Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (read any book .TXT) 📗

to watch as Frank Sinclair is slowly devoured. From time to time he returns, binds the worst of Frank Sinclair’s wounds, and finds creative ways to make sure the dying man remains aware of what is happening to him, but after what must be an hour or so it seems pointless. There simply isn’t enough of him left. And with a final well-placed peck, Owl punctures Frank Sinclair’s heart.

With the clothes of the dead man’s ancestors, Adam wipes the blood from his hands. The elephant gun is nearby, and he delicately removes Fox’s brush from the barrel. In the light of the moon, the tail gleams wetly, blood beaded across it.

The last time Adam saw Fox, he was living up in the Hida Highlands. There was a famine at the time, and though the crops down in the valleys were failing, and though many thousands were starving, Adam’s plum trees still grew tall, and bloomed bountifully, and, as the year progressed, bore heavy dark fruits. Adam shared his crop of fruit with anybody who made the journey up the high hills to his small farm, and after each feast he buried the stones in his fields, so that more plum trees would sprout next spring. One misty morning he woke to distant shouting, and went out to his trees to find a group of skeletal men tearing them from the earth. They were raking at the roots, binding lengths of rope around the trunks, and hauling them onto crude carts. It did not take long for Adam to stop them: they were all starved, and weak, and bore blunt tools. Afterwards, he sat among the wreckage and looked out over the valleys – at the way the mists pooled in the valleys around the green hills – and it was from those mists that she emerged: Fox, her fur agleam with the same dew that glinted on the grasses. She yipped, he remembers – a solemn greeting that broke the silence that had settled over everything like the mists. Then she sat with him a while, and licked the blood and plum juice from his fingers.

XIV

On the day that Eden’s twin trees burned, there was a storm.

There had never been a storm in paradise before. The winds and rains had always been gentle, and Adam had enjoyed the feel of them across his skin, and the way they played through the trees, rustling their leaves. Adam knew Eden’s weather as well as he knew the songs of all the birds, and the calls of all the creatures that called the forests and plains of paradise their home. Now, the winds and the rains made an unfamiliar music. The trees groaned, their branches heaving and whipping, and the rains were sharp and stung at Adam’s skin, pattering noisily against the sodden ground. The clouds were thick and dark in a way he had never seen before, and he had no name for it all, so he called it a storm. Eden’s creatures hid in the gaps between roots, and the knots of trees, and cried plaintively to Adam, asking him in their various voices for relief.

As night fell, the storm gathered its strength.

Light fell from the sky, and the clouds bellowed, and Adam cowered from them both. The bright strikes that left streaks across his vision he called lightning, and the great crashing boom that echoed across Eden’s valleys he called thunder, and from his crude shelter between an oak and a sycamore he could see the lightning, raking the hill at the very centre of Eden again and again with its terrifying magnificence. Soon, a new light billowed out over paradise, which looked, to Adam, like the sudden unfurling of a flower made of colours that he did not recognise. The strange new colours illuminated all of Eden with their eerie, shifting magnificence, and Adam felt himself drawn towards them. With the storm buffeting him, and with all of Eden’s creatures following in his wake, Adam made his way there, to where the twin trees stood, wisdom and life, at Eden’s heart.

Both trees were on fire. The light from them was brilliant and hypnotic, constantly shifting between all the colours that Adam had named in paradise, and revealing yet more, ever stranger colours, as they were consumed. The heat from them was fierce, and the rains hissed as they struck the blackened branches. The fruits of the trees warped and darkened as they caught fire, burning up in weird twists of coloured light, and crackling branches fell, still smouldering and crumbling into ashes among the trees’ tangled roots. Before long, even those very roots burned, until both trees were conflagrations, searing streaked after-images into Adam’s vision that would never really leave him. Adam turned from the dazzling vision to see that most of Eden’s occupants had come to witness the burning trees. He could see the fires reflected in all their eyes, even in the darkness of the forests that lined the base of the hill.

Eve arrived, then, and took his hand, and together they watched the trees burn.

After a while, she left him, and began to advance up the hill. Adam could see the way that the terrible heat affected her: heavy droplets of sweat rolled down her skin, each refracting the endless shifting colours of the fire, so that Eve gleamed with their burning. Still she ascended, each step drawing her closer to the place between the trees – that nest of tangled roots where she and Adam had slept so often, tangled up in each other. Adam wanted to go after her, wanted to run up the hill and join her there, perhaps burn with her, but something kept him at the base of the hill: the weight of his responsibility for all those that watched and waited with him, the animals of Eden, whose lives were each so beloved to him. Eve drew close enough to the trees that the flames licked