BY
T. KINGFISHER
FISHER-BIRD HAD A CREST LIKE iron and eyes as dark as the last scale on a blacksnake’s snout. She had a white collar and a gray band and a belt the color of dried blood.
Fisher-Bird had a chatterjack voice that she used to cuss with, and she flew like the air had personally offended her. Her beak was long and shaped like a spearpoint, and she could see the ripples fish made when they even thought of swimming.
Fisher-Bird knew things. Not like crows know things, or ravens—not that you can ever find a raven around these parts. Not like whip-poor-wills know the taste of your soul or thrushes know the color of music. But nothing happened in the woods or along the stream without it reaching Fisher-Bird eventually.
There’s a story about the red belt, and why Fisher-Bird’s got one and her husband doesn’t. There’s always a story. I don’t say this one’s true.
Time was, Fisher-Bird was perched on a branch over the stream, looking at the fish being lazy in the water. She was thinking maybe it’d be a good thing to dive down there, put the fear of god in a couple of ’em, or at least the fear of Fisher-Bird, when she heard a crack and a crash coming through the woods.
A man came down the deer-trail, staggering like he couldn’t see. His face was swelled up and puffy, and his breath squeaked through his throat. He had blood coming out of his ears and out his nose and even oozing out from under his fingernails.
Fisher-Bird looked at him out of her right eye. He was a big man. His arms were tree-trunk thick, and he was so shaggy it looked like he was wearing a shirt. Fisher-Bird had to look twice to see he wasn’t, just a mountain lion skin draped over his shoulders like the cat was going for a piggyback ride.
Then she looked out of her left eye, and she saw he had god-blood in him, thick and stringy as spiderwort sap, the kind that clogs up your veins and makes you a hero even if you’d rather just be an ordinary soul.
Poor bastard, thought Fisher-Bird.
He fell into the stream and shoved his head into the water. All the fish remembered they had somewhere else to be, and Fisher-Bird was left alone on her branch, just watching the shaggy man soak his head in the stream.
When he came up for air, his eyes were slitted open and some of the blood was gone, but his cheeks were still huge and puffed up with lumps. Fisher-Bird saw two holes in a couple of the lumps, and she knew right off what had happened. The shaggy man had pissed off Old Lady Cottonmouth. She’s not an evil snake, no matter what people say, but she wants respect and she doesn’t suffer fools.
“Damn, hon,” said Fisher-Bird. “You look like hammered shit.”
The shaggy man froze. “Who said that?” he asked.
Now, this pricked up Fisher-Bird’s crest, right enough. She wasn’t used to humans who could hear the language of birds, unless they were witches or somebody walking around in human skin who couldn’t lay claim to it by birth. “You heard me?”
“I heard you,” said the man, trying to pry his eyes open with his fingers, “but I don’t see you.”
“Up here on the branch,” said Fisher-Bird, and she dipped her beak, polite-like. “You see me?”
The man stared at her for a little bit, then said, “You’re a bird.”
“You’re quick.”
“Are you a devil sent to torment me?”
Fisher-Bird thought this was so funny that she let out one of her long chattering laughs—“krk-krk-krk-krrrk!” And then, “Hon, you showed up at my stream and ruined my fishing. I don’t think you’ve got the right end of who’s tormenting who.” (She didn’t really mind the fish, but she wasn’t about to give up the moral high ground so fast.)
“Oh,” said the man, after a minute. He dunked his head in the water again and swirled it around. He had long curly hair that hung down his back in wet hanks, until it ran into the cat skin coat.
When he came up for air, he said, “Sorry about the fish.”
Fisher-Bird was so charmed by a human apologizing for anything that she said, “Aw, nah, don’t worry yourself about it. You look like you’ve messed with worse than a fish today.”
“Nest of cottonmouths,” he said. “Whole ball all tangled together and chasing anybody who got too close. I was s’posed to clear ’em out.”
“Aw, that’s a shame,” said Fisher-Bird. “You gonna die now?”
He shook his head and scooped up some mud, slapping it across his cheeks. “I don’t die easy,” he said.
Fisher-Bird hopped a little closer on the branch. “Lotta people don’t die easy, but they take a couple bites from Old Lady Cottonmouth and they learn how pretty damn quick.”
He grunted. “There were dozens,” he said. “I’d chop one’s head off and two more would show up. Never seen a thing like it.”
“Shit, hon, that was a snake wedding you interrupted. No wonder they were pissed.”
Whatever the man might have thought about that was lost as he slapped more mud on his face, then down his arms where the snakes had bit him.
“Are you really here?” he asked after a minute.
This was a pretty peculiar question, but humans are peculiar creatures. Fisher-Bird turned her head so she could look at him out of one eye at a time. “Are you?”
The shaggy man groaned. “I mean, I got bit pretty bad,” he admitted. “And I think a bird’s talking to me, but maybe it’s the poison.”
“Could be, could be,” said Fisher-Bird agreeably. “Or I could have nabbed a toad and got a beak full of moonshine, and now I think a human’s talking to me.”
“. . . Shit,” said the shaggy man, with feeling, and flopped down on the streambank.
Fisher-Bird waited a polite length of time, while the mosquitoes hummed to each other, then said, “You dead yet, hon?”
“No.”
“How ’bout now?”
“I’m not dying. I told you.” He sat up. Fisher-Bird had to admit that he did look better. The swelling was going down, and he’d stopped bleeding from under his nails. “I don’t die. Name’s Stronger.”
“Stronger,” said Fisher-Bird, rolling the word around in her beak. “Stronger than what?”
“Everything.”
“Krrk-krrk-krk-krk-krk!” She laughed at him. “Modest, ain’tcha?”
“It’s true,” he said. He didn’t sound all that happy about it. He glanced around the stream and walked over to a big boulder half-buried in the gravel. “Look.”
He put his hands under the boulder. His arms flexed and the veins popped out, thick and ugly as nightcrawlers, and then he scooped the boulder up and tossed it a couple yards over his shoulder with a crash.
Water rushed into the muddy hole he’d left, and little squirmy things went running in all directions, except for the crawfish, who waved their claws and wanted a fight. Fisher-Bird dropped off her branch, scooped up a crawfish, and proceeded to beat it to pieces on another rock that hadn’t been flung quite so far away.
“Pretty—good,” she said, between smacking the crawfish around. “Don’t—see—that—much.”
“Yeah,” said Stronger. He sat back down. “It’s not so great. I break things.”
“What—kind—of—things—gulp!”
“People.”
Fisher-Bird cleaned the last bits of shell off her beak with one gray foot. “I see that’d be a problem.”
“Yeah. Now I got to do a bunch of jobs for my mother-in-law to make up for it.”
“Why your mother-in-law?”
“It was her people I broke.”
“Ah.” Fisher-Bird cocked her head. “That why you were off fighting snakes?”
“Yeah.” He began to pick bits of drying mud off his face. “That was one of the jobs. And the mountain lion I got here, that was one, too.”
“Big lion.”
“Yeah. There’s others. Had to kill a boar that was tearing up the farm.”
Fisher-Bird nodded. Boars were bad news. They didn’t bother her much, of course, but they could take a field and turn it into a wreckage of trampled mud in less time than Fisher-Bird could open up a crayfish.
“And a mad bull, and a bunch of mares that had a very peculiar diet, and do not talk to me about stables and . . . well, it’s been a long month.”
“Is that all you’re doing? Putting down livestock?”
Stronger didn’t look particularly pleased by this summation. “I caught a doe.”
Fisher-Bird snorted. “What did you do, stand in one place for a little while? We got more does than fish around here.”
“A specific doe.”
“Oh, well, that’s different.”
“My mother-in-law says go kill it, but my sister-in-law says if I do she’ll gut me like a hog, because that’s her pet deer and it got loose, and I said she shouldn’t ought to let it wander around loose, and then she got pissed at me and said she’d let her deer go where it damn well pleased.” Stronger rubbed his face. “So I finally just went out and grabbed it and carried it back over my shoulder. Which it did not like. I had hoofprints in personal places.”
“Still, pet deer. That’s honorary livestock.”
“I got my cousin’s girdle.”
Fisher-Bird had been looking for more crawfish, but she stopped and turned her head real slow to look at him. “. . . You got that kinda family, do you?”
“No!” And when Fisher-Bird gave him a steady look, “Well . . . all right. My mother-in-law’s married to her brother and they say her daddy was a cannibal.”
“Take an old bird’s advice, son, and get the hell away from those people. Marrying kin ain’t good, but you start eating each other and all bets are off.”
“Look, I didn’t know about that bit when I married in. Anyway, that’s what the jobs are for. I finish these, and I’m free and clear and they let me go. I’m gonna move west and never talk to these people again.” Stronger rubbed his forehead. “And it wasn’t like that with my cousin. I just went and asked politely. Wasn’t much of a job. I think my mother-in-law was hoping she’d be mad, but I explained all about it and brought her a bottle of the good stuff, and she said my mother-in-law was always a bad one and she’d be happy to do anything to spit in her eye.”
“Well, gettin’ away is good,” said Fisher-Bird. “I approve of that.”
Stronger nodded gloomily. “I don’t even like most of them, and that’s leaving aside that my mother-in-law keeps trying to kill me.”
Fisher-Bird, no stranger to family infighting, nodded wisely. “Some people come outta the egg mad.”
Stronger finished flaking the mud off his face. “You’re still a bird,” he said, almost accusingly.
“Yeah, I’d get used to that.”
“If you’re a bird, then why can you talk?”
“Shit, son,” said Fisher-Bird, and let loose a long string of curses that made Stronger sit up and take notice. “I’ve always been able to talk. Question is how you’re listening.”
Stronger shook his head. “Dunno. Never could before.”
Fisher-Bird scratched her beak. “Any of those snakes bite your ears?”
The man looked puzzled for a minute, then put his finger in his ear and wiggled it around like he was cleaning earwax. He winced. “Yeah. One got me right up there by the ear.”
“There you go,” said Fisher-Bird, pleased. “You make a friend of a snake, they’ll lick your ears, let you hear the language of birds.”
“These snakes weren’t friendly.”
“Yeah, but spit’s spit.”
He thought for a few minutes. “Huh. You know, I got some birds I gotta clean out for my mother-in-law. You think this’ll help me?”
“What kinda birds?” She hopped down a little closer.
“Weird ones. Feathers like metal. You shoot at ’em and it bounces right off and makes a noise like you’re shaking buckshot in a tin can.”
“Oh, them. Stimps.” She grimaced as well as one can with a beak.
“What?”
“Stimps. They’re herons, more or less, but their great-great-granddaddy did a favor for the Iron-Wife and got her blessing. Now they got iron feathers and think they’re better’n the rest of us.”
“I’m supposed to drive ’em off. They’re a real menace over at the lake. They drop feathers that’ll cut you all to ribbons.”
“Hmm.” Fisher-Bird thought it over. She had no great love of humans, but he’d apologized about the fish and that was a pretty fine thing. And she had even less love of herons, who took fish and frogs and a lot of other critters that rightly belonged in Fisher-Bird’s gullet, let alone magic herons who thought they owned the place. But most of all, she had an active loathing of stimps, who’d chased one of Fisher-Bird’s cousins out of the swamp and had a few nasty words for her when they did it.
“Yeah, okay.” The chance to get one back at the stimps was too good to pass up. “Best do it soon, though, before they start nesting. Once you get a couple dozen of them together in a tree, cackling and raising up eggs, it’s a problem. And it ain’t right to mess with other people’s eggs, even stimps.”
“So I should just ask ’em to leave, then?”
Fisher-Bird rolled her eyes. “Not unless you got a few hours to waste, listening to a stimp insult you. No, they ain’t gonna go on their own.”
“Well, I can’t get to them. They’re in a marshy bit, and if I walk out there, I’m hip-deep in muck. I try to grab one, they’ll be miles away, throwin’ those nasty sharp feathers at me.”
Fisher-Bird preened under her wing. “Come back tomorrow,” she said.
“What?”
“Tomorrow. Come back then. Maybe I can help you; maybe I can’t.”
Stronger looked like he might argue for a minute; then he closed his mouth and nodded. “All right, then. Thank you.”
Polite sort of human, Fisher-Bird thought. Worth helping out the polite ones. Particularly if it got rid of those stuck-up stimps.
Just the thought made her chuckle. “Krk-krk-krk-krk!”
* * *
“All right,” said Fisher-Bird, when Stronger came back the next day. “What you want is poison. You got any?”
“I had a whole bunch of dead cottonmouths,” said Stronger sourly. “But I didn’t realize I’d need them.”
“Nah, that wouldn’t have worked. That stuff dries out too fast, goes all to lumps. Need something nasty that’ll mix with tar.”
“I got rat poison back home,” said Stronger.
“Yeah, that’s fine. Now, you got arrows?”
“Arrows?”
“Shit, son, don’t tell me humans don’t use arrows no more.”
“I guess . . . ?” Stronger looked doubtful. “I haven’t shot a bow since I was little. I got a gun.”
“Can’t poison a bullet, son. You need some arrows, and you need to wrap the point with some cloth. Then you mix up some tar and some rat poison and dip the points in that. Make it good and drippy.”
“If I can’t put a bullet in the stimp, how’m I gonna put an arrow in one?”
“You ain’t,” said Fisher-Bird. “You’re gonna smack ’em with the arrow and leave goop all over those shiny metal feathers of theirs. Then they go to preen and they’ll get a mouthful of rat poison.”
Stronger thought this over. “Ye-e-e-e-s . . . ,” he said slowly. “Could work. But I still don’t know how to get to the stimps in the first place. They’re out in the marsh and the mud, and I can’t get a clear shot at any of ’em.”
Fisher-Bird flicked her crest. “You come back when you got you a bow and poison. Bring along a couple tin cans, too. Then we’ll see about getting you your shot.”
Stronger came back to Fisher-Bird’s stream two days later, carrying a pack and a bow over his back and a metal bucket full of arrows. “These things are nasty,” he said, setting the bucket down.
“Hello to you, too,” said Fisher-Bird. “The family’s fine, thank you kindly for asking.”
Stronger sighed. “My aunt’d ding my ear for rudeness, if she was still alive. Sorry, bird. Hope you’re well.”
“I’m good,” said Fisher-Bird. “And how’s your family?”
“Mostly dead and the live ones are mean,” said Stronger. Fisher-Bird cackled.
She hopped down from her branch and landed on the rim of the bucket. (Fisher-Bird never did learn to walk very well, but that didn’t slow her down much.) She peered down into the mess of black sludge, with the arrows sticking up out of it like porcupine quills. “Damn. Looks godawful, anyhow. You got them tin cans?”
Stronger slung the pack off his back and opened it up, revealing half a dozen empty cans.
“Flatten ’em out,” ordered Fisher-Bird. Stronger took each can between his palms and put his hands together like he was praying. The cans went flat as paper, and Fisher-Bird could see the dents left by his wedding ring.
“All right,” said Fisher-Bird. “That’s everything.” She jumped from the rim of the bucket, flapped her wings twice, and landed on Stronger’s shoulder. She had to cock her head over to look up into his face.
“You gonna peck out my eyes?” asked Stronger, sounding amused.
“Nah, son, that’s crows. Not saying I wouldn’t take a bite if you were already drowned, but that’d be more in the way of courtesy.”
“Eating my eyes if I drowned would be courtesy?”
“Well, you’d hardly want a stranger to do it, would you? Besides, people do weird shit with corpse eyes. Best to get ’em pecked out nice and quick so you don’t find ’em doin’ something nasty later.”
“I’m not sure I’d be worried about that, if I was already dead.”
“You should be. Worse things than dead, and a lot of ’em involve eyeballs.”
Stronger rubbed his hand over the eyes in question. “I am having the strangest month,” he said, to no one in particular.
“Try bein’ a bird. Now come on; let’s go make some stimps miserable.”
It was a hot afternoon, and the air was wet and thick with pollen. You could look down the road and see the trees get paler and greener until they vanished into a yellow haze from all the pine trees rattling their cones. Fisher-Bird didn’t much like pines in late spring. The rest of the year they were solid-enough trees, but they got a little spring in them and they became downright indecent.
The swamp had pines ringing it and then juniper cedars, trying to suck up as much water as they could, and then a narrow channel of open water. Then it all went to cattails and sedge and muck, with little scruffy trees that didn’t do much except give the cat-claw vines something to crawl over.
“I can’t get very far out there,” said Stronger. “I mean, I try, but I sink right in and it’s like wading through glue.”
“Yeah, I figured. Wait here.” Fisher-Bird took off from his shoulder and flew across the swamp, looking for stimps.
They weren’t hard to find. A couple here, a couple there, a few standing by themselves, with their big beaks poised to stab in the water. Fisher-Bird looked with her right eye and saw herons with steel feathers. She looked with her left eye and saw a goddess’s blessing hanging over them the way pollen hung over pines.
She also saw a whole lotta things she didn’t like. The swamp wasn’t right. It didn’t sound right, and it didn’t look right. There were big bare areas where the stimps had flicked their wings and scythed the grasses down like wheat, big white slashes in the trees where they’d rubbed their beaks and cut to the heartwood. There were ducks floating head-down, gutted by a careless stimp feather, and the water was greasy black with rot.
It was when she saw a dead beaver laid out, nearly chopped in half by iron wings, that Fisher-Bird started to get mad. But she kept her tongue and her temper inside her beak and went flying on until she came to a stimp so tall, it looked like a scarecrow made of iron.
Fisher-Bird landed next to the tallest stimp and said, “Morning.”
The stimp didn’t move.
Fisher-Bird cleaned her beak with her foot and said, louder, “I said good morning!”
The stimp didn’t move.
“Shit,” said Fisher-Bird. “You died standing up?”
The stimp gave up. “I have not died,” said the steel heron, with icy precision. “I am fishing. Which I would have thought that you would understand, even if you practice the art like a wild boar practices dancing.”
Fisher-Bird’s beak didn’t lend itself to smirking, which was probably for the best. “Aw, you’re in a mood. What’s wrong, not enough fish?”
The stimp grunted.
“Mess this place is in, surprised there’s a fish to be found. Or a frog or a turtle for that matter. Maybe it’s time you stimps moved on.”
“Go bother someone else, little bird,” said the stimp. “I’ve no time for such as you.”
“Sorry about your momma,” said Fisher-Bird. “Must be hard.”
“What?” The steel heron turned its head finally, gold eyes narrowing. “What about my mother?”
“Just figured you lost her young,” said Fisher-Bird. “Or else she’d have taught you some proper manners.” She studied her claws nonchalantly. “Unless you learned from her, in which case it’s pretty clear she was no better than she should—krrk!”
The stimp’s strike would have made a meal of a slower bird, but Fisher-Bird had been waiting. She was in the air as soon as the stimp took the first step. The swamp filled up with the rattle of steel feathers and the chatter of Fisher-bird cussing, but Fisher-Bird’s faster than any heron, even a blessed one. She came winging back to Stronger, pleased with herself.
“Heard quite a ruckus,” said Stronger. “But they didn’t take to the air.”
“Nope,” said Fisher-Bird. “Didn’t think they would. But they’re killin’ beavers now, what never did nobody no harm, and also they were rude, so now I got no qualms at all.”
“Suppose we could try to scare them out,” said Stronger, a bit dubiously.
“Krrk-rkk! What’s a stimp got to be scared of? Unless you got like . . . eagles with magnets or something.” Fisher-Bird got a thoughtful look. “Huh, that’s not a bad idea. If this doesn’t work, the osprey boys owe me a favor. . . .”
Stronger put his head in his hands. “One plan at a time, please,” he whispered.
“Sit yourself down,” said Fisher-Bird. “Once it gets a little later in the day, the stimp boys will start trying to look real fine for the ladies, and that’s when we’ll do it.”
Stronger picked a log out of the water and set it down so he had a comfortable place to sit. Fisher-Bird amused herself picking crunchy tidbits with lots of legs off the end that had been in the water.
The sun started to climb up in the sky. Nothing much happened for a while, except the sound of carrion flies buzzing over the dead ducks and the dead beaver. Fisher-Bird didn’t like that either. Ought to have been a lot more insect sounds in the swamp, maybe some early pondhawks zipping over the water, but nothing, just the flies.
Then a noise rang out over the swamp, a metallic clatter like somebody shuffling a deck of cards made out of tin.
“What the devil . . . ?” Stronger jumped, startled, and accidentally put his log a foot deep in the wet ground.
Fisher-Bird got splattered by the mud and chattered, outraged, while she cleaned her feathers off. “Krrk-krrk-krk!”
“Sorry,” said Stronger. “Didn’t mean—what is that?” The noise came again, louder, and then another one. “It’s like a frog . . . a train . . . some kind of bug?”
Fisher-Bird preened her feathers down with her heavy beak, grumbling. “It’s the stimps,” she said. “You never seen herons do the dance for each other, son? The boys raise their crests way up and then flatten ’em back down, trying to look taller. ’Cept when stimps do it, their crests are made outta metal and it sounds like . . . well, like that.”
Another metallic crash, like the mating call of rain gutters.
“Now you take those tin cans and fan ’em out,” said Fisher-Bird. “And you raise them real high over your head and you rattle ’em together and you’ll sound like the tallest, sexiest stimp in creation.”
Stronger stared at her.
“What?” said Fisher-Bird. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s like flexing your muscles for the ladies. Except the ladies in this case are magicked-up herons.”
“You want me to do a bird mating dance?”
“Shit, son, you put it that way, it almost sounds weird.”
“But what happens then?” said Stronger, taking out the tin cans and looking at them in disbelief. “Do they come looking for me?”
“And risk gettin’ shown up? No, they’re gonna try to make themselves taller and prettier. They’re gonna be hopping up and down in the swamp, doing their best jumps for the ladies. You look out over the reeds then, you’ll see a whole bunch of stimps going up and down like jumping jacks.”
Stronger looked blank.
“And that’s when you shoot ’em with arrows,” said Fisher-Bird. “Son, I got eggs that would have latched on to this plan faster than you are. Unfertilized eggs.”
Stronger gave her a hangdog look. Then he sighed, held the cans up as far as he could, and drew his thumbnail down over the short edges, like fanning the pages of a book. An ordinary man might have cut hisself to ribbons, but Stronger had the blood of gods thick and oozing in his veins, and the cans rattled and clattered like a stimp’s crest in his hands.
Fisher-Bird took to the air and watched stimp heads shooting up all over the swamp, like chickens hearing a hawk yell.
Stronger rattled the cans again and again, and the stimps craned their necks, looking for the source of the sound, each one worried it might one of the others. Then they stood up straight, raising their crests as high as they could go, and they started to bounce up and down, leaping into the air, each trying to make themselves look like the tallest stimp of all.
Fisher-Bird circled back to Stronger and said, “Now’s a good time.”
“Thank god,” said Stronger, shoving the cans into his belt. “Ain’t dignified.” He pulled his bow off his back, pulled an arrow from the bucket—it made a wet sucking sound—and took aim.
Fisher-Bird was a little bit worried, what with the stimps leaping back and forth, but Stronger’s aim was good. He pulled back on the bow till the wood moaned, then fired.
Thwap! Tar exploded over the nearest stimp’s neck feathers, and the bird dropped with a yell of disgust.
Thwap! Thwap! Sometimes Stronger missed, but mostly he didn’t.
Fisher-Bird winged in next to the first stricken stimp and saw its feathers splashed with black tar. The bird was frantically trying to scrape the mess off with its beak, preening at the feathers like any bird would, and pretty soon the rat poison started to kick in.
“Don’t feel so good . . .” muttered the stimp. It stopped worrying about its feathers and went staggering off into the swamp, wings trailing. Fisher-Bird cackled. There probably wasn’t enough rat poison to kill something the size of a stimp, but after the dead beaver, she wasn’t feeling a lot of remorse.
“Is that all of them?” asked Stronger. “I’m nearly out of arrows.”
“All the boys,” said Fisher-Bird. “Ought to be enough to move them along.”
Fisher-Bird went looking for the tallest stimp and found it at last, bent over like an old man, with tar rimming its beak. “This is your doing, Fisher-Bird,” said the stimp. “Don’t lie.”
“Didn’t plan to,” said Fisher-Bird. “Ain’t ashamed of it. Your people’ve made a mess outta this swamp, and it’s time you moved on. Plus, you were right little shits to my cousin, and I ain’t forgotten.”
“Used a human to do it, didn’t you?” The stimp’s voice was no longer so icy and precise. “Saw the arrow hit me. Some gall you’ve got, claiming we made a mess. You seen what humans do to a swamp?”
“Sure,” said Fisher-Bird. “I ain’t stupid.”
The stimp tried to step forward and its leg almost gave out under it, so it wobbled sideways and nearly fell, but its eyes stayed locked on Fisher-Bird.
“Go!” said Fisher-Bird. “Get gone! You’ve got no fish, no frogs, no food, and the human’ll sit out here and cover you in tar every time to try to dance. This ain’t no place for you anymore.”
“Oh, we’ll go,” said the stimp. “You’re not wrong there. But you’re not as smart as you think you are, Fisher-Bird.”
“Oh?”
“Heh,” said the stimp softly. “Heh heh heh.” And then it whipped its neck around so hard that the bones crackled, and Fisher-Bird was just a hair slow getting into the air, so the slash of the stimp’s crest took her low across the belly and knocked her down into the rotting mud.
Stronger came plodding through a long time later. “Bird?” he called. “Bird? The stimps flew away, the ones that could fly. Bird, where are you?”
He slid and squelched into the clear spot that had been the tallest stimp’s dance floor, and caught sight of Fisher-Bird. “Bird, no!”
He went to his knees next to the little limp bundle of feathers and picked her up with hands that were stronger than anyone else’s. “Bird, don’t die. It worked. Please don’t die.” He cradled her in his palm, and her wings hung limp at her sides, a girdle of dried blood across her white feathers. “You helped me. You’re the only one, aside from my cousin, who’s given me the time of day. Please don’t die.”
Fisher-Bird didn’t speak, didn’t move, just lay there with her eyes closed and her beak gaped open.
Stronger put his forehead down against her feathered breast and started to cry. And I ain’t saying the tears of a hero with god-blood have any kind of power, but I’ll tell you the only thing I know, which is that Fisher-Bird pecked his eyebrow, hard.
“Ow!” Stronger jerked back, nearly dropping her. “What the hell was that?”
“You damn near squashed me,” said Fisher-Bird. “I ain’t feeling all that well, all right? Damn stimp had rat poison left on his feathers. Serves me right for letting him get too close, I guess. More fool me.”
“I thought you were dead!”
“Can’t even have a bit of a lie-down without some damn fool crying all over you.” She pecked him again for good measure. “There. You got your stimps cleared out. Your mother-in-law can’t say you didn’t, and the swamp’ll be better for it in a season or two.”
“Can I take you back to your stream?” asked Stronger, who was raised polite.
“Yeah, I’ll let you,” said Fisher-Bird, who didn’t want to let on that she wasn’t feelin’ too much like flying right then. So he carried her back on his shoulder and set her down on her favorite branch, and bid her farewell.
“Hmmph,” said Fisher-Bird. “You finish up your jobs and get away from that woman, you hear?”
“I will,” he promised. “I will.”
Anyway, you all know the rest of the story. There were some golden cattle—or maybe some golden apples, depending on who you ask—and Old Man Hades’s guard dogs with their fine snapping teeth. Stronger did it all, without complaining too much, and finally his mother-in-law had to let him go.
As for Fisher-Bird, she never could clean her feathers for fear of getting a mouthful of poison, so she’s had a red band of blood and rust right across her belly, from that day to this. Which is still getting off lightly if you mess about with gods and heroes, so Fisher-Bird always said.