Chapter 15 Temple of the King #2
Electric blue eyes in a silver-black head studied Green from entirely too nearby. A beak like a pewter pickax hovered inches from his upturned face.
There was the deeper shadow hanging above the crow’s head, a patch of fully ripened dusk in the shape of a seven-pointed star.
With an effort of will, Green pushed aside his fear and spoke.
“Well, I live forty feet from this spot now, so it seemed neighborly to stop by.”
The crow puffed out his throat feathers. He made a gurgling, croaking sound that Green understood as laughter.
“Sleep comes hard on an empty stomach. A flight to the moon is longer than you think. Spring always has two false starts. And…even here in your infancy, you are still you. Why should we expect any different?”
The croaking laugh came again.
A dozen more crows, unaffected by the frozen landscape, glided in to perch in the branches above and watch the conversation. One crow used a swooping bluebird, frozen mid-flight, as a platform to gain a better view of the scene. The crows all laughed along with their king.
“My infancy?”
“A private joke, human. For now, at least, your memory flows to you from a single direction. Ours flows from many. Do not concern yourself overmuch. There is dignity in each of our allotted measures of strength and struggle.”
As he spoke, the king grew. Once the size of a man, the giant bird now sidestepped along his perch to make room for a body the size of a tiger.
“I know you said you’d rather I didn’t visit, but I really need help. I have so many questions. And my friend…my teacher…is dying.”
The king cocked his head, studying Green with one eye, then the other.
“Our preferences are our own affair. You need not carry them for us. Yes, we know about Valentina and your fight against the outsider. Indeed, such things are among the reasons we honored your request.”
The crow looked down at the hatch beneath Green’s feet.
“Please. I don’t understand. I have so many questions. Can you help us?”
The Crow King was now too large for his branch. He stepped down onto the mottled sheet metal roof. The surface made a soft popping sound as it accepted the ten-foot-tall bird’s weight.
“We sympathize. We hold you and your teacher in great esteem.”
“Then, please, do something. Like you did when you saved me from the bus.”
The king stood motionless.
“That is…one interpretation.”
“I saw you. In the memory. You chose to save me. You gave me this magic acorn or whatever the hell it is. I still don’t even know what it is doing to me.”
“Chose? Yes, we were able to pluck that moment because someone chose you. But it wasn’t us. The meal was to our liking, the trading of a token obeyed our own ancient custom, but the choice was entirely yours. Otherwise, we could not have accessed a thing as private and personal as your death.”
“I chose? What does that mean?”
“Indeed. You chose. At least twice. We heard you choose beneath the bus. And, more to the point, a much older version of you, forward in your future, but backward in a twin of this world’s past, asked us directly to be present on the street that day.
We repaid one of the favors we owed to past and future you.
In this dimension and in others. Your cheerful facility with paradox has always been superlative among your kind. Perhaps your chief talent.”
This is meaningless.
Frustration lit a fire behind Green’s eyes. He had the urge to swat a nearby crow from its perch, but he forced himself to swallow his anger.
“That doesn’t make any sense. I asked you to be there? What do you mean? My future, but the world’s past? I don’t understand.”
The Crow King paused, seeming to consider his words.
“You will, old friend. Soon, you will.”
There was an odd tenderness in the bird’s tone.
“We wish we had liberty to tell you more. Yet, for your sanity’s sake, for the sake of what you still must accomplish for our mother, even you must experience some things in their conventional order.”
“I just want to know what you’ve done to me!”
“You give us too much of the credit. Your own crafting of meaning shapes your path far more than we could. The truth of that acorn in your pocket holds to that same foundational principle.”
Green pulled out the acorn and looked at it.
It was unchanged. A common acorn.
“Is that some kind of riddle? Can’t you just tell it to me simply?”
The king looked up into the branches.
“The strangest human we know visits a royal pan-dimensional manifestation of collective history-spanning crow intelligence while battling an incursion from beyond reality…and he asks us for simplicity.”
The birds above all croaked with hoarse laughter.
The Crow King turned to look out at the surrounding forest, stooping his massive frame low beneath the uppermost branches.
He paused to wipe his three-foot beak against the central trunk, a motion like a barber stropping a straight razor.
As Green watched, the king continued to grow.
The huge corvid turned his attention back to his guest.
Green deflated with a sigh. It was all too much.
“Could you at least try to explain?”
“We are trying. Know that simply being here is costly to us. The body of a life is as much made of choices as matter and energy. Are we expected to explain your own choices to you? Who can decide for a creature to be different? To be strange among his peers? To mean something more than stuff stretched across space and time? Who chooses?”
“Catskill called me ‘not-man.’ What did you do to me?”
“The guardian’s senses delve deeper than simple substance. He doesn’t just smell the seed. He smells the tree to come.”
It was like standing at a locked door, sensing something vitally important was there, just out of reach.
The crow looked down at him and chittered softly, as if in thought. The creature seemed to make a decision.
“Hmm. Perhaps…A demonstration. A brief lesson. Come. Be quick. Lend us your acorn,” the king said.
The king’s cawing voice had grown deeper and louder. Green could feel the vibrations shivering along his collarbones. The words brought with them a smell of decay mixed with the cloying sweetness of overripe fruit.
With nervous care, he held the acorn up on his open palm.
A storm-colored blur darted at Green’s hand and the tiny nut was pinched in the crow’s kayak-size beak. The king twitched his great head and sent the acorn flying over the edge of the roof, falling to the ground below.
“Wait! No!”
The Crow King didn’t answer Green’s protests. The giant bird tilted forward, spread wings the size of billboards, and soundlessly followed the acorn down, untouched by the frozen landscape.
Green let go his hold on the branch, stepped to the edge to look over, slipped, and fell off the roof.
He sucked in a breath of surprise as his hip impacted one of the motionless oak leaves, frozen in the act of falling.
It crinkled like dry paper, but held his weight.
Clutching at empty air, he teetered on the leaf, rolled, and fell to the side before colliding with another leaf like a punch to the stomach.
Then to the ribs. Then to his left armpit before he fell the last six feet to the ground.
“Ow.”
He stood, brushed the dirt from his jeans, and looked up at the Crow King.
The bird’s growth rate had increased. Now, the king’s eye was level with the library roofline.
Green fought to regain his breath and composure while looking up at the tyrannosaurus-size crow.
“My acorn. Where is it? I need it back!”
The Crow King pointed his beak to the sky. He cawed three earth-shaking caws. The shock waves sent Green stumbling away, pressing palms to his ears and squeezing shut his eyes.
When he looked up the king towered as tall as the oak. Somehow, the Crow King was both a giant bird and something else. Green had flashes of seven silver beaks radiating outward from a central dark-feathered hub and wings that stretched along directional planes that weren’t.
The seven-pointed star above the creature’s head was now a massive window looking out on a darkling sky where tattered clouds scudded across the face of a great yellow moon. The king was both a dark pinnacle and a limitless crossroads.
The image made Green’s stomach turn and the edges of his vision began to darken.
The feeling made a wolf stir in his sleep. A borrowed growl rattled through his senses and the vision of the Crow King resolved back into simply an impossibly giant bird.
The king’s three caws had changed the landscape, calling in other seasons of the year.
Now, along with the falling autumn leaves, the trees were dotted with green buds, verdant growth, and insects paused mid-flutter. Islands of snow lay alongside blooming trillium and trout lilies. Acorns were scattered in profusion among the dandelions and the mirror gleam of iced-over puddles.
“Your acorn is here,” boomed the voice of the Crow King. “Retrieve it.”
Green had a sinking feeling even before he surveyed the piles of acorns.
There’s no way.
He looked down at a dozen acorns scattered near the toe of his right boot.
Kneeling, he prodded the innocuous little things with his fingertips. A few were of uncommon size. Several seemed to have insect damage. One was missing its cap. Fully half of them looked like they could have been his acorn.
“This is impossible. Tell me you know which one it is.”
The Crow King’s voice was like an avalanche.
“You called the acorn magic, did you not? If it is so singular and special, so heavy with significance, then select it.”
“I can’t!”
He grabbed one of the acorns and stood, holding it up to the colossal monarch.
“This looks just like the one I had. Just like most of the ones I can see from here. Is this it?”
“That is not for us to say.”
“Of course it is! How am I supposed to know?”
The Crow King gave another harsh, rolling laugh that sounded like a passing freight train.
“Don’t laugh! This is life-and-death!”
The dark feathered mountain settled.