Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  9. Ruse

  Big woolly-bearded bird.

  The raven’s black feathers flashed out in the beamy dark. But mostly he lurked in the different decks without a trace, except for the dry rattle of his feathers. He flapped his wings repeatedly as if about ready to fly. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him flap. When he returned, he landed in the full light with the feathers of his trousers flared and his throat hackles enlarged. He tended to his coat, tugging and smoothing and rearranging himself, as if none of Noah’s clan were watching, and walked with that stiff, exaggerated walk of a bird, holding his straight legs out to clear his back claws and throwing his head forward. He could have hopped or flown if he wanted. Instead, he leisurely walked to all the hiding places of my worms and ate them, one by one, shaking my precious stash down his horn. Over and over again he flew through the beastmen’s quarters and perched just beyond reach. He laughed and jeered, especially at the clean farm animals that numbered seven. He whinnied, he mooed, he clucked. “Come and eat. My friend, my furry friend. Eat up.” The raven used the exact words of the beasts as they dropped food into the cages.

  “Father,” said Ham. “I would like to have this creature when we return to the world.”

  Noah hurled a sandal at the raven, somewhere above him in the beams.

  “Shut up.”

  “Shut up,” said the raven. “My friend, my furry friend. Shut up.”

  All day the raven sang like that.

  “But Father, this is a very skillful creature indeed. Perhaps we should not waste this one, not even risk it.”

  Noah held both of his arms to his son’s shoulders. “Ham, I am glad you’re on this ship. You remind me of how I used to be, or should be, anyway. And despite myself, I fear you are right. We should keep all creatures aboard and find some other way to save the world.”

  “Shut up, my friend, my furry friend. There you go. Shut up. Eat up. Throw up. Soup.”

  “We should at least do something to make him stop squawking,” said Ham.

  All through the night, the raven kept at it.

  Then, “Ouch,” the raven cried. “Stubbed my toe. Why’s it so dark in here? Got to do something about that.” He flew into the beastman’s quarters, stole the holy casting pearl, and flew away with it in his beak. “Look at me. Glorious me. I light the way. Awake, my beauties, awake.”

  Unlike the slow-moving torches of the feeding cart, the light from the casting stone seared through the different decks, nearly as bright as day, shining from the raven’s open beak, a magnitude of light unseen by the animals for months and months. The brightness pained the dim slits of their eyes, and they hid their round, black, startled eye holes from the glow of God’s celestial pearl.

  The raven’s proud, sweeping journey ended right where it had begun. He brought the beastman’s chamber back out of darkness and dropped the pearl on a beam just behind me, exposing my hiding place. Then he walked along one of the beams above Noah and his family, walking with his shoulders and trouser feathers puffed out as always, walking stiff-legged, with the exaggerated authority of some ancient luminary at the Roost. He paused and wiped his bill on his own shins and scanned all around him.

  The sons and daughters of Noah held their blankets up before the companionway to their quarters.

  “Now we have you,” whispered Noah. “Insolent creature.”

  They tacked the blankets in place, and Noah made small hand movements to his clansfolk, who crept up on the balls of their feet as if hidden from the raven’s view. There, they waited in strategic positions.

  “Catch me if you can.”

  The raven swooped down before the face of Noah and gave a chop at his hair.

  Then the raven landed right beside me, in my hiding place, three times my size. In the shadows he pushed me aside, just enough for me to be seen. He began extracting the beastmen’s objects that I had cached there when they weren’t looking, objects that were marvels to me, trinkets that entertained me, pieces of glass, clay, metal—bright useless objects of unusual beauty.

  “My knife!”

  The beastman’s anger grew.

  The raven hurled down the beastman’s favorite, riddled with the pock-marks of salt and rust.

  Noah picked it up and began to clean it with his robe as other objects fell, a comb, a fork, a braid of the beastman’s hair.

  “You awful, thieving bird!”

  After all the objects fell, the raven pushed me even farther from my hiding place.

  “Just go,” he said with a nasty hush.

  “Eiyyawwwk!” I had been silent up until then, but I howled, I shrieked, and bit him.

  He speared me in the chest, and I flew backward, nearly falling to the deck until I caught myself.

  I tried to fly back to my old hideout.

  But the raven spread his monstrous wings and blocked my way. Then he tilted his powerful horn as if he would strike me even more fiercely. Completely hidden from the humans, he was silent and cunning, and he craned his head sideways in a question, answered by his own posture.

  “Go now, fodder,” he said. “I’m done with you.”

  I tried to fly free of the beastmen’s quarters, but by now they all had sticks, and one of them held a stiff net of hemp.

  “Careful. Don’t hurt him,” said Noah. “Though he’s the Evil One, he’s still important to us.”

  With the window and gangways blocked off, they cornered me, and, before the night was through, brought me down.

  The use of birds to find land is an ancient maritime tradition. The raven was used by Babylonian sailors and later the Vikings, and according to the old Roman Naturalist, Pliny the Elder, mariners of Taprobane (Ceylon) also carried ravens aboard their ships and set course by following the raven’s flight.

  10. Atlantis

  I thought the net was heavy, but their claws were bone-heavy and quick with an intelligence all their own, apart from those deep-set eyes that sleepwalked, animated by a logic that had ceased taking in the world long ago. Soon Noah had my wings pinned within the hairless, veiny bones of his clutches.

  “He is a deceptive little one,” said the one known as Ham. “He is much smaller now that he’s in our grasp.”

  “That’s because I Am smaller. I Am not the raven. The one you seek is still in the rafters.”

  “Who are you?” said Noah.

  “I Am. A crow.”

  “Father,” said Ham. “This is a crow.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. Both black-feathered birds. Both eaters of carrion. Look. This one is not the raven. Can’t you see?”

  Noah eyed his son, wheezing through his beard with a suspicious, worried look.

  “Are your eyes that bad? Father?”

  “What? What am I not seeing?”

  “That he is what he is.”

  “All right, then. Go on. Check the crows.”

  It took a great long while for Ham to return, and I knew the news would be bad.

  “What did you see?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Ham to his father, looking with lost eyes to his siblings as well. “There were so many blackbirds—brewer’s blackbirds, grackles, red-winged blackbirds, dippers, coots, cowbirds, all manner of blackish-feathered things.”

  “How many crows?” said Noah. “It was the crow cage, wasn’t it?”

  “I—I couldn’t tell.”

  Of course he couldn’t, with the seven crows, along with all the other birds, but I said nothing.

  “And in the raven’s?”

  “One.”

  Noah grunted. “I have no patience for this. Fool!” he said to me. “You try to deceive me a second time.”

  “Still, something is not right,” said Ham. “Look at the white plumes around his eyes.”

  “I will dispatch him immediately, before he works some new treachery.”

  “Father, I thought you might save the raven after all, and not sentence him to the flood.”

  But as Ham spoke, the other son
s unlatched the heavy portal, and Noah extended the hard, quick sticks of his arms.

  “Fly bravely,” he said to me, “if it is at all possible for a creature such as yourself. We depend on you for a sign.”

  Outside all was billowy whiteness. Then darker. I found myself in a deepening cloud as though the mountainside were afloat in it. Streams fell through the cloud stuff, then disappeared into their own noise. Whitewater rapids whirled through glacial ice flows, crystallized since the beginning of time. Waterfalls spilled noiselessly into nothing but cloud. Rocks stuck out into view, then hid again back in their own cloudy beginnings. I was happy to be flying free of Noah, though I doubted I’d ever find anything of the earth, or was anywhere near it. Finally I did find where flood and mountain met, and I followed the rocks and tide rips until I came upon the ark again and rapped with my beak upon the portal.

  The latch opened.

  I flew into it, and found myself inside a cage.

  Noah dragged the cage angrily through his quarters until I was near his table. He did not speak but only smeared what was left of the crust of his dry, dense, figgy bread into a saucer of curdled milk, then, holding the mushy concoction up over his hairy maw, tried finding the opening between the shards of worn, skeletal teeth. The slippery, smacking sounds he made were loathsome, and when he preened himself, he only smeared the cheesy pudding more deeply into the tangled bush around his face.

  He said, “I can see by the fear in your eyes that you did not even leave the mountain. You’ve been gone such a short time. Here. I give you one worm and one slice from my own table. No excuses. I will hear nothing from you but the sound of your wings as you leave.”

  Noah pushed me out the window again.

  The next morning, before he released me a third time, Noah set me down and fed me from his table again.

  My benefactor Hookbill the Dog Now watched him with her whiskery religious face seeing all, knowing everything, somewhat bored. Hookbill the Haunted tolerated the madness of Noah in the same way that she tolerated everything—the hyperactivity of orphans, and sad wanderings, and human food. Hookbill the Hound had the ever-patient eyes of an ancient traveler and so was never impatient to be anywhere, always in between places and home.

  When Noah finished eating, he stood with me clutched in both of his hands and had his sons lift the window yet again, saying, “Do not return until you have found news from beyond sight of the peak.”

  I lit on a rock close by and looked back at the ark through the cloudbanks. There’d be nothing to eat while I was gone. Meanwhile, my wings grew heavy with water. I flapped clumsily until I was out of the lee of the mountain and there was nothing below me but seawater, and the wind grew steadily and blew away the clouds. I found myself beneath a formless over-cast with a sourceless light. I turned around for a glance back at the mountain peak, but it was gone. All was ocean, only ocean, with its icy whitecaps breaking over the deep rollers. The more I flew, the heavier the seas became. They moved like great gray land formations, crashing, receding, repeating, and hardly moving, rising up to die, always renewing, always the same, icy, deep, and dark in their ongoing grayness, their frozen leviathan crashing.

  Other mountain peaks rose up from the sea and disappeared again in the drift of the horizon, trying to emerge up out of the clouds they created and clung to. It was the mountains’ last desperate attempt to get their heads up out of the water. One last gasp before they went under. I tried to fly to them. But the mountains kept their distance, drifting along the horizon. And the wind carried me away until I had to choose not to fly upwind. Mostly I glided, saving what little stamina was left in my wings.

  The fight with the beastmen and the raven still pained my bones.

  Above and below me, the gray-green elements darkened. There were no landmarks, no stars, no guidance. What I thought was the advancement of night was just me flying closer to the sea. Just above the waves, the deep waters absorbed the light. The air between the crests was cold and stung my eyes. Icebergs and their broken chunks were afloat, as large as the largest trees, close enough to throw out a dismal light all their own. For a moment I thought I was nearing land. But no, the ice chunks, after I flew near, turned out to be corpses. Large, washed-pale, and swollen like air-filled bladders, a flotsam of corpses rode the waves as if caught in a tide. I found one I could ride for respite. What kind of creature the corpse had been, I couldn’t tell. It was white, large, and bloated like them all, smelling rank like a swamp in late summer but filled with near-frozen meat and pickled in brine. I plucked at it, a cow, or a human, it was too large to tell, and a venting rush of vapors hit me in the face. I ate. As I did, it began to sink. I flew to another fleshy, gelatinous island. I pierced it easily with my beak. It happened again. As I ate, the beast lowered until the waves washed over it. I survived that fleshy wreck to eat elsewhere. Here I was, the last of the last creatures caught up by the flood, the last of the unchosen, which was what most of the earth was, or had been, all of that gone now, and I going with it. I ate until I was fully engorged and bloated and listless, with my wings too wet and heavy to fly. I got my beak caught between the ribs of one of the corpses just as it sank, and the icy, stabbing cold covered me until I could no longer flap.

  I would have sung my Parting from This Earth, except that the cold salt-water waves would have rushed down my horn and snuffed out both me and my song. It would be such a short song anyway, not varied and ongoing like the Mother of Many’s, which took seasons to sing and looped round itself and colored that afternoon of afternoons when you found yourself basking in the tree of her song. My own song would be shorter than even the Old Bone’s, or Hookbill’s, blunted by their own Misfortunes. But I should have sung it anyway, back when I first entered the ark and actually did part from the earth, and my bird body had sustained itself only long enough to deliver me here to the hurling floodwaters. I opened my throat after all, hoping that the wind might catch my song long enough to send it back to Plum Black, the Beauty of our Aerie, and all the other crows of the ark, so that they might hear it caught up in the spirits of the wind and sing it above their new home of friendly trees, wherever that might be. Amen. My song was just a few bubbles that circled in the swill. The dark gray waters rushed down my horn, and looking up, I saw where the ocean met the rainbow, where God’s good face blew upon the kindly waters.

  I rolled like a soggy leaf in the depths of different hues and temperatures. I remembered the dream that my last meal had had back on earth. I dreamt the dream of a cow, where sunlight drenched the hills, and the succulent juice of grasses dripped from my mouth. When it rained, the water turned into a river that crashed over the valley. I bellowed in fear, and the water engulfed my bovine esophagus, open wide to the sky. Water spilled into my lungs and both of my stomachs and my bowels. I rolled slowly through the underwater ravines, and my enormous hoofed legs bumped into the jags of the valley below. Crabs, sand mites, and schools of tiny fishes took tiny bites from me. An ancient, warted flounder swam closer and studied my roiling tongue. Though both of its bubbling eyes were on the same side of its face, they worked and blinked independently, and the severe mouth tugged on me with its time-old, protozoic hunger. For months that ancient fish swam beside me, like my shadow. I saw its completely white underside without feature or eye, and this was its hunger, too. When there was too little left of me to eat, and the last vestiges of my identity dissolved with my scattering bones, I’d already become the flounder and enjoyed hiding beneath the ocean silt.

  On the ocean floor there were still trees and bushes from the upper world, and I swam through and around them. I swam into an aquamarine village, and in through an open window, and into a human’s hut. Chairs and billowing garments hung in the underwater chambers, bouncing off a wall perhaps once a new moon, gesturing, rolling. I swam in and out of dark-water windows and doorways, down streets, over walls, and between limbless tree trunks still lodged in the mud. I swam through the thicker element with a faint memory of those
things housed in air. While the fine rain of expired plankton shells fell on me without event through the centuries and millennia.

  V. Covenant

  Glad to see the floodwaters gone, Raven scanned the beach and eyed a gigantic clamshell. He walked up to the clamshell and discovered little creatures inside it. When they cowered at the sight of his enormous shadow, Raven figured he would have to soothe the fears of those inside.

  “Come on out here, whatever or whoever you are. I will not harm you. The Flood is over. I am Raven, creator of the world.”

  The creatures emerged from the clamshell frightened and bewildered, but Raven played with the First People and showed them how to live in his shining, new world.

  —RAVEN AND THE ANCESTRAL HUMAN BEINGS, HAIDA, BRITISH COLUMBIA

  We divide animals in the Ark into good and bad, but the crow doesn’t arrive. We make all the male porcupines and sloths sit on the right side of the room, and the female porcupines and sloths on the left side of the room, but the crow doesn’t arrive. The two halves of Yin and Yang do not join.

  —ROBERT BLY, A Little Book on the Human Shadow

  1. Diluvia

  In the end, I was nothing but sea, surf, and spume, bulging and parting, leavened by the moon. Time flattened and grew expansive over the horizon, where I’d just lie and abide gravity and wallow upon myself. Where I was missing, I soon was filling myself in. I was the trackless depth of the sea and the ebb where rain and river stopped. I was the shore, and though there was much turbulence there—the jagged coastline made me gush and spout—I withdrew at the same time I advanced and accepted all things in my deepwater pastures.

  But all too soon I felt a slight annoyance, more like an itch, and it grew into the frantic anxiety of survival all over again. The ocean above my head escaped by froth and runnels and in a rush I fanned sand up over my broken fins. I was the flounder again, caught beneath a disappearing slack tide without enough water to swim back to any depth. There I cowered and buried myself beneath the sand, which would keep enough brine in my gills to allow the high tide, once it returned, to rejuvenate me.