Frightful Freedom

The crows flew single-file, swooping over identical peaks blurred and rendered like watercolor grayscale by the omnipresent mist. A little further beyond, below the path of the dive-bombing birds, marched a group of men swathed in polychromatic serapes. Bayonetted rifles burdened their shoulders, and sombreros cast long shadows over even longer, darkened faces. Shielded from the mid-afternoon sun, there seemed a uniformity among the Mayans, mestizos, Mexican-born freedom fighters, and loyalists to the Spanish crown. Each had changed his aim from the other soldiers to search for their children. Someone had taken them while their fathers fought on the frontlines. None of the mothers knew who it was or how or where they had gone. They felt compelled to wait at home on the off chance that they returned on their own.

One of the men, Segundo, decided to count the long, black line of crows. They were twenty-one in number. Another man, Mirador, spotted something strange about how they flapped their wings. They beat too frequently and clumsily such that their formation broke more often than it maintained. The man stared at them for minutes that felt like hours. Not one of the crows cawed or scanned for something to scavenge. Rather, it seemed—

“They’re coming for us, aren’t they?” asked a man named Pregonero, no nervousness but only semi-detached bewilderment in his voice. It was just another mysterious aspect of this enchanting vista, like the high-hanging sun shining so bright, it should’ve been blinding to look at, even under cloud cover.

All of a sudden, one of the men’s heads snapped downward at the sight of a woman walking toward them. Those who watched her believed she was a Mayan in Spanish garb: her bronze-colored face contrasted starkly against her flowing, diaphanous, emerald-green dress. She approached methodically, her bare feet unbothered by the hot hardpan they crossed. There was an effortless elegance to her every movement, an ease as disconcerting as it was graceful.

Though some had felt the urge to meet her halfway, all were stilled. Whether fearful or entranced, the men would walk only with her permission.

A few of the men retained sufficient will to shift their gazes skyward. The crows were cawing now, though not at the men or each other, but to the woman. Each member of the murder, one by one down the column, said its piece. Their cawing was cacophonous, even for crows. The men found it reminiscent of the din of war.

The woman’s movements emboldened in the presence of company. Striated skin showed through her gossamer clothes, and she seemed to control both the flowing of her dress and the flapping of the birds’ wings. Each beat followed that of her footsteps, as did the breathing of the men. All danced to her rhythm.

Then, about fifty meters from the men, she stopped. A small dust cloud behind her fell to the ground and died.

Later, when the men would hash out what they’d witnessed, they’d admit that they’d expected the crows to remain hovering. They didn’t. The birds flitted down onto surrounding rocks, deadfall, and cacti, creating miniature zephyrs with their labored efforts.

“What’s your name?” one of the men called Chatak Mool asked the woman in Mayan.

“You seek your children,” she responded in his native tongue. It was a statement, not a question. Many of the men did not understand the exchange and demanded explanations.

“Do we all speak Spanish?” she asked loudly in fluent Castilian.

They responded in the affirmative.

“What do you know of our children?” Chatak Mool inquired.

“That they hate your fighting more than you have. And you’ve hated it, but you still bring your weapons.”

“You’ve seen them, then? If you know something, tell us,” demanded Segundo.

“They can tell you themselves,” the woman replied.

Many of the men had grown impatient and took her response as a provocation. Several raised their rifles to the ready position.

“Papa! No!” cried a querulous, not-quite-human voice. Most of the rifles lowered.

“Please!” the voice pleaded again. “No more! Stop it!”

Segundo’s jaw dropped, and he lowered his weapon.  The crow had spoken to him, and it had sounded like his daughter.

Others among the crows began to speak then. Hearing their sons and daughters’ voices emerge distorted from these avian forms enraged many of the men. Their faces ruddied, and they shook their fists and called the woman a witch. Those lowered muzzles rose again.

“Gentlemen,” she said in a voice most placid, “the choice is yours, but if you fire, their blood will be on your hands.”

Many of the rifles cocked.

Undeterred, she continued. “You presume me to be an evil entity. You blame me for the loss of your children…” The wind picked up at her back, blowing her voluminous skirt and tossing her hair about. “Despite what you think of my beliefs and practices, it is I who has saved them, and it is they, and not just I, who will vanish if I’m hit.”

This was met with some concerned grumbling and a few more cocked guns.

“What do we do?” asked Pregonero. The Spaniard stood at the vanguard of this ragtag bunch who’d assumed that he’d take a leadership role. Now, that seemed uncertain.

“Who said we all need to agree?” asked Vega, the Spaniard at his side. “All of us have children who’ve been turned into crows—if those birds are really them.”

“If she’s telling the truth and we kill her, then all our children suffer the same fate,” said Mirador, whose son was the fourth generation in his family to be born in this new nation.

“Witches always lie,” said Pregonero, who, despite having more Mexican generations than all the assembled settlers, was still a loyalist.

Chatak Mool stepped forward. “If you think she lies, beware. The craftiest liars enrobe their deceptions in many truths.”

“He’s right,” said the man at his side. “If we misunderstand her, it could hurt us all.”

“Well, I’ve had it!” shouted another from the Spanish contingent. He fired. The shot caught the woman directly in the left shoulder and knocked her to the ground. As her body kicked up dust, two of his compatriots took aim. One shot barely grazed her side; another pierced her right thigh.

The fallen witch reached skyward.

In unison, the crows took flight and circled halfway between their master and the sun.

Two Mexican men fired at the fallen witch, hitting her on either side of her ribcage.

One Mayan man took a shot, and the bullet buried itself in the arch of her foot.

The witch, bleeding profusely, clenched and unclenched her fist, unleashing her spell. The birds burst into flapping fireballs.

The flames were as spectacular as they were short-lived. In those fleeting seconds, nearly all the men opened fire. Only Mirador, Segundo, Chatak Mool, and the man who seconded him, Eek’e’ chúunk’iin, held back.

Chatak Mool saw it first, but Mirador and Pregonero weren’t far behind in noticing the fireballs disappear as the shots echoed in their ears. What the flames left behind was not smoke, not incinerated carcasses, but nothingness.

When the men realized the crows had vanished, there was handwringing and conjecture intermingled with grief. As the men marched on in what seemed an endless, fruitless search, they agreed there’d been no birds; they had been a mirage, an illusion. But if that were so, had the witch even met their children? Were they safe now? Or did she speak truly, and now they were in danger because the witch had died? They could not say. All they knew was to soldier on till they found their children or the reason they had lost them.

#

Chatak Mool had been correct. The witch had mingled truth with falsehood. His mistake, and the mistake of all the men, was that they’d misidentified the lie. Their children’s blood was not on their hands, but the men were responsible for losing them just the same. For at a very small hacienda, whose agave crop lay dying, twenty-one children sat downtrodden under the shade of an awning, awaiting word of how their fathers faired on the test she’d given them.

When the children became crows, they knew their fathers had failed. They were sadly unsurprised and, without a caw among them, took flight to a new, and frightful, freedom.