I say thanks, maybe tomorrow, and he goes and I get into the hammock and pull the covers over and go straight to sleep.
I just know I'm going to go crazy here, and I know that I'm going to have to visit the crypt sooner or later, to look for Ergates and find out what's going on, so when I wake up in the late afternoon I splash some water on my face, have a pee and once I've decided I generally feel awake and refreshed, I get right down to it, on the principal that there's no time like the present.
I try to clear my mind of all things sloth-like (can't think of anything less useful to take into the crypt than any semblance of slothfulness) and plunge right in.
I think I learnt a thing or two during all that time I spent in the crypt as a bird so I head back in that direction only this time I'm not fucking about with wee dainty sparrows or hawks or nothing; I'm going as a big bastarding bird; a simurg. They're so big their brains can cope with a human mind without much finessing, which means I don't have to spend most of my time remembering what I am or disguising my wake-up code as a ring. It's a bit ambitious but sometimes that's the only way to get anywhere.
I close my eyes.
/Check out the immediate locality first; nothing out of the ordinary in the nearby crypt-space. Have a shufty at the architecture of the tower just on general principals — this old tower is a interesting place right enough — then look a bit further out. The traffic around the Little Big Brothers' monastery is just about back to normal but I don't go any nearer to find out more.
Zoom into birdspace.
/And I'm a huge wild bird floating on the currents sliding within the drifting wind, hanging lazily loosed on my outstretched wings cantilevered across the singing air. My wingtip feathers are each the size of hands; they flutter like a lamb's heart flutters when my shadow falls over it. My feet are steel-tipped grapples hung on the end of my hawser legs. My talons are unsheathed razors; only my eyes are sharper. My beak is harder than bone, keener than just-broke glass. My keel bone is a great knife cozened in my flesh and cleaving the soft air; my ribs are glistening springs, my muscles sleek bunched fists of oily power, my heart a chamber filled with slow thunder, quiet and unstressed; a towering damn trickling power, ticking over, headwaters of charged blood pent and latent.
Well, YES! This is more like it! Why did I ever bother being a hawk? Why was I so bleeding unambitious? I feel fierce, I feel powerful.
I look about, surveying. Air everywhere. Clouds. No ground.
Other birds flying in vast Vs, climbing in huge columns in the air, gathered in their own dark clouds, wheeling and calling. I think towards roosts.
/And I'm in the midst of them; spherical trees floating in the groundless blueness like brown planets of twigs in a universe of air, surrounded by a squawking atmosphere of birds to-ing and fro-ing.
The parliament of crows, I think.
/And I'm there, in bitter air between layers of white cloud like mirrored landscapes of snow; the great dark winter-trees are massed to the density of black cliffs against the icy billows of freezing cloud. The crows' parliament is in the tallest, greatest biggest tree of all, its brown-black twigs like the sooty bones of a million hands clutching at the chill blank face of heaven. The meeting breaks up when they see me and they come squawking and screeching out to mob me.
I beat, pushing down the air, rising over the pestering birds, seeking one who stays back, directing.
The crows swarm up around me. A few land blows on my head but it doesn't hurt. I laugh and stretch my neck, swivelling my head and ripping a few of their little toyish bodies from the air. I toss them aside; red blood beads, pulverized white bone pushes through their coal black feathers and they tumble torn to the snow-cloud billows. The rest scream, pull fluttering back a moment then mob in again. I stroke forwards. Air snaps swirling under my wings, rolling the pursuing birds round like bubbles under a waterfall.
I see my prey. He's a big grey-black fella perched on the topmost twig of the topmost branch of the parliament-tree and he's just realised what's going on.
He rises, cawing and shrieking into the air. Foolish; if he'd dived into the branches he might have had a chance.
He tries some acrobatic stuff but he's old and stiff and I snatch him so easily it's almost disappointing. Snap! and he's neatly encased in one cage of foot, flapping and screaming and losing feathers and pecking at my toes with his little black beak and tickling me. I slice another couple of his fellows out of the air, spreading their blood like a artist would, paint on a white canvas, then I think eyrie.
/And am alone with my little crowy friend above a tawny plane of sand and rock, beating towards a fractured cliff where a gnarled finger of rock juts out, its summit topped with a giant nest of sunbleached timbers and splintered white animal and bird bones.
I land and fold the soft cloaks of my wings and stand upon the brittle nest — timbers creak, branches burst, picked-clean bones snap — looking down at my balled foot with the old gray-black crow imprisoned in it, flapping and beating and hollering.
Skreak! Skrawk! Awrk! Gerout!
Oh shut up, I tell it, and the rock-crushing weight of my voice stuns it to quiet stillness. I balance on that leg, compressing the trapped crow and reaching through the bars of my talons with a talon from the other foot, tickling the bird's grey-black throat while the breath wheezes out of it.
Now then my little chum, I say — and my voice is acid on a slicing blade, boiling lead down a open throat — I've a few questions I'd like to ask you.
TRANSLATION — SIX — 4
You know what I'm going to do if you don't tell me what I want to know, don't you? I says to the old crow caged in my talons.
I'm resting in my big nest on the finger of stone looking out over the desert, sitting here quite happily pulling out the old grey-black crow's feathers one by one with my free foot, humming to myself and trying to get some sense out of the old bird.
I don't know nothing! the grey-black crow shouts. You'll pay for this, you piece of filth! Set me back where you found me immediately and maybe we say no more about this — eark!
(I scrunch his beak a bit with two of my talons.)
You swine! he blubbers.
I decided it's time to fix the old fella with a serious stare, so I lower my great-beaked head down to his level and look in through the talon-bars at his little black beady eyes. He tries to look away but I hold his head round looking towards me with a talon and put my head closer to him (though not too close — I'm not stupid). Crows can't actually move their eyes very much and now he couldn't move his head neither. They've got a thing called a nictitating membrane what they can flick over their eye and this old chap's nictitating like mad trying to block me out and if I wasn't such a fine firm fleshed-out example of a simurg he might block me out (or even taking me over if he was trying), but I am, so he couldn't and I was in there.
I had decided in my own mind by this time that simurgs were related to lammergeiers and as any fool will tell you lammergeiers are also known as bone crushers. So the old crow looks into my mind and sees what I intend to do and promptly shits himself.