I have to laugh then—to clack and cackle at the same time—weak as I am. The ridiculousness of everything. I make such a racket that the guards run away. In here the sound rings out in a different way than it does at the cliffs, but I see the people outside run from the windows. I’ve no idea how far they go, but to see them scatter makes me laugh all the more. Good to laugh, but not so good to laugh alone. I wish for the sound of one of us to alternate my hollering with, so that, at the same time that I’m laughing, loneliness comes upon me and tears flow I can feel them dropping onto the down of my chest. Oh, but none of us would have nursed me like this. We don’t do that. Who would stay with one of us through the winter? It can’t be done. You would be helped only if you could go south, otherwise you were to die and best if you were to fall into the sea to be taken by a sea creature. But if such a thing as that can’t be, then at least you were to stay on the cliffs where even the best climbers of the hale: ¬people can’t come. This is wrong, though I hadn’t planned to do it.
But, for all the noise, she hasn’t run away along with the others. No doubt the words “for better or for worse” or some such have been said and promises made, so she endures it. Perhaps she has plugged her ears with wool. I stop, though not for her sake, and she takes a soft cloth to wipe my tears. “Sweet, sweet, sweet,” she says. (One would think it is she who is of bird and sky.) “How sweet a god this be.” Odd that she would say such a thing when I would, and gladly, even at this moment, take a piece out of her hand, except who then would look after me? But I am forgetting she is my mate. Though we haven’t done any mating dance that I know of, there are customs to be kept to even so. She, of all of them, I must not harm.
She says, “Next time I will be seeing to it that you will behave as a god should,” and I’m thinking she is clever with her herbs. No doubt she will see to it.
But now she’s seeing to a different thing. She gives me a drink unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. After giving it to me, she covers my face with a hood made especially for me. In a few minutes I find out what the drink is. An aphrodisiac. No doubt of that. Why? How? My wing stretching back upon the rack and me fastened to my throne? But now she has untied my feet and legs. (I’ll not let her know that my left arm is free. I’ll try, that is, not to let her know, but the drug has caught me up so that already I hardly care.) She sits on my lap. She guides me. I feel myself inside her. With my legs and lower body free, I can arch up and down and sideways. As the drug takes hold of me I lose all sense of reality. I know I feel pain in my wing, but I don’t care. It’s as if I fly again. I glide, I feel the lift of the thermal, up from below. All I need do is spread myself out and balance on the pillow of air pushing up under me. And I have power, the power of a god. Yes, these are god doings. I think I am a god indeed. Truly a trinity of bird and snake and cat but mostly snake or bird-snake. Flying lover. And she says it as though she knows my mind: “Flying lover,” and, “My lover from the upper air and of the cliffs.” All the things I feel, she says.
And when it’s over, it begins again.
Afterward she nestles into my breast; her arms around me. I am feather bed and downy pillow for her for the rest of the night. If she knew, at any time, that my arm is loose, she must have forgotten it, but how could she not know by now! Perhaps she did and would tempt the god. And I will be tempted, of that I’m sure.
The next night a ceremony, and the next also, and the night after that. I am both too tired and too drugged to understand or care what it’s all about. Solstice. Not now but later. I know that much. And I’m hooded again. I see nothing of any of it. I doze but always wake when I hear her telling them what I say, and said, and have predicted. “’Glory, glory, to us all through the winter,’ he says,” she says, and often, and, “because he is here among us as Bask, the cat, as Crackle, the bird, and as old Squam, the snake, ‘and lo, also, a god child will be born of these three,’ he says,” she says, “so that we will live with gods among us for ever after this.”
They sing in chorus (and it is the one thing that I find really worthy of myself in all that they do), sing, “Who gives the lilies clothing?” and, “Rise, crowned with light,” and, “There is an arm that never tires beneath the wings of night,” which makes me wonder, do they all know about my free arm and all wish to tempt gods? They sing, “If on joyful wing,” and, “Sometimes a light surprises.” I like that one best of many good ones and I think, yes, yes, sometimes a light does surprise as the midnight light of snow. When they stop I want for them to sing again.
Then there is a period of resting. We are deep in winter. I begin to really recover, and no more drugs either, except for the aphrodisiac, especially on stormy nights when she is bored with dozing inside all through the day. But even so, I feel like myself I wake early full of energy. I do what preening I can. (I have a plan.) I exercise against my bonds. They have, anyway, stretched; and often, when she ties my legs again after our matings, she leaves the thongs looser. As though all the care she’s giving and the sex have made her love. She hasn’t the kind of tenderness to dance and bob, nor for mutual preening, but I see that the half-people have their own ways.
We do not talk. She talks at me, that is, but, clearly, doesn’t want a reply. I think she feels that if we speak to each other as one fellow creature to another, I might lose my godlike qualities. She wants me silent and remote… inscrutable. Clackings, roaring, yes, but nothing of the ordinary.
What she talks most about is our child (it has begun to show).
That it will be a boy and king of the people. (She calls herself and the others, people, not half-people.) I don’t trust any of her predictions though some have come true. Chances are it won’t come to term.
As I get better I get angrier and I think more about my plan. Am I to live by her whims? Masked when she wants me masked? Drugged when it suits her? (Fornicating. That’s all it is.) Handfed as though to make me tame? I will show her what the anger of a god is like and that that anger, and my strength also, are beyond the understanding of any half-person. And I will take her on my own terms. I will set god-rules and god-schedules. My anger, also, will be precise and cool as a god’s should be.
I wait for a sunny day. Then, carefully, feeling my muscles bulge against the thongs, I stretch them, I break them, one by one. As for the rack, I must loose myself from that even more slowly. My wing, though healed, is stiff and sore. She should have freed me from this rack long ago so I could keep the joints moving. Now I can’t fully fold my wing over my back. It’s a problem in this small place. Without wanting to, I knock down the herbs that are hanging from the ceiling. I knock the painted pots from the shelves. I knock the little statues of myself from their stands and the little cat gods and little snake gods from theirs also.
By now she’s standing in the archway that leads to the anteroom, still dressing herself in her long wife-robe. I push her back into the room she came from. There I see that she has a soft bed while I’ve had a hard throne. She has a fat coverlet of duck down (we have just such in our aeries) while I’ve not had anything (though I must admit she’s seen to it I was never cold). I split her wife-robe with one claw and push her on to the bed. I’m careful. The anger of the gods is careful.
At first her utter nakedness stops me… surprises me. Though I already know about the half-people’s lack of any fur or feather, I’ve not seen any of them completely naked. It’s revolting. No wonder she blindfolds me. Only when I think to myself, newborn chick not yet dry am I able to approach her, though she looks more like food than anything else; tender, like a suckling pig. She lies quietly looking at me. Her eyes are… yes, they are beautiful, expressive in a way ours never are. I can see she accepts what is to happen. Welcomes it, even. I would not be able to see any such thing in the eyes of a mate of my own kind, and it is this that turns me back on to her. I sit on the edge of the bed. I touch. Their breasts are larger and rounder than our women’s but as soft as though covered with down. I lie upon her then and my wings enclose
the whole bed. What an odd way to mate, I think, and such a strange season for it, and I take her… at my own time and timing… at a god’s time. Afterward I rest upon her within the tent of my wings. I’d not seen any such thing before, but I didn’t find it bad or wrong. And, since it was my lovemaking, I was conscious that she was my mate, as, indeed, she was, even though without any proper dance. I had found it, until now, hard to realize this.
But I must be carrying out my plan, so I get up, see the shelves of jars and bottles and sweep them to the floor. See her loom and crush it into its corner, strings dangling and tangled. See she has been weaving something for the god because it’s blue and there are gold and silver threads worked into it. I know why blue. For the lord of sky. I tear my claws across it. What care I, who come from in the blue, for gold or silver?
There’s no more damage to be done so I open the outside door and laugh out at the village, that this should be the morning of the loss of their god as they know him and become the morning of the god as he knows himself
It’s white outside. Dazzling. Blinding, so that I’m wondering who is the lord of all this snow? I have been too long in the dark. I step out and keep laughing, but I know I don’t sound the same and I stop and wait until I can see.
Paths are cleared from here to there, her door to other doors, but the snow is knee high on each side of all those curving walk ways, a god’s knee high. In fact even more than that.
I take steps in the stuff thinking to get up speed in order to fly. I sink. I flap. We have always felt awkward getting into the air from a flat place and have laughed at one another and ourselves, but I care how I look to them and they’re out now, half-dressed and dressing, pulling their hoods over their heads, and they see me flap and sprawl. The snow rises around me in a powdery cloud. I stand up. This time I follow a path and do get some speed, grab at the air. It’s cold, dense air, easier to hold onto than I’m used to. I manage to raise myself, legs dangling in the snow, pump harder, but this is the wrong direction for what light breeze there is. I turn and try again the other way, back toward the shack, and I do get up this time, but there’s more pain than I thought there would be. I stagger in the air, turn again, flop and fall, and flop and fall; up, then down, and down onto her roof Perch there. Feel, for the first time, what cold really is. This is cold. I’d not known about it until now. I’d not even suspected. I’d thought to fly to my cliff Live there, come back and feed on their goats, but that’s impossible. You can’t build a fire in even the best of nests. I think, for a moment, of living in one of our kilns, but that would be worse than in these shacks. Besides, I know I’d never make it to the rookery.
Sorry sight. The half-people have come out and gathered round to see the sorry sight of one of us (she also, now dressed and hooded), to see a lord of the sky (and cat and snake) sit and shiver.
“Now will you believe,” I hear a half-man say to her (he is the one to whom I said “granted” before I knew that she was mine), “will you believe,” he says, “that he is a false god, as I’ve told you?”
“No,” she says, “nor will his son believe it. And where is it written that any human can understand the ways of gods?” (Human, she calls herself!)
Ladders are brought, and chains that I could never break, but I already know that all I care about is to go back where the fire still smolders. I let them take me.
As they do, they sing. “Look upward when the morning shineth…” and it does shine. “Heavenly hosts o’er yon horizon, cleaving to the sky…” That’s us, though I can hardly consider myself as one of “us” any more.
The loom is repaired. The blue robe rewoven and tucked around me. I sit chained (often blindfolded, often drugged), crowned; jewels hang about me, hymns are sung, offerings brought. I sit and sit. My strength tails. My wings ache from disuse. Sometimes I howl at night and clank my chains. I wake the whole town. “Deeds!” I cry it out even in my dreams. “The gods must do deeds! Not sit silent, else the gods will surely fail.” They don’t care to listen. They don’t answer.
And she. When not blindfolded, I see how she grows bigger and bigger. I keep wondering what sort of funny chick it will be.
Spring is late, but I can smell it. We… they, the flocks will be coming back. I look forward to it with both eagerness and dread.
And then the birthing time comes. I hear the bustle of it in the anteroom. I hear her groans. I hear its first cries. Impossible to tell if it sounds more like one of theirs or one of ours. Then I hear her making a great wailing sound and I wonder, is it dead already? for I have just heard its peeps and squeaks. But no, I hear that her grief and horror is that the chick is female. She needed a god, not a goddess… not a rival to herself
“Kill it,” she says. “Do it or let me do it,” but instead they bring it in to me. The three men come, one holds it carefully. They ask that I should name my child. I think: Mother, sister, I’ll be privileged to use your names. But then I see the creature, face of the real people, yes, but the weak and naked body of those others and tiny, useless wings better cut off altogether. Streaks of yellow down here and there not yet dry. Up on the cliffs we’d have killed such a one on sight and no regrets. I refuse to name the thing. But then I look again more closely and I see the tiny beginning of the topknot shining in the firelight—a golden one such as my own. She will be one of the bold, as we say about ourselves. And is she really any more crippled than I?
All of a sudden I know I want to live, to await the season of my freedom and see summer again. I have let this go on all this time out of foolish pride and because I thought of myself as a person while they were only half-people. “I will name her,” I say, “but first I must tell you that I’m not a god. None of us is, wings or not. We are half-creatures like yourselves and no better. We perceive the patterns of directions in the sky but we do not perceive the patterns of destiny, and though I am like a cat and like a snake and often feel myself as such, I am not these three except inasmuch as snake and cat are birdlike. I have nothing to give but of myself and of my brothers and sisters if I can persuade them. Let me go free so I can give what I can give. My child is not a goddess either. Sing your songs. Do sing, ‘How sweet the truth,’ and sing that ‘Every flower is full of gladness,’ but not in praise of us. These are the first true things I’ve ever said,” I say.
The three men fall on their knees. ‘’You are a god indeed,” they say and I’m thinking it will all go on as before or maybe even more so, but it doesn’t. They do believe me. They get hammers to snap me free. (Who would have thought that freedom could be won so simply?) They give me my chick into my arms. They help me stand up. I’m so stiff I can hardly walk. “My mate is weeping,” I say. “Help me go to comfort her.” She will be surprised to find me not a god after all, and not a trinity, but I think I know ways to make her happy even so.
Omni, January 1990
Peri
MARGARET’S right. She always is. I don’t argue with her. As she says, I ought to see a psychologist. I ought to have done it a long time ago, and not only because of wasting my talent. I ought to see one because I’m always holding back. I’m always waiting, who knows for what? I’m blending in. I wear nothing brighter than brown. In fact I wear nothing except brown. I shouldn’t just stand there. I ought to go and be something.
Mother spoiled me. Money spoiled me. I admit all that, but I tell Margaret I never took to drink or drugs or frittered money away on crazy schemes. I think she’d like me better if I had. She even says it. She says it drives her crazy that I don’t have any bad habits… that I haven’t any habits at all, though I don’t see how that can be. She says, what’s to love or hate about me? And she can’t understand why I insist on keeping my ability hidden. She says I’m frightened. She says I’m scared to death to be anything.
Well, it isn’t as if I could really fly. I never manage, even when in the best of spirits, to get more than about a foot off the ground. Mostly I’m hardly up six inches. As she says, I haven’t practic
ed. I feel silly. I feel dumb being only a few inches off the ground and I know I look funny doing it: my toes point, my legs dangle… I have to lead with my left shoulder and hold my right hand out in front, left hand back. And I bump into things along the way—anything that sticks up higher than I can lift: stones, front steps, bushes… Even flowers sometimes get in my way. The worst of it is, when I bump into them or get tangled, I lose my balance and fall, always down on my left elbow or shoulder. I lose my hat. I drop my cane. My suit gets mussed and the knees of my pants get scraped. Once I went down into a puddle. And then why do it, anyway, when I can’t go along much faster than a brisk walk? Why bother?
Balance is the trick. Margaret doesn’t realize how hard it is. But I know she’s right: I could work at it. I could practice. I have a feeling, though, that she wants me to be more than I ever could be—that she wants people saying about me, “Look, look. He’s walking on the water!” or some such, and I can’t even swim.
Instead of practicing, I do it less and less. I don’t even walk briskly anymore. I slump along. Oh, I stand up straight enough when I go out with Margaret on weekends now and then, but when I’m by myself, which is most of the time, I let myself go. Sometimes I find I’ve buttoned up my overcoat or sweater all wrong and I don’t even care. I don’t wonder that she’s disgusted with me.
Even our son… He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. I know the look. I ought to, I see it every day on Margaret’s face. But Isabel, our grandchild… Now she’s the only one I never see looking like that. Perhaps she hasn’t noticed me that much, or doesn’t care, whichever. I don’t get to see her as often as I’d like. I suppose I’m considered a bad influence. She’s nine. Or is it seven? Naturally I can’t keep track. I try, but birthdays come and go. You’d think I could at least remember Isabel’s, but I don’t, not even hers, and yet I care about her. I really do.
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 64