Grey Eytel and His Band of Birds

Content Warning (click to expand)

kidnapping, mention of warfare

 

by Daniel Ausema

Aittel’s boat, empty of the body he’d been charged to sink, spun in a spout of wind and water and crashed into the roots of a tree.

We’ve all seen paintings of the event, watched it enacted on branch-side stages. Aittel, the famed ratite, is often shown with damp feathers, his wing-like arms sagging against his sides as he stares in disbelief at the tree rising from the wreckage of his boat. In re-enactments he checks the bark repeatedly to assure himself he hasn’t somehow returned to the familiar base of his own home. To many historians this represents the true beginning of Boskrea as a city.

A subtle prejudice lies in how the scene is imagined, but one that plays into how ratites are treated to this day. In truth Aittel, like all ratites of his day, knew well the existence of the other three trees. On many days they stood out from the mist, and the ratites were no more ignorant or superstitious than the humans or selichi of their era. They recognized those trunks and crowns as trees like their own, rising high over the shallow water. They could not, perhaps, have imagined the millions who would one day inhabit the city’s four trees, but surely they must have wondered, must have suspected that others lived as they did across that short stretch of unclean water.

A true picture of that day would show Aittel stepping from the wreckage, placing a tentative foot on the bark, and looking around. The angle of his beak might hint at fear, but should show his curiosity as well. He walked along the base, finding no stairways or even the paths of other people. He didn’t wonder about humans or selichi, for such had never come to the tree of the ratites, but he did peer above him for signs of other ratites. Were there villages nearby? On his own tree the houses would have been immediately beside the water, his people’s fear of the high open spaces of the trunks keeping them low in the tree, but might the ratites here hide their villages in strategic hollows between the roots or just above the level where he stood? What feuds and rivalries might he walk into without knowing?

His head feathers were mostly dyed black to signify his work in disposing of the dead, but a few were indigo, dyed with what even today is considered the ratites’ greatest secret, the color they create by treating certain varieties of shellfish. These feathers spoke of his native clan and declared his allegiance to a particular faction within the clans. What would those colors mean to those he met here?

What kept the trees separate in those days were the taboos, taboos common to each of the peoples. For the selichi and human ancestors also were certainly aware of their neighboring trees. Perhaps at some stage in the city’s prehistory, travel existed between the trees. Hints of such a truth can be found in various locations around Boskrea and even in the shallows beside the trees. But at some point, all three peoples instilled their descendants with the imperative to remain in their own trees. A taboo so strong that, as far as historians can determine, it kept the cultures completely isolated for centuries at the least, if not millenia, from days when all three peoples were pre-literate and into the earliest stages of literacy among the selichi.

Aittel felt he had no choice, though, but to find locals who could help him. Or at least to scavenge the unfamiliar tree for the materials to repair his boat on his own. So he climbed. Pragmatism overcame any fear of the higher reaches, fears he might have inherited or absorbed. The bark under his scaled feet was deeply grooved, and his arms, short as they were, gave him purchase and balance. With so little bark left anywhere in the city, it may be hard to imagine a ratite climbing without a path or the use of equipment. And perhaps he did use something from his boat, a pronged walking stick, as some have suggested. The tree in those days, though, was its own assistance. He switched back and forth without needing a trail to tell him to do so.

After a time — an hour? a march? a morning? — he clambered around the curve of the trunk and set in motion the story we all know. Aittel the ratite stumbled into a selichi village, and our history began.

To him the selichi must have seemed exotic. Was he afraid? Not as we might imagine. The selichi reputation in the centuries since have built them up as cruel and cold. Slavers at times, though officially not in today’s Boskrea. Ferocious in defending the privacy of their own neighborhood. Mysterious in their rites and traditions. Aittel would have known none of this. To him the selichi were tall, certainly, but thin as well, which may have made them appear weak. They outnumbered him, but they did not approach menacingly, as curious at the sight of him as he was of their village. Their movements were like those of insects, and insects formed much of the ratite diet.

They gathered around him, and he stared into eyes of yellow, brown, and blue. They had no feathers and no dyes to mark their status. Their chittering language made no sense to him, could just as well have been the calls of songbirds or of squirrels. Yet their buildings behind them were sophisticated, intricately carved from the side of the tree with the pieces that had been carved away pieced together to extend the buildings out over the incline of the trunk. These showed a skill beyond the rough huts of his own people. Aittel held out his wing-like arms for their silence.

“My boat.” He gestured downward at the water, and heads turned that way, though none could have understood him. “I crashed and need help.”

A selichi woman made a show of walking up next to him and craning her head to see where he pointed. She nodded to him, as if she understood, and other selichi mimicked her. Aitten waved his arms to draw their eyes away from the drop. They could not see the wreckage from where they stood, and he wanted them to pay attention to him.

He cupped the tips of his wings to make a boat, mimed it crashing into the tree and casting him up the trunk.

Writing was in its early stages among the selichi, the system that evolved into the writing shared by all of us today, but even so, some aspects of its use are lost. A brief fragment survives, a letter sent uptree to an official in the already rigid, hierarchical selichi system of governance. It speaks of a “bird-selichi” and tells primarily of the writer’s horrified suspicions that the visitor had come across from another tree. Parts of the letter that seem to hint at various undefined levels of government remain untranslated, despite conspiracy claims of a thousand other things they might refer to.

The scene is most familiar today, though, in the famous Dance of Eytelle that selichi dancers have been performing since two or three centuries after the time of Aittel. Until recently even Aittel’s part was played by a selichi woman, covered in the typical (and condescending) haphazard arrangement of feathers and rustic clothing. Today, while some ratites boycott any performance as degrading to them, a ratite generally plays the part of Aittel. And so we picture him — or her, if we know the story only from the dance —sweeping through the selichi village, gesturing wildly, portraying the fear and chaos of the shipwreck. We picture a swaying, sliding chorus of selichi villagers. We imagine the tensions between Aittel and one selichi elder, the arguments, the accusations. They fight with dance steps and facial expressions, tugging the villagers between their conflicting images of the future of the trees. A city, Aittel seems to promise, pain at times but glory too. A tower, the elder promises, pristine and insular. To many selichi, this makes the dance a tragedy rather than a triumph, for it was Aittel’s vision that has come true.

But there was no such elder in truth, not in any of the accounts that have come down to us. No grand arguments that bordered on violence, no debates on the future of Boskrea-to-be. These were additions invented by the first choreographers. What tension there might have been came only from the confusion of both parties.

Aittel spent a night beneath the many-planed selichi roofs. In the morning, he led a group of selichi to the wreckage of his boat. The mist was thick, but he pointed across to where he thought his tree must be.

We know which tree he had come to, for Marbol is still the neighborhood of the selichi. We know even where within Marbol the village had stood — now covered in more recent houses — for the selichi kept detailed records. But the tree that had been home to the ratites is unknown. For all that we do know and all that has been preserved in legend, as a grocer preserves a rare batch of ibeli fungus by pickling, we do not know which tree was home to the ratites and which to the humans. And Aittel himself, as the well-known story continues, can be held responsible for that fact.

The selichi helped him fix his boat, patching the holes not with more wood, as Aittel would have among his own people, but with long bundles of dried moss, bound tightly. They smeared a compound he couldn’t identify into the bundles and set the boat in the water, and it didn’t leak.

Already as he left, the selichi began the defense of their own tree, their own way of life. Aittel set them on the path to who they are today.

The mist made the journey slow, but the water wasn’t rough. Aittel kept a close look on his direction and any hint of the trees through the mist. When he saw another tree, he rowed himself to a point where he could see it as well as the tree he’d come from, then watched the details of the base and bark resolve out of the fog. It was his home tree, familiar from countless trips of ferrying the dead to where they were to be sunk. He marked the spot in his mind, marked the exact direction to the selichi tree, already disappearing into the mist.

Then he landed and said nothing to his fellow ratites of his discovery. An old poem — by an anonymous human poet — attempts to recreate what debates and plans may have raged in his mind. It begins,

     He speaks in silence
     the empty spaces form syllables,
     words that gather and
     sound only within his mind.

     A thought forms,
     gathers sawdust and detritus
     until it has a body,
     rising from the surrounding waters.

     Hiding from his people,
     he climbs into the creature’s arms
     crosses green water
     to lay his plans on tribal bark…

     (translated from Thrys by Siewart Roos)

The image of his plans becoming corporeal may be fanciful, but Aittel did study the other trees on those rare days when the fog let him, and soon he crossed to one. He circled the tree slowly, returning several times to examine the rising trunk before he ever landed. This tree showed paths down to the base, though less activity at the water’s edge than at the ratites’ tree.

At dusk on his third visit, he landed and tied his boat to a twisting knob of bark. A trail touched the water nearby, and he climbed. A quiet camp was set up on the path. Aittel pulled himself up just before he walked in. He watched. The Thrys, as the ancient humans are now called, set their camps in a way that was completely foreign to Aittel, beyond even the strangeness of the selichi town. He stared at the clump of temporary shelters, finding no reason to it, no logic.

Walls of fur and moss-fiber were anchored into the trunk at different heights. Even the people, whom he had yet to see clearly, anchored themselves at what seemed random locations around the camp. Children swung in anchored hammocks. A carefully guarded fire of dried moss filled a hanging bowl of a material unknown to ratites — ceramic, we now know, made from clay found at the edge of the water, trapped between the roots of the tree. Above it cooked the communal stew of fungus, air-grown vegetables, and the meat of trapped game birds. Its smell made Aittel hungry.

He circled the camp, just as he had circled the tree, without making any contact.

The claim that the old children’s rhyme, “Green moss, black moss, / Hiding in the darkness, / Eye-light, day, night, / Won’t you come and greet us?” refers to Aittel’s subsequent visits to watch this and other Thrys camps has been proven false. Its origin is much more recent. Nevertheless, it is true that Aittel spent much time spying on the humans, discovering what he could of their migrations and rivalries, the first student of another culture. He defied his people’s tradition of avoiding the heights and even managed to pick up the rudiments of their language. In all that time, some tribes may have become aware of a silent watcher in the night, as the apocryphal interpretation of the rhyme implies.

It is curious to speculate on what Aittel was thinking at this point. Why did he not return to the selichi tree? What was he planning among the humans as he studied them? The answer to the first likely rests on the fact that the selichi now knew about him. Little as they might have known of the Aittel’s people or culture, they would be more aware of him, prepared for his reappearance. Better the people who weren’t looking for him to return. Perhaps, as well, he sensed something of the fierceness that would soon come to characterize selichi society. He probably went, then, to the next tree with no more detailed plan than to discover what he would find, and the wandering human tribes intrigued him.

The humans had discovered ways of cultivating various forms of fungus and farming the broad trunk — though these crops were always in danger of being stolen by other tribes. Traditional routes and small-scale wars were all that protected one tribe’s food from others. Most tribes traveled narrow vertical stretches of trunk, trapping different birds and small creatures (which have since gone extinct) and tending their fungus as they went. In some wider strips the tribes were divided, essentially into two or more smaller tribes, each staying within their own elevation, trading and intermarrying when they met.

Aittel followed one band up the trunk as far as the lowest branches, beyond which even the humans seemed afraid to go. The largest birds the Thrys trapped lived at the edge of those branches, but they only stayed a brief time before descending. Hints of yellow touched the edges of the leaves, of something poisonous or simply not right. Already the tree died, though Aittel couldn’t have guessed what that would mean. Aittel looked deep into the overlapping leaves throughout the day that the humans descended, but he went no further either. Something about the way the light turned green drove him back down. He might dare things no other ratite did yet, but he would no more enter those branches than he would willingly jump into the poisonous green waters where he was supposed to be sinking the corpses of the recently dead.

Finally he revealed his discoveries to other ratites. At first it was only a few. None remember who those few were — his family, perhaps, or a group of childhood friends. They crossed at night and climbed to a camp Aittel had chosen.

Here again his story becomes folk tale, and each of us knows the tales. Folklorists have recorded at least seventy-five tales of Aittel and his band of ratites, possibly as many as three hundred, depending on how each variation is counted. Grey Eytel, he’s called, and among his companions the most commonly mentioned are The Songbird, Razorbeak, Dye-Mistress, and Night Fisher. Perhaps most popular is the tale in which The Songbird sings such an eerie song that she convinces an entire tribe of Thrys to change their ancestral route and pass unsuspectingly around a wounded Grey Eytel. That tale has been interpreted in more ways than any other, from branch-side storytellers to barroom ballads, in printed form as erudite poems and illustrated stories for children.

A sober look at the history makes most such tales highly suspect. His band did include male and female members, just as the tales state, though it’s impossible to say if any of them matched up with the familiar folk heroes. The amount of time they likely spent there was much less that the image conjured by the stories. But they were there, and their actions not all that different from the underlying stories that survive in popular imagination.

Outside the Thrys camp, Aittel and his band crouched. There was little light from within, only the red glow of the ceramic fire pots, banked for the night. There were no songs from the ratite band, not that first night, no clever trickery. Just silent waiting.

In early morning, long before dawn, they moved in. Aittel led the way to a lone hammock, and three ratites snapped the lines and wrapped the hammock around the sleeping figure. The sleeper woke rapidly and struggled, but Aittel had done well in appreciating the humans’ greater physical strength and assigning three ratites to the one. He’d failed, however, to anticipate how quickly the Thrys camp could awaken.

The sleeper — a man — shouted, and within a few wingflaps, a few heartbeats, humans jumped from their hammocks and pushed themselves from the strange structures. There were no torches, no additional light immediately, but the humans moved well in the dark, converging on the sounds.

“Run!” Aittel shouted, and they did, dropping their captive against one of the anchored structures.

It’s possible that one ratite fell from the tree as they ran, though that claim is contradicted in other sources. It’s known that Aittel cursed when they gathered and he learned that they’d left the captive. “Egg-suckers, feather trash. By the claws of the poorest gods, what did you think we were doing there to begin with? Ride a flyer, next time you want pleasure. You aren’t ratites.”

A botched attempt the next night on another tribe netted them two captives, but resulted in at least one — possibly as many as three — human deaths as they fell down the trunk. Aittel wasn’t ready to return, not with just two captives. His plans demanded more.

Those plans…even at this point of Aittel’s story, there is no consensus among historians as to how intentional his actions were. Perhaps he already had in mind all that would soon develop, or perhaps he was still doing little more than reacting to events, improvising, keeping his eyes open for whatever opportunities would develop.

Regardless, he needed far more than just the two humans. Most likely he had hoped to abduct people slowly for a considerable stretch of time, but the failures made him consider a new approach. It was a few nights later, still saddled with their pair of captives, that they entered a camp of Thrys openly while light still remained. The camp was of a small splinter group, fewer than two dozen men, women, and children. They outnumbered the ratites, but only slightly.

This approach could be seen as bold, a daring switch in the way he hoped to gather humans to him. But it was also more humble in a way, for he didn’t enter their camp to force anything on them — or at least not immediately — but to meekly present them with an opportunity.

“There is another land,” he announced to them as well as he could in their language. “Another tree with a wide trunk and none of your people’s tribes to compete with. Picture the crops you could grow, no one to steal them. Picture the birds you could trap, no one to sneak your trap lines.”

This is the speech as it has come down to us. Had he practiced speaking the Thrys language with his captives? Or is this simply a later fabrication? It’s a relatively simple speech, but even so, it seems a stretch that he could have learned the language enough simply by spying on the human camps.

Aittel spoke, anyway, told them, as well as he could in their language, of the tree of the ratites, of the spaces that the ratites didn’t use, promised them many things if they would descend with him and his band and cross the water. It was the taboo he was battling, more than just convincing a group to join him. He fought with many generations of history. This was not an accidental crossing, as his landing in Marbol of the selichi had been, not a single person crossing to spy, not a group crossing with the intent of returning. All of those broke the taboo, but reasonably, something the taboo could easily absorb.

The immigration he encouraged of this splinter tribe of humans would not be absorbed, could not be ignored by either people. Here the dance of the selichi with their dueling visions of the future of Boskrea would be more appropriate, future pitted against future, change against taboo.

If a dance were made, perhaps it would add an old wise one who had been telling a story beside the fire bowl before the ratites came in. Perhaps it would mix together true ratites and true humans into a swirling chaos rather than settling for costumed dancers of one race or the other. The humans, solid and graceful, lifting each other and spinning past; the ratites colorful with their feathers dyed, leaping high on their long legs. If performed low on the trees instead of on the flat branches high above, the dancers might make full use of harnesses, of natural and artificial ledges in the side of the trunk, rising and falling in a beautiful dance of a momentous occasion.

No such dance exists, though. As of now.

The humans discussed among themselves, too swiftly for Aittel to follow. The band of ratites shifted impatiently, and Aittel felt their tension himself. The camp was exposed to any humans who might happen by. An unlikely possibility, based on what Aittel had observed — the Thrys kept to their own camps in the evenings — but that logic didn’t calm their fears. A nightbird called the start of its hunt.

“Bring us. Show us.”

Descending to their boats, Aittel kept the splinter of a tribe at the front and the two captives farther back. Only in the boats as they pushed off did any of the tribe realize that the other humans had been kidnapped. One woman balked. The boat rocked as she jumped up. She pushed a ratite into the water and moved to the prisoner in her boat.

They spoke, her words sounding like chirping insects and the prisoner’s like an old branch in the wind. She didn’t resist when another ratite clasped her arms and pulled them behind her. She simply kept talking while Aittel and a group of ratites pulled their fellow from the uncertain waters. Whatever she and the prisoner said, something lost to history, it appeased the woman. Some have argued that the prisoners had come to accept what was happening to them, though that seems unlikely. Others believe she learned that the prisoner came from a rival tribe, and so the kidnapping didn’t upset her. Regardless, the ratites soon rowed them across to their own tree.

That might have been the end, the rest of the story trailing off into the folkloric exploits of the band of ratites, convincing, through force or persuasion, more humans to break taboo and journey across. Convincing groups of ratites, as well, to cross and settle at the base of the humans’ tree. But first one thing more happened, one thing that is glossed over by popular accounts and retellings.

A posse of ratites waited for Aittel when he disembarked alone. His own band stayed in the boats with the prisoners. The posse crowded in so his heels rested on water-lapped wood.

“You’ve broken custom,” one male, roughly Aittel’s age, announced. “You’re no longer welcome on this tree.”

Aittel glanced back once at his boats then stared into the eyes of the ratites before him. “This is my home. I think it should be the decision of the tree itself whether it welcomes me or not.”

The ratites looked at each other, beady eyes narrowed in confusion. An older female with feathers tinged in orange stepped from the pack. “What do you mean? Some…” she gestured at the humans in the boats with her wing of an arm, “alien ceremony?”

“Not at all.” Aittel lowered his body from neck to stubby tail feathers in the traditional ratite bow. “Allow us to climb. We will avoid the settlements, climb beyond them to the open trunk.”

The first speaker shook his head. “Let you climb? That’s exactly what we want to avoid.”

“No, it’s just what you want. It will show if we are truly cursed for crossing. If so, the punishment will come to us and not the ratite settlements below, because we will have avoided them. The gods or the tree itself will shake us off or strike us down in whatever way works.”

“They’ll topple the whole tree to prove their point.”

“Prove it to who? We’ll all be toppled then, and what kind of god does that? Certainly the tree itself won’t choose such a punishment.”

None of the ratites answered him, and Aittel let his question linger in the silence. “They will punish us only, or no one at all. And if no one, then we will all know that the taboo has ended.”

Imagine the production that could be staged if this event were fully remembered! More than the encounter with the selichi, more even than Aittel’s appearance before the tribe of humans, this argument would determine the future of Boskrea. A performance at the base of the tree, a stage of boats filled with the ratites who have become folklore heroes. A showdown between two groups of ratites, singing and dancing from boats to tree, leaping over the dangerous waters, their feathers dyed a brilliant range of the colors only they know how to create. It would be a true spectacle to commemorate the founding of the city.

Aittel, his band, and the humans climbed past leery ratites. No gods struck them down, the tree did not shake them off.

In later years, recalling the times that followed, human historians have tended to focus on the abductions that surely continued as Aittel and his band returned to the tree of the humans. Ratite historians have emphasized the open approach that Aittel showed with that first full tribe. They found the individuals and groups who were already on the outside of their tribes’ lives, those likely to accept a change to a new home. And simply gave them a choice.

Likely the ratite historians are closer to the truth in this regard, and who can say if perhaps the posse of ratites also spoke a kind of truth? The tree may not have sent them falling, but as the separate trees became our city, history or the gods seem to have pushed their people ever to the bottom. It was the ratites who broke the taboo and the ratites who have suffered the most for the development of the four trees into one city.

In the tale of Aittel, Boskrea owes the ratites for its very founding. In the centuries since, Boskrea owes the ratite people a thousand times over. What tales and poems, what dances and songs will honor them?

About the author and the piece (click to expand)

Daniel Ausema tells us that this piece was rejected 13 times and was slated to appear in an anthology that was canceled before we got it. Daniel’s short stories have appeared in many publications, including Strange Horizons and Diabolical Plots. Stories in the same world as this one have appeared in Three-Lobed Burning Eye and Penumbra — together with other stories in this strange and decaying city, they form a mosaic novel that he has been pitching to various publishers. He is also a poet and novelist and can be found online at https://danielausema.com.

 

©2026 by Daniel Ausema. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.