The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  But it helps.

  He counted the syllables on his fingers, while from his dry, hoarse throat, he whispered,

  “I am far away.

  I don’t know how to get back.

  She will come for me.”

  Whispered,

  “It is dark down here,

  My feet hurt and my head too,

  She will come for me.”

  * * *

  —

  He whispered the haikus to the empty pot, to the wooden steps, the dust. The locked door of the cellar. And his body settled against the words he drew out of himself.

  “Nia Imani,

  The captain of the Debby.

  She will come for me.”

  * * *

  —

  Elby, daughter of Jhige and Yotto, and of once-governor Kaeda, Mother of Hunters, was disappointed. “He is twice your age. Of the few punches he’d seen fit to throw, nearly all were drunken, and aimed at his children. You can call Chur many things, but you cannot call him a warrior.” She glanced from the tea she was preparing, at the woman who now sat at her table, and who grimaced as she nursed the growing bruise on her belly. “How did you let that idiot hit you?”

  “I didn’t think he’d do it.”

  “Then you’ve learned nothing.”

  The woman—Taya—dropped her gaze, and bowed slightly when Elby placed the steaming mug before her. She cupped the tea but did not drink it, not until Elby splashed it with some hard stalk-liquor. Her cheeks warmed from the drink. And she muttered, “I’m sorry.”

  Elby grunted. She sat down opposite her.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Taya drank again before she began, the liquid beading on her chin, unnoticed. “We had gone to South Lantern Forest, searched there for easy game. I followed your instructions, the only thought in my head was to break in the new ones with sure victory. Show them the Mondrada patterns, what trees they like to nudge against. I wanted them to find one. But the woods were empty. The animals were gone and I heard nothing but the bugs. I knew something was wrong. I felt it, all the signs were there. So I told them that we would leave. Return some other night, or to some other patch, but Gede…she would not listen.”

  Upon hearing the name, Elby’s grip on her mug tightened. “You were her senior. Why did you not control her?”

  “She was determined not to return without trophy. And she is—was—good with words. You know that as well as anyone. You wouldn’t have known it was her first time in the woods, with her confidence. And the way she spoke…it was a mistake, and it is a mistake I will never forget till my last day, but I let myself be swayed by her. I told them we would go no more than an hour deep.” She shut her eyes. “It wasn’t long until the Butcher found us. When we heard it coming, I told them to run. I did. We could’ve made it. But they were too scared. I was too scared. I didn’t have time to tell them to ready their whistles before it grabbed Rej.”

  “You did not bring back his body.”

  “There was nothing to bring back. It swallowed him whole.” She was very still, apart from the twitch of her finger on the lip of the mug. “It was horrible. But we fought. And in my eyes each of the new ones that night earned their status as hunter. It was a miracle that we hurt it enough to make it run.”

  “It tried to escape?”

  Taya nodded. “But Gede chased after it. We had no choice but to follow. It was that, or abandon her. In a clearing we surrounded the Butcher. If we had attacked as one, maybe, maybe it would have fallen and Rej would be the only one we lost that night, but Gede, damn her. She was not ready, for any of it. She had no wisdom. Just hunger. She went forward on her own, I think to claim whatever glory she saw for herself there. And the beast slapped her away. Like a doll.” Taya smiled, not out of joy, but as if something had broken in her. The face left to determine its own expressions. Her voice hollow. “She should not have been there.”

  “You blame me for that.”

  “I do.” She said this swiftly, without thought. “You knew her best. Her passions. Her youth. And still you—”

  “Your failure of leadership astounds me,” Elby said, interrupting her, and Taya flinched, as if slapped. “I sent out a beginner’s expedition, under your charge, and you return to me with two less your number, no meat, not even an herb to spice a dish with, and a volley of blame aimed at those who were not even there. Gede was young, but I was younger still on my first hunt, and miraculously, I returned to this village alive and unbroken. A dead long-ear in my bag. Do you know how I did it? It wasn’t skill on my part, or luck. It was because I did not have a weak fool for a leader. Taya. I would have let Chur beat you to death in that plaza if I had no more need of you. I would have smiled as I picked up your teeth.”

  The words reduced the woman to a child. Elby waited impatiently for the sobbing to stop. It did, in time, Taya murmuring, Tell me what to do, tell me what to do as she tried to compose herself with the napkin her mentor tossed her.

  “The boy. Tell me everything.”

  Taya breathed deeply through her nose. Her eyes were red.

  “None of us saw him approach,” she managed finally. “After the beast escaped, we found him sitting next to her body. He was naked. We thought he was one of the vile ones from the Eighth Village. We were rough with him at first. I still do not know where he comes from, but it was clear that he posed no harm.”

  “Clear how?”

  “He had tried to save her.” Elby’s eyebrow raised imperceptibly as Taya continued. “Clumsily. He’d stopped some of the bleeding with the bandages he’d wrapped, but the wounds were too deep and too total. He looked more confused than we were. He needed help. That’s what I thought. So I gave him my robe and brought him here. But I think now that was my last mistake today.”

  “Why.”

  “Noro. On our way back, he shared some whispers. A story his mother had told him, of a boy who fell from the sky. That he was an ill omen. That it was because of him the crops failed the following year.” She smirked ruefully. “You’re right. I am a bad leader. I’ve lost two hunters and I’ve cursed the village.”

  “The crops failed because of the poor mists and a hot season. They failed for boring reasons that do not make for good stories.”

  But Taya, who had inherited her mother’s thirst for such stories, said nothing.

  So. Noro knew the tale. Elby was disturbed as she remembered who had taken the boy from the plaza—Noro, and his idiot friends, headed for the governor’s house. She rubbed her temple. Nothing good came of a gang of fools trying to tease out a mystery. She wondered if the boy was even still alive, or if the grunts had by then administered their own form of misguided justice. There was nothing left for it now but to see the results for herself. She dismissed Taya with a wave, and went to empty the pot out the window. The last of the water had dripped from the spout when she noticed that Taya had not left, but stood dumbly at the threshold of the door. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Are you going to see the governor now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone is at Osan’s, preparing Gede for last rites. They cannot finish without you.”

  “I am aware.”

  “They will be waiting for you.”

  “And after I meet with the governor, I will join them.”

  “You will have them wait?”

  “She’s already dead. What’s an hour more?”

  There was a moment that passed, where Elby could read with painful clarity the thoughts on Taya’s face. But unlike in the plaza, with Chur, she did not speak aloud her defiant thoughts; that judgment. Instead, she simply said: “Before we found the beast, as we walked through the woods, she spoke about you. Your past hunts. The stories you told her.”

  Elby listened, without looking.

  “She intended to
make you proud,” Taya said.

  “Is that so.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is so.”

  And she smiled emptily before she opened the door.

  * * *

  —

  The truth was Elby intended to postpone her visit to Osan’s for as long as possible, though even she, the bullheaded sort, did not dare interrogate herself on why this postponement was necessary. Thoughts of emotion—especially those of her own—made her uncomfortable. Whatever went on in her mind she was more than happy to let continue without investigation, or oversight. It was much easier, she found, to simply do.

  It was late in the afternoon when she made her way up the hill. The shadows of the village were long fingers by then, cast by roofing and ropes and spear poles left unattended against walls, and fences. The fingers draped over the road, as if readying to strangle it. And it occurred to Elby as she struggled onward, her lungs burning and her ass eager to sit, that she never liked this place. Her sister, Yana, had a deep and unyielding affection for every detail of the people and the roads they walked, a love that Elby had no access to, and because she had no access to it, assumed this love to be a flaw in her sister’s character.

  She let out a reflexive hum, a spare note of her inner music, as she thought of her. She thought of them all as she entered the gates of the governor’s house. Of Jhige and Yotto, laughing together on the porch as they shared a cup of something strong; indulging in that enviable friendship of those who had known past intimacy and were at peace with intimacy’s end. And Kaeda, standing by the window, looking at no one but the sky. He was, and remained to his last day, a mystery to her. It was the mystery of those who walked in their sleep; an otherworldly logic at play as they paced alone at night, in their empty hand a cup, which they drank from deeply. She could speak to him for hours, about village concerns, about hunting supplies for her people, only to discover, at the end of it, that she spoke only to a body. The mind elsewhere but for those rare moments when he would snap awake, and smile with them.

  No, she thought as she knocked on the door. That wasn’t true.

  There was a period of time when he was fully awake.

  She remembered everything from that night—the sound that shook the walls of the village, and the line of fire in the sky, clear and graceful in its delineation, as if it had been drawn by the steady hand of a sky-bound artist. She had come into her own as a hunter by then, and had led her scouting party into the fields on Kaeda’s command, proudly so, unprepared for what she would discover at the impact sight. The naked child, unscarred, in that slight crater, among the strewn black wreckage. She reeled from profound vertigo, as if she were standing at the edge of a gulf where what she believed to be possible in this world was cleanly divided from the concrete proof her eyes beheld, and was overwhelmed by the dizzying distance between them. She remembered carrying him back to the village. How light he was in her arms. A small bag of leaves. The fleeting instinct she had, during the walk back, to snap his little neck, because wouldn’t it have been easier for everyone if all they had found that night was a corpse?

  Even now, as she waited for the governor to answer the door, she believed the answer to be yes. But as much as she loathed this place, she had a wolfish love for her family, and though she was distressed by Kaeda’s off-putting fascination with the child and Jhige’s learned fondness for him, and was dismayed to hear that Yana had begun to visit weekly to listen to his flute song, still she cradled their desires within herself like the last bright flames she would ever know, and accepted him as a part of their story’s fabric. And now she would do as they would no doubt wish done, if it was them who still ruled this village.

  She would see him home.

  The door opened.

  * * *

  —

  “Shouldn’t you be at Osan’s?” were the first words from Governor Jhoal’s pursed mouth as he stared down at Elby.

  “As much as you should have been in the plaza today to greet the returning hunters. But like you, I assume, I have other things to attend first. Are you going to invite me in, or are you going to make me stand?”

  “What do you want, Elby?”

  She looked at him. Looked at him till he knew.

  “He’s not here,” he said, after an “ah.” “Unlike my predecessors, I am not so…I would not keep a stranger of gray purposes in my home. I had him put away, for both his safety and ours, until things settle.”

  “Put away.”

  “To be taken back out, when matters are clearer.” Jhoal was a tall, broad-shouldered man. She suspected that was why he was elected to this position. It was certainly not, in her eyes, his capacity for problem-solving, or his courage. His tone became gentle—the faux gentleness of a river’s still surface, and the violent currents below. “Elby, please. You really should go to Osan’s now. I know it is hard but—”

  “Where did you put him?”

  He sighed. “The Dawara basement. Under lock and guard. And please do not ask me if you may see him, you may not. Not today. By week’s end, maybe. He was resistant to our questions, and by my judgment, had a look about him that speaks of trouble. I want him alone for a good while, at least till he’s more compliant.”

  “He will not be compliant. He doesn’t speak our language.”

  He shrugged. “There are other ways to communicate.”

  “You cannot possibly believe him a danger.”

  “I know that he has been here before, and that despite being sent off with the best of our labors, he has returned. I think that is reason enough to be wary.” He leaned against the threshold. “People are still recovering from the river murders. Land disputes with the Fourth Village are getting worse. A failed hunting party returned today. Two are dead. Soon the others will be nervous about their food. It is a blessing that Noro brought the boy to me before he was truly noticed. The fight in the plaza could have turned much worse. It has been a hard few weeks for everyone. It will not do to add him to our problems. Not yet.”

  She shifted her feet, uncomfortable from standing in one spot for so long. Bastard could have given me a chair at least. “I have a plan. It would be prudent to act sooner than later for it to work.”

  He held up his hands, palms outward.

  She said, “We both agree he does not belong here. But our Shipment Day was only last season. The ships from above will not return for another fifteen years. None of us want him to stay for fifteen years.”

  “So far we have common ground.”

  “But the villages on the other side of the water have yet to have their Shipment Day. Theirs will not come for another three seasons yet. The journey from here to there is just as long. We must send him there, now, before the ships leave. We must send him with a guide, or with proper instruction, and letters of reference for the villages he will need aid from. He will be one less problem, and you can continue doing…whatever it is you do in here.”

  “That is a long walk you would have him take.”

  “It is a longer wait if he does not.”

  He nodded. And he thought on her suggestion for all of a few seconds before he dismissed it with another shrug. “And who will go with him?” he asked. “I’ll not lose an able body to this expedition. We need every last man and woman. And leaving aside the fact that we cannot give him directions, or spare the supplies, I will repeat the most important point, as I believe you will not hear it: We do not know what he wants. No one visits the same place twice without intention. With so little information at the ready, we set him free at our peril.”

  “You cannot hold him in that basement for fifteen years.”

  “Less if he behaves.”

  “It will be too late by then.”

  “Then it will be too late, and we will proceed with our lives in safety. But today, Elby, we do not act, because we have nothing to act on. I will let you
speak to him. In time. But beyond that I make no promises. And right now, it is only you who are in danger of being late.” He looked at her as if even he could not believe the coldness of some people. “How long will you make them wait?”

  * * *

  —

  It was the smell she hated. It was one of those rare hates that could be traced to one specific point in time, a moment she was changed irrevocably. It was when she was young, a girl of five, and she was with her mother, visiting the halls where they pounded the dhuba into paste—visiting an aunt, or her mother’s friend, she could not remember, could only remember her startled terror when a pair of large and callused hands hoisted her up from behind, and perched her small body on the rim of the long trough so that she could better see the working of the seed. And how she reached for her mother, who was on the other side of the hall, in deep conference with someone, anyone but her, before she tipped over the side, and fell face-first into the mash. Her nose broke against the hard cake of the paste. The sound like a finger snap. And in that panicked and dizzying inhalation, there was a revolt of the body, a complete shuddering, as her senses were overwhelmed by the purple sick sweetness. The curative of Jhige’s embrace not enough to halt the pain or the nausea. Her lips curling, from that day on, at the sight of the pastry come dinner, or at the smell of the fields that infiltrated the village on the hands of farmers, the northern breeze. She loved her family despite the smells they carried of this place. And when they were older, and Yana embraced her after a long week’s work in the mash halls, Elby would grasp her purpled hands in her own, and be overcome with the desire to clean away that stain, that filth, which, to Yana, was nothing less than the finest perfume.

  She smelled the dhuba as she made her way to Osan’s, on the other end of the hill. The halting breath of it in the air.

  Like flowers bursting from the mouth of the dead.