The Modern World by Steph Swainston

direction, against the flow, at right angles to society. I was enjoying myself; I live for flight. I felt light and ethereal.
    The wind buffeted my wings. I exerted my strength and held them steady, like struts. I respect the winds, because at a touch some gales could snap my bones and tear my muscle, so to be weather-wise I study the clouds.
    Flying long distances is a very fulfilling challenge, because it has taken me all my life to learn the rules of the sky. It is always laid out like a chessboard halfway through a game, a confusion of risks and potentials. Flying puts the minutiae of life into perspective – I was concentrating so hard playing out the moves, I didn’t dwell on any of the daily worries.
    I looked for the small, fluffy white clouds that sit on top of thermals. They had been forming all morning and were drifting with the wind to make an archipelago, each cloud a signpost in a corridor of updraughts that would carry me south.
    I entered the first thermal and felt a jolt of lift. I turned and circled close to its centre, the tips of my wings spread wide to catch the rising air. The moorland spun under me as I rose smoothly, and all the time I was looking around, trying to predict the next source of lift. After a few minutes the warm air bubble faded and no longer bore me up, but I had already gained so much height I could glide out towards the next one.
    This is the best way of flying. From birds I learnt the trick is not to flap all the time but glide as much as possible to save effort. It’s a game of wits for me, though. When I was on drugs, I took the overfamiliar countryside for granted; flying around in a daze, delivering letters or failing to. No longer – I was seeing it with new eyes, full of gladness that I’m clean at last. The excitement of the real world made me high – the sky was more vivid than a trip – how could I have forgotten thescenery’s intense beauty when in love with all the Shift worlds to which cat could take me? The Fourlands was so much better.
    I pulled my little round sunglasses down from my forehead and looked out far in advance. The shape and colour of the ground influences the wind currents and spots where thermals form.
    As I left Lowespass the lines of trenches fell behind, but pillboxes and platform towers dotted the border of Awia – places to seek refuge from Insects. I could tell I had crossed into northwest Awia when I went over the Rachis River, a thin silver thread shining like flax unspooling through flower-spotted water meadows.
    I was flying over the upper Rachis valley, patchwork farmland thickly and evenly spangled with villages. This was the muster of Plow. All manors are divided into musters of roughly equal population, with the original purpose of marshalling fyrd. Each muster is administered by a reeve who is appointed by the manor lord. The reeve’s family change their surname to match the muster, a system created in the distant past, probably to make it easier for us immortals to remember them.
    I caressed the air over Plow, the largest town in its muster, but still not much more than the reeve’s moated farm around which gathered stone granges with red-tiled roofs and courtyards. They belonged to the tenant farmers who work the land under the reeve, and the vavasours who sub-rent from the tenant farmers.
    All the barns were empty of hay and the cattle turned out into the fields. Men and women looked up and pointed me out, pausing from their work bent double pulling up weeds from between shoots of wheat and barley. I waved and motion flourished all over the fields as hundreds of people simultaneously waved back.
    No wonder Plow muster is called ‘the bread basket of Awia’. Rock dust ground by glaciers in the mountains blows down in the high air streams and settles across the area, where the rivers add loam and make the most fertile land in the Empire. Awia is fortunate that the country is so fruitful; it would otherwise soon be ruined since