Birds Without Wings by Louis De Bernières Read Free Book Online Page A

greens, of which there were a hundred varieties growing on the hillsides and around the edges of the pastures, all of them edible, but some of them very bitter until one was used to them and learned to perceive the delicate flavours, which might remind one of walnut or garlic or lemon. Into their goatskin satchels they had stuffed everything that they had found, and were wasting time in conspiratorial fashion in order to delay their return home, where they would probably be given yet another task. Sometimes one’s mother sent one out to collect tezek, the dried dung that was used for fuel now that the trees had all been cut down and the goats had destroyed most of the shrubs. The only good thing about collecting tezek was finding the interesting and varicoloured species of beetles that inhabited it.
    They were sitting on one side of the sunken track that led past the almost intact ruins of a Roman theatre, which the townspeople still used for big meetings and celebrations. They were idly tossing small stones across the track, their target a small burrow made in the opposite bank by a mouse. “Why don’t we pee in the hole?” suggested Mehmetçik. “Then the mouse might come out, and we can catch it.”
    Karatavuk frowned. “I don’t want to catch a mouse.” Karatavuk always wanted to appear more serious and adult than he really was, and it is morethan likely that he would have liked to urinate in the hole to make the mouse come out, if only he had thought of it first.
    “Anyway,” said Mehmetçik, “if we pee in the mousehole, we might drown it.”
    Karatavuk nodded wisely in agreement, and the two boys continued to toss their stones. Karatavuk was the second son of Iskander the Potter, and he had the handsome face of a young man even though he was only six years old, with golden skin, and shining black hair that fell across his eyes, so that frequently he had to sweep it upward with the back of his hand. He had fine lips, and when he smiled he revealed a pointed tongue and small white teeth that had no gaps, but which were just crooked enough to be charming. His mood always seemed to be more sober than it was.
    Mehmetçik, who came from one of the Christian families, was shorter and stockier, and it was clear that one day he would grow up into the kind of man who can perform surprising feats of strength, the sort who can hold a heavy door in place whilst it is screwed on to its hinges. Like Karatavuk, his skin was tawny, his eyes dark brown, and his hair black and straight. They might easily have been brothers or cousins in two versions, one slim and lively, the other more solid. In fact, they were related, but in a manner tenuous enough for everyone to have forgotten how it came about. A great-great-grandfather had changed faith and married into the other family, perhaps, or a distant grandmother had married twice, the first or perhaps the second husband being of the other family. In any case, and in one way or another, if one traced it back far enough, there was no one in that town who was not in some way a relation of everybody else, whatever the theories that Daskalos Leonidas might have propounded.
    The boys compared toes, Karatavuk’s thin and long, Mehmetçik’s shorter and stouter. What they had in common was that they were powdery with white dust from the road, and tanned dark by the early-summer sun. Karatavuk was demonstrating that he could waggle each toe separately, and Mehmetçik was frowning with concentration in the effort to duplicate the feat, when they became aware that someone had come over the brow of the hill and was bearing down upon them.
    Even before they saw him closely, they realised that he was unusual. There was something uneven and exaggerated in his stride, as if he was so used to hurrying that he was incapable of proceeding at a measured pace. Furthermore, he did not walk in a straight line, but veered slightly from one side to the other, so that his out-turned footprints in the