Seven for a Secret

by Clive Woodall

  But Man is largely a pragmatic and self-serving creature, and the announcement of the date for evacuation focused everyone’s mind on the forthcoming disruption to their own lives, and relegated the plight of the rest of the natural world to an unimportant necessity in ensuring the future for the whole country. The cost was immense, but not prohibitive. Several vast conglomerates had realised that sponsorship of this venture would be hugely advantageous in terms of visibility and public good-will, and more than two-thirds of the overall funding required had been generated in this way. The rest was to come from the pockets of every man, woman and child in the country, and the spin-men went into overdrive, painting pictures of clear blue skies, free from the omnipresent insect netting that blighted everyday life.

  Only a few more observant men and women noticed the irony in the images being used to persuade the population that this was a right and proper course of action. In the promotional videos, birds flew in the clear blue skies, sheep grazed languidly in green fields, and even the lazy drone of a bumble-bee was used to enhance the idyllic picture of a future life that awaited one and all – if sufficient contributions were forthcoming.

  Politicians spoke in jingoistic and patriotic terms about the national sacrifice for the good of all and recalled public-spirited acts from the past, claiming that this would top them all for a place in history. Long before the public pronouncement, behind-the-scenes haggling with foreign neighbours had taken place to agree the three-month residency of the entire country’s population on their soil.

  Building was already well underway, erecting temporary shanty towns on every available patch of land, and a rudimentary infrastructure of transportation networks to allow the exodus to take place. Existing under-sea tunnels would be used to the full, supplemented by a vast flotilla of home-owned and foreign ships and boats. The preparation and evacuation would take about a week, and would test to the limits the renowned stoicism of the nation. The repatriation of the country would only be possible after the massive clear-up that would be required when the machines of death had done their work.

  Fire-sites had been chosen across the length and breadth of the land, and a voluntary workforce would complete the grisly task of disposing of all the bird and animal bodies as swiftly as could be arranged. And an army of bulldozers would be used to plough the billions of insect corpses into the ground.

  To minimise discomfort to the populace as a whole, the insect netting would only be dismantled in the final two weeks before evacuation. Then normal life would cease, and all commerce would be suspended, while men and women everywhere joined together in working for the nation’s good. This would revive a community spirit that would be sorely needed during and after the evacuation. Until then, the most important task would be the erection, at regular intervals around the coastline, of the thousands of monstrous magnets required. There was no turning back. The die had been cast, and the clock was ticking towards the deadline for the extinction of every living creature in the country.

  ‘What could the “peril” be “at Avia’s doors”?’ Olivia asked.

  The two robins had reached the coast of the Isle of Storms, and were nestled amid the leaves of an oak, waiting patiently for the unnatural sound of a ship’s klaxon to announce the arrival of their transportation home.

  ‘“But peril lies at Avia’s doors if you’re not true to Birddom’s cause.”’ Merion quoted the passage back at his sister, adding. ‘How can there be peril? Avia is supposed to be paradise for all of bird-kind. What danger can there be in reaching paradise?’

  ‘The peril is only threatened for those who are “not true to Birddom’s cause.” That’s what the rhyme says.’

  ‘But how can that be judged? Who will make that decision? Is there some sort of test to be passed before a bird can enter Avia?’

  ‘I don’t know, Merion. At the outset I envisaged Avia as a secret land. I was never sure where it was supposed to be, but I believed that it was as real as Wingland. Now it seems as if Avia is a kind of dreamscape – not real at all. And, moreover, guarded by a gate-keeper wielding death for the faithless.’

  Merion nuzzled closer to his sister as they rested on the bough of the oak, and held her tightly in his wings.

  ‘Don’t fret so, sis. There must be a sensible explanation. Tomar is too old and too wise to have sent us on a fool’s errand. Yes, I know that I voiced something similar a while back. But we are both just feeling the frustration of being a not-very-clever pair of robins.’

  At that very moment, the sound that they had waited for echoed across from the stretch of water where the car-ferry chugged its slow passage towards port.

  ‘Let’s leave it at that, sis,’ Merion continued. ‘We both need to catch up on some sleep during the sea voyage. Once we land back in Birddom, we must waste no time in more useless speculation as to the meaning of Septimus’ riddles. We must fly as fast as we can back to Tomar and to Mother. So long as we can remember the rhyme we will have done the job that was asked of us.’

  ‘You’re right, Merion. It will be so good to be back in Birddom again. How I am longing to see Mother. I have missed her so.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘I simply can’t believe what you are telling me,’ Lostri said, incredulously. ‘Engar a traitor? No, it is too much. You must be mistaken.’

  ‘Am I mistaken that my sister and I have been held in captivity? That we have been starved? Beaten and abused? Am I mistaken that we have been brought here under heavy guard? Forced to fly with little or no rest? That for the last weeks we have had none but corvidae for company?’

  ‘But why?’ asked the tawny owl. ‘Why would they go to all the trouble of bringing you here, to Cra Wyd?’

  ‘Who knows what foul plans that evil magpie has hatching inside his warped brain? But it doesn’t matter. All that is important is that we rescue Calipha without delay!’

  It was not for nothing that Lostri had been a respected and long-standing member of the Council of the Owls. And now he stilled any further words from Claudia with a soft rebuke.

  ‘No, that is not all that is important. I do not underestimate the danger to your sister, but I must think this through. Much of what you have told me is shocking in the extreme. But the implications could be more far-reaching than we currently envisage. I need only one more thing from you my dear, and then you must rest. You cannot help your sister in your present state. You look completely exhausted.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’ Claudia asked, abjectly.

  ‘Tell me about how you managed to escape.’

  ‘It was the merest chance. As I have said, we have been heavily guarded ever since our capture, and, although we talked of little else, there had been no chance of escape then or on our journey to Cra Wyd. But since our arrival, we had been largely ignored, as if our distance from our own home rendered us incapable of positive action. I am sure that they believed us to be thoroughly broken in spirit. And, without Traska around, the guards were soon bored with their continued duties, and much preferred carousing with the local thugs.

  ‘Well, last night there was some sort of celebration going on, and by dusk only two rather weedy-looking crows were left with the task of guarding us. Bruised and battered though we were, Calipha and I realised that there would never be a better chance of escape. Launching at them without warning, we managed to overpower the crows and began our flight for freedom. Calipha was slightly behind me, as she had insisted on despatching the injured crows herself, knowing that a far worse fate would befall them if they lived to tell the tale of their failure.

  ‘I quickly gained height, but as I looked back from treetop level, I was aghast to see six huge hench-crows surround my sister and force her, once more, to the ground. I thought about turning back and trying to fight, but she screamed at me to get away, to find help. There was nothing that I could do, but it almost broke my heart to le
ave her there in such peril. I flew as fast as I could, not knowing what to do next. But it wasn’t long, in speaking to other birds, before I heard your name mentioned and realised, with joy, that you were in the vicinity. I came to find you with renewed hope, that Calipha might yet be saved.’

  Lulled by the gentle rocking motion of the ship, Merion soon fell into a profound sleep. And, in sleeping, dreamt. It was as if he were walking down a long, dark tunnel. Merion had never been underground himself, but had heard tales from his mother about the time that she and Kirrick had escaped into a rabbit warren when fleeing from Traska’s band of magpies. He did not feel afraid, not even when the walls and roof of the passage closed in on all sides, leaving barely enough room for a bird to hop through with head held low. The darkness did not trouble him either. There was a rightness about the place, and about his being there. His journey was a good one, he was sure about that. And, if it seemed that he wandered for hours, he didn’t for a moment doubt that this was what he was meant to be doing.

  Then, in the extreme distance, a pin-prick appeared ahead of him. A tiny, brilliant point of white light, which strengthened as he walked towards it, and grew larger, banishing the shadows all around him, vanquishing the dark, until he emerged, suddenly, into a world of purest white. Initially, there was nothing but the light. His claws made no sound on the ground, if there was any ground beneath his feet. But gradually, as he continued forward, the whiteness became a thing of texture. Soft as the down on a chick’s breast. Warm, like milk straight from the cow’s teat. And there was sound. A deep rumbling sound, as rhythmic and reassuring as a heartbeat. Merion knew, instinctively, that it was breathing he could hear all around him, but he did not feel frightened. Not even when the softness around him started to move, the pure whiteness altering, dappled by grey.

  The creature stirred, and Merion felt as if he were at once inside and outside as it slowly turned. The white diminished as grey predominated, and soon became only a frame for the redness of the giant’s open mouth and huge lolling tongue. The eyes that fixed upon Merion were black in the centre, like pools of unfathomable depth, but the iris in each was grey in colour and flecked with amber, like shafts of sunlight at dawn. The brave robin met their stare with a calm heart, even calling out a bold greeting.

  ‘Septimus. It is good to see you. I did not think that we would meet again.’

  ‘Oh, you can be sure that we will, my young friend,’ came the reply, although Merion had seen no movement from the old wolf’s lips.

  ‘Did we forget something?’ the robin asked. ‘I thought that you had told us all that we needed to know at our last meeting.’

  ‘You are no one’s fool, my little robin. You seek more knowledge from me by your disingenuous questions. But you are right. I have been troubled since you left me. Troubled that I had been too vague, and that my very purpose would in the end be thwarted by my predilection for obscurity. I have one further message for you to carry to Tomar.’

  Excitement mounted like a dammed stream inside Merion’s chest, but he struggled to maintain his silence in spite of his desperate curiosity. This Septimus noted with some approval, nodding and smiling as he continued, ‘Tell my friend, and wisest of owls, that the entrance into Avia is a gateway in time as much as in space, and that to miss the opportunity would be irretrievable.’

  Merion was unable to contain himself. ‘What opportunity? How can we know when the gateway will be open if you don’t tell us?’

  In reply, the ancient wolf’s eyes closed as if in meditation, and the ensuing silence stretched the young robin’s nerves to breaking point. Finally, speaking once again with a voice that seemed to arrive directly inside Merion’s mind, Septimus began to breathe another stanza of the rhyme:

  ‘When all is lost and hope is gone,

  Think back to former battles won.

  Make ready all who chance the gate,

  For courage will decide their fate.

  Don’t fear the tunnel, black as night,

  For darkness comes before the light.’

  Engar looked around the ancient circle of trees with barely-disguised contempt for the owls gathered there to fawn upon him. ‘They will do everything that I say,’ he thought. ‘No one here will challenge me. They haven’t the guts. With Lostri otherwise engaged, there is nothing to stop me.’

  The barn owl’s face wore a look of extreme self-satisfaction, which the other eight Council members, feeling relief to a bird, mistook for a warm welcome. They smiled in return and waited, in respectful silence, for their leader to speak.

  ‘My friends and fellow Council members,’ Engar said. ‘I have called today’s meeting, as I believe we need to hear what three of our brethren have to report. Pellar, Cerca and Creer have all shown great diligence and loyalty to the Council. They have carried out their missions with the utmost celerity, as befitting the task that was set them. Would that the same could be said of Lostri. I find it hard to hide my disappointment that he has not returned. I, for one, was eager to hear about the situation with the corvidae in the north, where, as you all know, their strength in number is the greatest. But let that not lessen the worth of our successful delegates. We must hear their reports without delay. And maybe there is a very good reason for Lostri’s tardiness, which I am sure he will explain if and when he ever decides to return.’

  Creer, the long-eared owl, was the first to give his account of his travels and his discussions with the corvidae in the west of Birddom. He intimated that things had gone very well, with a mutual respect being noticeable at the meetings with the corvid leaders. They had been most anxious to co-operate and, at the same time, to reassure Creer that their aim was not to drag up the past, so distasteful to all, but to live in harmonious co-existence with the rest of Birddom, subject to its laws like any other birds and grateful for the leadership of Engar and the Council.

  ‘I think we can safely say that, whatever may have happened in times long gone,’ Creer expounded pompously, ‘we are now able to look to a future where corvids will be our allies and not our enemies; our partners not our foes.’

  Engar smiled once more, as he heard his own words coming from the mouth of his fellow Council member. Creer was word-perfect, having been so carefully coached, and had set just the right tone for what Engar had in mind. The barn owl thanked Creer effusively for his excellent work, then called upon Cerca to give his report.

  Cerca had travelled east, and his story was much the same. The corvidae were eager to look to the future, to a world where black and white could live happily alongside birds of every colour. Pellar’s visit to the south of Birddom yielded a remarkably similar picture, the only point of interest coming when he reported on a disturbing incident that he had learnt of from a distressed female blackbird. She had travelled for days without rest, and her exhaustion made her barely comprehensible. But, from what Pellar could gather, it seemed that she had set out from her remote home near the south coast with the aim of finding the Council of the Owls, but on hearing that one of their number was in her part of the country, had sought him out to regale him with her sorry tale. Apparently, Man had been making his mischief in a field near her nest, and her mate had been one of many birds killed, almost instantaneously, though what caused these deaths she could not explain.

  Not wishing this distressing but irrelevant news to dampen the mood of the Council, Engar dismissed it as an isolated incident and brought the attention of the Council members back to the happier news about the corvidae.

  ‘My friends, I am greatly encouraged by the reports from our three esteemed colleagues. I think that the corvids across Birddom need to be congratulated for their willingness to become a useful and integrated part of the great family of birds, which is the strength of Birddom itself. But I propose that we do something more than merely offer our congratulations. The magpies and crows, once reviled, have taken a monumental step towards rehabil
itation, and we should give them a reward commensurate with their efforts. Firstly, I ask all of you not to dismiss what I am about to say, without due consideration. For I believe that now is the first true test of our mettle as a Council that is fit to lead Birddom into the modern era. And that era can only prosper, I am sure you will agree, with peace for every bird.

  ‘I wish to bind the corvidae to us as brothers, and leaders of this our beloved land. And so, it is my respectful suggestion to the Council that we offer an olive-branch of friendship to their leadership to come and join with us in marching together towards a glorious future. I say that we should offer the corvidae three places upon this very Council. Circumstances have reduced our numbers to ten, from the traditional twelve who have always made up the leadership of Birddom. And Lostri, having failed in his duty to this body, should relinquish his place on the Council. I am confident that the substance of his findings will bear out all that has been said here today and, when he deigns to return to us, we will hear him. But his actions have forfeited his right to be a part of the highest, most noble body in the land.

  ‘What say you to my proposals? For we are a Council of equals, you and I. Do we admit three worthy members of the corvids to our number, and, in doing so, sew up an alliance that will ensure peace for all time in Birddom?’

  Eight heads nodded, though some less vigorously than others, and eight voices called out a unanimous ‘Aye’.