Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (top ebook reader TXT) 📕

weakness, starvation and accident were chief among the causes of death. To be elderly and embark on a long voyage or pilgrimage was to flip a coin, and to begin a journey while weary or starving or inflicted with illness was to invite death. The wind could fail, or your engine might, or even your feet. The weather might dry you or drown you or freeze you. Your food and water, if not properly kept or foraged, might poison you. Over the next horizon might be new diseases, waiting to strike you down. Your horse might break a leg or throw a shoe, or, without enough care, you might overwork your animal and have it just plain give up on you. One slippery section of deck and you might tumble overboard. One drunken argument with one of your fellow travellers, one border guard in a bad mood, one gang of robbers or locals or colonists and your journey might end short of its destination.

Sitting in the busy arrivals lounge, Adam tries to get his head around the fact that he is suddenly in Edinburgh. It doesn’t feel like he’s earned his passage here. He still feels like he’s in America. California, even.

Up on the big screen, Cassandra Coleman weeps dramatically into a handkerchief. She’s being interviewed about her time with Adam. The questions keep coming up in the subtitles: did she suspect that Adam was a killer? How well did she know Damon Darcy? What was it like being so close to both victim and murderer? Cassandra does her very best to seem both strong and upset simultaneously, and the effect is compelling. Even now, Adam appreciates her acting. She will go far, he thinks.

“Excuse me.” It’s the elderly lady he sat next to on the plane.

“Hello again,” says Adam.

“Would you help me with my luggage? My grandson’s waiting outside, but I’m struggling a little, and you seem like a big strong man.” She smiles.

“Sure thing, ma’am.” Adam takes her suitcase and hauls it along easily, following in her wake.

“That girl,” she says, “on the plane. Did you know her?”

“Not really. I only met her when I sat down.”

“Why do you think she jumped?”

Airport security, and then the police, have already spent a couple of hours asking him the same question. Adam gives her the same answer he gave them. “She seemed scared.”

“Selfish, though, don’t you think? Her family must be so upset. Now they’ll have to organise her funeral, and spend the rest of their lives wondering what they could have done. She shouldn’t have done it. Do you know what I do when I get sad?” She grips his arm and leads him past crowds of people. “I go for a nice wee walk. Cheers me right up. Or maybe I’ll go see a movie, or go have a natter with a friend! You don’t see me throwing myself out of a plane when I get sad. Such a waste of life. Oh look, there’s Bobbie! Hello there, Bobbie!” Adam places the case down beside Bobbie, who frowns suspiciously up at him. Then he and his grandmother go on their way, out into the cold Scottish day.

For a moment, Adam stands at the threshold, before the automatic doors that will lead him out of the airport. The first time he arrived in Scotland, it wasn’t called Scotland. In fact, it wasn’t even called Caledonia. When he and Eve first set foot in this country, all that time ago, it didn’t have a name to any but its few inhabitants.

Adam and Eve had been living in Rome for a few lifetimes, and they had grown weary of the place, of the very idea of civilisation. Together, they had watched emperor after emperor ruling over a slowly growing empire, shaping it with their successive whims. So, she and Adam began to talk to the traders, to find the limits of the empire, and some forgotten corner of the world where they might start anew. There was word of an island far to the north, called Albion, and though the south of it was known to be occupied, there was little news of the northern reaches. Tales reached Adam of wild lands, almost untouched by human hands.

It took them the better part of a year to travel through the empire, and across to Albion. They hitched rides with trading caravans, and rode horses, and sometimes simply walked, until at last they came to the fringes of the mainland and could see, across the sea, the suggestion of their island destination. Adam spent a season making a boat worthy of crossing, built out of the sturdiest trees he could find. He traded for good sailcloth, and tapped trees for sap to seal it, and Eve wound endless cord for him, to help rig his sail. Then, on the darkest night of the year, they waited for dawn, and when it came, they set sail across that cold and forbidding sea.

Strange, to set foot on a new shore; to feel the sand beneath your feet.

They spent a while together simply exploring the south of Albion. There were pale peoples here, who had begun trading with the land across the sea, and were aware of the advancing empire. They didn’t seem to care much for it. There were more tales of the north, of wild, unfriendly people who did not often trade, and hard lands, rich with forests so huge that they touched shore to shore; and mountains and shale and endless rain, assailing visitors until they left. Eventually, Adam and Eve set sail again, following the coast north and further north still, day by day, moon by moon, until winter began to give way to the first signs of spring, and at last they arrived in the north.

Adam sailed up a broad river-mouth, paddling with oars carved from the branches of an oak. The air was calm that day, he remembers; the river was still, and Eve trailed her fingers in the water,