The Once and Future King. T. H. White

at a time, with wide wings scooping the blackness and a cry of triumph in their throats. They would wheel round, climbing rapidly, and be gone from sight. Twenty yards up, they were invisible in the dark. The earlier departures were not vocal. They were inclined to be taciturn before the sun came, only making occasional remarks, or crying their single warning-note if danger threatened. Then, at the warning, they would all rise vertically to the sky.

      The Wart began to feel an uneasiness in himself. The dim squadrons about him, setting out minute by minute, infected him with a tendency. He became restless to embrace their example, but he was shy. Perhaps their family groups, he thought, would resent his intrusion. Yet he wanted not to be lonely. He wanted to join in, and to enjoy the exercise of morning flight, which was so evidently a pleasure. They had a comradeship, free discipline and joie de vivre.

      When the goose next to the boy spread her wings and leaped, he did so automatically. Some eight of those nearby had been jerking their bills, which he had imitated as if the act were catching, and now, with these same eight, he found himself on pinion in the horizontal air. The moment he had left earth, the wind had vanished. Its restlessness and brutality had dropped away as if cut off by a knife. He was in it, and at peace.

      The eight geese spread out in line astern, evenly spaced, with him behind. They made for the east, where the poor lights had been, and now, before them, the bold sun began to rise. A crack of orange-vermilion broke the black cloud-bank far beyond the land. The glory spread, the salt marsh growing visible below. He saw it like a featureless moor or bogland, which had become maritime by accident – its heather, still looking like heather, having mated with the seaweed until it was a salt wet heather, with slippery fronds. The burns which should have run through the moorland were of seawater on bluish mud. There were long nets here and there, erected on poles, into which unwary geese might fly. These, he now guessed, had been the occasion for those warning-notes. Two or three widgeon hung in one of them, and, far away to the eastward, a fly-like man was plodding over the slob in tiny persistence, to collect his bag.

      The sun, as it rose, tinged the quicksilver of the creeks and the gleaming slime itself with flame. The curlew, who had been piping their mournful plaints since long before the light, flew now from weed-bank to weed-bank. The widgeon, who had slept on water, came whistling their double notes, like whistles from a Christmas cracker. The mallard toiled from land, against the wind. The redshanks scuttled and prodded like mice. A cloud of tiny dunlin, more compact than starlings, turned in the air with the noise of a train. The black-guard of crows rose from the pine trees on the dunes with merry cheers. Shore birds of every sort populated the tide line, filling it with business and beauty.

      The dawn, the sea-dawn and the mastery of ordered flight, were of such intense beauty that the boy was moved to sing. He wanted to cry a chorus to life, and, since a thousand geese were on the wing about him, he had not long to wait. The lines of these creatures, wavering like smoke upon the sky as they breasted the sunrise, were all at once in music and in laughter. Each squadron of them was in different voice, some larking, some triumphant, some in sentiment or glee. The vault of daybreak filled itself with heralds, and this is what they sang.

       You turning world, pouring beneath our pinions,

       Hoist the hoar sun to welcome morning’s minions.

       See, on each breast the scarlet and vermilion,

       Hear, from each throat the clarion and carillion,

       Hark, the wild wandering lines in black battalions,

       Heaven’s horns and hunters, dawn-bright hounds and stallions.

       Free, free: far, far: and fair on wavering wings

       Comes Anser albifrons, and sounds, and sings.

      He was in a coarse field, in daylight. His companions of the flight were grazing round him, plucking the grass with sideways wrenches of their soft small bills, bending their necks into abrupt loops, unlike the graceful curves of the swan. Always, as they fed, one of their number was on guard, its head erect and snakelike. They had mated during the winter months, or else in previous winters, so that they tended to feed in pairs within the family and squadron. The young female, his neighbour of the mud-flats, was in her first year. She kept an intelligent eye upon him.

      The boy, watching her cautiously, noted her plump compacted frame and a set of neat furrows on her neck. These furrows, he saw out of the corner of his eye, were caused by a difference in the feathering. The feathers were concave, which separated them from one another, making a texture of ridges which he considered graceful.

      Presently the young goose gave him a shove with her bill. She had been acting sentry.

      ‘You next,’ she said.

      She lowered her head without waiting for an answer, and began to graze in the same movement. Her feeding took her from his side.

      He stood sentry. He did not know what he was watching for, nor could he see any enemy, except the tussocks and his nibbling mates. But he was not sorry to be trusted sentinel for them.

      ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, passing him after half an hour.

      ‘I was on guard.’

      ‘Go on with you,’ she said with a giggle, or should it be a gaggle? ‘You are silly!’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘You know.’

      ‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I don’t. Am I doing it wrong? I don’t understand.’

      ‘Peck the next one. You have been on for twice your time at least.’

      He did as she told him, at which the grazer next to them took over, and then he walked along to feed beside her. They nibbled, noting one another out of beady eyes.

      ‘You think I am stupid,’ he said shyly, confessing the secret of his real species for the first time to an animal, ‘but it is because I am not a goose. I was born as a human. This is my first flight really.’

      She was mildly surprised.

      ‘It is unusual,’ she said. ‘The humans generally try the swans. The last lot we had were the Children of Lir. However, I suppose we’re all anseriformes together.’

      ‘I have heard of the Children of Lir.’

      ‘They didn’t enjoy it. They were hopelessly nationalistic and religious, always hanging about round one of the chapels in Ireland. You could say that they hardly noticed the other swans at all.’

      ‘I am enjoying it.’

      ‘I thought you were. What were you sent for?’

      ‘To learn my education.’

      They grazed in silence, until his own words reminded him of something he had wanted to ask.

      ‘The sentries,’ he asked. ‘Are we at war?’

      She did not understand the word.

      ‘War?’

      ‘Are we fighting people?’

      ‘Fighting?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘The men fight sometimes about their wives and that. Of course there is no bloodshed – only scuffling, to find the better man. Is that what you mean?’

      ‘No. I meant fighting against armies – against other geese, for instance.’

      She was amused.

      ‘How ridiculous! You mean a lot of geese all scuffling at the same time. It would be fun to watch.’

      Her tone surprised him, for his heart was still a kind one, being a boy’s.

      ‘Fun to watch them kill each other?’

      ‘To kill each other? An army of geese to kill each other?’

      She began to understand this idea slowly and doubtfully, an expression of distaste coming over her face. When it had sunk in, she left him. She went away to another part of the field in silence.