Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri

Author:Ben Okri [Okri, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784081836
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2014-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

9

At first, he heard nothing. Then, after a while, he heard a faint shuffling sound, and muffled cries of agony, as of a small animal dying.

He scanned the square, but saw nothing. The tiny shuffling noise continued moving towards him. He looked again, and saw nothing. The figures stirring in the loggia were still. The whole square was still, as if waiting. Then, just as he was about to sit down again, he saw it.

He saw it as a horrid worm, and as a monster something evil that had crawled out from under the perfect stones. The world swam before his horrified gaze and a dryness filled his mouth. For a moment everything went dark about him and when he recovered himself, with his heart beating fast, he saw the creature crawling towards him in the dark. Somehow, it became perfectly visible, a mottled white against the patterned ochre of the stones. With faint cries of distress, it struggled on, crawling with great difficulty, pushing itself forward with its broken wings, and supporting itself on its one good foot. The other foot was bent and broken. It twitched in the soft moonlight.

For a long moment he watched the dove with a mixture of horror – and fascination. For a long moment he didn’t see it as a bird, but as a monster. The bird was crawling towards the House of Justice, crawling there to die an honourable death.

But the moment he saw it as a bird struggling to get to the edge of the square, where there was a border of flowers, he also became aware of something else, something quite ominous.

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