Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,306

flight—though not very good at it. Prim woke up one morning and looked out her window to find the branch vacant, the bird nowhere to be seen. She felt a pang of loss. But then the still air of dawn was fractured by a clattering of black feathers and a scraping of talons on the stone sill of her window. She leapt back. The bird perched on the window frame and gazed at her curiously. “I am Corvus,” it announced, “and I am not like other new souls who come into the Land, though I cannot remember why.”

“Oh, of that, there is no doubt,” said Prim. For she had never heard tell of a new soul who had adopted a form and acquired the power of speech so readily. Indeed, had Corvus so manifested in other parts of the Land, he’d have been done away with by the superstitious folk who dwelled in such parts. That he had come into being in a tree in the garden of the Calladons was lucky, for the Calladons were queer folk. “My name is Prim,” she said. “My family is Calladon. This is Calla.”

“What do those words mean? Prim? Calladon?”

“Oh, they are not those kinds of words!” she answered. “You see, some words are very old, and their significance forgotten.”

“So Calladons have been here for a long time.”

She nodded. “We built this house on the back of a sleeping giant at the dawn of the Third Age, if that helps you.”

“It doesn’t.”

This Corvus seemed quite difficult to please. She shrugged. “That is our garden, and this my bedchamber. I have been watching you.”

“I know,” said Corvus—not really making it clear how many of the assertions just made by Prim had been known to him. No matter. The bird looked her up and down. She was wearing a sleeping gown that fell all the way to the floor. “Are you a girl, or a woman?”

“Girl,” Prim told him.

“Of how many falls?”

“It is not what matters,” she told him. “Calladons are queer folk. Girls become women, or boys become men, when some occasion requires it. Of late this part of the Land has been quiet and such occasions few.”

“I require a small party of women and men to accompany me on a Quest and lend a hand in its culmination,” Corvus stated.

“What manner of Quest?”

Corvus seemed not to have considered this seemingly basic question. He pondered it for a few moments, then rearranged his wings in a birdy shrug. “Travel, searching, digging something up. I don’t know. Very important. Leave immediately.”

“May I have breakfast?” she asked.

When Corvus seemed taken aback, she explained: “Others will be there, who might help. And in any case it would never do for one of my family to enter womanhood and embark on a Quest without at least saying a few words.”

Corvus shrugged his wings and said he would wait in the tree. He hopped around to reverse his direction and took to the air with a lot more clattering and whacking than was typical of more experienced birds, and found his way, after some misadventures, back to his old perch. There he bided as various hints and clues emerged from the house: chimney smoke, sounds of dish-utensil collisions, opening and closing of doors and window shutters, and rising and falling murmurs of conversation. The house in some places was made of stones piled atop other stones, in others of wood. In some parts of it the weather was kept out by sheaves of grass cleverly bound together, in others by sheets of gray metal or splits of thin rock. It looked, in other words, as if bits had been added on to other bits over a long span of time without any very clear plan, extending this way and that to enclose little yards such as the one where the apple tree grew. No part of it was especially high or grand, with the possible exception of the one that seemed to be making the greatest amount of smoke and noise during the activity that Prim had denominated “breakfast.” This was a hall with a rectangular plan and a lofty peaked roof, with windows just under the eaves, high enough to admit light and air.

After a while, people came out of it, following Prim, who had tied her hair back and put on more clothes. They were all of the same form. Most were taller than Prim, but a few were tiny and some even had to be carried