Polgara the Sorceress. David Eddings

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      ‘It must have caught on my sleeve up near the top of that hill,’ I ventured.

      ‘Why don’t we go up there and have a look,’ she suggested, brazenly settling on my shoulder. The first sparrow followed his mate’s lead and perched on my other shoulder. All bemused by this miracle, I turned and started back up the grassy hill.

      ‘You don’t move very fast, do you?’ The first sparrow noted critically.

      ‘I don’t have wings,’ I replied.

      ‘That must be awfully tedious.’

      ‘It gets me to where I’m going.’

      ‘As soon as we find those seeds, I’ll introduce you to some of the others,’ he offered. ‘My mate and I’ll be busy feeding the babies for a while.’

      ‘Can you actually talk to other kinds of birds?’ That was a startling idea.

      ‘Well,’ he said deprecatingly, ‘sort of. The larks always try to be poetic, and the robins talk too much, and they’re always trying to shoulder their way in whenever I find food. I really don’t care that much for robins. They’re such bullies.’

      And then a meadowlark swooped in and hovered over my head. ‘Whither goest thou?’ he demanded of my sparrow.

      ‘Up there,’ the sparrow replied, cocking his head toward the hilltop. ‘Polgara found some seeds up there, and my mate and I have babies to feed. Why don’t you talk with her while we tend to business?’

      ‘All right,’ the lark agreed. ‘My mate doth still sit upon our eggs, warming them with her substance, so I have ample time to guide our sister here.’

      ‘There’s a seed!’ the female sparrow chirped excitedly. And she swooped down off my shoulder to seize it. Her mate soon saw another, and the two of them flew off.

      ‘Sparrows are, methinks, somewhat overly excitable,’ the lark noted. ‘Whither wouldst thou go, sister?’

      ‘I’ll leave that up to you,’ I replied. ‘I’d sort of like to get to know more birds, though.’

      And that began my education in ornithology. I met all manner of birds that morning. The helpful lark took me around and introduced me. His rather lyrical assessments of the varied species were surprisingly acute. As I’ve already mentioned, he told me that sparrows are excitable and talky. He characterized robins as oddly aggressive, and then added that they tended to say the same things over and over. Jays scream a lot. Swallows show off. Crows are thieves. Vultures stink. Hummingbirds aren’t really very intelligent. If he’s forced to think about it, the average hummingbird gets so confused that he forgets exactly how to hover in mid-air. Owls aren’t really as wise as they’re reputed to be, and my guide referred to them rather deprecatingly as ‘flying mouse-traps’. Seagulls have a grossly exaggerated notion of their own place in the overall scheme of things. Your average seagull spends a lot of his time pretending to be an eagle. I normally wouldn’t have seen any seagulls in the Vale, but the blustery wind had driven them inland. The assorted waterfowl spent almost as much time swimming as they did flying, and they were very clannish. I didn’t really care that much for ducks and geese. They’re pretty, I suppose, but their voices set my teeth on edge.

      The aristocrats of birds are the raptors. The various hawks, depending on their size, have a complicated hierarchy, and standing at the very pinnacle of bird-dom is the eagle.

      I communed with the various birds for the rest of the day, and by evening they had grown so accustomed to me that some of them, like my cheeky little sparrow and his mate, actually perched on me. As evening settled over the Vale I promised to return the next day, and my lyric lark accompanied me back to uncle Beldin’s tower.

      ‘What have you been doing, Pol?’ Beldaran asked curiously after I’d mounted the stairs and rejoined her. As was usual when we were talking to each other privately, Beldaran spoke to me in ‘twin’.

      ‘I met some birds,’ I replied.

      ‘ “Met”? How do you meet a bird?’

      ‘You talk to them, Beldaran.’

      ‘And do they talk back?’ Her look was amused.

      ‘Yes,’ I answered in an off-hand manner, ‘as a matter of fact, they do.’ If she wanted to be snippy and superior, I could play that game, too.

      ‘What do they talk about?’ Her curiosity subdued her irritation at my superior reply.

      ‘Oh, seeds and the like. Birds take a lot of interest in food. They talk about flying, too. They can’t really understand why I can’t fly. Then they talk about their nests. A bird doesn’t really live in his nest, you know. It’s just a place to lay eggs and raise babies.’

      ‘I’d never thought of that,’ my sister admitted.

      ‘Neither had I – until they told me about it. A bird doesn’t really need a home, I guess. They also have opinions.’

      ‘Opinions?’

      ‘One kind of bird doesn’t really have much use for other kinds of birds. Sparrows don’t like robins, and seagulls don’t like ducks.’

      ‘How curious,’ Beldaran commented.

      ‘What are you two babbling about now?’ uncle Beldin demanded, looking up from the scroll he’d been studying.

      ‘Birds,’ I told him.

      He muttered something I won’t repeat here and went back to his study of that scroll.

      ‘Why don’t you take a bath and change clothes, Pol,’ Beldaran suggested a bit acidly. ‘You’ve got bird-droppings all over you.’

      I shrugged. ‘They’ll brush off as soon as they dry.’

      She rolled her eyes upward.

      I left the tower early the next morning and went to the small storehouse where the twins kept their supplies. The twins are Alorns, and they do love their beer. One of the major ingredients in beer is wheat, and I was fairly sure they wouldn’t miss a small bag or two. I opened the bin where they kept the wheat and scooped a fair amount into a couple of canvas bags I’d found hanging on a hook on the back wall of the shed. Then, carrying the fruits of my pilferage, I started back for the Tree.

      ‘Whither goest thou, sister?’ It was my poetic lark again. It occurs to me that my affinity for the studied formality of Wacite Arendish speech may very well have been born in my conversations with that lark.

      ‘I’m going back to the Tree,’ I told him.

      ‘What are those?’ he demanded, stabbing his beak at the two bags I carried.

      ‘A gift for my new-found friends,’ I said.

      ‘What is a gift?’

      ‘You’ll see.’

      Birds are sometimes as curious as cats, and my lark badgered me about what was in my bags all the way back to the Tree.

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