I was unafraid. It isn’t the same as not being unafraid. I had never considered all the time I had spent, not being afraid, until I nearly sweated with the effort of being unafraid. If fear were scarlet fever, I had only now gotten it, and I walked and shuddered to contain the coughing. I my mind, two narratives played out: in one, I walked past the ditches near the river, and one day they were filled with plants, or water, or impossibly coloured fish, and my fate was not tied to them. In the other, I was remembered as a promising, young man, and the ditches filled with water, which slowly siphoned my skin from my bones.
If fear were infectious, it would have struck down all the animals of the Delta before they beat the first drum in their nightly dancing on the banks.
“You worry too much,” Crow said to me. “All your kind is good for. Even your memory is lacking. You don’t have the vocabulary for eternal promises in your kind’s language, do you? That’s why you’ve forgotten that I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” She tapped the bracelet around her wrist. It was nearly invisible, except that her hair was ink black, and mine red as cliff grass, and wound around one another, they drew the eye. I disliked looking at it. It seemed improbable and destroyable, though it had never given any hint of coming undone, or being torn or tugged apart. “No one would touch this. And no one will have the chance.” She climbed onto the branch above me and tousled my hair with her dust-orange foot.
Crow looked as feral and venomous as the rest of the animals in the Delta, but she was fine-boned and had eyes like a deep sea creature, all pupil, or else all black, so it was difficult to tell if she was looking at you if she did not face you head on. There were other fine-boned animals, but none that looked like a thing to fear between the trees at night. There were thick-boned, brutish beasts as well, who kept their distance from Crow. Some parties just didn’t associate with others. Some parties were safer to associate, recreationally, with than others. When Crow’s feathers began to veil her, there was another animal there to pluck them out. Some feathers came easily. Others drew blood from their roots.
No other animals plucked their feathers, pulled their scales, tore out their fur, or scrubbed their skin. I didn’t know why Crow accepted the pulling of the feathers, and she wouldn’t say. She was the only one who bothered to speak to me in my language. Their language was a mess of sounds. It soundd to me like whatever sound each animal might make in death, they used to speak to one another. I wasn’t certain of the specifics, only that death wasn’t involved, or if it ever were, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between it and the hissy, growling, howling accents I’d heard all my life.
There was no space for me among the animals. There were hundreds of acres of land in the Delta, and never an empty spot of dirt to claim when the animals sat. Never a foot of ground on the riverbank for me. I had seen the other humans, before I had ever seen my own reflection in the river. Following the latter event, I knew I looked nothing like them. The beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed, berry-brown children stolen from cradles and hammocks and basinets. No one had hair like ground tigernuts, or eyes like grey grass seed. Then I grew, and no one had features like broken china, or hands like spindly weed roots. Had I been born to an animal, Crow had once told me, I would have been left for a large bird to take away, while my siblings flourished. She did not say runt, but the other animals said it for her, when they turned away while Crow braided my light hair or touched my gold eyelashes, or pinched my eternally red cheeks. My skin did not believe we were in the Delta. Those from the Delta wore dark freckles over dark skin, roasted by the sun since birth. My cheeks thought I had taken fever, or the wind had chapped them over the course of years.
“Crow, why wouldn’t you change me?” I asked her once, lying on the riverbank, keeping my feet out of the water. Crow, the trickster she was, would let the current take me if it got a hold of my feet. She would let it take me long enough to amuse herself, no matter whether my heart would collapse from the terror or endure it. “Give me eyes and hair like yours. Or skin that doesn’t burn in moonlight.”
“How dull,” Crow said. “Little feather, I worked so hard to make you lighter and brighter, don’t you remember?”
Time had turned the memory into an ordeal that had happened to someone else. My mind worked had to destroy any memory of the world as it appeared from eight eyes, from the middle of the web had made when my brother cursed me with spider form. I remembered Crow, how she had taken me into her mouth and put me in her nest rather than eat me. Enchanted, when the curse broke, I believed she had known of my true form somehow. I had since learned that she had refrained from eating me only because she didn’t know if Spider was watching her and would be offended by her appetite.
I had been a side effect of the manners.
“I think they would prefer me as a spider,” I said. I had seen tricksters and their magic. Spinning grass into gold, rain into jewels, weeping into music. And Crow was one of the most gifted tricksters of all. “They don’t ever come near me.”
Crow turned toward me. In the nighttime, her eyes were pinholes. The night without them was false, the night within them true. “You? The problem here is not you.”
The ditches next to the river were larger the next night. The berth the animals gave them wider. Crow’s arms blacker and silkier. Feather by feather, she was plucked. Black river lines ran down her arms. She held them still, braced, for each jerk and release. The feathers were never left on the ground, but I also could never see where they went. They vanished into the darkness.
The animals danced on the riverbanks, then. The music was red and hot, like the deadliest part of a summer. The river simmered. Rocks bleached beneath the surface. The soil grew warm closest to the river. I stepped backward, avoiding, as always, wingspans and tails. And to stand on cooler ground. The bottoms of my feet ached with the heat. The music spun small glamours. From the corner of one eye I saw tigers hunting across a green plane. Shimmering like a mirage over the water, I saw salmon run, and the rocks that dashed the golden-lit rapids to shreds. Stories came and went, never begun or ended, just the middles.
Crow’s arms had smeared and dried when she stopped dancing. She sucked in each breath. She tilted her head, a habit she had when she was too tired to notice, or drunk on the music. On the other side of her, and the river, I saw one of the holes was larger than the others.
Crow did not always do well with answers. She did not like to give them out, for fear she would run out of them someday and have no more for herself. Instead of asking about the ditch, I asked, “What is the dancing for?”
She ran a hand down my hair, my neck, to my shoulders. I was sweating. Her fingertips stuck to me a little. “This river will grow one day and destroy part of the Delta. Then, perhaps, the whole thing, eventually. For now, we dance to keep the river from taking more than it already has, and to keep the dead from dancing with us. Why? Frightened?”
“Of the ditches. Those don’t look like things of the past.” I gave the animals digging the ditches a look, something as fierce as Hyena, as much as I could manage. “That one is for me, isn’t it? I can already taste the dirt in my mouth, I think.”
Crow flipped over my wrist and held it. My fingers tangled in the bracelet of our hair. Her wrist was flaky with dry blood under it. She said, “I have you life. I already told you, no one will be throwing you into a hole in the ground.”
I let Crow go, into the dancing. Some nights she tried persuasion. Others, she left me here. I plaited my own hair together into a meaningless knot, then unbound it and broke all of the strands. I kept an eye on the ditch, and the animals that dug it. It was too large for any of them.
In the wet days, the Delta tasted of dirt. Now, in the dry days, I tasted dirt. It was on my tongue, in my teeth, in my throat, at the edges of my vision when I woke from nightmares of the ditches. In my dreams I conjured up a scene of a burial from beneath. I saw nothing but the sky very far away, the walls of the ditch much higher than they truly were. My fear grew. In each dream, my fear was as potent as the dirt choking me. How fear grew away from the sunlight. When I woke, I reached for Crow, beneath the low branches of a bush tree, lying next to me. I said, softly, “I dreamed of my dying.”
Crow opened her eyes. She did not sleep, but her eyes did. Now she stretches, and as she did, I noticed her feathers returning already, sparse and course and so deeply black they looked purple. Her hands went above her head. Small birds left the higher branches to stroke her palms. She lowered her hands to her stomach and rolled over to look at me. She held up her wrist. “What is this worth to you?” She bit our hairs and pulled them taut away from her wrist.
I wasn’t sure how valuable something I didn’t want to own could be. I said, “If you want a gift, I already made one.” I showed her the circlet of flowers and grasses I had made while the animals danced. It had flowers from the riverbank that grew so low they were impossible to pluck without entering the water unless the river was running low on a night. Crow kissed the centre of one star-petalled flower before she slipped it over her head. It looked like an array of flowers that had got lost, and grown at night where they should have grown during the day.
Crow plucked one of the flowers from the circlet, so that one side began to fall into her hair, released. She put it in her mouth and smiled with her teeth. “Crowns are for royalty,” she said. “They will all have to love me now, won’t they? Queen of the Delta.”
I put my finger on the petals of the flower, right where it curved over her lips. She smelled of the other animals, and grass seed.
She stayed the same. Her black eyes could have been looking anywhere else. “What’s this, little feather?” She snapped at my finger, then gave it back to me. “You lie with me here and think you can lie with me like a woman? I’m not a girl. I am Crow. What would your people say to know you’ve lain with a Crow?”
“My people wouldn’t even think me a man, I think,” I replied, and took her hand. “And I’ve been away from them too long to care. About what they think, or whether or not you’re a woman.”
“You care. A condition of your kind,” Crow said, slowly and sadly, like she had handed me something that used to be living. But she stayed with me and didn’t stop me when I touched her.
I felt it in the soil before I heard it through the trees. They grew so thickly together, I did not even know the hoofbeats for what they were until they were almost upon us. I sat up. “Someone is coming.”
Crow said, “Yes. Your brother among them.”
She let me rise, then watched me crouch on the side of the river. On the opposite side, horsemen approached. They wore boots that might have never seen the ground, and hands that had never seen the rough end of a chore. They did not belong in the forest so much, they could have been put there by a badly done glamour. My brother was as fair and golden and despicable as I was, the most improbable person among them. He slid off his horse and stood next to the ditches. It did not seem to have crossed his mind that he was close enough to be tossed into one. He grinned a viper’s grin. He had a voice like charred wood. “We didn’t even have to call, and here they come to us. Animals.”
The horsemen laughed. The forest hated their voices. I did not think that they sounded very much like several crows hollering together from a distance. I did not think of how the fear had returned. I was unafraid, and busy at it while my brother mountain again and led them all back the way they came.
Crow rose. The circlet of flowers was a chain that limped over her crown and draped over her shoulder. “This is so dear to me. I’ll wear it all the rest of me life.” She touched one of the crinkled flowers.
“Why were they here?” I asked.
“To undo the dancing,” she said. “To encourage the river to grow. But they can never undo what we’ve done.”
The sun fell behind the mountains. The riverbanks cupped the water like dark iron. There was no music, no happiness or history turned to stone, except for one melody sung by Spider, briefly, where I glimpsed, blurrily, a trickle of water that grew into a river, swallowing woodland and everything that lived in it. The animals didn’t dance, nor did they dig. Instead, they sewed. Grass seed, tubers, still living roots. Every kind of potential life they tossed at the soil on either side of the river. Acres away, something keened. In the way of dreams, and somehow in the way of this night, I knew that the keening meant mourning.
Crow pushed her fingers between mine. The feathers on her arms were still stocky, as small as a baby’s, as stiff as if they’d grown out of her skin years before. “No more hiding as a little spider now. Understand, little feather?”
She would not let me cross the river with her. I stood on the opposite bank as tiger extended his claw and pierced Crow’s throat, too quickly for me to speak. I jumped into the water and began to wade across as they tossed her into the grave. For months I had dreamt of what she must be seeing. Dirt falling and falling over her, until it was just darkness and weight. Her face was uncovered still when I reached her. Dirt covered the wrist around which my life was tied.
I lurched forward, as if to fall into the grave with her. My legs froze. There was too much terror to help her. Where had I learned to be this frightened? I didn’t think I’d ever learned it.
Next to me, Snake nudged my elbow.
“Let him try to drown us now,” he said to me, in the language of my kind.
Crow rolled her head to the side, as she did when she slept next to me, preparing to close her eyes.
Art by Alisha/asmeesh
Text by Lucie MacAulay
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