The Birds of the Air by Alice Thomas Ellis Page B

swan’s liver, was a wren’s egg, boiled.
    The master of the feast had just raised his knife when a cold wind swung through the hall, drifting and swirling the smoke and making it plain that someone had opened the door. As all the expected guests were present this could only be a traveller, who must be invited to join the feast. It was not only the draught that chilled the company, for they were
very
hungry and all peered through the cloudy dimness of the hall to make sure that there was only one traveller to accommodate. Sometimes bands of pilgrims came by, cockle-shelled, flat-hatted and sandalled, telling tales of foreign lands where there lived men who had fathered one son and possessed only one milch goat for the sustenance of that child, and who when visited by strangers, even were those strangers hostile, slew the innocent goat to entertain them. The feasters were not yet so far advanced in civilisation that they could afford to laugh too heartily at such tales, and no one wished at this moment to be put to the test.
    Most were reassured to see a single figure approach and to know by the haggard features, the threadbare garments and the evil smell that this was a holy person, accustomed to frugality. Some, more worldly wise than the rest, thought bleakly that this holy person might well consume more of the feast than the invited guests together.
    The master bade him sit, and all were relieved to see him place his hands each in the opposite sleeve. Even then, long before anyone had heard of the germ theory of disease, no one wished to see his filthy hands dipped in the communal dish, and each looked surreptitiously to see if he carried the short knife necessary to spike the pieces of meat that were placed on each person’s
manchet
. Even the servants who sat below the salt, and for whom the bread was eventually destined, raised their chilled bottoms slightly from the bench to look anxiously at the holy person and wonder about his table manners.
    He had a cold grey gaze when his hood was back, and his head was very bony.
    On his right sat the sweet-faced lady with the white hair, who smiled at him kindly and was good enough not to fear the lice that were even now calculating the distance between him and her in their own determination to survive – for he had grown hopelessly thin and juiceless. He is one of those who range the wilderness, she thought approvingly, living on nuts and berries and the roots that only such people know of. A holy, holy person.
    ‘Tell us a story,’ she asked, knowing that such good people, starved and sanctified, were implicit with wisdom.
    He was silent, and the sweet-faced lady picked at her manchet with her thin fingers before turning to the man on her right. That man, angered at the incivility of the holy person, leaned before the sweet-faced lady and said, ‘
I pray you tell us a story
’, his hand on the hilt of the knife he used to settle arguments. He was already in a bad, nervous frame of mind because he feared that the Prince of his district thought he was growing too powerful and was plotting his destruction. In the end, he knew, the Prince would prevail, since the Prince’s people had ruled these few acres from time immemorial and the warrior himself came of foreign stock. In the small hours of the cold ill-smelling nights he would lie awake wondering whether he could elect to die by the Blood Eagle as his forebears in similar case had done. In those days before the invention of aspirin, gas ovens, plastic bags, this form of euthanasia involved the willing cooperation of the victim who, lying face down, would consent to have his ribs sprung from his backbone and his heart removed. Although brave, the warrior often wondered how much this would hurt and whether it would not be wiser to permit the Prince’s heavies to club or spear or garotte him to death. It was a matter of pride and a difficult problem to resolve. He had heard a raven croaking in an inauspicious manner only