The Once and Future King

‘Would you mind telling us,’ said Archimedes, ‘since you know so much about it, how many various things we birds are able to express by altering the tempo and emphasis of the elaborations of our call-notes?’

‘But a large number of things. You can cry Kee-wick in tender accents, if you are in love, or Kee-wick angrily in challenge or in hate: you can cry it on a rising scale as a call-note, if you do not know where your partner is, or to attract their attention away if strangers are straying near your nest: If you go near the old nest in the winter-time you may cry Kee-wick lovingly, a conditioned reflex from the pleasures which you once enjoyed within it, and if I come near to you in a startling way you may cry out Keewick-keewick-keewick, in loud alarm.’

‘When we come to conditioned reflexes,’ remarked Archimedes sourly. ‘I prefer to look for a mouse.’

‘So you may. And when you find it I dare say you will make another sound characteristic of owls, though not often mentioned in books of ornithology. I refer to the sound “Tock” or “Tck” which human beings call a smacking of the lips.’

‘And what sound is that supposed to imitate?’

‘Obviously, the breaking of mousy bones.’

‘You are a cunning master,’ said Archimedes, ‘and as far as a poor owl is concerned you will just have to get away with it. All I can tell you from my personal experience is that it is not like that at all. A tit can tell you not only that it is in danger, but what kind of danger it is in. It can say, “Look out for the cat,” or “Look out for the hawk,” or “Look out for the tawny owl,” as plainly as ABC.’

‘I don’t deny it,’ said Merlyn. ‘I am only telling you the beginnings of the language. Suppose you try to tell me the song of any single bird which I can’t attribute originally to imitation?’

‘The night-jar,’ said the Wart.

‘The buzzing of the wings of beetles,’ replied his tutor at once.

‘The nightingale,’ cried Archimedes desperately.

‘Ah,’ said Merlyn, leaning back in his comfortable chair. ‘Now we are to imitate the soul-song of our beloved Proserpine, as she stirs to wake in all her liquid self.’

‘Tereu,’ said the Wart softly.

‘Pieu,’ added the owl quietly.

‘Music!’ concluded the necromancer in ecstasy, unable to make the smallest beginnings of an imitation.

‘Hallo,’ said Kay, opening the door of the afternoon school room. ‘I’m sorry I am late for the geography lesson. I was trying to get a few small birds with my cross-bow. Look, I have killed a thrush.’

Chapter XVIII (#ulink_f9613d1a-f9e5-55d6-a033-0ac4c658bc25)

The Wart lay awake as he had been told to do. He was to wait until Kay was asleep, and then Archimedes would come for him with Merlyn’s magic. He lay under the great bearskin and stared out of the window at the stars of spring, no longer frosty and metallic, but as if they had been new washed and had swollen with the moisture. It was a lovely evening, without rain or cloud. The sky between the stars was of the deepest and fullest velvet. Framed in the thick western window, Aldebaran and Betelgeuse were racing Sirius over the horizon, the hunting dog-star looking back to his master Orion, who had not yet heaved himself above the rim. In at the window came also the unfolding scent of benighted flowers, for the currants, the wild cherries, the plums and the hawthorn were already in bloom, and no less than five nightingales within earshot were holding a contest of beauty among the bowery, the looming trees.

Wart lay on his back with his bearskin half off him and his hands clasped behind his head. It was too beautiful to sleep, too temperate for the rug. He watched out at the stars in a kind of trance. Soon it would be the summer again, when he could sleep on the battlements and watch these stars hovering as close as moths above his face – and, in the Milky Way at least, with something of the mothy pollen. They would be at the same time so distant that unutterable thoughts of space and eternity would baffle themselves in his sighing breast, and he would imagine to himself how he was falling upward higher and higher among them, never reaching, never ending, leaving and losing everything in the tranquil speed of space.

He was fast asleep when Archimedes came for him.

‘Eat this,’ said the owl, and handed him a dead mouse.

The Wart felt so strange that he took the furry atom without protest, and popped it into his mouth without any feelings that it was going to be nasty. So he was not surprised when it turned out to be excellent, with a fruity taste like eating a peach with the skin on, though naturally the skin was not so nice as the mouse.

‘Now, we had better fly,’ said the owl. ‘Just flip to the window-sill here, to get accustomed to yourself before we take off.’

Wart jumped for the sill and automatically gave himself an extra kick with his wings, just as a high jumper swings his arms. He landed on the sill with a thump, as owls are apt to do, did not stop himself in time, and toppled straight out of the window. ‘This,’ he thought to himself, cheerfully, ‘is where I break my neck.’ It was curious, but he was not taking life seriously. He felt the castle walls streaking past him, and the ground and the moat swimming up. He kicked with his wings, and the ground sank again, like water in a leaking well. In a second that kick of his wings had lost its effect, and the ground was welling up. He kicked again. It was strange, going forward with the earth ebbing and flowing beneath him, in the utter silence of his down-fringed feathers.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ panted Archimedes, bobbing in the dark air beside him, ‘stop flying like a woodpecker. Anybody would take you for a Little Owl, if the creatures had been imported. What you are doing is to give yourself flying speed with one flick of your wings. You then rise on that flick until you have lost flying speed and begin to stall. Then you give another just as you are beginning to drop out of the air, and do a switch-back. It is confusing to keep up with you.’

‘Well,’ said the Wart recklessly, ‘if I stop doing this I shall go bump altogether.’

‘Idiot,’ said the owl. ‘Waver your wings all the time, like me, instead of doing these jumps with them.’

The Wart did what he was told, and was surprised to find that the earth became stable and moved underneath him without tilting, in a regular pour. He did not feel himself to be moving at all.

‘That’s better.’

‘How curious everything looks,’ observed the boy with some wonder, now that he had time to look about him.

And, indeed, the world did look curious. In some ways the best description of it would be to say that it looked like a photographer’s negative, for he was seeing one ray beyond the spectrum which is visible to human beings. An infra-red camera will take photographs in the dark, when we cannot see, and it will also take photographs in daylight. The owls are the same, for it is untrue that they can only see at night. They see in the day just as well, only they happen to possess the advantage of seeing pretty well at night also. So naturally they prefer to do their hunting then, when other creatures are more at their mercy. To the Wart the green trees would have looked whitish in the daytime, as if they were covered with apple-blossom, and now, at night, everything had the same kind of different look. It was like flying in a twilight which had reduced everything to shades of the same colour, and, as in the twilight, there was a considerable amount of gloom.

‘Do you like it?’ asked the owl.

‘I like it very much. Do you know, when I was a fish there were parts of the water which were colder or warmer than the other parts, and now it is the same in the air.’

‘The temperature,’ said Archimedes, ‘depends on the vegetation of the bottom. Woods or weeds, they make it warm above them.’

‘Well,’ said the Wart, ‘I can see why the reptiles who had given up being fishes decided to become birds. It certainly is fun.’

‘You are beginning to fit things together,’ remarked Archimedes. ‘Do you mind if we sit down?’

‘How does one?’

‘You must stall. That means you must drive yourself up until you lose flying speed, and then, just as you feel yourself beginning to tumble – you sit down. Have you never noticed how birds fly upward to perch? They don’t come straight down on the branch, but dive below it and then rise. At the top of their rise they stall and sit down.’

‘But birds land on the ground too. And what about mallards on the water? They can’t rise to sit on that.’

‘Well, it is perfectly possible to land on flat things, but more difficult. You have to glide in at stalling speed all the way, and then increase your wind resistance by cupping your wings, dropping your feet, tail, etc. You may have noticed that few birds do it gracefully. Look how a crow thumps down and how the mallard splashes. The spoon-winged birds like heron and plover seem to do it best. As a matter of fact, we owls are not so bad at it ourselves.’

‘And the long-winged birds like swifts, I suppose they are the worst, for they can’t rise from a flat surface at all?’

‘The reasons are different,’ said Archimodes, ‘yet the fact is true. But need we talk on the wing? I am getting tired.’

‘So am I.’

‘Owls usually prefer to sit down every hundred yards.’

The Wart copied Archimedes in zooming up toward the branch which they had chosen. He began to fall just as they were above it, clutched it with his furry feet at the last moment, swayed backward and forward twice, and found that he had landed successfully. He folded up his wings.

While the Wart sat still and admired the view, his friend proceeded to give him a lecture about flight in birds. He told how, although the swift was so fine a flyer that he could sleep on the wing all night, and although the Wart himself had claimed to admire the way in which rooks enjoyed their flights, the real aeronaut of the lower strata – which cut out the swift – was the plover. He explained how plovers indulged in aerobatics, and would actually do such stunts as spins, stall turns and even rolls for the mere grace of the thing. They were the only birds which made a practice of slipping off height to land – except occasionally the oldest, gayest and most beautiful of all the conscious aeronauts, the raven. Wart paid little or no attention to the lecture, but got his eyes accustomed to the strange tones of light instead, and watched Archimedes from the corner of one of them. For Archimedes, while he was talking, was absent-mindedly spying for his dinner. This spying was an odd performance.

A spinning top which is beginning to lose its spin slowly describes circles with its highest point before falling down. The leg of the top remains in the same place, but the apex makes circles which get bigger and bigger toward the end. This is what Archimedes was absent-mindedly doing. His feet remained stationary, but he moved the upper part of his body round and round, like somebody trying to see from behind a fat lady at a cinema, and uncertain which side of her gave the best view. As he could also turn his head almost completely round on his shoulders, you may imagine that his antics were worth watching.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the Wart.

Even as he asked, Archimedes was gone. First there had been an owl talking about plover, and then there was no owl. Only, far below the Wart, there was a thump and a rattle of leaves, as the aerial torpedo went smack into the middle of a bush, regardless of obstructions.

In a minute the owl was sitting beside him again on the branch, thoughtfully breaking up a dead sparrow.