wind and ice were hard about him. “There is also pleasure in burning, in the remembrance of it: of endings and homecomings and the prospect of peace come out of the ashes.”

  “Home?” said August. “How can you talk about home here? Don’t you see them?” The men about him, huddled and stinking and starving, whittled down by cold with their fortitude broken down around them.

  “I see more clearly than you,” said Muninn. “Did you think science was memories of discoveries only, exaltation and shining horror at once? No, August. So much of it is failure and waiting and boredom, the sending out of little ships into weighty seas and wondering if they will bring answers with them. Wondering if the exploration has been for nothing.” She cocked her head, looking towards a man come out a small distance from the others, crouched down and wrapped about in ragged clothes and gazing towards the beach. There were pages in his hand, and he was smiling.

  “Am I supposed to know him?” said August. His feet were numb and his fingers hurt and he could not conceive how anyone would be so foolish as to expose themselves further to the frigid landscape. How they could find humour in it.

  “His name is Alexander,” said Muninn. “And he is a doctor, come down into the wild south with Shackleton, come for learning and exploration. Come for stranding, too. His ship has been destroyed. The Endurance. Do you know what endurance means, August?”

  “Of course I do,” said August, lying. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “It means being able to survive, to go on. To suffer in patience, in the hope that there is more than suffering.”

  “Didn’t do his ship any good, did it,” said August.

  “No,” said Muninn. “The ship could not endure the ice. Oak and fir and greenheart, and it was not enough. But a ship is only a thing, August, and there was more endurance on that expedition and it was not timber-made. Oh, they talk of Shackleton, and how he led his men and kept them alive, and it is a flashy thing, his endurance, and remembered.”

  “Then why aren’t you showing me him?” said August. He didn’t particularly care; he just wanted to be difficult, to be ungrateful.

  “Because flashy things are not enough,” said Muninn. “Not for you, who counts his success in small victories, in single days and drudgeries. You are not the only one who does so. Look at Alexander, August. Look at him, writing in his journal and happy, for the moment, though he is cold and hungry and lost, though he is losing hope and wonders if his home is gone forever. Would you like to know what he is writing?”

  “Not particularly,” said August, but when Muninn just looked at him, looked quietly and waited, her black body bright against the snow, he sighed as insultingly as he could and trudged his tiny body over to the man, to the words written in brief winter sunlight.

  “I have been watching the snow petrels,” he read, standing behind and reading over Alexander’s shoulder. “They are wonderful little birds. Sometimes they get caught by a breaker and dashed on the shore, but they soon recover and go off again to their fishing.”

  “Is that all he’s writing about?” said August. “Birds? Why should I care? They’re not important.”

  “You might want to watch them as Alexander has before you say that,” said Muninn.

  It was hard not to watch. There were dozens of them, hundreds, and their feathers were so white and so clean that when they were sitting in snow August missed them, until the quick, ecstatic movements as they rolled and cleaned awakened him. He could see them flying, see them running along the top of the water, almost, their clever dives and their quick flight turns and amongst them Huginn, larger and darker and as glorious, less swift and less elegant but as secure in his wings and showing off. And the petrels fell sometimes, and hit the water badly, and were washed up on a shore they hadn’t expected, and they shook their feathers out in the snow and ran into the air again, circled up in tight pretty spirals and dove again.

  August watched, and Alexander watched, and he laughed as August turned away in disgust, turned to look at the poor little shelters, the upturned boats and the ruined tents held down with rocks, the ice and the cold and the bleak white desert and the bergs crowded all about.

  “Look at it,” he said. “Just look at it! How can he laugh when he’s living like this? Hungry and sick and alone, all of them, and he’s laughing about the birds. He’s crazy. You stupid birds have brought me to a crazy man. Doesn’t he know where he is?”

  “Of course he knows,” said Muninn. “He knows many things. And one of these is that we make our own hells, and some are more frozen than others.”

  AUGUST 11, 1909

  SS ARAPAHOE, ATLANTIC OCEAN

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bsp; “They are the Diamond Shoals,” said Muninn, perched upon the ship’s railings and with her wings closed to the wind. “A place of sinking and salvage, where two currents come together. Do you see them, August?”

  “No,” said August flatly, his arms wrapped around himself. The air was foggy, but even if it hadn’t been he would have looked elsewhere for difficulty, looked up at the masts or the chimney or the cabins, the lifeboats lashed to the sides and useless to him. He wasn’t interested in shoals or sand or sea or anything that wasn’t resentment and misery.

  “They are a function of temperature,” said Muninn. “Of a warm body of current, a body that moves north until it meets another current coming down. The second is cold, and when they meet there is turbulence. The warm current is made colder and the water is angry about the shore. Sand is displaced, moved about, and the ocean floor is not left to settle. It shifts, instead, into sandbanks, into vast bars and barriers.”

  One the railings beside her, Huginn croaked, and August looked away from the hungry expression in the iron eyes.

  “Many hundreds of ships have sunk here,” said Muninn, dreamy in her remembrance. “Many sailors have drowned. They call it the Graveyard of the Atlantic.”

  “You don’t think I’ve seen enough graveyards?” August snapped, for he had seen the apocalypse once and again, seen the slow decay of children’s bodies in the hospital wards of Starship, felt his own body shiver and grow cold. Felt the warmth leach from him as the currents of his life bore him onwards and into barriers, into reefs and sandbars and annihilation. “Or is it that you find them so wonderful you think that I must find them wonderful as well?”

  Huginn croaked, wordless in his response, beating iron wings and launching himself from the ship railings and into white water, into waves cloudy with sediment and unfit for seeing. Yet when he emerged, moments later, there was a fish in his beak and he landed upon the deck, close enough to August’s feet that he felt the flopping of the fish through the deck, the hard, frightened thumps of it. And Huginn beat the fish against the ship and tore into it still living, ripped chunks of wet flesh with his razor beak and inhaled as if drowning, ate as if starved and feeding upon the dead.

  It made August want to throw up. Not just the raw violence of the feeding, the sodden flesh and the ecstatic gulping and the memories of gouged eyes and burning, but the way that Huginn stared at him while he ate, the way he took pleasure in August’s reaction, in the suffering and stilling of flesh, in the way the currents struggled and went out. He stumbled to the side, leaning as far over the railings as he could and it wasn’t very far, for the Arapahoe was large and sturdy and he was only a little boy, and a frail one at that.

  “He’s disgusting,” he said to Muninn. “Can’t you stop him? Can’t you make him stop?”

  “We all have our natures,” said Muninn, composed. “Ours is to eat the dead. Yours is to die. I do not make the rules.”

  “You are iron,” said August, and the taste of iron was in his mouth, the stringy saliva taste of metal and vomit. “You shouldn’t be eating at all.”

  “And you are just a child. You shouldn’t be disrespectful to your elders, though I note that hasn’t stopped you,” said Muninn, and there was a tinge of disapproval in her voice, just a trifle, and if August hadn’t felt so sick he would have thrown fish bones at her, tried to knock her off her perch until she called for truce and for mercy. Instead, he heaved over the side even though there was not much to throw up. Food had never been less interesting to him, the recollection of roasting standing side by side with sickness, with loss of appetite and slow starvation, the sinking of his body into skeleton.

  It was horrible to stand so hunched over, with bile in his mouth and his face wet with sweat and strain. August hated being sick, but he was used to company in his sickness, to cool cloths and sympathy and lemonade to settle his stomach. On the ship, however, there were none of these–only a raven beside him, staring out to sea and another behind him with scales about his feet and the smell of fish in his feathers. There was no-one to help him.

  “I am helping you,” said Muninn. “Not in the way that you want, but it is help for all that.”

  “I don’t need your help,” August snarled, sinking to the deck, curling up with his knees to his chest and his cheek on cool metal. “And if I did I wouldn’t ask.” He refused to give them satisfaction, the opportunity to prove their strength against his own. He preferred to be miserable.

  “Help is why we have come here,” said Muninn. “This ship is known for asking aid. You could learn by example.”

  “Don’t care,” said August, his tongue heavy and sour in his mouth and the queasy feeling still in his stomach.

  “You should sympathise,” said Muninn. “The ship is having mechanical difficulties. Like you.”

  “What?”

  “There is something wrong with its insides. Like you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Without help they will drift into the Shoals and founder. But the Arapahoe has a tool to help themselves with, a facility for transmission and for code. They are not the first to use Morse in this way, to call for help with the new signal, the SOS. But they are near to it.”

  “Why should I care if they’re the first or not?” said August, turning his face further into metal, hoping to cool the wet heat of his forehead and the dizziness inside.

  “We have been taking you to firsts,” said Muninn. “I don’t want you to think it is a habit. Science is application as well as discovery.”

  “I don’t care,” said August again. The smell behind him seemed to be growing stronger, and the scrape of iron nails on the deck as Huginn tore the remains into fishy, fleshy pieces hurt his ears and made his spine all shivery. He felt bile again, the rising of his gorge, and swallowed.

  “Good,” said Muninn. “I suppose I should not be surprised. You also are not the first; you should be used to following behind. Don’t look so surprised,” she said, gazing down at him from her perch high above his head. “You’re not the first to die, you know.”

  “Maybe not,” said August. “But it’s the first time it’s happening to me.”

  “Well, your memories of it are not out of the ordinary,” said Muninn. “Aside from Huginn and myself, of course. That should comfort you.”

  “It doesn’t,” said August, and the bile was in him, waiting to be vomited out. “Nothing does.” And nothing did–not the journey with ravens, the newness and the focused attention, not even the love from his family as solid as steel and steady beneath him, unbreached by reef or shoal or sickness. And later that day, when April roused him from sulky rest, her hand on his forehead and concern all through her face, she was the opposite of comfort.

  August glared at her as she cared for him, bringing lemonade and dry toast to help his stomach and straightening his blanket. He snatched it back and into disarray, even though having the tiger tangled round his legs made him feel overheated and queasy. “I don’t want your help,” he muttered, hating that she had to do for him, hating her. Hating everything.

  “Sorry?” said April, cheerful in the sickroom, cheerful because she had never had to ask for help like he did, because sickness was beyond her and the doctors never came for her and she was all that August would never be, healthy and full of future.

  “I don’t want your help!” he said, louder, then louder again until he was screaming it, over and over, until he was throwing everything he could in reach at her, even though the throws were weak and never touched her and that enraged him more. Until he was throwing books and lamps and pillows, until he was throwing the alarm clock that was never set to wake him but was set to blaring when August threw it at his sister’s feet, the call for waking like sirens, like ambulances, and him too sick to get out of bed and shut it off.

  It was his parents who turned it off, running into his room as April ran out, the door to her room slamming behind her and August turned his hot, streaming face to the window that was empty of ravens and
did not, would not learn.

  AUGUST 12, 1883

  AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

  “It’s a funny looking thing,” said August, frowning.

  The animal he was staring at looked like a cross between a horse and a zebra. The front half was striped like a zebra, striped in dark and white, and the back half was a deep, solid brown.

  “She is not an it,” said Muninn. “She is a quagga.”

  “She looks sad,” said August, peering through the bars. The quagga was huddled in a corner, and her head was hanging down.

  “She is sad,” said Muninn. “She is lonely, and she is dying, and she is the last of her kind.”

  “Is she going to die today?” said August, distressed. His own death was so close, now, that he could pity it all the more in others.

  “Yes,” said Muninn. “Very soon. And it will be unremarked, almost. No-one will know, when they find her, that she was the last quagga, the last ever. They will only find that out later.”

  “What happened to the rest of them?” said August.

  “They were hunted until they died,” said Muninn. “Until none of them were left but her.”

  “And now she’s dying,” said August. “She must be so scared. She must wonder what we’re going to do to her.”

  “Possibly,” said Muninn. “Although,” she continued, seeing his distress, “it is also possible that she does not understand enough to fear your kind for what they have done to her. She only knows that she is alone. She does not know why.”

  “She shouldn’t be alone when she dies,” said August. “It’s not fair!” He hated the bars between them, almost. He had been behind bars himself, sometimes, when they were put up on the side of his bed to stop him from falling out, from falling over, because his body had become too weak to save itself. And when he was lying down, with his head on his pillow, he would look out through those bars and pretend that he was in a different type of prison, and that one day he would escape to a place where he did not hear through the wall a sister that he did not want to see, the life that he wanted but would not have. He had imagined all the ways it would happen. He could dig a tunnel, or pry out the bars. He would pretend that his bedroom wall was made of stones that could be levered out, and when he did he would run away into the sun and never be trapped in his bed again.

  But the quagga had hooves instead of hands, and she could not dig or pry or lever. She could only wait, and look out through bars that were too close for her.

  “They are not too close for you,” said Muninn, and August saw then that his little hands, clenched around the bars and white-knuckled, had grown thinner than they had been even when Muninn had first come to him not two weeks before. A healthy little boy might have been too fat to fit through the bars, but August was not healthy and he would never be fat again, never be anything but a slow increase of bone in proportion to sinking flesh. And if he turned himself sideways and took a deep breath, he could fit through the bars and join the quagga in her cage.

  He could, but he didn’t want to. August had had enough of his own bars. He did not think he could stand another’s as well.

  “Perhaps I should leave her be,” he said. “Mum says when animals are sick sometimes they just want to be left alone.”

  “Perhaps,” said Muninn.

  Before them, the quagga staggered. Her legs gave out and she shuddered to her knees, tried to get up again and failed, her sides heaving. She gave up then, her long nose resting in the dirt and her panicked blowing stirring up little clouds of dust.

  “She’s already so unhappy,” said August. “Perhaps I’d only make her more scared.”

  “Perhaps,” said Muninn again.

  “And Huginn isn’t here,” said August, his hands still tight about the bars and unable to look away. “If he thought it was a good idea he’d be here, wouldn’t he?”

  “Now you’re just stalling,” said Muninn.

  There was the rush of wings behind him then and August turned, put his back to the bars and Huginn was in front of him with August’s blanket, his favourite tiger blanket, hanging from the raven’s beak. Carefully, the raven laid it at August’s feet.

  “Thank you,” said August, half-dismayed, “but I’m not cold.” He was cold so often now, but this day he was standing in the middle of a European summer, not the chilly winter of the southern hemisphere, and his flesh was warm about him.

  “It was not brought for you,” said Muninn. “Not entirely.” The blanket was knotted on top so that the bottom hung as a pouch, and the raven pecked at August’s bony little ankle. An affectionate peck, meant not to hurt but to gain his attention. “Open it,” she said, and August squatted, leaning his weight behind him, and though his legs ached and wobbled beneath him he teased open the knot to find his blanket full of earth, full of a dusty red soil that crumbled beneath his fingers.

  “It’s dirt,” he said, puzzled.

  “No,” said Muninn. “It’s home.”

  “My home doesn’t look like this,” said August, thinking of the dark, fertile earth of Oamaru, of the garden behind his house all filled with flowers and growing things even in winter: the flaxes and ferns he was so used to, the plants he saw every day from his window, from his little barred bed. But It was not brought for you, Muninn had said, and August turned with earth in his hands to see the quagga, curled in on herself in the corner of the cage, her eyes dulled with misery and dimming, and he understood.

  “I don’t want to go in,” he said, and his voice was half-pleading.

  “I know,” said Muninn, and August went anyway. He dragged his feet, and his hands on the blanket were clammy so that the little grains of dirt stuck to his palms, but he went.

  He didn’t even have to breathe in much, though the bars were so close together. Just one quick step and he was through, inside the cage and looking out, inside with the dying animal, the other one, and there was no escape for either of them but one.

  Behind him, he could hear Huginn croak, a wordless, self-satisfied sound.

  “Yes,” said Muninn, and he could barely hear her reply over the sound of his own heart beating. “You’re very thoughtful,” she said, and her raven voice was dry as deserts.

  August walked very slowly across the cage, as slowly as he could without stopping, and the quagga watched him come. He had been afraid that she would kick, that she would force herself up in a panic and do herself an injury–that his presence would compound her pain, would make her feel more trapped and more miserable. And one leg did kick, a small, exhausted kick and then he saw it happen, saw the resignation on the quagga’s face, the acceptance of his presence, the dumb endurance in the glazing eyes.

  “Don’t be sad, girl,” said August, sidling closer and getting down onto his knees beside the long head with not much less effort than the quagga had made when she had stumbled for the last time and fallen. “Don’t be frightened. I’ve brought you something, quagga.” And he fumbled with the blanket and drew out the African earth and spread it around her in handfuls, laid the last of it beneath her nose, and the quagga breathed it in and gentled, the old familiarity of scent recalling the plains and the grass and the pasturelands of her youth, of the time before she had been taken from her own kind and kept apart.

  The quagga breathed it in and gentled, and August laid his little bony head upon her striped side, felt the shallow breaths, the slow exhalations. “There’ll never be another one like you, girl,” he said. “There’ll never be another one like you, not ever again. You’re so special, just by yourself.” His own breath hitched, and he hid his face in her hairy coat, felt the movement beneath slower and slowing. “Even if there were a thousand like you, you’d still be special. It’s not fair,” he said. And said it again, over and over. “It’s not fair, it’s not fair...”

  Huginn and Muninn waited beyond the cage, watching through the bars of a prison they were not a part of, and August wept against the quagga and breathed with her, breathed in the warm scent of home unt
il his breaths were the only ones.

  AUGUST 13, 1952

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  Early on the morning of the thirteenth August was taken from one place of crying to another: from his own room–where he could hear April though the wall, the near-silent tears that told him she must be stifling her face in her pillow–to another where the tears were louder.

  The place the ravens brought him to was dark and cold and echoed with sobs–a great, heaving, half-muffled choking that echoed so that August felt the size of the room he was in before he saw it, small and cramped and bound about again with bars. The sound was so alone, so wretched and miserable that August froze, seeing again the ruined city behind his eyes and burning, and if he saw that city in himself when he looked in mirrors and lenses this was the sound he heard at night, echoing in the walls of his room and muffled so that no-one could hear.

  August froze, and Muninn was still beside him, her feathers flat against her body and sorrowful, with an expression on her beaked face that August had not yet learned to read. It was Huginn who moved first, who ran-hopped-scrambled across the floor towards the sound. And as August’s eyes adjusted to the dark of what he had come to recognise as a cell–zoo cages and hospital beds had given him an understanding of prisons such that he would know them always–he saw that Huginn had leapt onto a thin, ugly little bed, where a heaving figure was curled in on itself, covered with a ragged blanket and sobbing. He was not only there, the raven who ignored him when he could and looked at August with disdain when forced into acknowledgement, but he was there and... and kind. Huginn was crouched down next to the head, carding through the grey hair, combing it with his beak and crooning, trying to comfort, and the sobbing checked a little.

  “Who is that, Muninn?” said August. The ravens had taken him so often now to places that should have been beyond him that he had learned his presence would not disturb, learned that what the quagga had seen so close to its own death, its own cessation of memory, was anachronism and exceptional. He knew that he would not disturb the person crying on the bed, but for the first time he thought he might have liked to be able to, to be able to sit by them and offer comfort instead of always being the one who needed comforting and who could not now be comforted.

  “Her name is Lina,” said Muninn, and her harsh raven voice was subdued and sad.

  The urge to offer comfort became overwhelming, and August inched closer to the bed, then closer still and sat down upon an edge of it, gingerly, noting how uncomfortable it was and reaching out to put his hand on the person underneath the blanket, reaching out and then pulling back suddenly, for Huginn had looked up from his combing and although he still crooned there was violence in his eyes. So August pulled his hand back and folded it in his lap, wanting to help but not knowing how, and his own body was so little and so thin itself that he barely made the mattress dip but the figure under the cover shifted regardless and the blanket fell away from her face.

  She was an old lady, August realised, a very old, very small lady. She reminded him of his great aunt, who was never very tall herself and who sent August postcards and books on birds, hard nougat and salted caramels, who called him every week from her home in Delhi and never forgot his birthday.

  “This isn’t right,” he said, and the shock of feeling anger on behalf of someone other than himself was almost a relief. “Muninn, what’s happening? Why is she crying? Why has she been locked up all by herself?”

  “There is no-one left for her to be locked up with,” said Muninn. “They are all dead. Yesterday was the Night of the Murdered Poets, and this the first hours of the new day without them. There was a group of people, August, a committee, who came together against fascism, against ovens and pogroms and a boot in the face. Lina was a member. For three years they have been in prison, with torture and interrogation, with false charges and show trials. Once there were fifteen. Today there is only Lina, the only one allowed to live. She is to be sent far away and into exile. That is why she is sad. She is alone, and she has no home.”

  “That’s terrible,” said August, who had always had a home, who had always had people around him to care for him even when he didn’t want them and who saw now for the first time what it would be like without them, who felt the sting of it in his eyes and his chest. “The poor lady. But I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought you were bringing me to see science. What’s poetry got to do with it?”

  “It is only a name,” said Muninn. “They were not all poets. Some were involved in medicine, or biochemistry. Lina was one. She worked on something called the blood-brain barrier. Do you know what that is, August?”

  August shook his head, silent.

  “It separates blood from fluid in the brain, and although some things can pass through the barrier others cannot. It keeps bacteria out of the brain, and makes it difficult to infect.” Muninn shifted beside the bed, her feathers ruffling in upset. “It does not stop all damage, however. You have managed to find other ways to infect yourselves, and Lina could find no antibiotic to counter the infection that killed her friends, no medicine to save herself as her work had saved so many others.”

  “And she was sent away,” said August.

  “She was too valuable to kill,” said Muninn. “Too valuable to science. Though perhaps the exile in Dzhambul was as cruel, in its way, as execution.”

  “What happened to her there?” said August. He was sorry for her, sorrier in that moment than he was for himself. His time with the quagga, short though it was, had reminded him of what it felt like to care for others and the cool place that the quagga had made in the holocaust of his heart was spreading, spreading, and the ground around was wet with tears.

  “She went into exile,” Muninn said again and carefully, ignoring the exasperated I-know-that expression on August’s face. “Ten months later, the leader of the country died so Lina’s time away was cut short, and she was allowed to return.”

  “That’s what happened after,” said August. “Not what happened while she was alone. You know what happened to her in exile, don’t you? You remember it.”

  “Yes,” said Muninn.

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” said August, frustrated. “That’s why you’re bringing me to all these places, isn’t it? To learn? And when I want to, you shut up.”

  “Some stories are not mine to tell,” said Muninn. “Lina never spoke of her time in Dzhambul, never. She chose to take that time to her grave, August, and I will not make mockery of that choice for you now.”

  “Why didn’t she want to talk about it?” said August. He reached out again, reached out to the shaking lump under the thin blanket and again he pulled back under Huginn’s glare. “Was it so very horrible, Muninn?”

  “What do you think?” said the raven. “Everything she loved had been taken from her. Her friends, her work, her freedom. Her hope, too, for her hope was buried in shallow graves and shot all through with bullets. Would you be happy so?”

  “No,” said August, swallowing. “I guess I wouldn’t.” He let his hand rest on her leg then, braved Huginn and his hard, inhuman eyes but the raven did not attack, though his feathers stood high about him. It was all the comfort that August could give, and it made no difference. “She must be very sad,” he said, and Huginn stilled before him, a dark shape bent over and unwavering.

  “Guilty,” the bird croaked. “Guilty.”

  “But she wasn’t guilty!” cried August. “She wasn’t! Muninn said so!”

  “He means that she felt guilty,” said Muninn. “She survived when the others did not; she got to go back to her science, eventually, and her life, though that life was different than it had been, and thinner. It was not her fault that she lived, but the knowledge of their deaths made living difficult. She heard the gunshots, you see.”

  “That’s horrible,” said August, paling. “Horrible.”

  “Life is often horrible,” said Muninn, and her voice was very even, alm
ost tranquil. “But it goes on, and it is sometimes harder on those who survive than those who do not. That is why I have brought you here, to the day after rather than the day of. To see that some consequences belong to those who live. Those consequences you will not have to suffer.”

  She fixed August with hard eyes, and unblinking. “It’s not all about you, August,” she said. “And there is no mercy in that.”

  August could not argue. He had been brought to a place without mercy, a place that had shown Lina none, and if the incandescent place inside him where mercy had once dwelt and been burned away was cooling then the centre of it was molten yet, and fearful in the face of chill.

  AUGUST 14, 1894

  OXFORD, ENGLAND

  “You are being unkind,” Muninn observed. “Still.”

  “So what?” said August. “I don’t care.” But when he heard the front door slam and looked down through his window at April running out of the house, her school bag bouncing on her back and her head down as if she were trying not to cry, not to be seen crying, he did care. Not enough to open the window, not enough to call after her, but almost. His fingers twitched on the latch, but they didn’t open it and August tried to squash down the feelings of guilt as best he could. “I don’t care,” he said again. He was the one who was dying, not her. It wasn’t fair that she should get to go on and be happy, even if she got to go on and be sad first. It wasn’t as if she were going to lose everything she loved, like Lina. It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t.

  “There is not a lot of time remaining to you,” said Muninn. “Are you sure you wish to spend that time in unkindness?”

  “It’s nothing to do with you,” said August, sulky. “Can’t you just mind your own business?”

  “Your business is my business,” said Muninn. “And your memories are my own, and unpleasant.”

  “I guess it’s up to you to give me some better ones, then,” said August, and he knew how he sounded but it was as if the nasty comments were coming from a mouth other than his own and he was just an observer, watching from the outside as someone who looked like him and sounded like him did their very best to make others as unhappy as he was. He kept his head turned away so that he didn’t have to see Muninn’s soundless, disappointed sigh, so that he didn’t have to see the dislike written plainer than ever in Huginn’s iron eyes. Yet when Muninn extended her wing into the corner of his vision, he did not stop himself from reaching out to take it.