by Layne Maheu
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 far above us, encircling the nest, loomed a dark theater of crow faces, a council of gods staring down at our cold, water-wrinkled skin. These were the brothers and sisters from previous nest times, who numbered three, and who helped my mother and father in keeping the nest, since they weren’t old enough to begin nests of their own.
“Eeeeiiwaahh!” The one known as Squall cried out in fear of the sky.
“Don’t crack an egg,” cried Night Time.
“Bring on his own heart attack’s more like it,” said Plum Black.
It was common knowledge that upon hearing thunder for the first time, some fresh fledges drop from the tree like wet, heavy fruit, then rot in the mud like fruit, too.
“Let your heart attack this,” said Squall.
And he pecked at Plum Black’s shins.
When the thunder exploded again, Night Time made one of his wicked, uncanny mockeries and Squall stuck his beak down into his coat, wishing to fly off and hide.
“Hush.” Our Many cast a suspicious eye down at the hide tent of the Keeyaws, still full of humans, though the rains were letting up.
“None of you brought any food?”
“I did,” said Night Time.
“. . . and. . . ?”
“It was delicious.”
Night Time twisted his arrogant beak until it was right down over my face, and I thought I was going to receive a wondrous late-day offering, when he said, “Hmmm . . . his affliction seems to have—cleared up—a bit.”
“Your father pruned him.”
“I suppose he’s at all ends of the wind,” said Night Time, “where the Old Bone lives.”
“I’ve flown with the Old Bone,” said Plum Black. “I’ve seen him, and ridden with him, in the sky.”
“. . . and. . . ?” Night Time didn’t hesitate to mimic even Our Mother of Many.
“I can fly him to the ground,” said Plum Black.
“It’s not how fast,” said Night Time. “But for how long? And how far? And from where? It’s the intangibles.”
“Back when I was a fledge,” said Our Many, “the Old Bone was already old, and known as such.”
All of my family turned their beaks to my face, and their eyes blinked and wondered.
Like the portent it might possibly be, the quills and absence of quills burned there.
Where they’d been plucked.
Below my eye.
Morning came slowly.
Constantly I listened for my father’s return through the vaporous woods. Instead, I heard only the elder siblings call out and tried to guess how far. With time I could sense their wingbeats in their caws, and the ravines and open meadows had their resonant effect on their songs. As they moved in and out of earshot, I got a sense of our songscape and its traditional winds, long before I could venture out into it by my own wing power. Still, I heard nothing of Fly Home. Not even his far cry. Not even the dull echo of Keeyaw’s yelling could summon him.
With the beastmen below, pestering the fallen Giant to move, no one returned that morning with happy amounts of half-chewed creature: no pieces of caddis fly. No carrion beetle. No grasshopper. No grub dug up from the underworld. No seed from the farmer. No nut. No berry. No juicy eider egg, or gull egg, or nestling.
Nothing. Not a drop.
It was as if we were still under a heavy rain, even though the morning sunlight warmed us and a steam rose up from the leaves and glistening tangle of branches. All around us the steam hung in the air. It seeped from the bark of the trees like a hunger.
Soon the Giant lay fully in the road, where the wooden carts waited, and Keeyaw stood high up on the trunk, one hand holding on to his whip-switch and the other on to an untrimmed branch, and he rode his land barge far into his squinty-eyed purpose. The only thing about him moving—unless you counted the occasional lurch of the Giant—was his weedy, sea-gray beard, blown stubbornly over his distant, scowling face.
“Where will they take the Giant?” I asked.
But Our Many acted as if Keeyaw no longer existed.
“Where?” I said. “Where will they go?”
“Away,” she said. “Away!” she yelled down at the beasts. “Away!”
Usually Fly Home announced himself from far off. But I heard only the click of his sharp hooks on the nest and looked up. High above stood the old bird, somber and remote, and his feathers gave a rustling sigh as they settled into place. The elder siblings all gathered around, but not too near, so they could caw out their questions and be ready to duck away in fear of the answer.
“What?”
“What?”
“What of the pale feather?”
“What is the news?”
They flapped and pecked at the air, and I wanted to crawl under Fly Home’s wings and have him fly off because I wanted to be free of everyone’s ill-feathered commotion. Our Mother of Many sidled up beside him and arranged his nape.
“So, what took you?”
“What took me? How long will we have to endure him dragging our friends away? What took me?” He kissed Our Many. “Open up,” he said, “and I will show you.”
Turning his beak sideways, he shook a sweet morsel of offering down into her throat. Whatever he fed her must have been the most scrumptious delectable yet, because he lowered his great curved horn to My Other, and my brother’s eyes closed and his skin nearly changed color as if he were heating up.
“The news,” said my father, taking note of the barking and yanking of Keeyaw at his animals, “is the army of beastmen traveling here along the road.”
“Keeyaw?” she said. “Soon he will be gone.”
“No. More are coming. More than Keeyaw, and less than him. These are the kind who do not fell trees, but who fell each other, in numbers too great to count, let alone chew into pieces and hide in the trees.”
Squawks of giddy excitement came from my siblings as they shook their wings.
“So—” said Our Many. “What did become of the white feather?”
“I spat out. I had to. In order to bring back enough for an offering.”
“And what of the Old Bone? What did he make of the paleness?”
My father mumbled something under his beak.
“You mean you were gone all this time and you never saw the Old One?”
“You know how it is. You can’t just find the Old Bone; he finds you. It’s like going out looking for the wind.”
As Fly Home went on, his voice sailed far off into his resolve, far beyond the drudgery of Keeyaw.
“Last night, in the land beyond trees, I saw the great human masses and kept watch as they slept under the skin of dead animals. Today I followed them until I was sure they would pass by our aerie. It won’t be long now. Soon the hills will shake.”
The noise, the ru
mbling, it grew and grew and was still nowhere near. I thought it must be Keeyaw. But when I looked, it wasn’t the one ruthless Keeyaw at all but a long procession of his kind, all beastmen, pure and simple. Instead of casting fear and worry, these humans caused a thrill, except to Keeyaw. Hearing the procession, he and his small clan fled into the woods, taking all their possessions, utensils, tents, tools, beasts, fire, any trace of themselves, except the felled Giant, which now lay stripped and up on carts in the middle of the pathway. They moved quickly, losing themselves in the brush.
“You see!” cawed my older brother Night Time. “Where is the Tree Eater now?” He mocked the hammering of Keeyaw. “The many scare the one away.”
My older siblings flapped to the different trees above the road, calling back to the beast with names strange and wonderful to hear. While my father barely stirred, his deep-set features seeing all, telling none.
“Camels!”
“Oxen!”
“Elephants!”
“Armies!” my elders yelled over and over again.
“Armies of the beastmen!”
“When?”
“Where?”
“Soon!”
“I’m starved!”
Finally I could no longer stand it. I put myself in peril and climbed up out of the nest.
The beastman Keeyaw was a large behemoth of a thousand heads, all of them staying on the road, each staring at the one before it, mouth open, eyes vacant, feet trudging forward, animated by logic or some other force further hidden and dull. Some liked to just sit above a beast that did all the moving for them. One straddled an elephant laced with tassels and bells. But all the creatures, no matter how big or small, moved under the same dreary will. I could see now why my father liked to watch them so much; they were completely baffling to a bird.
When they came to the shorn tree trunk, they sent a search party into the woods after Keeyaw. They also tied a long train of their own animals to the sleeping Giant, and hauled it away.
Carts and all.
No more Giant.
The herd of a thousand heads glittered and clanked as it moved, and the trees still standing quaked in fear. With its many arms, it carried naked branches with sharpened points. It beat drums and cried out hoarsely and whipped itself. It seemed like an unbearable burden to move so slowly, unable to take leave of the earth and fly, vanquished to grovel, not only in the underworld but along that one deadened path. It took the herd of a thousand heads all morning to pass.
The wait, however, had its rewards. I learned that not all humans fell trees, and that the beast humans’ army overflowed with the rich wounds of kindness. Less than a day’s flight ahead was another such beast of a thousand heads, waiting for the time of the Great Offering, when the ground would swell with their numbers. For three days we feasted on nothing but the flesh of this tasty creature—eye tissue and innards and all sorts of tender delectables. And for days after that, strips of its fat and gristle hung in the woods all around us, hidden there to be eaten later.
One for sorrow.
Two for mirth.
Three for a wedding.
Four for a birth.
Five for rich.
Six for poor.
Seven for a witch—
I can tell you no more.
—ENGLISH COUNTING RHYME OF THE MAGPIE.
6. Mark of the Blade
Keeyaw returned.
My Other and I watched the lowly beastman emerge from below the bushes. He wandered out slowly into the clearing, edging his mule along, as if something might rattle them both. When nothing happened, he began barking his commands back into the woods. This time only the boy came out, the youngest of his clan, humming as he pulled on a rope, followed by a tawny old ram. One of the ram’s horns was broken, and the nap of its fur was scraggy and worn.
Keeyaw held the boy’s hand, and the water of the mammal leaked freely down the boy’s face. Keeyaw kissed the tears away, and made the boy stand near as Keeyaw dug a hole into the flank of the ram, stuck both of his hands into the bloody opening, and began pulling things out. Keeyaw acted as if he was showing the boy how to do it. He made the boy hold on to a long glob of gut, and the mass of it shivered as blood ran down the boy’s arms.
Then Keeyaw held out a bowl for the boy, where they placed the viscera along with some fat, and set it all down beside a dried pile of sticks, arranged like a large nest across the ground. Keeyaw then took two stones from his mule pack and scared the fire out of them by striking them together. As the fire took hold, he bled the ram and collected the blood in the same bowl. Then Keeyaw poured the contents of his bowl onto the fire. The smoke twisted, dirty and black. Above the flames, he waved smoking stocks of frankincense and myrrh, then dropped them onto the fire and uttered strange sounds.
Still, the wild, white-haired beast could not leave the woods alone. He hacked away at the vegetation on the forest floor until he stood just below our very own tree and made low, exhaling grunts of approval. He yanked his mule over by the reins, withdrew one of his implements from the mule pack, and dug into the bark. He did the same to a neighboring tree. I didn’t see it; I heard it, the nervous scraping away at the bark above the root.
“What?” I asked. “What was that?”
Keeyaw spoke again to the trees.
He even started to look like a tree.
Suddenly I could understand the mammal’s moans and grunts and strange staccato sounds, though the meanings were mired in his mysterious ways. The thing about his language that I understood most was his insatiable sorrow, distorted and grotesque. He held his thin tree-branch arms out until they trembled, and he addressed the trees with the following words—perhaps he addressed the Tree of the Many Names—he called it “Amen,” then “Yahweh,” and “Neter”; he called it “Jehovah” and “Amon Rah.” And he addressed the Tree in the following manner: “Deliver these, the last of the timbers suitable for a keel, to the long water house, and not again to the Sons of God and the Daughters of Men. Or is it Your plan that the Nephalem should sail away, and not us? Either way. I don’t care. I don’t care whom You choose. I’ll just keep trying. What else can I do?”
Then, wearily, Keeyaw picked up what was left of the ram and tied the ancient carcass to his mule, and he and his son left our aerie, searching the woods and sky.
Raven and some crows go picking berries. Raven eats the berries. He lies and tells the crows that it was a band of raiders that took them. He even plucks out his own feathers and tries to make them look like the raiders’ canoes. The berry juice, he says, is blood from the struggle.
—Raven Gets Caught in a Lie, LOWER COAST SALISH OF VANCOUVER ISLAND
7. Into the Unseen
Gray morning, ashen fog.
In a whoosh of wingbeats came our father. Perhaps this time he’d made his pilgrimage to the Old Bone, because the news had deformed him. His beak seemed larger from having to deliver the horrid word, and the burden of knowing had turned him into a confused, lanky monster, shining like one of our family, only so many times larger, with wings as wide as the trees. One wing spanned our entire nest, and he hurled past us without landing. But the whump of his wings told us he’d stopped somewhere in our tree.
We could sense him in the branches above, waiting.
My Other cried out.
Then our father blew past us again, tumbling through the fog. He turned and lunged onto the nest. The news had completely outweighed his ability to land, and he warped the bowl-like shape of our nest, and Our Many wouldn’t be happy about that.
My Other and I both looked up at the long, curving mandible that I hoped would give us food and not the horrid word. But then I realized that this was not our father. Perhaps it was the Old Bone of the Holy Realm here to pass judgment. The fear of my Misfortune burned hot across my face, and the great black bird gave me his one-eyed stare of mirth and scrutiny. The eyes that peered through his ragged mask were predators. He gulped and his beard rippled—an awful, hoary rip
pling of feathers with each gulp. Then his beak parted and he gripped my whole head in the vice of his horns. He bit down hard, with a force I’d known only from the time my father had plucked me. Was he plucking? Or feeding? It seemed he was tasting me, then spitting me out, and I felt the pang of rejection all over again.
“Sorry,” he said. “You’ll need plucking.”
He spoke strangely, with a huge, slobbering accent. Still, the sage old bird beamed with pleasure. And I shrank into the nest, searching upward for a sign.
“Me? Me? I Am.” My Other stood himself up and opened his throat out wide.
“Oh! You’ll do.”
The monster’s beak opened, and down came his curved, obscene horn. With a sickening, slithering sound, the beak pierced right through My Other. Then the raven snatched My Other up with that eerie opening and flew off with him, leaving behind blood-stained twigs and feathers. I remember the heavy swooshing sound of the wings, vwhump, vwhump, vwhump, as he fled.
“Fear not,” My Other called out, clenched in the very horn of his death. “I’ll always watch over you.”
I thought that those were his last words, but as the monster’s beak cracked down on his tiny wing bones, my brave brother cried out to be fed, even as he was carried off to be eaten.
“RAVEN!” came the calls from my family.
“RAVEN!” hollered my father, who tore in from nowhere and speared the monster and kept after him. A whirl of black feathers erupted in the air, and as My Other was carried off in a tangle of wingbeats and cries, all that remained were a few feathers of the murderer, floating down in the fog.
Long after My Other was gone, my family shrieked and called and clapped their wings, going nowhere.
“Raven!” cawed my siblings, in calls that trailed off into disbelief.
“I Am,” they cawed, in the same way My Other had cried it, but with a longing and loss that happens when a bird goes to the realm of song.
Our father came in from his futile chase and opened his maw in a rage, but no sound came out. He cleaned the slime of the raven feathers off his beak, scraping either side of it against the bark. He moved to call again, heaving and furious, but no sound came out. Then he flew next to our mother and tried to calm her, craning his head sideways and crouching low.