“Sorry,” he said. “You’ll need plucking.”
He spoke strangely, with a huge, slobbering accent. Still, the sage old bird beamed with pleasure. And I shrank into the nest, searching upward for a sign.
“Me? Me? I Am.” My Other stood himself up and opened his throat out wide.
“Oh! You’ll do.”
The monster’s beak opened, and down came his curved, obscene horn. With a sickening, slithering sound, the beak pierced right through My Other. Then the raven snatched My Other up with that eerie opening and flew off with him, leaving behind blood-stained twigs and feathers. I remember the heavy swooshing sound of the wings, vwhump, vwhump, vwhump, as he fled.
“Fear not,” My Other called out, clenched in the very horn of his death. “I’ll always watch over you.”
I thought that those were his last words, but as the monster’s beak cracked down on his tiny wing bones, my brave brother cried out to be fed, even as he was carried off to be eaten.
“RAVEN!” came the calls from my family.
“RAVEN!” hollered my father, who tore in from nowhere and speared the monster and kept after him. A whirl of black feathers erupted in the air, and as My Other was carried off in a tangle of wingbeats and cries, all that remained were a few feathers of the murderer, floating down in the fog.
Long after My Other was gone, my family shrieked and called and clapped their wings, going nowhere.
“Raven!” cawed my siblings, in calls that trailed off into disbelief.
“I Am,” they cawed, in the same way My Other had cried it, but with a longing and loss that happens when a bird goes to the realm of song.
Our father came in from his futile chase and opened his maw in a rage, but no sound came out. He cleaned the slime of the raven feathers off his beak, scraping either side of it against the bark. He moved to call again, heaving and furious, but no sound came out. Then he flew next to our mother and tried to calm her, craning his head sideways and crouching low.
“I Am!” she cried and flew in a circle around the tree.
She landed above the nest and cried, “I Am!” gaping down, looking through me and into the soiled part of our nest. She took up a stone of old excrement and threw it in a hard, heavy chunk down her throat. She circled our tree and landed above me. “I Am,” she cried and flew around the tree. She kept circling and landing like that, groping through the fog.
The soul of Aristaeus, also, was seen at Proconnesus flying out of his mouth in the form of a raven; this subsequently gave rise to the invention of many stories.
—PLINY THE ELDER
8. Burnt Offerings
“Surely you are my last lovely simp, for I will not live to have another.”
And though Our Many flew far into the tree of her sorrow, she never neglected her feedings or duties to me. When it grew hot, she’d fly back from the cold stream, moving her feathers as little as possible so that the water might drip from her wings and cool me. When the nights grew cold, she would ruffle her belly feathers down over me as if I were a clutch of unborn eggs, even though I was far too old for it, but since I was alone, it was tolerable, smothered up against the walls of the nest. While my own coat of feathers spread out dark and thick, hers grew prickly and slate-gray underneath and lost their luster in the hot summer noon.
“Oh my last, sweet last, hatched next to the Promise,” and from her horn came sounds that made me doubt the very world around me and believe only in the pale shroud of her song floating between me and the woods, while I sensed My Other come back and sit in the nest beside me and cry out. Her fading loves, drifting in and out of her last season, were sung for my ears and mine alone, one nestled beneath the stray, washed-out emanation growing beneath my eye.
It rained without end.
The water came down in such thick sheets that my mother sat there bathing in sorrow. After the loss of My Other, she had many strange, bewildering episodes and I thought that this overwhelming water from the sky was one of them. She watched distantly as my siblings shook and flapped over the nest, shrieking as if that might empty it of water.
My father spoke. “Oh, hapless bit of birdlife.”
I knew he wished I was My Other, so there still could be the promise of Pure Flight. Fly Home’s feathers were slick and no longer repelled the rain. He nudged Our Many to save me from the water pooling up in the nest, but she only shivered, staring into the onslaught. Their feathers were so waterlogged, their pale skin showed through, and it sickened me to see how much our skin was like the human’s. Soon I had to strain my neck, unable to call or else have the foamy water rush down my throat. The water weighed me down and kept me from climbing up on the nest top.
That was when the terrible whack of Keeyaw’s implement shook the base of Our Giant and moved through the branches. The pool of water in the nest shivered with each blow.
Our Many stuck her head beneath the fowl soup and dislodged some of the twigs and began throwing them over the edge. As the rainwater drained, she spoke. She put her beak right against mine and said these words: “Now. It’s time. I know it doesn’t seem like it. But you’ve been able to fly for a while now. You’re just shy of the wind. Don’t worry. I’ll stay over you until your feathers are dry. But be quiet when you’re down there. Nothing. Not a sound.”
“After I jump?” I felt just like the worm, no feathers, no wings, no eyes, no feature anywhere except the twisting of my guts through the middle. “What? What do I do then?”
My mother leaned back so she could take me in with both of her eyes, blinking with her alert, cloud-yellow love. She slid her beak through my feathers and gave me one last kiss.
“Why—you’ll be able to fly,” she said. “You’ll follow us, through the sky. It’s what you were born for.”
· · ·
So I climbed my way out into the storm.
The rain seemed thicker but somehow warmer out here. I edged my way out along the branch that shook from the grim attacks of Keeyaw, and soon my family called from their different trees.
“Fly!” they called, and it caused a break in the rhythm of Keeyaw’s implement. When I reached the edge of the heavy, sagging leaves, where it would be easier to jump, Keeyaw stopped, and through the spongy fronds, I saw him. He stood there staring at me in silence. My family stopped making their racket, too.
All that could be heard was the rain falling on itself.
In the dull calm, I spread my wings and flapped but still held on to my perch. The branch dipped menacingly.
Keeyaw was still looking up at me when he took his tool and slammed it once against the base of our tree, not in his usually pounding fashion but in anger, with just one arm. Then he threw his maul spinning through the woods. As if he’d suddenly proved something, he stood again in silence, staring at the woods all around him. Then he started to whack at the bushes in the vicinity of his tool. But the going was hard for such a lowly, groveling creature, and he stumbled.