Bitter Seeds

interlude

They arrived in numbers that blackened the sky, and at the beaches, they feasted.

Amidst sand and iron, surf and steel, ravens gorged on the dead. The first few hours were best, before sunlight and seawater fouled the meat. But soon the carrion reek attracted more than birds. New men arrived to clear the beaches. The ravens, scavengers themselves, watched while these new men picked what they could from the dead. Derelict armaments. Cigarettes. Pocket watches.

And when the dead turned noisome with rot, the men used their clattering machines to excavate trenches and pile the bodies. The fires burned for a day, a night, and a day.

More men arrived, with still more machines. They amassed at the shore, facing west, while a fleet of boats and barges assembled in estuaries up and down the coast. Like some great predator poised to lunge upon its prey, this assembly fixated on the island across the Channel.

Large predators, the ravens knew, brought down large prey. Large prey meant a bounty of carrion.

And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

New shapes darkened the sky that summer. Wave upon wave of these fliers screamed over the water in angry gray wedges of aluminum and glass. Other machines, flown by other men, leapt into the sky to meet them. This was a new kind of dance, a ballet not yet seen in the surge of armies and waltz of empires.

And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

Twined contrails traced sigils in the bright blue sky over the island. The attackers swarmed around the lattice masts dotting the coast like honeybees drawn to sunflowers. One by one, the towers fell, rendering the defenders blind. It was as though their eyes had been plucked out in homage to some ancient myth.

The battles moved inland, beyond the horizon, deeper over the island every week. Each day saw fewer defenders taking to the sky than the day before. The crows and ravens here had it harder than their Continental cousins, for the mounting dead were crushed under timber and brick and so did not make for easy picking.

Sensing its time had come, the army on the coast roused itself and focused on the island with renewed vigor.

And so the ravens stayed, and watched.

But then, at the height of summer, the weather in the Channel ... changed.

The fog—improbably thick—appeared within hours. It heeded neither sun nor wind. Distant shores disappeared, shrouded in per sis tent gloom. Sunlight could not dispel the haze that wreathed the island.

Phantoms writhed within the cloud bank. Fleeting patterns of light and shadow, noises like voices too faint to make out, lingering scents that evoked empty memories.

The phantoms danced within the water, too. The waves on the Channel assumed impossible geometries: pyramidal waves sliced past one another like serrated saw teeth; towering, needled-tipped spindles whirled through the troughs between the waves; whitecapped breakers defied time and gravity like immense crystal sculptures.

But although these elements rendered the crossing impassable to all manner of ship and landing craft, they did not gird the heavens. The bombs continued to fall. And fall they did, in numbers too great to count.

That autumn, the ravens of Albion abandoned the Tower of London.