by Неизвестный
They rushed the flock and scattered them, laughing, throwing clods of mud. Then they noticed the hole. The bigger one found a stick and poked about; before long the little one joined in. With thumbs and sticks they could dig much faster than any raven.
They turned up the skull and made their hooting noises of wonder. The younger one had it at first, but the older took it from him after a brief struggle and began to clean it, holding it up to the drizzle, poking his fingers into the muddy eye sockets. The jaw unhinged and fell away. The little one swooped on it but his older brother tugged it back. A classic squabble over prey, and all our ancestors could do was sit and watch while the head they’d dreamed so much of was tucked under a stubby human arm and rushed back inside the tower with the younger brother giving chase. Their only comfort was that it was clear, from the state of the thing, that none of the delicious brains were left. Still they felt rather embarrassed of themselves, getting out-scavenged like that, and decided not to tell any of the older birds what had happened.
A few days later, the human nestlings were ill. They lay moaning in their beds while adults flocked around them offering food that they refused. Greats-grandmother’s older brother began complaining that he should get to watch her human, and she should be stuck with the ones who never went anywhere and then died for a change. But when she tried to perch on their windowsill to see where the skull they’d stolen had gone, he chased her off.
It was early in the morning of the next day when a man came running to her human in a frenzy, plumage in disarray. She was intrigued, hoping this would lead them to another battle or perhaps a fire or outbreak of disease. But as she tilted her head to catch their inflections—sometimes, she said, it almost seemed as though they had a language and that she could understand a bit of it—an outcry went up from her brothers and sisters outside, a call of sheer delight, of feasting to come.
The human nestlings, her older brother croaked out with a combination of sadness and pride, had gone crazy-angry, right there in the heart of the city, in the heart of the tower. Already they’d seized one of the nest-helpers that tended them and started gnawing out the pain of their teeth. The rest had fled the room and blocked up the door.
The family settled in to wait. There was great jostling on the windowsill as they all vied to keep watch, and our greats-grandmother even ventured into the room. She bragged that she was the first to steal a scrap, a torn-away flap of flesh from the cheek, right under the beaks of the two crazy-angry humans. And as if she’d regained some honor, she caught sight as she flew away of the empty-eyed skull beneath a bed.
The sun had crossed its peak when the two tired of their kill, but there was still plenty of meat left, more indeed scattered about the room than eaten—one of the odd habits of humans that you’ll learn very well. They fell to scratching at the door, emitting deep moaning cries, so intent on getting out that the others felt brave enough to follow greats-grandmother’s example and start to scavenge their first of what they hoped would be many rich meals.
Of course, this meant that there was no challenge left, and greats-grandmother soon had her fill. She also remembered the interrupted alarm that had called her away from her human, and even if a battle or a plague wasn’t going to impress the family much now, she still felt she should find out what she could.
She found him with his flock around, deep in the anxious chatter that she associated with feasting, the tones and calls that they always made in the times leading up to battles, fresh executions, even the drowning of her older brother’s human. Soon they rose, and she followed them from window to window until they came to the other side of the door where the moaning was.
Her human twisted his face as she’d seen him do in battle, and gestured at a few members of his flock. They unlocked the doors. She could hear her feeding family retreat in a rustle of wings.
The nestlings rushed out and were caught in arms as thick as nets. Most of the humans, except the largest and strongest, retreated with their faces in their hands, but her human stayed. She watched him as his nephews were borne thrashing and biting back into their room, while sturdy members of his flock tied them to their beds, while an old white-haired human with frames around his eyes stooped to examine them. He never turned away.
She thought then, she said, of how she would feel were it her parent’s nestlings that needed to be pecked to death to save the flock. But that led to thoughts of the feast that was coming, and how fat her siblings would grow on all this flesh, and she resettled her feathers and slipped away to the roost.
There followed a frustrating time. More humans went crazy-angry, but nowhere near as many as the ravens had hoped. In such a small space, the humans quickly learned not to attempt to fight or call to the crazy-angry ones; each was quickly locked in a room or bound to a bed, and then pecked to death. Most had their heads off before the sun moved halfway across the sky, but those heads were buried in short order beneath the tower walls, the same frustrating cache a dozen times over. Only the nestlings, the first to go crazy-angry, were left alive.
Greats-grandmother’s thought returned to haunt her, because to her it seemed clear that her human was leading the flock, and that he was sparing those two, just as she might have been tempted to do herself in his place. It was then that she conceived her eccentric conviction that humans were too raven-like to eat, a conviction that she was the first bird on this island to hold, though it’s since become trendy. Not that any of us get much opportunity to put it to the test anymore.
Greats-grandmother took this idea to her older brother, because despite their feuding she knew he was fond of his humans too, and might understand. But he scoffed at her. He called her sentimental and silly, and when she tried to explain herself again, he said she was jealous that it was his humans and not hers who had led to a feast for once. Greats-grandmother always was firm that he started the fight, though she allowed that she might have thrown the first peck.
Their parents heard them before they separated, and as they preened the mud off their feathers they were both declared to be in disgrace. They could stay out the winter but come spring they must both be off to find their own territories.
Greats-grandmother knew it was high time that she had a mate and a nest of her own, might have been pleased under other circumstances, but that didn’t take away the sting of humiliation.
By now, there had been no new humans turning crazy-angry for three days. Still the nestlings lingered tied to their beds. They thrashed with as much energy as hatchlings trying to burst from the egg, although they’d had nothing to eat since their first kill. Their keepers no longer bothered to bar the door, with so many black-plumaged humans in and out to observe and cluck and try to help.
Greats-grandmother sidled up to her brother on their windowsill, ducking her head as though she wished a reconciliation. “I know,” she told him, “how we can both be in the good eyes of our parents again.”
He cocked his head skeptically, but he didn’t flare his wings and drive her off.
“Between us, if we pick at those knots, we can set your humans free. They’ll kill more of the others, and sooner or later there will be too many bodies for them to bury.”
Her brother bobbed his head.
Yes, he was not as smart as our greats-grandmother—in fact he was killed by a buzzard while gorging on a horse two years later, and never did find territory or leave descendants of his own. You, however, saw it at once. That’s what greats-grandmother was counting on.
So they untied the knots of the smaller human, and as he scraped on the door greats-grandmother slipped away, leaving her brother to unbind the other. She knew just where the nearest human was, and rapped at his door until he stuck his head out—just in time to see the crazy-angry nestlings stumble into the hall.
They bit only two men, both of whom were immediately pecked to death by their fellows. By the time greats-grandmother’s human arrived, they were once again tied to their beds.
He looked d
own upon them and shook his head, seeming to sink further into his brooding posture. This time he did turn away, and as he did so two burly members of his flock unsheathed their swords and sliced the nestlings’ heads from their shoulders.
They, of course, were buried at once and far deeper than the others. There was no hope of anyone, and especially not greats-grandmother’s older brother, getting so much as a taste.
Greats-grandmother’s human returned again and again to the nestlings’ room, to stare at their beds. Greats-grandmother was seized with the desire to give him some sort of reward for behaving as she’d hoped he would. So when she was sure no-one was watching from the roost, she dropped quietly into the room and pushed the much-contested skull from beneath the bed.
Her human knelt, and called out. In moments a black-plumage human arrived and covered it with a cloth. They took it out at once, and cached it again with smoke and bells; but greats-grandmother was never able to shake the feeling that her human had not liked the gift.
She and her brother did not speak the whole winter through, and when the oak leaves had budded to the size of a squirrel’s ear she set out north. She never saw her human alive again, though she, like most of the other ravens in the country, feasted at the battle where he died. She finally settled along the sea, and there we might have stayed had we not inherited her headstrong ways and her story.
Or if we had also inherited her diet. For having observed humans ourselves, few of us can believe that it is wrong to eat them. Especially not when they are crazy-angry and delicious. And all those heads still wait cached beneath the tower, with their infected teeth, to be unearthed again.
16th and 17th Centuries
Hung from a Hairy Tree
Samantha Henderson
The story they told many years later in Girvan Town—that a daughter of the vile brigand Sawney Beane fled her wicked life and lived a good Christian, until one day she was discovered and hanged from the Hairy Tree on Dalrymple Way for her sins—was a lie. Truth was, she knotted her own noose and took her own life on that old, moss-crusted oak beside the killing grounds. She knew herself no murderer, nor cannibal at heart, like her kin.
A year before, when she still lived in the blood-reeking coastal cave with Sawney—she would not call him Da—they snagged a gaunt pair walking the road out of Ballantrae. The man and woman staggered like pole-axed sheep, their eyes sunk deep, their mouths chattering without words. They had purple pin-marks beneath their skin, as if they were about to bloom all lavender. Their hands were torn, with old brown blood ground deep beneath nail and skin, but they didn’t fight when Gar and Christie took them. The joke that day told ’round the fire was God had looked on the Beane clan with favor and sent them easy prey that offered their throats to the knife. But she didn’t trust the sweet-musky smell of the pair; even in death they smelled like honeyed dirt. An open body should be a terrible smell, the first leap to cross before one can even think of eating another man’s flesh.
But Sawney’s senses had been blunted from gorging on brined meat. He ignored her warning and that day reached for her hair, as if to braid it between his chapped fingers, or to tug and bring her face closer to his filthy own. She ducked away fast, knowing no father should look at a girl, paw at a girl, the way he did. She knew that he had lain with Maggie and Elspeth, despite her brothers’ growl that he had his own woman in their Ma and that their sisters needed no men but themselves.
Outside the wide flare of the mouth of the cave, she found Christie and El butchering the Ballantrae pair on the salt-gravel. They laughed at the daughter while they drained the blood into an iron pot for Ma to make pudding later. She watched as Christie dotted a red blotch on his sister El’s nose, who giggled and knocked his hand away. He kissed El’s cheek and patted her grimy smock; beneath it her belly swelled with Christie’s child.
She looked out to the water and wondered how far she could swim, and would it wash away all the blood. For sixteen years all she had known was blood. As a child she had suckled a rag steeped in the Beane kettle, and ate a mess of stewed innards, for then she knew no better. But then she found the greasy meals made her ill, and she was the thinnest of her clan. The others mocked her lack of appetite.
She would not eat the roasted Ballantrae pair. She went hungry that night, and the next, while the rest of the clan feasted. The third night Sawney roared at her until she dipped her finger into a cup of broth—the surface had an odd sheen to it—and brought a drop to her lips to calm his anger. The taste made her gag and she hid it behind a dirty hand.
Within three days the daughter saw violet bruises bloom on the skin of her kin. Their eyes glazed as if they were drunk, and they smelled of sweet-dirt musk. Christie struck El down and gnawed her shoulder bloody before Sawney and Gar kicked him away. El screamed like a gutted sheep, like nothing human.
When she told them she would gather clean rushes for the cave-floor, they barely understood her words. She never turned back but slept in fields and trudged on roads new to her until, exhausted, she came to Girvan. The bleat of Elspeth’s crying woke her every night.
The Girvan-folk looked askance at all strangers, especially one so grimy, but their minds changed when she pawned a gold chain Sawney had torn from a fine lady’s neck and given the daughter when she was young, and still thought him a proper Da. She took in laundry for her living, and spoke little to anyone, but she went to church regularly, having learned some scraps of religion at her mother’s knee. It was months before she took the Eucharist. She always had work from the butcher and barber, for she was accounted uncommonly good at getting out bloodstains.
Word did come at last to Girvan that Sawney Beane’s clan, hollow-eyed and skin blemished with purple, boldly raided nearby farms rather than lying in wait for travelers, leaving a dozen-odd crofters gnawed to the bone in their fields before the King’s Men were roused and brought the mewing lot of them to Edinburgh. The Beane Clan didn’t try to flee or beg for mercy, but snapped at their captors and growled like ravenous animals. The Tollbooth jailers refused to have aught to do with them, and the King ordered them to Glasgow, for the men to be gutted and the women burned.
The gossips of Girvan would talk of little else for a fortnight. She wept for her kin. She wept for herself.
Soon after she woke with a burning thirst, a single bruise like a violet posy on her arm, and the taint of long-forgotten Ballantrae broth in her mouth. The worst was that she was hungry for more. She finished that day’s washing, drying the linens before the fire and stacking them on the kitchen table. She tore her own bed-sheet lengthwise and braided it into a sturdy rope, and on her way down Dalrymple Way she stopped at the church, leaving her hoarded coins in the poor box.
After they cut her down they found a note written on her hearthstone with a charred stick: burn me. No record follows—perhaps they did. Or most likely, she was buried at the crossroads to keep her from rising again, as is a suicide’s wont, or planted in the potter’s field, for none would claim her.
Good Deaths
Paul M. Berger
“This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai. If . . . one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.”
—Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure
The road had become a dirt track between rice fields frosted with moonlight. The gaunt mare plodded, and our little wagon jolted and swayed over the ruts.
“You see that?” Sugitani said.
Silhouetted against the stars was a lone infantryman of the army of Oda Nobunaga, conspicuous in his broad conical helmet. Heedless and gasping, he fled along a ridge as if all the hells were snatching at his heels, but there was no one behind him.
“Do you want to take him, or should I?” I asked.
“Gaki,” said Sugitani. Like when we were little boys, playing tag. You’re it. Or, You’re the ghoul.
I grunted and stepped down off the cart.
I raised my bow over my head, then drew the arrow back in the same motion that lowered it to my eye. A calm spread through me, and even before the release, I knew I had struck my target. The rush of the arrow was muted by the clatter of the bow as it spun in my grip and the string tapped the outside of my wrist. The infantryman was knocked backwards off his feet by the impact in the center of his chest.
Sugitani hadn’t even stopped the horse; on a still night like this, the man’s ghost was likely to harass his killers if we lingered. I was back on board in a few quick steps. Too easy. It had to be done, but there was no honor in picking off a panicked farm boy like that. Let me fight a real samurai who knows how to use his sword any day.
I hoped Sugitani would acknowledge the good shot, but he wouldn’t even look at me.
“This is too much to bear!” he spat. “Are we cowards now? We should have stayed to face them and fought to the end. Or else slit our own bellies and shown them how real warriors die.”
“And ignore our giri to our lord? We were ordered to fall back so that we could continue to fight,” I replied.
“Our forces are scattered. How can we serve Lord Rokkaku if we can’t even find him, Takeda?” Sugitani said. “If we end it now, at least he’ll have the benefit of two good deaths in his name.”
“We have lost our officers, but we still have our duty,” I insisted. “We cannot act as free as rōnin. You know I’ll follow you anywhere, but I think we should head west, towards the castle. Somewhere along the way we will find Nobunaga’s forces, and then we will fight. And we will die in a way that does great credit to Lord Rokkaku.”
He mulled this over, then grunted assent.
No one took his giri to our master more seriously than Sugitani. And to let Sugitani set aside that burden at the wrong time would have been to neglect my giri to him. He had been an elder brother to me as long as I could remember, closer than my blood kin. Each time he saved my life in battle or showed me the way of a righteous warrior through his own example, that obligation grew heavier.