The Birds of Ghar * The Aviary of Bago stands in a different place on each genre of map to name its location, each species of chart to define one, another, or another of the contours of Ghar. Though small—among the principalities and queendoms, the tribe-lands and the Ranges—Ghar stretches into fractal infinity on the skins and in the voices of innumerable atlases. There are personal maps, relating the Aviary to the north of Mother’s birthplace, while other mothers were born north of Bago’s House: mothers in Ghar have quarreled over the canonized and apocryphal locations of the temple and thus the shape of their land. The points of a compass cannot establish the dogma of fact on such maps; and in reading them, hearing them, and walking them, the eyes, the ears, and the feet trace the slippery contours of their own sensual and subjective truths. There are songs: maps of another breed that call the Aviary an eastern anchor, a southern apex, or a western mystery. In the maps of song, the place isn’t always a house of birds; in the most obscure imyas, the Aviary is an evil place: the roof/door of a subterranean jumble of limbos, purgatories, and the nests of nefarious worms. In the most arcane voice-poems of the Tá’ál-Baiál, it is the navel of the world: all that remains of the umbilical cord, severed after Heaven’s bloody labor. The Shao evokes it as the place in which Iratl hides her breasts when impersonating her brother, and where she digs them up and puts them back on, when the moon is full and her complicated swindle is finished. For Dira Em, the Aviary is a promise of torture; it is—as well—a reminder of the singular promise that she’d break, if given the choice. Her mother, born east of the shrine, has taught her only its meaning on a prosaic, geographical map, and its coincidental agreement with bison trails meandering in the wordless, animal quest for salt. For Dira, the Aviary has always been nothing, or if anything, a religionist’s folly. Now, however… “We might have ridden, Orós,” she says. “We’d save ourselves from blisters that way.” A breeze tickles strands of hair across her left cheek. She brushes them away and swats at the buzzing annoyance of a widget drawn to the promise of salt in her sweat. Whole clouds of them swarm, giving evidence of brackish water, in the easterly distance. “The walk is important,” Orós says. “It’s a part of what I need to tell you.” “I’ve surrendered a whole day for this. Be nice to me. We can go back and talk without getting sore feet. The temple is far, and I’m sure Keb will wonder where you’ve gone?” “Keb knows where I am, and I’ll make it up to you,” he says. It is a light and uncomplicated promise: no burden at all, it seems, for as easily as it wears the rolling baritone shape of Orós’ voice. “I need for you to understand something, and the walk will help, and if the walk is trouble, I’ll do whatever penance you insist.” —But she has heard the chatter of women in the town square: gossiping as they test the freshness of eggplants and pears and outrageous avocados; she has seen things for herself: Orós, it always seems, is at the heart of each hint, whisper, or laughing, salacious rumor. He can say nothing to soften the stone in her throat or dilute the bison salt that stings her eyes with each tear she denies, biting her lip until the threat of blood makes her stop. He can say nothing good today, and her promise to him is the promise of a fool. She curses herself for it, and curses herself for admitting that no punishment she might imagine for him will ever change anything. “Dira. Please. Don’t make a fight today.” There is brutal entreaty in the rolling timbre of his voice. She keeps him locked in the left-periphery of her gaze: thankful to the still-distant Aviary for its role in this moment: a distraction to examine, an anchor for her avoidance. Orós shrugs and the gesture draws her gaze for an instant: long enough to see his hair: like wet sand for its color, cut short, but beginning to grow, to curl over the crests of his ears in near-defiance of town fashion. She flinches, struck by his creamy pallor tinged golden by moderate caresses of summer sunlight. She glances away before tracing the definition of his cheeks. She avoids his eyes, but knows their color, the greenish-brown murk of them. She clenches her fists. The temple, she tells herself. Look at it. Don’t look away. Look at the temple. Look at the temple. It might be easy, to listen to her own echoing command, were it not for the compression of air at her side, and the ghost silence of his footsteps. Her ears embrace all that her eyes deny. Orós: so close to her. She dares not touch him, or even name the thought to do so. Not now. Not now. She clenches her fists until her nails dig into the soft meat of her palms. She tastes salt at the root of her tongue: the urge to spit, the urge to scream and curse. * * * “Grackles,” Orós says, “are like humans.” “Grackles,” Dira challenges, “were a scourge, once.” “They are Bago’s voice.” A sneer. A shrug. “You don’t believe in Bago.” Orós smiled; she felt it, even as her gaze avoided all but the edges of his shadow. The Aviary is closer now. It looms. They’ve walked in silence for a long distance that Dira cannot judge. The temple isn’t far and only a handful of miles name the space between the temple and the town. Grackles. The first word spoken since more than a thousand heartbeats back; the sound of it—though gentle in the warmth of Orós’ voice—is a brutal thunderclap, and Dira is sorry to hear the silence of her thoughts broken. The walk, Orós has said, is a part of what he needs to tell her; and in the way in which he invades her nightly dreams and daily longings, he breaks the thousand-heartbeat calm that has grown in the space between her ears. There is a comfort in the lisp of wind in prairie grass, and odd courtesy in the manner in which Orós has removed his shoes, so that he may walk—with naked feet, like any religionist pilgrim—on the temple road. His soles, Dira thinks, will be sticky (tonight) with tar, squashed insects, and flecks of road-grit. Without his shoes, his steps are silent, and so the wind is stronger in her ears, and the black songs of crows lack the accompaniment of shoes grinding road grit. The songs of other birds, weave themselves between black crow-notes. There are sparrows and sad, cooing doves; there are… Yes! Their near-forgotten songs are there. …grackles! “Whether I believe in Bago or not, does that change her myth?” “She’s returning,” Dira says, stunned and frightened for no reason but the unexpected presence of grackle voices. “Maybe not in the form of her cult, but in the calls of her familiars.” She clenches, unclenches, and clenches her fists in a fight to remain calm. “I’ve not seen or heard any grackles since we were children.” “And,” Orós says. “You hear them now.” “And this is what you want to tell me?” Silence. Perhaps a shrug. Perhaps a nod. Dira doesn’t look in order to see which gesture Orós has granted her. A feathery wisp of milkweed dander drifts just ahead of her, bearing its seed and following the breeze as easily as she walks beside Orós along the temple road. * * * What peace the day might have promised is shattered by a storm of bird voices: sharp, searing, detonations of call, response, and echo. The air is fat and pregnant with the scent of guano, an overwhelming cloy like a sickbed blanket wet with fever-stink, delirium, and the salty ichors of something dredged out of gloomy, obscure nightmares. The Aviary, once Dira’s defense against the sight of Orós, has betrayed her: in a fit of pique, perhaps, for her reluctant entry beside Orós, like some witless, faithful dog. The Aviary is a vast, complicated echo, trapped in the shape of a dome: octagonal as defined by its cracked and crumbling walls…a dome, as seen from the outside distance of more than a thousand heartbeats. But inside, it is dark with spots of light tracing themselves through a fine, near-invisible haze: dust, maybe, stirred by countless, black wings. The dome itself is open at its top, and Dira spots the motion of cottony, white clouds. Niches—hundreds of them—are set into the walls and they were untidy with twigs, grasses, and dribbled encrustations of bird drops. Mounds of nest litter edge the walls at their feet. By daylight, the Aviary is a pale, delicate structure, whitewashed with stucco; from its interior, it is an oppressive, heavy thing: a womb—an egg?—seething with nightmare potential. Bago is a dead goddess. Her temple—home, not ironically—to grackles is now the shelter for a stranger, darker force: a grackle agenda, Dira imagines, recognizing the echoing spray of their harsh voices. Grackles. For so long, Ghar has been empty of them, but now… …now, Dira counts them in the thousands, their ear-scalding language revealing the lie that everyone believes in town. The seed-thieves (the farmer’s scourge) are alive and breeding in the temple of an atavistic, goddess. Here. “I come here to think,” Orós says, stepping delicately to the center of the vast, stinking space. He has put his socks, back on, and his shoes. As he speaks, he unties a small pouch from his belt and opens it. He scatters seed beneath the dome’s uppermost opening. The seed (she cannot name the breed) seems to glow golden and with a warmth reminding Dira of how cold her fingertips have grown. “I come, once a week,” Orós says. “Alone, mostly, but sometimes not.” And where the Aviary denies the town-standard absence of grackles, Orós’ quiet words give a truthful tone to the rumors, the whispers, the veiled, twittering commentaries that seem to trail him through the streets. “You come here with Keb,” Dira says, flinching at the statement and the name she refuses to say to herself. Ever. “Yes,” Orós says. “With Keb.” The flap of wings announces a departure through the opening of the dome, or investigations of the seed Orós has scattered. It is strange that with so many of them, the grackles would remain shy of humans. In snatching her mind from the birds and the dim fantasy of a feathered mob, Dira crosses her arms over her chest. “So,” she says. “Why bring me here today?” “Because we’re friends.” “Because of something else, Orós.” Silence. Orós seems to shrink into himself, or diffuse—breath like—into the light-stabbed, bird-echoing gloom. It is a reflection of everything Dira has pretended not to see for years at a time, but it is here (right beside her and around her) and it reveals itself even as Orós seems to fade, darken, and evade the thrust of her statement. Temples, she remembers some old teacher declaring, created inversions: they are where lies dance with truth. What lies? Hers to herself? What truth? Something cold and inhuman? “We’ve never said anything about Keb.” Softly. “We’ve said plenty, Orós: you have, at least.” “And…?” “It’s enough.” “Dira.” He turns and faces her now, tying the empty seed bag to his belt. “Dira,” he repeats, as if he wishes to touch her, but dares not. “Keb has made an offer to my father. Half-business. My father has accepted it: both halves of it. So have I.” “Another salt mine?” Dira asks. “A boilery,” Orós says. “On the coast. We’ve always talked of going there. You and I. To the coast, just south of the dead cities. West.” Dira shrugs. “We were children when we talked like that.” “I’ll be going,” Orós says. “With Keb.” Rewriting a childish promise, perhaps. “And,” Dira says. “It’ll be all business and buggery, no?” She spits the question at him, afraid of what might happen if she doesn’t. She feels the whip-sting of the broken promise and hates herself for accepting it—so blindly, and so romantically—when it was first spoken by a little boy with scuffed knees and grubby hands. Orós flinches, as if struck. He nods. “Business and buggery,” he says, quietly, and something in his tone is harsher, madder, and far more precise than any tongue-lashing, any heated retort to the venom she has spoken and (now) cannot take back. “And you brought me out here…made me walk all this way to tell me that?” “No, Dira.” For an instant, it sounds as if he will cry. But his voice remains steady, uncracked, unbroken. “I brought you here to see the birds. When we were children, we’d watch them, blackening the skies just before sunset. We’d listen to trees grown loud with them. But as we got older, something happened.” “You discovered boys,” Dira says. “Just like I did.” “The birds got sick: so we said. And maybe it was true. For decades, they’ve been gone. But they’re back. At least here.” He laughs, and the sound is a bitter knot, unraveling in his throat. “And they’re back…so what?” “They’re back, Dira…and I’m leaving in a year. I don’t want to go badly; I don’t want to vanish. But I’m going, with Keb’s bracelet on my wrist and with mine on his.” Perhaps there is more he wishes to say: about the past and the glances—her glances—that he never returns; the closeness that remains, but with an edge of distance wedged in its heart. Maybe, she thinks, he has heard the whispers, the twitters, and the laughter in town and interprets it differently. Maybe the laughter, the quiet, smirking jokes—as he hears them, as he must surely hear them— aren’t directed at him and Keb at all. Maybe it is laughter, twitters, and rumors centered on her and the sputtering torch she carries, even as she denies its existence. Maybe the knowing comments of women at market, and men drinking smear in the taverns are about a future spinster: the town’s mad woman who scattered her heart, like grackle seed, to the wrong species of bird. Salt stings her eyes. Black shapes flutter from their roosts in the temple niches and spiral through the air before exiting the hole at the crown of the dome. “Dira.” “I want to go back,” she says. “Now.” Orós closes his eyes. Orós nods. “All right,” he says. Quietly: almost without sound, it seems. “But,” he adds: “Will you do something for me? I’m selfish for asking, I know…I accept that. But please, Dira…will you do something? An important thing?” Silence. “Dira?” She wipes her eyes. “What?” she asks. “What could I possibly do?” “Visit the grackles. When I’m gone. Will you come here and visit them?” “Why?” “Because when we were children, they were our birds. Nobody liked them but us. And when they left, no one missed them. But I did, and maybe you did, too. They’re back…and I’ll be gone. I’ll miss them again…these grackles. But you know where they nest, now. You can come here. You can see them. And maybe, if you want, you can remember the stories we told to each other, about the black birds with the blue feathered necks and bright, bright eyes.” He drops into silence, for a moment—a beat of the heart or two—and reaches for Dira’s hands. She allows the touch, the first in more than a lifetime it seems. His fingers are warm. His hands are firm, but gentle. He clasps her fingers and strokes her knuckles with his thumbs. She closes her eyes, as if in doing so, she may feel him more intensely. He keeps his silence. “I will try,” Dira says. “But things may change again. I don’t know. I don’t know.” He pulls her into an embrace, his hands finding tension in her back. He kneads it, gently; he softens it, the warmth of his body displacing the cloying bird-stink-heat of the old, weathered Aviary. He ends the hug, tenderly, and punctuates it with the jarring chastity of a kiss. Another. Two kisses placed upon each of her cheeks. “Let’s go back,” Orós says, softly, clasping her right hand. And after a while, they leave the Aviary. As they cross the entrance threshold and emerge into the glare of daylight, Dira turns and glances back inside as grackles spiral down from their niches and their roosts; they peck at the scattered, golden seed Orós has offered them. the end This is one of those stories written in the pinched ours of late night/early morning: something of a lark, in keeping with the avian theme defining this month’s Writer’s Challenge. This is one of those stories that doesn’t actually reveal itself to the writer, even as the writer approaches the final paragraph. I had no preconceived notion of what this tale would be…who would be in it, and even why it should be written. In a sense, it wrote itself, and it is, if anything…a lark, though not in the purest sense of the word. I enjoyed writing it. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed reading it. And, as always, thank you peeking in, and I hope you’re all having a great week.