birds lying in the creeks and waterways where they had died two months earlier, their wounds cleansed now by the slow current, and he would watch the white-haired woman who lived in the empty house below the cliff walking by the river. Along the narrow beach the huge birds, larger than condors, lay at her feet. As Crispin gazed at her from the bridge of the picket ship she moved among them, now and then stooping to pluck a feather from the outstretched wings. At the end of her walk, when she returned across the damp meadow to the empty house, her arms would be loaded with immense white plumes.
At first Crispin had felt an obscure sense of annoyance at the way this strange woman descended on to the beach and calmly plundered the plumage of the dead birds. Although many thousands of the creatures lay along the margins of the river and in the marshes around the inlet where the picket ship was moored, Crispin still maintained a proprietary attitude towards them. He himself, almost single-handedly, had been responsible for the slaughter of the birds in the last terrifying battles when they had come from their eyries along the North Sea and attacked the picket ship. Each of the immense white creatures — for the most part gulls and gannets, with a few fulmars and petrels — carried his bullet in its heart like a jewel.
As he watched the woman cross the overgrown lawn to her house Crispin remembered again the frantic hours before the birds’ final hopeless attack. Hopeless it seemed now, when their bodies lay in a wet quilt over the cold Norfolk marshes, but then, only two months earlier, when the sky above the ship had been dark with their massing forms, it was Crispin who had given up hope.
The birds had been larger than men, with wing spans of twenty feet or more that shut out the sun. Crispin had raced like a madman across the rusty metal decks, dragging the ammunition cans in his torn arms from the armoury and loading them into the breeches of the machine-guns, while Quimby, the idiot youth from the farm at Long Reach whom Crispin had persuaded to be his gun loader, gibbered to himself on the foredeck, hopping about on his club foot as he tried to escape from the huge shadows sweeping across him. When the birds began their first dive, and the sky turned into a white scythe, Crispin had barely enough time to buckle himself into the shoulder harness of the turret.
Yet he had won, shooting the first wave down into the marshes as they soared towards him like a white armada, then turning to fire at the second group swooping in low across the river behind his back. The hull of the picket ship was still dented with the impacts their bodies had made as they struck the sides above the waterline. At the height of the battle the birds had been everywhere, wings like screaming crosses against the sky, their corpses crashing through the rigging on to the decks around him as he swung the heavy guns, firing from rail to rail. A dozen times Crispin had given up hope, cursing the men who had left him alone on this rusty hulk to face the giant birds, and who made him pay for Quimby out of his own pocket.
But then, when the battle had seemed to last for ever, when the sky was still full of birds and his ammunition had nearly gone, he noticed Quimby dancing on the corpses heaped on the deck, pitching them into the water with his two-pronged fork as they thudded around him.
Then Crisp in knew that he had won. When the firing slackened Quimby dragged up more ammunition, eager for killing, his face and deformed chest smeared with feathers and blood. Shouting himself now, with a fierce pride in his own courage and fear, Crispin had destroyed the remainder of the birds, shooting the stragglers, a few fledgling peregrines, as they fled towards the cliff. For an hour after the last of the birds had died, when the river and the creeks near the ship ran red with their blood, Crispin had sat in the turret, firing the guns at the sky that had dared attack him.
Later, when the excitement and pulse of the battle had passed, he realized that the only witness of his stand against this aerial armageddon had been a club-footed idiot to whom no one would ever listen. Of course, the white-haired woman had been there, hiding behind the shutters in her house, but Crispin had not noticed her until several hours had passed, when she began to walk among the corpses. To begin with, therefore, he had been glad to see the birds lying where they had fallen, their blurred forms eddying away in the cold water of the river and the marshes. He sent Quimby back to his farm, and watched the idiot dwarf punt his way down-river among the swollen corpses. Then, crossed bandoliers of machine-gun cartridges around his chest, Crispin took command of his bridge.
The woman’s appearance on the scene he welcomed, glad someone else was there to share his triumph, and well aware that she must have noticed him patrolling the captain’s walk of the picket ship. But after a single glance the woman never again looked at him. She seemed intent only on searching the beach and the meadow below her house.
On the third day after the battle she had come out on to the lawn with Quimby, and the dwarf spent the morning and afternoon clearing away the bodies of the birds that had fallen there. He heaped them on to a heavy wooden tumbril, then harnessed himself between the shafts and dragged them away to a pit near the farm. The following day he appeared again in a wooden skiff and punted the woman, standing alone in the bows like an aloof wraith, among the bodies of the birds floating in the water. Now and then Quimby turned one of the huge corpses over with his pole, as if searching for something among them — there were apocryphal stories, which many townsfolk believed, that the beaks of the birds carried tusks of ivory, but Crispin knew this to be nonsense.
These movements of the women puzzled Crispin, who felt that his conquest of the birds had also tamed the landscape around the picket ship and everything in it. Shortly afterwards, when the woman began to collect the wing feathers of the birds, he felt that she was in some way usurping a privilege reserved for him alone. Sooner or later the river voles, rats and other predators of the marshes would destroy the birds, but until then he resented anyone else looting this drowned treasure which he had won so hard. After the battle he had sent a short message in his crabbed handwriting to the district officer at the station twenty miles away, and until a reply came he preferred that the thousands of bodies should lie where they had fallen. As a conscripted member of the picket service he was not eligible for a bounty, but Crispin dimly hoped he might receive a medal or some sort of commendation.
The knowledge that the woman was his only witness, apart from the idiot Quimby, deterred Crispin from doing anything that might antagonize her. Also, the woman’s odd behaviour made Crispin suspect that she too might be mad. He had never seen her at a shorter distance than the three hundred yards separating the picket ship from the bank below her house, but through the telescope mounted on the rail of the bridge he followed her along the beach, and saw more clearly the white hair and the ashen skin of her high face. Her arms were thin but strong, hands held at her waist as she moved about in a grey ankle-length robe. Her bedraggled appearance was that of someone unaware that she had lived alone for a long time.
For several hours Crispin watched her walking among the corpses. The tide cast a fresh freight on to the sand each day, but now that the bodies were decomposing their appearance, except at a distance, was devoid of any sentiment. The shallow inlet in which the picket ship was moored — the vessel was one of the hundreds of old coastal freighters hastily converted to duty when the first flocks of giant birds appeared two years earlier — faced the house across the river. Through the telescope Crispin could count the scores of pockmarks in the white stucco where spent bullets from his guns had lodged themselves.
At the end of her walk the woman had filled her arms with a garland of feathers. As Crispin watched, hands clasping the bandoliers across his chest, she went over to one of the birds, walking into the shallow water to peer into its halfsubmerged face. Then she plucked a single plume from its wing and added it to the collection in her arms.
Restlessly Crispin returned to the telescope. In the narrow eyepiece her swaying figure, almost hidden by the spray of white feathers, resembled that of some huge decorative bird, a white peacock. Perhaps in some bizarre way she imagined she was a bird?
In the wheelhouse Crispin fingered the signal pistol fastened to the wall. When she came out the next morning he could fire one of the flares over her head, warning her that the birds were his, subjects of his own transitory kingdom. The farmer, Hassell, who had come with Quimby for permission to burn some of the birds for use as fertilizer, had plainly acknowledged Crispin’s moral rights over them.
Usually Crispin made a thorough inspection of the ship each morning, counting the ammunition cases and checking the gunnery mountings. The metal caissons were splitting the rusty decks. The whole ship was settling into the mud below. At high tide Crispin would listen to the water pouring through a thousand cracks and rivet holes like an army of silver-tongued rats.
This morning, however, his inspection was brief. After testing the turret on the bridge — there was always the chance of a few stragglers appearing from the nesting grounds along the abandoned coast — he went back to his telescope. The woman was somewhere behind the house, cutting down the remains of a small rose pergola.
