“No!” It stamped its clawed feet. “Go back down! You’re far too big, it is entirely out of the question! The whole affair would fall to the enemy on grounds of unsporting conduct!”
I blinked. In my reasoning, I supposed that if birds could now be expected to talk, it was not too surprising that they talked nonsense.
“I can’t go back down,” I said slowly, as if to a very dense foreigner, “I’ve only just come up, and I am lost.” I paused, wilting slightly under the accusing stares of two dozen birds. “Lost beyond measure. My name is John; I am a priest.”
The crane looked somewhat disappointed. Its fronds drooped. “Then you haven’t come for the war?” it sighed.
“I have no hunger for war,” I answered the crane. “It’s all the fashion in my own country, but unlike fish stew, each nation does not perfect their own recipe. It’s much the same everywhere, bland and bloody, and I have no more stomach for it here than I did there.”
The crane gave an odd avian snort. “You are foreign, and therefore ignorant. It is forgivable, but not attractive.” It cocked its head to one side. “The Rimal is treacherous and deep. You are lucky. Perhaps your survival is an omen. As to where you are, lost creature, well, that is easy. This is Pentexore—but of course, that is like saying ‘this is the world, and you are in it.’ This is the land of the Gharaniq, the great cranes, and we litter it with our feathers. I am Torghul, I lead the charge this year, and I have come with my crane-knights to survey the higher ground before the enemy arrives.”
Torghul stamped the now-sunny ground and screeched; an answering cry ululated from the long throats of the other birds. Their long wheat-stalk legs flushed red in anticipation.
“And who is the enemy?” I asked, if only to be polite.
Torghul blinked slowly, masterfully retaining his calm in the face of such shocking idiocy as mine. “The pygmies, of course! We fight them every year. Miniature men, miniature women, like little dolls—their fingers are so tiny, we might mistake them for worms if we are not careful! They invade our territory in the spring, armored in mint leaves and fossil-filthy amber, waving miniature swords of sharpened antler. They come screaming up over the hill with such a distasteful sound! They say we took a queen of theirs once, and made her a crane—oh, who knows if it ever happened? War cares nothing for factual histories. We beat them back with our wings, our claws, but it is harder and harder, as the years go by, and they grow cleverer while we grow tired. But war gets our blood up, and we cannot help but feel joy when the spring winds blow over the Rimal, bringing the scent of mint with them.”
I sighed, and spoke slowly, rasping in my thirst. “In my country, I remember, I seem to remember, there were endless wars over pictures: some thought it was a sin to paint the face of God, others thought it a virtue. And they met, and fought, and died, and met again, and the paintings came up and down, up and down, like leaves changing.”
Torghul hooted derisively, but some of the other cranes nodded as though seriously considering the issue of iconography.
“There is no silly aesthetic debate here,” Torghul answered, tossing his golden fronds into the air. “The pygmy must be fought, or else the Crane would perish! There is no choice. But as I said, you are much too big—if you fought with the pygmy it would be Unfair Advantage, as you are twice the size of their tallest warrior. If you fought with us they would cry foul for the hiring of mercenaries. In either event the whole business would have to be halted on account of the technicality.”
My whole flesh shook. I wanted no blood, no talking birds, no arcane military lore—only to rest in a shadow and drink cool water. When I think on it now I flush with embarrassment still, for my body’s weakness, then—and later. I said
to Torghul: “I do not wish to fight. I did not wish to fight for paintings, I do not wish to fight for birds.”
“But we cannot let you go,” the crane-general protested. “You might reveal our positions, expose us to despair and defeat, for the sake of a simpering pygmy woman and a bed of mint!”
“I swear I will not. I am chaste; I have taken vows. But give me water and point my feet in the direction of a city, and I will not trouble you.”
The cranes conferred, blue heads bobbing up and down. Torghul finally cried out, clapping his beak again—clack, clack, CLACK. “We have determined that water is acceptable, if you stay well out of the battle, and we will send you on your way when it is done, but for now, you are a prisoner of war, and will be treated as such! Now go sit under the old fig tree and don’t talk—the army will be here soon, and on their heels the pygmies in their preposterous armor.”
I sank gratefully down beneath the glossy brown branches of the fig tree. Green fruit hung above me in crowded constellations. Shade closed over my wooly, grown-in tonsure, and I could have wept for its cool hands on my brow. I plucked a fruit and cracked it open, slurping the juice from the seedy pulp. It seemed odd only afterward that each seed was colorfully painted with the tiny image of a woman cradled in the blue shell of a mussel, her head rimmed in silver. My belly would not hear of examining such things when they could be eaten instead, and so I devoured five figs before a crane, smaller than Torghul and more silver than blue, walked gracefully towards me on legs I could scarce believe would hold the weight of the bird, so like were they to stalks of white grass.
The crane gently tapped the lids of her beak together, a much softer and kinder gesture than Torghul’s loud clapping. She approached, I realized, as a man would approach a wild lion, with ginger politeness.
“I am Kukyk,” she said in a fluted voice, “I have been…” her cheek-feathers flamed orange, “excused from the war. I am here to feed and water you.”
I tried to smile, though my teeth ached and rattled in my skull like rusted locks. The crane ruffled her feathers in a starry display and then, quick as a pelican collapsing into the sea, wrangled me onto my back and wedged open my jaw with her long, precise beak. I fought her and screamed protest, but she was so strong, stronger than a shipwrecked, starved man like me. So pinioned, I had full view of Kukyk as she closed her eyes and worked her pink throat until her gift came retching out of her: a pale mash of fish and fig and mouse and nameless prism-winged insects. I gargled and thumped the ground uselessly with blistered fists, but my mouth was already full of it, over-sweet and over-salty, porridge-thick and thin as water by turns. I could eat or choke, and so like a baby bird I submitted to the crane’s ministrations, and swallowed over and over until she had no more to give. Trickles of the stuff dripped from the corners of my mouth, and my jaw throbbed when she withdrew her beak. I sat up, slightly sick with the indignity—but already stronger, less ravenous and addled beneath the wide fig boughs.
Kukyk sat herself beside me, beaming, quite without any notion of my discomfiture. Without hope of apology, I thanked her; she demurred.
“I am glad that at least you are spared the battle to come,” I said, attempting genteel conversation.
The crane deflated. Her shoulders slumped and her wings made disconsolate gestures in the sand. “I am not glad,” she said. “I shall have to wait all year now, before I can fight. My heart is ashamed, and lonely for my comrades. But it is not in the smallest part correct to let prisoners starve. I have been assured that I will be in the front line next spring as compensation.”
I shook my head. “In my country birds do not battle at all, yet you are so thirsty for it!”
“This is not your country—and anyway, my heart doubts your words. Have you never seen a flock of crows savage a hawk?”
“Certainly.”
“Then do not wonder at us. I daresay you do not make a study of the sociology of birds. All Nature wars with itself.”
“Well, if I may not rejoice for you, I do rejoice for myself, who might have been drafted but for my height.”
Kukyk laughed, a long sound that took a great while to work its way through her sinuous throat. “Would you like to watch the battle at my side, Stranger John? It is certainly an honor, and in this fashion I may not be entirely robbed of the season.”