by Layne Maheu
Then, there was a loud, shrill call.
Other crows shot up from their hiding places and joined us.
The drums of the beastman spurred us on, and we flew even faster below the treetops to a clearing of denser smoke and noise.
Below us spread a vast valley of armies. The beastman filled the land.
Vaster fields of them stood along the edges and waited, while those in the lowlands converged in the shallows of a river that ran red. They brandished spears with stone points, arrows, sticks, shields, ropes, wagons pulled by bulls. They employed flames, drums, banners, horses, elephants, camels, hooded falcons on their wrists. The battle between the humans moved slowly, like a tide, a mass convergence to oblivion in the middle. In a strange way, it was distant and unspectacular. Mostly what we saw from the trees was the yelling mass of beasts and the columns of smoke. The sun was a pale orb barely able to show through it all.
By nightfall, the Great Offering had yet to begin.
We neglected the usual winds to the Roost, and by firelight, we watched the heated celebration. Humans danced, and drank, and mounted and enslaved one another. They twanged harps, thumped drums, blew horns, yodeled, and clapped.
The Old Bone stood beside me as though he could stand forever on his one good leg and watch the beastly happenings with the scarred-over, cadaverous cavern that used to be an eye. With his one good eye, he looked at me and blinked. I was not looking at him, yet I could do nothing to keep my attention away from him and his mutilated stare, judging me, looking at me, seeing only half of me, seeing the way only the Old Bone sees.
“So. This is the Long Jubilation,” I said, trying to make conversation with the beam of scrutiny coming from the Old Bone’s scar, even though it was not turned my way.
But the Old One only shuddered and blinked with his one good eye, as if blinking wakefulness back into his brain. He grunted. “What? Did you say something?”
“Were you awake?”
“No,” he said, without a visible change in his eye. “But I could have sworn someone spoke to me.” He preened and scratched himself with his stick of a leg. “Maybe it was God again.”
“What did It say?”
“The Ever Eternal wants to know when the eating begins.”
“So do I,” I said. “When is that?”
“When the living abandon the dead.”
“When is that?”
The Old One didn’t answer. He only stared at me with his eerie open eye falling asleep, and his other scarred-over cadaverous eye watching the humans leap around by firelight.
Ravenstone: Old English site of execution.
10. Slumgullion
I awoke with my head pounding to the disturbance of dreams, the sky torn apart, all trees vanished, and the dead floating upon the dead, which gave me a strange queasiness and hunger. I was utterly alone, with my mouth open to the sky and the very clouds filling me until I disappeared into a turbulence of vapors. Waking, I kept spotting crows perched on the lookouts above the Great Offering, waiting along with the vultures and ravens.
Then I saw him again.
The Man Called Noah.
As always, he was wary, staying on the outskirts of the woods, peering through the tangle of bushes and his own hairy head. Noah pulled his mule past the edge of the mercenaries’ encampment, where he seemed even more lost than he did in his mania to fell trees. And as always his mule packed around his tools, all except his jawbone ax, which he had slung over his shoulder, making him appear all the more like the dark harbinger he was.
In the dregs of the celebration, only a few last beastmen groveled across their heaps of blankets and skins. Everyone else slept in gangly derangement. At one point Noah looked at them as if he was about ready to speak, but walked away instead, puzzled, angered, pensive, and stoop-shouldered from the weight of his endeavor.
“That’s what it’s like,” said the Old Bone—I had forgotten he was still perched beside me—“when you keep all the food for yourself.”
Slowly Noah led his mule past the encampment to the field of the dead, and I took to the air and followed, and the Old Bone did too, asking, “Now what are you doing?”
“Why do you keep watch over me?”
We lit on a tree, and the Old Bone said nothing.
Noah stood and beheld the scene below, the endless sprawl of corpses, the looters who picked them over, the mourners who wept for their fate. The wizened Noah squinted up into the sky for a long while and then left the lush field for the thick of the woods.
With the coming of morning’s light, the looters fled the field. Mourners wandered off, too, but in a lost, aimless way, as though they had nowhere else to go. Perhaps it was too dangerous for them to stay after the soldiers awoke.
Yes, we were only crows and got only the gristle and sinew from God’s great bone heap. But today there was too much to attend to, and one had only to land, anywhere, everywhere. The kindness of the beast was endless. So why were we still in the trees above the Offering? From their perches, even the ravens waited, or especially them, majestic, cautious, sphinx-like, almost God Crow–like, three times our size. They watched and waited and occasionally croaked a clacking sound way back in their throats, an evil taunting sound, like a mockery.
Not yet, their silence seemed to say, while we crows eventually swooped down from the trees and joined the vultures and jackals. The Old Bone and I fell upon a dead soldier who had two large, furrowed wounds, big enough to get some real work done.
Maybe the ravens were waiting to see if we’d be ambushed, or if we grew sick from the poisons in the beastman’s blood. The flesh still had the sharp, metallic tinge of adrenaline to it, and that put me even further on edge. It was unnerving to be in the watchful gaze of the large birds. When? The ravens called to each other over surprising distances, in good numbers, with only a few in view.
“Fly Home!”
My father’s call spread across the sky.
By reflex I lifted my wings to follow, but stopped and watched my father arch over the valley and away.
How did he know I was down here knee-deep in humanity? The Old Bone was up past his bone in the wound of humankind, too, and he looked up, startled, not at my father’s yawp but at my reaction. All the other birds, vultures included, had flinched and flown away when I raised my wings, all except the Old Bone, whose face dribbled as he turned his one good eye on me and the fibrous gut he yanked on snapped. Perched in the pit of the wound, he looked like a normal enough crow. You couldn’t see the severed leg or the missing tail or the cadaverous eye, all covered up and sticky as it was.
“What?” he said.
“My father just flew over. He called a call I haven’t heard since I was in the nest.”
“Perhaps you should follow.”
“Should I?”
“Only you would know.”
“But there is so much goodness here,” I said.
“And so there is.”
The Old Bone sank his face back into the bloody furrows, and I took a moment to look over our meal.
The soldier’s eyes were gone, and he lay staring with his smeared sockets at the sky in a very tranquil sleep, one arm cleaving to his sharpened stick, which surely must have been a beloved thing. As we ate, I felt the welcome release the fallen beast must have felt at leaving his dead body and entering the form of a crow, as did all creatures. When consumed, they soon enter a state of excitement to fly. Crows are especially famous and envied for their flying abilities.
“If you don’t leave now,” said the Old Bone without poking his head up from the beast, “you’ll never catch up.”
“I wonder what he wants.”
But the Old Bone didn’t hear or didn’t care, tugging at the fresh, wiggly flesh. Taking a last bite, I flew away from the ample goodness and searched the open sky.
Good (1952) collected two American Crows with bills so deformed that it appeared virtually impossible that they could have fed themselves. . . . It seems lik
ely that such birds are fed by conspecifics, but few observations have been made. Among them are those of Verbeck and Butler (1981), who noted a male Northwestern Crow on many occasions feeding an unmated female with a deformed bill.
—LAWRENCE KILHAM, The American Crow and the Common Raven
11. Hookbill the Haunted, the Curse
I heard his powerful eeiiyaawck in the sky but couldn’t figure out where he was headed. I mean, I knew what direction. But to where? To what end? The old aerie was back the other way. He flew over the gray swamplands and across the great body of water where on the far shore goshawks jump on your heart and pin your wings to the ground. Fly Home was a fast and fearsome flyer. I had forgotten how fast. Each pull of his wings shot him far ahead of me into the wind. True, lately I had been flying with the Old Bone, who had to fight his way through the sky, but my father could pick up speed while bucking the wind in a glide. It was a great beauty to catch up to him and hear his feathers rattle in the headwinds. He seemed to see me without turning from the direction he flew and pumped and rose high into the air and into a field of cloud. Then we were completely covered by clouds, and the clouds dissolved everything from view. I thought we’d left the earth. Though every once in a while the slope of a mountainside peeked up through the cloud cover, and we rose to avoid it.
Finally we dropped below the clouds and lit on the back of the mountain. It was a barren, craggy mountain full of rock and scree and the occasional shoot of stubborn weed life that had somehow found enough mineral moisture to take root in this inhospitable land. We were far, far above the tree line, yet Fly Home managed to find some trees, or trunks of trees, that seemed to have stopped growing ages ago and stood petrified in communal lament.
There my father perched.
From a distance, I saw an old, dilapidated nest falling apart yet fixed in its unraveled state, and next to the rickety ladder of twigs a bird not at first noticeable, mostly because I couldn’t believe a bird that odd and ancient could exist. It looked like a corpse of burnt twigs, stiff and frail. I thought she was some tumorous growth in the crook of the tree. But when my father lit beside her, she moved, not suddenly but with a long deliberation, as though the bird had just emerged from a deep and demented dreamscape. She was a withery old hunchback. She had an enormous overgrowth for a beak, a deformity so large and ill-shaped that my father had to duck in order to place his offering anywhere near her. Turning sideways, he coughed up the round, perfect, bloody-red eyeball of a human and placed it on the branch below the twisted horn protruding from the hell hag’s face. The withered bird could only give the eyeball a slight push with that warped deformity, until the eye lay in her talons. She began to roll it back and forth along the branch. Every once in a while she pecked at it in an idle manner, looking all around her between pecks. The size of her beak affected her ability to look around.
The two of them mewed and rattled back and forth, and my father preened her delicately around the eyes. They sat there in silence, occasionally fluttering in the petrified trees, and they seemed content. This was not his new mate or even the Ghost of the Many, because I would surely have recognized her faint song, as I did sometimes at the nighttime roost, when her long, winding tune came humming just above or below the cacophony.
Then the two of them spotted me.
But was sight really the faculty she used to take me in with those cloudy orbs in her head? She saw me in the way the suddenly blind stumble and fall upon things. I felt her frail, cracked-feather weight all over me. The cobwebs of her scrutiny made me itch.
“One of your own?” she asked, knowing the answer. When she spoke, her vulgar horns parted but hardly moved.
“My latest,” he said. “Fledges are such hard work.”
“Most die.”
Fly Home glanced all around him in silent agreement. “This is the only one left from his nest, the one of the Pale Feathers.”
“I know.”
“Sorry.”
All three of us perched, staring at each other for a while.
“Does he even belong here?” asked my father.
And I felt my quills tighten in anger. Why wouldn’t he ever admit I had a place anywhere?
“The answer lies before you.”
My father looked at her, then he glared even more fiercely at me.
“Fly Home!”
He racked the air with his alarm and bobbed and flapped himself large.
He dove down from the tree until he was a sharp shadow just above me, beak open and wings pointed like a great open mouth—“keei-waaahh!” he cawed. “And clean all that human off your wings. Maybe you could keep up with me then.”
He was gone.
· · ·
The ancient one kept rolling the eyeball as before, aware of me yet not looking at me, strangely toying with me all the while.
Slowly I approached.
She grew annoyed. Only because the eye had lodged itself on one of her long, untrimmed hooks.
“Preen me,” she hissed in a hoarse, whiskery voice.
Because of her deformity, she could not preen the feathers on her back, which were a tangle of brambles and weeds. Feathers long dead and shriveled had wound themselves around other feathers trying to escape. She groaned as I worked the dull feathers free.
“Who—” I wanted to ask her who she was and why my father had fed her. But I barely had time to utter a sound when her song crept forth, a weak and murmuring slather of words sung from behind a thin gap she could barely open.
“I Am Hookbill the Haunted, the Seer, the Curse, but a curse to no one but myself, sibling to your father, Fly Home, so far back in his line he can never reach that part of his song, so many have come afterward. I can see farther than any bird or other living thing. The future to me is like looking into the next tree over.”
“I Am—” I was about to enter into my song, but, “Stop,” she hacked and hissed. “I know everything already, I have always known you would come. You are I Am, the last of Your Mother of Many, gone to the realm of song. I know what will be.”
“What?”
“Feed me.”
She wheezed.
I went to peck at the eye snarled in her claws.
“No,” she said. “There is food already in my bill. Push it down my throat.”
I scraped at the gelatinous glob in her beak and pushed it down into the cavern of her face. She opened her obscene mandible as wide as she could. The breath from her ribbed esophagus seethed in and out, yes and no, as she sucked me down into her gullet. “More,” she said, “more.” Trembling, since I feared I’d be eaten, I pushed the tissue down into her beak again, and down I went, far into the seething in and out, the yes and the no again, and the wailing of winds that dissolved my sight. As I moved within the hissing vapors, she breathed the curse of the deluge into my ears. “Fish shall swim in the sky,” she wheezed. “And birds shall fly in the sea. Upon the face of the dead, you will float, whereupon all flesh on earth will lose its breath below the waters. You will be among those safe in Keeyaw’s nest. But you won’t be of them. You alone will return to the flood. Now hurry, please, feed me.” And I felt my claws lifted from my perch as I fell into a venting of powerful forces that surrounded me and pulled me under, all my feathers soaked in the slurry. I circled downward. But the more I fed, the more I felt the curse go away. And perhaps I did feed her enough and she lifted the curse, or I’d altered it, because when I awoke, I was in the sunset again the same as always, flying with the regular sky of crows to the nighttime roost.
Just as I would on any other night.
I called.
And the sky answered back.
III. Deluge
By 5,600 B.C. the ocean had risen to a height where it stood poised to invade the Bosporus valley, and plunge to the Black Sea Lake five hundred feet below. Driven by the wind and tide, the waters must have repeatedly washed up onto the top of the divide to fall back, leaving damp patches on the soil, until a final surge began to flo
w continuously across and down the slope toward the lake, finding old gullies and dried streambeds in the rough ground between the trees and around the litter of boulders. . . .
Someone escaping the onslaught of the rising tide on this shelf would have had to travel, on the average, a quarter mile per day to keep up with the inundation. If fleeing up the very flat river valleys, they would have had to move half a mile to a mile per day . . . .
Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over a half mile.
—WILLIAM RYAN AND WALTER PITMAN, NOAH’S FLOOD: THE NEW SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE EVENT THAT CHANGED HISTORY, 1998
Some observers believe that crows have a language of their own, consisting of the variations of their caws, wailing cries, and other sounds.
—OLIVE L. EARLE, Birds of the Crow Family
1. Fleece of the Hills
Green season.
And in the trees, the furled buds waited for the next shower, when they would burst and the flowering streamers would hang from the maple heavy with lore. All the clamor of the woods convinced me that no other bird, beast, or green growing thing knew at all about the floating of Noah’s nest across the waters of the dead that would soon smother all living things. I hoped that they knew better than I did. But what did I care? In the happiness of spring, I was spring’s absence. I was the dark bird with no color but winter on my face. Even my own kind avoided me. Everywhere the green season kept busy with itself. Dragonflies flew, one stuck to the other. Two sparrows circled, each with the same spear of grass in its bill. The flower seduced the whole kingdom of honey-gatherers. And in the full heat of the noon, the hills were on fire with their green growing green. On the steppes where little grew, the farmer’s cow incited the bull. Cut loose from the rope, the bull charged across the desert, his eager member wobbling like a palm frond in the blue, beads of discharge bubbling off it into the wind. What was this restless urge in the hot oven of anatomy? Soon the water would put an end to all this.