Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  · · ·

  I raised my wings to follow them beyond exile, since I was already an expert on it myself. Perhaps these two, Nanniah and Ham, were better off banished. Perhaps they’d find their own Paradise. On their island of musical instruments they could learn to be more like crows and develop expressive, resonant voices, taught to them by the great mother who just might inhabit the unborn giant growing in the sea of Nanniah’s belly. Crows, with their own voices so pleasing and full, have no need for musical instruments. But after spending so much time imprisoned with the human, I could see now why the beasts might want to invent contraptions that sing, or dream of islands filled with them. Myself, I had only my own hunger and the song of how it had sustained nothing but sadness until then. “I Am!” I sang to the Lost Mother who rode within the banished. “Why am I Am?” I wondered, if I could not fly with my own kind, or free the Perished and fly in the wind that bore them along.

  At least I could hope for a sign from Our Many, and so I swooped down before the beastmen’s path, or landed out beyond their measly horizons, or hopped just behind them, and called out their inept calls. My visits seemed to give them a welcome break from the monotony of devastation, and even brought them joy, the Giant Child stumbling after me with open arms. Still, I grew impatient. They moved so slowly, they seemed immobile. They trod through gray ravines, past formless lands. Their thin trail of footprints shimmered as it disappeared across the floodplains.

  “Will we never get there?” said Ham.

  “Get where?”

  “This accursed land.”

  “Enough. It’s cursed too much already.”

  “Then curse whoever brought us so low.”

  Nanniah clicked her tongue. “Come along.” And her beast quickened, stirring up stones. Soon she hummed and sang quietly to herself and, with one hand, rubbed the soft slope of her belly, and I remembered how she had once cradled me in the palm of the other. I remembered the dark, feathery fall of her hair keeping me warm as she nurtured the sea out of my hollow bones.

  Seeing me, Nanniah would reach into her knapsack and throw seed down to me, and I followed, watching the seagulls and rock doves get to the offering before me. I watched and waited to see if these birds would be captured and eaten, or enslaved into the service of the obtuse beast who’d take their eggs and end up killing them anyway. But no. No harm came to any of the birds who took from their offering.

  In the vast plains and valleys of the wastelands, I flew above the banished family, and strangely enough, they seemed to follow. Without even trying, I led them to water, and easy crossings, and suitable terrain for travel. While Nanniah clicked and clucked her tongue to me, only me. I landed on her shoulders, knowing I could fly off any time. She dropped offerings into my beak, and Ham walked beside us, smoothing down the white feathers of my face with his curled, bony clutches. I thought I might follow Nanniah and her family all the way to exile. But I figured we were already there, and flew off, knowing I could find them again at any time, even on their new island if they ever found it.

  They’ve been able to handle anything we throw their way. They don’t just survive, they benefit. Their numbers increase.

  —JOHN MARZLUFF, “Crow Mysteries”

  8. Ghost of the Misfortune

  For days I flew the depthless murk of the sky and had no home, while my wings worked only to find one. Below me was a stream or a river running through the morass, more like spilling across it in search of a bed where it could form itself. The water ran in such shallow sheets across the muddy floodplains, I couldn’t see where it came from or where it went. Then I heard a sound that nearly dropped me from the sky. I thought it was my own memory, clearing its throat, a murmur sprung up from our own Lost Many’s undying song.

  I looked down.

  It was Plum Black, hopping across the mud.

  I cawed out her name and fell to the mud beside her.

  But she took off, the instant she saw me. I heard only the whack of her wings as she left.

  “Plum Black?”

  I ached in a familiar fight with the sky, and found myself flapping in her path. It could be no other. In a liquid flash of her feathers, she was flying the other way.

  I flew directly in front of her again. She threw her wings up in a panic and took off.

  “Stop!” she cried. “Good Ghost, spare me. I give up.”

  This time she dove straight down to avoid me.

  But I dove in before her.

  “It’s me. I Am! Didn’t you hear me on the ark?”

  “Of course, please. My heart stops.” Her feathers rattled in her panic to escape me, and she pulled out of her dive and flew up high, and kept going, until she was in the clouds, and above them. “My heart stopped back in the ark, too. Why do you torment me, calling to me from the dead, and giving me no reason. Why?”

  “No. It’s me. I’m alive. I Am!”

  “No, you’re a ghost. Like the rest. All ghosts. Left behind in the flood with all crows.”

  We found ourselves above a dazzling whiteness. The tops of the clouds had ravines and mountain ranges all their own. Shifting cliff faces turned to ponds, then slow glacial drifts. Long billowing sheaves of the gaseous ice reached out into the sky as the sun boiled them up and they scattered. It was a spectacular airy earth above the old earth. It had been a forever since the sunlight spread its warmth through my wings while the air above cooled them. The cloudy depths below us moved along with the wind, and took us with it, so it seemed as though all movement had ceased. And there was nowhere to fly to anyway, since everything hung in the same suspension. We were adrift, Plum Black and I, like the drops of rain that formed before our faces and turned into tiny crystals.

  “My eyes—” she said, and Plum Black flew in closer to me to catch a glimpse of my Misfortune, “—my eyes want too much. I am afraid to fly beside you. Maybe the clouds will swallow you up.”

  Up here Plum Black reflected all the hues a crow could ever have. I even thought the pale wash of Misfortune had formed along the spines and edges of her feathers. But it was just a dust of ice collecting on her wings.

  “Didn’t you hear me on the ark?” I asked. “I called to you!”

  “Yes,” she cried. “From the dead. But I can’t follow you to the Tree. I can’t.”

  “No. That was me. I’m alive. And you have no reason to follow me, since I have nowhere to go.”

  “How? How did you survive the flood?”

  I wanted to tell her all about the Old Hookbill’s prophecy and go even further back. But she must have had an ordeal of her own.

  “It would take a Winter Roost,” I said, “to tell it all.”

  “Yes!” she said. “Yes.” And she flew up close. “A Roost, a long Winter Roost, when we’re Crow Leaves, you and I!”

  All of the sudden she swooped up below me and gripped my talons in hers. We each spun around the other, falling, and her beak opened in a screech of joy. We plunged beyond the sun, in and out of the half-darkness of the clouds, and let the weight of the earth spin us around.

  Back on the fields of mud, I cried, “Again. Again.”

  But Plum Black leaned far into my face and gave me quick tugs and clips with her beak.

  “Your feathers,” she said. “The pale ones grow so thick. They curve around your face in a falling pattern. As if a hoarfrost had passed through you.”

  Instead of wanting to hide my face, I felt something entirely strange and new brew up inside of me. A heat rushed through me, but it was tempered by the appearance of Plum Black up close. She looked ravaged and thin from the passage across the waters, making her all the more precious, and the familiar old longing welled up in the hollow of my bones. We nipped at each other. We hopped and sang in the mud and passed pebbles back and forth, which were all we could find in the mud. Finally we found an oyster and broke apart its shell and fed each other the slippery meat. Her tail feathers twitched as she pulled them aside, and she crouched in a sad, shy invitation, twistin
g my anguish with the sight of her vulnerable folds of flesh beneath her crow-blue coat. But just as fast, she flew away, until soon she began pulling away again with breakneck speed, not looking my way but calling out occasionally, crestfallen.

  “Please don’t. Don’t follow me,” she said. “Please. This is as far as you should go.”

  I had to know why but feared the answer, and she cried out anyway, “Gone, all trees, all crows, everything, gone.” But I could barely understand her, or her words. The reason she avoided me was to avoid a confrontation with her new mate, who had traveled across the waters with her on Noah’s floating barnyard. Still, I followed her below the dismal cloud cover and across a formless land made dull by death. We came upon a crag along a gradual slope. And from a split between the rocks was a row of dormant trees. The last trunks on earth stood like mute Giants without heads or limbs, and here Plum Black lit. The twigs of her nest were covered in the bitumen taken from the nest of Noah, and the jag of it looked like something black and sooty, left over from a fire, precariously situated in a shallow crotch of one of the trunks.

  She tugged at a twig of her nest as if getting it ready for something without noting where I landed. So I lit next to her and curled my hooks through the crude, misbegotten tangle. It seemed as if the nest was missing half of itself, and had no soft inner lining, and few smaller twigs to help weave it all together. I looked up—and gone, Plum Black was gone, as always, to where I couldn’t tell.

  And the birds are whispering the elves are whispering to me, I am, I am,

  —JONATHON RICHMOND, “Afternoon”

  9. Season of Plum Black

  How was it that fingerling twigs could sprout from the Giants that had drowned and lost all their branches in the flood? No more than trunks, the last trees on earth grew fierce tiny buds, and these shook their greenling heads in the wind that blew through and around Plum Black’s nest. Gradually the winds returned with their spirits and names. It was as if all the birds that had drowned in the flood were just now rising from the mud to be carried off to the Bountiful Tree. I kept hearing them in the gusts that blew by, just a short blast of birdsong way back in my skull, or a howling through the jagged nest of sticks that Plum Black had stacked and pecked at and sat in with sad wonder. She kept waiting for the eggs to arrive, but seemed trapped already as if brooding for them to hatch.

  “I Am! I Am!” I flew overhead, and lit on a tree, or what was left of one. “Where are all the other crows?”

  “What?” she said. “I’m waiting for the eggs to drop. Don’t rush me. I don’t know what to expect.”

  “No,” I said, and hopped right beside her, and held my beak sideways so she could feed from my offering. “I meant the other crows, the seven clean crows that came with you across the waters.”

  “What?” she cried. “There were none. I was alone, in the dark, in a cage. I thought all crows would end when I died. Until I saw you.”

  “Then why did you tell me not to follow?”

  “This nest,” she said. “It’s so miserable. Nothing like Our Many’s. I didn’t want you to see it. Until it was done. Even now I’m ashamed.”

  It was true; materials for the nest were rare in the wiped-out world. But we found many from the abated saltwaters of the flood, and slowly her nest took on a more hospitable form. Shreds of kelp and other seaweeds lined the nest’s inner bowl. Dried seagrasses served as twigs, along with the limb of a crustacean, here and there. Even a starfish held up in the weave.

  When she flew from the nest, I could fly straight into the dark dream joy of Plum Black. I’d be far off watching her, until she took off and I’d rush to be with her in the sky. She flew ridiculously high, pretending I wasn’t there, and gave a turn of her head. She dove to escape me, and I’d anticipate her moves and fly in her way, until we were together falling from the sky. Landing, we fed each other insects or ocean clams still hiding in the sooty turf of the new plains. We locked bills and she crouched low in the fields of grasses and pulled her quivering tail feathers aside. In a rush I shook the heat of my anguish into her. Then we perched together, and for a moment everything grew peaceful. It was especially sweet for birds who’d finally found an aerie of their own to light together in the branches at sunset and let the best site for a nest come to them that night in their dreams. Except here we’d be long gone by sunset, and there were no trees anywhere. We stared out through the trembling grasses, trying to remember what woods were like. As always, Plum Black worked with her soft clippers at the Misfortune of my face.

  “It’s like a beard,” she said. “Like a mask. Yet it hides nothing. Sweet sadness, it is you.”

  Then as quickly as it had begun, it was over, the feeling of flying back into the lost song of Our Many, made sharp by the grip of coitus, cut off from me, as if half of me had been sawed off and flown away. And we chased each other over the fields of the sun.

  Then one day everything changed. The instant she saw me, she flew off, unable to cry out from all of the food stuffed in her pouch. I flew beside her, wanting to nip and tug on her feathers and have her chase me like before. But she let herself drop into the wind and hung on to it and was carried off.

  And I followed.

  In the cup of her nest was a brood of simps already too many to count, their gaping wound-like mouths all crying to the sky. Constantly she scoured the new earth to feed them, but never brought enough. Her nest was enormous, but her brood was even larger. Following her, I’d land on the pitch-covered nest and be nearly attacked as I lowered my offerings down to them. They nipped at my eyes and feathers as I found a beak, thin and veined like a new leaf, and felt the convulsive tugging of its infant hunger, pulling down on my food pouch as if yanking me inside out as only the ancient Hookbill could do. With others I had to push the food down their pharynx with my tongue. I moved quickly from simp to simp before I was emptied.

  “I am!” they cried. “I am!”

  “Of course, you are. Which one are you? And you?”

  All of the world’s flora and fauna was quick to replenish itself and make the world busy and robust, taking root in the rich humus of annihilation. At the wallows where the flood never left, water parsley, cattails, and all kinds of underwater leafy life curled up through the fanning layers of algae that soon formed a swamp. Loosestrife and brambles reached up over the sweet-grasses to lay claim to the banks and slopes beyond. I flew up over the greening hillsides. To get enough food, I had to return, nearer to the rising moon, on the banks of the nighttime flood.

  Up on the shore, where the waves of floodwater could no longer reach, the trunks of the Giants were stacked up. The edge of the flood was littered with trees. Many still had their branches and roots, and around the rocks and the logs of driftwood, the ocean kept coming. The roar of the breakers was like the flood wanting to roll up onto the land all over again. But it kept pulling itself back down into the nighttime sea. I hopped nearer to the surf, and sang the song of our aerie back to the flood that had carried the trees of so many aeries here to its edge. I looked up into the distance between the stars and wondered if our songscape was still down there beneath the ocean, or if it was up above air again, on the shores of the other side.

  What a perfectly New England sound is this voice of the crow! If you stand perfectly still anywhere in the outskirts of the town and listen . . . .

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden

  10. Lost Lore

  Out of nowhere I found a strange crow chasing me through unknown skies, and he made it clear he would chase me to the ends of the wind. His broad old wings worked and rattled while I pulled far ahead, and when I turned around, he was nothing more than a desperate speck below the clouds.

  “Crow!” he called out with a failing voice. “Crow!”

  He told me to rest my wings.

  Take heed.

  His aerie was far off.

  He had something he had to say.

  The diminished ring of his voice would have been comic if it weren�
��t so weathered and run-down. How could there possibly be a crow older than I? I grew oddly sentimental for the time when Fly Home would overpower the sky and send me off flapping. I made a sudden change of flight, which the stranger didn’t see, and fearing he’d lost me, he flew in the wrong direction and cried out, “Crow! Sing for me. So that I might know from where you fly.”

  I called him back to me and slowed enough so that when I turned around, he could see me. His face showed the strain of keeping up. The long bird paddled like the Old Bone now, with something strange about his size; his strewn feathers were lank and herring-boned.

  He said, “Strange bird friend. We are not much on this earth. Do away with your troublesome thoughts, and tell me, from where do you learn such powers of flight?”

  I leaned over, until my beak was just above his ear, and cawed, “From the Mother of Many, I Am!”

  He nearly dropped from the sky, until he remembered to keep paddling.

  “I Am?” he said, as though he knew me.

  I circled back around, and he dove before me so he could see the Misfortune on my face. Then he resumed flying, without any destination, as far as I could tell. I wondered how long he’d stay this aimless course, wishing only to speak with me.

  “Your mouth darkens with age.” He flew, open-beaked, still in dismay. “Surely you should have a name by now.”

  “Aren’t you one of the seven clean crows from the ark?” I asked. I wondered if perhaps Plum Black hadn’t seen them.

  “Clean? God, no. Being one of seven means only that Keeyaw can keep you in his stables, and sacrifice you, whenever he feels like it. What’s so clean about that?”

  “Keeyaw sacrificed me,” I said.

  “And still,” he flew, exaggerating his dismay, as if mocking me, “you fly to tell of it?”