crowcity

Know, my son, that that which is born of the crow
is the beginning of the art.

Hermes Trismegistus, Golden Treatise

first light
The freezing eastern wind cut across the land, turning everything it touched to ice. The needles on the pine tree twisted vacantly in its spell. The sky was clear, without a hint of moisture, and the wind promised eternal preservation from corporeal decay, as if anything caught in its witchery tonight would stand as silent monument ever after.

From the wood an owl screeched, aiming to freeze some small thing in terror. It was a night made for killers, the perpetual balance between predator and prey having swung in favour of the blood seeker. As if the warm pumping of blood about a body might be more easily sensed within the cold cloak of this night. A night that whispered you to hunt, to hunt in the dark wood, to hunt in the flashing city, to kill your prey. A night that had frozen and cracked the veils between worlds and declared open season for the duration of her reign.

I walked the hard foresters’ track that cut an uncompromising route through the wood, and that touched in places perhaps the old tracks, worn through the ages by animals and by man and by something inbetween. The ice blossom bespecked hawthorn hedges shielded the feet of towery journeymen ash and clutches of pine that skulked in greater numbers the further I walked. Creatures rustled in the dense bramble and dead bracken borders. Restless earthly ghosts lit for a moment by the pale frost glimmer, imprinting the darkness with a stray expression that hung there long after the animal had gone.

The thickening trees had softened the wind and quietened its eerie cry. But as I reached their most northern foray, and stepped out into its path once more, it bit into my cheek like a slit-eyed incubus and flew on fearlessly into the darkness, its voice wild and shrill. You may no longer see us but we watch you still.

The thin moon slipped and set and its scant light was lost. The tiny stars of the sky’s heavy cloth glistened, icy beads, no trace in their nature of distant spiralling sun fire. And their light, as it fell to earth, came jagged and erratic, and spun shocked in the end, by the wind’s icy blast, and whistled into the frozen mud and clumped quitch and skidded over the glass-topped puddles in the undulating field to my left, beyond the sagging barb.

Amongst the dazed photons, and eerily lit by them, stood three shaggy haired horses, piebald and skewbald animals, huddled around a mudded hump of hay, snorting steam at the night. Set there as sharded refraction somehow of that other night long ago that haunted from the edges of my memory. When they or their kin had given mount to wild Indian braves and galloped over a different land, fogged by mist and by time and by some other nameless quality. With their riders whooping blood-cooling cries and shooting their fire sticks with a cold fire passion, taunting the cowboys to find the courage to die with a little honour.

Seventeen horses, though it seemed more, reliving in a travelling show the murderousness of the Wild West for young painted Britons with dreams in their hearts and plastic tomahawks in their hands. I always imagined I would join them once free from school’s interminable shackles, but I never saw them again, nor yet met anyone else who had seen them. Even my mother, who had taken me there, had no recollection. And I could have gone crazy, wandering the land, an ear to the ground for any clue, however distant, that they had passed that way. But perhaps they had just all been ghosts all along, ghost riders riding crazy wild ghost horses, putting on their shows because it was more fun than walking the long and perilous and solemn track to Heaven.

I cut through the spinney where in the summer the giant mosquitoes breed in dank lagoons. The old railway embankment is now covered in self-seeded trees and diverse vegetation, the cold iron skeleton of its tracks long since robbed. Rabbits scatter along its earthy bulk. How industriously the earth seeks to cover what it once had championed.

Swards of nettle shine their several icy parts, reproductive organs, flowers, hanging chill and serene and unafraid. I stop and watch a moth lick the nectar with his tongue, chance stranger here to suckle and yet with this act to nourish young life in turn, sprung from the pollen he might loose. Babe, lover, father in one simple act. Obscenity and incest sucking and muttering and sacred in this hedgerow Eden.

The cold has numbed my face and crept into and silenced the mind behind. And the wind has died now, without ceremony, its breath quietly coming to rest in the fields and copses where its motion was lost. Somewhere in the distance a fox barks; the call is not returned.

From nowhere a thick crack of thunder wracks the sky. Clouds are rolling in from the west, so high above the world that the air is yet still down here. Stars and galaxies are washed from the sky, thick and furious cloud the master there now. Another crack of thunder but not a single leaf here shakes.

And it comes. White and silent and blinding, a thin finger of lightning strikes my head clean and hard and I’m held in a world of freezing electric fire, my nervous system painted like an X-ray on the black and grey of the night’s morning. I’m torn from my body and as I float there, my short life forgotten, I hear a muffled and feathery thud ahead of me. I see that a bird has fallen from the sky and then I see that it is my bird brother who is laid upon the path. And then the rains come, wild torrents that return me to my body, and I work my burned skin raw dragging myself across to him until I can hold him to my cheek and cry and cry.

birth, life, death, burial

I guess I must have been part crow for a long long time before I realised it. Sometimes I think I must have swooped down to my mother’s womb on those sleek black wings. Briefly there to sleep, not knowing if I’d ever fly again, not knowing if I’d even remember what I was and how I came to be there.

The knowledge was hidden within me somewhere, imprinted on secret neural pathways, fizzing nearer the surface sometimes in dreams or moods or seemingly unnatural desires, unbidden, unheeded, unknown. The conscious mind, gaoler not guardian to our deeper selves, fears the darknesses legion to its inception. It knows that to linger too long in thoughts of dark and dreamless beginnings will spell for itself a dark and dreamless end.

Slowly, though, perceptibly, almost, those dark waters rose, until the flood brimmed and burst, terrifying and vanquishing and cold. The lightning had struck its early morning death, a grim white finger pointing out my brother as if to say here, here is your kind.

And in a touch laid out upon the stony path by nature’s swift undertakers, that I might pay my respects, that I might mourn, that I might have a fellow soul to wander with through the lands of the dead. For though the rain waters had restored the spirit within me, I was scorched with too wealy a brand of the other side, that stood sore and proud and could not heal. I heard the whisperings now of the lost ones, tattered souls that drifted with the wind, and of the wind’s own ghostly motive source. For in death we are returned to our primal energetic source, and it had plugged me a wire and cast me loose to wander the beauty that throbs and gasps at the heart of our organic soul machine home. And there I lay, raw and bleeding, holding my brother’s now lifeless body, his yet feathery soul spinning and streaking where I could not follow and then it was gone.

He was beautiful. His black feathers ennobled by his death, his little form quite perfect. I held him to my cheek and cried and cried. How could I have forgotten him? How many years or ages had we spent apart? He whom I had ever most loved. I had never known such pain, nor yet such unutterable joy.

I took him to my attic rooms and kissed his face again before laying him down upon the witchily ridged and ringed elm table. And there I took perch beside him, stroking him gently, summoning the courage for what was to come. My trembling fingers searched out each of his feathers in turn; primary flight feathers shaped like blades to cut through the air; wider secondary feathers that swept the winds, holding him aloft; thick tail feathers that had given him his strong crow rudder and his mastery over the skies. I held onto each of them, with the tenderness I had not been able to show him in his life, before gripping the root and ripping it from his body, a black feather mountain growing slowly as I performed my grim task.

Of his flesh this and that scrap sunk into the pot of boiling water, bubbling and broiling and falling from the bone. My bare hands plunged the foaming broth, fishing for bones to be sucked clean, placing them with a ritual reverence into the sun’s cast to dry and harden. For an eternity I sat there at the table, sleepless, holding his bones, each one becoming more familiar to me than my own self, and more precious. Laid white and silent and still in my hands, the bones vibrated morsels of my brother’s world, shivered in my nerves the aerial stage upon which he had fretted and strutted his proud bird life. With a fragile beauty they buzzed a gentle intimacy with the mantra he would crow as he stood his vigil through all weathers; with the graceful pull of his wings as he traversed the mysteries of the mutable skies; with the incredible strength of intent required to ride the more furious winds. My young brother had lived an honourable life whilst we had been apart.

The day was drear and grey as I walked out to the tree where he would often roost. Crows circled the spitting sky, young birds, fellow members of his flock, seeking out insects; fully adult birds carrying twigs and wire and bones, feathers, fur and cloth to neighbouring
trees, to patch up nests that had been wracked by the ruinous winter winds, or to build new ones. Otherwise the world was empty, no sign of the people with whom I lived, no toiling farmers, no wandering deer.

I dug a hole beneath the tree and poured into it the broth that was my brother’s flesh, along with a pipe I had carved out of the fallen bough of a lightning oak during the winter. The world was so still, as if holding its breath at the spectacle of our ceremony. I crumbled moist clods into his grave and poked into the top his twined limb bones, forming an ornate yet simple cross, marking this little wormhole to the Underworld. I stabbed a blade into the flesh of my palm and watched the blood splash down onto the fresh earth.

crow seed

The field is crawling in crows. It seems as if they are being thrust forward in a generative gesture by the land itself. As if, perhaps, some lone Johnny Crowseed has walked this way, a shadowy and becloaked fertility totem of the earth, scattering tiny black crow seed across the land. And there it has lain dreaming of its birth throughout the winter, emerging now in a thick crow crop rabble, hungry for life.

A scarecrow stands quietly amongst them, his white gown and the birds perched upon his outstretched arms lending him the aura of a St Francis, the tranquillity he radiates drawing flocks of crows to him that they might dine on the crop’s unwanted insect visitors, thereby negating the need for expensive and harmful pesticides.

Crow seed, tiny and black, is made of the hardest organic substance known to Nature. It is as tough as steel, yet is also extremely light. Scientists have theorised that the seed is light enough to be picked up in a breeze and carried high into the Earth’s atmosphere, where the toughness of the pod might prove sufficient to carry the seed, unharmed, out into space. Solar winds will then buffet the seed across the galaxy, until it finds itself caught within the gravitational pull of a faraway planet and is sucked down to the surface. Should conditions on the planet be favourable to the germination of the seed, a new crow colony might then become established.

Indeed, it has even been suggested that this is how life on the Earth herself might have begun, with other lifeforms evolving from mutated crow offspring into all manner of flora and fauna over time.

feather fix #1

Head in hands I sat, destitute, at the attic kitchen table. My brother’s feathers lay helpless and hopeless in a barrow mound, undisturbed save for the wind’s occasional touch through the small square window. How was I ever to find and rescue his soul in this vast vast world? I felt utterly unequal to the task and shamefully unprepared. Surely there had been some mistake, some rogue and unforeseen ingredient that had already soured my chances. I was not God’s miracle making magician, could not be, no saver of souls I, unable even to eat for many days now, not knowing what was safe and what was not in this strange and subterranean land. Weak and failing, I was tailspinning a descent into blind despair too early, too soon.

I picked a feather out of the pile and ran my fingers along its length. Its black silkiness was exquisite to the touch and it held yet that deep and yearnful smell of crow. I closed my eyes and raised its winnowing end to my face, stroking the cheek below my eye, first on the right side and then the left, above my eyebrows, the long ridge from right to left with one side, from left to right with the other; along the top of my forehead where my hair meets my face, feeling my ka drawing close; eventually slowly circling the odd eye at the centre of my forehead in a compulsive and entrancing clockwise movement.

Before my closed eyes a dirty white mist began to fractal out of nowhere, an invisible epicentre somewhere between my eyes. The mist billowed a little like miniature thunder clouds on a hot day, a space blowing and clearing at the centre of the tumult. A picture began to form, a scene that seemed to be crafted out of fine gold filament. It was the first real colour I had seen for an age, and the most beautiful sight ever to grace my vision. I made a conscious effort to regulate my breathing, suspending my thoughts as the picture began to move, eerily, as of another, unimaginable, world.

Three crows, etched of gold, of darkly gilded wing, were flying over an arable field, whose crop glistened below with an otherworldly light, swaying gently, shining its life in a gentle wind. The crows beat their wings to a heavy rhythm, in no hurry, possessed of all the time in the world. The view then shifted and the crows were now flying towards me, though apparently unaware of my presence. One of them opened its beak, as if in a call, but the sound didn’t fall upon my ears; I could hear nothing, having vision only. The colour then began to fracture and fade away and, however hard I peered into the mystical peephole, the picture had disappeared.

With the sense of purpose and ritual of a junkie preparing his hit I ran the feather tip across my lips, placed it to one side, and picked out another one with which to repeat the process.

feather fix #2

A crow, etched and animated upon a sheet of beaten gold, stalks the ground, walking backwards and forwards over a small patch of crumbly golden earth, pecking at the ants that run hurriedly about its feet. With a quick look around it shakes out its wings and spreads them open upon the sunbaked soil, calling a casual truce and allowing the ants to climb into its wings and probe its feathers for the wealth of parasites that lurk within.

The crow trembles a little, the ants wriggling on his skin, tickling him with their legs and feelers as they snatch up the hidden parasites and carry them back down to terra firma and home to their subterranean nest. Soon, though, the crow can take no more and shakes any remaining visitors out from between his feathers before hopping up onto the pig trough to splash about in the water.

sunshine

The house where our fates had woven their bewitching cocoon around us had been erected upon the site of the intersection of three ley lines, deep in the forest then, a Medieval lodge engineered to provide the pursuit of game and that of courtly love; it was said that Henry VIII had cast his cap at Ann Boleyn here and perhaps even penned the eponymous Greensleeves for her within or around these walls.

My attic rooms were situated in the Elizabethan wing, but by chance, or by a feat of perpetual self deluding imagination, one of the ley lines ran underneath the length of one side of my bed, and in the mornings I had only to roll on top of it to feel the quickening sparks that flew so high above its underground burrow. A brief bathe in its gentle and tingling glow and the day could begin.

Dawn shaped the figures of a troupe of flies hanging by their feet from the dust laden drape that hid from view the shotgun wounds to the wall. Diurnal activity was heralded in by the act of harrying them from that haunt. With the sole weapon of a lit and smoking incense stick I cut and thrust and parried at the flies, isolating one of their number and swirling it agog until the air of the open window drew it away and I could begin on the next. They would have returned again by the following morning, the same flies or new ones to this fortress’s particular quest, but there was never one that I missed and allowed to remain.

I collected the cherry stones from the little attic kitchen where I had been muddling a way through making cherry icecream, inventing the art afresh, in a hopeless precursory apprenticeship to what would become the apocalyptic saga of the rhubarb and melon and ginger sorbet. Small strands of damp flesh clung yet to the stones, the memory of that pulpy wet touch still evident upon them. Perhaps those pungent slithers would encourage the stones to send forth shoots upon which to bear fruit of their own, would provide the only needful solace as they lay in the graves where I intended to put them.

I could not fault the weather nor the spirit in which it was presented as I picked a track up past the goose house where a fox had paid visit recently and been violently chased off by the inhabitants for its troubles; past the tribe of wild peacocks, a few members of which would always return my screeched call; past the duck who had long since lost the use of its legs and was lifted to its feed and water every morning on a forked stick and back again in the evening and would soon be cooked and eaten, tough and stringy and all but tasteless
and just about entirely lacking in nutritional value though it would prove to be.

Within the remit of the squatting manor stretched, beyond the expansive gardens, a woodland untouched by human hands and feet save my own, so dense and uninviting its network of stringy harsh growth. A woodpecker pair made their homes here, and could be summoned to communication by banging twice in quick succession upon the trunk of a tree with a sloughed branch. He would come with an aggressive air from wherever in the terrain he was at work and tap back, informing the interloper that this land was already spoken for, swaggering closer with each snap of my claim, finally preening and showing to his mate when the sounds ceased, deeming him victorious.

Within the sprawling circle of clumsily overgrowing apple trees stood an oak, solid and wizening, which provided roost to a small collection of jays. I had been a regular visitor to the site for some months before I was aware of their presence, for they would sound the alarum of my arrival with the warning calls of the blackbird, which they must have learned in their youth, and skirt themselves within the oak’s broad foliage, keen blue eyes watching hidden.

The oak would gladly provide them shelter, for their kind had aided greatly the spread of the oak across Britain in the wake of retreating glaciers, burying hundreds and hundreds of thousands of acorns in the damp earth, farming them for their shoots but leaving them to nourish and mature once they had clocked up a year’s growth, swarthy fungus faced pioneers of a largely inimical land.

It was not until an uncharacteristically curious young bird stole a bold peek at me and I espied its speckled head, pinkish brown body and black white and blue wings and tail that I became aware of their presence, a rare sight in such a small wood and so close to human habitation. With time and patience I picked out the other members of its family group, still far likelier to hear a mew or chirrup or occasional caw than I was to spot the curved flight of their long tails and rounded wings.

There was little room here for a cherry tree to establish itself, but I dug in a few stones anyway, here and there, scattered in the barer parts of the thick and eager vegetation, hoping that this secret dell would not also spring forth an axe wielding American president to endanger the life of a matured form. In time, perhaps, the jays’ descendants would have a new fruit upon their doorstep.

I took my wanderings further afield; I would be gone all day now and well into the night. Remember your promise, came the wind’s entreaty, kind now or mocking, I could not know. I padded far over the pasture lands, far over the fields glowing with the seductive flowers that would be fruit, and wherever I walked or sheltered or stopped for a beneficent smoke from my pouch the wind’s voice reached me, whether through its own whistling or its shuffling of available leaves or its inspiration upon the feathered minstrels who marked my way. My mind would be clearing and content when its intrusion would come again, allowing me no respite from its will. Take the sword and remember your promise.

And sometimes comes the stirring - where the lonely bird flies - on the breezes of the evening - under darkening silver skies.

I was well beyond the three days recommended for the completion of my quest anywhere in the world where the memory of these things still lingers, well beyond those three short allocated days, a week at most, during which time the rescue of my brother’s soul was still a feasible option. Much as I walked against the tide of the time and planted my little cherry stones, turning my fate, I only wished I could believe, into that of giver of life, none of these seeds would germinate, none force an inquisitive green periscope up through the darkness to thread a view to the sunshine and life above. They could only lie in their beds and rot. Everywhere I walked was only death and fear and suffering.

Feathered kills lay here and there, the menacing drone of chainsaws and distant traffic, a dead badger deserted by its parasites and even by itself. Dead dolls danced in the darkness, their visages blank and empty and incapable of change, the patterns of their movement contrary to my will. And in the whole world, that bubble of organic destiny and design, it seemed to me that there was not one single recorded event that gave hope and reason for perseverance to my intent, nothing to fall upon when all paths were clouded in darkness. No whispers or rumours of a girl who had ever rescued her crow brother’s soul from any Netherworld, and I struggled against the tide all the more, near to exhaustion now, but still I could not stop. My persistence hatched only havoc, as my actions and thoughts became translated into the material language of causality. At every juncture I had to choose whether to continue to cause this random suffering in the dumb world around me, waiting for a miracle, or whether on balance the utilitarian way would be to give up on my brother and myself. The thought of with one thrust of a blade to my heart ending it beckoned like a siren’s song, but my obstinacy and pathological optimism held me tight to the prow of my by now mostly mechanical intent.

bronze warrior bird

The day was surprisingly bright, the colours unusually vivid. Yet I had been walking the long white track, staring at the ground, lulled into a light hypnosis by the regular tramping of my feet, for a time before I thought to look around at the sea green fields that surrounded me. The vast yellow sun had netted everything in its sheen, its aqueous, slippery light puddling everywhere.

I appeared to be approaching a tiny hamlet. A little church spire poked up, fashioned from chicken wire twisted all around itself, a creeping and luminous carniverous plant picking a slow ascent. Two belisha beacon sentries flashed dutiful attention. The neon green and orange stripes of a symbiotic zebra crossing basked like sunning snakes across the threading track.

A kid came running towards me. He was dressed in a creased and faded Czarist military uniform, his hair combed harshly about his serious face. He was probably about ten.

“They’re waiting for you in the tea shop. They said you’d come. You’ll have to hurry though - we don’t have much time.” He was tugging on my sleeve and it seemed easier to go with him.

They were gathered outside around a fountain. Their worried faces became more purposeful when they saw me appear and they chattered quickly amongst themselves, glancing up at me every few seconds. Eventually one of them stepped out in my direction. His face was square and ruddy, lending him every bit the look of a man of the land.

“I’ll take you to him,” he said to me. “It’s not much further.”

We walked side by side in an expectant silence along the track as it twisted and turned through the hamlet, past the grey and dull brown houses and beyond, towards a wooden barn and an old elm tree. It was the only tree apparent in all that land.

“He’s around here somewhere. He does wander but never far.”

A figure stepped vacantly out from behind the barn and stood beneath the tree. Roughly the same height as myself, he was covered from head to foot in an amazing bronze outfit, a suit of armour almost, shaped to fit his body perfectly. His legs were long and spindly, his little chest quite pathetic. His arms hung loosely at his sides, a black cloak draped around his shoulders.

He was wearing a bronze bird mask, a full face helmet, completely covering his head and face. It had taken a bad dent to one side. He stared out past me with deep black orbs from either side of his huge bronze beak.

“We found him like this, over there,” said the man, gesturing vaguely in a direction that meant nothing to me. “Standing there, like that, with those eyes that gaze at nothing.”

“I’ll fetch someone,” I suggested. “A doctor.”

“No,” said the man, regarding me oddly. “Only you can help him.”

I felt a dim panic rising inside me.

“But I don’t know what to do.”

“You will,” was his disconcerting reply.

And with that he turned and walked away.

The birdman’s outfit was stunning, unlike anything in the picture books of history, but perhaps not such a stranger to the geometric and creative truth of dreams.

“How did you dent your helmet?” I asked him gently, but he didn’t respond. I moved a step closer, to no effect, and a step closer still. He didn’t seem to register that I was there.

“You poor gorgeous thing,” I whispered, lifting my hand to his head. The bronze felt warm to the touch, had perhaps been tongued by the sun. I ran my fingers along the weird line of symbols that ran around his helmet. Leaning forwards I kissed him on the forehead. He fell into my arms, barely weighing a thing, and I held him close and tight.

I sat down with my back to the tree trunk and supported him with a raised knee. His head fell onto my chest, and I held him there, under the tree, stroking him, kissing him, whispering to him how much I loved him, watching his wide black eyes gaze out at nothing. Oh my brother! You have marked your trail with this piece of you, dropped like a lace handkerchief along the way. You do exist! And you are more noble and more beautiful than ever I could have imagined. And he purred softly with a gentle click click as I stroked his soft exposed throat with trembling fingers and rested my head on his warm bronze. And for all the emotion I fell asleep, awaking to cold sunlight peeping in through the attic curtains.

Hurriedly I cleared the shredded paper from the table, replacing it with the salt mill. My knife was pointing off to the northwest, and I aligned it back to north. The feathers had spent long enough wandering like vagrants around the table. I wrapped them in silk and lowered them into the waiting wooden chest with its happy grinning skulls, where they lay content beside my few most precious things.

I was getting so tired of the objects in my room causing this constant interference to the attic’s karma, gathering wherever and with whatever pieces they would, aggregating their power, turning the events in a larger world which was unaware or acceptant of their
conspiratorial assemblies. Trying to control their generally devious collective will made it hard work living up here. But then perhaps I was crediting them with a freedom they may simply not possess, for they could perform their tasks just as well as zombie automatons of a mean lord. Clockwork devices controlled by some remote mechanism or programmed at the moment of their manufacture to run out their lives to a predetermined pattern. Whichever were the case, moving around arranging themselves in relation to each other was the only way they had of working their edicts and voicing their opinions on the aesthetics of their communal destiny, and it did beat those dark years of having no intelligence around me at all.

With a sigh I lifted the datura plant to her morning spot, facing east. She had started demanding that she follow the sun from window to window throughout the day, and truth is I was too scared of her to disobey.

the crow family

The crow family is thought to consist of the most highly evolved of birds, since they are remarkably adaptable to changes in their environment. It is no surprise, then, that this is a global family, with members as diverse as the shadowy folkloric raven, the artistic bower bird, and even the birds of paradise. It is likely that the crows originated in Asia, possibly evolving from a jay-like ancestor.

Britain is home to four genera of crow - namely Corvus, which includes the raven, the carrion and hooded crows, the rook and the jackdaw; Pyrrhocorax, our representative being the red-billed chough; Pica, the magpie; and Garrulus, the jay.

The earliest remains of crows found in Britain were in Norfolk and Suffolk, dating from the warm Cromerian interglacial period of 500,000-600,000 years ago, when they would have lived alongside mastodons, extinct kinds of horse, cave lions and forest rhinoceros. In the Middle to Upper Pleistocene, about 100,000 years ago, there is evidence that choughs lived in Devon and the Gower Peninsula in South Wales, and that magpies then lived in County Clare, later becoming extinct in Ireland and recolonizing much more recently.

Remains of jays found in Yorkshire suggest that they were taken as food by Middle Stone Age hunters. Carrion crow remains have been discovered at the sites of the Glastonbury lake village of about 250 BC, although it is unclear whether their function there was as food, pet or oracle.

The carrion eating species of crow, particularly the raven, rook, the carrion crow, hooded crow and the magpie, developed in the Middle Ages a sinister reputation - if indeed they did not already have one - by feasting on the bodies left on the battleground, and for being no strangers to the fruits of the gallows.

The crow in its various forms had been an important character in myth and folklore during Celtic times. Morrigan, the triple goddess of War, Fate and Death, was possessed of the three aspects of Nemain (Frenzy), Badb Catha (Battle Raven) and Macha (Crow). As a shapeshifter she could turn at will into a raven, hooded or carrion crow. In this guise she would often watch over the battlefield, from which vantage point she might alter the course of the battle with her magic, encouraging warriors to warp into battle frenzy.

The Celts kept a number of crows as sacred birds, to whom they would present the impaled heads of slaughtered enemies to feed upon. Morrigan was a mediator between the land of the living and that of the dead. In order to complete the circle of life she held the secret of regenerative ecstasy, picking clean the bones of the dead in her crow form to prepare them for rebirth. This is perhaps why it is held that King Arthur became a raven (sometimes a chough) after his death, allowing him to remain neither dead nor alive, but with the ability to be either.

The great Norse god Odin was also associated with the raven; he had two of them, Hugin and Munin (Thought and Memory), who perched on his shoulders when they were not flying far and wide, gathering information for him.

The number of legends that involve the once white crow being turned black may well be symbolic of the suppression of paganism by civilising Christianity, the mother religions being superseded by those of the new father god. A Tyrolean legend has the child Jesus beside a stream where some ravens were bathing. They ignore him when he asks to be allowed to drink and continue with their splashing. “Ungrateful birds,” says Jesus. “Proud you may be of your beauty, but your feathers now so snowy white shall become black and remain so until Judgement Day.”

The birds certainly appear black to us, yet their vision is finer than ours and they see the ultra violet of the spectrum. To each other they shine and glisten in their generally blue, green and purple iridescent sheen.

feather fix #3

A flock of young crows has gathered at the edge of a thinly reeded lake, busily stabbing their beaks into the moist golden earth in the hope of spearing a worm or other underground thing. The air seems ponderous, heavy, perhaps with the heat and hardship of a long dry summer.

A fish rises suddenly along the shore close by the flock, gaining the quick attention of half a dozen birds. One of the birds seizes or is seized by a reflexive initiative and launches itself into the water, plunging its head under the rippling golden surface, rising with a small shining fish struggling in its beak. The crow beats its wings hard to break free of the water’s hold.

At that moment a coot comes skidding along beside it, and grabs onto the crow’s legs with its beak, holding fast as the crow fights to get away. The crow relinquishes its prey, apparently to call to its fellows as it splashes in the water silently and helplessly, the coot now into a dive, dragging the crow down with it. The other crows move as one and storm the water, mobbing the coot, stabbing at its submerged form until it releases their companion, who arises, bedraggled, and gropes its way to the shore before the scene slips away.

moonshine

The moon was hanging fat and heavy over the dipping sheen of the rolling terrain, threatening to drop from its orbit and crush the world beneath. It would not bounce back up to its celestial vista with a smiling face but only pulsate there on the ground like a greedy maggot, sucking on the earth’s own life force for sustenance, laughing to itself with a self conscious abandon though it felt no real emotion. But it did not fall. Not yet.

I had doubled back on my route and was headed towards the river that had to be crossed before I could make the final furlong home. It was a little way further to the west but between there and here stretched indeterminate land that I could not be sure of getting through. A hollow brook gasped and I jumped it and clambered through thick bracken with concealed barb and towering shaggy groups of elm and the occasional witchy pine and began to think that it would have proved easier to have followed the thin road and crossed the river at the stone bridge.

The moon shaped a clearing ahead of me and I twisted the top off my water bottle, throwing my head back in a relished swig. Commotion leapt from the moon painted elm in a panoply of flurrying and chattering magpies, whose roost I had disturbed. One for sorrow, two for joy, the rhyme that counted this myriad mayhem of magpies had never been penned. The moon accented the white amongst the black of their fluttering wings and tails and where one ended and another began could not be told. Too many certainly to cross and cheat the evil
eye whose creatures they were reputed to be, too many instances of threatened bad luck to switch about or iron out. I could only stand there in wonder at their display. And the intruding danger then passed, they soon returned to their roost, the busy chatter falling away.
The last few flew back to the tree and became lost within its foliage.

My eye was drawn by that matriarchal dominatrix moon. The visage of the three beaked crow was discernible within and then upon its hollows and pocks. It twisted about and opened its three beaks wide, giving the impression of a triad of stammering mussels clinging onto that rock island in the dirty black ocean of space. A beady eye looked down, and I did not feel it to be the gaze of one who cared much about the fates of those it oversaw. It possessed a grim beauty though, and held me transfixed as it passed its ocular laser beams over the earth beneath, bestowing anything its keen eye picked out with a quick zap of lunacy not grace.

I held myself still and rigid, my breaths shallow. One of the cherry stones in my pocket wriggled about until it had found a hole and squeezed through it and rolled down the inside of my trousers and in a final flourish over my boot and onto the ground. Its movement did not escape the attention of the three beaked crow. Any half hopes I had held that the moonbird would see only the stone and miss me were soon dashed. I stepped from the shadows and into the gooey light, pretending to have only just noticed the figure on the moon, but I doubt that I had it fooled.

Oh, hello there, I greeted it in my mind. I wasn’t sure you were real. Uh, nice night, as I felt myself freezing in terror from the feet up. In a rush a hundred different potential tubular realities suckered at one end to the moon wavered briefly in the air then swooped and struck my consciousness and I clocked each of them in turn in the click of an immeasurable moment, spinning, searching through them in suspended desperation for the one that I believed must be there somewhere. They dropped from the moon and into the brackened land surrounding me, flailing about on the ground before burrowing deep into the earth, wriggling down faster than light, finally breaking from my mind too and disappearing now from view.

War, Fate and Death. The only War is that between your blindness and your vision. The Fate you seek is amongst these time worms, spoke the three beaked crow deep into my mind, but how will you dig for it without a beak? And Death is too beautiful a subject to contemplate on such a miserable night, is it not? But without a dead bird sleeping in your heart you probably can’t see that. Isn’t there anything that will drink your blood?

crow collective unconscious

As I was collecting nettles for a pot of tea one morning I heard the voice of my brother the crow. I wasn’t dreaming. It came from amongst the shadowbands of crows in the vast unkempt garden, with whose ways I had become familiar from the silent study of his bones and feathers. His unique caw reached me, crowed through another bird’s beak.

It was eerie to be assuaged of this connective world, this impersonal morpho-genetic omnipresence. The mycelium shadow world which shoots forth the individual crow as a spore head through which the invisible intelligence might perpetuate its own existence, concurrently furthering its knowledge and experience. The vastness of myth rains down on the black crow badlands, and they stalk its rivers as it flows back to its dark and impassive data banks, redefined, redolent, returned.

So I took to those lonely rivers too; searching for my brother, lost and alone, wandering with nothing on my mind but the abject beauty of desolation. The soul-searching lone bird cries that echo across the black blood rivers of the Underworld like they do nowhere else.

Even the dangling vegetation that cast shadows over the black shadow waters had given up the ghost, feeding on the sounds of my laboured paddling with the abandon of the truly insane. A quiet and wilful abandon that left everything to chance. I had never felt so
much at home.

My wooden canoe cut through the freezing ghostbone mist, slipped silently along a shrouded shore. The bitch witch figurehead smiled no more. Uncounted islands specked the river like gritty debris, each draped with a grey fog funeral pall. A dead tree stood on every one, and, hanging motionless upon these each, a man - hearts ripped out, long since devoured - chests ragged and open - a ghostly garden of carrion flowers.

I would but rarely put into a shore. I didn’t wish to leave the fragile security of my boat. I never had much idea of where I was, and a creeping sense of foreboding hung over everything like a sick mist. I found it slightly humbling that, for all the human pride in exploration, so little was known about this place. There were no heroic figures pushing boulders up hills; I saw no gifter of fire strapped to a rock, helpless in suffering while his liver was ceaselessly pecked away; no wild women jumped out at me from the shadows, their hair alive with snakes.

On this occasion, though, I was drawn irrepressibly towards a grassy bank, steering my canoe through the thick vegetation that hung from the stone ruins of the crumbling quay.

Weathered stone faces of forgotten forms stared blankly by. I felt that I knew this place, had been here before, but couldn’t connect how this might be.

With never a thought of entrapping sorcery I jumped onto the bank, tied up my boat and scanned the vast swaying blue green. It stretched far into the distance, where it rose to meet the bright blue skies and warm white clouds in a long straight hump, rather like a barrow, or the uniform mounds that the passage of time and the movement of the earth can make of old and forgotten ramparts.

I walked up to this horizon, where the view fell away over further meadow and toward distant vertiginous thick walls of stone. The space and clear air were exultant after the claustrophobia of the endless blind rivers and watchful weed.

I raced towards the stone perimeter, along a path trodden through the grass, and stood and stared up at the edifice reaching high above me, its carved creatures and weird geometrica tinted with the rich autumnal creepings of lichen. I ran my fingers along a carved groove and heard footsteps ring out some distance away to my right.

Rapidly in pursuit, I almost missed the dark entrance in the stone wall. I bent down and peered into the gloom. The echo of running feet washed towards me, travelling the dark tunnel. With a hand on either side of the narrow opening and head bowed, I made my way slowly into the musty darkness as the echoing plethora of footfalls cascaded back and over me.

Making but laboured progress, I soon began to realise that my quarry was travelling far faster than I. The gently mouldering sound was almost beyond the reach of my ears when I felt my left hand falling away from the wall and into a wide space that waited there. Scouting with my feet I shaped the zigzag of steps twisting upwards into the wall. Fearing that I may be entering a labyrinth, I nonetheless scrabbled forward with my hands, gradually climbing through the darkness. I could no longer hear anything but my own breath, upon which I focused, to dampen the panic and sickness that claustrophobia threatened.

Above me blurred a murky light. The gloom receded a little with each step. My hands were looming into visibility again. I stopped to look at them a while, half seeing in an alien corner of my eye tiny skulls lurked there amongst the hairs and geometric wrinkles, and wondered whether man wasn’t perhaps closer to the reptile than the monkey. But if my hands were witness to the genetic history of their fabrication they weren’t telling.

Now in the brightness on top of the wall, I could see that it was only about thirty feet wide, although it had seemed much more when I was worming through the tunnel. The rough stone was peppered with warm lichens and a thirsty grass colony was slowly establishing itself where it might. On one side of the wall was the meadow through which I’d run; on the other a huge and recalcitrant orchard. The trees weren’t standing in rows but were clustered haphazardly. It wouldn’t have surprised me if one had picked up its roots like an Edwardian lady her skirts, wished well to its fellows, and coasted off to have a chat with another group.

The wall at either end disappeared into thick and impenetrable forest. I walked its length a little, dimly recognising the place but having no real idea where I might be, still no closer to my brother, no closer to resolving his disappearance, wondering if I was to search fruitlessly these lands forever. Yet was I strangely happy, as if no adverse fate could touch me here, safe now in the sun’s warm and breezy spell. Our mutual deaths had been written on another wind, a darker wind than this, scratched by an unknown quill, and I asked myself would it really matter if I never found him, if we never fulfilled that wind’s grim purpose, if we were destined never to find a raw young sun to bleed into our night’s tragedy?

There were some well worn steps almost hidden on the orchard’s side, down which I trotted like the little goat Gruff when trolls were just something it heard about at bedtime, safely snuggled up in the straw. The fat yellow sun was warm on my skin. It was lovely here.

Plump red apples smiled out at me and I picked one down and bit into it. It was the juiciest apple I had ever tasted, cool and sweet and deliciously fresh. I was sucking on that apple for a good few seconds before I realised what I was doing, spat the mulch out of my mouth in
horror, threw the apple as far away as I could in my startled panic, and ran the long long way back to my canoe, pushing out into the foul mist with relief. I couldn’t believe what I had done, paralysed, like a dumb and helpless rabbit in the gaze of a wise old venomous snake.

So now it was official, but even before that fateful bite I had always known that I had come here to stay.

coig cluaran corcair

The night spread like a chilling fever across the land. The sun was torn from its celestial throne and slipped helplessly off the edge of the visible world and down to its dark and hidden night time haunt. In days now passed the west was the lowest point on the compass, for it was the under world where the sun would go nightly to die.

It is little known amongst the current inhabitants of this ancient land that the dark overlords of the Terran oasis have long since assumed the form of the crow, in which guise they oversee the machinations of the Gaian mind, largely untroubled by the animal will to power occurring beneath their aerial roosts.

A pair of hominids sit smoking rolled up tobacco cigarettes on old and rusted farm machinery somewhere in the Eng Land. They watch the sun go down, unaware of the nearby crow chasing beetles in full scurry around their dusty hedgerow nests.

“The transmission’s blown. They reckon a week for parts and then the labour,” speaks one of the humans to its companion. He’s waiting for his car to be fixed by a local garage. This is unknown to the crow, and of no relevance. All that interests him are the words uttered at the moment he posed a silent question to the all-seeing eye.

Ah, thinks the crow, interpreting the speech in a way that his specialised learning and enforced meditations and vision quests have enabled him to do. The Gaian mind has not yet synthesised into cognisant existence her elective saviour. Hope is yet all that reigns in this land.

The crow already knew this, of course, but he finds it reassuring to hear the Gaia stream of consciousness, the craca, confirm the same, since sometimes the crow suspects that the crow guardians have their own secret design. But for now the night is coming and the crow must away, for he has work to do.

He pecks up one of the little purple backed beetles in his beak, tosses it in the air and deftly catches it again, swallowing it whole. Call it superstition if you will, but those little things always seem to help him dream. With a poignant caw to the departing sun he stretches his wings and flies off to the northwest, an ear out for any owls come early to the night’s hunt. The two species presently hold a precarious truce, to which the crow is not inclined to trust his feathery life.

Tonight he makes for his favoured dreamtime roost, a gnarled old elm fully at the centre of a tiny patch of virgin forest, just this side of the equine stud farm. It’s a raucous place during the day, almost always a flock of young crows scavenging the horse feed and showing off their emergent aerial grace. When night falls, however, it is a place of incomparable peace and solitude. He comes here every fifth night without fail, to take his turn at the crow watch ritual, to join in the roc, the crow family group mind, the secret society of the overlords.

The crow, whose name, incidentally, is Coig Cluaran Corcair, smooths through his feathers and steels himself for the night’s vigil. He fixes his mind on the movement of his breath and the beating of his heart and drifts gently into a mild trance, enjoying the brightly perfect geometric snakes that swim and writhe in front of his eyes. His thoughts shoot off to the night air, leaving him still and calm and receptive.

A snake breaks from the ubiquitous swarm, seemingly the only one of its kind who is aware of the crow’s presence. There is a primeval glint in its reptile eyes as it floats towards the crow, its mouth opening wide, a vague suggestion of ecstasy illuminating its mien, as it sinks its fangs into the crow’s yielding throat.

The body of the crow that is Coig Cluaran Corcair shudders in a spasmoid paralytic fit. All breath is expelled from his lungs, and his head falls to rest upon his chest.

His body is still, rigid, but his ka is hurriedly navigating a path through the swirling grey mists, keeping to the thinner densities, working hard to keep his eyes open and his attention fixed.

The roc is well hidden from chance discovery, many leagues deep within the graa. Within that fluid medium of consciousness, removed from space time, the crow overlords have constructed a number of meeting places, each surrounded by individually encoded security walls, where crow dignitaries discuss the activities of their domains and receive any mandates from the higher echelons of the overlordship.

Coig Cluaran Corcair rushes through the graa at breakneck speed. There is no warning that he is approaching a roc cell, just a demand resonating on a theta frequency for a security check. The crow responds with the requisite digitoid, and is rewarded with the flash of the corresponding mythalim, an image confirming his clearance. A little further and another security check, and he is through the net.

feather fix #4

Again it is a hot summer’s day, not a cloud in the pale gold shimmering sky. A rotating sprinkler stands in the field of thirst retarded maize, spinning its slow robotic trajectory from side to side. A solitary crow stands aloft upon its moving arm, enjoying an occasional douching as the wind scatters the spray across its outstretched wings and shining head.

feather fix #5

Two crows creep, heads down and wings sleeked back, through a herring gull colony, closely watched by the birds crouched upon the ground around them, incubating their eggs and sitting their young. One of the crows approaches a gull, fanning its wings wide, threatening
attack to provoke it to defend its nest. As the gull lurches forward to chase off the interloper, the other crow leaps behind it and snatches a baby from the nest. Both crows then beat a hasty retreat to share their warm spoils, the gull returning to its nest, not daring to risk any more young to surprise deceit.

in the past

It’s never easy for even the accustomed collector of crow bones to stumble upon much of a find. The birds are simply too intelligent to fall prey to the mechanical monsters that patrol those dry tarmac rivers scarred across our countryside. Legends tell of huge crow graveyards to which the mysterious precognitive creatures set out upon their last journey, though none has yet been found. Perhaps they are too well protected by the powerful crow magic which has been so influential in the development of human fear and superstition through the ages.

I grew up rambling around an old dinosaur beach haunt, deserted by the titans by then, primarily due to the passage of time. They had left a large number of stone morsels in their wake, and it was generally thought to be a worthwhile pastime for a child to collect this temporal debris and impose upon it a subjective order and an occasional duster. My bone hunting skills were well honed by the time the devil’s toenails became eclipsed in my imagination by the bones of crows.

As things turned out though I could just as happily have spent my formative years simply dribbling into a bowl of gruel, since I stumbled upon a whole dead crow quite by chance one day, whilst freeing the garden’s Elizabethan pond from the stranglehold of weeds. Perhaps the crow had been caught by that selfsame greedy growth, caught off her guard one fateful day. Perhaps, even, she had wrapped garlands of the things around herself, thinking them flowers, believing their tightening grip to be the embrace of a young and troubled Danish crow prince for whom her mad heart yearned.

Whatever the story of this tragic creature, her life had ended, as lives do, but her tale was not yet told. I could see great things for her yet. Her polished skull would cut a fine figure perched on the top end of my guitar, and perhaps certain other of her bones could be strung together to form a small ethereal xylophone or to be plaited in my hair. First, though, the bones must be prepared.

I set swiftly to work. The cold pond water and the crow’s feather armour had preserved the bird well against the action of bacteria and hungry fish lips. The feathers were ready to give up their weary vigil however and didn’t need much coaxing to relinquish their tired hold. The flesh itself was fairly well matured and very soft, but didn’t smell too bad at all.

I stuck it in a pot on the AGA to bubble away while I was out in town, scouring the charity shops for literary esoterica with which to adorn my little travelling book stall. I would add some bleach to the mix when I returned, to whiten up the bones.

It wasn’t an entirely wasted journey either. The Red Cross on the way up to the home brew cavern yielded a nicely weathered copy of Moby Dick; the Salvation Army in the shadow of the prison walls was harbouring a grubby collection of rantings by that fearsome mad Arab, Abdul Alhasred; and Help the Aged proffered a pristine book of Yeats’ poetry, and a gorgeously colourful graphic novel, set in a time when a space faring race is busy puzzling over huge ancient stone pyramids left windswept on every planet they have occasion to visit, but that didn’t count, as I’d be keeping that myself, for a while at least.

Some of my friends were sat around the kitchen table, limbering their minds up for the day, the air thick with their sweet smoke. They pounced upon my morning’s quarry with an excessive interest.

“Oh, cool.”

“Isn’t that the one with the most unspeakable name of God in?”

“You’d be thinking of the Chinese translation.”

“Hey, get the genetic engineering on this.”

Assorted boyish chuckles.

“Oh, that soup was vile by the way.”

“What soup?”

“Oh, we thought you must have made it.”

Hesitation. A will to disbelieve.

“It wasn’t on the stove was it?”

“Well, it was.”

“In a pan?”

Oh no.

“And you ate it?”

“Well Charlie spat it halfway across the kitchen, if that counts.”

“Where is it now?”

“The dog got it down in the end, but only with the help of a lot of cake.”

“Yeah, a lot of cake.”

So that was that, then.

lost souls

I was back on the river again. As usual, I had been quietly paddling my canoe onwards along the still slow waters for a time before my mind caught up and realised I was once again all but adrift in this spidery wet hell.

That fear that resides in the bowels, that can send shockwaves of paralysing heat through the soul, that fear resides here, and has its own jealously guarded name.

Yet I felt relieved to have returned, since my presence here, however much it might imbue a body with a strong dose of mortal terror, meant at least that I had a chance of continuing my quest, of finding my brother’s soul and of restoring it to him.

People have been believing in the existence of the soul ever since there have been people around to do so. Throughout recorded history and to the present day, the soul is seen as an animating, separable, surviving entity, the vehicle of individual personal existence. Modern scientific techniques, such as Kirlian photography, have enabled the study of a mysterious energetic force, tentatively called the aura, which radiates around all living matter. Kirlian, a Soviet cereologist, discovered the technique when studying cereal disease. He found that imperfections appeared in the photographed aura of a plant a short while before disease became visible on the plant itself. Shamans have always held that much physical illness is but a sign that something ails the soul, and that it is the soul which requires healing.

Normally it is the shamans who see the soul, yet it is possible for any individual to perceive it, in dreams or as a ghost. It is probably because of this ability of ordinary men and women to see the soul and to be touched by its magic that belief of its existence has survived and is so ingrained in the human experience.

Amongst indigenous peoples, who have retained their soul experts, the shamans, and for whom the soul is an everyday reality, a very clear distinction is made between the body, the psyche and the spirit soul. Wallis Budge, in his translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, came to see that the Ancient Egyptians recognised nine different aspects of human existence:

the khat - that which was liable to decay, and could only be preserved through mummification. Budge understood that the khat was mummified so that the spiritual body could continue to develop in the Elysian fields.

the ka - generally translated as the double. The ka is an abstract individuality or personality which possesses the form and attributes of the individual to whom it belongs. In life as in death, it is independent and able to wander about at will. Since it is believed to be able to eat and drink, the Ancient Egyptians would ensure a plentiful supply of offerings, lest the ka be forced to eat offal and drink filthy water.

the ba - or heart-soul is connected with the ka, in whom or with whom it dwells, although in many texts it also lives with Ra or Osiris. The ba may enable the assumption of other forms, and is often depicted as a human-headed hawk.

the ab - or heart was closely associated with the soul, and was held to be the source both of the animal life and of good and evil in man. The preservation of the heart of a man was held to be of the greatest importance, and in the Judgement it is singled out for special examination, the weighing of the heart. Certain chapters of the Book of the Dead were written specifically to prevent the heart being separated from its owner in the Underworld by the Stealer of Hearts.

the khaibit - or shadow was closely associated with the ba and was certainly regarded as an integral portion of the human being. Like the ka, it can be nourished by food and drink, and has an existence aside from the body, with the power of going wherever it might.

the khu - or spiritual soul is often mentioned in connection with the ba and regarded as an ethereal being. This aspect of the soul can never die, and dwells in the sahu (spiritual body).

the sekhem - or power seems to be the incorporeal personification of the vital force of a man, dwelling in heaven among the khu (spirits).

the ren - or name appears vital to a man on his journey through life and to the afterlife, being connected magically with the essence of the owner itself.

the sahu - or spiritual body forms the habitation of the soul. Within it all the mental and spiritual attributes of the natural body are united to its powers.

I paddled through the gloom until the river widened to form a dank lagoon. Vision was too poor to gauge the size of the gulf, but the echo of the thin wails around me suggested a reasonably wide chasm.

The moans ceased suddenly, and I became dimly aware of an intelligence trained upon my movement. I held my paddle still, slowly drifting forward, but could hear nothing.

There seemed to be more of a lack of light ahead of me than I was accustomed to. I rolled my eyes wide in my head to improve my night vision, and opened my mouth to amplify any sound. The canoe’s inaudible creaks groaned as if remembering a fierce wind trying the timber’s strength when it was yet a tree. The river yielded grudgingly any progress made on its length or girth. Slowly I made out the glimmer of my own hands once again.

The lagoon seemed almost deltoid, little black rivulets creeping through dark and sticky mud deposits. I feared my canoe might become wedged between the mud banks, ready with my paddle to prise myself free should it become necessary. It was then, my attention drawn away by navigating a route, that a voice spoke out.

“Typical bloody cavalry, always takes its time.”

It was a woman’s voice. My canoe had run to a halt, grounded by the mud and silt.

“C’mon darling, don’t be shy. Lord knows we’ve been waiting long enough for you.”

A stringy laugh or two reached my ears. Maybe these people could help me. They seemed to know me. In the name of adventure… I leaned over the side of the canoe and pressed my paddle deep into the mud, as deep as it would go. It hit solid ground two or three feet down - solid ground or the thick bones and leathery hide of a lurking amphibian monster - and I stepped in after it, time slowed to a near stop. The thick cold mud oozed and crept half way up my thighs, threatening to suck me in still deeper. I picked up the rope I’d tied to the prow of the boat and waded a sticky and gurgling trail towards the source of the whispering and raspy breathing, dragging the canoe behind me across the mud.

Approaching the island I could almost see figures stood upon it, tall and still in the dank gloom. The mud was shallowing out and my progress increasing, but caution held a light brake. I stepped onto the hardened mud of the island proper, my legs caked in a black crust. Not a soul approached me, although I could see their silhouettes clearly now.

There were perhaps a dozen frozen shapes before me, not people as I had at first thought, but wickerwork cages.

“Are you still there?” I asked, meaning to address the woman who had spoken to me.

I held tight the string of my canoe, afraid of losing it in the near dark, conscious always of the need for an escape route, whether the building should catch fire, the bus crash, the bull turn nasty.

“Oh yes, love. I’m not going anywhere in a hurry, am I? But you take your time. You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“It’s the first time I’ve seen this island. Why are you all in cages?”

“Don’t they teach you anything these days? It’s for our own protection, isn’t it.”

“Protection against what?” I asked.

A voice, male, empty and dead, spoke out, “Are we getting out, Bea? Are we getting out, Bea?”

“Be quiet, can’t you?” the woman replied impatiently.

Her voice then softened again, to address me. “Well you’re supposed to work it out for yourself, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t help you since you seem so nice. It’s part of the test, love. All the new guides have to help a few poor souls like us out of this cold hell. To see if they’ve got what it takes. Now we’ll help you find your way, and you’ll do well. You’ll make a good guide, I can tell.”

This was the first sign in so long that I was making any progress in my quest for knowledge of this place. Feelings perhaps, intimations, beliefs, nothing with any form or substance that matched the framework and fabric of my mind, but that sometimes seemed near enough to tag, only to slip or skulk away, silent or screaming, gone.

“So are you going to stand there daydreaming all day or will we get started?” she carried on.

“The cages are only made of wicker; why don’t you let yourselves out?” I wondered aloud.

“It’s bloody symbolic, isn’t it, you damn fool!”

Her anger and impatience were making me suspicious and frightened.

“I’m sorry, love. I don’t mean to temper, but if they fail you we’ll only have to wait for another one to come, and it’s been so long.”

I looked heavenward for inspiration - if you can still believe in heaven after being down here for any time at all - that is, I looked upward, away from the oppressive island, and saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. A crow! Could it be?! It flew towards me, as if in a dream, my brother’s khaibit! I could feel his thoughts, his fear and mechanical perseverance. His flight path almost brushed my face and I reached out towards him, slow and dreamlike, a moonwalker. Oh, that sound! The sound of a crow’s wings beating the air in flight, their feathers rasping slightly, brushing their neighbours as they pull and make their way. Surely it is the most beautiful sound, the most perfect symphony for the soul!

And he was gone. My movement was too slow and he was gone. I breathed in deep to root the moment and to consider the thoughts that had reached me from him, even through the psychic veil I could now sense hung around this island, isolating it all the more.

“Show me your eyes!” I demanded, turning again to the prisoners. “Show me your eyes!”

A dozen tiny pairs of red lights were apparent through the dark mist.

“Please help us, sir!” pleaded a new voice, a child’s voice. “We’ve been bewitched by a cruel being and only you can break the spell!”

The thin wails started up again, drifting off to a place where there were no ears to hear them nor hearts to care. I struggled to hold my thoughts together as they threatened to pierce my reason. Finding no words I let rip a roar.

“Killers!” I cried, aiming to drown their voices and hypnotising will with my own shouts. A string of curses hit me from the dark and my heart pounded so hard I feared it would explode.

“I won’t set you free! And there will be no one I shan’t warn about you!” I was dragging the canoe back through the mud, trying to find a glint of water, but there was no light.

“Rot there or repent! Rot or repent! Your only hope of release is to be gifted the forgiveness that cannot be stolen! Or to fade and crumble and rot.”

Water lapped cool around my thighs and I pushed the canoe out into the dark, jumping belly down upon it, breathing hard and fast onto the wooden boards.

dinner

The mist had fallen thickly, gathered its conspiratorial droplets of water from far afield, cloaking the house and gardens and surrounding meadows and copses in its jealous opacity. It was a day that cheated the thief who had stolen the colours from my world; a day which was made up of greys for all who were trapped within it; a day which promoted form, not colour; a day that glanced, half remembering, back to the primordial soup from which some part of us arose.

My housemates were busying themselves in their various solitudes, creeping about the ghost laden house only occasionally, in search of refreshment or in vain attempt to chase off the dogs of gloom. I poured a cold bath and lay motionless in it for an hour or more, as had become my custom, cooling my blood down sufficiently that my friends, whom I now had good reason to suspect of being vampires, would not sense a potential feast as I went about my business. I had discovered that, contrary to lore, they were prone to wander abroad during the day as much as at night, the ages spanned by the perpetuating consciousness of their incarnations having allowed them to master most restrictions of mere temporal imposition. I certainly feared them, but could never let it show.

It was our way to take turns in cooking dinner, which had made the occasion something of a ritualised feast. Just lately I had become aware of the witchcraft they habitually cast over the food, their dark arts transforming the vegetables into terrified creatures who were then eaten alive, and I could not touch it. The wine they turned into blood, and I would at times steal a sip, allowing it to excite old memories within me, feeding long forgotten instincts which I would then fight to suppress. I couldn’t allow myself to become absorbed by this small and insignificant nest of the Undead. Were I to give in to their dark and silent beckoning I would lose sight of the quest to save my brother’s soul and become like them, trapped in an endless world of brutality and unconcern, and he would ever be alone.

Tonight it fell to me to prepare dinner. I stepped out into the mist’s cool shroud and walked towards the worked plot at the far end of the garden, gaining small relief from the almost tangible menace that hung around the house. Yet the import of my recent revelations continued to eat away at my mind. All these years I had been largely blind to the impersonality that surrounds the little jungle clearing human stage, a cold skin that breeds silent hopelessness until it is prevalent enough to be accepted without question as the true and natural state.

A small troupe of fairy ring champignons had pushed their little heads up through the ground, giving me cause to smile. They were good magic and offered themselves selflessly up to tonight’s feast. It is small sacrifices like these that keep the world this side of ruin. Of course, they could as easily be mute poison assassins, seeds of random death, but I trusted my luck, this little patch of luck. They gave me an idea for a theme for dinner.

The rest of the evening’s fayre proved somewhat more reticent in its keenness to be consumed. Much as I urged, perhaps not without an element of self interest, that there was no reason to fear the reaper, night was drawing in before I was through. It’s no small task collecting enough beetles and worms to feed six people.

The peppered oil heated quickly on the AGA, spitting ferociously as the first beetles went in. Burning air ripped through their shells, hissing and screeching torturous furies.

Some fennel seed to complement the hard shell texture, a firm squeeze of lime juice to draw out their internal liquids. Shaking the wide pan to keep the feed well aired and to watch them dance, imprinting them with the frenzy and abandon of Dionysus. Whoever, wherever, whatever you may be, we will take you closer to your gods, and be sure that you will fear them.

A moth, drawn by the warmth and light of the stove, circles the pan, screes uncontrollably in, the powder from its rough wings leaving slow motion traces in the air that it has left. I add a little red wine to the mix and ring the bell to rouse my friends to dinner.

Performing acts of such mass destiny is thirsty work, and I step out of the foray and run the tap. The water gushes forth, gleeful in its release. I let it run over the tall glass, driving any dust away. As I fill the glass and lift it to my lips, emptying my lungs in readiness for a long cool pull I pause, am vaguely aware of footsteps behind me.

Something wasn’t quite right with the water. I felt I should know, might recognise what was wrong but couldn’t remember, couldn’t quite think.

“Mmm. Smells like Italian.”

“Have you got that fungi book? I’ve an awful feeling these mushrooms have come from the garden.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Well, the cook is patently insane.”

“What’s the matter - you want to live forever?”

“Oh God. Look.”

And in a flash I remembered where I’d known water like that before. The implied feats of plumbing and engineering were beyond me, but there could be no doubt. The waters of Lethe had found their way into our pipes and were coming out of the tap.

Each and every soul, when passing through the combine from life to life, ceremonially jumps or is pushed into the placid waters of the River Lethe, that soothing gifter of forgetfulness that promises a clean slate with which to start the next incarnation. That promise is a lie, of course, since the karmic Furies are not so easily put off the scent of an errant soul, but existence in the gruelling Underworld can be such that the promise of forgetfulness may beckon like a mercy. I had been pulled from these waters by a friend, relative or stranger; someone with his own design, or who was carrying out the bidding of a higher will; I knew only that I was pulled from the waters before my consciousness had entirely slipped away, and was thus possessed of a rare ability to remember things I should not. Something of the movements of the wheel of fortune; fragments of lives now passed.

And now, it would seem, those responsible for allowing me to slip through the net had elected to correct their mistake. I lowered the glass from my lips, having thankfully touched not a drop, and threw it hard away from me. It hit the wall above the AGA in full flight, smashing dramatically, glass and water exploding in all directions, the stove spitting angrily, switching the water to steam at a touch. Slivers of glass shot into the bubbling pan, one shard fully staking a beetle, as if only this could shake its little life out.

“The water holds danger tonight,” I proffered.

“No kidding,” responded my friend.

knives

Dusk was creeping in through the communal kitchen window, but slowly, as if it was really too much trouble for it to come any faster. I idly opened the knife drawer and was immediately shocked at the filth and disarray that met my gaze. The knives lay there in their own dirt, strewn and scattered with little regard for a need to carry themselves as knives of their standing should.

I had by now given up all hope of rescuing my brother’s soul, of making it as psychopomp, and was sufficiently clued up on what was going on to realise that there remained only one alternative. My friends, who had waited patiently, as custom demanded, for their chance, now held all the cards and I could hold them off no longer. I wasn’t sure which of them would perform the grim but necessary task, nor whether I would be given a choice of instrument when the time came. I had made sure that their leader knew which among these blades was my favourite, but decided that the most prudent course of action would be to clean and sharpen them all in readiness for the event.

My vision accustomed itself to the gradual coming of night as I sat at the table, the now pristine drawer drying upside down, waiting to be filled with equally gleaming inhabitants. Each knife was cleaned and polished in turn and lined up on the table to be sharpened. A bowl of water sat upon the table there in the dark as well, into which the sharpening stone was customarily dipped. The knives were a little reticent at first, thinking, perhaps, that they were too humble to play such a role in the world of men, but they soon entered into the spirit of things and clamoured for their turn at the stone, each one wishing to be honed to a finer point than the one before. I could hardly deny them their desire.

I worked well into the night and eventually they lay in their places in the drawer, which I slid back into the unit. I could not sleep though for thoughts of how I could have cut them more of an edge if only I had shown more dedication, and as dawn traced thin grey shadows onto the table I was again at my task.

This same pattern continued for days. If I was successful in snatching even a few minutes’ sleep I was summarily roused by a blade which felt it was bluntening with the action upon it of the moon’s light outside, or another one needing to change its position in the drawer for complex reasons that I could often only guess at. I was pleased that they were taking things so seriously.

Such a blatant signal that I was ready for my friends to do their worst was not lost on them, and it seemed that the excitement of their bloodlust was beginning to tell. They had affixed locks to their doors to keep themselves in when the craving called them in the night, and took turns keeping watch over each other in case one of them did weaken. They were educated creatures who knew that these things must be done within the surround of the most fitting astrological frame and with due attention to appropriate ritual. When this was to be though I did not know.

honkor crau

Honkor Crau is a fine figure of a bird, if perhaps a little portlier than his life mate might wish. Most crows will feed only as long as is necessary for their nutritional intake, never experiencing the slightest fear when stepping off the roost of their wings losing the perpetual battle against gravity. But then Honkor Crau is no ordinary bird. He was a single chick, cosseted by his mother and doting yearling sister after his father had been shot down by a farmer. They had impressed upon him that he was a crow in ten thousand, destined for great things, and he had no reason to doubt their entreaties.

His rise through the secret levels of crow society was as expected. He possessed the appropriate blend of deference and independent thought to be noticed by the higher ranking members of the overlordship. His father had been a simple, unambitious bird, largely satisfied with following the flock by day and contributing heartily to the roost’s throng at dusk.

Yet the basic tenet of crow society holds that all crows are not only created equal, but that they continue to be valued equally, however lowly their chosen path through life, and Honkor’s humble origins did not disadvantage him at all.

As a yearling, spending more and more nights away from the juvenile flock, at a special roost where he was learning of his true birthright, it was becoming apparent that he harnessed a remarkable talent. Driven at first by an immature desire to avenge his father’s death, he made an oath to himself that he would become the best shaper maker the overlordship had ever seen.

For at night, when the stars peer vacantly down upon the scattered shadows of the earth, or when the moon bathes the fields in her soft light; when rain storms lash the land with their impassioned plea, or when the world is still but quietly growing; when meteorites blaze in glory through the atmosphere - their nomadic chase through space is over! - or when lone bird cries haunt the earth; through all this and more, the crow shaper makers are hard at work around the planet, shaping the medium of consciousness to Gaian will, seeding dreams in sleeping minds.

For there is a hole, a tunnel, if you will, that connects each individual’s subconscious with the Great Unconscious, that land of mythological and archetypal splendour where everything is true and anything is permitted; that is, anything that can be fabricated from the material of truth - beaten, woven, carved, etched, crafted, distilled - is permitted. The crows call this place the graa, where their many roc stations are secreted. It is from these stations that the crows gain access to the sleeping mind, implanting suggestions deep within the sleeper’s subconscious, to grow in their own time, eruditely nurtured by the crows.

Honkor Crau was given permission to practise his nascent art on the man responsible for his father’s death. At first he viewed the farmer’s nightly excursions into the graa during sleep, noting the archetypes that held particular relevance and meaning for his subject. It seemed that the farmer was a frustrated soldier, in precessive lifetimes more suited to the conquering of lands than to their successive farming. There was little opportunity for such a type in the current world, the needs of the military having changed its ideology and requirements, now a vehicle of and for basic societal human rights, no longer a breeding ground of wild adventure. And so the farmer satisfied his primal urges by taking pot shots at crows, lining his booty up along barbed wire fences. This wont had caused his wife’s affection for him to wane, as she felt it to be a barbaric practice, which didn’t even seem to stop the crows from flocking to their fields. Hence the man sought solace in his own company, and that of his twelve bore, in a cruel cycle. In time perhaps an age more suited to this man’s favoured way of life would come again. Or, in the meantime, his humanity would develop sufficiently to change his needs. Honkor Crau decided to focus his shaper making on this very end.

Now, the Great Unconscious being what it is, it is inseparable from the web of synchronicity that punctuates and decorates and gives substance to our lives. In other days, not long passed, this was called the Web of Wyrd, and was rationalised with the image of those that determine our fates, the triple aspect of the Earth Goddess, spinning the fibres that hold us and our journeys together. Honkor Crau thus knew that any changes he might fashion in the farmer’s subconscious would sooner or later become mirrored in the man’s waking life. All he needed was an angle.

It was about this time, somewhat synchronically, in fact, one might say, that grants were being offered to farmers who elected to turn towards organic enterprise. The idea had of course been thought up by the overlordship some time ago, since crows were tired of pesticide sickness, thinning shells and occasional mutant offspring, and it was now beginning to bear material fruit. Most crop killers had become immune to the pesticides anyway, which allowed for a ready acceptance of the initiative amongst the human committees who had become its unwitting guardians. The economics would be persuasion enough for the farmer to consider the organic option, and the literature he received would mention the good work that avian foragers provide in keeping insect pests at bay. And perhaps his dealings with the tree hugging element might soften his soul a little, might encourage his perception of the farm toward that of a willing giver of fruitfulness and away from an erratic and oft mutinous factory. It would be a start.

Thus did the crow exact revenge upon his father’s killer, by playing with his mind as a human child might play with plastocine, and by being instrumental in the execution of Gaian will therein. His work did not go unnoticed by his tutors, and his magnanimity in the face of such an emotive subject tended very much in his favour. In short, his rise had begun.

feather fix #6

Now the cold dark months of the year, white gold snow glimmering over the ground, hiding the worms and slugs and beetles that move beneath. A sparrow hops about under the tree, desperately looking for some small thing to stave off its hunger. It doesn’t register the sleeked back crow creeping behind it until it is being shaken by the neck in a strong and unyielding beak and its worries and mortal struggle are over.

blood

The cave was dark, its walls rough to the touch. The heady scents of mouldering blood struck in warm gusts. I held my body up with one arm while the other flailed blindly about, hoping to find a feature upon which it might gain purchase and orientation. An insect buzzed without
ceasing in my ear. Knocking my head did not budge it loose but only served to make me more dizzy. My every balance was shot. I could not stand and had fallen heavily upon my knees many times. I could not think over the droning of the insect. Above the cave the wind blew camomile and dandelions in the morning sun’s gaze, but this was hidden from my eyes and from my heart. Down here another world’s laws held sway, and there was nothing down here that wasn’t disfigured in some way or would not seek the light for its own reasons.

There waited in the rock of the cave walls small prehistoric reptile monsters, still and silent as they had been since the rock had formed from bogwood or from molt around them, for the day when some prospector or miner or archaeologist or archaeopterixophile would chip them free
and they would stretch their leathery wings wide and caw in a final farewell to a carboniferous age that would still hear them somehow and they would become briefly famous in esoteric publications and, if captured on video, might even become TV news, these ancient ancestors of the crow, in secret and only possible repose.

The insect’s drone became magnified to that of a huge and eyeless beast stripped of its skin, grinding bones in its uncompromising jaws, slavering foul acidic juices, no light shining into its eyeless sockets down here - so let us dash our pretty heroes to their gory deaths for that is the story in which I believe and which offers to me the sweetest poetry - but was zap! returned directly to its insect self, as was I returned to my struggle.

The dim sound of something dragging along the cave floor alerted me and I listened for each dull tap and feathery drag as it came closer by the inch. It settled at my feet and I heard its rasping breath and popgun heartbeat and near dead mind. It clawed without strength or reason at my ankles and I reached down and lifted it onto my thighs. With its final remnant of energy it dragged its cold damp body and burrowed under my shirt and lay next to my belly as if to warm its stiff dead form. Gently I stroked its wet feathers and stroked the cold and the wet away as it lay lifeless upon me.

I too drifted into sleep, but was awoken by a weak stabbing at my chest. The bird had worked its way up onto my heart and was there seeking to plunge its beak deep down into that pulsing organ. I took his head in my hands and held him still and firm and helped him to penetrate the resistance of my skin and my bone armour and to sink his beak into the gushing red warmth of my heart which he proceeded to lap up as if born to it.

He had come in from the cold, returned to the hearth fire of my heart, as if fulfilling some ancient prophecy spoken of through the ages by blind and mad old men, and by creatures who seemed half man half horse and were feared but revered by the common people. By secret societies of people with golden hair who spoke in a now long forgotten language, and by wild locked women who screamed out his name as they were dragged to the fires. We had somehow across the arenas of time and space and that other more elusive dimension of myth stumbled upon each other and the world made sense again, was returned to its original plan and purpose by this meeting. And then it was as if it had always been this way and could never have been any other. As my brother stabbed and licked at the source of his small resurrection, which glistened like a bullet hole in wet metal, I watched the shine return to his eyes and the sheen to his coat and to the gentle aura that surrounded him and glowed palely blue and marked him as a little candle of life inside that cave down there.

I am crow, he breathed, his essence to him restored. Is this where you live brother? Are these mouldering rocks your friends and only companions?

With the light of his life I could see a woman standing beside us. She beckoned and drew my wide eyes towards some strange markings, scratched as they were into the rock or etched into a thin layer of ash upon the rock, row upon row of mystical sigils, which glimmered and phased in their own meaning. I had lost too much blood and could feel my attention slipping away. With difficulty I held onto consciousness long enough to watch her as she pointed and pointed again and again at a particular rune like symbol, and I summoned all my mental strength to commit it to memory, to take it back with me to my other life. As I faded out I felt my brother curl up inside my heart and sleep and I smiled in the warm knowledge that he would surely now come to feed from me whenever his dreams might let him loose, and that the rune which I had been gifted formed the silent call with which to awaken him. I live on the other side of the mountain now, he had whispered, and I knew that there were those there that loved him.

And you will become a great shaman, should you survive, for you have suffered hard and long and will surely continue to do so and it is told that he who suffers most must become among those most strong. Blood may be thick but there is something that is thicker yet than blood, and something of this you have seen.

labyrinth

It wasn’t clear where the Minotaur had fallen. If she had anticipated his bloody resting place being hallowed by a lone oasis of blooming poppies or some other now more darkly rusted flower, she could only be disappointed. So even the blood of a semi-divine dripped back into the earth’s organic recycling plant, indistinguishable in the end from all else.

She hitched off her red leather jacket and laid it on the ground where she stood overlooking the labyrinth wrapped mound, and sat.

Wandering people, talking seemingly amongst themselves, betrayed her own thoughts to her, punctuated the singular destiny that had led her here, or provided at times an uncommissioned response to those thoughts.

“She thinks she’s done all this herself,” hissed one woman, staring straight at her, as if to ascertain for herself what the hierophant was made of, before snorting and turning away.

“I want to go home,” whined a small girl in her charge.

“We all want to go home,” the woman retorted sharply. “But we can’t until we’re all together. Some people don’t seem to care about that though.”

They milled around.

“Horrible scars.”

“Cool.”

“I mean truly hideous.”

“That’s the best way.”

Bustled about.

“I didn’t think he’d paint it red.”

“Well did anyone think to ask him not to? Anyway, maybe he likes it that way.”

“Doesn’t seem to bother him. I guess he can eat off it all the same.”

Came and went.

“Starting to look a bit miserable over there.”

“Yeah, supposed to be getting worse as well.”

As the sun reddened and warped and sunk, the crowds fell away and she rose to her feet, grasped her jacket and slung it over her shoulder. Put out the lights and quiet the hounds. Let the journey begin.

Shadows crept and dragged a shroud of dark around the mound. No more a strut of Christian stone to pierce the sky and bleed more yellow light upon a gathered throng. Now the squatted mound wrested the power from the solitary, frightened tower, and menaced on its haunches, threatening to topple it to the ground, goading any unfortunate pilgrims to walk its labyrinth. And so into the twisting bowels of the earth, any erstwhile symbolism now trodden and squashed into the very real dirt.

She stepped the trail. Thoughts rushed and bit her like harrying harpies, screeling and screeching, whipping leathery wings about her face, claws scratching little beaded drops of blood that ran like new spidery veins across her cheek. She turned up the collar of her jacket and stooped into the trail, shielding her face with her hands, striking now and again, but they were too quick for her, reeling beyond her reach before spinning a turn and hounding her again.

A wind peered out from the west, craned its neck and began to blow. The long grass bowed in supplication but the wind blew on, blowing the grass straighter and flatter, peeling with its breath small snakes from their little nests and rolling them like biscuit dough along the mound’s curves. They whistled across her path and one caught itself around her ankle and twisted and sunk its fangs into the flesh of her calf, just above the black boot, before dropping back into the shadows.

She stood still, wholly wretched, peeping up at the stars through her fingers. If she could have jumped and flown away into that distant alien ocean, her cares sucked and shingled as she sped and sped the vacuum, perhaps now, finally, she would. If an eyeless stranger were to step out of the sky or up from the earth and say, “This experiment in hopelessness is over. You could never have expected to understand,” and with a gesture end it, wrest from her, gently or brutally, her temporarily assigned consciousness or identity, she would not argue, would make no plea in her defence. Yet no such gifting assassin there was or could be, and she stepped onwards, winding the labyrinth, her footfalls echoing the dread that what awaited would prove more grim indeed than simple nothingness and extinction.

As she climbed, the harpies and the snakes fell away, and she had nothing left to contend with but her own remaining fears of what might await. She looked around at the world she was leaving, and was met with a full panorama of red lightning that sizzled and shocked where the earth met the sky, as if a virulent energy was now visible as the naked world twitched to a close. A perfect veiled abyss from which those four gaudily painted riders might emerge, sat aback the small circus ponies that gnashed their teeth and wailed staccato otherworldly laughs, scalps and skulls of the vanquished adorning their bridles, shaggy fetlocks splashed with blood and mashed brains and fear. Ofttimes I have gazed upon her face in the arbours of delight, and godlike dancers have whispered to me her name.

“Please, sit down.”

She had reached the top and stepped inside the stone needle.

“Here, next to me.”

She sat beside the bearded fellow and marked his companion stood in the shadows.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

She nodded and then, thinking, added, “Well, not really.”

“Not really.”

“I know I’ve made a mess of it.”

He turned and studied her. “It was a mess before ever you came along.” He seemed to extend toward her the kindness normally reserved for injured woodland animals, ruined deer that lie dying, their bodies broken, in the road.

“I could have made it better.”

“Could you? Have you any idea how many have tried and failed?”

“I lost my way.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t yours to lose.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“Maybe it was only lent, not given.”

She hesitated. “So have they taken it back now?”

“What do you care if they have?”

“I want to save him. I want to save my brother.”

“But you don’t care much about anyone else.”

“I - I just thought that once I’d saved him everything else would be OK.”

“And is it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t exactly saved him yet.”

The lightning continued to flicker around the horizon, its distant thunder almost too gentle to hear.

He stuck some cigarette papers together and feathered loose a wad of tobacco and heated and crumbled some resin over the top. After mixing it together with the tips of his fingers, he ripped and shaped a cardboard tube filter and rolled it all into a cigarette. “Do you want this?” he asked her.

She took it and closed her eyes to guard against night blindness as she lit it.

“Only through the heart can we cross these worlds,” he said.

She waited for him to continue but he did not. She passed him the joint, her hand trembling.

“Did the others say for sure that they were coming, Nick?” asked the boy in the shadows.

“You’re Mr Patience tonight, aren’t you Tom? If they’re coming, they’ll come.”

“I just wish they’d hurry up. I don’t know where my tent is.”

“Am I being damned?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It isn’t my decision.”

The wind blew across the open top of the tower, hesitantly at first, soon testing, finally manic. Rain clouds were herded in like fat sheep for slaughter, and roared as they opened and fell and gushed into the tower. Torrents poured and rushed and spattered and soaked and the people underneath could not make themselves heard above the noise. They waited for the storm to abate and it did not and finally they huddled under a tarpaulin and waited again, taking turns pulling smoke from a little wooden pipe.

The rains ceased as the sun came up. They folded away the tarpaulin and stepped out into the dawn, which was resplendent.

“Such beauties…”

At first they thought it was a trick of the light, but the merciless onslaught of the rains had soaked her red leather jacket and bled the dye into her shirt and trousers and streaked her face and hands.

“Have I been damned?” she asked.

Neither of them answered, or could answer, and she turned and walked away.

chaos theory

She walked along the sea front, the cries of seagulls overhead tugging at her attention. She had been struggling to keep her consciousness intact and small, but by a process of mystical osmosis it had spilled out into the world again and her sense of separateness was lost. The
sky was open and wide and blue enough today for her contemplative union to be pleasant however. Perhaps a little of her had slipped through the cracks to the dark and hidden underside of life, but this was nothing new for her, and with time and experience she had
become equal to the task. It was easier, somehow, here in the southwest, amongst the scattered relics of an ancient Celtic dream, far from the grim Nordic realities that reigned back east. Here the old heroes sought something more than bloodshed; their gods were happy to waver in and out of view, and when her sense of self was returned to her it always brought a message or two from them.

She had not long since broken out of the institution where they had put her. The law would allow her her freedom should she remain loose for six months, and she had no choice but to drift as best she might. They had held her against her will in an old workhouse where women had once been sent that had happened to fall pregnant outside of marriage, some of whom remained there yet, unable to function outside of the institution and its nullifying structure. She had seen old ladies dragged screaming to electro convulsive therapy, their fingers peeled away from the furniture onto which they had clutched with their last and terrified bout of will even after their strength had been spent. She had watched another woman turning tricks in the toilets for single cigarettes, and things were no different even when she had offered the woman all the cigarettes she could possibly smoke. She had recognised a few others like herself just by meeting their eye and they had recognised her and spoken of death but she could not yet speak.

They had forced chemical medication upon her and when the medication had caused her muscles to spasm they had not given her anything to counter the effect. She had proceeded to vomit up the pills but was discovered, there being nowhere to hide, and was no longer allowed to leave the sight of a nurse. The medication made her sleepy but she was not allowed to rest her eyes outside of the allotted hours of sleep. A friend she had made ran away and hanged herself. Another, more fortunate, had set out for the railway line to lay his head upon the rails and sleep, but was accosted during the course of the short journey by a woman lurking in the bushes, a patient on account of her nymphomania, who succeeded in changing his mind.

There was never any attempt to explain to her the reasons why she was obliged to take the medication, but had there been one then this is the best it could possibly have been:

We believe your brain is producing more of the neurotransmitter dopamine than is normal (although we haven’t actually tested it), which is causing you to behave in a more than eccentric manner, which we think poses a danger to yourself. If you are actually producing an excess of dopamine it may just be symptomatic of other changes which are taking place, but we haven’t really looked beyond the dopamine production. We can’t actually slow the rate of dopamine production, but we can slow down the brain’s neuroreceptors’ acceptance of it. Dopamine seems to control behaviour that ranges from walking and repetitive movement to feeding and drinking; once we stop it from being readily accepted by the neuroreceptors you will experience Parkinson’s disease symptoms such as rigidity, tremor and spasm. I feel I should add that dopamine is only one of at least fifty, maybe a hundred or more, neurotransmitters, none of which we really understand, but other
people that were acting a bit like you and took the medication are now fine on sickness benefit, with only occasional relapses. And some are even normal for the rest of their lives, although they do tend to die sooner as a side effect of the medication.

She had found a handwritten book hidden dusty and lost behind the bookcase and in it read of a pilgrim’s experimentation with alchemy. It was a vast work, beautifully illustrated with ornate symbology, that told of one man’s love affair with the art that became a science, and jumped from detailed chemical analysis to complex mathematical algorithm to heavily scored riddles and question marks and elusive scraps of sentences that nonetheless suggested their sense to her. Towards the end of the work the author had chosen to write everything in a code, but it was easy to crack for he had simply replaced letters with his own icons and then also swapped the first and the last letter of each word around. It was a marvellous and compelling and inspirational work and when she had finished it she put it back in its original hiding place, wondering how much more dust it would gather before being turned in human hands again.

From time to time a bat would slip through the crack of open window and through the bars and would flit about the place. She would wait until they had chased it around with a bed sheet for half an hour or more before sending a signal to the creature from some deep part of
her mind and the bat would fly straight back out of the window. One of the patients ate the goldfish. Another filmed with the occupational therapy video recorder a vibrant Hamlet, starring what insects he could muster for the various parts, the prince himself a hawkshead
moth who tragically died before the filming was complete and had to be tugged about with invisible thread since no understudy could be acquired.

She had been waiting for her escort to return her to the ward after an afternoon spent with a brush and a hand that shook uncontrollably, and still the escort did not come. She was stood beneath a mature sycamore and thought its branches might offer a brief respite from
the world gone mad and its cares and perhaps even her own, and pulled herself up into its arms and foliage and climbed higher and higher, where she found a comfortable vantage point from which to watch the commotion that erupted beneath when the escort did finally
come to find her gone. They searched the buildings and behind the dustbins and they called out threats and then called in the police who alerted the outside world with their radios, but never once did they think to look in the tree. I’m up here, she thought to call, but had not
been able to speak the last few months and so kept silent.

The cold dark that awaits the sun’s departure before creeping out of the east blew raggedly in, and she sat an hour or two more before lowering herself gently from the branches. She had only to keep to the shadows and the thickets and out onto the railway line which she followed through the night, no one paying her much mind for no one cares to pay much mind to a lone figure skulking along a railway line at night.

Days were spent sleeping off the effects of the medication in plastic roofed dens deep within woods and once within a barn, which was warm and soft and beautiful, a nest of baby blackbirds mewling for the food their parents brought them. During a brief storm, huddled under a plastic sheet, two dogs picked up her scent and menaced and barked and bared their teeth, but their owner thought they had holed a fox and called them away.

The bounty of the land she walked kept her as she cut a gradual southwest track and stole away her own van in the night with the keys she had kept hidden upon her. No one had thought to put a stop on her bank account and she helped herself to what she could, to fuel
her trip. She did this before heading for the Cornish peninsula, so that no one would know her direction. She considered this to be the measured act of a rational individual and did not fear for her state of mind, although she did fear for much else. Her luck held out and the police did not pull her over. She found a likely spot to park the van and from there proceeded to be as invisible as possible and to try to work out whether the butterfly flapping its wings causes the hurricane, or is rather dancing the same poetry that the hurricane is dancing. And
most of all to call her bird brother to her.

phobia and obsession: a self help guide (sponsored by Neurostun, because you fear)

Phobia and obsession are normal human emotions, dating back to our caveman days when they aided our survival in a mad and irrational world. A Neolith sufficiently phobic about the venomous fangs of rogue serpents was a Neolith likely to develop a supernatural awareness
of their presence. Without the human capacity for the peculiar focus of obsession the first human tools would surely never have amounted to anything, and our language would still consist of the occasional malformed grunt.

In today’s civilised world, phobia and obsession can still be our friends. The individual with a paralysing phobia about pollution may well become a dedicated environmental activist; the footballer obsessed with perfecting his free kick technique might put a vital goal past German defence. It is when your own particular phobia or obsession is considered anti-social, or even odd, that you become a danger to yourself and to those around you.

For example, it is fairly common for a motorist to worry that the bump he heard whilst driving was a pedestrian whom he had inadvertently knocked down. It is quite acceptable for the motorist to then retrace the route once or twice, a casual eye out for any bodies laid by
the road. But when he packs up a lunch to spend the whole day searching for the corpse, following flocks of noisy scavenging crows across the countryside from roadkill to roadkill, the obsession has gone too far. His behaviour follows no known survival instinct and he has begun to pose a threat to society, his journeys adding unnecessarily to already heavy road traffic.

If you are worried that your own behaviour may be posing a threat to society, or even to yourself, you should turn yourself in at a psychiatric institute for evaluation. Let the experts have a good look at you. It may well be that, as at the dawn of mankind, your phobia /
obsession / compulsive ritual is simply an illustration of the marvellous capabilities of the human mind.

grand unified theory

The bus was headed for the edge of the cliff and the brakes had failed entirely. This seemed all the more tragic as the sun was shining, the grass lush and freely strewn with bright and cheerful flowers and merrily yoked bees. At least the slow motion engendered by our impending deaths ensured we had plenty of time to enjoy the view.

Lolloping rabbits danced through the grass, untouchable by danger when the thumped warning call was not sounded. Some chewed the generous vegetation, others braided dandelion flowers for loved ones. Everyone was happy. Amongst their number played a white rabbit, a pet perhaps who had elected to go native and join the wild rabbits in their savage bliss. He looked up and, smiling, waved us onto our deaths.

A carrion and a hooded crow stood side by side upon a tree stump, flicking their resting wings in their peculiar manner, peering in at the bus as we rolled by, perhaps already slightly slavering at the thought of all the eyeballs that would soon be awaiting their attentions. They had evolved from the same ancestors, in isolation from each other during an Ice Age, identical still but for the pale ash grey hood which one of them wore. Reunited now, as were my friends and I to be, perhaps, on the other side of death’s veil.

A troupe of beetles was wending a mass exodus along the ground, the leader wriggling its antennae as if it were picking up a secret signal telling him where to take the dark and scuttling brood. Their path zigzagged through the grass as the line progressed, the creatures smearing a trail of auric constancy.

The nose of the bus dropped and we began tumbling over the cliff, helpless, yet feeling no fear, death not cruel but casting a spell of ecstasy upon us as does the fox upon the chicken. Embrace. Release.

“It’s OK,” I said to my fellow passengers, time standing shocked and formless, the knowledge of a memory buzzing from my bones and hitting my brain. “I’m dreaming. We can go wherever we like.”

Their necks stretched and twisted to inspect me more closely, their eyes turning full black, their disguises, faces, apparent identities sloughed like alien skin. They were not accustomed to being found out. Something came at me, waves or dust. I smiled and closed
my eyes. For I knew again, and perhaps this time I would not forget, that the one who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.

The silver sun burned like ice into my eyes, blinding me. It flared low in the sky and it flashed across the wet grey ground. I heard the cawing of the excited crows before I saw them, crawling and jumping, cackling and screeching. A blissful repose as I felt the light that
illumes their nature and spirit, the spark that invests their form with that secret and divine ingredient, uniting the first crow with the last, with all crows, ecstatic essence of crow, and with the inspiration from which they were conceived by their creator, patient but hungry to be
made flesh.

The glorious light glowed within my bones and I watched them drop away like falling matchsticks, slow and shining, into the darkness beneath, tumbling through the black, and I shot down after them like an arrow fired by an ancient god who knows well the secret
rhythms of the world and where the spirit beings dwell.

I landed gently upon my feet, beside that dark moody river gurgling its mournful song as if it were running a thicker liquid than the water that marked its shape. I walked along the edge a little, my boots sounding out on the stone path. A few dead trees rasped hollowly. All else was silence.

A sudden pain in my face arrested my movement, doubling me over, my hands clawing for the cause. Agony. It felt as if my jaws would split and my face fall open. With my fingers I could feel a bony rim forming, thrusting through my skin, erupting in a hard circle. I screamed with the pain as it pushed and urged and grew. I ran my hands along its firm length. It curved into a point. A beak! I tried to open it as I would open my mouth and it felt stiff and heavy but good, new muscles responding to my will. I almost missed my shoulders pulling back like cartoon hypnogogia and stretching into wings, feathers shooting through my skin and blossoming like weird primeval flora. My face itched and I had no hands to scratch it, contenting myself with rubbing it on a stooped shoulder.

My feet were yet my own, in my own boots, but not for long. A sensation like lightning sped my spine, realigning it, and down my legs, zapping them into long and spindly things.

My boots burst open and I limbered my new talons, the pain forgotten now, stretching into my new legs and finding no trouble balancing my new light body upon them.

Shaking out my wings I opened my beak again and heard a deep caw rumble from deep in my throat and roll out over the river. The rumble was the rumble of thunder that does not toll the storm but gives voice to its power, sounding at the instant the lightning flashes, earth and sky jolting together with the same shock, the rains the tears of a consummated Heaven.

primrose paths, slippery slopes and everlasting bonefires

The trigger that fires a soul into the Otherworld is unique to each individual. It need not be something dramatic and instantly recognisable, although it was this way for me. Often it is something thin and wraithlike that haunts from a distance for as long as it will until the individual becomes aware of it. And then a little longer until he is aware of nothing else.

This is the calling, the bewitching that reaches us through the ether from where the spirits play their magical enchanting pipes. It is something that seems quite exciting when we read about it from the warmth of our beds, until the moment arrives and we realise in a cruel
flash of truth that it would as happily crush us under an unforgiving thumb nail as gift us untold powers and magic.

I’d been waiting for ten years for my call to come, and like a fool I feared far more that it wouldn’t come than I feared that it might. I spent these fallow years in studious preparation for the great event, learning a few rudimentary meditative techniques; experiencing as many psychoactive substances as I was able, marijuana, LSD, morning glory seeds, ergot, fly agaric toadstools, magic mushrooms, peyote, cannabis, the san pedro cactus, datura root, khat, the DMT of northern reed grasses; and reading anthropological accounts of the visitation of the calling. It proved far harder to find a single genuine recording of such a shamanic calling than it was to score almost any of the drugs with which I sought to strengthen my nascent energy body.

Most authentic accounts tended to come out of Siberia, where the shamans still rove the lands and the hinterlands, hunted by anthropologists rather than state endorsed killers now, largely free from Western nihilism’s mental and spiritual shackles. Living in the East of
England, I would delight in the occasional freezing winds that tear their way through the skies on an uninterrupted trajectory from Siberia, winds in which these shamans had stepped. And the Siberian rook visitors who come to winter here in the East. The Hungarian explorer
Vilmos Dioszegi collected a huge and invaluable amount of material during his travels through Siberia.

Suzukpen, a shaman of the Siberian Soyot community near the Suy-Surmak River told of his shamanic calling:

“It has been a long time. With two of my brothers, the three of us went to hunt squirrels. Late at night we were crossing a mountain, going after the squirrels, when suddenly I saw a black crow right in the middle of the road.

We were advancing in single file. I was the first. I came nearer, but the crow kept crouching in the middle of the road. It stayed right there and waited for me.

When I reached it, I threw some snow toward it from a branch.

It never moved.

Then I hit its beak with my stick.

Kok-kok. The knock resounded loudly.

What was all this? What was going to happen to me? Because the night before, before seeing the crow, I had already felt miserable.

Next day I went back to where I had seen the crow. Not even a trace of it was to be seen, anywhere! Although the others, that is my brothers, had seen it too.

From then on, from the time I hit the beak of that crow, I became very ill. My mind was deranged.

I have been suffering for as long as seven years.”

There are other tales of this turning point in the embryonic shaman’s life. It generally follows, precedes, or is concurrent with a long period of sickness, both physical and mental. The black spirits have recognised potential shamanic worth and will induce illness and insanity to see the mettle of the man. It is of little matter whether there is a living tradition of shamanism in the individual’s culture, as the spirits are perfectly able to visit during dreams, trances, and their masterful manipulation of the synchronous web.

These black spirits will gift the pagan pilgrim with a spiritual sickness and steal his soul. If he is then able to reclaim his soul and heal himself, a quest which but rarely takes less than seven years, he has served his shamanic apprenticeship and learned enough of the magic of
healing to benefit his community.

When it gets hard and the rookie shaman fears that he is bound for failure and madness eternal, it is worth remembering that it was hard even for the greatest masters:

“I became ill when I was twenty-one years old and began to see with my eyes and hear with my ears things others could neither hear nor see. For nine years I fought against the spirit, without telling anyone what had happened because I feared they might not believe me or make fun of me. In the end I became so ill that I was close to death. So I began to shamanize, and very soon my health improved. Even now I feel unwell and sick whenever I am inactive as a shaman over a longer period of time.”
Yakut shaman Uno Harva

“How did he become a shaman? Sickness seized him when he was twenty-three years old and he became a shaman at the age of thirty. That was how he became a shaman, after the sickness, after the torture. He had been ill for seven years. While he was ailing he had dreams: He was beaten up several times, sometimes he was taken to strange places. He had been around quite a lot in his dreams and he had seen many things…He who is seized by the shaman sickness and does not begin to exercise shamanism must suffer badly. He might lose his mind, he may even have to give up his life. Therefore he is advised, ‘You must take up shamanism so as not to suffer!’ Some even say, ‘I became a shaman only to escape illness.’”
The wife of Kyzlasov, a shaman of the Sagay tribe from Kyzlan on the river Yes

“The man chosen for shamanism is first recognised by the black spirits. The spirits of the dead shamans are called black spirits. They make the chosen one ill and then they force him to become a shaman.”
Sunchugasev, another Siberian shaman

“I sought solitude, and here I soon became very melancholy. I would sometimes fall to weeping, and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then, for no reason, all would suddenly be changed and I felt a great, inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it,
but had to break into song, a mighty song, with only room for the one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of my voice. And then, in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight, I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different way.”
The Inuit shaman Aua

“When I shamanize, the spirit of dead Ilya [a brother, who was himself a shaman] comes and speaks through my mind. I was forced to become a shaman by my shamanic ancestors. Before I began to shamanize, I lay ill for a whole year. I became a shaman at the age of fifteen. The sickness that forced me to become a shaman caused my body to swell up and I frequently fainted. When I began to sing, the sickness usually passed away. After that, my ancestors made me into a shaman. They separated my bones and counted them. My
flesh they ate raw. When they counted my bones, they found that there was one too many. Had there not been enough bones I could not have become a shaman.”
the Tungus shaman Semyon Semyonov

The Siberian shamans, Sunchugasev and Kyzlasov, were asked what kind of things the soul of a shaman might encounter on its journey to the Land of the Dead. Sunchugasev replied:

“His soul is taken to the shaman ancestor, and there they show him a kettle full of boiling tar. There are people in it. There are some who are known to the shaman. A single rope is fastened across the kettle and they order him to walk over it. If he succeeds, he will live long. If he falls into the kettle, he might still become a Kam [shaman], but usually they do not survive.”

Then the wife of Kyzlasov spoke up:

”That kettle is always there. Not only the shamans fall into it. They say that the soul of a sick person might also tumble into it. Some of the shamans cannot be persuaded to attempt passing over the kettle. This I know from certain people who told me that they were forced to pass around the edge of the kettle. They did it, and as they did not fall into the kettle, they became shamans.”

feather fix #7

The flock is scattered over a muddy gold furrowed field, pecking the invisible grain intently, raising no eye to scout for stealthing danger, knowingly blessed or in carefree feeding abandon, despite a few dead fellows hanging strung up here and there. Peering deeper into
the shimmering window I see a lone crow at each corner of the field, grim and silent sentries, taking their turn covering the land and the skies with their keen vision that their fellows might dine without fear and interruption.

The dirty smock of a black browed scarecrow is caught in the gust of a teasing wind and a few nearby crows lift their wings and take to the air, floating back down again when they see that the movement poses them no threat. Another gust blows by a moment or two later and the birds remain standing, only one or two bothering to turn and look at all, scratching at the burnished earth or turning clods, or driving their beaks into the ground as if they would follow them down in a dive, wings pulled back for speed, deep into the dark gold earth, beating now the slow and silent strokes of subterranean swimmers, surfacing but rarely for snatches and gasps of air.

stoned crow

I’d heard the word. The creatures that walk the angular towers with their jagged little wings had spoken the clouds, blown across those lands by a fairytale. Even rumour could play havoc with the weather here, and I peered into the sky and caught the scent. Mountains with
all their subterranean machinery are never hard to read, for they must ever obey their own natures. A bald eagle is no goat.

The stonework held and I mounted the rusty knob and checked the tension of the wire. It was looser again today - the air was too thick - and messages vibrated underfoot. The old would die and fall away. Tremors of storm bathed germination, a heart.

Don’t you tire of their tests? I bounced the wire and jumped. And beat a path back to skies the clouds had fled.

How does one tell land which is enchanted? For all seems such beauty from the sky. Gentle earth, mounds and dips, softly downed green or shining wet to cleanse and quench.

Tracks here meander, there run, as if they have chosen their own way, and towns seem less substantial than a dream.

And yet, senses too subtle for conscious thought hear it and gear the engineering of a dive. A tiny castle, ornately carved from forgotten rock, whirled from molt by a spinning forefinger, I drop and fall.

Beaded insects line the worry walk, chant a faint murmur in their tread. The beak of an owl glints milky. All else is dust.

And down the dampening fissure and the swollen ocean heaves black as octopus jet, spills and foams onto the pebbled beach, sucking and chewing those thousands of tiny souls.

He is not here. A spider would take me but my lifetime’s wishes are long since spent.

It was a threaded skein led them to the magic oak. The ivy tells it still but few birds care to listen. I seek not for myself.

A rosy glow, sweetly scented, pours from the sky and pools the pebbled ground.

Broken bodies mend. I pick him out with the tip of my beak and take him home.

land of the rising crow

Nearby a holiday maker arose from a sun flooded bench, leaving in his wake a momentary shadow, a partially eaten sandwich and a broadsheet newspaper, which last he had crumpled in a perfunctory, well practised and business like manner. She crept upon her
quarry, pouncing on the sandwich and devouring it in a single cannibal motion. Luck might strike so cleanly but seldom in a working day, walking the sea front or the countryside nearby. The coins she had occasion to find would be stockpiled for tobacco rather than food;
she listened to the hunger of her soul over that of her body.

Her physical needs satiated, she sat straight backed and rolled herself a cigarette, her gaze far out to sea, lulled into a gentle trance by the sweeping movement of a pair of red billed choughs over and around a distant cliff, their long wings gracing them an immaculate ease of flight, the most accomplished of the crows in the air. Lifting her lightweight telescope to her eye, she fancied she could pick out even their red legs hugged tightly to their bodies as they swooped and dived and played on the wind’s currents.

She had heard of these birds building their nests in quarries, mines and sea caves, and had watched this pair the last month to’ing and fro’ing about these cliffs where they were raising a small shy brood. Their slender beaks caused their feeding habits to be slightly different from those of the other crows. On the sandy beach, too small and isolated for the tourists to bother, they had dug a deep hole in their foraging for wriggling food. Around an ants’ nest they had probed and pecked at the insects and their juicy nutritious larvae until disturbed by a maniac spaniel.

With a neat flick of the lighter she breathed in the smoke, an image of Tezcatlipoca, the Aztec Smoking Mirror, flashing fiery and dark for an instant in her mind. She had wandered and drifted much of late, haunted by a ragbag of ancient gods in their many cultural guises, and sought some direction to her quest. Perhaps this newspaper would provide a clue, had perhaps even been placed there by the beloved Quetzlcoatl. She spread its pages wide and scanned the headlines for relevant articles.

The ghost dance of the macabre drew her eye. An odd death had occurred on the roads. A woman, involved in a minor crash, had been picking her nose at the moment of impact, and her sharp clawed finger had been driven hard up her nostril and embedded deep in her brain.

The girl thought of the Cyclops, that proud prehistoric race, who had been promised knowledge of the future but were tricked, and granted the ability to foresee only the circumstance of their own deaths. She wondered if the woman in the paper would have lived her life differently had she known what was to befall her. She thought briefly of her own mortal life, just an ordinary life like any other, and how far away it now seemed. She had known of her own end before it came, but had not been able to avoid it for the knowing. And yet it seemed that only after her visit from that dream clad Reaper, the event of her ego death, had she gained her own free will, and even now she sometimes wondered, as she turned the page. Certainly no one around her appeared to possess any semblance of free will at all. Otherwise she would surely have found the sought evidence of conscience and concern in their shaping of reality, their use of the secret magical language of a subtextual, subgestural alchemy, of which they were undoubtedly aware. Yes, whichever way she worked it, it always came back to this: they have invested all their free will and hope of salvation in her, and she is lost. How to make that final leap or step or stumble of consciousness which the world awaits? She didn’t shy away from death and fear, didn’t hide from their lessons and quests. She did love the world, despite its rejection of her. She was doing her best.

Death was no god himself, not anywhere in the world, but he served the gods, had access to their counsel, and she was glad that they allowed him to dream. An agent of the World Machine, as she now recognised him, had told her once that to serve is the highest form of love, and she wondered whether Death were wont to feel this way as he went about his business, as he carried out his orders with as much artistry as he was able.

The photograph of the crow immediately caught her eye. A crow is a fine disguise, known throughout the world. It is a common enough site to deter attention as it travels here and there, not really feared, rarely now revered, generally not even noticed. The perfect form, perhaps, for the Feathered Serpent to travel in, held as he is within the Smoking Mirror’s imprisoning magic, yet still himself. She read on.

The carrion crow in Japan has found a new way to crack its nuts. It perches on the traffic lights beside pedestrian crossings and waits for the lights to turn red and the traffic to draw to a halt. It then carefully places its nut right in front of a vehicle’s wheels and retires to safety as the lights change to green and the vehicle moves forward, cracking the nut open under its wheels. The bird will then wait until the lights are once again turned red before creeping out and collecting its prize in safety.

She folded the paper methodically, wondering why people are so surprised by the manifestation of intelligence. Isn’t the development of intelligence the whole point of this old world? And has it really been such a fruitless experiment that the slightest evidence of success constitutes a news story? She was glad that the Feathered One was continuing his particular destiny of educator, raising the expectations of those whom he sought out or who happened across his path, and hoped that the author of the piece hadn’t blown his cover. He
asked not for the blood of his followers but for their dreams and imagination, and carried himself as a worthy and beneficent god might. His cloth of gold he offered to all, and he employed no guards.

She had been walking the cliffs that morning and came across an abandoned quay. Children played in the water, fleshy cherubs smiling knowingly or not the immortality of their spirits.

“Careful with that bottle,” called a parent.

“Joey lost the lid,” replied a child. “Doesn’t matter what happens to it.” And a few moments later came the sounds of smashing glass.

secret society

Coig Cluaran Corcair stumbled into the cell, feathers ruffled and head in a daze. The roc of gathered crows did their best to appear as if they were trying to hide their disapproval of his habitual ungainly entrance, whilst secretly somehow admiring him; Coig was very much a
maverick crow, who viewed the roc as his duty as a particularly able and intelligent bird, but set no score in the customs and manners that went along with it.

He made a cursory show of preening his naked feathers back into place, and acknowledged the assembled birds. Amongst them was Honkor Crau, a rare visitor to so lowly a cell, and Coig flicked his wings and tail in a friendly gesture of recognition, smiling partly to himself and partly to the waiting birds.

Honkor Crau was adorned in the most fabulous attire, tailored by his own rare shaper making skills, and looked for all the world, some might say, like a raven’s nest lining.

Immaculate threads of white fur draped across his shoulders, over a loose and silkish purple garment. At his throat hung a simple medallion of pure gold, a symbol which Coig did not recognise etched upon it. Strange silver and blue wavy lines ran along both sides of his beak, and he had fashioned a single white line on the horizontal above each eye. Certain other birds had attempted to dream their own facial markings, and Coig wondered to himself what the world was coming to.

“Ah, Corcair,” began Honkor Crau. “I have received word from the raven brethren. They would perhaps have sent a croaker I think this night, yet the entry of a new soul to the Knowledge requires their attentions. They feared to lose a single member of the ceremonies. Balance, I understand, is something of an issue. Notwithstanding the ravens’ peculiarly superstitious nature, I am led to believe that we are passing through a particularly difficult period. In any case, they’re all tied up with their mystical mumbo jumbo, and consequently a second hand account will have to suffice.”

Had Coig external aural appendages they would have been pricking up by now. The reverberations of a newcomer to the Knowledge were never easy, but would not normally worry the ravens. He had sensed an especially virile chaos to the world of late, which he had been inclined to put down to his own increasing cynicism. He had even recently for a moment or two considered finding a mate at the next spring gathering and raising young, in a desultory attempt to regain some meaning to his life, or to so fill up his hours with fetching food and chasing away predators that he would have no time to wonder whether any of it really mattered. So even the ravens were bothered then. That made him feel a little better, since he’d also been concerned that he might have been falling paranoid. So many odd things seemed to have been happening around him lately. Crows themselves are far from immune to the ebb and flow of the graa.

“The brethren have found a series of strange and sporadic anomalies in the craca which they have identified as being connected. Latest intelligence holds that the possibility of it being a mutation of a known thread is now extremely minimal.” Honkor paused for breath or
perhaps effect. “They have reason to believe that one of the old and uncatalogued myths may be resurfacing.”

A stunned silence fell upon the meeting. The crows had been masters of the graa for so long that it was endemic in their society to consider their inauguration the starting point of real history. Cluaran breathed sharply. He was excited. The world may be in danger from the chaos creeping in through the cracks in the perimeters that sought to contain that unfathomable dark, but yet that self same adversity might well spell the saviour of his own sanity. The nonsense engendered by the frightening anomaly suddenly made sense.

“My purpose here is to find a bird willing to seek this aberrant thread and to trace it to its source.” Honkor Crau’s gaze had remained fixed these last minutes upon the unconventional form of Coig Cluaran Corcair, and as their eyes met he knew that he was looking at the crow he had been seeking.

crow god

When I saw him, when I saw the crow god and was witness to an inter-species mythological meme, my heart pounded in a fury of revelation. The movements, the forces, that know no boundary, that exist within and without the whole of life, the connective power that binds us in
one living mass. He hung upside down from the metal parapace like a bat king. His eyes peered out as from another world, obsidian from his charcoal feather cloak, those points of black light more ancient yet than that molten stone medium, cooling and crystallising over millions of years in the hidden subterranean wastelands of the earth. Those eyes held the secrets of the world.

And it was Woden in his crow form, Hrafngwd, that mysterious gifter of knowledge, who has been known, variously, as Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, Wotan, Odin, even Osiris and Queztlcoatl. The rock and roll star of the gods, the main man. Why so many various forms and the misunderstandings that difference engenders? Oh, I have no form of my own but live within a dream, and am stronger and clearer and more myself the deeper within that dream, and to those not so deep within the dream I wear the clothes of life’s familiarity, for I live to serve them and they need not serve me. It is perhaps as I wished. And I cannot force an immutable law for I have no more idea of my own origin than do you, for the world is not yet finished and we are not yet come full circle. It may please you to recognise me where you will.

Around him in precarious snow chilled nests low aloft the frozen trees lay weak and dying birds, mostly newly hatched young. Cheated out of the short lived promise of an early spring, their thin frames were not equal to the sudden hunger forced upon them by this equally unseasonal cold. And the crow god hung helpless; for all his knowledge and powers unable to disentangle adversity from experience. I think it was for this that he cried.

And it was he, he who had taken my brother. It’s an old old tale, he seemed to say. The oldest, perhaps, of the tales of the modern world, the world left behind when we withdrew from the hurly burly of the busy visiting, from the beasts become men, men become beasts, rugged angels, dumb immortals, passing through the bright and shady veils as if the world were one. The material world has a form all its own, and is too heavy to sit at Heaven’s quiet repast for longer or for more. The unthinkable act, the gate was shut, the animals left to themselves and to their devices.

And it’s just a story and has been told many times before this time, has found its way into the rich neural weave of myth. There are only so many tales and I think you will find this one to be your favourite, to be the best. It’s my gift to you. Pick up the trail, he seemed to whisper. We miss you.

And so his head hung there, held up only by a twisting and die hard will, and I felt his warm and enlivening black eyes upon me. And I was by him enraptured and I was by him changed. And whenever he has entered my thoughts since I have found myself possessed of an immutable resolve and take a full and quiet moment to breathe his breath back to him, in the calm silence that his spirit engenders.

riding north

She coaxed the old van into the yard, its laboured suspension complaining musically. The dry dirt track came to an end in a mechanical graveyard, various once proud vehicles laid in rusting repose despite the frenzied attentions of the chickens pecking in the grass that skirted the worn out forms. A sheepdog loped out with an unenthusiastic bark and before long an old wiry man clad in an oil and grease smeared dinner jacket strode after him.

The exchange was swift and she started up the bike’s growling motor, twisted the throttle sharply until the engine’s splutters were mostly ironed out, secured the battered helmet at her throat and squeezed the throttle more gently now, allowing the bike to take her forward, back along the mud track and out into the world. She turned northwards and didn’t stop.

As the storm clouds gathered she thought perhaps of finding shelter but then the storm was upon her and nowhere seemed safe from its wild tirade. She fancied that the rubber tyres would save her from any lightning bolts and so she carried on, half wondering whether the electricity of a strike would prove fatal when she lowered her feet once more to the ground, but she was not struck by any bolt this time and thought soon of nothing but how good the bike felt under her and how well it picked its track as they swung off the Southwest peninsula and crept now true north like a salmon or an eel, gaining deep satisfaction from obeying a primal urge.

Upon that night and the nights following she rode on until darkness fell and then turned off the road, killing her lights lest anyone see her passage, bringing the bike to a halt in some isolated place, unpacking her tent and bedroll and curling up beside the bike, making no fire for none was needed, but smoking cigarettes in the light of the stars and sometimes the newly waxing moon. When she rode it was along the thinnest and most backward tracks that she could find, often twisting all about to gain only a few more miles of the north.

The third morning she awoke in a patch of virgin forest to the gaze of a doe and its young. The fawn’s eyes were wide with curiosity but it looked to its mother for the lead and she would come no closer, but watched brightly for longer than she would normally perhaps have dared, sniffing the air as she did so, until the moist dewy grass underfoot reminded her of her tasks and the pair danced away.

As she wheeled the bike along the grassy track a jackdaw swooped overhead, wagging its tail in a gesture of friendship. She had heard that the jackdaw is the most active crow traveller, there being some little migration and also evidence of movement from Britain to both the Netherlands and to Ireland. They are happily colonial birds, preferring to nest, close together, in holes, whether in trees, cliffs, chimneys or ruined buildings. Sure enough, another jackdaw soon appeared, and yet another, until a few of them were hurrying about, hawking for ants in the air or scuttling about upon the earth in search of insects, one or two enjoying a casual peck at a rabbit’s remnants. She laid the bike down and crouched to watch them a while before picking up the bike once more, laughing at their antics as she wheeled it on and back out to the road.

Hawks were more plentiful now, hovering silently at such regular intervals that the world could almost be clockwork, and the omnipresent crows as she traced her route. A tank smoking and fiery sat at the centre of the road, blocking the route of those who had been priding themselves on fording the last flashed river.

She had devised a method of projecting a thin strip of her consciousness before her, an unfurled sparkling green ribbon that alerted her to anything ahead that was imperceptible by her ordinary senses. This covered her primarily for deer leaping suicidally from the shadowed thickets at the edge of the roadway. Not to make use of this sense seemed equivalent to riding with her eyes closed.

As she rode she would find sometimes that she had slipped into a world so devoid of time that if any seed of temporality had been blown by chance there also it would find no framework within which to function and would be forced into behaviours of extreme surreality or would simply cease to exist altogether. She wondered, when returned to the ordinary world, whether at these times she were even visible.

A car had skidded to a dusty stop in a layby and the driver staggered out, groping at his shirt, his arms flailing helplessly. She pulled the bike over, whipped off her helmet and ran to see if he needed assistance.

“Give - me - CPR!” he gasped, and collapsed on the ground. She ripped his shirt open and pulled off a leather gauntlet and made to place her hand upon his heart to see how it beat. A stunned wasp lay on his chest, mechanically setting forth its sting. She picked it up with the gauntlet she still wore and placed it on the grass beside them.

“It’s just a wasp,” she told him. “There’s nothing wrong with your heart.”

And soon she was over the border and into the northern land named for the hag who seemed to run things here. The light stretched further into the night, the sunsets and dawns almost bleeding into each other either side of an ever briefer dark. The air was crisp, clean, the wild areas tangibly wilder, their inhabitants different, sometimes alarmingly so, as she trekked onto the moors and heard and then saw and was quickly and resoundingly defeated in a battle of animal will by her first capercaillie. The people too were different, mostly uninterested in her passage. She was just another of the mad English from down there, that strange land swarming in Romans or other salt or paper rich fools, Cromwells, soldiers that fought without honour and hid behind clouds of gunpowder smoke, football players whose inexplicable good luck gifted them glory when their meagre talents and lack of guts failed to.

She reached the western coast and sought to sell the bike for the price of a ticket to the distant Outer Hebridean islands.

“Well you don’t look like a John Thorsinger,” said the man at the secondhand warehouse, reading the name on the papers which she had handed him. A lie was out of the question. With the apparent ability of those around her to read her mind, even her propensity toward exaggeration had been coolly tempered.

“The one before,” she proffered, meeting his gaze, perhaps unconsciously frightening him with her unblinking stare.

“Before, huh?” And she was witness to yet another’s ears pricking at this word. That seemed all they wished to know. The world before the fall from grace. And, of course, that world regained, as if it were so distant from them, so unattainable, that they could not even imagine its existence.

“Before before.” The words came to her and she spoke them with conviction.

“Well, Before Before,” he said, as if that were her name. ”If I have your word that that’s in order then I suppose we can do business.”

She still didn’t understand the difference in connotation of the words “business” and “magic”, didn’t understand why “business” was even necessary when surely “magic” would more than suffice. Perhaps “business” was ordinary material magic, whilst “magic” was the higher form. The crafting of the subtle complexities of language required such sharpness, such sophistication, but then perhaps it had always been so, and the lightning strike had simply left her brain damaged and unable to keep up.

“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s good,” knowing she sounded less the prophet than the fool.

He handed her the folded notes but did not reach to shake her hand.

The winds at the ferry point were wet and salty, and the music she piped on her whistle as she waited to board was almost stolen away. Upon the deck during the night passage as she played the music haunted the expanse of the sea, and fell short of the occasional faint island and blur of fishing boat.

Upon disembarking she walked away from the town and caught a ride with a crofter to the west of the island and walked some more until she found an isolated and deserted beach where she lived for a week or more, watching for whales at sea or scouring the beach and whittling driftwood, fixing a small fire in the evening if she had caught a fish or been given one by the islanders she would meet if she wandered up past the rotting cow with its thick and salty black hide and guarded bones and eyeless head and onto the track and anywhere around that precious country which never fell dark the while she was within it. And as she sits there, upon occasion regaled by a suggestion of the still distant aurora borealis, she listens to the voices that come from a place she cannot yet see, and she marks their words and entreaties and does so now without fear.

She tramped across the bogs which had been cut in places for fuel or sale, leaving behind a mosaic of watered dirt patches. Small stone circles peppered her route, harbingers of the further one which she sought and had sought for many moons since and which finally arose from the evening’s warm dusk. There was no barricade to the circle, no appointed hours for visits, not even another soul apparent nearby.
The stones cast long shadows from the fat golden sun, warping in its exit from the sky as if preparing for rest by relaxing the strict edicts of its shape. A small group of rooks - an accessible provincial parliament - enjoyed the last embers of the sun’s warmth, surveying the soon shadowed land with a distant gaze before finally accepting the dark’s approach and departing together for the night’s roost.

The gathering of stones was shaped such that it was the custom to run along an enclosed chase on the approach to the centre of the circle. She fell once, the earth not allowing her to taste her secret fruits so easily, and laughed as she pulled herself up and ran on into the heart of the group, where the laughter stopped at once as her blood ran cold with a petrifying awe and drained her form.

He stood there still, had kept his lonely vigil during that unimaginable passage of time, the last one to inhabit his stone after the others had moved onto the land which they had most probably dreamed into existence, taking their horses with them. A lone sentry, ancient watcher, who wavered into visibility in his pale blue and green and purple painted light form decorated with gold touches, smiling welcome from the foot of his stone. He had known that she would come even before she had known it, yet as he beckoned her toward him she could not move, numbed by the paralysis the more she fought it, until she fell frozen upon the ground.

“You’re so close,” he whispered, his voice seamed with the accent of those who are spawned beyond the origins of the wind. “To your body breathe life and rise. To resurrect yourself always is best.” She found herself unable even to draw breath, her chest remaining resolutely still while she tried and tried to take just a gasp of air. Something was rising in her, but it was fear and cold panic. She tugged at her limbs with her mind but they were stone.

She remembered reading of a girl her age, on the island of Iona that time, decades before. Stretched out on the grass, drained of life whilst trying to access another realm of reality. A simple aside in strange death esoterica. Just another example of what you risk when you dare to search for secrets that prefer to remain guarded and hidden, buried under dust for one more bold, more beautiful. Just another guard at the door.

And with a final bout of will her arm tore itself free from the grip of its physical counterpart and clutched a hold of the air itself and pulled her one rip at a time free from her body, which lay shining like wax in the cold dew.

She twisted in her weightless form, jumping and spinning and gently landing again, as if her body were too imbued with the laws of physics to shed them quite so soon. She shimmered in a weird translucence, perhaps with the light of the moon, perhaps not, as if she were fashioned of a phosphorescent solution that writhed and oozed within the long plastic tubes of her limbs and trunk. And it was not just her. The grass beneath her seemed saturated with this substance and felt strangely gooey under her feet although it did not stick to them. She pressed her foot into the grass and watched as the luminescence spread outward, out of the grass underfoot, only for it to seep slowly back once she lifted her foot again. Gasping in wonder, she realised that she was breathing, though she had no physical lungs for the air to fill. She checked the body laid upon the grass as well. Its chest - her chest - was rising and falling in a shallow motion, but it was surely sufficient to perpetuate the life that it somehow housed.

She turned to face him and felt his gaze travel the length of her and reach the tips of her toes, her pale form feeling its touch, echoing with a myriad of physical sensations the passage of his attention, a thousand times more sensitive than any physical sense of touch.

She struggled to retain her consciousness, a distant howl to let slip the hounds of love, no, of ecstasy, no, a mist falling, I can’t stop, droplets like elfin rain engulfing her and carrying her away, washing her along the flood plain, faraway.

“Hold it,” he whispered into her mind. “Hold it just there.” And she floated to the surface and opened her eyes, raked the flowers from her face. “Do it to me,” he said.

She smoothed her photic hair through, slowly, as in a dream, and looked into his eyes. She had thought that, as a creature formed of light, that light defined his being, that from light was he forged, but his eyes, those apparent windows to the soul, seemed darker the longer she lingered there. Tiny vesicles of light pumped along thin channels that threaded throughout his body like visible and yes! audible blood vessels, that sped around his body, many becoming one, one becoming many, joining, dividing, speeding, rushing, feeding his form but not determining it, concerned with their own movement, leaving him to his.

“Getting dizzy again,” she thought to herself, pulling out, hoping that he had heard.

“It’s OK,” he said. “It is intoxicating at first.”

She looked around to regain her bearings and something caught her eye.

“Wow. There really is a thread joining me to my body.” She had read about such things and was pleased to see that experience bore the reading out. It gave the experience a touch more objective reality somehow. “But you don’t have one.”

“That’s true,” he affirmed. “But I wouldn’t recommend you losing yours just yet!”

“Won’t my body get cold on the grass?” she asked.

“Good instincts for survival - I like that,” he said. “Tonight conditions are clement, but this might not always be.”

An owl screeched somewhere in the soft distance. Coupled with the sound came a visual element of the cry, to which she had been previously blind, a dance of fierce light painted in the sky, ripping through the air at the speed of sound, turning to eye her with a
nonchalant malice before shooting by. She almost screamed.

He laughed. “The owls do pride themselves on their magic. Unless you’re a dormouse though they mean you no harm. A simple thought form, cast at the moment the cry is shrieked. Quite effective.”

“Can everyone see these things?” she asked.

“Do you know, I often wonder that myself.”

And they talked the night long about secrets that wear the mantle of history and carry an unblinking iguana on each shoulder.

feather fix #8
Deep cold winter and the land seems fashioned from a harder substance than the gold that murks and shines its ragged shapes. A lone crow stands on the bare swaying branch. It is almost through the season of death now, having found solace in the flesh of some other less fortunate creatures who have fallen to the icy touch.

Beneath, in the scrubby pasture with bare gold ore patches, lays a couped ewe, its heavy fleece holding it prone upon its back, the lambs in its belly not aiding its quest. Frantic efforts to regain its feet have brought it close to death now. The crow stands and waits still for the tired life to depart that shaggy form in a whisper, then jumps from the tree, holding its wings wide, and swoops down to the vacated meat beneath. Alighting on the sheep’s woolly white head, it sinks its beak into the staring eyeball, tugging to pull it from its bony haunt, overbalancing almost as it comes free, now swallowing the morsel whole, relishing the juicy warmth.

One by one more crows arrive at the fleecy table, digging and ripping into the resilient hide, seeking out the warm entrails and unborn lambs that wait like spring’s promise within.

a stranger by birth

She rode the ferry back to the mainland. It was dark and late when they arrived and she picked a road and held out her thumb and was fortunate in gaining a ride before she had left the town. The moon was strong and she watched the wooded edges for life and movement.
They stopped for coffee, and reaching into her pocket she found five pounds that she didn’t know she had and was able to buy them apple pie also. They talked about the country and the people, for he too was a stranger by birth from this land. He agreed that there was
space enough here to stretch into being something more than would have been the case had the journey not been made, and suggested to her where she might best find the work she sought, for which she thanked him, although unsure whether she would have occasion to
follow it up.

He dropped her off at her request beside the road a few miles from town and gave her a bottle of spring water and a lunch his wife had packed up for him, and she shook his hand and pulled the sickness out of him which he did not even know was there.

A hundred or so yards into the wood she threaded her tent and bedroll through a deer fence and climbed over it and walked on until she found a small clearing. The world was silent but for the mewing cries of birds and the rustling movement of other unseen creatures
in the brambled floor. She put her tent up and crept inside and slept. Her dreams came raw and violent and when she groped her way back to wakefulness she realised that she was running a fever and shivered partly with the sickness and partly with the fear of dying out
here, finally alone and with no one to treasure anything she might leave behind. An eerie sense pervaded that she knew this place and this time from a memory made before her life had begun.

She rose in the night, half expecting her body to still be laid under the blanket, thinking she had heard music in the glade. There was no music, but when she huddled up again she was chewing on limeflower and elderflower, vaguely aware of having met a beneficent someone or something, and the fever did abate and neither was the lunch ruined when she came to need it.

The sun came streaming through the trees, never cruel up here, as she packed up her things and set out again for the town, deeper into the trees to begin with until she could pick out a track that seemed to be going in the right direction. Where the path crossed a road someone had dumped a pile of rubbish, and she picked out a long cardboard tube which had dodged any rain, and further along the way rubbed it with the juice of purple and red berries to brighten it, and carried it along with her.

Dusk had fallen when she reached the town. People were busying themselves with the celebrations of the end of the working week. She found a likely spot and played her cardboard didgeridoo whose music seemed to fit here despite the many thousands of miles of distance from its spiritual home, blowing across the busied streets like a stag’s ululating moonman bellow over the distant mountain valleys. People brought wine and cigarettes and chatter and some money, stopping with her a while before the dictates of the evening drew them away again.

She spent the night at a campsite and awoke early for the unaccustomed luxury of a shower and smiled at the rooks rooting through the campers’ concealed foodstores for bread and titbits. They lived in colonies in the broad elms to the west of the campsite, from which vantage they could survey the open country surrounding. Once the campers were up and about only a few birds would remain to stalk and rustle through the staked plastic bags, the others gathering and leaving on feeding trips, some returning and congregating again at the
roost before setting out for pastures new throughout the day. In this way the rooks communicated to each other where the best feeding was to be had on that day, sharing any good fortune that might befall them. This remarkable co operation was helped by the males
having ceased production of the hormones that aided the aggression necessary to them during the nesting season.

the twa corbies
Anonymous, 14th Century

As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies making a mane
The tane unto the t’other say
“Where sall we gang and dine today?”

“In behint yon auld fail dyke
I wot there lies a new slain knight
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair

“His hound is to the hunting gane
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame
His lady’s ta’en another mate
So we may mak our dinner sweet

“Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een
Wi’ ae lock o’ his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare

“Mony a one for him makes mane
But nane sall ken where he is gane
O’er his white banes, when they are bare
The wind sall blaw for evermair”

pure

Time passed and she found work in the forests to the south of the town where outlaws used to prey on travellers or hide from an alien or simply inalienable law. There she would cut heather deep, taking its roots to be transplanted elsewhere, providing wild oases in towns where the land feared it might forget how it once was before civilisation cemented it into its new and uncompromising forms. Or pollard a copse at the request of the farmer, sometimes cutting back the gorse from stealing too much of the sheep’s and wild flowers’ small domain.

There were always deer fences needed erecting, the price to be paid for the reforestation of certain tracts of this land; a perpetual task the want of which would be nullified by the introduction of a few shaggy wolves keen to make a new life for themselves here where the wind howled their song and sickened for the lack of the animals it loved. And there was a cobbled stone footpath to be stretched where the public walkway was prone to mud and flooding. Each stone was gathered in its sleep from the surrounding pasture or wasteland and turned in rough hands, rudely shaped with crude metal implements to take its place on the jagged shale bed, held in place by the combined coercion of everything around it now, closely shouldering its fellows, the humble earth dirt giving vital bond that would strengthen with the action of the weather and the movement of travellers upon the path.

Her steel sprung nerves and sinews found themselves lulled and assuaged by the simple labour, and the fluidity of carefree speech began in some small but significant measure to return to her, the simple pleasures of friendship no longer such invading strangers in her world.

She made her flimsy canvas home nearby the site of the present work, watching in one place a brood of barn owls grow and strengthen, lose their ragged fleece and take their first creamy flight, battling with the thickness of the air to hold them aloft, their parents goading and encouraging and then perched watching invisible from a distance as their offspring stretched their emergent kingdoms and stumbled through their first clumsy kills. At another site she befriended a yearling fox who sloped at dusk as she cooked around her camp, communicating its desire for a few scraps, playing in the soft browned pine needle floor or chasing butterflies further down the dell, dancing through the bracken, occasionally flushing out a rabbit and always starting in a slapstick surprise as the chase began.

The day’s labours, that had once seemed to enslave her, stealing all her time and energy, now somehow remaindered her many long morning, evening and night time hours. She walked the land nearby her camps, learning which shady river spots the fish would favour and consequently the otters and kingfishers also. Any fresh roadkill carrion would never lay for long beside the dusty edges of whatever track had witnessed its fall. Pheasant and rabbit mostly, she would collect them and hang them from a tree near her camp, which became busier with keen eyed corvids quick to realise that she wouldn’t chase them from her parlour.

After skinning the rabbits she would tie up a leg or two to a branch, an easy meal for a crow visitor, then mash the rabbit’s brains and work them into the hide, for every creature contains enough tannin in its brain to tan its own hide, although she was not sure whether this were also true of dinosaurs, with their famously small brains and bulky bodies. It certainly worked for the rabbits though, and after being worked and stretched and sunned they were sewn together for bedding, for the nights were getting colder now and the ground damp and chill.

The autumn seemed set to progress into winter and she gathered her accumulated wages and took a room in town, beside the river that rushed around the myriad of tiny islands and out into the firth, where fish leapt slapping their tails in the freedom of the air or seasonally swam calm and unhurried further upriver to spawn and die. There she befriended two boys and they shaped spears out of sticks and went hunting for wild boar or wolves or more mythical quarry yet and played until the day’s end, when the shadows drew long and the song of the river and the birds changed, and they put their world aside until another time, returning to warm and nourishing domesticity.

She acquired a guitar, and sat at dusk on the high veranda outside her room, playing screeching notes and gentle chords and shimmering harmonics that blew and drifted and sang across the wooded perimeters, curling around the trees or gazing up at the dark and imposing mountains as the autumn tightened its grip on anything it was able to reach and twist inside of.

And in the spaces between her labour and her play she navigated routes throughout this cold granite land on her new bike with its restless spirit, or rode out west and walked into the vast mountainous arenas where the water of the rippling burns trickled like a song in her throat and mind. Ravens made their homes here and she delighted in their wheeling and swooping, their four foot wingspans paddling through the sky, honking like geese or releasing a more crowlike caw. Quick raven eyes brushed the land beneath, and were watched in turn by an occasional skulking eagle or buzzard intending to profit from the raven’s legendary ability to find carrion, subsequently attempting to chase the raven from its feast should its searches meet with success.

Worthy companions these rough black birds indeed of the great god Odin, perched as they did upon his shoulders, this one Hugin for thought and this one Munin for memory, whispering to him the day’s sights during the course of his dinner, so enthralling him that his hound would steal with a nonchalant ease the meat from his table. The Vikings carried a raven banner into battle, woven to a strict magical edict, the wind holding its wings wide, helping their warriors to achieve battle frenzy and surely striking terror into the hearts of their adversaries. A desperate Alfred the Great had all but given up his England as lost until he succeeded in capturing the invading Danes’ totem and his fortunes were turned. William the Conqueror, himself a descendant of the Vikings, is pictured on the Bayeux tapestry entering into battle behind the raven banner.

It is said that the ravens also aided the Vikings’ quests to discover new lands, notably Iceland, Greenland and North America. They would carry the birds caged upon their ships, loosing one when lost in foreign seas, marking and following its course should it not return to the ship but sense an unseen land to fly toward. Less fortunate of course was Noah, whose raven did not return with a sprig of fresh laurel, for the madness of the feeding frenzy was foremost master of its mind as it floated and drifted on the swollen and ripe corpses of the drowned.

Now the raven is guardian to an England which has largely banished it through cruelty and ignorance, no longer a raven oak at the heart of every village, these birds stolen for their protective magic from the nest as fledglings from diverse parts of the kingdom and set to stalk the grounds of the Tower of London, suffering the further ignominy of a clipped wing now, since Charles II was warned that should these birds chance to desert the Tower then the Empire would fall.

Sleek and black as she looked upwards, impressing with their long wings and thick round tails, cutting a path through the sky so suddenly grey with the threat or promise of rain. Keepers of secrets, custodians of untold things. The legend of the Raven Stone held that whenever a young raven died, a parent would away to seek a magic stone, discernible only to one with the degree of esoteric knowledge which these birds possess. The stone would be returned to the nest and forced into the beak of the dead young bird to protect him between incarnations and to ensure that his next life would be as a raven, a practice mimicked perhaps by the Ancient Egyptians, who would place a carved stone or gilt scarab into the mouths of their own deceased. But for these stones ravens were cruelly hunted and young mercilessly killed in order to send a parent upon the quest.

Here in the wildness of the west though they were able to pursue their heart’s desires, to patrol the vast terrain, to swoop and dive or hang on the updraughts, to coast upside down as they sometimes will, and to be free.

There was no meanness of spirit anywhere out there and at the back of her mind preyed always the thought of wandering these wildlands in her hermitage forever, far from the world and its concerns. There were passages to other worlds out there, a few scattered and secret chambers that held beings who had not received human visitors for some time, and she sought them out and became adept at finding them and communing with whatever she might there encounter. A certain light and sometimes a thin melody would lead her to an otherwise unremarkable spot where she would sit and sometimes beat a steady rhythm on her bodhran or on the hand drum she had crudely but effectively fashioned from the soaked and softened rawhide of a dog chew stretched over a chock of hollowed elm limb, and wait for whatever might befall.

Aerial apparitions cut and curled from the darkness, red and green like ragged flags or Beltane flames, snarling vicious smiles and eyeing her with a uniform suspicion upon the occasion of their first visit. They did not care to be seen and shot off like the smoke of suddenly extinguished candles many times until she learned to anticipate the breaths and rhythms that would hold them a little longer, give them cause to stay a while and not start away, and twist a little longer beside the odd entity that claimed a measure of kinship by her presence.

They followed the strict procedure that had always been their way, methodically filling her to the brim with fear, or with a blind faith in her ability to calm the madness that still enveloped and suffocated her; anything they willed her to feel or think she mostly would, and they would but rarely lay pleasant thoughts upon her; anything remotely agreeable would generally be a device through which she might view that the seed of who she would be was immured within the worthlessness of the part of her that felt the pleasant happiness of pride or that fool blind faith, and she was slowly and willingly assassinated piece by piece. And through it all reigned the suspicion that they were simply purifying her for their own devilish sacrifice, but still she came.

crow rustling

I held my wings next to my body and shot through the shadowed foliage like a bullet, lucky to have found a way between the branches. The intricacies of flight had come back to me easily, as if I had never stepped into a hominid form at all. The first time I awoke from a night’s flight, human again as a distant cock crowed the morning in, my shoulders were stiff and sore from beating my wings the night long and I could barely move. I lay there in the most blissful pain, remembering the joys of riding the sky, the cool breeze upon my face, the incomparable sensation of suspension in the air and movement through it, the fabulous views. And then those tiresome telephone and electricity lines, almost an assault course the aerial world now.

It was night and a thick witchcraft wood had been magicked up since I was last here, confusing me and causing me danger, almost entirely blocking the thin and cloud patched starlight down here. The house stood as before, squatted over the swarming and shadowed ground, holding its secrets like a mad chained woman. The windows on the second floor were open and I flew in, returned to my human form as I landed. Oil lamps burned dimly in every corner of the wide room, stationed on antique furniture, laying yellowy shades over the
deep red velvet curtains and pale mushroom wooden floor. The golden settles offered comfortable forgetfulness but I held firm and remained upon my feet.

He stood perched upon an ornately carved Jacobean trestle, the links of a golden chain wrapped fast around his ankle. He looked at me with his sad eyes and I hoped that he had always known that I would come. I walked towards him and lifted a hand to stroke his head. He buried his face in my chest and I held him tight, whispering words I could not control, tears streaming my cheeks.

From outside the windows came the sound of distant harrying wings. They knew I had come to steal their pet away and they would not be pleased. I pulled his claws from my coat and balanced him back on his perch and ran to the windows one by one to shut them fast. And to the last one.

“Have you seen Cecil yet? He’s a message for you from Audrey. He may be chasing those aperitifs.”

“A moment. Give me a moment. I’ll be with you in a moment.” I pulled the last window to and turned to face the strange dark character. The room was crawling in them. They wore blue and green and purple silk gowns and garments and busied themselves in polite chat with each other. They had got in somehow.

Three or four of them surrounded me.

“We were just saying what wonders the gardener’s achieving in the grounds. Have you seen the fishpond?”

“Oh, delightful,” added another one, addressing each other, but with their wide black eyes fixed on me, as if they were possessed of a collective consciousness and were unsure whether I was part of it too. Or they were unsure whether I was aware that I was. “And do you
know he won’t tell what bulbs are waiting to enchant us.”

I slipped through them and looked over at the perch. A few of them were offering him titbits, touching his precious head. As I made my way towards him I was accosted again.

“Were you at the races today? I don’t recall having seen you there. Who are you with?”

“Oh do leave the poor thing alone Alfred. She’s come for her brother.”

A few more steps and I reached the perch. The creatures turned to face me, still standing between us.

“He is ours you know.”

“And we do love him so. I’m just dotty about him.”

“He’s coming with me,” I said, leaning through them, unhitching the clasp at his foot and rustling him inside my coat.

“A trifle unsporting,” spoke a voice behind me. I turned and saw that they had surrounded us and had those unblinking eyes fixed upon me.

“Got to fly!” I called, breaking into a run and heading for a window. Without a moment’s hesitation I jumped through headfirst and we were together, the two of us, side by side, paddling our way through that black sky with our velvet wings.

feather fix #9

The white gold ice stretches through the snow, a river frozen in time and space. A fishing hole has been bored through its frozen metal crust and a line sunk to the cool running waters beneath. The line has been left to be checked later once the barbed bait has enjoyed its chance to ensnare a piscine fruit.

A pair of crows swoop from the cedar which shines its icicles like Christmas tree lights, coming to rest beside the fishing hole. They each take a turn peering into the hole, sinking their beaks low until they touch and enter the gushing water, holding them there an indeterminate while. Upon re-emerging they have a caw or two for each other, apparently in conference about what might lie beneath in the river’s keep.

One of the crows lowers his beak into the hole again and takes a hold of the line, seemingly measuring its weight with a short tug. His friend keeps an eye out for surrounding danger as the line is pulled from the hole a little and held under the crow’s claws as his beak goes down again for more. In this fashion the line is jerked out bit by bit until the crow can barely hold it and the two crows grip on together, stealing the slippery slapping fish from its watery world and dragging it through the hole and out onto the alien ice. They nudge the fish further and further away from the hole so that it cannot slip back in, and sink their beaks into its struggling flesh.

deep in the graa

The thin rain stung the crow’s face as he beat a path through the spitting air, alone but for the distant and stiff flighted figures of dead and incumbent heroes. He feared the far northwest where stretched the thick dark forest, the deadly forest of fairytale with its monsters that the conscious mind has long forgotten and which hunger for a return to infamy almost as much as they hunger for a slavery meal of flesh blood juices and crunching bones.

Coig Cluaran Corcair had done his homework. He had spent the last moon and more amongst the rooks, the guardians elect of the dusty catalogue of myth, and guardians self appointed of crow moral scripture, their latest crusade being to end cannibalism within the crow family. They held themselves at great pains to ensure his best preparation for the singular task that lay ahead, a team of runners always at hand to delve into the roc library for anything he might require.

The rooks had kept the annals of the truth that is myth from the beginning of recorded time, when one of their number fell upon the Knowledge and died and fell upon the Knowledge and died again many times over until nothing was hidden from him and he became akin to a god and could not or would not die and led them into their current golden age, for all that he had become mostly lost within his dream these last few hundreds of years, and there were those who feared he had perhaps chanced to fall prey to a madness. But the structure he had left behind yet stood and it was their way to serve it with a quiet and with an educated respect.

There Coig had worked his way through all the familiar threads of myth, remembering his schooling and the songs of his own particular tribe and the seeming idiosyncrasies in the microcosmic pools and macrocosmic ocean of his world whose dictate was no different from his own nor from that of his gods. It was his task within this all to seek the moment that contained within it the first moment which may yet also prove to be the last moment, the clue that would lead him to where the Web of Wyrd first dripped out into the world from some other place, the source of their especial consciousness and of, if their suppositions proved correct, the current anomalous madness.

And yet he had found nothing but blurred and incomplete and partly fabricated analogies, and had come to the frightening realisation that he could only know the nature of what he sought within and upon its own domain, for something of it is lost in its translation to this world and he seeks the purity of its seed.

The rooks could not argue with him when he voiced his intention to track for sign of his quarry within the murkier reaches of the graa but wished him well and took him to Rykor their chief and Roikan his greatest seer, who gifted him a call which had been kept secret since their order was first declared, at the dawn of recorded time, for it was the best that they could do.

And so Coig now flew those uncharted wastes, thinking he might as well be seeking the first spark of fire or the first drop of water, fearing already that he might have died when he hadn’t been looking and that anything chancing to follow would be in vain.

Ever thicker the forest now, the country beneath was nonetheless scarred horribly in places, dirty black lesions where unwelcome fire had left its random trace. Herds of bugs scuttled through the ashes and over and under the charcoal and back into the dark green forest’s sway.

Dull spiders with glistening eyes, spooky ethereal architects, waited beside their huge grey webs or simply waited, so mean and quick were they that no web was required for them to catch their prey.

Coig had never been this deep into the graa before, and wondered would he see a unicorn or a small horned dragon or perhaps a creature that no one even knew existed, but none was yet apparent. He was grateful for the grey light, scant and thin though it was. A clearing opened beneath him, the ground in this small enclave too rank and boggy for the pines’ roots to bear. A round brick opening lay like a mouth at the centre of the clearing. Coig turned into the wind and hung on its breath, peering into the crumbling edifice for a sign of life. He fancied he could hear a dragging sound within the earth and hung on a little longer.

A cautious but seemingly unthinking face devoid of hair and perhaps even skin peered from the gloom, spied the bird and contorted his face into a rude and grotesque and mostly toothless grin, waving at him with a slow limb. Coig cawed an uncertain hello and waited at a distance to see what the beast would do. Another figure rose from the earth, a thin and mean looking fellow with blue skin and a long face. He would have no part in his companion’s new friendship and pulled him away from the light and back down into the hidden ground, the beast grunting in complaint. Coig cawed once more, in farewell, and turned back to his original direction.

There was little sound out there, and what little there was was strange and unrecognisable and at least faintly disturbing. Uncontrollable by him and against his better judgement, Coig’s imagination began to create for him from the creeping shadows and growing gloom increasingly scary sources of the snaps, grumbles and shrieks. He feared flying through the near dark more than he feared roosting in this unhallowed land, and yet he feared sleeping at roost here more than he had ever feared before. In a desperate measure, his beak trembling, he released the call the rooks had gifted him. Beneath him appeared a dim pale blue and green and dancing purple light and he swept a steep descent to
investigate.

Expecting a marsh gas will o’ the wisp, Coig almost stumbled and fell from the sky when he made out the glimmering photism of a figure stood awaiting him, surrounded there by grizzled standing stones which cast shadows around and outside of the circle by the action of his peeping light upon them.

“Safe will you be within my circle,” the figure called, and Coig did not doubt it to be the truth.

school

The mountains of the far west drew her soul like a lover’s gaze, calling to her even in her dreams, but there was one thing that filled her with a greater passion yet, and this was the pulling of sickness from the good people she might meet and who might never even know her name.

Their need would be marked by the alighting upon them of her bird brother, invisible to them, and he would aid her in her need to understand the especial sickness that visited. Sickness, she was learning, has ever but two causes. The first and most commoncause is that the soul, or a part of the soul, has been lost. It may have been stolen, or given away in unconscious exchange for something else that is desired. The second cause is that the soul has been overwhelmed by an alien power, by which it is inhabited or possessed, often as a result of a spiritual scarring from another time or place, or by ill will. Even apparent accidents can generally occur only if the soul has become in some way compromised, a shadow fallen upon it. Only in a scenario such as these could sickness befall.

The apprentice is at all times in great danger. The red darknesses must be twisted through in search of souls to be retrieved, and alien energies will mostly only vacate the sick individual if the shaman offers them an alternate place to live. If he cannot subsequently rid
himself of the presence then his sanity and life are in real peril.

She walked the markets, hoping to find some discarded vegetables for the night’s celebrations. It was now six months since she had made her escape, and could no longer be picked up and returned to that house of pain where they sought to convince others like herself that they were suffering from a brain disorder. Most of the people she knew that lived on the streets here had chosen to do so rather than lose their identities within the sterile nullifying structures of those institutions where it was such a crime to carry a favour embroidered with imagination’s more surreal totems and sigils. It was difficult to survive on the streets though, too many people sucking what energy they could off their fellows just to stay alive, and once they had fallen into the trap of needing alcohol to cope with the thoughts of how they were to pull themselves out of the mire, and those cold and sleepless nights, they were unlikely to shake off its grip again until death provided a new release.

Picking some scattered potatoes and a tattered leek from the gutter she did not flinch from those that jeered her, for she knew that her god considered her worthy to look upon his face and to know something of what he holds in his heart.

An old man, bowed and crippled, trod an uncertain path amongst the elbowing shoppers, stopping whenever anyone came near him, fearful of being knocked and further harmed in some way, his muscles taut and largely unresponsive. The crow let fly and circled him as he tapped his stick here and there, unable to buy much to sustain him through the week for he did not possess the strength to carry his purchases back home. The girl fastened the vegetables in her backpack and turned to face the source of her brother’s agitation. The rest of the crowd seemed oblivious to the old man’s struggle and he was isolated from the patterns of its movement.

She could see by the slimed traces of his own especial time worm that he had fought as a ground trooper in the war on the European continent as a young man and carried scars from this time, emotional and spiritual wounds that had never healed for they were sustained
by the pain of having lost close friends in battle and also by the guilt of his own survival when he was no better than them and no more deserving nor suited to live.

She quietly walked towards the old man, his back bent and sorrowful. She stood behind him and opened her arms wide, building a wide matrix of her own life force to lay upon him and gentle the onslaught which was to come. He stood still, perhaps in some way held there by the enchantment of her work. They mostly remained motionless, only a few ever turning and regarding her with eyes that were not their own.

She chose her moment and sent forth a gush of sparking energy from beneath her navel towards the base of his spine, shaping and aiming it with her hands, enveloping his hips and driving out the demon that had lain in ethereal and decadent decay within his belly.

She patched up the passage of its exit as best she could, knowing that she would have to visit this one in dreaming to kindle and strengthen his indigenous energies and to encourage them to break the habits formed by decades of submission. The torrent then ceased, he shook his head as if in disbelief or surprise and continued on his way. She remained a moment or two longer to pull herself together, to reabsorb any loose threads and to seal the gap in her own midriff through which the stream had run.

The crow now perched upon her shoulder was invisible to everyone but a busking fiddler who played his music in the town from time to time.

The first time he had approached her, playing her guitar in a wind strewn street, she had not been able to hide her surprise when he greeted the bird also, the first indication that her secret world held claim to any objective reality. They played together and afterwards he told her that this far north there existed an unbroken heritage of shamanic tradition, and that he had served his apprenticeship with an aged aunt who had in turn learned the art from her grandfather, in a line that snaked back into the mists of time. A friendship was struck up and occasionally at night they would busk together, running a power line from a bank’s cashpoint lobby to energise their weird blend of music.

“I have the fiddle mike.” He pulled it out of the oilskin backpack.

“Excellent. I’ll run you through the wah wah,” as he handed her the lead, tinkering with his garishly painted instrument to attach the device.

“Lights, camera, action.”

He drew his bow across the open strings. A rich tone echoed from the ragged speaker, surprising him with its depth and clarity. He drew his bow across again, working his foot on the pedal this time, and the wah wah worked its magic, the sound more circular now than linear. He played the melody of a folk refrain, melding it with the tubular, cyclical patterns of the wah wah.

“Instant psychedelia!” he smiled, looking up but not pausing from his play.

“Better believe it,” as she ran some swiftly flowing picked chords around the melody, smiling as they served to raise his musical jubilation yet higher, faster, and in more closely carved circles. And having risen to a notable peak, arriving at the top of this musical mount with a final surprised stumble, the sound became a question and answer, a repartee of posited observations and agreements of what was visible from that ethereal haunt, until she had moved solely to the bass strings and was engaged in a hypnotic beat, he picking and scratching at the strings with his bow, his fingers, his teeth.

“Free your mind and your ass will follow - the kingdom of heaven is within.”

Two young men had joined their exposition.

Again, spoken in the manner of a jubilant Bayou preacher, “Free your mind and your ass will follow - the kingdom of heaven is within.”

His friend, in dull monotone, “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”

“Free your mind and your ass will follow - the kingdom of heaven is within.”

“Resistance is futile. You will all be assimilated.”

“Free your mind and your ass will follow - the kingdom of heaven is within.”

“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”

“Free your mind and your ass will follow - the kingdom of heaven is within.”

“Resistance is futile. You will all be assimilated.”

And so into the night.

Speech was still very hard for her and he understood and told her that things do become easier further along the way. He could not interfere with her own apprenticeship, but suggested she visit a friend of his on the other side of the firth, the guy who had rigged up his fiddle mike, a crazy electronics whizz whose chief project was to put together gadgets designed to aid the individual seeking to harness the powers of the mind.

The land was cold bright stone with patches of heather and pocketed lochs of clear bright water and the sky a deep and turbulent blue. Forests touched the thin road in places and it did seem possible that wolves lurked and played within them. Along the northern shores of the firth, seals lay basking on rocks in the sun and fishing boats spliced the waters where troupes of dolphins breached in unison, their silvery forms quick and dazzling. She rode on and looked out for the painted bus laid resting in a garden, the ark that had in another age brought the electronics man and his people to this distant land.

He led her upstairs to his workshop and handed her one of his devices, a black box and strobospex goggles, explaining the functions of the different knobs, how the differently speeded light pulse flickers encourage a sympathetic beating in the electrical rhythms of certain areas of the cortex, enabling the user to entrain his brainwaves to resonate at a desired frequency.

Starting with a high alpha setting, mimicking a relaxed and meditative state, colourful mandalas began to spin and whirl before her eyes, feeding her a soothing and uplifting light. It was as if she were swaying in the topmost branches of a tree, buffeted by playful winds, the
dancing foliage making a patterned show of the sun’s rosy light. She turned the knob down lower through alpha, aiming for the state of mind a moment before sleep descends but to hold it there without succumbing, and weird hypnogogic visuals formed and writhed, little movies like the secret crow worlds that had been revealed to her by her brother’s bones and feathers.

When she had finished and pulled off the goggles she enthused about the little psionic mind machine, and noticed that she was talking with a rare fluency and abandon, and elected to buy one without further hesitation. It was to prove invaluable in her need to gain a working familiarity with her new consciousness, aiding her in maintaining specific states of mind, providing with ease the focus engendered by the sensory deprivation of a vision quest.

feather fix #10

The salmon have swum hard upriver and found mates and spawned and died in a ritual circle of life. Now their pale golden bodies float the eddy, bobbing with the wind’s patterned breeze upon the water. Dark figures line the surrounding rocks, watching intently the thin soup.
One dark black bird jumps from his stone haunt, a keen eye hawked somewhere on the water beneath. Beating his wings hard he picks up speed and motion and then, gliding, holding his wings taut and firm, he makes a pass over the river, his talons reaching down and snatching a fish from its watery grave. His forward motion is at once arrested and he battles the air to stay aloft. Slowly though he breaks the water’s meniscus clutch and drags and ferries the shimmering body to the shore, prancing and showing to his fellows, dancing around the dead form.

crow heroic poetry

Sir William B. Juste (1870 - 1967) spent a large part of his life learning the crows’ particular language, and committed to posterity the more popular songs that his favoured birds would crow when flying in large feeding flocks or resting at the roost. Although he had no evidence
to support his theory, he postulated that the songs had developed over a long period of time, earlier legends being merged with more recent instances of similar heroism. Perhaps his boldest exposition was that there exist individual crow bards who travel the world singing their songs, developing the narrative sometimes to suit their own style. There follows a collection of songs identified by Sir William, who ended his remarkable life in a lunatic asylum.

road kill wine
We like to peck at road kills
We do it all the time
The tendered meat it is our bread
The eyeball juice our wine

another great crow triumph
It came upon a dusky night
When all the crows were sleeping
Ghost dance in the shadowed black
A silent owl came creeping

His beak was cruel, his talons mean
And many crows he’d eaten
He didn’t know that on this night
He’d finally be beaten

Ten hundred crows were in that roost
Their dreams revealed his prowling
They saw as one his dark approach
And readied for the owling

In measured flight he chose his prey
And swooped into the killing
But the crows beat off his murd’rous might
And set his luck to spilling

They pecked his calm and pecked his stealth
And pecked his wayward stealing
And by the time they’d pecked their fill
They’d ceased his errant mealing

crow christ
Christ creature
Recumbent chryssaloid
Coiled around winter’s cracking bones
Creatrix of cold Christmas slumber

Pools of mesmeric omniscience
Upon the dream’s floor gather
Firebreath refractions of trance’s chill

Hiss of steam, venting
Blood flows still

Jagged shards of divine elixir
Scrape the veins of eternal ritual
Crimson sex and death reign still
In these everforested wilderlands chill
Transcendental true brave Eden
Cold skinned sharp clawed celestial thrill

Come, young sun, in raw open honesty
Dance the day’s ceremonial dreams
Breathe new life into fresh raw majesty
Rip the wind with sacrament screams

Birthed in the first bewildered bloody light
The crow christ lifts its head to the skies

smoke and mirrors

“Perch if you will upon my shoulder,” spoke the apparition, and the crow held his wings wide and tilted and alighted upon him, his feet faintly tingling as he landed on the sheening form. “It is safer than upon the stones. There are those bold enough to snatch you away, but not
here within.”

“Much obliged,” responded the crow. “And would you think it ungracious of me to enquire whether the offer might hold till dawn? My wings are fairly well shot. And I’m wet and cold and hungry.” He paused a moment and smiled. “Without meaning to appear lacking in the more blunt beaked attributes of a hero of course.”

“You will be warmed and nourished with me without the need for food,” replied his benefactor. “But I fear the dawn will not come. For once the night has fallen in this place it will not rise again.”

“Then I’m stuck. I can’t make my way in this dark.” The crow’s wings dropped and his spirit fell as a cold truth chilled his bones. He could already see the jaws closing around him, a moment or two more of consciousness as he heard his bones crunch and then nothing.

“I am not held within this place, for I can jump from one of these circles to another and thence to another and so forth. But you, my friend, cannot. Your only method of egress is to slip through a crack and away from this world. You sigh, brother, and I cannot think why, for it is a rare and honourable feat which you will accomplish if you are successful.”

“Oh, it’s this quest I’m on,” replied the bird, embarrassed by how grand and ridiculous it sounded. “I need to find the source of the graa, where it first slipped out and came into its own being, or my own world will be badly endangered.”

“I know your quest little one. And I know that you cannot face the source without it ripping through your mind like a flashed river, devouring with unconcern whatever might lie like a sacrificial lamb in its path. And you would be the lamb and your bleats would be few and then none. And yet for all that it is not lost for there is another way.

“You seek I know the source of the unknown myth and in this I can help you. You must find the First Crow, for he is lost and imprisoned and mostly mad and the events surrounding his entrapment will reveal to you the cause of the anomalies, for I can tell you that he has journeyed deep into the graa to a place where time is of no import and myths collide. I can open a way for you to this place but that is as much as I can do and after this you will be alone. You realise you have no choice since this quest was always to be yours, but this does not mean that the end is written, for fortunes are capricious and do not care for their natures to be known. Rest now, for too soon you will forget that there ever was rest.”

Coig Cluaran Corcair rubbed his tired beak through the photic hair of his weird perch in an affectionate gesture and settled his head under a wing to sleep. His dreams were hurried and cathartic and shook his cares out of him and when the peace of a deep and untroubled sleep finally fell upon him it did warm and nourish him.

In the night surrounding unseen things crept and groaned their foul contagion, set in patterns of behaviour that had been decided an eternity since, mouldered marionettes of an unseeable hand, garish faces painted upon them, yellow dots of eyes and red splashes and
blurs of mouth. There they tore dripping chunks from each other in the blind of the bloodlust and dragged limp bodies about but never to their lairs. Most hunted alone, and those that did hunt in packs had always as much to fear from their fellows as they did from the ever present surrounding menace.

It was as the watcher had said and still dark when Coig awoke. He preened his feathers a little, the long flight having taken a toll, running his bill along their edges, mending their raggedness and slipping them back into place. His host wished him well and tore a rip in the fabric that bound this strange land. The crow hopped into its unfathomable dark and was sucked long and hard into another place entire.

He floated through a yellowish bone mist and fell to rest in seeming midair. A strange drone lightly ululated around him, the sound of powder rising shocked and sudden into the air, drifting, settling and bursting up once again. He probed the mist beneath him but found only more mist. Cautiously he stepped forward, his beak feeling a way.

As he walked, blinded, he picked each step with a precision that required his full attention. The mist underfoot was of an uneven surface, and spongy, though without true substance. One more step and he dropped away, slowly, his outstretched wings no brake here, and rose again as gently, only to fall once more. He pushed his weight into the lowest point of the cycle and seemed to rise a little higher. Hopping into the air at the zenith he repeated the process and found that he was bouncing over the yellowy grey cloud and could see around him and above him thousands, tens of thousands of crows in identical pose. He flicked his wings and so did they. He uttered a testing cry and thousands were returned, echoing softly and falling away. And then another cry let forth, a strange call which he did not know, and it was multiplied and hung a while and the cadence suggested the frailty of the individual flower even amongst a meadow of sisters.

And when the voice came again it called him by his name and he understood in a breath that he had come to the dwelling or dungeon of the First Crow. Mad and blinded and imprisoned, he could not smash the mirrors that surrounded him, for he feared the seven years or seven lifetimes or seven ages of ill luck that would ripple out and infect the graa and infect the world and ruin all that he loved and held precious. And yet my remaining presence here threatens the world. For this fortune is not my own, is not as it should be, and is confusing those who weave our fates and who are prone to over immerse in the surreal at the best of times. They work hard to hold the world together and are inclined to make the most of the release of madness when it knocks upon their door.

He then let fly a piercing shriek which scorched through Coig’s ears and the next thing he knew he was back at his favoured dreaming perch, the leg of a purple backed beetle stuck underneath his tongue.

dance

Riding out in no particular direction one night, the moon half formed and brightly cold, a few ragged clouds racing the sky high up where the winds ripped with more fury than down here, she spied a thin plume of smoke rising from the quarry where the highlands of Scotland were
being torn up and transported south to make more roads. There was no vegetation to fuel a fire out here, nothing willing or able to grow on the bare exposed rock, and she pulled up to investigate. Removing her helmet she could hear, she thought, dim music echoing up from some carved nook of the quarry.

She cut the engine and wheeled the bike forward as silently as she was able. During one of her recent night time forays she had stumbled across a coven mumbling around a small fire deep in the forest, and had no immediate wish to repeat the experience. Along the rough trail which carried the track marks of a large number of domestic vehicles she walked.

She skimmed the perimeter of the works, hid the bike behind a rocky outcrop and, crouching, stole up the incline which at its highest point lipped out to overlook the arena beneath.

Two distinct fires were burning. Their warm glow and dancing flames painted the figures of twenty or thirty people sat around beating drums or moving to the music, a thumping beat now echoing cleanly up from the deeply gouged circle, wavering trills of electronic sound ringing out in spasmodic and fitful bursts. It was a music produced by the technologically adept young but had been seeded by aged seekers of truth who never exchanged their love beads for telescopic umbrellas and long ago imposed upon themselves an exile into lands of mystery and strangeness deep within the Indian subcontinent. Here they had nurtured a wish to produce music that could captivate and elevate consciousness, a contemporary form of the oldest man made music, a pulsing beat and organic chanting providing release to flourishes of wails and other spontaneous sounds. She drew away from the edge and walked around until she found a path down and wandered into the throng.

Two figures approached her and she hesitated but they greeted her warmly and offered her a mug of cider.

“Take it. It’s from Devon. Probably even had a rat fermenting in there with it it’s so genuine.”

“Sounds good. Thanks.”

“It’s gone a bit sour but hey it’s free.”

“Sure. Sounds good. Thanks.”

“You been to these before?”

“Uh, I just saw the fire.”

“Well, get grounded. See you later.”

She made for the smaller fire and perched on one of the logs provided for respite and rolled a cigarette, letting the music take her thoughts and then take her mind. A dog crept up and stuck its face in her drink, snuffling and lapping the flat cider. She walked over to where the generator was chugging away and the decks kicking out the psychedelic trance, and various individuals in varying degrees of goneness moving and writhing or whirling like dervishes or laid twitching on the ground, and joined them, dancing hard in the dark under the stars, the music imparting its secrets gently or suddenly, now pounding the ground of the Siberian tundra in a different but familiar body, now rushing through space as if she had never existed at all.

Finally she drew back to the fire and knocked a rhythm with a couple of sticks, punctuating the cadences of the surrounding drummers sat bowed over the catalysts of their own release, beating a time that loosened the grip of the shackles of time, like curing like, the cracks and spits of the fire, screeching cries of an owl, scattered laughter, transitory servants of a wider mind, a bigger picture.

The first pink patches of dawn were caught and gathered by a fire eater, stood silhouetted up on the brow of the surrounding rock, and blown across the sky.

the healing power of crows

It is dusk and the thick boughs are bustling in preparation for the night’s roost. A familiar scene; groups of birds gathering nearby, discussing, perhaps, the day’s feeding forages, before flying up to take their places within the branches of the broad elm where they will rest the night. But peering into the growing gloom the onlooker sees that an unusual species has joined the roost. Human figures sit expectantly amongst the foliage, a feathered friend perched here and there upon them.

This is the scene across the nation as people flock to their local crow roosts, hoping that they will become one of the growing numbers who have been cured of all manner of maladies after a night spent with the magical birds. Friends and relatives are encamped around the trees, waiting for the morning to bring them a transformed loved one, none doubting that these fabulous birds are blessed with a divine gift.

As darkness falls upon the camps candles are lit and the sweet scents of incense waft the air. A figure walks here and there amongst the throng, encouraging with tales that offer testament to similar miracles. A few pilgrims join together in song or to roast potatoes in small fires or to toast marshmallows. Meanwhile the roost is dark and still and silent, any wonders of healing stealing over the roosters invisible in the night.

And when the first misty slivers of dawn thread the sky and a sleepy cacophony tolls the morning in, brightly shadowed figures jump from the tree or slide its trunk, running arms outstretched with a replenished or new found joy towards the waiting crowds, TV cameras and thinly goateed preachers.

And in time perhaps the movement will become established and the followers able, one day, to lay windblown upon a wooden dais over hallowed land and have their tired flesh pecked away by the sacred birds, their bones and spirits prepared cleanly for the rebirth that
awaits them, a natural order returned to the land.

circle

The ravens were happy and they were not happy. There were many protracted meetings to which Coig was not invited, many long nights of chants and whispers and coming and going and going and coming and nothing being done. The First Crow had been trapped now for hundreds of years, so perhaps a week or two more of waiting would make no difference, but Coig no longer felt the security of time as an immutable force, a universal constant, and wondered whether there should not be more urgency to the final furlong of his quest. After the frenzied activity which had swallowed up his life, he was also a little impatient of the ravens’ seeming inability to make a decision and bring this to an end.

Eventually he was summoned to a solemn gathering of upwards of a hundred ravens, few of whom he knew even by sight. It struck him as odd that none of the ravens would any longer look him in the eye, but their ways are very strange, and he was magnanimous or perhaps fearful enough not to challenge them about an apparent scarcity of manners.

He was led into the centre of the circle by a pair of young ravens, who blessed him under their breath as they held in their beaks the oil and incense pots into which an adept dipped his beak and groomed Coig’s feathers through, anointing him with the strange scents and ridding him of his parasites. An especially sombre raven stepped forward now also and held a ragged feather, which was reputed to have come from the First Crow, to Coig’s face.

With slow and gentle wafts he began to lull Coig into the drift of a soothing trance, and he struggled to keep his eyes open. He was walked mesmerised and shaky across to the flat high sided stone a few steps before him and was laid upon it, slowly surrounded by a dozen or so mumbling birds who came forward from their positions around the larger circle.

The bird who had held the feather of the First Crow began a throaty chant which the other birds picked up as they stepped a widdershins movement around the circle. Coig’s paralysis was spreading and he could no longer move even his eyes, but his lids remained open and he could see the individual birds as they walked through the spot upon which his vision was fixed. They removed the beautifully crafted masks which had caused them to appear to be ravens, and yet they were ravens underneath. The raven masks they held in front of their raven faces and, now lowering the masks, now lifting them again, their talons scratched and dug into the dry mud, forming mystical markings of their own. Slowly, though, they blurred from visibility, the track marks and the birds, a yellow fog rising around them, dampening their sound, and Coig lost the fight to keep his eyes open.

The avian high priest approached him upon his cold stone dais and spat out a string of unintelligible sounds, brushing Coig’s face with the feather as he did so, before stepping away again, the chant still holding. Coig opened his eyes in time to see a shard of lightning crack out of nowhere, the dark sky above him, and strike the side of his head with a piercing white pain and he fell, down and down from the sky where he had suddenly found himself, hitting the earth and yet falling still, unable to steady himself with his wings, numbed by the distant incantations of the bristle faced ravens which he could still somehow hear, although their witchery had sent him to another place entire.

As he saw the crack in the world above him he knew that he had died, and remembered that he always seemed to die this way, a fool’s death not a hero’s, and laughed and laughed at the crazy world he was leaving behind, and the crazy one he was heading towards, and wondered briefly again how much it all mattered within the frame of that unknowable vastness which he was even now penetrating with his streaking and feathery form.

And the tales began. A heroic crow who had travelled beyond and saved the world from certain insanity. An ancient crow who had smashed the mirrors of his illusory perception and seen the truth and shown it to the world. Brave ravens whose magic had cheated the bad luck that threatened to pierce the world when the mirrors smashed. Or an ancient crow who skulked still in a timeless trap, the cause of all the madness in the world. All tales were told, and who is to say which ones were true.

a way

She was sat on the deck chair polishing her boots when she heard the old man whistling his approach. The birds had a minute before announced something headed this way. She figured it would either be him or his dog, as no one else ever came out this way, not even the
sheep, although their voices certainly carried that far through the hazel copse and across the dank swamp.

“Howdy!” he called. “That does look the life.”

“Hi. Yeah - no complaints to the management today. How’s things at the farm?”

“Och, we won’t be worrying for nothing to do. Maisie wondered if you’d find somewhere for this,” he proffered a covered dish. “She don’t seem able to cook just for two, never could, and Mighty Max is already fed and watered.”

“That’s very kind of you both. I was just about to set to with this rabbit.” She knew they worried she went hungry out at the caravan most nights, whatever she might tell them to the contrary. “Here. Would you do me the favour of taking it off my hands? That cat’s bringing them home like they’re going out of fashion.”

“It’s saved me enough lead to near enough roof the chapel that cat.”

They both knew he hadn’t fired his gun in upwards of ten years, and the cat had only clocked up six months’ residency, had perhaps even chosen to alight here because the farmlands were so rich in rabbit.

“She can hunt them all right.”

The falling sun glinted bright patches in the swampy ground.

“No mixy in them is there?”

“None. They’re all good rabbits. I’d tell you if there were.”

“You would. Yes, you would. Well, I’d best be getting back. Time and tide.”

“Thanks for the dinner Craig. I’ll see you later - It’s Maisie’s session night tonight. I don’t suppose you’ve thought any more about trying it yourself?”

“Och, you know me petal. I don’t know that I could do with feeling any younger. But that’s not to say I don’t appreciate what you’ve done for Maisie. I never thought I’d see it.”

A flurry of wings and hurried cries erupted from the copse.

“That cat. Go on. I’ll see you later.”

She watched him pick his careful path, wary not to pierce a rubber boot on any rogue gorse. No doubt that she’d like a chance to work his feet, smooth through any auric disturbances, clearing energy blockages or patching small chasms. Giving those shadows that gather with age no purchase upon the soul.

She looked through the copse at the reddening sun and lifted her arms and arched her back and stretched. She was getting used to this. Where once menaced maniac riders of the apocalypse now grazed fat rabbits, where slid cold spirits out to steal her soul now slipped fat brown trout. She doubted that even Cu Cuhullain would have had the physical constitution to ride out the Vulcan pendulum of psychosis - swing - autism - swing - immersion - swing - withdrawal - swing - excitement - swing - survival - swing - swing - swing.

If the shaman stories were true and provided a possible release from the fear and confusion then there was no choice but to practise the shamanism, and she’d finally swallowed her fears and taken up an evening class in medical herbalism and complementary health technique. And the act of performing the healing art involved an ebb and flow and controlled flux of the therapist’s own energies such that a waxing measure of focus and direction did grace her.

As part of the course the group visited hospitals and hospices, and she found that the physical contact involved made it much easier to create an environment in which healing might take place, and that this measure of participation in the process of their own recovery
allowed the sick to gain something by it, to experience a feeling of holism and connection, an irrational understanding. Maisie, a dear old lady beset with arthritis, had been allocated her test case, and had soon insisted she join herself and Craig for dinner at the farm. They guessed that she had been driven north by some unspoken personal tragedy, and she could think of no reason she shouldn’t accept their hospitality and move into the caravan.

“Och, you’d be doing us the favour,” Craig had said. “We’re short of a tramp for it, and, well, when the other farmers harp on about their tramps’ antics, we’ve only got the tales of Old Joe, who’s been gone from us six years, and everyone’s heard those stories a thousand times.”

“He’s only teasing you sweet. We’re not calling you a tramp.”

“I wouldn’t mind being called a tramp.”

“Well, to put paid to any notions you might have about being one, you don’t have the smell for it. You’ll have to settle for being a New Age thingy.”

“That sounds terribly fashionable.”

“Oh aye, and we’ll be the first to have one.”

“Apart from the MacPhersons you mean.”

“They don’t count on account of him being their son.”

She whistled to the cat which came running with a mouse hanging from its jaws. She pulled a few greasy chunks of mutton from the stew to augment the cat’s dinner, and tucked into the remainder whilst it was still warm, wiping up the last traces with a hunk of bread. She rinsed the dish through in the stream, cupped a little of the water in her hands and slurped it up. Then she wandered back to the caravan and set up the chessboard on a flattish stump.

She called to the evening air and from a distant cacophony of busy roost-time caws flapped and soared the bird, and hung in the air and dropped onto the stump on the other side of the board. She lifted two pawns and shifted them from one hand to the other and again and back until she she forgot herself which was where, and offered them hidden to the crow. He thought a moment, his head cocked, looked her in the eye and pointed his beak at the one of his choice. She set the pieces back in position and moved the board through a hundred and
eighty degrees.

“All right,” she said. “Your move.”

crow heaven

For what can we ever ask of heaven but to cure us, to make us whole again? To bathe and heal us in its rosy glow, to wash away our cares and our fears and our imperfections. A periodic cleansing of our spirits, patterned in the peep of a solstice sun through a mathematic
crack in the cairn’s rocky corsage, creeping and trickling and flooding into the subterranean chamber to relieve the year’s greatest darkness, joy and salvation its wake, which, like its light, must fade and fall.

But to live forever, until the end of time at least?

Is eternity no longer contained within a raindrop, spoken with but a single beat of the heart?

Eternity?

The moving wheel turns.

Does it stop?

It is the moving wheel.

But does it stop?

Your words have no sense. It is the moving wheel. It can only move.

So it cannot stop?

It cannot stop.

It will keep moving forever?

It is defined by its movement. It moves and is. There is no stops and is not.

So it will always be?

As long as it moves, it is. Movement and being are one.

And it can never stop?

It cannot stop. Stopping is not its nature. It can only move.

So nothing can stop it?

Nothing can stop it. It cannot stop.

Only move?

Only move.

Wholeness only. All else is nothing, no one, nowhere. There is no else. Wholeness is all we have.

johnny crowseed comes to town

He steps out lithely in his black and liquid clothing, something of every nation and race dancing upon his countenance as he walks. His journey is lonely and magical and without end ever and he was born to it and wears about him his grandfather’s wolfskin seedbag, which itself has perhaps seen these lands before. But if it has it is of no matter, for all land is the same to it, warm and fertile or cold and stony, and in even the most intractable place there is a hollow where a tiny crow germ can nestle and lay dreaming of its birth as the spring
rains draw near.

Appendix

The Egyptian Book of the Dead, chapter 64, from the papyrus of Nu, rewritten for Crow
Magic

It was the custom, in Ancient Egypt, for the “discoverer” of a manuscript to rewrite it, grafting upon it the benefit of his own experience. This would suggest that there was more to discovering a manuscript than simply finding it in a cave somewhere; there is an implicit suggestion that a common mystical path is being described.

I am yesterday and today, and I have the power, should I wish, to be born another time. I am the divine hidden soul who creates the gods, and who gives celestial meals to the divine hidden beings in the world, in the underworld and in heaven. I am the rudder of the east, with
two divine faces which the crack of dawn illumes.

I am the lord of those who are raised up from the dead, the lord who comes forth from out of the darkness. Hail, ye two divine crow sentinels, perched upon your haunts, who hear that which I say. The flesh of the sacrifice is swinging, beckoning, and has been spied
by the raven. May Badb Catha accept my gifts, my eyes starting tears as I watch and wait.

Familiar with the Abysses is your name. You ached in a chasm, while the winds of the wilderness blew bare your bones. I work for you, O ye ancient crow ancestor spirits, who are in number four million, six hundred and one thousand, and two hundred, and who stand twelve cubits high. You join hearts together and reach far, for the sixth hour, which belongs at the head of the world, is the hour of the overthrow of the fiend.

I am come there in triumph, and have entered the hall of the world. The strength which protects me protects my spirit; blood, cool water, offerings. I open a way among the teeth claws and talons of all those who would harm me, who keep themselves hidden, who would oppose me, and those who writhe upon their bellies. The eye will not absorb the tears of the goddess Morrigan. Hail, goddess Morrigan, open for me the walled garden and grant me pleasant paths upon which I might travel.

And who are you, who consumes in hidden places? I am the lover of Nemain, and go in and come forth in the name of The Watcher, the lord of millions of years and of the Earth; I am the maker of my name. She who bears has birthed upon the Earth her fruit. The door by the wall is shut fast, and the things of terror are overturned and spiked with the beak blades of the carrion crows of regenerative ecstasy, the two Macha goddesses.

To the mighty one has his eye been given, and his face radiates light as he illuminates the earth. My name is his name. I shall not become corrupt, but I shall come into being in the form of the crow god; the blossoms of eternal spring shall be in me.

I am he who is never overwhelmed in the waters. Happy, yea happy, is the funeral couch of the still heart. He enters the misted pool and yet comes forth. I am the lord of my life. I have come to this place, and I have come forth from the roost within the tree of life of the crow god. Verily, all that is thine is held in state by the three beaked crow.

I have clasped the sycamore tree and the elm and I have opened their secrets. I have opened a way for myself among the secret gods of the world. I have come to see the one who dwells in his divine uraeus, face to face and eye to eye, and have drawn to myself the winds that rise when he comes forth.

My insight will ripple across my face, o bird god, who dwells in Yggdrasil. You are in me and I am in you, and your attributes are my attributes. I am the rain god, and Cloudmaker is my name. My forms are the forms of the god of the First Egg, the feathers of the winds of
the earth.

I have entered in as a being of no understanding, and I shall come forth in the form of a strong spirit, and I shall look upon my form, which shall be that of the crow for ever and ever.

CROW FM (Special Bonus Chapter)

DJ: Hello Caller and welcome to Crow Calls, the daily roundup of crow related news, views and gossip.
Caller1: Hello Craig. I love your show.
DJ: Thankyou caller. You’ve made us the top local crow station this year.
Caller1: I’m certainly pleased about that, but I’m afraid I’m phoning in to complain. It seems to me that crows are getting lazier and lazier.
DJ: Yes, go on.
Caller1: There’s a roost in an old elm tree in the field at the back of us. On a fine morning, to be fair, the birds are off foraging quite early, but in even the mildest of drizzles they hang around the roost for ages, jawing up a rowdy racket. Standards are slipping, and it’s giving
crows everywhere a bad name.
DJ: Thanks for your observations, caller. Any listeners out there who’d like to stick up for the crows’ collective character, give us a ring on 01999 199199.

(musical interlude)

DJ: That was Boy Crow and Are You Getting Enough (Carrion in the Morning)? And we have someone else on the line. Hello caller, and welcome to Crow Calls.
Caller2: It’s nice to be on the show, Craig. I’m going to have to agree with the previous caller though. It seems nowadays the only roadkills the crows will bother with is the stuff that’s had its guts ripped out in the impact. Any pristine corpses will just lay there quietly rotting. It’s as if the crows can’t be bothered to make the first tear into the roadkill anymore. I personally find this shameful. When I was a girl the crows would think nothing of spending a whole morning beaking and clawing at a hide.
DJ: Thankyou for your observations caller. We’re lucky enough to have with us in the studio today Dr Peter Holland, holder of the Corvid Majore cup for crow knowledge. Dr Holland, do your own observations bear this out? Are crows getting lazier?
Dr: Well, Craig. As we all know, crows are possessed of unparalleled intelligence. Why should they spend hours pecking to break through a hide when there’s a yard of easy guts laid out for all and sundry half a mile down the road?
DJ: Are you saying there’s more carrion on the roads than there used to be?
Dr: Oh yes. Creatures of nature can work well with speeds of up to 45 mph, the speed of a sparrow hawk. Any more than this though and they become crow meat. Simple.
DJ: I think our next caller has something to tell us about this. Hello caller.
Caller3: It’s the crow overlords have given us the secrets of travelling faster than the hawk. In our dreams, when we are asleep. It is their desire to see roadkills regaling our routes like spring cherry blossom. It is their will.
DJ: Uh, thankyou caller, and now for some more music…