Magical: Day One

The carrier pigeon, after a pleasant sun-doused doze on the window-ledge, awoke to the growing dark. The sun still glittered down the length of the three by-lanes that ran down the short edge of the square, its light caught and shadowed at points by shuffling pedestrians and small sellers’ carts, and on the upper floors, by lines of washing strung there by the shopkeepers’ wives and by the occasional row of tiny sparrows perched upon the lines. It was lowering now to its final ebb, and the pigeon thought there is a bright colour to the sky tonight, and ruffled his feathers and stretched, his hold on the slightly-sloped stone ledge seeming suddenly loose. Resettling his perch—for there was nowhere else conceivably, now, to go, with his homeward message yet undelivered—he resettled his oddly ruffled mind.

It was odd, it seemed to the carrier-pigeon, that he should still be carrying his message. He was not, surely, usually this long in waiting on the ledge. At the other end…yes, there had been a wait there, more times than once, but how many times, in any approximation, he could not say. At this end, though, it was odd. He scuffled along the breadth of the window-panes and took in the interior, all dark still, even as the outside sky grew darker and he thought, yes, usually there is flame by this darkness, and so, probably no human had arrived while he slept and waited. Probably no human at all, and certainly not the one for whom he waited—for he still carried his message.

He ruffled his feathers again—it was an unconscious response to a mounting sense of discomfort, though not physical, for he felt warm and rested still from his afternoon’s dozing, and had fed well at his last posting, where the Master of Pigeons (his name was Aldwick, though he was most commonly known as Young Master Pidge) kept up a live supply of crawlers. How exactly he sourced this supply, none was keen to enquire. Pip was particularly fond of Young Master Pidge’s crawlers—he considered, with some vagueness, that they tasted of the city’s southern flat-lands, for there was a whiff, he felt, of the sea and its saltiness and its fishiness, and this scant scent of salt always gave him some impression we can most usefully describe as an impression of the concept of ‘home’. He knew—though how he knew it, he could not conceive of—that he was born of the city’s southern edges.

Once he had remembered something—though he was not, afterward, really to remember the remembrance, except once, in a moment that flashed by in an instant—of the place he was born. A ragged wiry nest amongst the grass-clumps at the outskirts of the southern city, in the rag-lands, the stretch of dry grassy land with its occasional date-palm and its occasional shanty-like sellers’ shack. The taste of toasted corn—snatched from beneath the tables of an outdoor café close to the waters-edge—had once given him this impression of ‘home’ too, a corn much like the one sold by water-side stallsmen.

The rag-lands ended patchily and merged with the mudflats that swelled each evening into shallow waters, flooding the ever-green grasses. Each early morning, as the waters drew back into the bays, and the flats were lain wet and bare beneath the very earliest glimmers of sunlight, and the night’s lingering coolness still cut through the summer’s air, the birds of the shallows came to feed on the sea-crawlers left stranded on the glistening muds. Some used long bills to reach deep into the water-logged sandy mud, others shuffled wide bills along the stretches of shallow water, catching up the small fish drifting in the waters.

Click here to read Part 1.