The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

somewhere between the rushing dark clouds and the wheeling lights of the city below found himself suddenly aware – again – of a flash and spreading of wings, white wings, wings like sails thrown out as wide as the eye’s own horizon. At first they had seemed to scythe the air around the fixed arms of the glider, cutting into the night in halting and in speeding bursts, keeping time with the blasts and howls of the sky’s tearing voice as it sang its strains of insane music. But then, gradually, the white flashes of wings seemed to settle, and Fitz became aware of great birds around them, not as a harrying or as a haunting, but as a presence. From moment to moment as Mr Ahmadi sought to climb into the wind, striving against the draughts and blasts where they knocked and shook and shuddered the glider, the birds appeared to be accompanying them, tracking them, at times near and at times far, but always there. Fitz had dropped in and out of consciousness so often he hadn’t known what was sleep, what waking; but always in the pale light rising from the land below he sensed the wings over him, wide and weariless.

How long they had flown, like froth foaming at the fountaining head of the wind, he had no idea. All he knew was that their bodies, arced and rigid, had been pushed across the answering arc of the sky, speared hurtling across the dome of night until with the night, at last, they dropped.

They had come to rest at the top of a broad grassy slope by a wide river. It could have been the hour, or the repeated shocks of the day, but Fitz hardly seemed to remember the details of the landing; it was as if they had simply stood up, and found the ground beneath them: Mr Ahmadi shuffling on the grass before him, Fitz shuffling behind. Once they had unstrapped themselves, and Mr Ahmadi had broken down the glider and packed it away, each of them taking a handle, they had walked briskly down to the river. A little pier or dock stood at the river’s shore, and beside it, for the river or the tide was low, a little beach lay in shadow. On the beach – as if someone had prepared for them – a wherry had been drawn up on the stones and sand, with oars set ready in the locks. Mr Ahmadi had jumped down, and Fitz behind him. They had stowed the glider in the transom and had together pushed the boat out, Fitz scrambling in before the river water began to lap at his ankles.

‘Sleep if you can,’ Mr Ahmadi had said, as he pulled on the oars. And, nestled in the bows, Fitz had slept – for how long, he didn’t know. All he could remember was the pull of the oars against the wind and, when he opened his eyes, Mr Ahmadi’s silhouette against the lights, his tall hat dipping forward, then leaning back, again, and again, framed by the dim air above the syncopated surging of the riverbank.

Day had overtaken them. Guiding the wherry close to the bank, where the current was weakest, Mr Ahmadi had pulled, and pulled again in an almost musical motion – but Fitz had felt that his strength was flagging. They had passed through a lock, where the bank shifted – now lower, grassier, draped with willows and longer, more ample. The water of the river, which earlier had heaved with gusts and slapped at the little boat, now lapped and lingered at its edge, lisping with the strokes of the oars and the tissuing breezes among the leaves of whispering trees. Fitz had drowsed in the dim light, his sense of things displaced, dispersed, fragmented. Hours might have passed.

And then – for the first time – the boat had struck the bank.

The steps running up the bank were broad, ten or twelve feet across, cut from single slabs of stone and weathered by centuries. A small man in a porter’s uniform had hurried down them to take in the boat, drawing its painter through an iron ring that hung from a post, and lifting the glider easily from the transom. The manner of his movement was hushed, deferential and efficient.

For the first time in days the wind seemed to have subsided, and the morning, the bright morning, the clear and dew-fresh morning was laced with birdcalls and cut with an astringent fragrance of lavender and verbena. The scene like a thread brushing the air had drawn him: he had risen to his feet, and stepped ashore.

Now, sitting at the edge of the bed, his gaze fixed before him at the whiteness of the wall, Fitz grasped at a feeling – the feeling of his arrival, of those first steps on the grounds of the Heresy. For all of his fatigue, for all the dirt and rust and sweat and soil that had stained his clothes, for all the rumpled and rattled anxiety of the day before, he had immediately registered – there, on the steps – the encompassing and seductive peace of the place. His senses had been in tumult, startled at the novelty, so that even now he could taste the luxurious emerald of the grass, and hear the bright crystalline ringing of the pearled drops of dew that tipped its blades, could all but touch the lark’s tight trills, and stub his fingers in the musk of purple buds; and yet, instead of that riotous congestion of sound, and sight, of touch and taste, what Fitz recalled above all was the sense that he had not been there at all, that even as it had happened, it was no more than a memory, that he was no more than an exciting tale told by another.

He didn’t dare admit to himself how much he had liked it.

Between rows of roses huddling their blooms he had trailed