The August Birds

  #

  The door to his room was open, and August lay in his bed, lay in the dark while a small strip of light from the hall illuminated the edge of his bedroom door, and he was thinking still. He could hear voices speaking dimly in other rooms, his Mum and Dad talking in the living room, the sound of the television. He knew that they were disappointed in him, and he knew as well that they were trying very hard not to show it. Mum had smiled at him over dinner, chatted with him as if everything were normal, but she had a range of smiles that pretended they weren’t sad and he knew them all.

  It was lonely in his bed. The birds were gone, and his parents sounded far away. This was the time of night he would usually have talked to April, past bedtime and both of them pretending to be asleep when their parents came to check. There had been walkie-talkies once, but August had been sick over his and it had never worked well again. Instead, April had taught him Morse Code and knocked on the shared wall between their beds, knocked with knock-knock jokes to make him laugh, and if the knocks and the muffled giggles had filtered downstairs to the living room then their parents had pretended not to notice and let their children have their secrets together.

  August turned in his bed, and laid his palm flat against the wall. He hadn’t tapped upon the wall for a long time now–it had begun to hurt his knuckles more and more, as he got thinner and thinner and the flesh wore away from his bones, and then he had been too hurt and too angry to knock. The wall felt silent under his hand: flat and smooth, with no vibrations, and the stillness and the silence was that of broken thoughts and missed chances, and before August could think worse of it, before he could talk himself out of it he curled his little fingers into a fist and beat them against the wall.

  -.- -. --- -.-. -.- / -.- -. --- -.-. -.- he rapped. Knock, knock.

  There was no answer, though August waited with his palm pressed against the wall, waited with his breath held tight until he couldn’t hold it anymore, until his bones ached with stillness and his stomach ached for another reason altogether. She always answered him. April had always answered, and she might have been asleep but she might have been angry with him, angry back and not answering, tired of his meanness and with her pillow over her ears so she couldn’t hear him calling for her because the distance between them had become too great to be breached and he had lost his chance to breach it.

  -.- -. --- -.-. -.- / -.- -. --- -.-. -.- he rapped again, and his knuckles stung as much as his eyes. Knock, knock.

  And there was no answer still, and silence, and August left his palm against the wall until he had to take it away to wipe at his face, because he wasn’t crying, he wasn’t, and there was no answer. And then, and then, there was a small noise echoing through the wall, right beside his head and repeated in familiar patterns, and he was laughing instead of crying, and felt better for it than he had in days.

  Who’s there? said April.

  AUGUST 15, 1914

  GATUN LAKE, PANAMA

  For the first time in nearly a week August did not wake with anger. Instead, April was with him. They snuggled under the covers together and if it was a tight squeeze she had brought biscuits to compensate, sneaked from the kitchen the lovely ginger biscuits made for August by the lady who lived next door because she knew he liked them. They’d spoil his breakfast, but August didn’t care and sugar was one of April’s primary food groups.

  “You’re not a lump,” she said, her mouth half-full and with crumbs all over her lap. “Grumpy, sure. But not a lump. Certainly not a useless one. You’re not useless, for one. And you’re too skinny to be a lump.” She forced another biscuit into his hand. “Maybe you’re a particle.”

  “Oh, a useless particle. Great. I feel so much better.”

  April stuck her tongue out at him. “Call yourself useless again and I’ll take away your bickies. You can have Weetbix for breakfast like everyone else.” And she laughed as August made a face and snatched at the tin in mock-terror. “You are particles. A collection of them, anyway, and they’ll always exist, one way or another. Or you can be a wave if you want. Like when you throw a pebble in a pool. The ripples come from you and spread out and out and go on forever.”

  “They don’t go on forever,” said August. “They’ll bump up against the sides and stop eventually.”

  “Fine. It’s a giant pool. Never-ending, no sides. You’re such a complainer.”

  “Still,” said August, between mouthfuls of his own, “it’s a nice thought, the ripples. Little bits of me reaching out. It’s like being remembered.” He paused, leaning against her and her body was solid and warm against him. “You’ll remember me, won’t you April?” For more than tantrum, he wanted to add but couldn’t. For more than sickness and selfishness and shrieking at you for things that were never your fault.

  “Of course I’ll remember you. I’ll remember all the bits of you that I know, which are different from all the bits Mum knows and all the bits Dad knows. We’ll all remember you together.”

  “But that won’t last forever,” said August. “One day you’ll die too and there’ll be no-one to remember me. Nowhere for the ripples to go.”

  April rolled her eyes. “They’ll go,” she said, taking another biscuit from the tin and shoving it gently into his mouth to shut him up. “Of course they will.”

  His mouth still tasted of ginger when the ravens came, when they flew him over oceans and deposited him on the deck of another ship, this time the Ancon, caught this time in lake waters instead of shoals, and in no danger of sinking. “This is the first official trip through the Panama Canal,” Muninn had told him, and August had leaned against the railings as the ship was lifted through locks, as it floated between steep banks of rainforest.

  “It’s hard to think of it ending soon,” he said. “That the me that stood on this ship and saw the birds and smelled the trees and the water will be gone.” That this would be the last of him, nearly, the ending days of August.

  “There will be other Augusts,” said Muninn. “Other months, other boys. You are not the last.” Other journeys, other sailings. Other boats laden down with cargo and sent from safe harbour.

  “But none of them will be me,” said August. He hesitated. “April... April says that we go on in other ways. Particles and waves and so on. I didn’t really understand.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Not really. I mean, I understand what she’s saying in my head. But I’ve been trying hard to feel it Muninn, really feel it, and I can’t.”

  “You can,” said Muninn. “I have your memories, remember. You understand more than you think. Your sister knows that you do. It’s why she told you.”

  “Oh, let’s not pretend she’s not cleverer than I am,” said August. He had two weeks left–two weeks and two days and there was no time left for lies. It didn’t even bother him anymore that April was cleverer than he was, that she would survive when he did not. It had bothered him before, bothered him badly, and he had hurt her for it. But now... after exile and extinction, after shoals and snow petrels and reaching out in his sinking he couldn’t feel bad that she would live, that she would take herself out into the world and make it better thereby.

  “Then let us not pretend that her abilities take away from yours,” said Muninn. “You are capable of encompassing continuum, August. And if it is something that you need to see as well as think, then I can give you the looking of it. Hold to the railing, now–and don’t let go, no matter what you see.” Or what he didn’t see, as he clutched at the bars as he had clutched at those on the Arapahoe, this time for expectation instead of expulsion. For the bars began to fade–August could still feel them solid in his palms, his fingers curled around them–solid as the deck was solid beneath him, and also disappearing, becoming a faint, wavering stain against the landscape, against the water that was Canal and lake at once and it was as if he were standing in an invisibility more thorough than that he had experienced thus far with ravens. But it wasn’t only the s
hip that disappeared, for the lake itself began to run backwards, to shrivel into small channels and then into a wooded valley with a river running through, too small to carry the Ancon even though he felt it silent beneath him, still smooth-sailing through another time.

  “Do you see it, August?” said Muninn, perched on invisible railings beside him and her iron feathers brushing his fingers, her iron claws curled around a bar he felt but could not see. “Do you see what is happening this August, what is happening every August for years until the dam is made, until the lake is built? Both man-made, and they were the largest in the world for their time. Do you see the people bringing the earth and rock and clay to make the walls, to hold the dam in place against the water to come?”

  “I see them! There’s so many of them, Muninn. They must have thought they’d never finish.”

  “Do you see the dam done, and the land behind it filling with water?”

  “Yes,” said August, for beneath his feet the water was rising up in the valley, pooling and shrinking the land, transforming hills to islands, making the lake wide enough and deep enough for shipping, and the Ancon came back to life underneath him and then faded again and the Canal was full of ships, ships laden down with containers and cargo, easing past them as if the Ancon was a ghost in the water, and absent.

  “There,” said Muninn, as the landscape flickered and changed about them, faster and faster until it seemed a slide show, moving around August as if in circles until the spinning halted. “Do you see that? That island there, the Barro Colorado? The one with all the buildings on it?”

  “I see it,” said August again, and saw as well Huginn launching from the pale shadow of ship beside him and into the air, circling the buildings and spying this time for more than fish. “What is it, Muninn? Is it a holiday park?”

  “I did not bring you to see holiday parks,” the raven replied. “That is a reserve, a biological research station, come to study tropical ecology after the Canal was completed. Biologists began to come here in the twenties, and they have come ever since, to study plants and insects, birds and anteaters and monkeys, come to study all the life of the rainforest that the Canal opened up for them. They would not be here if not for the building you saw, the hauling of all that rock and spoil. That is the Canal, August. Not just the sailing, but the building of it and how that building stretched into the past. Not just the sailing, but the science of life here along its banks, and how that life continues to be explored long after the builders are gone. Long after this boat has gone. That is continuation. That is change and influence and consequence gone further into the future than you ever imagined.”

  Slowly then, the first boat, the boat that would be decommissioned long before August’s death, long before the end of the Canal, came back into focus and August saw as well as felt it under his hands, under his feet and all around him, the railings and the chimney and the flags.

  “That’s the Canal,” he said. The images around him stopped: the whirling kaleidoscope of engineering and biology and he was as he had been, a small boy on a steamship, part of history but not pinned to it and no longer feeling as if he should be pinning down.

  “I wish you could see it,” said Muninn. “How it all rolls on and on until today, a bright and endless ripple.”

  “I do see it,” said August, smiling. There was wind in his face and the Canal smelled of water and wood and oil all together.

  “You see part of it.”

  AUGUST 16, 1960

  GOMBE STREAM NATIONAL PARK, TANZANIA

  Muninn glanced at August, her head cocked to one side. “Must you be so restless, child?” she said. “Surely it cannot be that difficult for you to sit still? You are sickly, after all. I would have thought such squirming beyond you.”

  “I’d be fine if it weren’t for these insects,” said August, slapping at himself. His pyjamas kept the worst of them off, but the material was thick and fleecy and meant for the New Zealand winter, not a warm summer in the open air, and he was sweating through it, a magnet for bugs. “It’s alright for you. They’re not interested in iron.”

  “Leave the poor things be,” said Muninn. “They’re not hurting you. Look at Jane. Does she seem so bothered?”

  August peered around the bird. “She looks as sick as I feel,” he said. Jane was sitting beside them, her blonde hair pulled back into a pony-tail, and her face was wet with sweat. She was indeed sitting quietly next to her companion, August noted with some disgust, and neither of them were over-concerned with insects. But there was a vagueness in her eyes that he recognised well enough–he was used to feeling dizzy and weak and a little strange himself, used to the haze of dim reality, the way the world looked slant through sickness and almost familiar.

  She had been lying down when Huginn and Muninn brought him into the little clearing, a high point streaked about with ravines that August had seen from above, and wooded. Huginn had landed right down by her face, his iron wings working to make a breeze over her and she had shifted then, raising herself up to sitting and wiping the sweat from her eyes.

  “She should be in bed,” said August critically, and it gave him some satisfaction to say about someone else what he had so often heard about himself. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She has a disease called malaria,” said Muninn. “Coming down with it, anyway. She will feel a great deal worse in the days to come, I assure you, but she will be alright.”

  “Why did she come all the way up here if she isn’t feeling well?” said August, who had seen the climb from his perch on Muninn’s back, who had been grateful that it was not his to make.

  “Why did you?” said Muninn. “If sickness so concerns you, I can always take you home.”

  “That’s alright, thank you,” said August, hurriedly. “I expect she didn’t want to stay in bed if she didn’t really have to.”

  “A shocking concept,” said Muninn, and her voice was very, very dry. August suspected that she was making fun of him, but the thought didn’t bother him as it would have in the week gone past, where he had taken all attempts at humour as mockery, and cruel. He stuck his tongue out at her, and then again at Huginn for good measure, but the other bird ignored him. He was looking at the open ground ahead of them, a clearing in the trees and the woodlands, and Jane was looking with him, in the same direction and waiting.

  “What are we going to see?” said August, and Muninn sighed.

  “It’s a good thing no-one here can hear you,” she said. “You would have given your position away long ago, and he would have gone around before we could see him.”

  “Who?” said August, but before he could ask anything more there was the steady sound of footprints, of a large animal approaching, and out of the trees, only a few metres away, appeared a chimpanzee. His fur was shining and very black, as black as raven wings, and he had a white beard. August and Jane and the ravens were close enough to see his expression, and it was a mirror of their own, of surprise at strange creatures and chance meetings. The chimp stilled, staring, turned his head to one side and then to the other, craning as August craned for a better view, for curiosity and connection.

  “Will he come any closer, do you think?” said August, holding out his hand and forgetting, for the moment, that the chimp could not see him, that it could only see Jane and her companion.

  “He is not a dog, August,” said Muninn, and August dropped his hand back to his side, sheepish. “You will note that he is cautious in his curiosity.”

  “We wouldn’t hurt him,” said August.

  “He doesn’t know that,” said Muninn. “And more salient is the possibility that he would hurt you. Hurt Jane, rather, or her companion. A chimpanzee is far stronger than you are, August.”

  And the chimp was moving then, as if in illustration of a caution other than their own, moving out of his path and into the undergrowth. August sighed, disappointed, but the sound of the chimp moving through the vegetation did not fade away and August turned about in conce
rt with Jane and the ravens, as the other animal made his way around and below them, rejoining the path he would have taken had the clearing been empty and he’d been able to walk through without hindrance.

  “I can still hear him,” said August, pushing himself up on bony knees so that he could see better. “I wish I could see him.” He tried to catch Muninn’s eye, but the bird was very deliberately staring at the ground so that he could get no clue from her, and Huginn was standing beside Jane and crowing to himself as if he were laughing.

  “Look!” cried Jane. “There he is, up there!” And August saw her expression alight with more than fever, followed her arm as she pointed and saw the chimpanzee again, and above them. He had climbed a tree to look down upon them, climbed for a better look, for curiosity and cleverness.

  “He’s spying on us!” said August, delighted.

  “How else is he to know you?” said Muninn. “Sometimes one can only learn by taking on a different perspective, by looking from a different angle. That chimpanzee can see more and differently from the tree than the ground. It was a sensible decision, the act of a thinking creature. If only all apes would be so thoughtful.”

  August screwed up his face. “All apes,” he said. “Do you mean me, Muninn?”

  “You are an ape, are you not?” said Muninn.

  “I suppose,” said August. He hesitated, and in his hesitation was the remembrance of Neanderthal graves and telescopes, of reefs and radios. “Is that what you’re trying to do with me?” he said. “Trying to make me see differently, to make me look differently? Is that why I’m here?”

  “That is why Jane is here,” said Muninn. “To learn to see the chimpanzees in a different way. She was not the only one. Dian went to the gorillas, and Birute to the orang-utans.” She settled her wings on her back, watched Huginn take off to fly back and between the woman and the ape, crowing as he flew, circling each in turn. “This was one of the early days, when they began to study each other. To see the new things in their world and begin to understand them, to see the way that other creatures lived.”

  “It must have been so strange,” said August, who had lived a double life himself, who had gone from his own kind and his own home and into the homes of others, who had seen discovery and war and failure in those others and seen them again in himself. Who watched Jane, the sweat and fever and sickness in her face and the wonder painted over all until the sickness was only secondary.

  “There were points of familiarity,” said Muninn. “In a different context, but they were there. Tool use, carnivorism, aggression. The ways that families came together, the ways that they came apart.” She paused, and did not look at him. “Sometimes it is not so easy to see in others what we think of as belonging to ourselves,” she said.

  “No,” said August, who had tools and hurt and sickness to spare and had shared them, who had made others share them. “I guess not.”

  “Still, as a way to learn I highly recommend it,” said the bird. “I think sometimes I have learned as much from apes as Jane did.”

  “Thanks,” said August, dryly. “I think.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Muninn?” said August.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t think you really answered my question. You know, about why I’m here.”

  “Did I not?” said Muninn. “Perhaps that is a question you are meant to answer for yourself.”

  AUGUST 17, 1834

  CERRO LA CAMPANA, CHILE

  Muninn flew him to the very top of the mountain. August could not have walked up on his own, nor could he have sat a horse, or even a donkey, for the length of time it would have taken for them to carry him upwards. Nor, when he was at the top, could August go exploring. The top of the mountain was a shattered jumble of rock, of weathered and fractured greenstone, all split and shattered and the fragments unsteady beneath him at angles.

  “You will turn an ankle if you’re not careful,” said Muninn, and she was not wrong so August picked his way to the nearest slab. He was dizzy often now, dizzy from more than heights, so he was over-careful, inching his way between the rocks until he found a brief flat place where he could sit without too much discomfort.

  “There is more to look at than your feet, August,” said Muninn, reproving, and when the black spots disappeared from his eyes and he could make his skinny, sweating little fingers loosen their grip upon the rocks, August raised his head and looked. Before him was a nation of knives–a horizon of peaks and edges, of mountains before him as far as he could see, and some were tipped with snow. The air was cold and very still.

  “They are the Andes,” said Muninn, and August, who had only seen the Southern Alps when he had flown over them on another trip to Starship Hospital in Auckland, who had only seen the Southern Alps but who had pictures on his wall of Everest and Hillary, of the Himalayas and Mount Kilimanjaro and the Andes, actually squeaked in excitement. That small noise echoed and came back to him in waves, and he would have been embarrassed had Huginn not cawed then as loudly as he could, to hear his own echoes come back to him. And then Muninn was crowing too, and in the cascading effect of all their voices together August almost missed the echoes of a fourth as it came up onto the summit of the mountain with its companions, and if the man who arrived could not hear their echoes he could hear his own, and be as delighted by them. His face was so rosy with excitement, with happiness, that he seemed younger than he was, and for a moment he looked a little as August looked, and their twin small-boy faces were radiant in the sun.

  August felt the kinship between them, and it was a feeling that saddened but did not fade when the man did what August could not–scrambled over rocks and broken boulders, strong and healthy and able to move on his own and without help. And his steps that started in excitement became measured, and that was another point of difference between them, for if August was dying he was still young and often measurement was beyond him, and consideration, and comparison. He could grasp them sometimes, but dimly, as though they were a theory new-come to him and not yet assimilated, but he did not look for them as the man was looking, did not consciously gather evidence in the same mingled state of astonishment and expectation.

  “Who’s that, Muninn?” said August, watching the man bend over some of the rocks, tracing lichen with his fingers, the lichen that grew on some surfaces and not on others, the lichen that August had not noticed until the other had done it for him.

  “His name is Charles,” said Muninn. “And he has come on a grand and wonderful voyage, come from his home far on the other side of the world in a boat that is called Beagle. Come to learn, to see shapes and differences and islands.”

  “This isn’t an island,” said August. “I’m not stupid, you know. We could have seen tortoises, if we’d gone with him to islands. I like tortoises, Muninn.”

  Beside them, Huginn made a rude sound.

  “Oh, you think everything is plodding,” said Muninn. “Not everyone is as quick as you.” And Huginn, impatient at the chastisement, made another rude sound and hopped away, hopped towards Charles as he bent over lichen, poking and scraping, and waited next to his knee with more patience than he had ever extended to August.

  “I was born in the wrong month for tortoises, wasn’t I?” said August, resigned and mournful at once.

  “That is not my fault,” said Muninn. “If you must blame someone, blame yourself. Had you held on to your mother for another few weeks, you would have all the tortoises you could wish for.”

  “I don’t mind, really,” said August. “I’m only teasing, Muninn.” He laid one little hand upon her back, the iron warm from the sun and heated under his palm. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “It makes me feel so small.”

  “You are small,” said Muninn, mollified, and she reached back with her beak to give his fingers a friendly tweak. “Very small, and very young. No wonder the mountains are surprising to you. They are certainly surprising to him. But then,” she con
sidered, “he is also young. Very well: you shall be young and surprised together.”

  August smiled and bit his lip–he thought it might have been rude to laugh. “I wonder if we’re surprised by the same thing,” he said, he who had been surprised by size and smallness, he who watched Charles also focus on a smallness, and not the same. For Charles had risen from his crouch and was searching for more lichen, was ignoring the view in favour of the ground, of the broken rocks, and while August did not grudge the interest neither did he understand it. Perhaps Charles had had more experience with mountains than he had, and they were no longer exciting to him.

  “You are,” said Muninn. “Surprised by the same thing, though you do not know it. The perspective is there, the presence of opposites, and how those opposites can show understanding.”

  “If you say so,” said August, who didn’t understand one bit.

  “Look at the rocks, August,” said Muninn. “See how broken they are? And how some have lichen growing on them, and how some have been broken so recently that lichen has had no time to grow?”

  “Is that what he’s looking at?” said August, and then he could see it himself, because the rock on which he sat was dead rock, hard and empty, and the rock beside his feet was traced with life, with the lacy patterns of lichen.

  “They are indications of earthquakes,” said Muninn. “Charles has seen earthquakes before, and this is another piece of evidence for him, evidence of the changing nature of the Earth. It will make him wonder how life can adapt to such change.”

  “He can get all that from lichen?” said August.

  “Not all of it,” said Muninn, “but some. It is the presence and absence of life illuminating him, August. The contrast between the two is as a little candle for him. It makes him want to question, and to learn.”

  “He’s going to learn a lot,” said August.

  “It was a very interesting voyage for him,” said Muninn. “To go to such strange places, to go beyond himself. It was full of things he had not seen before, or imagined. The lichen is a little thing–alive in some places, and then absent. It is easier to see life in absence sometimes, in disruption. It gives perspective. Like you,” she said, “on this mountain. You have also seen something you have not seen before, and not considered. And it has made you think differently about your life. It has made you feel smaller. And it has made him more aware of disruption, of the threat and discontinuity of life.”

  “Me, too,” said August, almost absently, as he watched Charles, as he watched the lichen at his feet, the tiny pieces of life that could so easily be broken off and crushed.

  “Yes,” said Muninn. “You too.”

  AUGUST 18, 1868

  GUNTUR, INDIA

  “I know,” August said. “I know! You don’t have to keep reminding me. We went over this with Ruby, if you remember.” He glanced at Muninn, saw the steady clockwork of her eyes, the ticking over of time all encompassed within. “What am I saying? Of course you remember.”

  “Humour me.”

  August sighed. “Total eclipse of the sun. Don’t look at it, you’ll burn your eyes out. I know, Muninn. I won’t look. I don’t want to be blind; there’s enough wrong with me already.”

  “I want to be sure that you are certain of it,” said the raven. “There is an eclipse today, and another tomorrow. I would not have you damaged further.”

  “I’m fine,” said August. “I’ll be fine. You’ve got my memories, you know I remember. So stop fussing, will you? You’re worse than Mum. Though you could have told me. If I’d have known we were going eclipsing, I would’ve made a camera. One of those pinhole ones. It wouldn’t have been hard, I’d only need cardboard.”

  “I did not bring you here for eclipses, August. I wanted you to see something else. Look over there: it’s with Huginn, and with Pierre.”

  August had to shift to see it, for Huginn was blocking his view, dancing about the instrument and forcing his face up close to it, staring into one end as if gazing at a mirror. “What is it?” he said.

  “It is a spectroscope. Its purpose is to study the properties of light. When light passes through a prism it gives a spectrum, and the spectral lines shown by the scope are characteristic of elements. That is why Pierre has brought his spectroscope: he wishes to study the chromosphere of the sun, the solar prominences that burst from the surface and are more easily seen in eclipses. He hopes it will tell him something of the elements within the sun.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yes. He will see a yellow line that he cannot explain. It will not match up with what he expects to find. Instead, it reflects a wholly new discovery, a whole new element. Pierre is about to discover helium, August.”

  “Helium? Isn’t that the gas they put in balloons?” He had balloons at his birthday parties, and some of them were filled with gas that made them float high and gave his Dad a squeaky voice. He liked balloons.

  “I know you do,” said Muninn, and her voice was smug, as if there were secrets in it, and promises. “And yes, it is.” And that was all she had time to say, for the sky began to darken then and she hovered by his shoulder, her iron wings open in case he did something foolish and she had to cover his eyes. Instead, August focused on the spectroscope and on the ground, on the little blades of grass before him. He focused on the little plants as if he were Charles, and the sky became darker and darker until he couldn’t see them at all, until the birds that were not ravens stopped singing and the only thing he could hear was his own breathing, and Pierre’s.

  “You’ll have to be quick,” Muninn warned him, and when Pierre moved a little away from the spectroscope, from the telescope it was attached to (he bent down suddenly, cursing, as if something iron, something he couldn’t see, had pecked hard at his ankle) August pressed his eye to the scope. “Do you see the yellow line?” she said, as Huginn flapped up from the ground and shoved at August until he could stare into the scope with his own iron eyes.

  “I do,” said August. “At least, I did.” It had seemed such a simple thing in daylight: put together to dissect suns and make barcodes out of light. “It’s amazing, Muninn,” he said, and wonder was all through him. “It’s so little, and it does so much.”

  “Like you,” said the raven, and August laughed in disbelief.

  “I can’t do that!”

  “But you are also a kind of spectroscope,” said Muninn–as if his fingers were glass, as if his palms were made of prisms.

  “For the sun?” said August. “I don’t think so.” The sun did leaves lines on his flesh–shadows, and burns that turned his skin pink and left the marks of tanning on him–but there was nothing fundamental about those lines, no indication writ upon his flesh of helium, or of hydrogen or any of the heavier elements.

  “It is not the sun shining through you,” Muninn replied. “It is death.” And August was quiet, because that he understood. The lines left by death were familiar to him, the lines on his body where bone showed under skin; the perfect half-circles under his eyes, delimiting in dark smudges the planes of his face. The tendons on the back of his hands, the way that all those lines together made new lines on the things that touched him. The medicine so carefully measured, sometimes in little cups and sometimes in bags of fluid to be hooked up to his body and pumped through, the needles sharp and straight against his skin. The pulses on the machines about his bed, the way that they measured differently the different parts of him.

  They had been talking through darkness and a strange sort of twilight. Then suddenly there was colour in the world again, only greys and blues at first and then more and more as the light came back and the eeriness passed and August could look up and Muninn’s wings were folded.

  “What are you reading off me, then?” he asked, as if those lines were letters carved into him as death radiated through, as if those letters were scratched onto him and able to be interpreted: a child’s book of hours where all the hours were running out. “That’s what he’s doing, isn’t he?
The lines on his spectroscope show him what elements are in the sun. I already know what elements are in me: carbon, mostly, with some other bits. Calcium for bones, and there’s iron in my blood.” But Muninn didn’t need to be told this–she already knew what was in him, what was in everyone. She remembered those parts of them without telling. “You must be looking for something else.”

  “It’s not me doing the looking,” the raven replied. “It’s you. And your doctors, and your family. Everyone who knows you can see the end coming through you. It’s written all over your face if it’s written nowhere else.”

  “My face.”

  “As if it were glass,” said Muninn. “A perfect polished surface. You refract, August, even without meaning to. The entire spectrum shines through you. Can you not see it?”

  “I don’t look in mirrors anymore,” said August. He knew what he looked like, knew what sickness had done to him. And even if there hadn’t been mirrors, like the one that had hung above the fish tank until he had asked for its removal, he would have known because other people had prisms too. He could see in their faces what he looked like. He could see that they knew what was coming.

  He didn’t need a mirror when he had other people.

  “And they don’t need one either, not when they have you,” said Muninn.

  “They have them anyway,” said August. He was the only person he knew who did without mirrors. April had one in her room. So did his parents. And there was a doctor, one of his favourites, who had long black hair all twisted up in a complicated style that she couldn’t have achieved without a looking glass. Another whose eye-liner was never smudged, another with a moustache he trimmed into strange shapes sometimes to make the kids on the children’s ward laugh. He wondered if there were another reason–if they finished up their days and went to look at themselves when they were done, went to check their own prismatic faces to see something shining through that wasn’t death, not yet, for all it left lines on them.

  “If you can see their lines you can see what yours are not,” said Muninn, “and know yourself thereby. What do their lines tell you?”

  “That they’re alive,” said August, and his voice was sad and heavy at once, and when he looked down the lines in his forearms, in his hands, were stark: lines of bones and tendons and shrinking. “And that I won’t be. Not for much longer.” He looked up at the raven then, the one that stood by him when the other was with Pierre, looking for lines of another kind, the thin yellow strip that said helium, that said not-August. The raven was dark, a prism all clouded before him and though the feathers were thin and filamented lines August could see no colours there, could wrest no meaning from them. He wondered if she ever saw her own face, the black iron lines of it. “What is it that you see, Muninn?”

  “I see a spectrum,” said the bird. “And I see that it is familiar.”

  AUGUST 19, 1887

  KLIN, RUSSIA

  August was propped up in bed, playing Go Fish with his Dad when the ravens came. He froze for a moment, unable to make the bridge between them, to contain them both in the colliding hemispheres of his life, but when it became clear that their appearance was confined only to him he relaxed and let them watch.

  “I just wanted to say,” said Dad, picking up another card, “that I was proud of you. For making up with your sister.”

  August would have liked to have left it at that. It gave him a warm feeling inside and he didn’t feel that often. Oh, his parents told him they were proud of him a lot, but August knew, deep down, that he had never done much to be proud of. Mostly when people told him they were proud of him it was after something nasty had happened–another needle, another operation, another painful, boring, or embarrassing test, and they were so proud of how well he’d put up with it. The thing was, they told him that even if he didn’t put up with it well at all–he remembered when he was younger, crying and screaming at the needles while his Mum hugged him, and when it was over they’d still said they were proud at how well he’d done, how brave he’d been. So when Dad told him that he was proud of him for something else entirely, August would have liked to have taken the credit and warm feelings and hugged them all to himself, but the ravens were perched on the end of his bed, Muninn with her honesty and Huginn with his determination to think the worst of August always, the irritation and the badly veiled contempt, and he couldn’t stay silent while they were watching.

  “It wasn’t exactly making up,” said August. Making up said to him that the two of them had been to blame, squabbling about sharing toys or space or attention, and the truth was that the fault had been entirely one-sided. “It was more me saying I was sorry.” He clutched his cards a little harder, refused to look up from them. “It was all my fault, Dad. Not April.”

  “Yeah,” said Dad. “I know.”

  August looked up in surprise. “You never said anything.”

  “You’re going to be ten soon, you’re not a little kid anymore. Your Mum and I thought you’d figure it out for yourself.”

  “And if I hadn’t?”

  “I would have said something, had it gone on much longer.” His Dad put down his cards, rubbed one hand through messy hair. He opened his mouth and shut it again, and sighed.

  “It’s alright,” said August, quietly. “You can say it. Whatever it is. Like you said, I’m not a little kid anymore.”

  Dad smiled at him then, the kind of smile Mum had when she was trying not to cry. August hated that smile, but he knew he would have hated the crying more. At the end of the bed, Huginn shifted from one foot to the other and shook out his wings.

  “You’re my boy,” said Dad. “You always will be. My child. But you’re not the only one. And as much as I’d like to let you have things all your own way right now, I’ve got April to think about as well. I won’t let her go the rest of her life thinking her brother hated her. That her brother... that he died hating her. I’m glad you apologised, August. I’m glad you made up. Because if you hadn’t, I would’ve made you.”

  “How?” said August. He was genuinely curious. It wasn’t like grounding him would have made a difference, or taking away his toys. He was already losing far more than telescopes and fish bowls, and against that their loss would have been a bare thing, and trivial.

  “You know kiddo, I think I would have had to guilt you into it,” said Dad. “I’d never forgive myself, but I would have done it.”

  “Even if it made me sad?” said August, testing, though he did not know for what.

  “You wouldn’t have been sad for long,” said Dad, and his face crumpled for the briefest moment and then smoothed again, a control over expression born out of pain and long practise. “April would have been sad for much, much longer. I don’t expect you to understand, but–”

  August reached out then, placed his thin little hand over his Dad’s big brown one and squeezed as hard as he could. It wasn’t very hard, but it was enough. “I get it,” he said. “I do. It’s alright. And you didn’t have to do it.”

  “No,” said Dad. “You did. Like a man, all grown up. I was so proud,” he said again. “So proud.”

  “Anyone would have done it,” said August, muttering it under his breath almost and too embarrassed, too pleased, to do more than glance up at his father, at the ravens. Muninn was watching him, and her eyes were kind.

  “Pull the other one,” said his Dad, throwing down his cards. “Your Mum and me have been lucky. Two good kids. It’s not always that way. Having children is such a crapshoot, August.” He caught himself then, gave a conspiratorial, guilty smile. “Don’t tell your mother. Fucking swear jar.” August giggled, and his Dad continued. “You never know how they’re going to be, or what you’re supposed to do with them. We make it up as we go along, and hope we don’t screw it up. Hope we don’t screw you up. Sometimes I look at you and your sister and I think, well, we jumped off a bridge with you kids, and it turned out alright. You turned out alright.”

  “Jumped off a bridge,” said August. ?
??Really?”

  “Like an adventure,” said Dad. “Just, you know, with teething and screaming and shit.”