The rapid wings rasped, the feathers came, the hooked beaks thrust in and tore out after a brief stay, the spurs were in danger of becoming locked but they were intelligent fighters. I was annoyed at the thought that they would tear each other to pieces. But Urns was not badly damaged, and the grey already becoming exhausted. He had been pierced in many places; and with a guttural squeak he sank to the ground, a heap of blood and feathers. Urns in a sort of dainty paroxysm did a little dance on him, occasionally bending to sink his beak in him, and then gradually quietened and presently stood still, staring with his one eye out over the battlefield.

So I began to walk to him.

A Southern N.C.O. caught at me. “No, miss—not over there. Just because he’s stopped a moment, don’t mean he’s not still dangerous. If you’re looking for someone—”

“No. It’s all right. He’s my bird.”

“Oh? I seem to remember there was our commander Iro riding him—No sign of him now—But even if you haven’t made a mistake, miss, don’t think he can be approached now. He won’t know you, and if he did it wouldn’t make no difference,” he said ominously.

The bird stood like an arch-beaked, two-legged, black monolith, giant against the wheeling, croaking, red sky, the horizon low, flat and distant between his legs.

I continued to approach him. At first I had a low feeling of loss—Oh, yes—Lei—Iro dead—But really, Lei had long since ceased to be any of my business. And there’ll always be someone to succeed Iro. I continued to approach. The blind eye was grey, the staring eye red with the frozen triumph of the animal, where a human would be merely exhausted. When they had given him to me, before each new meeting was a little more and a little more a giving of myself to him, they’d told me he’d lost that eye in a fight over a female. Well, that female was long since forgotten, and now I am approaching him to take up again that fierce loneliness between us.

He sensed the approach—the eye in a swift bird-movement cocked my way; for a moment I felt pain, I felt that he is far too elementally an earth creature to have been sent to me to help Atlan, leave him alone, go on your way, stop taking every coincidence as a personal tribute—

He stared and then stalked towards me. It was different from the mad, rushing scamper he’s always used before. His eyes glowed into mine. He uttered a series of short, quick, staccato barks. Then he thrust his head under my arm and crooned and crooned and crooned.

The Southern N.C.O. looked at me in amazement and awe.