Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(38)

“Hold him down.”

Scott reached out one-handed, grabbing Arnold’s hair and together they tugged on him. It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t like fighting in films.

“Not like that.” Batty sighed as if they were idiots and he stood and kicked Arnold in the back of the knee while shoving his chest. Arnold went down flat, his backpack digging into his spine. He wriggled. He was pinned; he was an ant.

Batty’s lip twisted as he aimed the magnifying glass once more, focusing the light on Arnold’s wrist. He tried to pull away, but Dale held onto him. He was not strong enough; he could not get free. He couldn’t even see what was happening, but the heat was a liquid weight on his white skin.

“You’ll get done,” Scott said. “He’ll go crying to his mum.”

“I’ll not. He hasn’t got a mum.”

“He hasn’t got a mum?”

“Course he hasn’t.”

Arnold squirmed. He kicked at their legs experimentally, then harder as the pain bit.

“Hold him steady.”

The look on their faces hadn’t changed. There was interest in their eyes; there was curiosity.

The pain grew worse. In another minute Arnold couldn’t think of anything else, and then it intensified and he began to scream, not just one single sound but again and again.

“Shit! Make him be quiet.”

“Shut it, dickhead!”

“Fuck this. Come on.”

Just like that they left him, their shadows fleeting, the sunlight subsiding to its usual life-giving glow. There was a livid pink patch on Arnold’s wrist. He looked at it for a while, half expecting to see smoke rising from the skin, and then he raised his head and saw something in the grass.

He forgot his wrist and crawled over to the kitten. It wasn’t moving and he scooped it up; it did not struggle. He cradled it in his arms, lifting its head with a finger. It wasn’t breathing. They had broken it between them; they had ended it.

He slipped his arm from the strap of his backpack, then stopped himself. He lay the little creature on a flat grey stone by the riverbank and stroked it once. Then he walked away.

He knew he couldn’t take the kitten back to the home. No matter what they said, he wasn’t that stupid.


Of all the treatises and encyclopaedias and guidebooks and catalogues, Arnold liked medieval bestiaries the most. They didn’t just describe animals within their pages but told mankind how to deal with them, what cunning could be expected of them. They told of the essential nature of the beast that lay beyond the reality. Sometimes they amused him with their fanciful descriptions, but mostly they felt like armour: plates of steel, each overlapping the next. Their truths were not to be found anywhere else.

From Bartholomaeus Anglicus, he discovered that the eagle will slay any of its offspring that cannot stare unflinchingly into the sun. He learned that the swan sings its sweetest song before it dies. He found out from Pliny the Elder that cranes take turns to watch for enemies through the night, holding a stone aloft in one claw; if they should fall asleep, the stone will drop and wake them. Many of the bestiaries contained similar information, but there was only one that told of the Orphan Bird.

The Orphan Bird had the body of a crane and the beak of an eagle. Its feet were a swan’s, its chest and neck those of peacock, and its wings had feathers of black and red and white. The Orphan Bird lays its eggs in the water and the chick grows almost at once. The good eggs float and are hatched beneath its mother’s wings; she then leads the good chicks, with great rejoicing, back to their father.

The bad eggs—the bad chicks—sink to the bottom. There they hatch, beneath the water, and there they are condemned to live and die in darkness and in grief.

Red and white and black, Arnold thought. He had woken late in the night, as he often did. Red and white and black. Blood. Skin. Hair.

This bestiary was written by a man called Pierre de Beauvais at some lost time, though it was known to date from before 1218. His was the only known mention of the Orphan Bird, though the author referred to himself as ”the translator.” Arnold understood that. He was a translator too: birds into diagrams, feathers into shades in a painter’s palette; life into terms he could understand. Skin. Hair. Blood. Not messy but neat and ordered, everything in its right place.

The scar on his wrist itched and he rubbed at it. He was not a child any more. The child had long since passed away; now only the man remained.


The girl was watching the swans at the edge of the car park. They were big and bold and hissy, and would stick their heads through people’s car windows to grab sandwiches or crisps, dripping lake-weed over the glass and painted metal. They were as tall as she was, but she wasn’t afraid. Arnold knew that her parents must be somewhere near, hiring a boat perhaps, or queueing for ice creams.

He went over to her, bending to pick up a single long white feather. After a while, he realised she was looking at him.

“A wing feather.” His voice was dry from lack of use. “See how the outer edge is curved? It’s so the swan can fly.”

Her eyes opened wide as if he’d told her some great secret; and perhaps he had. He smiled, started to set it down, then noticed the others, scattered all around. More white ones, some muddied to brown, but there were other kinds too. He caught his breath as he saw the brilliant emerald neck feather of a mallard.