Poldarn knew or remembered enough to keep perfectly still; but as the sun moved through the scattered clouds, the light changed, brightening up enough to flash a slight reflection off his pale face. At once, four or five crows got up from the edges and wheeled over him, slow, high and screaming; he froze, but they were aware of him now, and the whole flock lifted in a jarring explosion of harsh voices-you didn't need to know their language to get the gist of what they were saying. For a few heartbeats they hung in the air like smoke on a calm day; then they began to swirl and circle, winding broad, lazy hoops of concerted movement, boldly overstated brush strokes against the grey sky.
Poldarn had been expecting that, relying on it. On his way he'd picked up half a bucketful of flints from the headlands of the neighbouring fields, where generations of field hands had tossed them as they'd harrowed and mashed the clods. As the flock billowed over his head-they always made this mistake, just once, it was almost an arrogantly chivalrous gesture, allowing him one clear chance to take a few easy shots, satisfy his honour-he stooped down, grabbed a flint from the bucket, marked a point in the sky where the press of bodies was so thick he couldn't miss, and let fly. The first stone somehow managed to thread a way through the crowd without hitting anything, but the next five stones knocked down four birds-one dead in the air, two with broken wings landing indignant but in good order, and one pitching messily on its back, skipping and hopping in a dance of murderous rage until Poldarn got his foot behind its head and crushed it into the hard soil. The two broken-winged runners were harder to catch, they waddled with furious determination towards the hedge side, jinking and tacking out of the way every time he came within arm's length, so that in the end he had to resort to a desperate, flamboyant tackle to bring them down. Once he had his hand over their backs, it was a different matter-thumb pressed against the neck-bone, two forefingers to lever back the head until the neck snapped. Four crows had changed sides; not nearly as many as he'd have liked, but enough to make a start.
Next, Poldarn chose his place. That was a simple enough decision; all he had to do was look at the pattern of the green haze of pea-sprouts just starting to show above the ground, and mark out the biggest bare patch, where the core of the flock had been feeding. The size of it made him very angry; almost a quarter of the crop was already ruined, an act of war against him and his household that he would have to make good against them, one way or another. Life was hard enough without this sort of thing, the sudden advent of a horde of merciless raiders who didn't care if the Ciartanstead house starved. Something had to be done, and it was already way past diplomacy or settlement.
Next, he built his hide. Again, he didn't need to think hard about that. The bare patch was tight in to the middle point of the hedge and ditch side; that was where they wanted to be, so that was where he'd have to go. Fortunately, it was the place he'd have chosen anyway; there was even a young oak standing up out of the hedge, to mask him from above. With that, the ditch to hunker down in, and the screen of weeds and nettles out front, he was practically invisible until he chose to show himself. Admittedly, it wasn't going to be comfortable crouching in the bottom of the ditch. The mud (silt from the recent rains, the last of the black ash filtered and ground small by the water) came oozing up round his ankles, and he had to sit on his heels with his back braced against the trunk of the oak, his head and neck craned forward so he could look out through a narrow gap in the weed-curtain. If he stayed here any length of time he'd be crippled the next day. As if that mattered.
Having marked his place in the ditch, Poldarn scrambled out and set up his decoys. From the thorn hedge he cut four straight sticks, each as long as his hand from fingertip to wrist. He sharpened these on the thin end and dug the points in under the dead crows' lower jaw, up through the brains until they stopped against the roofs of the skulls. That was enough to hold the dead birds' weights as he pegged them out, as realistically as he could manage, standing them upright with the heads raised and the beaks jutting out like spears at port arms, proud sentries at their posts. With only four of them to play with he couldn't suggest a convincing pattern, so they would have to be scouts, marking out the limits of the safe zone in advance of the main body. Accordingly he posted them at the extreme corners of his killing field, fifteen paces from his hide. The idea was that the crows would come in along the obvious flight-line from their castle, the knot of thin trees on the hilltop. Once they'd marked the position of the scouts and been made aware of the safe zone, they'd slow down by turning into the breeze, bank, and glide down to pitch in the centre of the approved space, gradually filling it from the middle outwards until there was no more room; whereupon another platoon of scouts would establish further safe zones in suitable adjoining areas, and so on until the field was carpeted with crows like black snow.
Before going back to his hide, he skirmished the headland for a few more handfuls of stones, just in case it turned into a good day (nothing worse than having to disrupt a fluent spell to go scrabbling out in the open for ammunition). Then he folded himself into the hide as best he could, wriggled his back into the closest approximation of comfort that he could find, and waited to see what would happen.
Poldarn knew, or remembered, that it was no good expecting birds to come in for at least half an hour after set-up-it was set down in the rules as a fundamental principle, unshakeable as the orientation of the rising and the setting sun. During that time, it was absolutely essential to keep perfectly still; you could just about get away with blinking so long as you had a first-rate hide, but anything more energetic than that and you might as well go home. After that, if you were really lucky, you'd hear the screams and squawks of the advance scouts, gliding slowly over at double-treetop height. You wouldn't see them, of course, because one thing you had not to do when the scouts were overhead was lift your head, or even raise your eyes; the flicker of the whites of your eyes would be enough to send the scouts into a scrambled, flustered turn, followed by a fast and noisy retreat, after which you might as well go to sleep for an hour for all the good you were likely to do He'd only just got himself into position when he felt a patch of darkness flicker across his forehead, the shadow of a crow hanging between himself and the sun. He caught sight of it a few heartbeats later as it crossed the bare patch in his line of sight; a T-shaped pattern of dark grey, unnaturally elongated, distorting as it dragged over humps and dips in the dirt. The first scout was over him already-impossible, unheard of, but there it was. A mere twenty years, and already they'd forgotten even the most elementary basics of their craft. He'd have to set them straight on a few points.