Chapter Eight
I guess I never paid much attention to the walls, but now that I thought of it they were pretty high, and not much to look at either. They were basically flat gray cement all the way up and around on the sides and back of the yard. In the corners there were little rooms on top with windows but I didn't remember ever seeing anyone in them.
“Maybe we could get into one of those rooms on top,” I suggested but Random and Parsnip didn't think it was possible. There was no way to climb up and even if we did there was nothing to hold on to, and the way the bottoms stuck out, nope. I had to wonder how anyone ever could get in there. Parsnip thought there must be stairs or something on the other side, which only made me wonder what else might be over there.
“We either go straight out the front, or we dig,” Random concluded, “and you already tried the front.”
“So where do we dig?” I asked. They both shrugged.
“I guess where the ground is soft,” Random said.
“We'll split up,” Parsnip decided. “We'll each take a side and poke around, then meet up back here as fast as we can.”
Random got the back, Parsnip took the other side, and I was assigned the wall where we already were, so I got up and started crawling around, kind of clawing into the grass to see if it was any easier in one place than another. I kept thinking about how we had nothing to dig with, really, except our hands, and it wasn't looking so good on my side. I was mainly getting my knees and elbows and hands all dirty. I didn't even notice the two very large black birds hopping along behind me and chattering merrily away. Finally I realized they were trying to talk to me. I glanced over to see them standing side by side right next to my head.
“Well?” the one on the right asked. “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Are you what? Are we talking to ourselves over here?”
“Are you the boy who talks to birds?” the one on the left asked, flicking a wing at the other one.
“AM I a boy?” I asked.
“THE boy,” the bird corrected. “Are you THE boy who talks to birds?”
“Obviously he is,” the other one said, taking a step further away from the first so as not to get flicked in the face again.
“Who said I was a boy?” I wanted to know.
“All the gulls are talking about a boy who talks to birds,” the bird said.
“But Midgerette said I was a girl.”
“Okay,” the one on the right said. “Whatever a Midgerette is.”
“She's a seagull,” I said. My knees were starting to hurt, so I just sat down on the grass. Now the birds were lower than me but they still looked huge.
“Are you ravens or crows?” I asked.
“Ravens,” said the one on the left. “I'm Mary, and he's William.”
“And you are?” William asked.
“They call me Candles,” I replied, “but it's not my real name.”
William made a weird clucking sound that didn't translate to anything, and then he said,
“All these new ones have ridiculous names. Whatever happened to the good old days, when you could tell what they were by their names. Now you have to guess.”
“Usually the females have longer feathers on their heads. He's got that, but he doesn't have the bumps in front,” Mary considered. “Those are the only ways I can ever tell them apart. But not all the females have long feathers.”
“Or bumps,” William agreed.
“Can you help us?” I blurted out.
“There's more of you?” Mary asked. “We only heard about the one boy.”
“My friends. Over there,” I waved in the general direction of where Parsnip and Random might be. “We need to get out of here, but we don't know how.”
“Fly,” William suggested.
“We can't fly,” I said. “We're not birds.”
“Can you swim?”
“What good would that do him?” Mary interrupted. “There's no water here.”
“Right,” William snapped, “just a whole entire ocean right over there across the road.”
“They won't let us leave,” I said. “They have guards.”
William and Mary looked at each other and made weird little movements with their heads and their eyes. I guess it was some kind of special language that I didn't understand.
“We don't know how we can help,” Mary said. “Did you have a specific idea?”
“You know what's out there,” I said. “Maybe you could tell us where we could go? If we could get out of here that is.”
“There's the city,” William said.
“Sure,” Mary agreed. “Surf City is nice. There's lots of the old kind of people-people there. None of you new ones.”
“Where is it? Which direction? And how far?”
“Aw, not far at all. Just go straight behind you, over this wall, then turn right and go for about, what would you say, dear? Three, maybe four of their minutes?”
“Flying, sure,” Mary bobbed her head, calculating. “But say if they're walking fast, like they can do sometimes, then it'd be more like, oh, a hundred?”
“Walking fast?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “We've seen them go as fast as they can with their feet jumping off the ground. It's not what we'd call fast, but sometimes when they chase us they can go a lot faster than usual. We've been surprised. They can never catch us, of course.”
“We like to let them think they can. It's a sort of game. Do you like games?”
“I don't think so,” I said. I wasn't sure I knew what a game was.
“What do you like to do?” Mary asked. “We like to go new places and see new things. Like you. You're a new thing. And we've never been here before, either.”
“The gulls are all talking about you,” William repeated. “They say you can talk to all sorts of people, not just birds. Is it true?”
“Can't you?” I asked. William shook his head.
“We can't even talk to all the other birds,” he said, “only some that are smarter than others, like pigeons and seagulls and crows.”
“Try talking to a finch,” Mary laughed. “It's all just peep peep peep.”
“Wrens talk pretty, though,” William said and Mary hopped over to give him a serious flicking.
“You and your wrens,” she warned.
“Ow,” William failed to evade her and took the blow straight to the head. “If you're going to be that way,” he said, and suddenly flew off, up and over the wall.
“Stupid bird,” Mary said. “He likes his wrens, though. I'll show him what about wrens,” and with that she took off after him, leaving me cold and covered in dirt on the lawn. I hadn't even made it halfway down the length of the wall, and already I could see the sky beginning to lighten with the dawn. It wouldn't be long until Mother's breakfast.