K Parker - Shadow

You'd never get me out in one of those things, he told himself. Not if you paid me.

Then he felt impatient, without yet knowing why, so much so that he splashed several yards into the water, wincing as the cold unpleasantness seeped in round his toes and ankles. The boat was still a long way out when he took a deep breath and shouted, 'Have you got it?'

One of the men with his back to him turned half around; the movement was ill advised and nearly swamped the boat. The oarsmen yelled at him to sit still at the same time as he shouted something inaudible, presumably a reply to the question.

He found this extremely frustrating. 'I said, have you got it?' he yelled, even louder. This time he could just make out the man's reply. 'Yes.'

That was evidently the answer he'd wanted to hear; he could feel joy flooding his heart, as palpably as the sea had flooded his worn-out boots. Of course, he hadn't got a clue what it was.

Perhaps it was because this was a dream, and in a dream things happen at extreme speed, so that you can dream a week in a few minutes of real time, but the minute or so it took for the boat to reach the shore seemed to last an entire lifetime. Just before the brittle prow bit into the shingle, a single crow dropped down on the rock beside him and turned its head away.

'Well?' he shouted.

The man who'd answered his question hopped over the side into the water, then reached back into the boat and picked up a familiar-looking bundle. 'He's asleep,' the man said, 'for a change, the little bastard. You're bloody lucky we didn't pitch him over the side.'

'It's a boy, then.'

The man scowled. 'Well, of course it's a boy. Do you think we'd have bothered otherwise? Here, you take the dirty little snot. If I never see him again, that'll suit me just fine.'

Stepping a yard or so further into the water he took the bundle from the man's outstretched hands and at once felt an all-consuming sense of relief that nearly stopped him from breathing.

'My grandson,' he murmured.

'Yes,' the man from the boat confirmed. 'Almost as big a pain in the bum as his grandpa, if you ask me. Next time you want a kid fetched from a long way over the sea, do it yourself. Now, if you don't mind getting out of the way, we've got valuable cargo to land.'

Some other men had come down the path; they were helping the men from the boat with barrels and jars and boxes. The baby in his arms looked like some exotic wild animal.

'Thank you,' he said, and the man from the boat nodded.

'That's all right,' he replied. 'Tursten was a good lad, I'm sorry.'

He turned away and started on the long, painful climb back to the top. He didn't notice the gradient, or the treacherous footing, or the wind that tried to comb him off the side of the cliff. He was utterly fascinated by the way the strange creature was opening and closing its tiny five-fingered hands, almost but not quite the way a human being would do it. It occurred to him that if some inhuman thing, a monster or a god, were to take a human body to live in for reasons of expedience or policy, probably it would familiarise itself with the way the thing worked by flexing the muscles and testing the nerves and tendons, just as this strange object seemed to be doing. The thought made him stop for a moment and frown. The idea had been that his dead son would somehow have found his way into this small body (because Tursten couldn't really be dead, that would be unthinkable; there had to be a way round it), but now that he was actually holding it, he wasn't sure. Maybe something else was in there, as well as or instead of Tursten.

Well, he thought, it'll be interesting finding out. Even if it is my son, he can't be expected to remember anything of his previous life, it'll be as if Tursten had come home but with all his memories wiped away-in which case, of course, he wouldn't be Tursten at all any more. Take away someone's memories and all you've got left is an empty bottle, a piece of scrap only fit for putting in the fire and bashing into something else.

At the top of the cliff he paused and looked back. There was the sail, more or less exactly where it had been when he first looked down from there (but since then, everything had changed; the old world had come to an end and a new one had slipped in and taken over the physical remains). He noticed something yellow and shiny in the child's left hand, just visible through the gaps between the soft, damp fingers. A gold ring, or something of the sort; he wondered where that had come from, and what it meant.

The child opened its mouth, miming a cry though no sound came out. He cast about in his mind for a nice soothing lullaby, but all he could think of was: Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree Hardly a wonderfully apt choice; but the kid seemed to like it, so he carried on: Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Then he jumped in the slacky-tub to save his soul.

The child started to howl, which suggested a certain degree of taste, if nothing else. He laughed, and started to sing 'Sweet Meadowgrass' instead, but found he could only remember the first two lines.

He took his time walking home, as if part of him didn't really want to get there. At the top of Enner's Steep he stopped and leaned against the orchard gate, looking down over the sprawl of thatched and tiled roofs of the farm. For some reason he felt a need to preserve an image of it in his mind, as if something he was just about to do would change it for ever. He made a careful mental note of the position of each building, taking the main house as an obvious datum and locating the barns and outhouses in relation to it, then he looked up at the sun to check the time, though that was hardly necessary. At Enner's, you didn't need the sun to tell you the time, you looked up at the thin, spindly fir trees and then down at the yard. If the crows were roosting, it was early morning, midday or evening. If they were in the yard, mobbing the stalls, it was morning or afternoon feed. If they were pitched out on the grass in the long meadow, it was mid-morning or mid-afternoon; and if they were crowding together on the branches of the apple orchard, it was morning or evening milking and the boys had driven them off the yard as they walked the stock through. As often as not, you could tell the time with your eyes shut just by listening to them. All the years he'd lived here, he'd been aware of them nearly all the time, their single cold mind reaching into his, groping in the dark for his thoughts-where was he going, what was he doing, was it safe to be out or was it time to fall back to safe positions and wait for him to go away? Once a year, ever since he was old enough to toddle and throw a stone, they'd assaulted the castles and cities in the fir copse with every weapon at their disposal, from pebbles and slingshots to blunt arrows and twenty-foot poles, trying to break up the nests while the season's children were too young to fly; every year, no matter how hard they tried to wipe them out, they killed or drove off a third of them, thereby preserving an exact balance with their normal rate of population growth. It was the only time they could even pretend to win a victory against the rookery; the rest of the time, the raiders raided, stole, wrecked and withdrew, undefeated and unassailable.

(Tursten hated the crows, always had; he could remember him as a small boy, standing in the yard screaming at them. As he got older he stopped screaming and went quiet, his cold, savage mind devising some better way, and as always he'd found one. He collected twelve birds whose wings he'd managed to break with stones, and pegged them out a dozen yards out from the meadow hedge, their legs tethered to short sticks. At midday, the birds in the trees flew down and pitched next to them, assuming they were the scouts sent out to find safe pasture; Tursten was waiting for them in a hide of freshly cut hazel, perfectly still, with his forty-pound bow and plenty of lead-nosed blunts. Every bird he stunned, he pegged out, until he had dozens of decoys; and the more decoys he put out, the more birds came to join them. At dusk he went out and killed them all, apart from half a dozen he kept for the next day. After three days the survivors got wise and circled above his head all morning, screaming at him the way he'd screamed at them; he appreciated that. It was the greatest victory ever achieved in the war, but he never managed to repeat it; and two years later, the numbers were back to where they'd always been.)