A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong Read Online Free PDF

stolen first thing in the morning, so they’ll be looking for it.”
    He nodded. “Well,” he said, “thanks for everything, professor. I’d just like to say—”
    “Get the hell away from here,” I said, “before anyone sees us.”
     
     
     
    There are few feelings in life quite as exhilarating as getting away with something. Mainly, I guess, if you’re someone like me, it’s because you never really expected to. Add to the natural relief, therefore, the unaccustomed pleasure of winning. Then, since you can’t win anything without having beaten someone first, there’s the delicious feeling of superiority, which I enjoy for the same reason that gourmets prize those small grey truffles that grow on the sides of dead birch trees; not because it’s nourishing or tasty, but simply because it’s so rare. Of course, it remained to be seen whether I had actually got away with aiding and abetting a murderer after the fact and assisting a fugitive. There was still a distinct chance that Subtilius would be picked up by the watch before he could get out of the city, in which case he might very well reveal the identity of his accomplice, if only to stop them hitting him. But, I told myself, that’d be all right. I’d simply tell them he’d burgled my rooms and stolen the money and the cassock, and they wouldn’t be able to prove otherwise. I told myself that; I knew perfectly well, of course, that if they did question me, my nerve would probably shatter like an eggshell, and the only thing that might stop me from giving them a comprehensive confession was if I was so incoherent with terror I couldn’t speak at all. I think you’d have to be quite extraordinarily brave to be a hardened criminal; much braver than soldiers who lead charges or stand their ground against the cavalry. I could just about imagine myself doing that sort of thing, out of fear of the sergeant-major, but doing something illegal literally paralyses me with fear. And yet courage, as essential to the criminal as his jemmy or his cosh, is held to be a virtue.
    The first thing I did when I got back to my room was to light the lamp and open the shutters, because I never close them except when it snows, and people who knew me might wonder what was going on if they saw them shut. Then I poured myself a small brandy—it would’ve been a large one, but the bottle was nearly empty—and sat down with the lamp so close to me that I could feel it scorching my face, and spread out the manuscript, and read it.
     
     
     
    They say that when we first sent out ships to trade with the savages in Rhoezen, we packed the holds full of the sort of things we thought primitive people would like—beads, cheap tin brooches, scarves, shirts, buckles plated so thin the silver practically wiped off on your fingers, that sort of thing. And mirrors. We thought they’d love mirrors. In fact, we planned on buying enough land to grow enough corn to feed the City with a case of hand-mirrors, one angel twenty a gross from the Scharnel Brothers.
    We got that completely wrong. The captain of the first ship to make contact handed out a selection of his trade goods by way of free samples. Everything seemed to be going really well until they found the mirrors. They didn’t like them. They threw them on the ground and stamped on them, then attacked our people with spears and slingshots, until the captain had to fire a cannon just so as to get his men back off the beach in one piece. Later, when he’d managed to capture a couple of specimens and he interrogated them through an interpreter, he found out what the problem was. The mirrors, the prisoners told him, were evil. They sucked your soul out through your eyes and imprisoned it under the surface of the dry-hard-water. Stealing the souls of harmless folk who’d only wanted to be friendly to strangers was not, in their opinion, civilised behaviour. Accordingly, we weren’t welcome in their country.
    When I first heard the