Song of the Crow. Layne Maheu
his implements and the white, colorless beard that hung from his face in a way he had no control over. It just hung there and swung as he worked. And his eyes—those suspicious, unseeing orbs he occasionally turned to the sky as though he were about to be scolded and were constantly being watched—how could eyes sunk so far back in his skull ever see a thing? And his tools—they say he was the first to use tools, that he invented them. According to the lore of his kind, this was his gift to the world. And it was always upon us. All around us, the trees had been severed from the air and hurled to the underworld. And somehow I took a strange pity on this supposed Doom of the Trees. It seemed his grim hacking away at the Giants gave him no satisfaction whatsoever. Instead he seemed trapped in a landscape of irritable brooding, and taking his anger out on the mute Giants gave him no escape. Still, it was his only answer, which he repeatedly struck.
My Other finally plucked his way up to the nest top. He perched much closer to the edge than I did and spread his prickly wing points out to catch hold of the howling, but he failed to jump. He just crouched low and did what I did. We sat there and wondered about this Keeyaw creature from the heaving edge of the nest. Then My Other picked himself up and whipped his tiny bones in the direction of the powerful gusts.
“No! Stay there!” cried our mother, seeing his brave little twigs flapping. “Stay in the nest!”
I realized she’d wanted to join us at the nest but didn’t want to reveal our whereabouts to Keeyaw.
Though we thought Our Many had been calling us out to fly, she must have meant it for Keeyaw. Crows have no alarm call for walk off, or grovel your way back across the underworld. Fly was the only call she had to drive Keeyaw away.
And she dove down to mob him, strafing his whiskery head. But the wind weakened her attack. When she dove after him a second time, a sudden gust nearly pushed her up against the trunk. So she hung on to the trees between us and the beast, looking at him, then at us, then back to him, full of hesitation, until it turned to weary patience.
“Get back inside,” she called, mute and panicked
So I dove back into the safety of our nest’s inner bowl and closed my eyes, until I felt more acutely the heaving and roiling of Our Giant through the air. My fearless Other, who was already practiced in the ancient art of imitation, stayed up in the headwinds and made the sound of Keeyaw’s ax just fine. But no crow could imitate the sound of a tree falling, like the rippling of violent thunders, darker than doom, worse than the end, broken limbs, loose leaves flying. Frightened birds and creatures took off. Then our mother fled. The branches of our own tree sank, and there was a silence, like a weight falling in my chest. We felt the whole world tilt. When the Giant hit, the woods exploded. Each bounce brought more thunder, until it stopped.
The forest was never so quiet as then.
Except the cooling of the wind. And the murmuring of the yes. And the murmuring of the no. And the sighing beneath the leaves, waiting for the final word.
Soon the rhythm of Keeyaw’s ax resumed.
And the wind picked up, arguing again through the grizzled mat of the beastman’s beard, and My Other could imitate, with the high, nasally pitch of parody, the sound Keeyaw made, hacking away at the underworld, rending the tree of its branches, and the beastman would hesitate and look up, full of woe and worry, swinging those awful implements over his head and then down again. Tunk, tunk, tunk, sang My Other. And Keeyaw’s mournful mustaches shook.
We’re told that his understanding of nature was so exact that he could select the tree, specifically a cedar tree, or a kind of cedar tree, that in the course of one-hundred and twenty years, once planted, could grow to the height of fifty meters, which is the measure he needed for the construction of the Ark.
—AARON TENDLER, Noah and the Ark, Voyage to a New Beginning
3. Mother of Many
Another tree gone, and the sky hung lower.
The Giant lay dead, dumb, and naked, and Keeyaw kept smacking it, ripping the limbs free until the trunk lay wasted in the clearing. He went after the branches with the same grim intensity he went at the trunks, lost in mossy arboreal sadness, and he kept hacking away until he was further hidden from sight. Only then did our mother find it safe enough to fly to the nest. Her eyes, leaking the ancient ooze of her years, took us in lovingly as she lowered strips of half-chewed frog gut into our gapes. Then she cleaned the nest of our dung sacks, flew away with them in her beak, and then came back.
Every once in a while the winds threatened to argue all over again, but the sky let out a long sigh and the wind went on its troubled way, leaving us to the devices of Keeyaw.
My hungry brother and I strained above the nest to see what Keeyaw was up to.
He heaped all of the severed branches into a loose, snaggy pile.
“Is he building a nest here?” I asked.
I waited for an answer, staring at Our Many’s claws, scaled and gnarly and clutched to the nest at my face. Above her hooks, her squat old body blocked out the sun. But then she was the sun, dark with love, ragged with comfort. As if she were well-being itself, we longed for the blue-black, worn-feather protection to come shining down over us. But she bristled now from wounded authority, and her beak kept working away at the unrest in her coat.
Then “Eeiiwaaack! Eeiiwaaack!” off in the distance, soaring.
Whereas most creatures flee the sound of Keeyaw, my father flew in, desperate for a look. “Fly Home!” Whenever our father heard the beastman’s attack fall over the woods, he cried out in alarm, but also in eerie exultation. “Fly Home!” Was it a welcome? A threat? He flew in wild and large and threw his hooks out to land—even though the tree was no longer there—as if in denial of what Keeyaw had done. He must have thought his own absence had allowed the tree to fall. He lit far from our nest and let Keeyaw have it. He bobbed with each caw and his feathers flared as if Keeyaw were directly below, and the strange, terrible beast answered with the gnawing of his ax.
“Me! Me!” cried My Other. “I Am!”
But not even the begging of his favorite could bring my father to the nest.
Instead, Fly Home stayed where he was, leaning and lunging and spreading with each call, and our mother flew to the outlying woods to meet him. But their greeting was clipped and afraid. Our father had a huge, swimming brow of crown feathers where all his distant thoughts could live, and our thick old mother stretched herself up as best she could to rearrange his scattered brow.
“Can’t you see?” she said. “What’s happening to the woods?”
“Has he touched Our Giant?”
“No,” she said. “I won’t let him.”
And they quieted even further as if suddenly realizing the good luck that our own tree had been spared, and silently they watched Keeyaw, turning their heads, pecking at their perch, while the beastman walked in and out of the Giant’s arms, carrying cracked sticks and heavy fans of cedar leaf.
“So. What did you bring us?” Our Many finally asked with a quiet sweetness. “From far off, from far off.”
“Open your beak, and I will show you.”
My father gave a gentle tilt to his horn and shook the offering down into the sweet food pouch of her throat.
Then he flared up and leaned into the wind.
“Meet me in the sky,” he said, which was a common enough farewell among lovers but was especially gallant in the falling woods.
Instead of flying away, though, he perched just above the downed Giant and began yelling again at the beastman.
And