“You see!” cawed my older brother Night Time. “Where is the Tree Eater now?” He mocked the hammering of Keeyaw. “The many scare the one away.”
My older siblings flapped to the different trees above the road, calling back to the beast with names strange and wonderful to hear. While my father barely stirred, his deep-set features seeing all, telling none.
“Camels!”
“Oxen!”
“Elephants!”
“Armies!” my elders yelled over and over again.
“Armies of the beastmen!”
“When?”
“Where?”
“Soon!”
“I’m starved!”
Finally I could no longer stand it. I put myself in peril and climbed up out of the nest.
The beastman Keeyaw was a large behemoth of a thousand heads, all of them staying on the road, each staring at the one before it, mouth open, eyes vacant, feet trudging forward, animated by logic or some other force further hidden and dull. Some liked to just sit above a beast that did all the moving for them. One straddled an elephant laced with tassels and bells. But all the creatures, no matter how big or small, moved under the same dreary will. I could see now why my father liked to watch them so much; they were completely baffling to a bird.
When they came to the shorn tree trunk, they sent a search party into the woods after Keeyaw. They also tied a long train of their own animals to the sleeping Giant, and hauled it away.
Carts and all.
No more Giant.
The herd of a thousand heads glittered and clanked as it moved, and the trees still standing quaked in fear. With its many arms, it carried naked branches with sharpened points. It beat drums and cried out hoarsely and whipped itself. It seemed like an unbearable burden to move so slowly, unable to take leave of the earth and fly, vanquished to grovel, not only in the underworld but along that one deadened path. It took the herd of a thousand heads all morning to pass.
The wait, however, had its rewards. I learned that not all humans fell trees, and that the beast humans’ army overflowed with the rich wounds of kindness. Less than a day’s flight ahead was another such beast of a thousand heads, waiting for the time of the Great Offering, when the ground would swell with their numbers. For three days we feasted on nothing but the flesh of this tasty creature—eye tissue and innards and all sorts of tender delectables. And for days after that, strips of its fat and gristle hung in the woods all around us, hidden there to be eaten later.
One for sorrow. Two for mirth. Three for a wedding. Four for a birth. Five for rich. Six for poor. Seven for a witch— I can tell you no more.
—ENGLISH COUNTING RHYME OF THE MAGPIE.
6. Mark of the Blade
Keeyaw returned.
My Other and I watched the lowly beastman emerge from below the bushes. He wandered out slowly into the clearing, edging his mule along, as if something might rattle them both. When nothing happened, he began barking his commands back into the woods. This time only the boy came out, the youngest of his clan, humming as he pulled on a rope, followed by a tawny old ram. One of the ram’s horns was broken, and the nap of its fur was scraggy and worn.
Keeyaw held the boy’s hand, and the water of the mammal leaked freely down the boy’s face. Keeyaw kissed the tears away, and made the boy stand near as Keeyaw dug a hole into the flank of the ram, stuck both of his hands into the bloody opening, and began pulling things out. Keeyaw acted as if he was showing the boy how to do it. He made the boy hold on to a long glob of gut, and the mass of it shivered as blood ran down the boy’s arms.
Then Keeyaw held out a bowl for the boy, where they placed the viscera along with some fat, and set it all down beside a dried pile of sticks, arranged like a large nest across the ground. Keeyaw then took two stones from his mule pack and scared the fire out of them by striking them together. As the fire took hold, he bled the ram and collected the blood in the same bowl. Then Keeyaw poured the contents of his bowl onto the fire. The smoke twisted, dirty and black. Above the flames, he waved smoking stocks of frankincense and myrrh, then dropped them onto the fire and uttered strange sounds.
Still, the wild, white-haired beast could not leave the woods alone. He hacked away at the vegetation on the forest floor until he stood just below our very own tree and made low, exhaling grunts of approval. He yanked his mule over by the reins, withdrew one of his implements from the mule pack, and dug into the bark. He did the same to a neighboring tree. I didn’t see it; I heard it, the nervous scraping away at the bark above the root.
“What?” I asked. “What was that?”
Keeyaw spoke again to the trees.
He even started to look like a tree.
Suddenly I could understand the mammal’s moans and grunts and strange staccato sounds, though the meanings were mired in his mysterious ways. The thing about his language that I understood most was his insatiable sorrow, distorted and grotesque. He held his thin tree-branch arms out until they trembled, and he addressed the trees with the following words—perhaps he addressed the Tree of the Many Names—he called it “Amen,” then “Yahweh,” and “Neter”; he called it “Jehovah” and “Amon Rah.” And he addressed the Tree in the following manner: “Deliver these, the last of the timbers suitable for a keel, to the long water house, and not again to the Sons of God and the Daughters of Men. Or is it Your plan that the Nephalem should sail away, and not us? Either way. I don’t care. I don’t care whom You choose. I’ll just keep trying. What else can I do?”
Then, wearily, Keeyaw picked up what was left of the ram and tied the ancient carcass to his mule, and he and his son left our aerie, searching the woods and sky.
Raven and some crows go picking berries. Raven eats the berries. He lies and tells the crows that it was a band of raiders that took them. He even plucks out his own feathers and tries to make them look like the raiders’ canoes. The berry juice, he says, is blood from the struggle.
—Raven Gets Caught in a Lie, LOWER COAST SALISH OF VANCOUVER ISLAND
7. Into the Unseen
Gray morning, ashen fog.
In a whoosh of wingbeats came our father. Perhaps this time he’d made his pilgrimage to the Old Bone, because the news had deformed him. His beak seemed larger from having to deliver the horrid word, and the burden of knowing had turned him into a confused, lanky monster, shining like one of our family, only so many times larger, with wings as wide as the trees. One wing spanned our entire nest, and he hurled past us without landing. But the whump of his wings told us he’d stopped somewhere in our tree.
We could sense him in the branches above, waiting.
My Other cried out.
Then our father blew past us again, tumbling through the fog. He turned and lunged onto the nest. The news had completely outweighed his ability to land, and he warped the bowl-like shape of our nest, and Our Many wouldn’t be happy about that.
My Other and I both looked up at the long, curving mandible