Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  And it was here that I heard the story of how the affliction of the white feather had turned the Old Bone into a Misfortunate of hardship and woe. As I listened to the ritual singing of history, I hid the afflicted side of my own head, despite the night’s shroud of darkness.

  “Before the terrible blight of Keeyaw cursed the earth . . .”

  I couldn’t see the Bard in the darkness. There were too many other birds in the trees around her. But she sounded thin and trembling, a mere filigree of plumage—“. . . A crow named Yamah did fly. . .” She sang in the old style. “. . . From tree to tree, and across the waters, Yamah flew with the goodly God Crow, and watched over all creatures, all that flew across the sky, and all that crept upon the underworld, as the God Crow had instructed them to do. Now Yamah watched over a particular beastman, a Shepherd who slept every night by his fire. Knowing that if Yamah did try to eat thereof, peril would come unto him, and trap him forever in the viscera of the beast, God did speak to the Goodly Crow. ‘Yamah,’ It did say, ‘first, eat you a hole in the stomach of the beast, and thus ensure you an escape route, lest you yourself be eaten.’

  “And Yamah did this thing. He plucked a hole in the flesh of the beastman, and from the ribs of the sleeping beast, out flew the generations of the perished. And many were the Perished, who covered the sky in black, and who did smile upon the might of their son Yamah and bid him, ‘Take wing in Our blessing.’ But the wrath of the beastman was great; and a leg of Yamah was smitten, and rendered free; and with the talons of that leg, Yamah was blinded on one side. As Yamah yet took wing to flee, the beastman did reach out for tail feathers, and lo, much harm was done. Still, to this day, does Yamah fly in the blessings of the ancients, who protect him in his broken-down state, now the Old Bone of Misfortune, unto the ends of the wind. Amen.”

  It wasn’t until here, at the end of the story, that I realized the song was about the old, injured bird who had shown me the sea. My soul seemed to levitate, and the top of my head felt ripped wide open—so wide that anything could have fallen in. Such is the rapture of inspiration in youth. I had stolen fish with a Holy Bird.

  The Old Bone . . . Random cries rose up around us. The Old One . . . Nearby, the old bird shivered, lifting a few nape feathers, as if the story of his own affliction was a draft, affecting him while he slept. “. . . May he see with the Everlasting’s special powers of sight . . .”

  “. . . Yes, the God Crow is a merry joyful mightiness, and if you get eaten, the God Crow wants you to be happy just the same . . .”

  I awoke like a bolt from my dreaming but calmed quickly as all the crows around me were asleep—rustling occasionally or flapping, but mostly asleep as the leaves of the trees we’d become.

  The Norse God, Odin, kept two ravens perched on his shoulders, one named Thought and the other Memory, that flew the world by day and returned by nightfall.

  7. Mob

  It was neither morning nor night but the gray passage between the two. Below us, the lakewater barely stirred the small trees and bushes that over-grew its banks. Occasionally, there was a fluttering in the branches as our restlessness grew, and a caw here or there. It was still too early to fly, but too late for sleep, and we perched on a new rumor of plentiful foraging. Soon, somewhere in the approaching day, we’d land on a feast of so much burnt flesh that the beasthuman couldn’t possibly eat it all. Not to mention all the cakes and breads and all manner of delectables left to soak in narcotic potions.

  “Where?” muttered the Old Bone, Holy Bird of Misfortune and Woe, with all the special powers of sight given to him by the God Crow. He must have been seeing through his scar because his good eye was fast asleep.

  We always assumed that the first to fly would know where the feast was. But to take off first without knowing anything only invited too many followers, who themselves knew nothing.

  Before the morning’s first rays, we heard the whack of bird wings. Then we flew from the greater roost with all the stealth we could muster. In a fumbling wave, we lifted with heavy wingbeats, whole branches of us at a time, bumping into each other and fighting for a space in the sky. A bird up ahead called out that he had seen which way the others had flown.

  Where? Where?

  The bunch of us flew in distraction, and soon we were mobbing an eagle’s nest precariously close to the roost. We dove and squawked with the mock bravery of numbers, and the eagle ducked and flew off.

  “Eagle!” we cried. “Eagle!” which is the same as imitating its screech.

  “That’s an eagle all right,” said the Old Bone, who flew right beside me with all the special faculties of observation given to him by the God Crow. “Keep an eye out for the young ones.”

  Filled with courage, we lost track of trying to find any feast, and the elder birds kept up the seasonal task of pointing out potential enemies to yearlings such as myself. We swooped on the aerie of a suspicious hawk. We attacked a tree known to be the daytime roost of an owl, even though there was no owl in sight. Still, we made our nasal owl sounds and mobbed his tree.

  “Owl,” said the Old Bone. He didn’t bother with the imitations. His voice no longer carried. “Watch your back at night.” And he hummed a little screech to himself and dove over the tree empty of owl.

  Then we flew over a clearing and happened upon an abysmal creature, a lone beastman. We spied the long, bony animal sitting on a log before an open flame, surrounded by what looked like his own aerie. He just sat there roasting a large animal with no skin and no bowels and no head.

  None of us knew what sound to make for this creature. We flew over his campsite silently, like burnt ashes in the wind, and circled beyond the ridge of trees where we couldn’t be seen. We whispered.

  “He doesn’t even think he’s a creature.”

  “He burns the blood right out of it.”

  “Disgusting.”

  “Idiot.”

  “Now, this one,” said the Old Bone. “This is the one you have to look out for.”

  The closer we flew, the more my guts crawled, and I bristled with familiar dread.

  “Because,” the Old Bone went on, “when you see a cow, you know a cow. You see an elephant, that’s an elephant. You see an eagle, after a time, you know an eagle. And so on. But this one, I still don’t know what to make of him. Except, of course, for his wars. With his wars, he’s too generous. I get hungry just thinking about it.”

  “That’s Keeyaw,” I whispered, seized with fear, Keeyaw of the lank figure and the mournful locks, the one whom the God Crow had given a name. But what? What name? I searched his aerie for Our Giant and the Tree of the Dead and the Lost Love of Our Many.

  “What do you mean, what? He’s not going to give us any of that. That’s one tasty morsel. But it’s useless. Let’s get out of here.”

  But I lit on a tree just above the beast.

  “Noah!” I called.

  I called the beast, “Noah!” who in his admiration of the burning, headless creature had neither heard nor seen us.

  crow’s foot: a carpenter’s mark of measurement.

  8. The Fires of Keeyaw

  “No birds land here,” said the Old Bone.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they land somewhere else. Something wrong with your eyes?”

  While my own eyes watered from the smoke twisting through the trees, the Old Bone saw the way God sees and stood on his one good bone. He cleaned his beak back and forth on the other bone just hanging there all gory like a pestilence. Above the trees I watched the last of our little murder of friends flap off to the adventures of a new day, and the Old Bone was aware of them as well as aware of the one called Noah, though the old bird did nothing but study the stillness of the clouds beyond the hills.

  For the longest while, the Old Bone and I just sat there and watched the beastman roast the open animal. Behind him was a huge pile of severed trees as skinless, bowelless, and hoofless as the beast above the flames. As truncated as they were, I could still pick
out our old nest tree among the fallen Giants. Noah was burning their hacked limbs, and I wondered if he was going to feed our old home into the flames. I recalled all the life that had once spread out and landed there, held up in the breeze by those thin, leafy limbs. I could hear Our Mother of Many and her varied, wavering song from the uppermost part of the tree now just a twisted, tortured shape among other nightmares sprawled out in the daylight across the worn-out earth. My fledgling days were burning right before my eyes, and perhaps the mysterious whereabouts of the Mother with them. And Noah did this with his wits flown completely out of his head, his eyes wetted and withdrawn into their sockets but still fixed on their smoking source of discomfort. Even his bones didn’t move, stretched-out, simian, and bulbous at the joints. He sat arrested by the flames.

  “This is his nest, you know,” said the Old Bone.

  “Whose nest?”

  “The beastman’s.”

  “Where?”

  Crow conversations can be short, with very long pauses between remarks. As the Old Bone watched, his feathers twitched, a motion much like eye batting. But since he had no tail, he had no counterbalance, and his twitch was more like a lurch that threw him off balance, especially on that one leg.

  “Right here,” he said, catching himself. “You’re perched on it.”

  What I thought was a hill was really a mass of shorn trees all heaped together and cinched in place by enormous fibers made stiff and shining with black, tarry bitumen. It was a steep hillock of trees, dripping and pooled up with the black, tarry stuff.

  “This?”

  “Something wrong with your ears, too? It is and has always been. In the time before I was born, a time long before your great Mother of Many, Keeyaw was already building it, collecting the forest, restacking it. Already it was enormous.”

  “But what about the time before Keeyaw, when you freed the ancients perished within the ribs of man?”

  “What? There has never been a time before Keeyaw. No bird remembers it. Keeyaw has always been.”

  “What about the ancients trapped within the ribs of man?” I asked, thinking of Our Mother of Many within him now. “Can’t they ever be freed?”

  “How’d they get there in the first place?”

  “Weren’t you ever called Yamah?” I asked.

  “Crows used to call me that.”

  And the world became flat and empty to me. I was overwhelmed, yet I despised the knowledge of the Old Bone. All the sacred notions of the roost skittered away like water bugs escaping a surfacing frog when he spoke. I had the urge to leave him and fly down into the beastman’s nest, because I thought that there in the tangle of dead trees I might find the one Tree of the Dead and clues to the whereabouts of Our Many’s ghost. But I didn’t want to tell the Old Bone a thing because whatever hunch I had would vanish when he opened his beak.

  “Look,” he said. “Birds don’t land here, and birds don’t go down inside. They don’t go poking around in the beastman’s nest. What good can come of it?”

  I wanted him to fly off to his infested swamp. I didn’t need any Old Bone to chop down what was growing of my hopes. Besides, once, the God Crow had spoken to me, or at least I thought It had.

  “Oh, It did, did It? What did the Endless Eternal say?”

  I despised the Old Bone even further for knowing just what I was thinking. Finally, grudgingly, I spoke: “It told me to be ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  I looked down at the tangled hill of shorn Giants below us.

  “Well, don’t let me stop you.”

  So I readied myself.

  The one-eyed, one-footed, tailless crow would not go down with me into Keeyaw’s mountain of dead Giants.

  “I’ll call, though,” he said, “if the beasts do anything funny.”

  I flew in alone through a large, branch-woven opening at the uppermost part of the nest.

  Going down inside was like filling my wings with wind for the first time, but a wind of foreboding awe. Below I found dark, fathomless spaces, which I had to wade through until my eyes could adjust and I was covered with dusty cobwebs pocked full of hollowed bugs. Occasionally, seams of light shone in between the trunks, but in most compartments was utter darkness, and I avoided these. I found myself drifting closer and closer to the opening where Noah and his family often walked in and out and where the daylight poured throughout and seeped gloomily into the compartments. The gangways were flanked by strange latticework, like those of the pens where the beastman kept his animals. And there at the bottom of the nest, more like an island of dead trees, the weevils and worms had worked their way up the wooden dunnage and scaffolding to the bottommost trees of his home. Some of the limbs of the hull had already spliced back into the earth with roots. Why should any creature need such a mountainous home? Yet I was drawn to its wood-cave coziness and felt that the large, inert power of it was dormant. This landmass of trees was awaiting some otherness too large to comprehend that involved chaos and terror and motion. The limitless hulk of it was doomed and unfit for this world and waited there out of time, and out of place, saddened by the burden of itself. There was a stratum of carpenter ants and beetles, and the mildewy world of the mosses had foisted their way up into the gopher-wood construction. And there, where the sun shone deep into the catacombs of the vessel, tiny spears of grass and mustard weed grew up through the hull and had actually taken root on the bottommost ribs and beams. And following some mice there, I found the most spectacular thing of all, huge stores of grain, whole hillsides of it, compartments and compartments, foodstuff enough to swim in, like a small, hapless fish on the ocean floor.

  This was where I belonged.

  Indeed, the earliest expressions of humankind recorded thirty thousand years ago in the caves of Lascaux, in modern-day France, feature a crow-headed man and a totemic bird form thought to represent the external soul.

  —JOHN MARZLUFF AND TONY ANGELL, In the Company of Crows and Ravens

  9. Kindness of the Beast

  When I emerged from the mountain of hewn Giants, the sudden sunlight burned my eyes as if they’d been rubbed in salt, and I couldn’t make out a tree to land on with all the sun spots wandering beneath my eyelids. All I could do was yell out from my own blindness midair.

  “Food! Mountains of food!”

  It was difficult flying, wondering where to light.

  “Of course there is.”

  Hearing the Old Bone, I found his branch and landed. “But you don’t know how—”

  “There’s food in all of their nests,” he said. “They’re stuffed with it.”

  “Are they?”

  “Yes. That’s the way the beastman is.”

  “All just like Keeyaw?”

  “How much food does he have?”

  “You can’t see it all, there’s so much.”

  “And so it is with all beastmen,” said the Old Bone. “And they can’t hide it all that well either, or don’t bother to, anyway.”

  “Let’s go in and try some,” I said.

  “Oh, no. Couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Crows don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You must be wary of all that creepeth and crawleth, and all that, until you know them and know you’re in no danger. With the beastman, you can be sure of only one thing: there is danger. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  And we flew away from Noah’s rookery with its foul smoke and its sprawling nest, clumsy and misplaced, looming like a mountainous mistake, filled naively with stores enough to feed every crow in the world for a lifetime.

  All night at the roost, I wanted to sing out the song of the food I had found. My dreams were consumed by vast glacial drifts of food spilling out of their wooden caves and valleys and engulfing me whole. I was carried off in a slow tide of grains and figs and cakes and all manner of foods eaten by the beastman, some of it on fire, whole piles still smoking and some sopped with narcot
ic potions. The birds who tell other birds of the great food bonanzas, they are the favored birds, courted and doted on, revered, inspiring fear and affection, sung of in lore, copied in song. But what if the bonanza buried in Noah’s mountain of Giants brought only harm? What if his legendsized cache brought death, to even a few, or just one? What would my song be then?

  Perhaps another day.

  I’d wait until I learned more about his nest.

  Besides, word had spread of a beastman’s army approaching, and though I’d fed before from the feasts of the Long Jubilation, I had yet to see the kindness of the beast firsthand. On the eve of the Offering, it was hard to sleep, especially with all the strange theories concerning the beasthuman and the dangers of eating too much of this humanity.

  · · ·

  Before dawn, we flew through a gray forest that was eerily too quiet. From the distance came a crow’s incessant call.

  “Here.”

  He called, “Here.”

  And we flew here.

  Then, “There.”

  And there, under the trees, there was nothing.

  We moved swiftly below the treetops and through the deathly silence. In the dull mist, I could make out the hulking shapes of beasts moving quickly away from the direction we flew, a pheasant beating the air, a boar grunting his escape, a deer disappearing with her fawn. Even the snake flinched and gave its presence away.