A Kindness of Ravens

A Kindness of Ravens

Published by Richard Cheney

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Richard Cheney

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold

or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person,

please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book

and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return

to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for

respecting the hard work of this author.

A Kindness of Ravens

Published by Richard Cheney

"Everybody got to watch the sky turn gray."

- James Taylor, from Everybody Has the Blues [In the Pocket - 1976]

Fore-feather

This is a feather, fallen from a heaven where you cannot yet be, a dream-place of shadows inhabited only by deep sleep. Deep. Hollow. It is a sleep from which most do not awaken any time soon.

Once, as a child, I thought I feared heaven. Its winter sky was often rent by the swarm of black ravens, a cloud of hundreds of individuals thinking and flying as one; hunting, I suppose. In my imagination, I was the prey.

Over several years of childhood, I had a dream of a place I did not know; it was not my Southern California canyon home. The dream-house was a gothic gabled dark gray-green structure, more Midwest than coastal and already ancient when I first approached it from a wide cornfield to the south. It was November, before Thanksgiving, after the harvest. Walking through the stalks, some fallen over, some still upright, and some uprooted and carried away, I saw that all were hay-colored and hard. To bend the stalk was to hear the snap as if breaking a bone.

The house was ominous like a dark headland above a cornstalk sea in which I swam within its damaged rank and file. It was just at sunset when the colors of oncoming winter were not yet fully gray, as waning embers in a fire, gray with just a gilded flame, otherwise spent and dark but dangerous.

To the east of the house, a small orchard of fruit trees seemed to be the homing point of an unkindness of ravens approaching from the northwest.

I reached the border of the cornfield and stood before an open space separating me from the orchard to the east and the gothic house immediately to the north. Without thinking, I left the line of corn stalks and stepped into the open. Immediately, the ravens, whose swarm had now arrived directly over the fruit trees, turned in my direction as one cloud and hurled out of their midst a single bird, aimed at me. Down it came, wings locked in attack, a maneuver I had never witnessed in a raven, and I turned and dove back into the meager protection of the stalks. I succeeded only in taking down several of them, falling upon them, leaving myself open to the attack. But the bird broke its attack, swooped and climbed out of its dive when it reached a point just above the standing sentinel of stalks.

It was only a warning.

As dreams will, I was instantly inspired with the guardian task that was mine alone to accomplish. I rose to my knees, wary of the waiting swarm above. I gathered the stalks that I had broken off in my fall and then broke away others until I had easily two dozen stalks collected in my hands. I stood and dragged them with wary confidence toward the space between the orchard and the house, where I now saw that others had also dragged stalks, gathered together as if the collected gatherings were graveyard tombstones. Other piles were no longer upright, fallen in on themselves in their several places from a distant time. It was the clear sign of ritual, but the child I was in the dream knew nothing of these things; he saw only that others had also gathered and dragged dying vegetation in seasons past and uncounted to this place.

I was about to join my burden to the others when a warning cry echoed down from above, not from one, but from a host of ravens, from the unkindness of their hundreds of voices. I looked beyond the open space where dragged vegetation marked a trail heading north, then west around the house. I turned around and saw that the trail continued around from the south side, completely circling the house, joined to where I stood beside the cornfield.

I was under the watchful gaze of a thousand black eyes, which seemed to imply that I was to drag my burden around the house until I had circumnavigated the high gables and the gray sky, beneath the ravens’ watch. I marveled at the task; it was a ritual that meant my life or death according to the mercy of the eyes and black claws of the ravens hovering above.

As I took the first step, a shadow from an opened back door of the house stretched from the light within, approaching in a flat stream. Though entirely in silhouette, I knew it was Dad. I was saved! But as I dropped the burden of stalks to run toward him, his head shook and I stopped. From the distance between us, I should not have been able to see the sad action, but as dreams will, I had the sight magnified. I was directly beneath his long, drawn face and it continued its sidelong motion of denial.

You must go, his frown said, you must, in your generation, also drag the stalks. Drag them ‘round the house, and ‘round again, if need be. It is the ravens’ demand for the right to fly. Your wings are young, my son, but you must now fly.

The air and the sky are free...

Chapter One

April, said T.S. Eliot, is the cruelest month, but it is November in the Southern California canyons when the weather turns and the harvests to the east and south toward Mexico and northeast in San Juaquin Valley should have already been gathered, laid up and protected from the coming winter, from the relative cold -- and we in California are so spoiled in that acclimated chill, as if Minnesota or Michigan knew no colder climate – and from the dampness and the ravens.

There are, to be sure, colder places, even in California, but ravens haunt almost all places in the world. It is a sign of their intelligence that their kind can live anywhere with man and flourish, and even in places he does not.

In the warmer months, and in late autumn, the ravens will gather from our refuse of the harvest, and use their storage in winter as do humans. But a full month before winter solstice, as it seems like no other time of year, before the wind turns and before the sun goes cold white in the haze of waning autumn, before the cornucopia spreads upon the grateful board, the families of America gather about the table to offer their sacrament of the harvest feast while the ravens gather as black clouds and rain destruction on the human soul. Or is that just a watchful eye that we have garishly misunderstood?

Grateful? We dare tempt the clouds even in the shadow of the cornucopia and abandon the safety of our gables, not yet crusted with overnight frost, and dare to pass beneath the tree that was the home of the new summer hive of honeybees; it is no shelter from the wayward raven who wanders from the cloud, not for loss from the swarm, but for the sole purpose of a harvest of the soul. No, not wayward, for it is another sign of their intelligence. From the swarm, one willfully descends while the others, knowing its plan, hover, waiting, as if a single mind joined by the flight of black feathers. Is that gratitude? No, it is a trait of humankind, perhaps learned from the raven, for its creation surely preceded our own, that greed is put away for one day while other days are spent in the avarice of gain.

I was eight or nine. I could not have been older, for my tenth birthday, on the very day, as I recall, was to mark my formal initiation into a world whose gates are guarded by the flight, the swarm and the melancholy mythology of the raven’s unkindness. Before that time, a single feather, as it were, would occasionally fall from the swarm, then invisible to my eyes, cross as a shadow across my eyes, and land noiselessly on the ground. It was a harbinger, . as my father would say, and an education.

My father was an architect whose name, Daedalus Huxley, was already well known as an eminent designer of homes and castles of commerce. We lived in affluence in Mandeville Canyon, just a half-mile from the mouth that once, I’m told, opened onto a polo field until sometime a half-century before now. Perhaps at my birth, the stirrups of noble equestrians gave way to the book straps of a middle school: Paul Revere Junior High School. But for now, even that school experience was a number of years away. For now, the single feathers would fall, shade, and send a chill up and down my spine. How could I have known that the chill was not so much fear, but the spirit growing at my spine, from youthful shoulders, a length of wings that would not yet beat, not yet rise, not yet soar, and, in their time, not yet loose feathers of my own.

My name is Daedalus Icarus Huxley, named for my father, and also for the son of a father in Greek mythology whose tragic exploits were known to me at an early age. He, Icarus, escaped with his father from the labyrinth of his father’s design and, using wings of their own manufacture, he flew too close to the sun, fell and perished.

For convenience, I have never used my father’s name; I think it was always understood that my name was simply Icarus. Most people prefer just Huxley; it is my own preference. Why my father chose to name me after himself and Icarus is as shrouded in mystery as my grandfather’s convincing my grandmother that their son should carry the moniker of Daedalus. Daedalus Icarus. One can well imagine the jokes I caused. Mother did not like either name. Regardless, in my youth I discovered that the men for whom my father and I were named were historic figures, not myth, because they visited me, first in my sleep, then awake, as spirits of the dead.

I would become a psychiatrist practicing in Beverly Hills.

I am, and was as a child, a traveler in the paranormal, whose boundaries know no politics. The sheer size of such a place was a point of fear.

All creatures know fear. All realms of existence know fear.

The first feather, I later realized, came at a time of day that would least illicit the response of real fear; at night, in dream sleep. It was, in the dream, a real feather, not metaphor. And it was my first lucid dream, though at the time, I did not know of such things. As a result, the fear that did come in the dream was as real as had it happened in an awakened moment.

I was at play on a bright afternoon in the front yard – and this dream was, unlike the dream that would unfold the ravens’ secrets to me - a dream of my own recognized canyon home, a yard that featured a blend of deciduous and evergreen trees and yet, somehow, even in a canyon, the yard was more than merely dappled with sunlight. And, as fate would have it, as dreams are accustomed to introducing such illogical elements, my adapted toy was a corn cob still in its husk, left over from a meal some evenings before. It was purchased from the market; a vegetable garden was not existent in this yard. I turned the cob, wrapped tight in its cocoon of green husks, with the strands of corn silk twisted and browned at the tip, but still yellow and slick, I would discover, inside the husks.

I found the outer husk leaf, traced it to its tip and peeled it toward the cut base, leaving it attached as I would have peeled a banana. In like manner I peeled away several more until suddenly, within the layers of husks lay a brilliant, black feather, pressed in place, and resistant to pulling away as if it were one of the husks and not the totally foreign object to corn that it was. This was not the first cob I had ever peeled. Many had been done at my mother’s side, so the experience was tried and mastered even in my young hands. I had encountered feathers before and knew them for what they represented as well; the fallen single member of a bird’s wing, nearly as common as the hairs that dislodge from my head when it is vigorously brushed. I know I had marveled whether the feathers were ever missed by the raven, but I had decided that it was likely as painless and regenerated as the hair on my head. But I also knew that at no time was a corn cob open to the air. Never would a feather find its way on the wind into the husks to wait for discovery. Certainly not a feather of this size, nearly as long as the cob and as wide as a single leaf of the husk. And I also knew that once peeled, the husks would not lay neatly back against the cob as if they had never been disturbed. Then how did the feather appear between the husk leaves, for I also knew that it had not naturally grown there?

I put it there for you to find, young Icarus.

The voice was whispered, but I heard it plainly enough.

Put there for you to find, it said again.

I looked all around, suddenly fearful of the dappled shadows in the yard, not helped by the fact that a gentle breeze blew the trees and, therefore, the shadows moved in exaggerated fashion. At the periphery of my vision, one shadow moved contrary to the wind. I nearly bolted then and there, but something other than fear kept my feet rooted. I know now how the fear in dreams will allow some motion, but the instinct to run is paralyzed, as is the actual sleeping body for a time, locked out of muscular activity. No, this was something altogether different; a curiosity, a morbid fascination, as if I had confronted a road kill higher up on the canyon road where wildlife still has unfortunate resistance to flee the oncoming human tide.

Then I saw that it was not the shadow itself that seemed to move contrary to the others, moved merely by wind, following obediently the motion of their real selves. It was not a shadow at all. It was something invisible; moving in front of the shadows, like the clear ripple of a stream distorts the stones in its bed.

I stared at the thing.

The air and the sky are free, it said.

I know it was the thing that said it. Its motion accelerated with the words, and took on some color as it did so, immediately dissipating when the voice was silenced.

It was more than my young mind could process. Seated on the ground cross-legged, I slumped over on my side as if I in a faint…

…and entered yet another dream, a deeper consciousness, a message from a place I had not yet known existed.

I am lying on a rough floor of stone in a darkened room. The walls are also stone. The ceiling, if there is one, is too dark to see. There is a faint fire burning in one corner, barely throwing enough light to do more than throw a close, pale light on the two adjoining walls. I am curled up in the opposing corner, in a darkness that is not penetrated by the fire.

An old man sits near the fire. I cannot see clearly what he is doing; making… something. There is a pile next to him. He sits between the fire and the pile and he draws from the pile to make his curious assembly. His hands are nimble for his age. He works quickly. This is not a leisure activity. I see the worry in his face. He is driven. This is a work of necessity and it will consume him until he has finished.

Curiosity overcomes my hesitation – it is not fear at all that I feel. In the cache of darkness, I stand and remain for a moment in the corner, but standing has done nothing to improve the visibility. I must move closer. I must know what he is doing.

Several steps away from the corner keeps me in darkness, but now I can see some of the scattered pieces near the base of the pile. A sudden flare pops in the flame and for an instant, the entire room illuminates. In the instant, the flare is gone. He has not seen me, but I have recognized the pile by the several solitary pieces near his foot.

Black feathers. Thousands of feathers.

He is making a cloak, I think, of feathers. I am reminded of a story my father told of King Arthur and his mentor, the wizard Merlin. In the illustrated book, the wizard is cloaked in a cape of black feathers. Raven feathers, father said.

I dare another step forward, and still the old man is oblivious to my presence. He obligingly lifts his work from his lap, and I see my mistake. It is not a limp, shapeless cloak. This has structure. It has designed framework beneath the feathers. But what it is, I cannot tell.

As I turned over the puzzle in my head, a shape passed through me so quickly I had not the time to react before it was over. It should not have been possible. Another man, much younger, has just walked right through me as if I were not there. It felt like the sudden gust of wind, only instead of against my back, it flowed inside of me, and I felt the pull as it left from my chest.

"Father?" the young man said – but he was older than me. He has his back to me.

"It will be another evening, at least, my son," the old man said.

I suddenly heard a noise behind me and turned, now seeing light flicker faintly against what I had thought was a continuous wall. I now saw that there was an open portal in the wall, but as the hallway beyond was as dark as these chamber walls, I had not recognized the opening. The flicker was distant, as was the scraping noise I heard.

They heard it as well.

The son turned, facing me directly, and I know my face must have shown in the faint, reflected light, but he had just passed through me and had not known I was there; perhaps I was invisible to them. Indeed, he did not react to my presence. He moved forward and I stepped out of his way, not wanting to experience the discomfort I felt from his first pass. He stood at the portal, looking down the hall. The scraping steps grew faint and fell silent.

He turned back, and I followed him, now bolder in my invisibility.

"He grows closer, the young man said. Another evening or two, and he will find our lair. We must be away tomorrow night."

The old man nodded, attentive to his work.

I saw that near the fire, the old man had a ceramic pot, close to the fire. It contained soft wax in which he dipped his hand occasionally and then drew the wax across the base of the feathers as he progressed, row upon row of…

… a great wing! Mounted on an articulated architecture of reeds – bones, as it were – were the careful rows of feathers mounted and held in place by the wax and string. And behind the old man was a pair of wings plus a third. He was working on the fourth to complete two pairs. Each wing was easily the height of the son.

"Tomorrow night? No, Icarus, my son. This must be done in daylight while he sleeps."

Icarus?

Suddenly, my thoughts fled in every direction. I knew the name, for it was my own! Surely, these could be no others but…

Was this not Daedalus, the architect father, as was my own father? And then Icarus, his son?

How conveniently illogical. How daring to dream of these men. Oh, I knew the story well enough. How else would a father have explained his name and that of his son, but to relate the mythology of the Greeks at an age when my understanding was so limited as to believe anything my father said? Father related the tale frequently enough. I believed all my father said.

But to be a dreaming witness of this very moment, well, wasn’t that belief of a kind as well? Not just belief, but ratification? Had I not taken the story and made it my own?

The illuminating in my mind was brilliant, as if the room were charged with a fire so intense, we should have all, these ethereals and me, been consumed by its light.

The light extinguished as if it were not there at all; indeed, it had always been only in my mind. But the darkness reigned only for a moment when suddenly another light, soft, but brilliant white, crested over the top of one of the high walls.

The moon! Full and white and as large as a hot air balloon as it rose above the wall. There was no ceiling to this place; it was open to the sky. I remembered then that as my father told the tale, this was a prison, a labyrinth to be precise, and this, then, was not a room, but one of a thousand small dead-ends at the end of many turns that were designed to frustrate and deceive – designed by this old man now spent at the task of making the escape for his son and himself.

Then the noise we had all heard must have been the Minotaur. Fear incarnate.

The wall was high, indeed. As the moon rose higher, it illuminated an opposing wall and I could see the hand and foot holds that bit into the stone, carved out as flat steps to scale the wall to its height.

With the rising of the moon, old Daedalus stood slowly and carefully laid the final wing on the floor. He walked back to a finished pair.

"My son, let’s try yours on."

He lifted the pair of wings, joined by tied, flexible reeds as a harness through which Icarus, my ancient namesake, crouched and then stood within, placing his arms through straps secured beneath the structure while Daedalus held the assembly as if it were a heavy coat for his son. Heavy, indeed, but though the thing was cumbersome, the strength of Daedalus ignored his apparent age. This man was one to behold and marvel, just as was my father in his time.

Daedalus secured the several straps and the harness with more straps about his son’s body. Five minutes were consumed in mounting the wings on his shoulders.

When it was complete, the father stood back and motioned for his son to exercise the wings. The span was so great, it filled the length of the room. Slowly, the son flexed his shoulders, sweeping his outstretched arms down, then up, repeating several times.

"It’s heavy, he said. But I think with the height of the wall, we will have speed enough to fly."

The old man nodded, knowing in advance that his design was proper for the task to be accomplished.

"Yes, my son. The air and the sky are free."

Chapter Two

Dream sleep is awakened like any other; one either awakens with a start, or the stirring is slow to remembrance of consciousness. But dream sleep is unique in its ability to leave some feathers behind, as if we had been visited by angels and were left a trail of loosened feathers, fallen as they hurried to heaven without ceremony to be gone undiscovered, a trail that never leads completely back to the gates that are our home.

At least, that is what my father has said, and I believe him. And I have also believed these many years since that dreams are sent earthward from heaven, and even those that are alarming, even frightful, are the warnings of a concerned Parent for his child, wanting to give warning in a medium too easily dismissed, but useful if heeded.

My father also said that sacred things are to be held as such, and I am certain that there is no sacred thing but that it is from heaven. And so I held this dream not just in my vest, had I one – and I still do not – but within my heart, where even Father, I think, does not see. I would tell him in my time, once I had reasoned it and could stain it with enough humanity to reveal the divine beneath. At least, that was my plan. But planning, like maturity, takes patience and time, and childhood plans often run their course against a more concrete reality.

This dream was a Sunday night and Monday morning had its press of reality even for a child. My father always hurried on Monday mornings, believing that such a day demanded a more urgent pace than Friday afternoon, or, for a fact, the entire weekend and other weekdays. Perhaps this was not unusual to my father, for I have learned in my quasi-medical practice that more heart attacks occur on Monday mornings than on any other day.

In my fifth grade education was the beginning of teachers’ efforts to start a life long journey of thinking through the elements of a particular subject for the purpose of composing an essay. The subject assigned on that Monday morning could not have been more troublesome: the subject of my latest remembered dream. My first inclination was to invent a dream, for the only one that came to mind, of course, was that which I have just related. But the mind was blank for exclusion of any other tale than the introduction to Daedalus and Icarus. And I wondered if Miss Corvus knew the identity of these masters of mythology. Had they been introduced to any other child my age? Though not due for three days, I knew that I should reveal the matter to my father that very evening.

I knew he would not be angry. He, of course, was to blame for planting the seeds in the first place, and he would be the first to recognize that he had done so. He sat quietly, respecting the telling of the dream at my pace and in my words, until I had completed the telling up to the point of my awakening upon the words by Daedalus: The air and the sky are free.

Yes, my father said. I could tell he was thinking about those last words because Father always sat in his easy chair with its wide, leather upholstered arms supporting his elbows. His hands were joined at the palms, pointing up, the paired index fingers would press against his upper lip, and his eyes were closed. His breath was calm and evenly paced, and every so often he would vocalize a grunt from his throat. This was his attitude when deep in thought. He did so as I closed my tale.

Yes, he said again. That is, indeed, what Daedalus is said to have told his son. It was the encouragement that their flight would be unencumbered, at least from the threat of the Minotaur.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. I was seated on the floor at his feet, a place I liked to be at such moments when I knew that I would learn from such interviews. The view of my father’s face was clear from that perspective but it emphasized his hands, my favorite sight of all of my father. More than his face, I liked to watch his hands. They had their own voice to me and they were always kind to me. His hands were a home that I imagined was favored to me as an infant.

Curious that it was raven’s wings, he said, seemingly to himself, for his eyes closed again and his head nodded slowly. He was turning the story over in his mind. And why not? They, of all birds, are thought to be most intelligent. The feathers of such a bird would be noble and most adept at flight. Daedalus would have known this, and surely, as with that intelligence, the raven inhabits virtually all continents, and perhaps even Crete. His eyes opened again and he looked directly at me. Raven’s feathers, you say. Icarus, this was not a dream.

But it was, I insisted. I would not lie, Father.

"No, I know you would not, but this was more than a dream, my son."

I must have had a stern denial on my face; I knew I was curious. I knew that it was a dream.

Father, I started, but he interrupted me.

Icarus, he said. He almost never called me by my given name, his name, just as he preferred not to be called Daedalus. Mother never called me Icarus, favoring the diminutive and abstract honey, and she always called Father Dade, like the Florida county. Father usually called me Son and only called me by my given name when he wanted to have a serious conversation or if he were angry, and I knew he was not. Come up here, son.

His arms opened, inviting me to climb into his lap. I was reaching an age when this was an embarrassment. He never would have done this if Mother were in the room, but as we were alone, and I was needing some re-assurance, I readily agreed. When I had settled in his lap, I looked again into his gentle eyes. He smiled.

I mean to say that I know you were dreaming, but it was more than just a dream.

"Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. This was really weird. It was like I knew what was happening. It was like I could tell I was dreaming, that I could separate me dreaming from my dream self. I was particularly conscious of it when I felt Icarus, I mean