The Strange Bird Page 5

  But the Strange Bird knew there was nothing rational at all about the Magician’s spider, for even as it revealed her, it revealed the Magician to the Strange Bird, and this was how she knew to expect the worst.

  The spider withdrew, the children—most of them naked, faces smudged with caked blood and grime—turned to the Magician, expectant, as if she might reveal some great truth. Even Charlie X looked to her as if she were a queen.

  “Full of animals,” the Magician said, musing, thoughtful, pushing the children away from her, sending a rippling wave out to the sides as packed so tight they fought to keep their balance. “Not of the Company. Not this type of workmanship. It has a specialized feel to it. Is their lab in the city? No, I doubt it. I would know. Where? Never fear—I will get it out of you.” Now peering down at the Strange Bird again, addressing her. “And also what is staring out from your eyes. Because someone is. Someone not you.”

  “Can I. Can I.”

  “No, you can’t, Charlie X. No matter what you might want to say.”

  “Reward. Is reward.”

  “Is reward?” The Magician laughed, a mocking laugh that even the Strange Bird, still struggling on the table, knew was a warning.

  “Bird invisible. Bird invisible in tree. Charlie X see. Bird escape. But Charlie X follow, though, track down. Bring. Reward?”

  The Magician turned in a graceful arc to face Charlie X, arm extended, and when she stood motionless once more Charlie X’s throat had been slit with a knife hidden in her sleeve.

  Charlie X reeled, caught his balance, hand reflexively at his neck.

  The moon-faced children, the sad, malnourished children, gasped and chattered in a language the Strange Bird did not know, or perhaps it was nonsense, gibberish. But they did not draw back or seem overly surprised and by this the Strange Bird knew the Magician was often murderous.

  No blood came from Charlie X’s throat and instead out poured a stream of tiny mice and she saw that the mice had already begun to stitch up the cut with their teeth, from the inside out, as the man gurgled and struggled to right himself, stumbled against the side of the stone table, hand as it met the stone touching her wing as well.

  “Mind your place, Charlie X. Mind you recognize this is no apprenticeship. You bring me things. You receive favors for those things—for example, I let you live like a trapdoor spider in your courtyard kingdom and do not disturb you there. But that is all. You are not one of mine.”

  Charlie X had moved past caring about lectures and rewards, although the wound was now sutured and the mice returning to their lair, through his mouth.

  “You are not one of mine.” The Magician gestured to the children. “You are not young enough, and you are part Chiropteran.”

  “Am still young,” Charlie X countered, in a gurgle, but could not rebut the second thing.

  But she snapped her fingers and the children converged on him, still intent on his own reconstruction, and dragged him up, struggling, and carried him out like a living coffin, above their heads, on their shoulders. A sea of children headed out of the observatory through the far archway, jettisoning Charlie X that he might return to his trapdoor and feed once more on the remains of the Old Man.

  Surely, the Strange Bird had believed, there could be no place worse than the laboratory or the Old Man’s cell, yet for all the beauty and mystery of the planets revolving there above her, the Strange Bird knew that she was in what Sanji had called “a kind of hell.”

  While the blue fox head on the wall stared down impassive, glowed like a lamp because the Magician had turned it into a lamp, but not given it the mercy of forgetting what it had become, and as the Strange Bird looked up at the still-living fox, she realized the Magician would not kill her. It would be worse than that.

  * * *

  The blur, the disassembly, the knowledge, received from the intensity of the Magician’s gaze, that she would be a bird no longer, and how this hollowed her out before a single knife touched, or a single one of the Magician’s creatures had burrowed into her flesh and curled up there. How she longed for the days spent in her cell in the underground prison, the nights spent sharing with the little foxes. How that was now some idyll, some pleasant memory of sanctuary.

  The children with their dead eyes had returned to crowd close, lustful for the demonstration. The Magician had made them lustful in that way, focused their energy and intent to mirror her own. They were a family, in their way.

  “Isadora, you are so beautiful,” the Old Man said, but she could not see his face there among the multitudes, nor Sanji’s. She could not understand what he was saying, except that now the Magician was saying it.

  “You are a lovely thing,” the Magician said. “But you can be more beautiful still … and more useful.”

  “The seeds of me are the seeds of you,” the Strange Bird said. Something Sanji had told her, whether in a dream or in the lab, she could not remember.

  The Magician did not miss a beat. “Well, that may or may not be true, but you are the one undergoing transformation. Without an anesthetic, dear. But you are a made thing, as I am not, so you shouldn’t need it. You will find ways to numb yourself. If you even understand me and aren’t just running on a loop like a mechanical nightingale. But you must because I cannot do it for you.”

  “One by desert, one by sea. One by forest, one by marsh.” The labs. The research. Her, the bird.

  “And one on the table, ready for the work,” the Magician replied.

  By her look if not her words, the Strange Bird understood. It was a look Sanji had given her and others in the lab. Before they added, subtracted, divided, multiplied, as if there were a way, in referring to the math of it, the acts became abstract, not about flesh and blood at all.

  She would not be recovering from this. She would not escape from the observatory, not, at least, as herself.

  * * *

  The pain hit sharp and piercing, as if each of the children held a lit match and set each individual feather on fire, with each quill turned into a blade driven into her flesh. And still this could not describe the agony as the Magician took her wings from her, broke her spine, removed her bones one by one, but left her alive, writhing and formless on the stone table, still able to see, and thus watching as the Magician casually threw away so many parts that were irreplaceable. As she gasped through a slit of a mouth, her beak removed as well.

  While there came the rush and withdrawal of the wave that was the roar of the children’s approval and the bright, tight leers of their compressed faces, eclipsing the heavens above. The rapt silence with which they held their breath at some new trick the Magician had performed through reduction of the Strange Bird’s flesh. So invasive and yet completed with such smooth and clinical assurance that the Strange Bird did not have the option of dying of shock, flayed as she was. Remade as she was.

  “Every created animal,” the Magician said in a vague, disconnected voice. “Every created animal, every single piece of biotech, has a signature, or sometimes many signatures. Of their creators. Of their intent. And these signatures leave a message, intended or not. And if you can read those messages, you can … oh, what have we here? Override and interlacing that should not be there—a second voice. Let me just take a moment to snuff out that voice.

  “There. Done. Now, as I was saying, although I doubt anyone in this room can understand me, I certainly hope not, this ‘surgery’ would not be successful without translating the signatures. The intent. To reform intent, you must not cut against the grain. For example, this ‘bird’ actually contains traces of squid and even human influence. It also has a quite strong camouflage ability—so strong it invests in both physical camouflage and internal camouflage. So, what shall I change this creature into? Something of personal use to me. Can anyone guess? No, of course you can’t. But soon enough most of you will be hopping up onto this table to find out for yourselves.”

  * * *

  There came a moment, pulled at, reshaped, spread out
flat, that the Strange Bird found a way to turn off the pain, made each thing taken remote from herself. The ceiling fell away and the laughter of the children and even the hands of the Magician, so complicit in dissolving her, and even the little, innocent creatures, like the spider and the worms, that the Magician had sent inside her on journeys to make the Magician’s repurposing easier.

  All of this fell away, and, in the end, there was only the head of the fox on the wall, staring benevolent down on her, shining with that blue, unfading, eternal light, that beatific agony, and the compass that still lived within her and pulsed in secret and had hidden itself from the Magician. It pulsed known to her alone and she could not scratch the itch, and yet the compass by its distraction, its presence, let her know she was still alive. Transformed from compass in her mind to a beacon, calling out to the southeast, to a place remote, communicating that she could not come there, but the southeast must come to her. And the pulse was the pulse of her mind, her heart, of the remnants that survived in what was left of her body. This was all that saved the Strange Bird, although she was bird no longer. The beacon that meant something other than flesh lived within her still.

  Sanji, captor and confidante both: “There is no shame in going dark. There is no shame in giving up, for a time.”

  And the Old Man said, peering out from his corpse at the edge of the courtyard, “I live in darkness now. I live there. I die there. I live there.”

  She had no wings. She was spread out impossibly long and wide across the table. Hours and hours had passed. The children had lost interest and left. Only the fox and the Magician remained, and the fox had no choice.

  The Magician wiped the sweat from her face, stared down at her new creation, which stared back up at her from eyes hidden among the iridescent feathers, gulped like a flounder through a mouth now hidden on the underside of what the Magician had created from her flesh.

  “I will wear you as a cloak once you’ve recovered,” the Magician said. “No one will see me approaching. I will be invisible wrapped in you, and for that I thank you, though I doubt you will enjoy it. But that is the price of change. Someone always pays.”

  The thing on the stone table lay still. The thing on the stone table had already taken on the texture and color of the stone table, as was its nature. The thing on the table listened to the pulse of the beacon and counted each beat, waiting.

  Where was she headed?

  What did she hope for?

  Where did she wish to come to rest?

  The Fourth Dream

  In the fourth dream, Sanji is a bird and she flies beside the Strange Bird high above the Earth, where no pain and no suffering can be seen or felt. Sanji as bird has an odd aspect, for her bird-flesh has been made from many different animals, some that can fly and some that cannot. Yet still she flies.

  The Strange Bird is made of air, not of flesh at all. She relishes being made of air, revels in it, can soar invisible and triumphant. She wonders why Sanji would choose the guise of avian when she could be air, she could be nothing.

  The Strange Bird lives in this dream for a long time. She lives in it for as long as she can.

  Time and the Cloak

  Unexpected, in the aftermath … that Charlie X adored her, ran rough fingers over the feather cloak when he thought the Magician wasn’t looking, and by his touch the Strange Bird learned more of her own contours and reach, for there were parts of her that could not feel at all, were rendered numb, and by the distant ghost of Charlie X’s hand she began to sense the map of her new body.

  “Soft,” Charlie X murmured, as if he had never known anything soft before. “Pretty.” Admiring a handiwork not of his own doing. All he had done was kill and eat a human being. All he had done was pursue her, catch her, and bring her to someone even worse.

  The Magician slit Charlie X’s throat often, yet often he returned and each time the Magician had grown more used to him and relied on him more. The Strange Bird lost track of how many times Charlie X’s throat had been cut, how many times the mice poured out. But each time, Charlie X’s hand shook worse and the sadness in his eyes overtook the rest of his face.

  The Strange Bird loathed his touch. What he gave her in awareness he took away a hundred times over in how she had no say in the matter. Now she was the Old Man in the trapdoor, half-in, half-out. Unmoored, circling around, circling back, unable to escape yet able to escape.

  * * *

  There was no true way for the Strange Bird to regain herself in the aftermath of atrocity. She had no wings. She had no wings, and the panic of that, the shock, was only tempered and made distant by how many of her senses the Magician had stripped from her. Her mouth could not sing but only breathe in shallow, uncomfortable gulps. Her eyes now saw only what was above her when the Magician laid her to rest at night and what was above her when the sun rose before the Magician took her up again.

  Between, she did not have the comfort of true sleep, but only a half-awake imitation so that the Strange Bird always felt exhausted, forgot so many times that she had been mutilated, beat wings that were not there, and quivered instead, and quaked in her smooth, thin formlessness and for long moments did not know or forgot what manner of creature she had been turned into.

  Somewhere in the horror of the first nights, the Magician, drunk with her power, gave the Strange Bird over to the feral children, and allowed them to run through the observatory holding her aloft as they had Charlie X. Their filthy hands all over her, pulling and prodding and trying to rip and sometimes to bite, and by all of this the Strange Bird knew that the Magician was using her children to test the strength of what she had made.

  The children gave out a mighty cry and brought her up to the telescope and draped her over the broken eye and swung from the ends of her that dangled down. They yanked her from that spot and brought her to another and swung once again. They gnawed like Charlie X’s mice, but not as gentle. They wrapped themselves six at a time in the length and width of her and the Magician laughed and pretended she could not see their legs and heads peeking out.

  She saw again the storm of beetles and the real storm that had come up behind them, and she was both the beetles, ripped apart by the cyclone, and the storm billowing out senseless and raging. Even as from the outside the Strange Bird was utter stillness and silence.

  Cloak and cowl both, draping and undraping, which hurt the most as she would again forget the lack of wings and feel unbalanced, experience vertigo and be unable to catch herself, and forever there was the sensation of being undone, of being only a skin slid across the skin of the Magician, and that this made her less than animal, less than nothing, a mere surface with no depth, a flat pool of water that would in time recede to even less than that.

  “Such a brilliant cloak, such a useful cloak,” the Magician said to the Strange Bird when she had retrieved her treasure from the children. “You will be witness to great things, important things.”

  The Strange Bird would be gasping inside, choking, unused to the cascade, the steep fall away. Caught herself, saved herself, only by imagining the cowl of herself around the Magician’s face as her two true wings transformed and curved together around that lionesque head. That she chose to frame the Magician’s features and that in any moment she willed, the Strange Bird could bring those wings apart, break the frame, bring the Magician visible. Or wrap the Magician’s face so tight that she would suffocate.

  To live in such closeness to the creature that had unmade her could not be described, made every moment tense. To be intimate enough to feel the Magician’s breathing and the tensing of muscles in her taut back, the strength in those shoulders, the breath of the Magician sometimes upon the side of the cowl, those lithe fingers pulling at the fabric of her feathers and her life. There were the hands of the Magician upon her, worse than Charlie X’s, to place her properly and the prickle and tensing as her feathers changed without her bidding to match whatever landscape they moved across.

  The Magician’s Compa
ss

  If the Strange Bird had a compass that compelled her, then the Magician, she came to understand, had a compass, too. This was a slow understanding, one that leaked into her over weeks, months, and years. For nothing came to her easily now or with any speed.

  At true north lay the great bear Mord, her mortal enemy for control of the city. At true south lay the Company building, a place that the Strange Bird knew as a kind of laboratory on a scale far outstripping the one from which she had escaped. To the west, the Magician’s regard for her transformed children, her observatory headquarters, while to the east, forever changing in the intensity with which the Magician regarded them, were a scavenger named Rachel and a competitor of the Magician’s named Wick. Rachel worked with or for Wick and Wick made creatures much as the Magician did, and used them to barter for goods.

  The Magician would meet Wick in secret near the observatory, slipping on the Strange Bird and then slipping out past her own sentries to admonish Wick or order Wick or try to exert influence. Wick was never amenable, always as slippery as the Magician, a thin, pale man whose affect was like being only a surface and not a creature.

  “Remember how much I could hurt you,” the Magician would say, and the Strange Bird would wonder why she did not hurt Wick then, there. Only in time did she realize Wick must himself be formidable, in his way, but by then the Strange Bird did not care because everything about her was falling apart, falling away.

  But the Magician also spied on Wick, and Rachel, from a favorite spot—standing beside a swollen, polluted river below a cliff into which had been carved dwellings. Once, the Magician stood there for so long that the Strange Bird noticed, came out of her thoughts, for every muscle in the Magician’s body was tense, on alert. Soon, as dusk fell, Rachel and then Wick came out onto the balcony above and began to argue. The Magician began to mutter and argue with herself, and this was how the Strange Bird knew, for the Magician could read lips and said the words out loud to better house them in her memory. The Strange Bird had no opinion of Wick, but she liked how Rachel held herself, compact and apart, and precise.