The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [25]
“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,