The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  “I’m supposed to drive ’em off. They’re a real menace over at the lake. They drop feathers that’ll cut you all to ribbons.”

  “Hmm.” Fisher-Bird thought it over. She had no great love of humans, but he’d apologized about the fish and that was a pretty fine thing. And she had even less love of herons, who took fish and frogs and a lot of other critters that rightly belonged in Fisher-Bird’s gullet, let alone magic herons who thought they owned the place. But most of all, she had an active loathing of stimps, who’d chased one of Fisher-Bird’s cousins out of the swamp and had a few nasty words for her when they did it.

  “Yeah, okay.” The chance to get one back at the stimps was too good to pass up. “Best do it soon, though, before they start nesting. Once you get a couple dozen of them together in a tree, cackling and raising up eggs, it’s a problem. And it ain’t right to mess with other people’s eggs, even stimps.”

  “So I should just ask ’em to leave, then?”

  Fisher-Bird rolled her eyes. “Not unless you got a few hours to waste, listening to a stimp insult you. No, they ain’t gonna go on their own.”

  “Well, I can’t get to them. They’re in a marshy bit, and if I walk out there, I’m hip-deep in muck. I try to grab one, they’ll be miles away, throwin’ those nasty sharp feathers at me.”

  Fisher-Bird preened under her wing. “Come back tomorrow,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tomorrow. Come back then. Maybe I can help you; maybe I can’t.”

  Stronger looked like he might argue for a minute; then he closed his mouth and nodded. “All right, then. Thank you.”

  Polite sort of human, Fisher-Bird thought. Worth helping out the polite ones. Particularly if it got rid of those stuck-up stimps.

  Just the thought made her chuckle. “Krk-krk-krk-krk!”

  * * *

  “All right,” said Fisher-Bird, when Stronger came back the next day. “What you want is poison. You got any?”

  “I had a whole bunch of dead cottonmouths,” said Stronger sourly. “But I didn’t realize I’d need them.”

  “Nah, that wouldn’t have worked. That stuff dries out too fast, goes all to lumps. Need something nasty that’ll mix with tar.”

  “I got rat poison back home,” said Stronger.

  “Yeah, that’s fine. Now, you got arrows?”

  “Arrows?”

  “Shit, son, don’t tell me humans don’t use arrows no more.”

  “I guess . . . ?” Stronger looked doubtful. “I haven’t shot a bow since I was little. I got a gun.”

  “Can’t poison a bullet, son. You need some arrows, and you need to wrap the point with some cloth. Then you mix up some tar and some rat poison and dip the points in that. Make it good and drippy.”

  “If I can’t put a bullet in the stimp, how’m I gonna put an arrow in one?”

  “You ain’t,” said Fisher-Bird. “You’re gonna smack ’em with the arrow and leave goop all over those shiny metal feathers of theirs. Then they go to preen and they’ll get a mouthful of rat poison.”

  Stronger thought this over. “Ye-e-e-e-s . . . ,” he said slowly. “Could work. But I still don’t know how to get to the stimps in the first place. They’re out in the marsh and the mud, and I can’t get a clear shot at any of ’em.”

  Fisher-Bird flicked her crest. “You come back when you got you a bow and poison. Bring along a couple tin cans, too. Then we’ll see about getting you your shot.”

  Stronger came back to Fisher-Bird’s stream two days later, carrying a pack and a bow over his back and a metal bucket full of arrows. “These things are nasty,” he said, setting the bucket down.

  “Hello to you, too,” said Fisher-Bird. “The family’s fine, thank you kindly for asking.”

  Stronger sighed. “My aunt’d ding my ear for rudeness, if she was still alive. Sorry, bird. Hope you’re well.”

  “I’m good,” said Fisher-Bird. “And how’s your family?”

  “Mostly dead and the live ones are mean,” said Stronger. Fisher-Bird cackled.

  She hopped down from her branch and landed on the rim of the bucket. (Fisher-Bird never did learn to walk very well, but that didn’t slow her down much.) She peered down into the mess of black sludge, with the arrows sticking up out of it like porcupine quills. “Damn. Looks godawful, anyhow. You got them tin cans?”

  Stronger slung the pack off his back and opened it up, revealing half a dozen empty cans.

  “Flatten ’em out,” ordered Fisher-Bird. Stronger took each can between his palms and put his hands together like he was praying. The cans went flat as paper, and Fisher-Bird could see the dents left by his wedding ring.

  “All right,” said Fisher-Bird. “That’s everything.” She jumped from the rim of the bucket, flapped her wings twice, and landed on Stronger’s shoulder. She had to cock her head over to look up into his face.

  “You gonna peck out my eyes?” asked Stronger, sounding amused.

  “Nah, son, that’s crows. Not saying I wouldn’t take a bite if you were already drowned, but that’d be more in the way of courtesy.”

  “Eating my eyes if I drowned would be courtesy?”

  “Well, you’d hardly want a stranger to do it, would you? Besides, people do weird shit with corpse eyes. Best to get ’em pecked out nice and quick so you don’t find ’em doin’ something nasty later.”

  “I’m not sure I’d be worried about that, if I was already dead.”

  “You should be. Worse things than dead, and a lot of ’em involve eyeballs.”

  Stronger rubbed his hand over the eyes in question. “I am having the strangest month,” he said, to no one in particular.

  “Try bein’ a bird. Now come on; let’s go make some stimps miserable.”

  It was a hot afternoon, and the air was wet and thick with pollen. You could look down the road and see the trees get paler and greener until they vanished into a yellow haze from all the pine trees rattling their cones. Fisher-Bird didn’t much like pines in late spring. The rest of the year they were solid-enough trees, but they got a little spring in them and they became downright indecent.

  The swamp had pines ringing it and then juniper cedars, trying to suck up as much water as they could, and then a narrow channel of open water. Then it all went to cattails and sedge and muck, with little scruffy trees that didn’t do much except give the cat-claw vines something to crawl over.

  “I can’t get very far out there,” said Stronger. “I mean, I try, but I sink right in and it’s like wading through glue.”

  “Yeah, I figured. Wait here.” Fisher-Bird took off from his shoulder and flew across the swamp, looking for stimps.

  They weren’t hard to find. A couple here, a couple there, a few standing by themselves, with their big beaks poised to stab in the water. Fisher-Bird looked with her right eye and saw herons with steel feathers. She looked with her left eye and saw a goddess’s blessing hanging over them the way pollen hung over pines.

  She also saw a whole lotta things she didn’t like. The swamp wasn’t right. It didn’t sound right, and it didn’t look right. There were big bare areas where the stimps had flicked their wings and scythed the grasses down like wheat, big white slashes in the trees where they’d rubbed their beaks and cut to the heartwood. There were ducks floating head-down, gutted by a careless stimp feather, and the water was greasy black with rot.

  It was when she saw a dead beaver laid out, nearly chopped in half by iron wings, that Fisher-Bird started to get mad. But she kept her tongue and her temper inside her beak and went flying on until she came to a stimp so tall, it looked like a scarecrow made of iron.

  Fisher-Bird landed next to the tallest stimp and said, “Morning.”

  The stimp didn’t move.

  Fisher-Bird cleaned her beak with her foot and said, louder, “I said good morning!”

  The stimp didn’t move.

  “Shit,” said Fisher-Bird. “You died standing up?”

  The stimp gave up. “I h
ave not died,” said the steel heron, with icy precision. “I am fishing. Which I would have thought that you would understand, even if you practice the art like a wild boar practices dancing.”

  Fisher-Bird’s beak didn’t lend itself to smirking, which was probably for the best. “Aw, you’re in a mood. What’s wrong, not enough fish?”

  The stimp grunted.

  “Mess this place is in, surprised there’s a fish to be found. Or a frog or a turtle for that matter. Maybe it’s time you stimps moved on.”

  “Go bother someone else, little bird,” said the stimp. “I’ve no time for such as you.”

  “Sorry about your momma,” said Fisher-Bird. “Must be hard.”

  “What?” The steel heron turned its head finally, gold eyes narrowing. “What about my mother?”

  “Just figured you lost her young,” said Fisher-Bird. “Or else she’d have taught you some proper manners.” She studied her claws nonchalantly. “Unless you learned from her, in which case it’s pretty clear she was no better than she should—krrk!”

  The stimp’s strike would have made a meal of a slower bird, but Fisher-Bird had been waiting. She was in the air as soon as the stimp took the first step. The swamp filled up with the rattle of steel feathers and the chatter of Fisher-bird cussing, but Fisher-Bird’s faster than any heron, even a blessed one. She came winging back to Stronger, pleased with herself.

  “Heard quite a ruckus,” said Stronger. “But they didn’t take to the air.”

  “Nope,” said Fisher-Bird. “Didn’t think they would. But they’re killin’ beavers now, what never did nobody no harm, and also they were rude, so now I got no qualms at all.”

  “Suppose we could try to scare them out,” said Stronger, a bit dubiously.

  “Krrk-rkk! What’s a stimp got to be scared of? Unless you got like . . . eagles with magnets or something.” Fisher-Bird got a thoughtful look. “Huh, that’s not a bad idea. If this doesn’t work, the osprey boys owe me a favor. . . .”

  Stronger put his head in his hands. “One plan at a time, please,” he whispered.

  “Sit yourself down,” said Fisher-Bird. “Once it gets a little later in the day, the stimp boys will start trying to look real fine for the ladies, and that’s when we’ll do it.”

  Stronger picked a log out of the water and set it down so he had a comfortable place to sit. Fisher-Bird amused herself picking crunchy tidbits with lots of legs off the end that had been in the water.

  The sun started to climb up in the sky. Nothing much happened for a while, except the sound of carrion flies buzzing over the dead ducks and the dead beaver. Fisher-Bird didn’t like that either. Ought to have been a lot more insect sounds in the swamp, maybe some early pondhawks zipping over the water, but nothing, just the flies.

  Then a noise rang out over the swamp, a metallic clatter like somebody shuffling a deck of cards made out of tin.

  “What the devil . . . ?” Stronger jumped, startled, and accidentally put his log a foot deep in the wet ground.

  Fisher-Bird got splattered by the mud and chattered, outraged, while she cleaned her feathers off. “Krrk-krrk-krk!”

  “Sorry,” said Stronger. “Didn’t mean—what is that?” The noise came again, louder, and then another one. “It’s like a frog . . . a train . . . some kind of bug?”

  Fisher-Bird preened her feathers down with her heavy beak, grumbling. “It’s the stimps,” she said. “You never seen herons do the dance for each other, son? The boys raise their crests way up and then flatten ’em back down, trying to look taller. ’Cept when stimps do it, their crests are made outta metal and it sounds like . . . well, like that.”

  Another metallic crash, like the mating call of rain gutters.

  “Now you take those tin cans and fan ’em out,” said Fisher-Bird. “And you raise them real high over your head and you rattle ’em together and you’ll sound like the tallest, sexiest stimp in creation.”

  Stronger stared at her.

  “What?” said Fisher-Bird. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s like flexing your muscles for the ladies. Except the ladies in this case are magicked-up herons.”

  “You want me to do a bird mating dance?”

  “Shit, son, you put it that way, it almost sounds weird.”

  “But what happens then?” said Stronger, taking out the tin cans and looking at them in disbelief. “Do they come looking for me?”

  “And risk gettin’ shown up? No, they’re gonna try to make themselves taller and prettier. They’re gonna be hopping up and down in the swamp, doing their best jumps for the ladies. You look out over the reeds then, you’ll see a whole bunch of stimps going up and down like jumping jacks.”

  Stronger looked blank.

  “And that’s when you shoot ’em with arrows,” said Fisher-Bird. “Son, I got eggs that would have latched on to this plan faster than you are. Unfertilized eggs.”

  Stronger gave her a hangdog look. Then he sighed, held the cans up as far as he could, and drew his thumbnail down over the short edges, like fanning the pages of a book. An ordinary man might have cut hisself to ribbons, but Stronger had the blood of gods thick and oozing in his veins, and the cans rattled and clattered like a stimp’s crest in his hands.

  Fisher-Bird took to the air and watched stimp heads shooting up all over the swamp, like chickens hearing a hawk yell.

  Stronger rattled the cans again and again, and the stimps craned their necks, looking for the source of the sound, each one worried it might one of the others. Then they stood up straight, raising their crests as high as they could go, and they started to bounce up and down, leaping into the air, each trying to make themselves look like the tallest stimp of all.

  Fisher-Bird circled back to Stronger and said, “Now’s a good time.”

  “Thank god,” said Stronger, shoving the cans into his belt. “Ain’t dignified.” He pulled his bow off his back, pulled an arrow from the bucket—it made a wet sucking sound—and took aim.

  Fisher-Bird was a little bit worried, what with the stimps leaping back and forth, but Stronger’s aim was good. He pulled back on the bow till the wood moaned, then fired.

  Thwap! Tar exploded over the nearest stimp’s neck feathers, and the bird dropped with a yell of disgust.

  Thwap! Thwap! Sometimes Stronger missed, but mostly he didn’t.

  Fisher-Bird winged in next to the first stricken stimp and saw its feathers splashed with black tar. The bird was frantically trying to scrape the mess off with its beak, preening at the feathers like any bird would, and pretty soon the rat poison started to kick in.

  “Don’t feel so good . . .” muttered the stimp. It stopped worrying about its feathers and went staggering off into the swamp, wings trailing. Fisher-Bird cackled. There probably wasn’t enough rat poison to kill something the size of a stimp, but after the dead beaver, she wasn’t feeling a lot of remorse.

  “Is that all of them?” asked Stronger. “I’m nearly out of arrows.”

  “All the boys,” said Fisher-Bird. “Ought to be enough to move them along.”

  Fisher-Bird went looking for the tallest stimp and found it at last, bent over like an old man, with tar rimming its beak. “This is your doing, Fisher-Bird,” said the stimp. “Don’t lie.”

  “Didn’t plan to,” said Fisher-Bird. “Ain’t ashamed of it. Your people’ve made a mess outta this swamp, and it’s time you moved on. Plus, you were right little shits to my cousin, and I ain’t forgotten.”

  “Used a human to do it, didn’t you?” The stimp’s voice was no longer so icy and precise. “Saw the arrow hit me. Some gall you’ve got, claiming we made a mess. You seen what humans do to a swamp?”

  “Sure,” said Fisher-Bird. “I ain’t stupid.”

  The stimp tried to step forward and its leg almost gave out under it, so it wobbled sideways and nearly fell, but its eyes stayed locked on Fisher-Bird.

  “Go!” said Fisher-Bird. “Get gone! You’ve got no fish, no frogs, no food, and the human’ll sit out her
e and cover you in tar every time to try to dance. This ain’t no place for you anymore.”

  “Oh, we’ll go,” said the stimp. “You’re not wrong there. But you’re not as smart as you think you are, Fisher-Bird.”

  “Oh?”

  “Heh,” said the stimp softly. “Heh heh heh.” And then it whipped its neck around so hard that the bones crackled, and Fisher-Bird was just a hair slow getting into the air, so the slash of the stimp’s crest took her low across the belly and knocked her down into the rotting mud.

  Stronger came plodding through a long time later. “Bird?” he called. “Bird? The stimps flew away, the ones that could fly. Bird, where are you?”

  He slid and squelched into the clear spot that had been the tallest stimp’s dance floor, and caught sight of Fisher-Bird. “Bird, no!”

  He went to his knees next to the little limp bundle of feathers and picked her up with hands that were stronger than anyone else’s. “Bird, don’t die. It worked. Please don’t die.” He cradled her in his palm, and her wings hung limp at her sides, a girdle of dried blood across her white feathers. “You helped me. You’re the only one, aside from my cousin, who’s given me the time of day. Please don’t die.”

  Fisher-Bird didn’t speak, didn’t move, just lay there with her eyes closed and her beak gaped open.

  Stronger put his forehead down against her feathered breast and started to cry. And I ain’t saying the tears of a hero with god-blood have any kind of power, but I’ll tell you the only thing I know, which is that Fisher-Bird pecked his eyebrow, hard.

  “Ow!” Stronger jerked back, nearly dropping her. “What the hell was that?”

  “You damn near squashed me,” said Fisher-Bird. “I ain’t feeling all that well, all right? Damn stimp had rat poison left on his feathers. Serves me right for letting him get too close, I guess. More fool me.”

  “I thought you were dead!”

  “Can’t even have a bit of a lie-down without some damn fool crying all over you.” She pecked him again for good measure. “There. You got your stimps cleared out. Your mother-in-law can’t say you didn’t, and the swamp’ll be better for it in a season or two.”