To Murder a Sparrow
The bones laid delicately among blades of grass that cut tiny furrows with their tin edges; two legs, two wings, a finely-structured head and beak. A whole skeleton laid out peacefully beside the morning dew that had settled that morning from the night fog. The flesh had escaped though - yes, escaped, to a rock some paces away, where the meat of the bird's body had been stretched out over sun-warmed stone for the coming investigation. A boy, no more than eight years old, stared at the skeleton of the sparrow for now. He had long black hair and no name worth mentioning, much like the avian carcass before him.
For now, his clumsy fingers tweaked the wing joints in little circles, mimicking the exquisite musculature, beating the absent feathers as if to make the skeleton fly. For now, the boy sat and thought of wonder, and unbeknownst to him the tips of his fingers began to shine with a otherworldly light, and the skeleton twitched on the ground just once - it escaped his eye, but it would not tomorrow, for the young boy had fine eyes, for now.
For now, there was peace.
"How did you fly?" the boy asked, articulating the wings, and tried to make sense of how the bones and the muscle went together; of how bird and sky meshed. It seemed to be just escaping him - something natural that bonded the two - and though they laid all around him, he never thought to look at the bent and scattered feathers. Light blue in colour, they laid in tangled messes.
Tomorrow he would glance at them, and make the connection.
His name was Orochimaru, and these were peaceful days yet, when he lived in a cottage he returned to each day, beside the corpse of his mother, who had died of cholera some time earlier.
~*~
Between all things there is rhyme: stone and serpent, bird and cloud, bone and willow. Close your eyes and clap your hands, and if your imagination is great, you will hear it.
~*~
Then came the second War, born of poverty and resentment and greed. It was a hungry beast and ate the lives of many men. Before long, the men in black, the recruiters, came to the village to gather the boys and men, for the great beast required tribute to be satisfied. From Orochimaru's village they gathered seven men and three boys; but then they heard a tale of a cottage on the outskirts, and a missing-nin that had taken a wife, and settled there in isolation to raise his son. The men in black hastened to the tiny building to recruit or kill him.
There they found Orochimaru, holding up the tiny skeleton of a bird in the air, swinging it gently so as to make the feathers he'd carefully tied to the wings rustle. In the cottage they found the body of a woman who had died of some disease weeks past. The garden, just in bloom, had already begun to rot - its fruits had obviously fed the child these weeks past. Of the father, there was no sign. He had escaped.
The men in black took hold of Orochimaru. The skeleton stayed behind with its false coat of feathers and a dead mother - but the boy convinced them to at least burn the cottage first and give his mother a proper burial. Matches were struck - the house was set to burn. First smoke and then thin flame rose from its foundations.
When he judged the flames to be high enough, Orochimaru took up the skeleton and cast it out over the burning structure. The rising hot air caught against the feathers, and lifted it up; and without the weight of its flesh, the dead sparrow rose into the air and circled upward on a pillar of ash. The boy looked upon this, and smiled. He was glad.
Then the men in black took him away from the cottage, and he never looked back, for ahead Orochimaru could see the bright bone wings of a sparrow beckoning him onward ever higher.
~*~
The place they took him to was a long canyon, in the great forests of Konoha - that was the name of Orochimaru's country, they told him. Konoha. "You live there," they told him, "And she asks you to defend her in her time of need." Those were the words they told everyone, but the boy paid them no heed, and looked for blue-jays and cardinals. It was spring, and he could hear them singing in the distance.
The men in black lined all the boys up before the dawn one day, and another man came to shout at them. He was large and stout, and when he shouted Orochimaru couldn't hear the song of the birds he wanted to find. Then when Orochimaru tried to leave for the forest to find the birds, the man came over and pushed him - young and small, he fell over. The shouting man hoisted him up by the neck, but the boy's hand flickered down into his loose, baggy clothes held up with strips of linen, and emerged with the beak of a sparrow in hand, now-black bits of flesh still clinging to it. Orochimaru pushed it into the man's eye, and he shouted again, and the man tried to let go. Light as the bird he had skinned, the boy clambered down the meaty arm, settled in against the thick neck. There he closed his eyes and began to chew.
Blows rained down upon him, but he simply curled up and chewed.
Time passed. When Orochimaru finally looked up it was evening, and the sun had nearly crossed the opposite horizon. The shouting man's body laid still beneath his clumsy
hands, and under the thick neck and its gaping wound a red stench was pooled. Orochimaru felt at his head only for the hand to come away red - he pushed the cut closed and wished it to go away, and when it finally did the sun had gone down and night had fallen. There was no more birdsong.
~*~
All things die, except wonder;
for without wonder how would we know to die?
~*~
The next day the men in black came again, and took Orochimaru through the trees again - this time, wrapped in heavy chains that jingled with music that the boy liked. He would shake them and listen to their song, and hear the songbirds sing back to him in chorus. When he asked questions of the men this time they would not answer, so Orochimaru contented himself with observing the trees and the life within them.
Then one night at camp there went up a cry, and Orochimaru blinked; one of the men in black laid on the ground, and a long green finger was wound around his leg. Then the man rolled over, and the boy saw that it wasn't a finger; it was an animal, long and thin, with two beaks in a fleshy mouth. It released the man and vanished into the high grasses of the forest.
Several hours later the man died, and Orochimaru added the animal into the list of songbirds, though he never heard it sing back when he rattled his chains. He wondered where its wings were, and decided he'd find out when next he'd have a chance.
The next night he saw it again, and grabbed it behind the mouth and squeezed; then he sat on it a very long time until it breathed no more, and its pleasant song was silent. Then he pulled the flesh off with his fingers and studied the skeleton; it too was thin and light, but longer than anything he had seen. It was longer than Orochimaru himself. The beaks he took out for himself.
When morning came the men in black saw the snake and asked many questions; when they turned to Orochimaru he told them the bird had come to him so that he could study it and learn how it sang and flew. One of the men laughed, but then Orochimaru sang for him the song of the Long Bird, and he too fell silent.
There were no more questions, and as they took him back to the next place of men Orochimaru sat next to a tree each night and sang to the Long Bird and his chorus, and found new birds to listen and study. The chains felt lighter than the air the sparrow had floated away on; he hardly noticed them, for as with his friends, Orochimaru used his head far more than his hands.
But finally the trees ended and they took him into a forest of cottages, where everywhere people stood and walked and sang to each other, and Orochimaru found himself mightily confused, because their songs were so tangled and bent and restrained. The boy was taken into a large stone cottage, and there a young man that did not smell like he looked stood. And his words pierced through the haze of song that clouded all of Orochimaru's senses.
"I will teach you, if you will learn." he said clearly, and the boy grasped onto that with all the strength he had, for although Long Birds and Song Birds had much to teach, they had never built a house or laid a garden.
"Yes, please!" Orochimaru shouted, instinctively going to his knees. The man smiled and told him his name.
In future ages, he would vocalize the name as Hiruzen, but he would never forget that first perfect pronounciation; for here was a man that knew his song, and Orochimaru heard it in the syllables of his name: Hi-ruuuu-zen, a noise groaned out from between his teeth, a long and despairing sigh. It was the sweetest sound Orochimaru had ever heard.
This was when he knew that the purest songs had to be coaxed from the mouths of men, and so he gave up forevermore on his songbirds; except that one that so like a sigh had hissed for him, whimpering as its skin was peeled away, its twin beaks in his pocket - he would never let Long Bird go, for hers was the first song the boy had heard toll so sweetly.
~*~
There are two fundamental halves of the universe: matter, and energy. One is the base material from which everything is crafted, but the other is information; rippling in waves from one mass to another, carrying messages across oceans of nothingness - whale-songs across the abyss of negative space, so little of which we can decode. Our eyes and ears are limited, students; there are a hundred octaves beyond our imagining, palettes above comprehension, an entire universe lost in every second we are not listening. Can you imagine what is being lost?
- Dr. Hans Motlich