Read Online Ghostheart by Ananda Braxton-Smith - Free Book Online Page B

the bog giving an ear to the ravens. He gathered magpie feathers and wove himself a cap of black and white that marked him out as belonging to the flocks. At last he climbed into the willow branches and built himself a nest among the redstarts. He wove the nest from soft twigs and sedge, and lined it with wool and feathers. Then he roosted in it all broody in the drooping branches.
    He said the birds were just angels in bird-suits and they brought him messages from God the Brother. He heard the messages clear as talk in dropping water, and plain as bells in birdsong. The birds said that there was an angel called Tempus whose job it was to measure out time, so that everything wouldn’t happen at once. He said that everything was always on the edge of happening all at once and I needn’t look so unimpressed.
    ‘You should be thankful,’ he told me, quite high and snippy. ‘It’s Tempus as keeps today inside today, and tomorrow on the horizon, and next summer faraway and not turning up on the threshold anytime it wants.’
    ‘Oh, well then,’ I said. ‘As long as we’ve got you to tell us the whole point of
time,
we’ll be all right.’ I had to be slopping around in the wet cut in the morning, and I didn’t care to hear about what he thought about in his idle, flighty days.
    He turned a glad face to me and I felt bad.
    The first skylarks of each grey or beamy dawn met with my brother out in the black rush and they sang together in full choir. The magpies played Follow My Leader with him all along the bog-ways and out into the quaking mire. He met with kites and merlins out in the water-meadows, and ghosty owls looked for him in the night to be fed the mice and frogs he caught and kept for just such a purpose. I asked and asked why his angels needed such an enormity of blood-food.
    Even angels have to eat, he kept saying until I was beside myself with it.
    ‘What about afterwards, then?’ I said, brimful of irrits. ‘Do angels need to — empty themselves too?’
    He gave me a look like the old days; a look like I should shut my gob. It was balm to see him sharp in his own face again.
    ‘
Boson? Boson? Boson
?’ I asked him in my most belling sort of voice. ‘Please tell us. Are the angels girls or boys? Boson? Boson? Do angels have you-know-whats?’
    He was still, with a face you could edge the axe on.
    ‘The angels want to kick your arse, Fermion Quirk,’ he told me and stalked off. I took his temper as a sign that maybe he was coming back to us.
    When he took to wearing his cap of feathers down among the lowlanders, even my parents had to confess him distempered rather than just high-tempered and plaguey.
    But my brother was passing from us; already there was hardly any of him left. It was like I’d dreamed a family and been woken of a sudden and now the dream-family was fraying to threads. It was like I’d never been a twin; never had a brother.
    It all seemed to have gone missing along with our tools.
    Then on one of those mornings when the sunlight buds pale green, I rose from my bed and shuffled outside and I knew. I knew straight-up something had to be done.
    Under our hill of baking turf-spits, he lay shrunken in a bed of gravel and shale. His eyes were open and fixed on the house. I turned and that’s when I saw.
    The walls were covered in pictures of birds. Entirely. He’d carved them into the stones with blades, and scraped at them in white shale. His crowding flocks had us sieged.
    It must have taken him all night.
    His cranes stood as tall as the eaves. Snipe and redshank fluttered right up the door-beams, curlew and lapwing crowded the threshold. The casements looked to be rot-spotted but they were just specked all over with thumb-sized wrens and pipits.
    I followed a line of puffins around the walls and found his bat-eared owls scratched by the lean-to. Those owls trailed into a cast of diving hawks. Flights of swallows and martins, wagtails and buntings, trailed in ribbons across our