Song of the Crow. Layne Maheu
watched as if taking in breaths without exhaling. Neither spoke.
We saw the hapless beastman scuttle out from under the bushes, peering from behind his desperate mane of hairy brambles. He seemed anxious, as if he’d forgotten where he’d left the fallen tree. Once he was in the clearing, though, he settled down and pulled his mule out into the open. He called sharply back into the woods, and a small group of Keeyaw-like creatures came to join him, a few of them with the same wild growth around their faces, but dark, like a crow’s. Others had smooth, serene, hairless faces, and with them came a mixed team of hoofed animals. Before long they had an encampment set up with tents and campfires and cooking pots and their animals tethered to the trees. One of the beastmen was slight and half grown, with no trace of a beard on his face, and he dawdled behind the others, lost in childish dreams, humming to himself and cradling a jawbone ax with the teeth of a dragon, or an ox, or some other monster, over his shoulders.
That was when I climbed out beyond the nest.
I picked my way up over the barbed scratchgrass and forbidding sticks and my toes hung up. In the open air, I felt acutely my impish nakedness and the whole world swam into being. Cloud, hill, nausea, carcass, bloody grin, gravity, constellations, illimitable depth. Out farther, I hung on to the spongy green cedar fronds and bobbed above the heights. Everything was much clearer, but that was fear. Then my mother’s beak hurled me back into the nest, and I hadn’t traveled nearly as far as I thought. Still, my new perch had a much better view than before.
“Careful,” our father said to me. “Careful. Watch your perch. Watch yourself.”
“Cursed,” cried my mother. “Just like his father. Left on his own, he’d do nothing but sit around and watch the ways of that thing human. Why? Why is our nest even here? So close to the road?”
My father only folded his wings into place. “The babes will be able to fly soon enough,” he said.
“They’ll need more feathers than that.”
My father only tugged at his own feathers. When he wasn’t off watching Keeyaw, he liked to watch the human go back and forth along a pathway made hard and barren by constant use, one man alone, or a small band riding other beasts, or whipping them, or traveling in great growing armies. If it weren’t for the traffic along the road, I don’t know if we’d ever have seen our father. For long vigils, he would sit in his tree above the road, his bulky brow stern and preoccupied. Just then he reached out for the air in the direction of Keeyaw’s tents, ready to fly.
“What?” said our mother. “Again? If you keep watching, you’ll just lead him here.”
“Lead him here? He doesn’t notice a bird. It’s as if the trees fall down on their own. If we could lead the Keeyaw here, then surely we could lead him away. No. He comes here following his own madness.”
Then Fly Home leaned again as if to dive into the wind but turned back to the nest. He bent his head far down to feed me again. But this time no food came from his beak. His sharp one-eyed stare watched me and watched me from different angles, then stopped watching me altogether, all except for the pale patch of skin just below my eyes, the patch where the white pinfeather grew. His glare was so fierce, I felt ashamed and had to hide my head down in my usual crags and burrows. The white feather’s appearance was like grief stuck to my parents, but especially my father, because he’d seen it before, on the skin of a sibling from his very own nest time, the one known as Hookbill the Haunted, whose tree had been struck by lightning and who had lost her eyesight. Then, half-dead and half-living, she’d returned from the Tree of the Dead, where she had gained the powers of divination and prophecy, and began uttering cryptic speeches because she lived now close to the God Crow, Who sometimes spoke through her in Its heady God Crow speech. How did I know of all this? My mother and father had discussed it all before, that time when my father ripped out the white pinfeather at its first appearance and the blood trickled down and dried on my face.
“Why?” my mother had cried. “Why?”
“So it will never grow back.”
But when the washed-out color reemerged, I overheard my father mumbling something under his beak, about how maybe I was a mockingbird, or some other foreign egg placed in the nest when no one was looking.
This time he lunged at the feather in one swift bite and pulled back on my face until my bones made a snapping sound. Now he had three pale pinfeathers in his beak and spat the two smaller ones out. I nearly lunged from the tree, hoping to catch a glimpse of one, having never before seen them or their color, stuck as they were just below my eye. I saw one, perhaps, a mere spindly blade of fluff. It dove as if injured, not quite a feather and not exactly white either, but a pale gray or absence of any color whatsoever and so an absence of Crowness and a portal to some strange otherness that would put the fear in my father and burden him.
“These are far too early,” he said with his horn clenched, “for normal feathers. They’re definitely not baby’s down.”
“I thought you were going off to watch the Keeyaws,” my mother said.
“I was. But now I’m taking this confounded feather to the Old Bone.”
“He is like you,” said Our Many, “or how you should be, maimed by the beastman, always off watching him. What will that prove?”
“He is the only other bird around with the paleness. He’ll know. He’ll know what our wintry son is all about.”
“I don’t care who knows. Surely you can see with your own eyes. Why don’t you help me find out what’s happening to the woods? Find out where Keeyaw has and has not been. For when the babes are strong enough, we’ll fly to safer woods.”
“The Old Bone will know about that, too. Fear not.”
The wind took his call and brought it back a second time, as Fly Home opened his broad, serrated wings until they covered all of our opening to the sky in black, and the sun shone through in iridescent greens and purples as they ripped through the air and were gone, throwing a sharp blast of air down over us.
“Fear not.”
Cooperative breeding behavior is rare in birds. . . . I have seen five adult crows at a single nest at once, all with their heads in the nest feeding young.
—KEVIN J. MCGOWAN, “FAMILY LIVES OF THE UNCOMMON AMERICAN CROW”
5. The Most Delectable
From the sky came all changes: sea-salt winds, clouds in the shape of fishes, hailstones, thunder, tree-drenched water, and hard winds that drove misfortune in the face of hope. It wasn’t unusual to have Fly Home gone all afternoon. But I had the unnerving feeling he’d be gone all night, and he’d taken the warmth of the sky with him.
Now the changes came from the deepest underworld.
Under a gathering thunderstorm, Keeyaw unhooked his huge, sullen land animals from their traces and gave up on trying to move the fallen Giant for the day. It had taken them all afternoon, and after much nervous yelling and flapping around, they’d managed to move the shorn tree trunk just a single length of itself in the direction of the highway. When the thunder rolled through the woods, it chased Keeyaw and his flock into their tent. I’d heard that there were fire breathers in there, which seemed true, as the smoke poured out of a flap on the roof and seeped through the seams. The sky was angry at only them, because they left their beasts outside, tied up, their backs to the storm and their ears flicking in the gray sheets of rain. Here and there the animals kept their unsurprised mouths busy on the wet leaves and grasses.
The sky flashed.
Thunder split the sky.
Perched