Pattern

'Scout?' the boy asked.

'Don't think so. Just occasionally you get a loner, out of touch with the rest of 'em. Look, he's on the turn. Keep still, he'll come back in straight at us.'

Sure enough, the crow executed a long, wide, sweeping turn, dropped low and came in with languorous, easy wing-beats, three feet or so above the ground. Poldarn let it come, knowing that if he could manage to drop it cleanly in the right place, its fall would bring in a new wave of scouts and the brief drought would be over. He could only just see the line it made in the air through his curtain of nettles, but he'd gauged its speed pretty well. When he reckoned it had reached the right spot, he straightened his protesting knees and threw at where the crow ought to be. Sure enough it was there, and the stone cracked it on the forehead. It dropped flat, wings tight in to its body.

'Shot,' the boy said, deeply impressed. 'I didn't even see it.'

Poldarn grinned. 'Nor me, I figured out where it was going to be. Now we should be in for some action.'

He wasn't wrong. Three scouts came over high, shrieking harshly, and slowly drew off; shortly afterwards, four more birds hobbled in on the line the singleton had taken. More or less at the point where Poldarn had killed the loner, they put their wings back and pitched.

'We leave them alone,' Poldarn said. 'Remember, for every one you can see, there's a couple of dozen that can see you.'

'I know,' the boy said. 'Right, here we go. Incoming on the left.'

Poldarn frowned; they hadn't come from that quarter before, or he hadn't seen them (he had a blind spot there). 'How many?'

'Two,' the boy replied immediately. 'One's on the glide, the other one's thinking about it.'

'Fine. We let the front one pitch and take the other one.'

He didn't see the second bird until it was a bare foot off the ground, but it was in the right place at the right time, so he killed it quickly and dropped back down as fast as. he could. The first bird lifted, but spread its wings straight away and tacked into the wind to brake its airspeed. As it sailed over a gap he bobbed up and killed it. There was another bird in the air before he sat down.

'That's amazing,' the boy said. 'I can never get them to do that.'

'Watch and learn,' Poldarn replied smugly. 'The key to this lark is patterns. Get the patterns right and all you've got to be able to do is throw a stone straight.'

No time for idle chatter for several minutes after that. They came in thick, almost too many of them, so that Poldarn had to keep throwing and killing just to keep the picture tight. 'You know,' the boy said during the next slight pause, 'it's starting to make sense to me now. It's like I can actually read the patterns and know what they're going to do. I can't explain it, though.'

'That's good, you're starting to think like them. They don't think in words, see; so you've got to be like them, think with your eyes.'

'That's right, think with your eyes. Like drawing a sword, really' The boy stopped talking while Poldarn nailed a couple more crows. 'It all makes sense when you're doing it,' he went on, 'definitely what you said, patterns. You know exactly what's going to happen; it's almost like you've been here before and you're remembering it all, so you can remember exactly where each bird's come from and where it's going to be. Either that, or you're reading their minds. Or both.'

They came in again while the boy was still talking; but he must have seen Poldarn stiffen, because he abruptly fell silent and held still. Poldarn killed another three; then he reached into the bucket for a stone and found it was empty.

'Fuck,' he said, 'that's a bloody nuisance. Do me a favour, will you; nip out and get a few stones, the headland's covered with them.'

But the boy wasn't there any more; he must have slipped away while Poldarn was busy. Annoying; he was too stiff and cramped to want to get up. No choice in the matter, though; so he straightened his knees with an effort and clambered up the side of the ditch.

He hadn't seen the field, of course, not since he'd got down and worked himself in. It was an extraordinary sight.

There were dead crows everywhere, a black mat of wings and bodies; some on their backs with their claws curled in the air, some on their sides with a wing frozen in death, some flat on the ground with their wings spread. One or two were still twitching, straining their necks like athletes striving to lift weights. As he hauled himself out of the ditch, something thrashed frantically in the tall nettles. He stood and stared for a long time, remembering various things he had seen-the ground littered with dead monks at Deymeson, the aftermath of the battle in the river, when the old women in their black shawls had come out to rob the dead, and a host of other pictures from the back of his mind that were equally vivid, though he couldn't fit a story to them. But they all conformed to one pattern, in the alignment of the corpses, their spacing, the gaps between them. They lay just as they'd been when he'd arrived, when they were still alive and feeding (it was the picture he'd been trying to achieve, the pattern he'd held in his mind as he worked) and they covered the sprouting peas like the mountain's black ejecta, the only difference being that he'd put them there, and he'd been doing good.

Stones, he thought; but he didn't move. Instead, he looked towards the volcano, Polden's Forge, and saw a thick column of black smoke billowing out of the summit, exactly like a flock of crows put up out of a knot of tall, thin trees, their castle. He could almost believe that the smoke was crows, all the crows he'd killed that day and on other good days, when he'd blackened the fields with his mess. It reminded him of one day in particular, a turning point in his career as the death of crows-he'd forgotten all about it until now, but suddenly it appeared in his mind's sky, swooped and pitched in the killing zone of his memory, the day when a young boy called Ciartan had gone out to kill crows on a field of sprouting peas, only to find that a man he couldn't remember having seen before had got there first and built his hide in this very ditch, under this very oak tree. The offcomer (a strange and rather frightening man with a sad face) was having a very good day, the field was covered in dead bodies, and he'd sat with him in his hide for a while and watched him at work, learning ever so much about decoying and tracking the birds in night and building and maintaining patterns-the foundations on which he'd based all his subsequent triumphs, from that day to this. It was the sheer number of the dead that had impressed him then-after the man had gone he counted them, one hundred and seventy-two-and (he guessed) it was the similarity of that picture of slaughter to this that had jarred his mind back into the groove.

He let go of the bucket and went out to count the dead birds. There were a hundred and seventy-two of them. As he turned them over with his foot and reckoned up the total, he was singing: Old crow lying on the cold brown clay, Old crow lying on the cold brown clay, Old crow lying on the cold brown clayBut there'll always be another for another day.

He remembered that he'd left the billhook in the bottom of the ditch. For a moment he was tempted to leave it there-he was too tired and aching to go scrambling about in ditches, it'd be easier to go home, fire up the forge and make a new one-but he put that unworthy thought behind him and slithered back down the slope into the mud (much deeper now, where he'd churned it up.) The hook had managed to burrow its way into the bed of the ditch and he had to scrabble for it with his fingertips. The mud felt cold and rather disgusting, it was like paunching a rabbit you'd killed yesterday and forgotten to dress out; he found the hook eventually, but while he was groping for it he came across something else. At first it looked like just another stone (could've done with that a few minutes ago, when the crows were coming in) but something prompted him to scour away the surface mud with the ball of his thumb, and he realised that it was iron or steel, remarkably well preserved under the coating of mud, except that it had turned a stony grey colour. A knob of mud in the middle gave way under his finger and proved to be the eye of a small axe. Once he'd found the billhook he spent a few minutes scraping off the mud and rust coating, and was pleased to see that it was salvageable; all it'd need would be a touch or two on the grindstone and a new handle, and he'd have a perfectly usable tool. He tucked it into his belt, wondering how it had come to be there, sunk in the mud and deprived of its history. But there were no clues to be found just by looking at it; its memory had long since rotted away, along with its handle. Not to worry; whoever it had belonged to and whatever it had been, it was still a perfectly good axe, and so long as it could be made to remember how to cut, that, surely, was all that mattered.