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

still, the cold had begun to soak into his body. Water from somewhere – from mud that had splashed him, or maybe it was his own sweat, cooling – touched his skin with damp and set it shivering.

‘I know,’ said the Master. ‘That day, years ago, when the seas calmed, I had what sailors called a sea dream – a vision, an experience, as real to me as this rock is now. Maybe it was real. Who can say, after all, what is seen on the wide ocean? Who can say what things are known over the deep? I woke to a blistering sun. My eyes burned, and my lips were parched, scaled. I drank the last of my fresh water. I covered myself; but I knew I had to get ashore, anywhere, and soon. As if in answer to my prayer, as if in response to my need, almost immediately I sighted an island. I supposed it was an illusion, that I had been staring too long astern or that, dazzled by the boundless volume of the still-swelling water on every side, I had conjured its necessary complement. It seemed a small, a lonely, a lovely and a simple place, rock and sand standing not more than twenty metres proud of the waves. There were trees, and in the island’s centre a little pool of fresh water. I intended to pull up my boat, and set myself in the warm sand, to rest in the shade, to drink my fill, rest again. I never reached the island. I was luckier than I knew.’

Fitz thought beneath the moonlight that the skin of his hands was changing colour. It seemed paler than it should, almost blue. The shiver that had started in his wrists and armpits had now settled, digging in, to a deep throb turning over in his chest. While the Master was talking, the last of the albatrosses, the great one that the Master called the king, had been stepping towards him. Now Fitz realized with alarm that the bird was very close, and while the blood knocked in his veins against the shivering in his bones, the white wings lifted as the bird advanced on him. Its eyes were on his.

Fitz backed up, towards the Master. The bird came closer again, fanning his wings into a kind of broad dome, keeping its head down, staring, always staring. Fitz shuffled back again, and again, till he was almost standing on the Master’s hand, till he almost tripped on the rivet by which his wrist was stapled to the rock. Still the great bird advanced. Only when Fitz had backed all the way to the Master’s very side, so that his heels nearly touched his torso, did the bird fold its wings and raise its head. It emitted a low trill of clicks. Fitz, startled, sat on the ground – and realized that in the near shadow of the Master’s side, not far from the other, huddling birds, the air was warmer and more human.

He saw that I was cold. He’s herding me.

While the Master went on with his story, Fitz put out his hand. The great bird eyed him for a minute or two, then slowly drew up alongside him, settling against the Master’s waist. It hunkered down on to its legs, as if rocking back and forth with loving delicateness on an egg that lay beneath.

‘A brisk breeze was blowing. I had only just trimmed the sail when, looking ahead, I saw the whole of the island buckle. The ridge of rock at its centre rose into the air even as the beach before me slid under the waves. It was no island at all, child, but the back of a gigantic sea creature, a monster larger than anything that has ever moved on land. My eyes couldn’t take in the size of the thing, but my little boat felt the force of its dive. The creature’s tail, broad as a city, reared out of the surf. The eddies and curls that it made in the sea’s surface would have capsized a craft far larger than mine – and wrecked it, too, had I not foreseen the danger and tacked, at the first moment, into a better course. And it dived – the monster dived – so slowly, lumbering in the sea the way a cloud, when you see it from a great distance, fleets by inches across the sky. And I reached into its colossal shadow, so that when at last with a mighty flick it sank beneath the waves, that rushing swell it made, half a mile high, caught me square on the stern and drove me ever before it – out of control, but so long as I held the place, as safe as anywhere on the face of the sea.

‘By the time that swell gave out, I found myself again in the cold seas of the north. These birds – all of them – they had followed along with me as the swell pushed ever on, throwing up whole shoals of fish that made their pickings easy. And they haven’t left me since.’

The breeze was flickering across them, tasting them with its cold tongue. Squeezed against the Master’s side, Fitz had drawn up his legs and sat hugging his knees, face to face with the albatross. Its eyes where they caught the light of the moon – dark, glinting, alien – seemed as deep as any sea. Fitz hadn’t even noticed when the great bird slowly lifted, then extended its wings over both boy and man.

‘Imagine,’ said the Master. ‘Imagine being able to look into the air, to see its flows and currents. Imagine the ability to unthread its tumbling turbulence. Imagine that. Imagine bending the eye on vacancy. Wind, my apprentice, is the roaring voice of nothing at all, the song of wild visions and of sleep, the sliding and the friction of non-being across being. These birds have eyes so fine, so