Bird-King Tower
A skyscraper looms over the lush verdant muggy rainforest canopy the din of insects the flapping of wings among the leaves and the skyscraper above, its many tall windows revealing floor after floor of empty office space and fluorescent light, casts its shadow on the treetops. In the penthouse lives the Bird-King. His head is a toucan’s head, his torso a human’s torso covered in inky black feathers, and his legs end in hooves. He sits at a mahogany desk. He stares at a television, the twenty-four-hour news cycle going and going and going, murders and presidents and economists and elections and climate change and bailing out corporate interests, bailing out the airlines, and the misdeeds of an online retailer in desperate need of trust busting and going and going. He has not moved from this spot for three hundred hours and twenty minutes and twenty one seconds and going and going and so forth, and suchly and so on it goes and he watches. He watches, it goes. Occasionally a commercial, the only commercial, about how “mommy can’t play with me because she has bipolar depression” sells a drug to him (the consumer), a toucan-headed birdman satyr at the top of a skyscraper inside of his rainforest kingdom, his living stockpile of organic food, going and going and journalism, and following the trail of money, and the Bird-King can’t remember who really controls the media. It might be him.
He raises his head from his papers and blinks his bird-eyes. He has a lime-green bill three times the size of the rest of his face, and his eyes are positioned just behind it, small and hard like marbles. There is a scream that echoes up from the elevator shaft, the door to which is always open. There is no elevator car anywhere in the building, except for the smashed-up one in the all-gender restroom on the third floor.
He knows whose screams he hears: another of the Forest Spirits was ensnared in one of his ground-traps, and the creature is now chained to the wall in the torture chamber. The Bird-King hopes that his torturers will remember not to kill this one. He would like to know from where the Forest Spirits have attained their powers, because he certainly did not grant them.
He stands and walks to the penthouse windows. Below, the canopy looks like an expanse of rolling green hills. His bill hangs slightly ajar. Behind him, he can hear the news anchor talking to a pundit:
“yes, but if the stock markets fail the corporations will not stay afloat, which means that their workers will not have jobs-”
“what I’m talking about is an actual restructuring of the economy, so that workers will not have to depend on businesses that cannot keep afloat to stay afloat themselves…you’re asking Americans to have six months of rent saved up in the case of a crisis, but what about the airlines? The airlines can’t make a profit off of any flight that isn’t fully booked. That’s not good business, and that’s why we keep having to bail them out and bail them out and bail them out and bail them out and you catch my drift, yeah? Because…”
The Bird-King is no longer listening. Seven days pass as he gazes out the window. The television’s whine fades as his ears attune to the natural sounds of the canopy. The sky goes pink, purple, black, pink, blue. Four birds crash into the glass and tumble freely earthward, one after the other. Four little blood splatters remain on the surface. The moon comes and the moon goes away. The Bird-King hums a tuneless song for seven hours straight.
The first lobby of the skyscraper catches fire. Four hundred miles north, two of the human nations go to war over a mountain range recently discovered to contain enormous deposits of some resource or another.
A Messenger arrives. Across her shoulder is a bag, inside of which is a flat rectangular parcel sealed at the top with a warlock’s saliva. On the lower half of her face is a mask fashioned from a dark green handkerchief, which she has attached to her ears using rubber bands. She opens the door and smoke billows out into the sculpture garden at the base of the tower. The only sculptures in the garden are porcelain roosters of various colors and sizes. She enters the building.
The lobby is in flames. The Messenger hums and floats into the air. She glides through the reception area. The smoke makes it difficult for her to breathe, but the fire flickers safely below her feet. She inspects the empty elevator shaft. She scratches her beard beneath the kerchief and drifts towards the center of the lobby again.
She hears a wretched scream echoing from the elevator shaft. She flicks her wrist, and a gladiator’s spear tears through the empty space in her open palm. She wraps her fingers around the wood and feels the weapon’s weight. She whispers a command to the handle and drops the spear. When the spear hits the ground, it grows fur and transforms into a mouse. The mouse scurries off, dodging burning leather sofas and bizarrely low coffee tables.
The Messenger floats over to the spiral staircase in the center of the lobby and sets her feet on its first step. The fire seems to steer entirely clear of the staircase, a circle of untouched lobby around the landing with a foot-or-so radius. The Messenger ascends.
Just beyond the fourth floor’s landing, a trio of steps peel themselves back to reveal a gaping mouth layered with sharp yellow teeth. As the Messenger rises, the jaws prepare- and when she approaches them, they lunge and snap in her direction. She folds herself once, twice, a dozen times in a single instant until she is impossibly small, and the jaws snap shut around the spot where her full body hovered a moment before.
The Messenger unfolds herself several steps further up and runs.
The Bird-King sleeps for the first time in decades. His quilt hangs from his bed, stretching endlessly into the pitch-black silent chasm of his sleeping chamber, where his bed is stationed on an isolated cliff connected only to the rest of his apartment by a long, narrow rope bridge. He dreams of Clipperiastime, the diseased star whose sickness rendered so many worlds unlivable. He dreams of exodus, of radiation poisoning, of one thousand years of war and two thousand more of imprisonment on a desolate planet cursed by a vengeful sorcerer. He dreams of Chicago. He dreams of a lover, an 18th century French aristocrat who tenderly touches him who rides him with desperate fury who leaves him alone in his bed and takes with her each time another piece of his body: an eye, an ear, a wing, his beak, until he can no longer see until he can no longer hear until he can no longer fly and when he cannot move in response to her caresses she leaves him and never returns.
The Forest Spirit steps into the labyrinthine corridors of the tower’s thirty-third floor. They relax their tentacles and drop the two strangled dog-beasts who acted as their torturers for many weeks. A little chirp bounces from the back of their throat into the network of hallways and returns several minutes later. They follow the sound path.
The Bird-King wakes, thrashing in confusion. He has forgotten what it means to sleep, and the return to consciousness feels like a sudden drop. He feels afraid- his heart pounds and his stomach quivers.
The mouse scurries through a ventilator duct above the Forest Spirit.
All movement inside the skyscraper slows to a near stop: each little atomic particle of the Bird-King, of the Messenger, of the mouse, of the Forest Spirit trembles in one direction or another. Shafts of light cut across the floors of the skyscraper and out through the leafy branches of the forest. Monkeys and honeyeaters sing. Time passes. No time passes at all. When the world inside the skyscraper catches back up to the world outside the skyscraper, one hundred years have gone by; the Messenger has ascended only a step, the Forest Spirit turned only one corner, the Bird-King only just begun to rise from his mattress.
The Messenger’s resolve falters as she ascends. With every tap of the leather pouch against her hip she remembers another of her failures: her family’s farm that she mismanaged into bankruptcy, tap, the three month period where she was too depressed to get out of bed, tap, her unsuccessful attempt to open her veins in the public single occupancy toilet in Harvard Square, tap, the arrangement she made with a demigod to move from her original universe to this one, tap, the night she’d tried to go back and lost her hand in the process, tap tap tap. Her short arm itches beneath its chainmail semigauntlet. Somewhere between the fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth floors, the Messenger begins to sing:
I am the one true
lonely soul
I drift around this
spinning globe
I go where no one
dares to go
because I know
the planet spins
on goes the show
the planet turns in outer space
my life could take me any place
but history I can’t erase
I am the one true
drifting wood
I’m nothing bad
I’m nothing good.
The Bird-King hears this song and walks across his rope bridge over his chasm, through his sleek chromium kitchen, through his foyer with his many antique suits of armor, and leans against the bannister at the top of the stairs.
The Messenger sees him standing there from a dozen steps below, and stops.
“I come bearing a message,” the Messenger says.
The Bird-King nods and reaches out his hand. The Messenger bounds up the stairs, retrieves the envelope from her pouch, coughs on it, and places it in his hand. He opens it with a long, sharp talon and reads:
This Messenger is host to a deadly pathogen, and now you have it too. The Bird-King looks up. The paper trembles in his hands.
The Messenger makes finger guns at the Bird-King: “Cha-ching, bitch,” she says.
The Bird-King screeches at such a frequency that every window in the skyscraper squeezes and shatters. The Forest Spirit is just crossing the threshold of the lobby’s main entrance when the glass doors shower down, coating their shoulders in dust and shards of glass. They continue to walk. The soles of their feet suffer no harm as little bits of the ruined door crunch into the dirt below. The soles of their feet are made of intertwined tree roots, gnarled and stiff. The porcelain roosters glare.
The pieces of glass look much larger to the mouse.
The rainforest goes two-dimensional, as in a pop-out children’s book, and the trees smash in on each other, leaving only the skyscraper erect where there had been a full canopy a moment before. Grass and wheat sprout up, and the land warps to form undulating green hills. A herd of deer gallops past the skyscraper. Crickets creak and a crow calls out. Dandelions sprout fuzzy white heads.
“Would you like to see my inter-dimensional library?” The Bird-King asks on the staircase. The Messenger agrees, and they spend weeks among the books, reading at times silently in opposite corners and at other times together, out loud, performing the characters in the books with dramatic voices and theatrical flair. As the days pass, the Bird-King develops a sore throat, a dry cough, a fever, and the occasional bout of diarrhea. The Messenger remains perfectly healthy.
“Why isn’t it affecting you like it is affecting me?” The Bird King asks.
“The warlocks tell me I’m going to be asymptomatic right up until the instant it kills me,” the Messenger answers.
The Forest Spirit stands on the crest of a hill in the fields. Quiet tears roll down their cheeks. The wild grasses tremble in the breeze. One single tree stands at the edge of the pasture just in front of a cobblestone fence. Beyond the tree is a massive wall of green hedges. The Forest Spirit misses the shelter of the rainforest. They miss swinging in the trees. They consider returning to the skyscraper to plead with the Bird-King to bring the trees all back; the thought of returning to the place where they’d been so hurt fills them with such dread that they jettison the thought. They walk towards the single tree, and with every step they take a patch of flowers sprouts in their wake: bluebells and buttercups and yarrow. Bees and butterflies flutter about among the new flowers, each eventually settling along the line of plants to pollinate. Two of the Forest Spirit’s eight tentacles wrap around each other to form a solid rod which they use as a walking stick; this, too, bursts with new life: the tentacles grow a dark green ivy that spreads all over the Forest Spirit’s body until they take on the appearance of a weeping willow in summertime.
A melody played on an oboe fills the scene. The sound comes from nowhere in particular, and in another moment it is joined in harmony by the notes of a Moog synthesizer. The harmony of the two instruments evokes a sort of neo-pastoral optimism, as if the Forest Spirit really might have the power to revitalize the rainforest, to bring back the trees and the running rivers and the mosquitos, but not alone: not without stewards and protectors and collaborators and scientists and a shifting of paradigms, a shifting from torture and exploitation and ecofascist sentiment to a new way, or an old way wearing new clothes- this is the song which the oboe and the Moog play together to the open field where the Forest Sprit walks with slow determination towards a single tree beyond which lays a cobblestone fence and a wall of hedges.
The Forest Spirit desires to see what lies beyond the wall of hedges. They reach the tree, a sturdy oak with dozens of initials and lopsided hearts carved into its bark. They stand for a moment in the shade. They continue walking towards the fence, which is high enough to reach their waist. They hurl a leg over, straddle the flat stone, and pull their body across to the other side. They turn around to see the field they’ve just crossed, and spot a flock of soft pink flamingoes standing one-legged among the wildflowers.
The hedges are thick and solid, perfectly rectangular and flush in such a way as to render them impenetrable. The Forest Spirit reaches out a tentacle, aiming to imbue one of the hedges with floral life. Nothing happens. They frown. They walk alongside the row, certain that there must be an access point somewhere.
The mouse is rather happy to see that the rainforest has become a simple countryside.
The Forest Spirit finds a bronze gate after a twenty minute walk along the hedges. It is taller than the shrubs, and its posts culminate in sharp points at the top. An intricate pattern of bronze triangles connects the posts, which gives the gate the appearance of a snowflake. The Forest Spirit wraps three of their tentacles against the right side of the gate and leans forward. A shrill, sustained sound squeaks from the gate’s hinges, and the door slowly gives way. As they step inside, they notice that the grass beneath their feet is as unkempt as the grass outside: it comes up in spurts of vegetation that sometimes reach as high as the Forest Spirit’s thigh.
The gate closes of its own accord. The Forest Spirit stands engulfed in green, surrounded on all sides by hedge. A massive inlaid stone circle peeks out from beneath the vegetation at the center of the entryway, which seems to the Forest Spirit like a sort of annex: three separate paths radiate from the stone circle and branch off into the hedges. They walk until they are standing on the hard stone- on its surface is etched one word in a flowery script that the Forest Spirit does not recognize. They consider the three paths before them, and the gate behind. The hedges bow inwards towards them as if they are the sun and the hedges are hedges accelerated in time. They try to chirp their sonic chirp. Nothing comes out of their throat. They walk forward into the middle path.
The Messenger tends to the Bird-King in his cavernous bedchamber. She is pleased to see that he is dying, because although his reign over this dimension did not create the destruction and the disease and the disorder that eats at the fabrics which keep the layers of reality distinct, it certainly took advantage of the decay. She feels it necessary to watch and ensure that his life-force drains from his body. She sees, however, no reason to do so with cruelty, so she brings the Bird-King tea and crackers and tells him stories of her days on her former plane of existence, where the laws of physics were simpler but the people equally complicated. The Bird-King vomits off the side of his bed into the void. Bits of his beak flake off and flutter into the open pit as he hunches over, bedsheets wrapped around his legs. His colorful body is dwarfed by the stark white cloth.
The Messenger spends most of her free time in the library, a corner of which is devoted to endless shelves of books containing every tweet ever tweeted. Here she searches for the answers to life’s greatest mysteries, questions like “what is goodness?” and “why did that comedian say that hurtful thing?” and “how does inter-dimensional border-crossing work?” She becomes very anxious reading the tweets but learns nothing that she didn’t already know. She takes all of the library books off the shelves and drops them one-by-one from the penthouse windows.
By the time the Bird-King perishes, the tower of books reaches just below the penthouse window, the long one which looks out at the countryside from the bauhaus-inspired living room. The library is empty of books. The Messenger lifts the Bird-King’s corpse from the bed. His beak has disintegrated entirely, and as she lifts him a smattering of pallid feathers break off and flutter into the chasm. She carries him across the rope bridge into the living room to the window and heaves him out onto the book pile.
She pilfers several gallons worth of gasoline from the Bird-King’s penthouse garage and dumps them out onto the pile of books. She strikes a match and drops it out the window. The body and the stack of literature and knowledge and tweets and vinyls alight. The flames form a ring which descends as the fire grows downward. The Messenger watches until, with the flames about a third of the way down the stack, the tower of books collapses. She pulls her chainmail back into place. She drinks a glass of water, eats a fistful of deli meat from the smart fridge, unzips her fly and pisses on the marble floors of the Bird-King’s kitchen, and walks to the grand staircase to make her descent back down the skyscraper. She considers floating down the elevator shaft, but she is afraid of both tight spaces and heights, and she does not have the energy to float for that long, anyway. Floating exhausts her more than running, so she runs down, and down, and down through the building as the Forest Spirit goes forward and forward and forward through the hedges.
The hedges are arranged as a labyrinthine maze, with forks and dead-ends and circuitous paths and a disorienting degree of sameness. The Forest Spirit gets lost. They spend several hours choosing paths and trying to build a mental map of the maze, getting hungry and dazed as they go. They try several times to chirp and echolocate to no avail. When finally one of the paths opens up into a large circular space with an inlaid stone in the ground and a bronze gate looming over them, they fall to their knees and weep. They try to leave out the gate: it will not budge. They turn their attention to the hedges and try to shrivel or reshape them with forest magic. Nothing happens, just as nothing will grow beneath their feet. They curl up in the grass beside the gate and sleep for two hours. They dream of happy squirrels. They wake and eat several fistfuls of grass and weeds, which gives them a small degree of sustenance but does nothing to soothe their growing hunger. They return to the maze and choose the path on the left.
As they re-enter the labyrinth, the Forest Spirit decides to mark their path. They pull up a circle of grass, but the grass grows back within seconds. They tear a chunk off of a hedge, but this, too, reassembles itself in a flurry of stitches. They lay one of their tentacles on the ground, step on it with their fully weight, and hurl themself backwards. The tentacle rips free from their body. Vibrant green blood gushes from the socket, which they plug with the end of one of their working limbs. They use their fangs to shred the severed tentacle into twenty pieces. At the next fork, they set one chunk on the path they intend to follow. They watch it for several minutes, and once they are confident that it will not disappear, they continue onwards. Their injury pulses and throbs. Their stomach growls. The sky grows cloudy, and in an instant a rainstorm barrels down upon the hedge maze.
The Messenger sees the rainstorm as she travels through the countryside. To her, the storm appears to form a perfect swirling circle in the sky, its precipitation contained within the boundaries of a field of hedges. Where she stands, atop a hill between the maze and the tower (the tower is a skyscraper no longer, having shrunk and turned to brick and the penthouse rearranged into a turret and the entry doors gone tall and wooden the moment the Messenger set foot out into the world) the day is clear and sunny, and the fields go on, pleasant in every direction save for the localized squall. She sees a crack of lightning pierce the sky above the hedges.
The Messenger spots a farmhouse and a barn off in the distance, with a herd of livestock in the pasture and rolled bales of hay and an irrigated plot of what she is fairly certain are carrots. She sets off down the hill toward the farm.
Something deep within the labyrinth roars.
The Messenger turns, considers the dark hedges once more, and continues towards the farm.
The Forest Spirit turns, rattled by the sound, and considers the fork ahead of them. They are badly hurt: their tentacle wound is not healing as it ought to, and their right foot is charred and flaking from the lightning strike. Their ears rings. They are ravenous. They are slipping in the mud.
They decide to pursue the roar by following the path that heads roughly in the same direction. They drop a piece of tentacle as they go. A little bubble pops where it sinks into the mud.
The Messenger watches a rabbit bound across the field.
The Forest Spirit again becomes lost. Each path looks the same and each fork looks the same and each dead end looks the same as all the others and the bits of tentacle are gone. They fall to their knees in the muck and let their eyes close, the rain splashing all around them. When they open their eyes again, a single black rose grows up from the earth. They lean in and inhale, and as the musty scent fills their nostrils the corridor of hedges sprouts a colony of black roses, all bending towards the Forest Spirit. The roar comes again- closer now, as if it is coming from a spot just around the corner.
The Forest Spirit stands and runs towards the sound. While they run, they channel their energy to grow two whips made of thorny rose stems around the tips of two of their tentacles. The corridor veers left, and the Forest Sprit reaches the center of the labyrinth where a Minotaur sits atop a thirty-foot pile of bones and smokes a cigarette.
The Minotaur’s fur is white. She has six pink udders, three on each side of her torso. Her hands are human hands, covered in fur except for a patch of pale, exposed skin on each palm. Her legs end in hooves. She has a long gray tail, two short sharp shimmering horns atop her skull, and eyes as smooth and absent of color as a cue ball. The Minotaur takes another drag from her cigarette. The pile boasts bones from a variety of species- some the Forest Spirit recognizes, like human and capybara, and others foreign. The rain falls all around but never seems to touch the Minotaur. She stares unblinking at the Forest Spirit from her perch.
The Minotaur flicks her cigarette into the pile. She claps her hands together and a flash of lightning strikes the ground inches from the Forest Spirit’s uninjured foot. They jump out of the way with a yelp.
“There is some confusion in the English language over whether ‘labyrinth’ is synonymous with ‘maze’,” the Minotaur drawls. “In classical tradition, the labyrinth is generally depicted as a unicursal structure-”
The Forest Spirit lashes one of their whips up towards the Minotaur. She catches it neatly in her fist and yanks, sending the Forest Spirit sprawling forward into the bones. Facedown, the Forest Spirit hears the Minotaur crunching her way through the field of hard tissue. They roll onto their back, grab several longer bones with their tentacles, and heave themself upward onto their feet.
The hedge maze is gone. The countryside is gone. The very earth is gone, replaced with, as far as the horizon stretches, fields and fields and piles and mounds of damp-smelling bones. The sky is a swirling mass of dark clouds. The Forest Spirit whimpers. They hear a snapping sound behind them, and they whirl around to see the Minotaur only several feet away, an axe in each of her hands. They tighten their tentacles around their scavenged bones and their remaining whip. One tentacle still plugs their open wound.
The Minotaur lunges. The Forest Spirit counters left and swipes a tentacle holding a femur towards the Minotaur’s torso; she blocks it with an axe, binds it upward, and slashes with the other axe at the extended tentacle. The Forest Spirit pulls their tentacle back, but their momentum follows and the Minotaur rushes forward and swings both axes in towards their stomach. They hunker down into their knees and parry the axes with a bone on each side. They flick a tentacle, and the whip catches the Minotaur across her snout. She snarls as a line of blood reddens her white fur.
The Forest Spirit ducks and pulls away. They slide on the slick bones, wet from the ever-pouring rain, and half-stumble half-run down the pile, landing off-balance on their feet a quarter of the way from the bottom, which forms a valley between this mound and the next.
The Minotaur descends slowly towards the Forest Spirit and speaks: “But the labyrinth was built to keep the Minotaur in captivity and so it could not have been a single path: it must have been a maze. And the Minotaur often asked herself: why did they create me only to lock me in a cage? And she asked herself, too: why weren’t they capable of building a better cage?”
The Forest Spirit steadies their feet and readies their weapons. They breathe, and a line of black roses sprouts up through the bones between them and the Minotaur. The Minotaur crushes the roses beneath her hooves as she walks.
“Did you ever meet the Bird-King?” The Forest Spirit asks.
The Minotaur does not reply. When she gets close enough, the Forest Spirit hurls a bone at her head. She moves to dodge it; they flick their whip out again. The Minotaur crouches. The bone whirrs past her. The whip goes sailing over her head, and she steps forward and severs it in twain with an axe. The Forest Spirit pulls what is left of the whip back, closes some distance to the Minotaur, and sends the whip back out again. This time she deflects it with the flat of her axe blade and traps it beneath her foot, forcing the Forest Spirit to abandon the weapon. Both charge, assaulting each other in a flurry of bones and axes, parries and strikes and binds and feints and slashes. The Minotaur gains an edge and pushes the Forest Spirit back down towards the valley with every swing of her axe.
Towards the bottom of the mound, the Forest Spirit blocks an overhead strike and drives a bone into the Minotaur’s ribcage. The Minotaur groans and drops to one knee. The Forest Spirit pummels her several times over the head. With blood trickling down her face, the Minotaur sweeps one of her axes upwards and catches the Forest Spirit in the chest. She pulls herself to her feet and pushes the blade deeper in. The Forest Spirit drops their bone-clubs.
The Minotaur pivots and slams the Forest Spirit’s body into the ground. She drops her second axe and drives the first deeper into their chest. The Forest Spirit tries in vain to choke the Minotaur. Their tentacles slap ineffectually at her face. Their feet kick at wet bones. Their body thrashes. Black spots cover their field of vision, and something furry nuzzles into one of their tentacles. Reflexively, they wrap their tentacle around it and turn their head to look.
No sooner does the Forest Spirit recognize the creature in their suction cups as a mouse than it morphs in a flash of hot light; they scramble to keep hold of it as it grows heavy and long and plunges through the Minotaur’s heart and back out the other side of her body. She collapses sideways and the Forest Spirit loses their grip as the Minotaur’s body, pierced through with a long spear, tumbles the rest of the way down the pile of bones and comes to settle in the valley. The spear changes back into a mouse, which scurries off.
The Forest Spirit stands and pulls the axe from their chest. The field of bones disintegrates, eaten up by insects and fungi, and grass grows through the decaying matter and flowers bloom and birds flap through the sky and the countryside returns. The Forest Spirit stands on a hill of dirt at the center of the hedge maze. They wave a tentacle, and their wounds knit themselves back together in a latticework of plant material. At the bottom of the hill lies the body of a dead cow. The Forest Spirit walks down to it, their stomach rumbling, to whisper a prayer and dig a grave.
The Messenger knocks on the farmhouse door. Nobody answers, so she walks over to the barn and eases the door open. There are no people or livestock inside, but the smell of farm life is pervasive and there are animal stalls and mountains of hay and the sunlight comes in golden through the slats in the wood. The Messenger sinks into a cushion of hay. She pulls the green handkerchief off of her face, folds it neatly, and slides it into her bag. Her forehead goes hot and feverish. Her beard itches. She wonders how things are going in her home dimension. She closes her eyes, draws in a shaky breath, and dies on the exhale.
© Marge J. Buckley, 2020