by Fiona Cavell
Fiona found the journey even longer this time as the children slowed her down more than she could have imagined. Gabrielle hurt her leg, Jegudiel felt sick and baby Duriel was so heavy in the sling along with all the other supplies that she could hardly carry everything. She struggled on, trying to keep the children entertained and happy. At least this time the bird would not have beat her to it as she felt sure he would have flown away somewhere, happy that he was starving her and the children, happy she would do anything to please him upon his return.
*
Finally, she reached her village, but to her horror Sicarus was already there, claiming she was an unfit mother and demanding the return of the children. He told the elders of the village, Michael and Peter, that he was entitled to a proper court hearing at the neighbouring village, as was the tradition when villagers argued over where a child should live if their parents separated. Michael and Peter, the village elders, had no option other than to ask the neighbouring village to convene a court hearing for the following week to decide upon the case involving the custody of Gabrielle, Jegudiel and Duriel.
For that week, Fiona felt forever frantic. What if Michael and Peter, the village elders, the rest of the villagers and the neighbouring court believed the bird that she was an unfit mother? What if she had done all this just to lose her children? The thought was unbearable. She went to Sicarus and begged him to take her back, but of course he was unforgiving. “If you want me back,” he gloated, “you will have to change your ways.”
Fiona nodded and said she would do anything. But whatever she offered, Sicarus wanted more. “Let me get down on my knees for you every day,” she suggested, feeling sick to her stomach, but he laughed at her.
“I will expect you to do that morning, noon and night.” He grinned. “You will never be allowed to leave the house and the rope ladder will be permanently destroyed. The bark from the tree will be stripped off so it’ll be too slippery for you to climb,” he continued, enjoying every moment of this new-found power. “You will only be able to speak to the back of my head, and only when I say you can speak to me. You are too unworthy to look at me. The only time I will allow you to look at me is when you are on your knees, and then you must look at me constantly.”
Fiona shuddered and agreed. Her life was over now anyway. What did it matter? If the neighbouring village court would give him her children, then her life was not worth living. The only thing that mattered to her now was being with the children, even if it meant having to put up with him.
“You will never come back to this village,” he continued to dictate.
Fiona listened as the bird put more and more conditions on her. Each condition was designed to control, humiliate and overpower her, and had no other reason except to provide continuous amusement to the bird. Eventually she could take no more and walked out. She could hear Sicarus calling after her that now she was guaranteed to lose her children and it was all her fault for not going along with his very reasonable request.
She walked straight out of the village and into the forest to Maggie’s hut. “Please help,” she asked Maggie. “You are the only one who understands about the birds.”
Maggie nodded. “You have to learn to believe in yourself,” she advised. “And never go back to him or believe what he says under any circumstances.”
Chapter Seven
“A long time ago,” Maggie started, “I was married to a bird.”
Fiona was amazed and listened intently to Maggie’s story.
“When I was a young girl,” Maggie continued, “I lived in a neighbouring village similar to this one.” Her voice started to shake, and she had a distant, unhappy look in her eye. “My father died suddenly, and my mother didn’t cope very well. Together they had traded by running a small school for the children, but after my father died my mother became depressed and wouldn’t teach. I had no experience and was only young myself, but I had to take over the school and do two people’s jobs because if we didn’t continue to trade, we would lose our hut and our place in the village. I resented it and put out the word to other villages that we needed help.”
“One day, a charming man from another village turned up. He was experienced in running schools and self-assured, and he really seemed like the answer to our prayers. He said his wife had died and he was left to look after his son, who was close to my age. He spoke fondly to my mother and she appeared to like him at first. I was still young and innocent, and desperately wanted to get my mother back to normal and running the school again, so I could go back to being a young girl with no trade responsibilities. So, I encouraged her to marry him. I made it clear that I was on his side the whole time even though my mother had doubts. I knew she was reluctant to be with him the more she got to know him, but I couldn’t understand why. He seemed so charming and kind to her, and it was her only option if we were to remain in our village and live the life we had always lived. My mother wanted us to leave the village and find a new life, just the two of us, but I wouldn’t hear of it. So she went ahead and married him to please me. We were a happy family for a while, my mother, the teacher and I. His son didn’t live with us and had remained with his grandmother in the neighbouring village.”
“But slowly that changed,” Maggie continued. “I used to see strange shadows in our hut at night and hear screeching noises. Then I started to notice my mother was scratched and had cuts and bruises over her arms and legs, and she started to look depressed again. When I talked to her about it she clammed up, so I talked to her husband, the teacher. He was called Trollos. He told me that my mother was self-harming, but I found it difficult to believe. My instincts told me Trollos was hurting her, but everyone tried to convince me he was a good man and was helping my mother but I didn’t, by then, trust him. So, I decided to try and find out his background and a bit more about him, and I went to visit his son in the neighbouring village.”
Maggie cleared her throat. “The son confirmed my fears. His father appeared charming but deep down was an evil man. Trollos had attacked his own son and left his village to be a teacher in another village. Trollos had abandoned his own child, who had only lost his mother to a horrible accident a year before. He was the most beautiful boy I had ever laid eyes on. At nineteen he was three years older than me, and tall with broad shoulders and black eyes.”
Fiona gulped. She knew what was coming next.
“I fell in love with him straight away, and he wanted to marry me and agreed come back to live with me in my mother’s hut where we could all be together. My mother was sad when she found out about our relationship, but I didn’t understand why. I thought maybe she just couldn’t be happy and didn’t want me to find happiness either. We argued constantly, and I told her that she clearly didn’t love me, and I loved her husband’s son and wanted to marry him. Trollos’ son was called Stigmus and he had a most amazing talent.”
“One-night Stigmus had shown me a secret, how he could magically fly around the night sky, and I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. I tried to explain to my mother that he had magical powers and would look after me forever, but she remained unhappy about the forthcoming marriage and then announced that she wouldn’t be able to allow us to live in the family hut, and neither would Trollos. If I insisted on marrying him, I would no longer be her daughter. I was shocked by her harsh words.”
“I remember seeing her face, agonised and distorted, and noticing even more scratches up her arms. Her husband Trollos had hold of her hand a little too tight as she was speaking to me and was smiling. He hadn’t even congratulated us on our engagement. I could tell my mother was torn and was doing what her husband, not she, wanted, but I didn’t understand why she hadn’t stood up to him. I do now, but I didn’t then, and that was the last time I saw my mother, so I never got the chance to tell her I loved her or understood.”
Maggie looked to the ground. She shuddered. “I told my mother she was selfish and
heartless, and I would still marry Stigmus and go and live with my lovely future husband as far away from her and her creepy husband as I could. I remember thinking at the time how odd it was that my own lovely future husband’s father was a monster, and how different they were. I didn’t understand how someone so lovely could have come from that.”
“But later I realised how wrong I was. After we wed my new husband was kind to me, or so I thought, and found us a hut many miles away from my mother, miles away from anyone. When I heard my mother had died by her own hand, I didn’t believe it and wanted to go back to the village, but Stigmus told me I shouldn’t look back and refused to fly me back. It was at least a week’s walk to my village, and at that time I didn’t feel up to such a long walk. I thought my husband was trying to protect me.”
Maggie sighed. “It didn’t occur to me until later how isolated I had become. I saw no one except my husband, but more and more he started to fly off for longer periods of time. At first just a few hours, then a whole day, then several days.”
Chapter Eight
Fiona listened to Maggie’s story with sadness. Maggie told her how her own husband turned into a bird in the beginning, and it was thrilling as they flew beneath the twinkling stars and the midnight sky. Maggie was happy and didn’t think too deeply about how her mother had suffered and died because of the man Maggie herself had introduced her to. Her mother’s scratched arms and the shadows and screeching noises made no sense until Maggie started to experience them herself. Her story was spookily familiar. An accidental scratch, an angry scratch, a deliberate scratch, a torturous scratch, a sadistic scratch coupled with multiple kicks and sharp pecks in intimate places which had otherwise only known gentleness. It was during one such attack that Maggie suffered such dreadful internal injuries that she lost her unborn baby and was unable ever to conceive again.
Fiona could feel the sadness in Maggie’s story. Maggie went on to tell her that Stigmus would later begin to torment her about being barren and told her she was not woman enough for him. He started to leave her for longer and longer periods of time, sometimes without food. He told her that if he didn’t come back for a week, she should assume he was dead and ask for mercy and charity from the nearby village. Maggie knew, like all villagers, that each village had to be self-sufficient and each villager had to work and have a trade for the village to function and flourish. Whilst the villagers could look after their own elderly and sick, they could never support outsiders unless it was a matter of life and death. For this reason, all villages had a rule that if an outsider asked them for charity and mercy, they would be taken care of. However, if the outsider was not genuinely in need and it wasn’t a matter of life and death, or there was another person or village who could reasonably be expected to look after them, then there would be serious consequences. Generally, this involved locking the outsider up in a hut and treating them like an animal.
Maggie’s husband didn’t come back for seven days and beyond. Maggie knew she would surely starve. She lasted ten days until she crawled to the nearest village and begged them for mercy, which they freely gave. She told them her husband had died and there was no other person who could be expected to look after her. Maggie started to settle in the village and helped to look after the animals. She started to feel part of the village and was given more responsibility. After six months she was out one day looking for a lost animal when she received a hard blow to her head. Stigmus had hit her with a large rock and dragged her back to their old hut miles away from the village.
When Maggie awoke, she heard the sound of a crying baby. Her husband had brought her back to his hut where he now lived with his second wife and their new baby. His second wife, Maria, had become ill from all the beatings she had been given and he needed someone to look after her and the baby. Maggie was told that unless she looked after and accepted them, he would send her back to the village and she would be locked up by them because she had taken their mercy and charity when it wasn’t a genuine matter of life and death and her husband had been there to support her all along. She had committed fraud on them.
Maggie froze. She knew her choice was imprisonment at the village, to be treated like an animal, or living in a cruel and adulterous relationship. She wanted to choose imprisonment to get as far away from her husband as she could, until she saw the state of his second wife. Maria was at death’s door and the baby was starving, neglected; his tiny lips were blue. Maggie’s heart went out to them. She discovered to her horror that the second wife, Maria lost a lot of blood following the birth and was constantly tired. She had started to scold her husband because he wasn’t helping with the baby. At first, he pushed her away, then hit her, then punched her, but it would not shut her up. Stigmus had then reached for his hunting knife to threaten her, as he used to do with Maggie. But unlike the many times when threatening someone with a knife had worked, on this occasion it didn’t. Maria continued to berate him. He couldn’t allow that, so there was only one thing he could do to shut her up for good. He cut her tongue out. She never nagged him again.
But the injury made her even more ill and unable to look after the baby. So, Maggie was brought back and told to take care of them both, which she did. Stigmus took it in turns sleeping with his two wives. Maggie planned to leave him and take Maria with her when she and the baby were nursed back to health, but then Maria felt unable to leave. Maggie understood why. Sometimes it is too difficult to leave and just easier to stay. Even though staying is unbearable, the alternative is too frightening to even comprehend when you have lost everything.
Chapter Nine
Fiona was filled with pity. She had known Maggie all her life and never imagined that she had lived such a sorrowful life. Maggie disclosed that when she did finally leave her husband, his second wife and child remained. Maggie went back to the village that had previously given her mercy and charity and had to accept that they would imprison her for fraud. They locked her up for over a year, and during that time Maggie became an elective mute, out of respect for Maria who was unable to get away. After a few years of wandering she resolved to find a village that didn’t know of her background and try and teach the children to beware of the birds and began to speak again. But of course, the village decided her teachings were too unorthodox and she had to leave and build her own hut in the forest.
Fiona started to worry. One in four are birds was Maggie’s message to her. How could her own village have cast Maggie out simply for speaking the truth? How many birds were in Fiona’s village and she hadn’t realised it? How many people were suffering in silence and too frightened to leave? For a few moments Fiona had forgotten about her own horrible situation with the court case and Sicarus trying to have her children taken away from her, as she was feeling the pain of the many which included Maggie, her mother, and Maria who had all suffered at the hands of the birds. Then her own reality set in once again. Before hearing Maggie’s story, she had been begging Sicarus to have her back, to avoid the court case and the risk of losing Gabrielle, Jegudiel and Duriel. She shuddered. She knew she could never go back and had to face this future even though it was as scary as living with a bird. If she could find the strength to finally stand up to him and win, she would be able to help others. But the thought of standing up to him in front of the court made her cry.
There were eight more days until the court case, but it felt like eight months or even eight years. Fiona tried hard to settle back into the village with the children, and even tried to resume her occupation of looking after the village animals but found it impossible to concentrate on anything other than the court case. It constantly occupied her mind and prevented her from sleeping or functioning in any way. Hour by hour she sat and cried, visualising how it would feel if Sicarus were allowed to take her children away and she never got to see them. Each time she saw their angelic faces her heart wanted to stop beating so she would never have to face the day of judgement.
Seven days b
efore the court case, she thought about running away from the village. But where could they run to? How could she survive with three young children? How would the children cope? They had been through so much already. It was pointless. The children were just beginning to settle into the village and form friendships with the other children and a relationship with her parents, whose hut they were all staying in until after the hearing.
Six days before the court case, she could not face the prospect of her children being taken away from her and forced to live with Sicarus, who would be cruel to them. He would no doubt punish them to hurt her, and the thought of that made her cry. She thought perhaps they would all be better off dead, and she wondered how she could arrange this within the next six days. Her mind raced and envisaged all sorts of horrors, but of course she couldn’t entertain the idea of killing her own children for long, and after crying some more decided she had no option other than to face Sicarus and win.
Five days before the court case, Sicarus turned up in the village to gather his evidence. He insisted the village elders, Peter and Michael, examine the children to prove his allegations that Fiona was an unfit mother and present their findings to the court on his behalf. Fiona watched in horror as Sicarus demanded Michael and Peter note all the injuries the children had. Gabrielle had a cut foot from walking on a rock during their escape. Jegudiel had grazed his knees from climbing down the tree and Duriel was slightly thinner for not eating enough on the arduous journey back to the village. “See how she has harmed them!” shouted Sicarus, smiling selfishly. “The court will certainly rule in my favour!”
Four days before the court case, Fiona didn’t want to get out of bed. She hadn’t slept again, and she was scared. Her parents talked her round and told her she must get up and look after the children or surely Sicarus would be back, gathering more evidence. “He is still controlling me now even though he is not here,” sobbed Fiona. She got up and looked after the children, hoping that the days would pass, and the court case would soon be here. By dusk she regretted that and hoped it would never come and the days would stand still. But the days and nights passed in their own time and at their own pace, despite any hopes and fears Fiona had.