Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  Above me I heard a growling pack of wolf-dogs in a fight over a fellow flounder, until one of the dogs had the stiff fish in its jowls, and the rest chased it down the beach. Then I heard the snort of another dog, this one just above me. Instead of fear, I felt the luminous presence of my benefactor Hookbill the Hound of the Two-Colored Eyes, and she too dug me up into the hot slather of her jaws and carried me along the mudflats that went on and on in the surf’s nether mist. The light was still that of early, early dawn.

  I’d washed ashore, out of the dream of a flounder and into my old form.

  A crow in the mud.

  Too muddy to cry out.

  Above the surf, large predators stood guard, unmoving, like the stone statues once set before the temples of humans. At their feet lay enormous white carcasses, preserved in the frozen brine of the flood, melon-sized holes chewed out of the bloodless sponge. You couldn’t tell what beast was what in the dull light. Cats three times Hookbill’s size did nothing, not even turn their vacant eyes from their vigil out beyond the surf, as the dog, my old deliverer, passed right before them.

  Hookbill, now heavy with pups, carried me through a land of utter desolation. Her mange swung in tassels of mud below her swollen belly, and the undersides of her legs kept a steady splatter going. We traveled neither rising nor falling in a land where the flood had wiped out everything and left only a sickly gray humus across the plain.

  Occasionally we’d come across a heron or some great horned animal contemplating all the nothing in the vast, shadowless waste. As we approached, the bird would unruffle its wings and work them heavily without taking flight, the sun being somewhere, for the overcast was brighter in one part of the sky. Perhaps the wing movements were my own. I wasn’t sure. I dozed in and out of sleep.

  We came upon an upward slope furrowed deeply by a single path, and we slogged our way up the mountainside

  · · ·

  I shook myself awake when old Hookbill the Dog Now stopped trotting and bit on me a few times to rearrange me within the gentle pressure of her jaws. She stood looking up at the long pile of the ark and the huge rocks that had snagged the ship and held it fast. Its keel now sagged along the mountain slope, and it lay broken and caved in on top of itself, so it looked even more like a hill of black, shorn trees. Thin columns of smoke poured out through gaps that had formed along the ark’s decking and sides. And in the ship’s shadow, Hookbill the Haunted dropped me below the old bird body of herself still up there on the bulwarks, laminated by the weather and the pitch to a flat, grotesque shape, that of her screaming out the side of her face. Even the compressed old husk of her was growing weary, for this was one of her last acts in the crow realm. As I lay looking up, I could sense her powers taking leave of her own hound’s body and entering into one of her pups, and by the way she’d delivered me—walking slowly with dropped shoulders, setting me on a rock—I’d thought for sure she’d made an offering of me. Especially when the first of the clan to arrive was Mona with her fat little fingers and her laughing teeth. She grabbed me up in her pink hands and groped and prodded me until her huge, gummy smile went flat.

  “Here. Give it to me,” said Noah. He spoke now with a solemn, reverent air.

  “There’s not much left, anyway,” said Mona, slinging the muck from my wings off her fingers.

  Cold, soaked, and crusty-winged, I could do nothing but allow Noah to pick me up in hands grown haunted and prophetic now that he had saved the world.

  “Poor fellow. Run into trouble, did you?”

  I wanted to spit back the bile of the sea he had ushered down my throat.

  “Remember me? Eiyawwk!” But my voice hardly carried.

  And with old Hookbill the Intermediary gone to other purposes, the understanding between beast and bird grew cloudy and easily misconstrued. I cursed. “Why don’t you swim like a fish into oblivion?” But my anger melted as I realized that swimming like a fish into oblivion wasn’t all that bad. I wondered for what purpose I’d been pulled back into the broken, wasted world. My beak pinched down on the shells of soured grain that Noah held out for me.

  “Father,” said the son known as Ham, who took a handful of the grain and blew it from his palm. The wind caught it up and sent it beyond the mountainside.

  “Not much left of that, you know,” said Noah.

  “With what will we replant the earth?”

  “God will take care of that. What do you want?”

  “Look at this creature, Father. Is this not the crow you sent into the flood?”

  “No. This bird became so on its own. Why do you contradict me?”

  “Why should I contradict you, when the truth does so on its own?”

  “Insolent son, cease. After our voyage, our hearts need rest. Not argument.”

  Noah’s grip around my wings tightened, and I thought he might hurl me to the ground.

  “Here. You take it.” He held me out to Nanniah, also heavy with child, who’d come near, hearing the rising voices of her husband and father-in-law in a quarrel.

  In the gentle bones of her slender hands, I heard the lost Mother of Many beating her wings against the ribs that imprisoned her. Or perhaps it was the squirming of the unborn babe, conceived back in the lost world and carried in the strange sea of Nanniah’s belly. Cursed or not, he kicked against her flesh as if to wake and be free. Strange animals, without the humility of an egg. She hummed, and her hands caressed me in the warmth of an entirely remote love, hidden inside herself. It would have been there even if the child were not. To her, I could have been a plaything or a shoe. As she walked, she carefully cleaned the sand lice, grit, and ooze from my tail feathers and wings.

  Although reputed to taste nasty, “crow tastes just fine. It is similar to wild duck or any other wild bird with very dark meat.”

  —KEVIN J. MCGOWAN

  2. Paradise

  As if I were a fledge of the beastman, Nanniah the Madonna of Eden carried me everywhere in the sling of her arm. She petted me, she bounced me, she whispered secrets I could not understand into my scared and wrinkled ears. And soon, like water seeping through my feathery skull, my sea-filled dreams heard something like the warblings of the lost mother again and turned happy.

  The heavy chaff-eating beasts, the goats, the yaks, the oxen, and so on, lived exclusively off the fodder of the ark, its hull busted open on the cliff face and the stores of grain spilled out, discolored and mildewed, already germinated in places. The roots and fresh spears of grass spread out of themselves, yellow, anemic, and thirsting. The mixed herd of livestock stood hoof-deep in the dunes of seed. Their jaws worked like grinding stones wearing down on what was left of the day.

  The giant son of Nanniah remained seated there beside the rope ladder that had saved his life. Round-shouldered, naked, and pale as if still waterlogged, he watched over the activities of the clan of Noah’s with a confused, vaguely suspicious look as though he’d been slighted but was not sure why. He turned his perplexed face to his penis and flipped it around a few times and studied its reaction as would a naked toddler in the sand.

  It was his mother’s job to throw down scrap for the chickens and ducks, who seemed especially charmed by this, or by her, or both. The lap cat was always curling itself beneath the hem of her dress, until Nanniah tripped on the cat and it screeched. In her fall, Nanniah flung me to the ground. I flapped, but smacked hard against the loam, where I found the cat crouched over me, her tail swishing, ready to pounce. I cawed in anger. But the cat paid little attention, shifting her back paws side to side to gain footing for a jump. Here was a creature I’d usually imitate and taunt, especially back in the ark, and now I was helpless, until Nanniah caught me up again into the crook of her arm and carried me into the wreck’s tired catacombs. We entered one of the newly broken cave-like openings, where Nanniah put me into a small, abandoned cage for protection until I could fly. Then she carried me in my birdcage into the compartments where the beastmen had slept during the voyage.


  Except now their quarters were bright with flames.

  The flood had left huge drifts of sand and rock throughout the ark, which the beastmen had formed into pits of fire, and now the smoke disappeared through holes between the black beams and branches. Here and there the pitch melted down from the logs and formed into black pools and stalagmites. From all the preparations under way, I was sure the old Hookbill had brought me back as a part of their offering. Mona came over to my cage and held out a sliver of fish gut between her pinched fingers and thumb.

  “Fatten up, my sweet.”

  She dumped the rest into a bucket thick with slop. Most of what they prepared was seafood—or all of it, it seemed. The place had the damp, salty air of the hemp fishing nets that the Old Bone and I used to pick through on the beastman’s idle boats. Ropes of seaweed were being dried on racks. All kinds of fishes and eels were flayed open and hung from the joists. The head of a lingcod as big as a bear’s lay on a table, its filleted bones strung out, and the tail fin hung over the side. The beastmen must have found all the sea creatures stranded when the slack waters fell back. But from their talk I learned that they were forbidden to eat any kind of flesh whatsoever, sea life included, until the one known as Noah had invoked the Everlasting All-Seeing Whom they referred to as Yahweh and they had made their ritual sacrifice to Him in gratitude for their deliverance.

  Knowing this bothered me with increasing vividness as Mona, Japeth, and their mother, Namah, traded off dipping a ladle into the overturned shell of a giant sea turtle, eviscerated and propped up over the flames, so that the soup within gushed with a steady boiling. Through the steam, I saw the kelp, and the fish heads, and the turtle’s own head and limbs, bobbing in the chowder of its own shell. There were other such kettles of gumbo and broth, and along with the pitch a sweet, salty moisture dripped down from the beams. Mona slurped at her ladle and swiped her face with her sleeve and leered at me with her small, nubby teeth set far apart.

  “Here you go, sweetie. Want some bladder?”

  I looked over to Nanniah for any sign of my salvation. But she only looked down, turning a paddle in one of their many steaming pots. I wished only to eat more anyway, since the more I ate, the more their sharp, narcotic potions mellowed, and in the magic of their sauces I yearned for the nearness of Mona’s stubby fingers and the hypnotic knowing of her smile, which would bring me somewhere beyond this waiting. She held her hand out and I turned my head sideways through the wickets of my cage as if it were a kiss. It had been so long since I’d been anywhere near the black, bird-like beauty of crow wings, and I could mistake any sort of animal warmth as my welcome. As I lay listless from my bout with the sea, I wished only for more oyster drenched in their bloody opiate, so that the beastmen might hurry up and carry me over to their sacrificial chopping block, if that was what they were going to do.

  When Nanniah finally picked me up, she carried the whole cage, and took no notice of me or her family, and left. Outside, she carried me serenely past the tents set up at the foot of the ark, as if a small village had formed in its shadow. Seeing her son—the naked giant—Nanniah placed my cage down on the sand next to him.

  “Keep him safe,” she said, and withdrew into the ark.

  I wasn’t sure whether she had spoken to him or to me, because the giant barely acknowledged me, but wore a cross, perplexed expression as he gazed out over the mountainside and the valley below.

  “Crow,” he said, still focused elsewhere. “Which burns hotter, the fire of bushes or the fire of stars? What becomes of the smoke from stars? If fishes drink, then what is it they drink? Water? Then why is there so much of it? And why can’t I drink underwater myself?” And so on, he kept asking questions as Nanniah approached, balancing a ladle, filled to the brim. “Mother.” The giant grew slobbery with emotion. He cupped the ladle with both hands, and soup ran down his soft, blubbering cheeks. He calmed himself, though, as he finished. “Mother. Why did you bring me here?”

  She put her hand on his enormous, quivering side. “Because I knew you would not let go.”

  “Is Papa proud of me?” he asked. “Is he?”

  “Yes. Very.”

  Because of his size, I could see only one of the giant’s eyes at a time. His grief was like that of a whale, mute and lost within the vastness of his own flesh.

  Now Noah had seen the feeding of the giant and grew fierce with displeasure. He hurled down the object of his toil, a rock about the size of a boar’s head.

  “Can’t you wait?” He yelled across the muddy fields, his anger diminished only by the empty distance. “For even a little while?”

  Nanniah answered with a quizzical look.

  “I am piling rocks for an altar!” he said. “So that we all might eat, without spoiling everything.”

  “Then hurry up,” said Namah. “Almost everything’s overcooked anyway. You know how delicate fish is.”

  Japeth and Mona laughed and ran after each other in a game that involved throwing fish heads, fish fins, and guts at each other. Mona squealed with her bucket and tried to mash the glistening contents into the hair of her mate’s younger brother.

  “We’re starving,” said Namah.

  Noah worked himself into quite a state of agitation, dragging his lame leg across the mud and piling up rocks for an altar. The rocks teetered over his head as he threw them into place. Soon he had a ram with him on the end of a rope, but grew weary of just standing there holding the tether.

  “Shem, get over here. Help me hold this ram. And help me find rocks!” he yelled to anyone else around, which was no one.

  “There are so few rocks in this land,” Noah grunted, head down.

  Soon the three of them stumbled up the rock pile, until the lank Holy Noah, God’s Chosen One, stood poised over the ram, wielding his pockmarked sacrificial blade. He raised the knife.

  But, “No.”

  He shook his head.

  “No, no, no—this is all wrong.”

  He yelled out to the rookery, calling the names of his clan. They pretended to ignore him with wide, spooked eyes, immersed in their activities. His calls grew high-pitched and whiny, like a child’s, until he individually ushered each of them into the service of his offering. “You stand here. And you here.” They allowed themselves to be arranged with the patience reserved for children, as if the whole ordeal was simply to humor him, and because Noah moved so slowly with that hobbled walk of his. Soon all of his family stood as still as statues, it seemed, pitying him, his daughters and wife on one side and his sons on the other, each holding a crude earthenware jar. “Essence of Myrtle.” Noah lit a stock of it and dropped it into one of the jars. “Essence of Pine . . . of Reed.” He called out the name of each spice as he lit it and placed it in a jar. From where I sat, in my cage next to the giant, it seemed as though the stomachs of the beasts were on fire.

  “To Namah!” he called. “Light of the Garden.”

  “What are you doing with that bowl?” she asked.

  Noah was dumping out one bowl of fish broth into another in order to empty the first.

  “We are gathered here—” He cleared his throat and turned his gaze upward, throwing his voice afar, “to give thanks for Your returning us to Paradise. And we shall need hearts and tongues, livers and testicles, and all the sacred flesh of divination to ask for Your Blessing.” He held up the bowl. “Japeth.”

  The boy wiped the sacrificial blade on his own cloak and placed it in the bowl. And Noah held the receptacle with much aplomb as he limped past the two rows of incense bearers.

  Now, all of Noah’s excitement was not lost on the ram. When Noah grabbed the mane of its neck, it began to run. Japeth strained to keep hold of the reins while his father tried to cut along the panicked animal’s neck. The ram ran in circles with the gimp-legged Noah hanging on to it. That was how the ram died, dragging the old man down the rocks. Noah continued cutting up the ram and digging into its flesh until he dragged it back up onto the rocks and set flame to it abo
ve the bed of straw.

  As they all walked away from the burning animal, Ham spoke, under his breath: “Behold this offering!” He made soft gestures, as if gathering the air up to his face. “Sweet-smelling frankincense, galbanum, stacte, fresh spices of the morning, all for a murderous god.”

  Hearing his son, Noah cried out, and threw Ham onto the ground, though Ham fell more in deference to his father, or from ancestral fear, than from being physically overpowered.

  Noah stood over him. “Take it back.”

  “Why should I take back the truth? How would that change anything? Especially what has happened?”

  “You cannot dare to guess at God’s way, nor make judgment on Him. Take back what you have said. Or will you ruin this world as well?”

  Nanniah fell to her knees and cried out to Noah. For days she and Ham had crooned to me and fed me, suspicious of the rage of their father but wishing him back to good health, too. Noah must have forgotten himself in his anger, because he clutched the knife in a threatening manner and his fist shook.

  “What? You too?” said Ham. “I thought that was God’s bidding.”

  “Enough! Out of my sight!” Noah stood and limped away, throwing the blade into the sand. “How could I have made such a son? And how did we ever survive?”

  Now the Everlasting All-Knowing beheld the twisting smoke and the sweet smells of bubbling flesh above the flames and landed not too far away, folding Its black, mighty wings. The Good God Crow took sidelong hops in the mud that covered the valley as far as the eye could see. The sun burned away the milky layers of cloud covering. And in a burst of brilliance, a rainbow broke out over the parted sky. The Magnificent God Crow burst out, too, with a few guttural croaks and caws. It preened Itself under a wing and hopped around, then pecked at an object lodged in the mud. Of course God would make many rainbows after this one, but this was Its first and for that reason perhaps Its most brilliant. The rainbow was so perfect and striking that even cattle stopped grazing to lift their heads. Every creature on the earth turned its eyes upward to behold this wondrous rainbow stretching across the heavens.