Bellman & Black Read Free

just black, he is blacker than that. His is a luxurious superabundance of blackness never seen in any other creature. He is the essence of blackness.
    So whence the glorious color?
    Well, the rook is something of a magician. His black feathers are capable of producing an entrancing optical effect.
    “Aha!” you say. “So it is only an illusion.”
    Far from it. The rook is no theatrical conjuror with his top hat full of tricks, deluding your eye into perceiving what is not. He is quite the opposite: a magician of the real. Ask your eyes, What color is light? They cannot tell you. But a rook can. He captures the light, splits it, absorbs some, and radiates the rest in a delightful demonstration of optics, showing you the truth about light that your own poor eyes cannot see.
    Nor is this spellbinding display of flamboyance the only trick he has concealed in his feathers. Though it is exceedingly rare, a handful of witnesses have seen this spectacle: on a bright summer’s day, turning into the sun, a rook alters from black to angelic white. Mirror-bright he dazzles and glories in his whiteness.
    Given his beauty and the dramatic and magical alterations he can bring about in his appearance, you might wonder why the rook is to be found in common fields, grubbing for larvae. Why are these supreme creatures not owned by princesses, housed in gilded aviaries, fed dainty morsels from silver trays by liveried servants? Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins, and dragons?
    The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainment of human company he is more likely to seek out the drunken poet or the wild-eyed crone than a damsel with a coronet. He is partial to a bit of dragon liver or unicorn tongue when he can get it though, and he wouldn’t refuse griffin flesh if it came his way.
    ·  ·  ·
    There are numerous collective nouns for rooks. In some parts people say a parish of rooks.

Part I

Verily, the rook sees far more than we give him credit for seeing,
    hears more than we think he hears,
    thinks more than we think that he thinks.
    —T HE R EVEREND B OSWELL S MITH, FROM B IRD L IFE AND B IRD L ORE

CHAPTER ONE

    S ix days out of every seven the area along the Burford Road resounded with the clattering, booming, clanging, rattling, thundering noise of Bellman’s Mill. The shuttles that hurtled back and forth were the very least of it: there was also the churning, crashing roar of the Windrush as it turned the wheel that powered all this hectic to-ing and fro-ing. Such was the racket that at the end of the day, when the shuttles were brought home to rest and the mill wheel ceased to turn, the ears of the workers still rang with the vibration of it all. This ringing stayed with them as they made their way to their small cottages, was still there as they climbed into their beds at night, and as often as not, continued to sound through their dreams.
    Birds and other small creatures stayed away from Bellman’s Mill, at least on working days. Only the rooks were bold enough to fly over the mill, seeming to relish its clamor, even adding a coarse note of their own to the music.
    Today though, being Sunday, the mill was peaceful. On the other side of the Windrush and down the high street, the humans were making noise of another kind.
    A rook—or a crow, it is hard to tell them apart—alighted with aplomb on the roof of the church, cocked its head, and listened.
    “Oh come and dwell in me,
    Spirit of power within,
    and bring the glorious liberty
    from sorrow, fear, and sin.”
    In the first verse of the hymn, the congregation was tuneless and disorganized as a herd of sheep on market day. Some treated it as a competition where the loudest wins all. Some, having better things to do with their time than sing, rushed to the end as quickly as they could, while others, afraid of getting ahead of themselves, lagged a safe semiquaver behind.