Crow Jane (3 page)

“And at this party, right? This woman comes up to President Coolidge and says ‘I bet my friend I can get you to say more than two words.’” She seemed proud of herself for remembering this banal story about a dead, unimportant president.

Jane remembered Calvin Coolidge; the best she could say about him was that he didn’t have delusions of grandeur. Which, on reflection, was an unusual quality in a politician.

Jim smiled politely and kept walking towards the hallway. He clenched and unclenched his fists, which Jane read as a sign that he was itching for action and wished he had a weapon in his hand. She was happier, of course, that he didn’t.

She stumbled onto the tracks a few feet away, feigning drunkenness, as Jim reached the railroad tracks and the little plank bridge. She saw clearly now that he had something under his shirt, against his belly.

“What was Coolidge’s answer?” Big Hair looked like she was on the edge of her seat.

“‘You lose,’” Jane said, and she stabbed Jim with both knives.

She’d heard the story, too.

Jane’s knives were not enchanted, but they were good sharp steel and they cut flesh effortlessly. Jim yelped and fell back, and Jane grabbed for his belly—

but Jim wasn’t
collapsing
, he was
rolling
, and as Jane’s fingers brushed fibrous, sticky bands on the hard, flat stomach of the bar-band singer, he was gone, out of reach. Her two knives went with him, one in his hip and one in his side, and she narrowly avoiding getting kicked in the face.

Hot red blood spilled onto the planks, unhidden by Jane’s wards.

Big Hair shrieked first, but Sequins screamed louder.

Jane rushed forward to close the gap, whipping smaller knives from their sheaths on her forearms and slashing overhand, trying to cut the big man. He moved like an acrobat, though, staying just beyond the glittering razor edge of her blades. His first tumble backward landed him in a handstand, one hand on each of the metal rails of the abandoned train track that ran across the floor of the bar, and then he sprang further away again, landed on the tips of his boots, and shuffled backward immediately. The spurting arc of blood trailing behind him spattered across Jane’s duster and, from the suddenly ramping volume of the shrieking behind her, might also have ruined the girls’ outfits.

Slash, slash, duck and dodge, and then suddenly Jim snatched two beer bottles off a table as he passed and hurled them at her. Jane batted one aside with an elbow and let the other hit her in the shoulder. The crow swooped between her and her target in a cruel and taunting maneuver, obscuring her aim for a moment and pricking her in one of the few remaining sensitive spots in her soul.

In the fraction of an instant during which she hesitated, Jim pulled the knives from his own body and charged to attack.

The yelling was more general now, and Jane could hear the voice of the bartender in the tumult. “Everybody cool it!” he barked in his Appalachian twang. “Now!”

Boom!

That would be one barrel of the man’s shotgun. Jane wasn’t at all worried about the firearm, nor was she too concerned about the bartender himself, despite his unusual perceptiveness, but she didn’t want the rest of the band to come back out of the restrooms and interrupt. Especially the wizard, but in a band whose drummer was an Outcast from the Mirror Queendom and whose organ player was a sorcerer, who knew what other hidden talents and threats might lurk?

Besides, the singer Jim was amazing. He met her every attack with a parry or a sidestep, and he fought like the furniture and people around him were a third weapon constantly at his disposal. He flicked tumblers at Jane with the tips of her own knives, and kicked stools in her direction, and when a scar-faced man with a bandanna covering his shaved head—maybe a bouncer—moved to intervene, Jim tripped him and kicked him into Jane’s way like he was rolling a barrel down a gangplank.

Time to take decisive action.

Jane launched her effort with a fierce counterattack, genuinely hurling herself at the singer’s jugular and crotch with staggered, alternating blows. She did her best to cut his flesh, but she was unsurprised when his lightning speed and panther-like athleticism kept him out of harm’s way.

Nor was she surprised when he stabbed her, sinking her blade into her belly.

She let herself go slack and stare.

The screaming of the college girls was very loud in her ears.

Jim sank the second blade into her back, between her shoulder blades. Jane felt it bite deep into her heart, and she grimaced in pain.

Jim stared at her fiercely. His lips mouthed words: “
Who are you?”
This close, she knew his face. He looked so very much like his brother.

How odd, Jane thought. How very nearly amusing.

She let the hammering pain force one of her knees to buckle, not losing contact with the big man’s gaze. He caught her from falling and repeated his lips-only, silent query.

“Easy with the lady, mister,” Jane heard, and in the corner of her vision she saw the bartender, John from North Carolina, arrive. He held his shotgun leveled at Jim, and the singer frowned. “I saw as it was her who attacked you first, but I reckon it’s time for all the stabbin’ to be wrapped up.”

Jane grabbed the strapping on Jim’s belly with one hand and cut at it with the knife in her other. It was duct tape, and as the tape and the object wrapped in it came away in her hand, she head-butted Jim the rock and roll singer in his handsome face.

Jim staggered back, blood spattering down his face from his nose.

John turned to object and she ran him over, knocking him to the ground with her shoulder in his midriff. Unexpectedly, a rush of feeling coursed through her. Searching her memory, she recognized it as glee. With any luck, she thought, she might be dead by morning.

And she’d take that angelic bastard with her.

She shouted the Adamic incantation of her spell as she vaulted over the bar, spraying blood on everything she touched. The crow flapped its wings and plunged into the
Wild Turkey
mirror ahead of her—

and then she jumped again, into the glass and gone on the tail of the black bird.

***

Chapter Three

Qayna—who, millennia later, would be known as Jane—came home from her fields and found Abil waiting.

He was cleaned up, out of his customary kidskins and leggings and instead wearing a white tunic and sandals. His hair was oiled, and he smelled of flowers rather than of the herd. The whole family stood behind him, Father, Mother, Shet, the younger children. Behind the family, towering above them and crackling white, stood one of the Messengers, his six wings flapping steadily behind him as if to keep him in flight, though his feet appeared to touch the ground.

They were all waiting for her.

* * *

Qayna had been in the fields because she worked, as everyone worked. She never felt unsafe, however long she was alone—the beasts, for the most part, didn’t molest her, and there were not yet any other people besides her immediate family—and she accepted the work. Her mother, though, in hushed tones when they were alone together under a comforting moon, had often told her of a time when all their kind had been only two, and there had been no such thing as work and no risk of starvation or any other kind of death, only love and tending the plants of the garden. Mother’s stories of discovering the infinite variety of life and nurturing it so that it could blossom to its fullest thrilled Qayna’s heart in a way she could not make Abil understand, and she tried to be like Mother in her daily tasks, her contribution to feeding and clothing the family.

Abil chose instead to work with Father. Qayna was the oldest, but Abil was second, and he was nearly Father’s height and serious when the rest of the children were a gangly troop of monkeys, always on the heels of cheerful young Shet. Abil worked with the herds, which was a labor of long hours. He milked ewes, cared for injured animals, chased away wolves, sheared the flock before lambing every spring, and, when one of the herd was to die to feed the family, it was Abil who chose the animal to make the ultimate gift.

Abil’s was a lonely work, and Qayna didn’t envy it. Besides the long hours he spent leaning on his staff in the fields, it was Abil who moved the sheep into warmer valleys when the winter winds came. At those times, Father stayed with the family, which was good, because Father’s first task was to oversee the instruction of his children.

On the same day the herds went to the winter pastures, Father would retreat into his own private tent for hours, and then the Messengers would come. Jane knew why they came, because she had crawled as a child under the tent flaps and listened to Father’s rhymes, the names he had given the Messengers in them and the odd words he used to conjure them. And the summoning was not the end of Father’s responsibilities; the Messengers came from the towers in the west bringing lore and learning, but it was Father’s job to make sure his children were prepared and to repeat their lessons with the family over and over until they were taken fully to heart. If his children didn’t learn and live the teachings of the Bearers of the Word, Father told them, then the Bearers of the Sword might come in their stead. All this was well and good, and, Qayna thought, the proper order of things.

Still, it meant long, cold nights for her brother, huddled over a small fire with his flute and his wallet of dried lambs’ flesh.

Qayna, meanwhile, combed the forests and the fields for herbs that were edible, good for body and spirit, and she brought them to the family. As Father taught the children the Way and Mother whispered lessons to Qayna of the Garden, Qayna in turn taught the plants. With example, with firm, dirt-fisted persuasion, with patience and with love she taught them to stand in rows, to grow upright, to be nourishing and cheerful, and to beautify the hillsides above the family’s dwellings of skin and stone. On winter nights, when her grain slept in silent furrows, waiting for the spring to rise and bud, she stooped under the lintel to return to her Father’s fire in the evenings and spared a thought for her brother in the hills, a thought that was loving and compassionate.

Loving and compassionate, but nothing more.

During this most recent winter, a tall Messenger with an expressionless face taught the family about the Bond. The Bond was the tie that connected Father and Mother and all of them together, and the First Precept was that man and woman should enter into the Bond, be fruitful and multiply. Qayna had found it amazing, and though she had shushed the tittering of the younger children, she had found it embarrassing, too, and she was vaguely relieved that Abil wasn’t present. But late at night, when Father and the six-winged Messenger stood on the brow of the hill and recited the names and deeds of the stars above them, Mother whispered to Qayna that it was all true.

Not only was it all true, she confirmed, but Qayna had to prepare herself. She was to be the first woman to enter into the Bond east of the Garden. This was the Way for her daughters to keep the First Precept, ever since Mother’s own choice, a mysterious fork in the path to which she only alluded and only in hushed tones, but which sounded like a decision freighted with dread, rebellion, and regret.

Qayna expressed doubt.

Her body was ready, Mother explained patiently; it was time. In the same way, Qayna prepared the earth before she filled it with seed, enriching the soil with the castoffs from the family’s table, so that the seed could flourish in it and grow into tall stalks of wheat or fruit trees, Qayna had been preparing her own body.

Qayna denied it.

She was outraged. She had participated in no such embarrassing pursuit, and besides, there was no one for her to marry. Would the Messenger take a rib from her side and make a companion for her? Would he form a man from the dust for her convenience and pleasure?

Mother insisted. She had prepared her body without knowing, feeding it and exercising it and making it strong. And Qayna’s body had responded; the changes in her flesh that had sent her once under each moon into Mother’s private, separated tent were a clear sign that her body was ready to fulfill its purpose, to achieve the task designated for it by its creator. Mother had told the Messenger about these changes, she admitted to Qayna, and that was why the Messenger now taught the family about marriage.

Besides, the First Precept was inexorable. There was only the family, and if the family did not multiply, then there would be no more people, only a wide world, empty but for the Towers and the Messengers. And the Bond, cruel as it might seem, would tie her and a mate together for their own protection, and the protection of their children.

What children? Qayna asked. What mate?

It was time, Mother explained, and there was a companion.

There was Abil.

Qayna fled. She didn’t want Abil, not as anything other than her brother. She wasn’t sure about the First Precept and the Bond generally, but she knew that she wasn’t ready yet, and maybe never would be. Horrified and sickened at the thought of what was proposed, angry at the base treachery of her mother, she began from that day to carry a knife.

Abil returned with the warmer weather, as green tendrils started cautiously to poke their heads out of Qayna’s furrows. He was tall and worn by the weather, his jaw becoming straighter and his arms and legs longer and more muscular, like Father’s. Qayna couldn’t look at him directly, and neither could she avoid looking at him when she was in his presence. Mostly she tried to avoid him, dunging and pruning the orchard and the field and searching his face, when she could do so without being noticed, for any sign that he, too, had spoken with the Messenger this winter.

She wondered if he
knew
.

Shet and the others, meanwhile, seemed to follow her even more closely than they always had, giggling and pointing at her whenever she caught them peeking around a corner or peeping up from behind a rock. The little children pointed and giggled, anyway. Shet just stared.

Until the day when she came back from watering her farthest field and found the family gathered in front of their dwelling.

* * *

Abil stood in front of Mother and Father, perfumed and oiled. He was dressed in a fine white kilt Mother must have woven and sewn for him, and tooled sandals that had obviously been cut, stitched and dyed by Father. Her parents held up more clothing, she guessed for her, and they smiled.

Behind them rose the Messenger. He was tall, far taller than Abil or even Father, and his skin, his robe, and his six wings all glowed crackling white. His hair danced and snapped like flames in the spring breeze, and there was a smell about him that was unnatural and unearthly. He had a strong, imperious brow and piercing eyes that seemed perfectly clear and bottomless. Qayna had never felt totally at ease around this Messenger or any others of his kind, but she was especially uncomfortable now.

“Come,” Mother said.

“Come,” Father repeated.

Abil smiled. It was an ugly smile, a smile Qayna had never seen before on a human face, a smile that looked like it belonged on the bristling muzzle of a wolf.

“It is time,” the Messenger boomed. His voice was like lightning in the far hills in Autumn, a thundered utterance that was impossible to misunderstand and that brooked no dissent.

“No!” Qayna cried, and she fled.

Qayna bathed in a spring beyond her orchard, in private and in secret. The spring was her own special place, a canyon of young stone and crystal water she had discovered while chasing fluttering spores in a dry summer storm the year before. She ran to the spring now, not directly because she feared pursuit, but by a circuitous route. She dropped below the fields into a gully, crossed a river, climbed a hill, and then finally came to her spring by traveling downstream from its sources.

She undressed, trembling from shock and rage, laying her tunic and sandals on a large rock beside the stream and setting her small knife carefully on top of them. She threw herself into the water, gasping from the sudden cold shock.

The spring was deep, and with the chill of the water prickling her skin, Qayna sank to the bottom. The solid reality of the rock beneath her bare feet and hands reassured her that the earth and its limits were unchanged, and when the pressure on her lungs became so real that it began to pain her, she surfaced.

Abil stood above her at the water’s edge, and behind him waited the Messenger.

“Am I so bad then, Qayna?” Abil asked. The look on his face was petulant and wounded, a look such as Shet might wear if a prized toy had been taken away from him. Something else lurked in the expression, too, a note of violence that Abil could not entirely hide. “Am I so bad that you will not have me?”

Once Qayna and Abil would have played together freely, naked and thoughtless. Now she stayed in the water, trying to keep her body from his eyes and unable to think of anything but the strange and terrible revelations the Messenger had delivered the previous winter about Mother, Father and the First Precept. As if he were thinking of the same thing, Abil couldn’t keep his eyes off her body, and stared at the water in front of her and the rippling, distorted images it bore.

“Am I a beast?” Qayna replied. There was no word for
slave
in the tongue of her birth, as there was yet no one to enslave. “Am I a mere thing that has no say in its own use? Am I a garment to be worn and cast aside, a tool with which to harrow up the earth, a lamb to be slaughtered?”

“It is the First Precept,” the Messenger intoned. Between the canyon walls that enclosed the spring, his words rolled like the cracking of the heavens. He hesitated. “Do you choose to disobey the will of Heaven?”

“You would not have me choose at all!” Qayna shouted. The heat of the anger warmed her against the water’s cool bite. “You would have me only lower my head and submit! That is not the joy of the Garden, that is not the path of my Mother!”

Abil crouched beside the water, beside the stone on which she had laid her things. Perhaps he meant it as a way not to appear threatening, but it brought him closer to Qayna and that felt like an invasion. Besides, squatting on his heels, he opened his tunic and exposed his body in a way that reminded Qayna uncomfortably of the fact that he, like she, was no longer a child, and that his body, too, had prepared to obey the First Precept.

“Let’s choose to obey together,” Abil said, grinning. “We could choose to do otherwise together, but let’s choose to obey.”

“Obedience is sacrifice,” the Messenger trumpeted. His voice was loud and brassy, but Qayna thought she heard the faintest note of compassion in it. “To obey is to sacrifice the other things you might have done, the other possibilities you might have enjoyed. If those other possibilities were always and in all respects bad, obedience would be painless. Every commandment is a summons to obedience, a call to sacrifice on the altar.”

The horrible, ineluctable tone in which the Messenger spoke, and the tiny trace of warmth in his voice, only made the content of what he said completely unacceptable, even though, Qayna realized, the words were true.

“I’m not ready!” she cried, treading water. “Not now! Can I not wait?”

“It is the First Precept,” the Messenger repeated. “You must choose now.” The gigantic being’s voice softened considerably. “I, too, have no choice.”

“Come on, Qayna,” Abil splashed into the water after her. He was laughing, but Qayna didn’t think there was anything to laugh about, and his mad chuckle did nothing to break the rising wall of tension in her breast.

She backed away from him, towards the edge of the spring.

“You know me. You know the Messenger’s teaching, and the Way, and what Father and Mother have done.” He swam towards her.

She splashed out of the water on the far side, staring down at her brother. He stared up at her, his eyes on her naked body, and now his look truly became the hungry stare of a wild animal. Qayna felt vulnerable and threatened, the more so when she realized that the Messenger was staring at her, too.

And the Messenger’s eyes, always so patient and mechanical and full of rote wisdom, were now full of something else. Something animal, something that burned.

Abil splashed for the bank. He was a fast swimmer, faster than Qayna, and her heart and mind raced in fear. She ran around the edge of the water, brambles and sharp stones cutting into the work-toughened skin of her feet, running for her clothes.