The Carrying Crow and the Tale of the Two Gold Coins: A Free Dark Fantasy Short Story

In between the wars of men, eyeballs become rather scarce on the ground, as it were, and in times of peace a crow does what a crow must do. Actually obtaining a human eyeball brings with it a particular sense of accomplishment. The firmness between the sharpened halves of a beak; the sense of anticipation; the worry that you might drop the thing and someone else might squabble it away from you; the triumph of putting one’s claw upon an eyeball and know that it will soon be burst and supped; the moment of piercing the orb and feeling it deflate gently, making a mess of itself and inviting ants.

The liquor of it flowing down one’s throat!

But mostly these days the grassy fields grow green and fair and the cattle munch their cud in peace and the knights joust each other for the favor of ladies and not blood-muddied inches of territory from their enemies, more’s the pity, and if any eyeballs are damaged in the process, well, they’re cleaned up right away and tucked out of sight. Tsch!

I was eating well enough, complacent mice from around the big grain stores, you know how it is, fat and greasy things that hardly squeaked when you swooped down from above them and broke their stupid necks. Hardly any challenge. Hardly worth the time. Even the overeager stoats over by the wizard’s tower to the north (foul-smelling place that it was) hardly had any get up and go.—But stoats tend to go to the ravens anyway, who are bigger and louder and bossier and altogether more likely to tell wizards what they want to hear, and be considered wise.

Crows are fools, nobody has to tell me that twice, but sometimes it takes an early fool to catch the eyeball. Or was it an early eyeball to catch a fool?

Ah, words are slippery things, skinny little fish hardly worth the catching, except that there are so many of them and you’re bound to pick up a few if you stick your beak into human business often enough, which I do. All of which was to say that it should have been no mystery that when I saw the opportunity of obtaining an eyeball last week, that I took it, even though the chance of my success was about as likely as being crowned King of Drauvenmark, that being the human name of the lands around us at the time, more or less, although a few of the neighboring kingdoms were probably gearing themselves up to disagree.

The opportunity was thus: a black-haired woman in a red velvet gown was sitting at an open window in that squarish red castle on the top of the hill sunset-ward of the flat summer bat-caves next to the river with all the little silver fish.

The castle belonged to some duke or other, it doesn’t matter who, and the woman was sighing loudly while looking down at a grassy area near the moat below the castle.

I had been perched on a tree nearish the castle, looking back and forth from one eye to the other, trying to see what it was that the woman in red was sighing about, and saw a pair of human lovers in the grassy area, the man playing some sort of musical instrument and cawing—singing, that is, singing—at a woman in a green gown, who was seated on a blanket spread out on the grass, with a stout nursemaid beside her dressed in white and gray. The nursemaid was knitting, and as she was knitting her head fell forward, then jerked back upward, then fell forward again, which was bad news for whatever she was knitting, I can safely say, while Milady Greensleeves looked at the troubadour, by turns adoring and bored. The music was loud and discordant and quite pleasant.

The woman in red seemed displeased with the lovers, or the music, or the knitting. Or she could have had an itch on her bum, who am I to say? But to my eye, she was jealous.

And I thought: perhaps the woman in red would assist me in obtaining an eyeball or two, or at least turn her eyes away while I assisted myself, if I helped her get rid of her rival.

I shook my feathers out, heaved upward into the sky, and made my way over to the tower.

The black-haired woman watched me approach, pursing her thin red lips and pinching her brows together as I cam between her and the sight of the lovers below.

I landed.—I had not come without a gift; I had been about to devour a fat fieldmouse and had, on the impulse of the moment, brought it with me. As I landed with my feet on the stone lip of the window, the woman leaned away from me, wrinkling her nose at me in disgust.

I danced briefly for her, lifting one foot, then the other, so that she would be sure to see the tempting little mouse swaying from my beak, then dropped the mouse inside the window—ptah!—and waited for her reaction.

“Eugh!” she said. “Whyfore hath thou brought to me this vermin, carrying crow?”

I have to admit that I felt a bit insulted at that; it was a perfectly good mouse. But never mind that, I had a mission to accomplish!

“Eye! Ball!” I cried.—I had been working on speaking in human tongues for some time, and if my vocabulary was limited by my lack of lips, at least my understanding was not.

The lady in red pretended not to understand. “Shoo! Shoo!”

I shook my head vigorously. “Not! Troo! Eye! Ball!”

You must understand that I have always struggled with the letter S.

Displaying a complete lack of understanding, the woman in red threw a shoe at me. Rather than allow it to strike me with full force, I gave myself a backward shove off the lip of the tower window and fell backward into the sky. The shoe and I tumbled downward; it was a little thing after all, made of light calf leather and dyed a pleasant ocher hue. If someone had cut it up for a dainty little hat properly sized for a crow I would have worn it, with a little ribbon tied around my neck!—It has long been a dream of mine, to be kept as a lady’s pet songbird. For of course I am as gifted with song as I am with words, if I do say so myself.

A shame it would have been, to let such a lovely shoe go to waste!

From above came the shriek of the lady in red, who surely had realized what a mistake it had been to throw one of her shoes out the window, and I thought to myself that if I managed to bring the shoe back to her, she would surely be more amenable to furthering our discussion regarding the thwarting of rivals and the obtaining of eyeballs.

I nabbed the shoe in my beak, flapped my wings, and soared away. Or I would have done, if the shoe hadn’t slipped away from me and the damned thing gone a-falling once more.

Straight toward the surface of the moat, where a hundred of the gigantic black carp that live in the moat rose and open their mouths, trying to gobble me up!

I cursed in the tongue of crows, then dove after the pretty little shoe.

My beak closed over the leather just as one claw touched the surface of the water—and slid into the mouth of a waiting carp!

The carp, which have scrumptious-looking gold eyes, big as coins, are said to rise to the surface in order to give notice of the presence of death within the castle. And I believe it! For they were surely attempting to bring about the death of me!

The jaws closed upon my claw, then yanked downward.

I heaved with my wings and spread my claws and they cut through stiff, cold flesh!

But at the same time, I was spun around and my claw caught on one of the carp’s mouth bones like a fishhook caught in its cheek.

The carp pulled downward, trying to drown me and escape at the same time—but the other fish had not learned the same lesson, and tried to eat me all the same, which had the effect of keeping the first carp from diving properly, for the other fish were battering at it, same as me, which forced it to thrash around on the surface, held above the water by the force of the struggling bodies below it.

In other words, it was drowning in the unbreathable air.

The first carp released my foot, its mouth streaming blood, and tried to gasp to pump water through its gills—and I was free!

And I was still holding the shoe.

At least, until the fat field mouse I had gifted the lady earlier landed into the footbed with a plop.

The mouse had not been, as I had thought, entirely dead, only stunned, and at that moment it climbed out of the footbed of the shoe and looked at me with beady black eyes full of murine rage.

I myself was too occupied with getting both of my legs underneath me at the same time so I could leap into the air and regain my powers of flight, burdened as I still was with the lady’s shoe, to do anything other than to stare back at it in surprise.

The mouse jumped forward, clinging to my face and squeaking something defiant in the language of mice (which I have never bothered to learn), then opened its jaws to bite. In horror I watched its long teeth spread themselves as wide as possible, and aim themselves for my vulnerable eye—!

And that’s when the largest, blackest carp I had ever seen burst from the water, catch its head in the footbed of the shoe, and attempt to dive back into the depths of the moat.

Fortunately fish are quite stupid, and instead of diving into the moat, it flung itself directly onto the steep bank of the moat opposite the castle.

I leapt skyward, kicking off against the head of one of the carp, and was soon aloft. In moments I had landed next to the carp, which was smothering on the shore with the pretty little shoe still stuck to its face like a mummer’s mask, and one leg of the frantic mouse trapped between the scales and the leather.

When I tugged the shoe free, the mouse ran a few steps, then collapsed panting in the grass, too frightened to do more than squeak balefully at me, a curse on all crows, no doubt.

But I was not interested in the mouse.

I dragged the shoe (it was heavier than I had thought, or perhaps I was tireder) out of the moat in the direction of the troubadour and his amour and her nurse. To make a long story short, I dragged the damp, fish-blooded shoe past the singer and onto the blanket, and flung it in the lap of Milady Greensleeves, rival of the lady in red, who shrieked and ran away while the nurse huffed and climbed to her feet to follow her, and the singer gaped after them both, then at me, then at the sound of the lady in red cackling at the scene from the tower above, her vengeance well-managed, at least for the moment.

And then I returned to my carp, well enough paid for my trouble not to make any complaint about it, and had carp for dinner and not one but two golden eyeballs for dessert.

—And as for the formerly complacent mouse, if he had not died, he is living here still, for he was gone when I returned.