by Layne Maheu
Then the God Crow flew above Noah, wracking the air with the might of Its caw, and Noah squinted upward as the Goodly Bird flew off and was gone.
In the majestic quiet of the sky, I saw a familiar far-off flapping, the only movement below the vastness of the clouds. The distant crow wings grew closer, and so did my hopes. Through the mesh of my cage, I saw her, the Beauty not only of the woods but of all the long-gone world. Meet me in the sky! My heart beat against the slats of its longing. I had to be near Plum Black and catch her mirror-like flashing in the sun. “Plum Black!” I called, or tried to. “I Am!” But my voice, like my heavy, sea-soaked wings, stayed lodged where it was.
Without a look at the wondrous rainbow, Plum Black lit on the ark. She clipped a loose twig from one of its untrimmed branches, exposed by the wreck, and flew away with it in her beak. Perhaps she was carrying it back to the aerie she’d found with one of the crows from the ark.
Seeing me suffer in my fight against the cage, Nanniah opened the door and reached inside it. Then she tossed me into the air. But my heavy, wasted wings brought me down into a muddy puddle, where I splashed through the wallow. “Oh, poor bird.” Startled, Nanniah laughed and stooped to pick me back up, and she struggled to hold on to me. After pressing me against her face, she cradled me again in the gentle crook of her arm.
When you had your first kiss, the crows were there, flying around nearby. They were cawing overhead at your college graduation, and worrying a hamburger wrapper through the wire mesh of a trash container in front of the building when you went in for your first job interview.
—IAN FRAZIER, “TOMORROW’S BIRD”
3. Vine Stock
From far down the sloping morass came the stooped figure of a black bird, hopping. It hopped with a crow’s quick double hop. But why did it only hop? It was still too far away to tell. In my present state I did nothing but keep silent in the sling of Nanniah’s arms. I’d burn with humiliation if any crow, especially Plum Black, ever saw me as a captive to those who had brought Our Mother of Many down. I hoped that it wasn’t Plum Black, limping back to the ark after an injury. But who else could it be?
As the injured bird drew closer, I could see that it was a crow of some sort, maybe one of the seven clean crows carried across the waters. The bird wasn’t lame but hopped just fine, and when something interested it down in the mud, it flew wonderfully above the object, making a low, banking turn and swooping back to take a closer look. Then it began hopping up the mountainside again. It was an extremely tall and lanky crow, God Crow–sized but wizened and raw with dull, split feathers and a world-weary manner. Noah was so busy gaping at the beauty of God’s rainbow that he did not see this strange bird, though it took the traveler half the day to approach.
“Good afternoon,” said the Strange Crow, hopping up to Noah and inspecting the mud on its claws.
Noah only eyed the creature.
“What is that in your hands?”
Noah clenched the twig and looked down suspiciously.
The Strange Bird had that eerie otherness about him that brought both fear and awe.
Finally Noah spoke to him. “It is a vine stock.”
“Oh? Of what kind?”
Nanniah also drew near, intrigued and alarmed, and the babe in her womb squirmed from skittishness.
“A vine from Eden,” said Noah. “It will bear the grape.” And he held it up to his face as if trying to inhale the future that would untwist from within the bark.
“May I?”
The Strange Bird flew to the blackened rocks and held up the outstretched points of its claws. The claw foot was thin and dry and cracked like dead root. Behind him, the rocks of the altar still smoked.
“No.” Noah withheld the vine. “Begone with you. Haven’t you ruined enough already?”
“As you wish.”
And the Wizened One hopped down from the rocks as if ready to hop all the way down the mountainside.
“But it wasn’t I who sweetened the juice of the apple,” said the Strange Bird, beginning his long journey. “Nor did I make your kind thirst to know more than can, or should be, known. I only point out the obvious.”
“Obvious? Then why do you even come here? To pester me? To gain a foothold back into the world?”
“Sir.” The Strange Bird was sadly offended. “Why am I here?” He stopped and shot his glances all around him at the gray, muddy abyss that now had a wonderful sheen in the sunlight. He pecked at his shins. “If I did not come here, you would invent me, or someone just like me. Is there anything else you might wish from a mere servant?”
“Servant? Oh, no, I trust you not. I wish only to forget that old earth and all you accomplished back there. The knowledge you showed us from the tree has gone sour. I will let it ferment back to its beginnings, and yield wine, which will at least gladden people’s hearts.”
“Very well. May I help in any way?”
“Oh, no. No help from you. Begone. I wish only that this vine be fed by the sun and yield quickly. For the sooner I drink thereof and forget about you and how you ruined things, the better. This vine is from Eden, the old Eden, before you ever got there.”
“As you wish. Though I’m older than the garden you speak of, I am, as I’ve already stated, nothing more than a servant. Farewell, Noah.” And the Strange One hopped, lank-winged and weary, back down the long mountain.
Meanwhile, the vines Noah planted sprang forth with supple green shoots and luscious leaves before he could even attend to the next furrow in the mud, so that when he awoke the next morning, the vines hung fat and toppled over across the ground with bursting clusters of the opulent grape, and Noah laughed in his madness, already drunk in his anticipation, for he was the first and most accomplished vintner the world had ever known.
After pressing the grape that fermented that day, Noah sat on his rocks blackened by fire. He nearly had the potion up to his lips when he turned around, startled.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?”
It was the Strange Bird again, perched beside Noah on the sooty altar.
“What? What could it be? Look.” Noah held up his goatskin bottle. “Wine—already. Just look at how fertile this new world is.”
“No, I meant an offering.”
Behind the Stranger were four beasts, each tied to a heavy rope staked to the ground—a lamb, a pig, a lion, and an ape. These behaved as if already drugged by the heavy narcotic potions of Noah, whose face narrowed down to one eyeball as he studied the throat opening of his goatskin bottle.
I felt Nanniah’s arms tighten around me, carrying me around all the time in the sling of her arms.
“You! Again? Did I not resist you yesterday?” said Noah. “Must you tempt me again?”
The Strange One hopped up to the foot of Noah.
“I only remind you of your obligation to make an offering.”
“But—I made one the other day. Everyone saw it.”
“Yes.”
And here the Wizened One took it upon himself to remind the beastman known as Noah that if one is lame, as was Noah, especially in such matters as the ability to perform the marital act, then the firstborn must burn the offering in the supplicant’s stead.
Noah turned to his sons, who had gathered around. All three stood at a distance, wide-eyed, like children.
“Father, it is true,” said Shem, the eldest.
“But God accepted my offer yesterday,” said Noah. “Did He not? Did you not see the rainbow? Did He not establish His covenant, that He would not curse the ground anymore on our behalf? No more flood upon all living things. No more wrath. Only mercy. He said, ‘Be fruitful.’”
“Yes,” said the Stranger. “To even God himself, at times, the particulars are not important. But, if you wish to pass on the ancient covenants, which is your duty and yours alone, now’s the time for teaching, and also for alms. Your vineyard grows unconsecrated.”
“But it grew so fast,” said Noah.
“It is t
he Accursed One’s work,” said Ham.
“Nonsense,” said Noah. “It’s God’s, just a little faster this time. Shem!”
And the eldest son obeyed his father and prepared the altar for fresh slaughter.
Ham withdrew and put his arms around the womb of his wife, who nurtured both me and the unborn babe, and he led us all away.
Seeing us, the Wizened One hopped up to her feet and spoke: “What’s this? A crow . . . Domesticated crows?”
But Nanniah gave no answer, and Ham cleaved to her in such distress that I felt my wings in peril of snapping and I heard the sudden song of the mother inside her ribs tell me it was time. I worked my wings free and to my surprise, I was strong and dry and I took to the air. Nanniah helped by throwing me upward, as she’d been wanting to do all along.
In the sky, I flew. I flapped and flew away and found myself above a formless landscape without end.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “The Raven ”
4. Sacrifice
From its ravaged origins, the wind had no name and no spirits that called out for one. The gusts were barren and unchanging, formed from a world void of form, and all of the sky was the same, one gray, abysmal murk. The sodden, silty plains of Paradise still had pools of sitting water. Through the clouds, I kept seeing strange skeletal birds in the vaporous depths, or the ghost of them, rattling back into the dark vapors as soon as they appeared. They were enormous, scaly, naked-faced birds in a hideous soar. Still, I managed to follow them, until they circled the same patch of nothingness in the sky. Not only did that sky have the sweet taste of death in it, but it was a death that had decayed and begun its rejuvenation, a taste I had grown to love, and used to fly to with a sweet, happy singing in my heart. It was the vernal juices after the winter melt, the decay where the germinating seed takes root.
I left the vultures and descended, only to find that they’d been circling Noah’s rookery. There, the old man was sitting on a stray log from his ark and talking with the Strange Crow of the Withered Coat. Noah drank from one of his goatskin bottles, in the middle of a loud discussion.
“No, no, you have it all wrong,” said the Strange Bird. “It was the apple’s plan all along. Hence, the sweet juices. You poor mammals had no choice but to eat it. Besides, you must first know what it is in order to know why it is forbidden. For to choose not to know, after having been given the choice, is to choose not innocence, which you no longer have, but a docile, stunted life of ignorance.”
“Ignorance?” said Noah. “I can remember back when farmers used to scratch the ground on their hands and knees, clawing through the dirt with their fingernails. For nine generations outside the Garden, they were like that.”
“Until you invented tools,” said the Strange Bird.
“Until I invented tools.” Noah smacked his lips around a good draw from his goatskin. “With that so-called knowledge of the apple, they’d still be scratching the ground.” He squinted with glowing contentment out over the distance, completely unaware of the moon-eyed patience of the vultures perched on the far side of his fields.
Already the lamb lay like a limp sack with its blood spilled over the roots of the vine.
And Shem, the firstborn, busied himself trying to subdue the second of the sacrificial beasts. Though the lion was on a tether, Shem was mortally afraid of it. He tied the rusty sacrificial knife to the end of a long lance and repeatedly thrust it at the lion. I was hoping that the braided hemp might snap, for surely the lion would take his blood-fed revenge out on more than just one of them. Then there would be no one left to set fire to the bodies. Before its roar could escape the cavernous mouth, there was already an echo, like the molten bellows of the earth yelling back at the sad surviving lot. Soon the lion gained control of Shem’s weapon. The young beastman dove after it, but stopped. The lion had it completely within his sphere.
“Father!” Shem came back and stood before Noah, breathing hard and yelling. “Must we sacrifice the lion? Alone he is like subduing seven beasts. No, seven of seven.”
Noah shut his lopsided lips, and looked at his new bird friend in speculation.
“Do as you wish,” said the Wizened One. He had an easy lilt to his voice, sunny and lulling, a voice gained from basking in the tropics. “As you say, I make no pacts. I only tell you what I know.”
“I’m not sure,” said Noah. “Can’t we forgo the lion? Or replace him with a less troublesome creature.”
“Why do you ask?”
“You were the one who brought these animals here fit for sacrifice in the first place, already on tethers and stakes.”
“True.” The bird lifted the skirt of his tail feathers and a small stream of excreta fell beyond the log. “I brought the lamb mainly because a man can be as timid as the lamb before he tastes of the wine.”
“And the lion?” asked Shem, as if in a fight with his breath, half from his battle with the king of beasts and half from his increasing anger with the Stranger.
“Drinking yet a little more,” said the Strange Bird, “a man believes himself to be as strong as the lion.”
“Shem,” said Noah. “I would have taken care of the lion myself, if it weren’t against our laws. I have a personal debt against him.”
Shem spoke. “No man will ever be as powerful as the lion. It is as the stranger says. Your drink alone tells you so.”
“The sacred knife is within the lion’s circle, is it not?”
“It is.”
“Very well. You may use the bow,” said Noah.
Shem withdrew into the tangled structure of broken logs that used to be the ark. Upon his return, he had a taut, curved bow and a sling of arrows. He stood just beyond the circle of the lion, which paid no attention, gnawing on the spear as if it were a slug of food. It seemed the lion had not eaten in days and lapped at his own blood.
Shem repeatedly flung arrows, and the lion kept gnawing as before but flinched with each new shot, until the great cat lay down as if readying for a nap. Shem watched the arrows rise and fall like porcupine quills, three in the lion’s rib cage, one in the hip, one in the neck, and one that fell with the cat’s last resonating breaths. When Shem walked near to pick up the sacred knife, the lion stood back up. But he buckled on his elbows, stood back up, and blinked at Shem with the calm, lucid knowledge of his own death, which he accepted. When Shem tried once again to cut the lion down with the blade, the lion roared, and Shem speared directly into the lion’s eye. After clawing the lance free of his face, the lion lay back down with its good eye to the ground and fell asleep. Shem’s own eyes leaked the water of the mammal. He walked past his father and spoke without looking up.
“I will rest now.”
“Your work is not finished,” said Noah. “Until then, all is for naught.”
“I will gather my strength first.”
And the lion’s blood spilled down upon the sodden loam and fed the root of the vine.
Beside the lamb, they’d dug a hole.
Noah, the sad captain, limped over to that grave mound with a stiffened air made even more venerable now that he’d drunk his potions, and loosened the spade from the wet clay. It sighed, and water oozed up from the shovel mark. I begrudged the beastman’s strange rituals even further, realizing that they were going to vanquish yet another sacrifice to the underworld. What Noah did not see were the three big, scaly birds perched back on the rows of his new vineyard, waiting with their naked, obscene skulls—faces without feathers so they could plunge right into the corpses and not have to worry about cleaning the bloody juices off their jowls. I flew over to wait with them. Alighting, I drew Noah’s attention, and he hollered at us, thumping the ground and shaking the spade he had himself invented, now with a new, invigorated purpose.
We scattered, the vultures rising slowly with big, heavy heaves from their tree-branch arms, not scared, and not even conce
rned, but with a solemn patience that knew there would always be dead things in need of their services. They landed just a few rows back, and I flew up to the busted bulwarks of the ark. What did it matter if the spoils of another feast passed before our eyes by way of fire, or earth? There was always the ark, where I could peck at the last of the putrefied grain stores.
Noah looked down at the lamb. It had been a small lamb, about the size of a cat, but was even smaller now that it was stiff and dry. The only movement around it was that of the flies, which seemed to have multiplied more quickly than anything else in this new world. It was a whirling turban of flies and the soul of the lamb rose with it into the air as Noah walked by. It circled in the air for a time, then swarmed back down on top of itself.
Ham walked up to his father, scowling.
Noah shrugged him off. “These we cannot burn,” he said. “They are to fertilize the field with our wishes to God. We must dig.”
His son only eyed him as if he did not understand.
“Very well,” said Noah, “if you will not help. Though I cannot perform the holy rites, I can still work a shovel.”
Nearby, the Strange Bird of the Sunken Posture pecked sharply at the headless skin, looked up, squinted off into the distance, then tried to needle his beak up inside it.
Noah turned his gaze upward as he paused on the shovel.
Everywhere in the wide bowl of the sky, the clouds retreated and all was a clear, peaceable blue as if this was the sky’s natural state. Everywhere the rejuvenation had begun. Beyond the vineyard, shoots of vegetable life rose yellow and green above the mud. Grasses along the ark’s spilled grain stores were taller and trembled in the new sun. Long lines of songbirds flew back and forth between the seed piles and their new homes wherever they built them according to the needs of their kind, and the winds also carried the fresh pine sap of the forest where they lived. The old hound that had once housed Hookbill the Seer now lay in the ark’s shadow, licking clean her new litter and nursing them as she breathed. The weary bitch’s teats leaked with the life juice of the mammal.