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He is barely a hatchling, sightless, mindless, nameless and constantly hungry. What lulls him and his four sisters and one brother to sleep is their mother’s worried caw, taking on a shrilling tone as she asks her mate for food. The winter has overstayed its time in the forest and holds them in an icy clutch of what seems to be a never-ending fast. Their father brings two half-frozen worms he managed to rip from the clenched jaws of stone-hard earth. Two worms for a family of eight.
He THINKS he had four sisters. He insists he has no idea why, when talking of later times, he mentions three of them. Blames it on the memory problems.
I’m a dodger like that, see. I’ve had a lifetime of practice in dodging and resisting.
He’s made it past his first moon and the winter hasn’t. Air has gotten warmer and the food is more… more in general. So there is ‘more’ of all of them too, fortunately. One of his sisters and a brother already start to get excited by a prospect of flying. They both want to be like their father, strong, proud, enduring. They’d consider him an angel, an intimidating, stern one, if they only had any concept of angels. However, he and his other sisters more often turn their heads towards their mother. Everything is beautiful about her. Her sadness too.
He assumes it as his responsibility to cheer mother up. So he does awkward, stumbling twirls and small jumps in front of her, showing off his barely-summoned-into-existence feathers. He sees the smallest glint of amusement in her round, warm eyes.
Once you’ve resisted the cold, your mother’s sadness attacks you from the front.
He and his siblings are two moons old by now and ready to fly. It is said among the ravens that by the time of the hatchling’s first flight, their personalities should be developed enough to name them appropriately. So they fly. No one said that they fly well. One of them bumps into a branch, the other two bump into each other midair. There is a frantic squeaking with a hint of the future caw in it, coming from a puddle of mud. She is worried that there might be something wrong with her leg after she fell. He vocally expresses concern about the state of his beautiful feathers, now dowsed in grime and dirt. His sister pecks him on the head. Hard.
She is the one who cries ‘a vain fool’ during the assembly of a clan, when he is to be named. She is no longer a ‘she’, but Katrai. ‘A stern one’. Arkoi, ‘father’s joy’. Tekhei, ‘a jester’. Hiumal, ‘mouse eater’. And finally him. Soon enough the whole clan chants enthusiastically his new name, announcing to all and everyone: here he is, a vain fool. Diaval. Diaval. Diaval.
When you’ve pushed back that, the name you hate ambushes you from behind.
He is a year old and going through his little rebellious phase, which consists of flying around. Out of the forests, away from his nest. Tekhei has been gloating enough about how often she’s seen humans doing their things and how well she knows them now and Diaval’s jealousy gets the best of him. It blows the wind into his wings, carries him over the treetops to the places where there are no more treetops. Only blades of grass and seas of golden plants he does not know the name for yet, but he recognizes their scent, the mother used to feed those to them sometimes. There is another familiar smell in the air. Meat. And Diaval is getting hungry by now. He flies down and lands next to a hooved, horned creature. It lies on its side, unmoving and not breathing, with a huge gash opening its body to worms and bugs which have already started dining on it. The raven joins the feast with a loud, satisfied caw. He’s not alone for long; soon, an older raven and two crows swoop in and use the chance for a goat meat on the menu.
A shrill, high-pitched cry causes him to jump and interrupts his dinner. Before he understands what is happening, he feels something hard and heavy hit the joint which connects his right wing to the rest of his body. Another stone hits his spine, as he attempts to fly away. Cawing in surprise and agitation, he leaps into the air again to see the attacker. They’re all long legs and featherless skin and a terrifying grimace on their face, or at least he thinks it’s a face, and it’s all Diaval needs to identify them. A human.
A string of curses leaves their mouth as another stone flies in his direction. He dodges it and tries to fly away, but something else catches his eye. A black-and-grey stain plummeting to the ground along with a stone that hit it. One of the crows just wasn’t quick enough.
He doesn’t see the rock that hits him on the head coming. It’s not enough to knock him down, but manages just fine to rob him of the full clarity of the mind. Diaval flies to nowhere, flies to escape, and by the nightfall he finds himself completely exhausted. Once he feels his feet hitting a surface, he falls asleep on the spot.
Sunrise reveals that the raven has gotten hopelessly lost. His wings are heavy and refuse to do their job and his head is filled with vague feeling of emptiness except for the thought that his mother might start to worry by now.
Just when you’re finally okay with your name, bam – stones. But stones don’t stunt ravens. Stones don’t kill birds. Humans do.
But proud and strong as we may be – human folk is one of those things we- I- just are not able to ‘resist’.
This one incident has significantly discouraged Diaval from venturing further into a strange world of humans. Not for long, though. Taking precautions and carefully planning the objects to avoid, soon the raven flew out again. And again. And again. By observation and mistakes, through being chased away with broomsticks and screams and still sometimes welcomed with some bread or even a piece of pastry, by watching how they worked and talked and loved and slept and filled their time with activities that made more and more sense by the day, Diaval, as many other creatures before him, was becoming more and more oriented in the ways of Men.
Once he stumbled upon a strange place, perhaps the strangest of them all. A field with some trees, but mostly filled with low grass and oddly shaped stones, arranged in lines. Some of the stones had carvings, some even very detailed sculptures of – how quaint – winged humans. Many had stone boulders or pieces of wood that would cross; short, horizontal one in the middle and the longer, vertical one, somewhere in the upper half.
Diaval’s musings were interrupted by a loud voice coming in from five or six stones away from the one he had sat on. He noticed a large gathering of humans, who seemed to be focused on something lying in front of them. Something he couldn’t see due to it being surrounded by all the people. Before he flew off and inspected the crowd, he noticed another thing. The stones had letters on them. Words. Names.
He sat himself in a comfortable way on a tree right above the people’s heads and looked down. The gathering reminded him of an odd ceremony he witnessed some time ago. People were loud and ate and drunk, and the more they drunk, the sillier they would become. He remembered a male and a female by the table; the female was dressed in a white robe of an enormous size. However, these people seemed pensive and unusually quiet. Many wore clothes in muted, bleak colours. Some, as he noted, were wiping their eyes. Some didn’t. Faces of those people had narrow streams of tears flowing down them. Other four people were standing around a massive hole in a ground and, with a help of ropes, were lowering a long, wooden box into it. The last man stood right next to the wooden cross. He wore a long, black robe, which confused Diaval. I thought only human females wore dresses. In his hands he held an open book and was clearly reading from it. The raven leaned in a bit and listened.
‘…we call to you in grief and sorrow: you hear us and rescue us. Watch over us as we mourn the death of your servant, precious in your sight, and keep us faithful to our vows to you…’
‘Amen’, responded the crowd in unison, and Diaval understood what was happening. This is what the humans did when one of them died. The people gathered must have been the friends and family, the wooden box probably contained the corpse. All other stones and crosses, and the names… they marked the places of the burial of other humans.
That’s a bit ridiculous, Diaval thought, and with a loud caw, he leapt into the air and left the people to their odd ceremonies.
We endure the presence of humans, as they endure the presence of each other. And – dare I say – better than they endure the sudden lack of presence of certain people.
He is four years old and, despite his many travels, he still comes home from time to time. He’s not the only one who’s leaving home more or less for good; Katrai and Tekhei are already boasting about how great their nests will be. Arkoi starts to observe other male ravens more carefully, and Hiumal… well, Hiumal does his thing. Eats mice. Diaval more often than not catches his mother deep in thought. Also more often than not he notices that these thoughts are not particularly cheery ones. It may or may not have something to do with the fact that after one of his many returns their father was no longer there.
One night Diaval has a nightmare. He dreams of humans armed in saws and torches and dogs by their sides, monstrous beasts with mouths full of teeth and eyes glowing red. He dreams of stones and their tree falling to the ground. He dreams of jaws and the stench of half-digested meat coming from inside them, he dreams of white fangs ripping Tekhei’s wing open, Arkoi’s squeaking and of Katrai putting up a fight with the nearest dog, scratching his eyes out in the process, blood sticking her feathers together.
He opens his eyes and realizes that: a) he hasn’t dreamed up a single thing, b) he is currently being mauled by an enormous hound. That just decided that it’s bored with torturing the bird. Diaval registers the canine’s open jaws coming at him at an alarmingly high speed. The instinct does the rest.
The dog jumps back and snarls after being stabbed in a hard palate with a beak of its almost-victim, who is in the process of escaping. Adrenaline pumps in Diaval’s veins, drowning out the pain, the panic, everything except for the monotone, subconscious ‘get out’ in his head.
He lands on a tree he knows the humans won’t cut down and this is when he hears it. He looks down and the sight of two beasts ferociously attacking something along with a familiar cawing with a hint of a shrilling tone in it tells him that his mother didn’t make it.
The adrenaline rush is over, giving place to the unbearable pain and something worse than that. The image of the crowd around a fresh grave during a funeral springs up in his mind. I wonder if a vain fool would be allowed to do a funeral, Diaval thinks, and then he thinks nothing, sees nothing, is nothing because the dark has swallowed the world and him with it.
He is welcomed back to the world of the living – alone.
You’ve just learned to live with the humans – they bring in dogs.
‘If it bothered you so much, why didn’t you tell me before that?’
He is angry.
He is a raven-turned-human-turning-occasionally-raven-again-when-Maleficent-finds-it-convienient and has been for the last 17 years. Sometimes he is a cat. Sometimes a squirrel. But not a dog. Never a dog. Must not be a dog.
Until a few hours ago and he is so, so angry.
Angry enough to nearly throw all the reason and everything he’s learned about Maleficent to the wind when he decides that he has had enough of her secrecy, of himself blindly following her every order, never sure why, never knowing exactly why, only guessing, only deducing, when he decides that two can play this game and the words are curling themselves to jump off his tongue--
(‘If it bothered you so much, why didn’t you tell me before that?’)
He is sitting on the lowest branch of a tree somewhere in the Moors, hugging his knees and glancing down at Maleficent sleeping in the roots. She looks almost peaceful. He still envies her for that. Sleeping so calmly on this particular night.
He was not angry enough to actually say it.
He might never be angry enough to say it.
He won’t allow it to be said.
He does love her. He is also falling in love with her, for that matter.
And it’s fine. As long as she knows him as a vain, foolish bird…
(‘If it bothered you so much, why didn’t you tell me before that?’)
(For the same reason you haven’t told me about your wings, Mistress.)
…It’s fine.
And when you have finally resisted all of the attacks, you lie down to your bed to resist a long, lonely night.