The August Birds by Octavia Cade

Author:Octavia Cade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: death, history, historical, science, mortality, sibling relationships, science history
Publisher: Octavia Cade

AUGUST 17, 1834

CERRO LA CAMPANA, CHILE

Muninn flew him to the very top of the mountain. August could not have walked up on his own, nor could he have sat a horse, or even a donkey, for the length of time it would have taken for them to carry him upwards. Nor, when he was at the top, could August go exploring. The top of the mountain was a shattered jumble of rock, of weathered and fractured greenstone, all split and shattered and the fragments unsteady beneath him at angles.

“You will turn an ankle if you’re not careful,” said Muninn, and she was not wrong so August picked his way to the nearest slab. He was dizzy often now, dizzy from more than heights, so he was over-careful, inching his way between the rocks until he found a brief flat place where he could sit without too much discomfort.

“There is more to look at than your feet, August,” said Muninn, reproving, and when the black spots disappeared from his eyes and he could make his skinny, sweating little fingers loosen their grip upon the rocks, August raised his head and looked. Before him was a nation of knives–a horizon of peaks and edges, of mountains before him as far as he could see, and some were tipped with snow. The air was cold and very still.

“They are the Andes,” said Muninn, and August, who had only seen the Southern Alps when he had flown over them on another trip to Starship Hospital in Auckland, who had only seen the Southern Alps but who had pictures on his wall of Everest and Hillary, of the Himalayas and Mount Kilimanjaro and the Andes, actually squeaked in excitement. That small noise echoed and came back to him in waves, and he would have been embarrassed had Huginn not cawed then as loudly as he could, to hear his own echoes come back to him. And then Muninn was crowing too, and in the cascading effect of all their voices together August almost missed the echoes of a fourth as it came up onto the summit of the mountain with its companions, and if the man who arrived could not hear their echoes he could hear his own, and be as delighted by them. His face was so rosy with excitement, with happiness, that he seemed younger than he was, and for a moment he looked a little as August looked, and their twin small-boy faces were radiant in the sun.

August felt the kinship between them, and it was a feeling that saddened but did not fade when the man did what August could not–scrambled over rocks and broken boulders, strong and healthy and able to move on his own and without help. And his steps that started in excitement became measured, and that was another point of difference between them, for if August was dying he was still young and often measurement was beyond him, and consideration, and comparison. He could grasp them sometimes,

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