Читать книгу Song of the Crow - Layne Maheu - Страница 13

One for sorrow. Two for mirth. Three for a wedding. Four for a birth. Five for rich. Six for poor. Seven for a witch— I can tell you no more.

—ENGLISH COUNTING RHYME OF THE MAGPIE.

6. Mark of the Blade

Keeyaw returned.

My Other and I watched the lowly beastman emerge from below the bushes. He wandered out slowly into the clearing, edging his mule along, as if something might rattle them both. When nothing happened, he began barking his commands back into the woods. This time only the boy came out, the youngest of his clan, humming as he pulled on a rope, followed by a tawny old ram. One of the ram’s horns was broken, and the nap of its fur was scraggy and worn.

Keeyaw held the boy’s hand, and the water of the mammal leaked freely down the boy’s face. Keeyaw kissed the tears away, and made the boy stand near as Keeyaw dug a hole into the flank of the ram, stuck both of his hands into the bloody opening, and began pulling things out. Keeyaw acted as if he was showing the boy how to do it. He made the boy hold on to a long glob of gut, and the mass of it shivered as blood ran down the boy’s arms.

Then Keeyaw held out a bowl for the boy, where they placed the viscera along with some fat, and set it all down beside a dried pile of sticks, arranged like a large nest across the ground. Keeyaw then took two stones from his mule pack and scared the fire out of them by striking them together. As the fire took hold, he bled the ram and collected the blood in the same bowl. Then Keeyaw poured the contents of his bowl onto the fire. The smoke twisted, dirty and black. Above the flames, he waved smoking stocks of frankincense and myrrh, then dropped them onto the fire and uttered strange sounds.

Still, the wild, white-haired beast could not leave the woods alone. He hacked away at the vegetation on the forest floor until he stood just below our very own tree and made low, exhaling grunts of approval. He yanked his mule over by the reins, withdrew one of his implements from the mule pack, and dug into the bark. He did the same to a neighboring tree. I didn’t see it; I heard it, the nervous scraping away at the bark above the root.

“What?” I asked. “What was that?”

Keeyaw spoke again to the trees.

He even started to look like a tree.

Suddenly I could understand the mammal’s moans and grunts and strange staccato sounds, though the meanings were mired in his mysterious ways. The thing about his language that I understood most was his insatiable sorrow, distorted and grotesque. He held his thin tree-branch arms out until they trembled, and he addressed the trees with the following words—perhaps he addressed the Tree of the Many Names—he called it “Amen,” then “Yahweh,” and “Neter”; he called it “Jehovah” and “Amon Rah.” And he addressed the Tree in the following manner: “Deliver these, the last of the timbers suitable for a keel, to the long water house, and not again to the Sons of God and the Daughters of Men. Or is it Your plan that the Nephalem should sail away, and not us? Either way. I don’t care. I don’t care whom You choose. I’ll just keep trying. What else can I do?”

Then, wearily, Keeyaw picked up what was left of the ram and tied the ancient carcass to his mule, and he and his son left our aerie, searching the woods and sky.