The Saxon Tapestry [antikvár]

jjlfc Oyin^ ojtScWatcrs Swan Mere was once the Place of Gulls. A thousand years ago they came, those birds, a motley, tatter-coated, clamant; goose and plover, mallard and blue hawk, filling the walls of heaven with their wet, creaking, whimpering wings, like thunder in the dawn. Following the salt-trails from the stormy Wash and the wide, drowned waters of Cowbit and Earith. And in the morning times, early, when the moorhens wandered, the lonesomeness and the ancientness of it all would have been yours to feel. Through the love-song of the bittern and the curlew's lament you would have heard the wind in the tall reed-ronds and the rank wilderness of cutthroat sedge, and the tossing white showers of meadowsweet, rippling the slad all lashy. The wind would keen far, far out upon the brown face of the glittering floods. And it was the saddest sound. It never gave over its blowing, not for a day nor for an hour. It never let you be. And while it blew there was always an unquiet in the air and a troubling of the waters, yet withal a peace, older, deeper, that was not the peace of God. When England belonged to the Saxons, Swan Mere, mist begirt and vast against a vaster sky, was part of the lands of Earl Leofric. At the Hail of Little-Bethlehem-of-the-Rushes that stood at the end of the world, east of the sun and west of the moon, where the Earl dwelt with his household, the birds would have been beholden, flocking in their multitudes, dipping and rolling as they swept in across Heart-Break Fen by way of Powt Hole and Whaplode Fleet.