Read a preview
Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Late Egg
High in the loft of the old mill above the village of Nettlecombe, in a nest made of feathers, thistledown and one strand of somebody's blue knitting wool, a swift chick hatched three weeks too late in the season.
His name was Pip, and he was small, quick-tempered, and very proud.
The other chicks from the earlier broods had already grown long and sickle-winged and gone. The loft was quieter now. Wind came through the gap under the eaves and smelled of cut hay and river water, and the whole colony above the mill screamed in the evenings like a kettle boiling over the roof.
Pip loved that sound more than anything.
"That's us," said Skimmer, his sister, who had hatched a day before him and never let him forget it. "That's the whole family, up there. Aunts. Cousins. Great-grandfathers. Everybody who ever lived in this loft."
"When do I do it?" said Pip.
"When your feathers are ready."
"They're ready now."
They were not ready now. Pip was still mostly a grey pincushion with a wide, cross little face. But he did his push-ups every day, the way all swift chicks do, lifting his whole body off the boards on the ends of his wings and holding it there, trembling, counting under his breath, because a swift who cannot hold his own weight cannot hold the sky.
And every day Skimmer watched, and every day she noticed the same thing, and said nothing about it.
On Pip's left wing, the long primary feather closest to the tip had grown in crooked. It came out of the wing at a slight, stubborn angle, like a finger that had been broken and set wrong. It looked almost normal. It did not work almost normal.
The day he first flew, Pip shuffled to the gap in the eaves, looked down at the millpond forty feet below, screamed once for courage, and fell out into the evening.
And for two hundred wingbeats it was glorious.
The air came alive under him. He tipped one wing and the whole world tipped with it. He shot over the millpond so low that his reflection ran along beneath him like a second swift, and he pulled up and the sky opened and he laughed, which for a swift is a thin high shriek that makes farmers look up.
Then, at about three hundred wingbeats, his left wing began to feel wrong. The crooked feather buzzed and slipped. It let air through where no air should go. His wingtip started to shudder, and the shudder ran up into his shoulder, and the shoulder began to burn.
Pip fought it for another hundred beats and then he could not fight it at all.
He came down.
That is not a thing swifts do. Swifts eat in the air, drink in the air, gather nest material in the air, and sleep in the air, thousands of feet up, turning slowly in the dark. A swift on the ground is a swift in terrible trouble. Their legs are tiny and their feet are made for clinging to walls, not for walking.
Pip did not land on the ground. He landed, with a scrabble of claws and a great deal of bad language, on the mossy stone lip of the mill wall.
He clung there, gasping, absolutely furious.
Skimmer came round in a wide circle and landed beside him, which cost her some dignity too.
"It's the feather," said Pip.
"I know," said Skimmer.
"How long have you known?"
"Since it came in."
Pip glared at the millpond. Below them, the wheel turned slow and green and dripping, and a marmalade-coloured cat sat on the far bank pretending to be a flowerpot.
"Nobody can know," said Pip.
"Nobody will," said Skimmer. "Fly in short bursts. Rest on the wall where the ivy is; the others can't see you from above. And practise, Pip. Practise until the good wing is twice as strong as anyone's, and then it won't matter how far you can go, because you'll get further in six minutes than they get in ten."
So that is what they did, all through the shortening days of that late summer.
Skimmer taught him to snap flies out of the air over the millpond, opening his mouth into a gape so wide it made his eyes disappear. She taught him to drink by skimming the water and taking a beakful without stopping. She taught him to shear along the hedgerow where the midges rose in columns at dusk, and to turn on one wingtip at the last second before the willow.
And Pip counted. Six minutes, then a rest. Then six minutes more.
"It's enough," Skimmer told him, again and again. "For the loft, it's enough."
"And for the crossing?"
Skimmer looked away over the valley, at the blue distance where the hills went soft.
"The crossing," she said at last, "is a long way."
Because that was the thing waiting at the end of the summer, the thing every swift in the loft was made for. One night, when the air changed, the whole colony would go up together and fly south, over land and then over the sea, thousands of miles, without landing. Not once. Not for anything.
Pip lay awake in the loft that night with his crooked feather tucked tight against his side, and told himself that he was fast, and that fast was the same as strong.
It is not.
