Crowfeeder
Crowfeeder
by David Michael
Until you see carnage of that extreme, you can’t really believe it’s possible. That morning I saw it for the first time, and the scary bedtime stories of the Crowfeeder became real.
As we stepped into view, the closest of the black carrion birds startled. A ripple, like a wave in a black ocean, flowed across the field as the birds flapped into the air, reconsidered once they saw how few we were, and settled back to continue gorging.
We stood on a slight rise, looking down at the scene. The morning sun magnified the stench and threatened to gag us, even though we had wrapped scarves across our mouths and noses.
The carnage contained no human shapes. Only hints remained of what had once been men, a full regiment of professional soldiers, their parts separated from one another and piled together. The nearest mound showed feet, all of them left feet, severed at the ankle. Near that a heap of legs, maybe left legs. It was hard to be certain. I forced myself to stop cataloguing body parts.
I noticed that there were mounds with no crows on them, mounds that flashed in the morning sun. Weapons, divided into heaps of swords and bows and even arrows, and armor, divided by type and rank.
Then I saw how organized it all was. The birds had introduced a small amount of chaos as they hopped and pecked and fought over the remains of men and women that had been rendered convenient for them. But the original pattern remained. The human body and implements of war, neatly separated into their component parts and arranged as if for shipment. I had seen warehouses of valuable merchandise arranged with less precision.
A squawk very near me drew my attention from the battlefield. A bird had landed only a few yards away, and was scolding us for invading its privacy. From its beak dropped half a hand with the two remaining fingers spread.
My stomach threaten to unman me. I fought to follow the stoic, lockjawed example set by the Captain and Leftenant. I had questions, but I didn’t trust myself to ask them. I wanted to beg for mercy from my god. But if I opened my mouth I feared I would heave and heave until even my pitiful soul had splashed onto the ground. So, like the Captain and Leftenant, I stood silent, and whispered my prayers inside my head.
Finally, the Captain turned away, and the Leftenant and I followed him down, away from the sight.
A man on horseback waited for us at the bottom of the rise, one of the scouts the Leftenant had dispatched. The scout dismounted as we walked up. He saluted and waited.
“The survivors have been found?” the Captain asked.
The scout said, “Yes, sir. About half a mile from here. Due west.”
The Captain nodded. “Take the priest to them.”
The priest. That was me. “Will you not need me here?” I asked.
The Captain’s face betrayed only the slightest trace of annoyance, and I realized I must’ve spoken out of turn. Military etiquette proved more difficult to master than I had expected. “Not yet,” he said. “There are many … preparations that must still be attended to. I expect we will be able to light the funeral pyre at sunset. In the meantime, you will be of more use attending to the survivors.”
I wanted to ask about the survivors. None of the stories about the Crowfeeder mentioned survivors. But I resisted. “Yes, sir,” I said.
“Dismissed.”
“If you will follow me … sir,” the scout said to me.
Always that hesitation when the men spoke to me. As I followed him, him leading his horse, I wondered how long it would be before I was an accepted member of the company.
“Survivors?” I asked the scout as we walked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I had never heard that … that the Crowfeeder … left survivors.”
The scout spat, and looked at me out of the sides of his eyes for a moment. “Before today,” he said finally, “you probably didn’t even believe there was a Crowfeeder. Not really.”
I had no answer for that. He was right. The Crowfeeder had been a legend from the Last Great War. That war had ended almost two decades ago, before I had seen five summers. I walked on.
After another few minutes of silence, he said, “The survivors are mostly camp followers. Cooks, fletchers, women. Noncombatants.”
“Because the Crowfeeder is a mechanical,” I said. “Like the stories say.”
“Yes,” he said, with a fresh, hard edge in his voice. “Because he’s a mechanical.”
I had met a few of the mechanicals. Here in the country where they had first been created they were scarce. I could understand. We had built them, magically endowed them with intelligence, and then forced them to fight our war. And we had sold them to the other nations in the war, as well. When the war ended and the mechanicals had been freed, most of them had chosen to leave.
We had been walking through a copse of trees. We reached a clearing that had been expanded with axes. Soldiers tended to people laid out on pallets on the ground in the center of the clearing. What looked like men had been raised on wooden crosses just inside the edge of the clearing. Though the clothes showed blood, nothing filled them, and the wind ruffled them. A sack filled the hats, with faces crudely painted on them in red.
“Scarecrows?” I said.
“Yes, sir. Because the Crowfeeder doesn’t want the crows to come here.” The scout spat again. “He wants us to see this.”
As we continued forward, into the center of the clearing, the soldiers stepped aside so that I could see the survivors. At first glance, they appeared whole. Injured, some of them in pools of blood, but alive. A few of them lay on their pallets, screaming.
“The Crowfeeder ranges all over, sir,” the scout went on. “Any one of the Ten Nations that used mechanicals in the Great War will draw his wrath. But he has a special place in his cold heart for us.”
Then I saw. I really saw. And I dropped to my knees.
“Everyone knows he was one of our generals. One of ours. He was effective. One of the best.”
Effective? I wanted to pray, but when I opened my mouth all that came out was bile.
“At the end of the war, we tried to have him terminated. Taken apart and destroyed. And he hasn’t forgotten.”
The survivors … no. I couldn’t think of them as survivors. Each of them had been butchered.
“What gave us the right, he wanted to know, to treat him, to treat mechanicals, the way we did.”
Their arms and legs had been chopped off with clean, sharp efficiency. And then they had been reassembled, with no attention … no, I realized, with deliberate intent. Arms and legs, no two from the same body, had been sewn onto the torsos with thick leather threads.
“And so he exacts his revenge.” The scout stopped talking. He knelt beside me, his hands on my shoulders, supporting me as I vomited and cried out to my god.
Most of them still lived. Staring at me and the soldiers and the sky with crazed eyes. Prisoners in their own corpses.
When the heaving finally stopped I sat there, trembling.
“Can you stand, Father?” the scout asked me. It was the first time anyone in the company had called me that.
I nodded, and he helped me stand up. He didn’t seem to mind that I clung to his right hand with my own.
“What we need you to do, Father,” he said, “is perform last rites. For each of them, one at a time.”
I looked at him in fresh horror. “But they’re still …” My protest faded away. I looked at the bodies on the ground again, laid out with such brutal precision. Then I nodded again.
I took my hand back, and stood as straight as I could. I took out my gold disk, the symbol of my god, and my censer. “Let’s get them as comfortable as we can,” I said.
“Yes, Father.”
I knelt beside the first one, a man of middle years, and touched his forehead with the disk. “Forgive us,” I said.
Copyright © 2006 by David Michael. All rights reserved.
A Short Story a Day » Is It Cheating? said,
November 21, 2006 @ 12:31 am
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