The Scorpion Signal

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I turned again, wheeling into the wind with the edge of the cliff a hundred feet below me. The air feathered against my face, numbing it, and tears crept back from the corners of my eyes, drying on the skin. A pale sun was turning the sea into hammered gold, below on my right side, and the waves were rolling in ice-blue arcs, hanging poised for an instant before they shattered along the shore.

It had been the twentieth turn: I'd been counting them. I was now half hypnotized by the sliding images of grass and cliff and sand and sea as they floated below my prone body, and by the periods of near-weightlessness as the wind gusts dropped me into the troughs and lifted me out again. A minute ago two gulls had come abreast of me and drifted alongside not far away, their sharp heads turned to watch me as they wondered what I was; inland I could see our three shadows gliding in perfect formation across the short brown grass of the cliff top, two small ones and the third much bigger but still the shape of a bird, not of a man. By a degree, however small, I was taking on their character, watching the land below and feeling the lie of the wind, the muscles compensating as evolution worked on my humanoid body and adapted its behaviour to the needs of a bird.

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