Plumage (19 page)

“Twee! Twee! Twee!”

Sassy looked up, and her despair softened into a bittersweet smile. Wings fluttering ecstatically, Kleet was greeting her blue budgie in the mirror. After his first three shrieks he gabbled tenderly, beak to beak with Sassy's reflection. Her poor budgie, it looked as glum and hassled as she felt, its cobalt feathers rumpled, and it looked as if it wanted to swoon in Kleet's arms. Or wings. Whatever. Just behind the glass, it—she—pressed close to him as he crooned and twittered and tried to nibble at her cheekfeathers.

“Kleet,” Sassy said, “you're smarter than people. They can't even see her.”

They look at me and all they see is a dumpy dumped housewife with squirrel-gray hair
.

As if he could hear her thought, Kleet whirred up suddenly to perch atop her much-impugned head. “Twee! Twee! Twee!”

Sassy put her hand up and brought him down where she could look at him. She loved the feel of his vermicular feet gripping her finger. She loved his round eyes in the sides of his no-neck head. She loved his feathering, as yellow as daffodils, as green as Eden in sunlight.

“Twee,” he said to her earnestly.

“Kleet,” she wondered aloud, “what are you trying to tell me?”

In all his short life Kleet had never felt so loonishly happy, so blessed. She had called to him once again, his deity, she had called to him from the hardair world and the force of her clarion summons had startled him from his sleep, he had flown to her, he had found her again, and—this was the dayspring of Kleet's great joy—she had extended her pale holy twigs to him in greeting. She had allowed him to perch thereon. She had spoken to him by name.

And as if this were not ecstasy enough, Deity had shown unto him an azure princess of a parakeet—it was the first time Kleet had ever encountered one of his own kind, and she was female and so fair, so lovely melting blue, and—true, she was sealed away from him behind the mystery of hard air, but—but would she not soon, somehow, be his mate?

“Twee!” Kleet sang in rapture and rejoicing and holy praise. “Twee! Twee! Twee!”

His was a living deity. A tree that spoke and walked. A very descendant of the One Tree.

Long ago, in the Great Time, Kleet knew, there had been the One Tree whose feathers were all colors, not like the mostly green feathers of the sleepy trees today. The One Tree's feathers were iridescent blue like jays and yellow like canaries and bronzegold like pheasants and flashing red like tanagers and flamingo-pink and toucan-orange and hummingbird-puce and green like—like parrots, of course. And parakeets. And like parakeets and linnets and larks and nightingales, the One Tree sang. There were no birds back in those beginning times, and no other trees except the One, but the One Tree sang like every bird that was ever to be and grew great enough for every tree. And as the One Tree grew and sang, it lifted its branches and took flight. It darted up like a skylark, it soared like a sea hawk—but it did not leave the earth. The One Tree's roots grew to the core of the world, and such was the greatness of the One Tree that when it flew, the whole world flew with it.

Kleet knew these things, not because any mentor had ever told him, but because they were true. From his hollow-cored bones he knew them.

But, his bones told him, the One Tree became lonely. Flying through the vastness of being, the One Tree found many worlds, worlds like eggs and worlds like stones, worlds made of fire or ice or fog or dew, worlds with many sorts of creatures living on them—but never another world with One Tree like itself. With each world it found, the One Tree grew lonelier.

Then out of the solitude of the One Tree there came the First Winter and the Great Molting.

Kleet understood the loneliness, the solitude. He had felt them.

Sadness had made the One Tree shed all its plumage. And that was the end of the solitude of the One Tree. Each feather shed by the One Tree flew up and became a bird, each according to its color or colors, all the many birds in the world, far beyond numbering. But the molting of the One Tree did not stop there. When all its feathers had dropped, the One Tree itself began to molt apart, twig by twig scattered far, far by the winter wind, branch by branch falling, and finally splinter by splinter cracking like a great shellbreak, until every part of the One Tree was leveled to earth.

And each twig, each splinter, each branch, grew into a tree, all the many trees in the world, far beyond numbering.

Trees were dwindled, diminished remnants of the One Tree, Kleet knew, sleepy stupid things that no longer sang or flew. Still, many trees molted upon the coming of winter, remembering the One Tree.

And many birds still flew to trees for comfort, remembering the time when Bird was Tree and Tree was Bird. Sitting in the heart of Tree, singing, Bird knows itself to be the spirit of Tree.

Sitting upon the warm lifted five-twigged limb of Sassafras, singing, Kleet knew her to be Deity. BirdTree.

“Twee,” he sang her praise. “Skreek. Skreeeeek! Kek kek kek Twee!”

And she sang back to him, skreekings he understood not at all, although the music of her singing swelled his breast fit to burst with joy. Deity sang:

“
Birdie, birdie in the sky
,

Why'd you do that in my eye
?”

“Sassy! Hi,” Lydia said. “Come on in.”

Surprised that the big poopy woman remembered her name, Sassy smiled mistily. She hadn't thought Lydia would know her; these days she didn't think anybody knew her or cared. She carried Kleet nestled to her gravitationally challenged bosom under her coat, because it was cold out, and she had been feeding herself and Kleet on junk food filched in the employee lounge, she was missing work, not that she gave a flying leap, and she had spent her last few dollars on gas to get to Lydia's apartment. But Lydia's greeting made her smile.

She didn't feel like making small talk, though. As soon as she had stepped into the apartment (watching the floor so as not to trample other bipeds) and Lydia had closed the door behind her, she opened her coat to show Lydia the parakeet clinging like a honeycreeper to her sweatshirt.

“Twee,” said Kleet.

“Oooh!” said Lydia, her homely voice hushed like dawnlight, her homely face soft and bright like sunlit forest mist as she gazed at Kleet, as Kleet gazed around him.

“Kek kek kek!” With a cry that for once was not “Twee,” Kleet flurried into flight, zooming toward the other parakeets.

Lydia wore, swear to God, the same rib-knit too-tight poop-on-the-boobs T-shirt as before. But Sassy felt no revulsion this time. She took off her coat to reveal her own sweatshirt spangled with poop.

“He loves you,” Lydia said.

“Are you sure?” Sassy felt not so certain. True, Kleet liked it when she sang, and she could not recall that anyone else, human or bird, had ever liked her singing. But Kleet had not yet bitten her. Sassy sported no blood blisters on her face.

Yet—of all the angsts she had been experiencing since Frederick had so rudely snatched her away from where she wanted to be, for all of her desperation, she had not felt that old familiar misery labeled “Nobody loves me.” There was Kleet.

And there was Racquel.

Oh.
Oh
. Momentarily Sassy felt her breath stop.

Nah. Just a brain spasm.

“Sure I'm sure. He adores you.” Clearing a cockatoo and two baby parrots off the sofa, Lydia sat down. Sassy started to sit beside her, but then another brain spasm seized upon her.

“Lydia,” she requested, “do me a favor, would you, and come stand in front of the mirror?” She wanted to see what sort of a bird the big, soft-spoken woman was.

“Sure.” Lydia shooed away a conure that had landed on her head and heaved herself to her feet again.

An owl, Sassy bet herself as she led the way to the wall mirror with the parakeet shelf in front of it. Lydia would be an owl or maybe a dove, something soft gray fluffy and otherworldly and wise.

There was no need to fight the parakeets for mirror space; they were all clustered at one end of their perch, bunched around Kleet with mighty chirpings. Peering through the huddle of budgies to make sure Kleet was okay, Sassy did not look at the mirror until she and Lydia stood in front of it.

Then she looked, and gasped.

“Lydia!” she yelped.

The plain-faced, bosomy woman wheeled to peer at her. In the mirror, plain bosomy Lydia mirror-image did the same.

“I can
see
you!”

It was Lydia in the looking glass all right, clear down to the streaks of bird do on the shirt. Not an owl or a dove, and not a no-birder, like Frederick, and not a surprise-birder, like if she had turned out to be a vulture or something, but—just Lydia. Herself.

Lydia had to be the most complete, whole person on the face of the planet.

Sassy was so excited to see a human being with a self-reflection that she flapped her arms and jumped as if she were trying to take off and fly.

“Whatever blows your skirt up,” said Lydia, her gaze not owlish after all, but far more serene. Utterly accepting.

Sassy grabbed her hand like a child. “Can you see
me
?” she appealed. “In the mirror,” she added; it was terribly important to get this right. “Can you see me?”

Lydia looked, then stared. “I'll be danged,” she said.

“What? What do you see?”

“A blue parakeet. Where'd that come from?” Lydia swiveled her head to check on the parakeets still gathered around Kleet, then looked back at Sassy's blue budgie in the mirror again.

Sassy yelped again and bounced some more. In the mirror, her blue budgie lifted its wings and danced.

“Is that
you
?” Lydia asked as if somebody had got a name tag wrong.

“You can see me!” Sassy caught hold of both her hands and danced a half circle around her, swiveling her about-face. “Nobody else can see me. Lydia, you're the one. I knew it.” Sassy towed her toward the sofa, scattering macaws and a lovebird or two. “I knew it. You're the one who can help me get myself out of this mess I'm in.”

At the rim of the benighted hollow Racquel froze, seeing three things at once: the campfire, with its promise of warmth; a haunch of something that was definitely not mushrooms roasting over the gentle flames; and sitting around the fire, fletching arrows and waiting for their dinner, the men. Seven or eight of them. Unmistakably heterosexual men, even though they wore tunics and—whatchacallums, leggings, cross-gartered and too baggy and patched to be considered tights. It was the ill-fitting hose and something about their oafish posture that tipped Racquel off, the jutting angles of their lumpen shoulders and their bristling jaws. And if there was anything that frightened Racquel more than death or taxes, it was men. Hets. In gangs.

He had blundered right into the great all-time original boys' club, he realized. And all the boys sat with their glinting steel knives in hand and their bearded faces turned his way, staring at him.

And there he stood, unmistakably a guy in drag.

He shivered with more than the chill of his wet dress and bare legs in the nighttime breeze.

One of the men nearest to Racquel stood, looming and shadowy in the firelight, his knife a bright blood-colored slash in the firelit night.

Shaking, Racquel started to inch away.

“A Moor, by my troth,” said someone almost in a whisper.

“Aye, a Moor!” said someone else in the same wondering tone. “Shipwrecked, perhaps.”

The man standing close to Racquel beckoned. “Welcome, stranger,” he said with more presence of mind than the others were showing. “I am Robin Hood and these are my merry men. Welcome to our revels.” He swept his arm toward the food and the fire.

Relief flooded Racquel, clashing with his fear so badly that it shook him worse than ever. He felt his knees weaken and give way. Shadows seemed to wheel around him; he could see nothing but firelight and shadows. He collapsed where he was.

“Is he alive? Is he breathing?”

“He's fainted.”

“Do Moors faint?”

“He's half-naked, poor fellow. Half-starved with cold.”

“Get a blanket, Tuck.”

“Brandy? Do we have any brandy?”

“No, Robin drank it all.”

Amid hubbub, Racquel felt many hands taking hold of him, heaving him up and carrying him closer to the fire. Blessed warmth. Someone was rubbing and chafing his hands with something coarse and sweetly dry. Someone else was rubbing his legs and feet.

“His poor feet, they're all blood.”

“Get that wet—what is that, some sort of robe? Get it off him.”

Limp, Racquel felt them tugging his dress open and struggling to remove his empty bra.

“What sort of a corset is this?”

“Some kind of baldric that Moors wear.”

“It's religious, perhaps. To carry relics in.”

“What is this—” The voice grew hushed; Racquel felt someone pulling down what was left of his panty hose. “His skin comes off like a snake's!”

“Don't! You'll hurt him.”

“It's already off.”

“As fine as if an angel molted it.”

“He seems all right underneath.”

“Odd-colored but everything's there.”

Naked, and not so much semiconscious anymore as opting out of all this, Racquel felt them wrap a blanket around him.

“Somebody get some water warming for his feet.”

“Will, rip me some bandaging, would you?”

“Can't anybody find any brandy? Or some mead? Anything?”

“I told you, Robin drank the lot of it.”

“Pepper, then. Find some pepper to put up his nose.”

Racquel took exception to the idea of anyone's stuffing pepper up his nose. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up but was surprised to find that he could not do it. An odd noise came out of him, a sigh that was more like a moan.

“Wait a bit. He's coming around.”