The Girl With Plumed Eyes

One day a man was walking through the marketplace of the city and overheard that in a certain house a woman was for sale who had feathers in the place of eyelashes. Intrigued, he finished his business quickly and walked over to the house of sale.

The merchant, who knew the man well, seated him and offering sweet coffee and figs, told the girl's story.

She was a peasant girl from a mountain village to the east. By all accounts her childhood had been without incident until, upon reaching the age of womanhood, feathers had appeared around her eyes. The village priest was immediately called by her anxious family, without result. Old women crossed themselves when the feathered girl came to draw water at the public well. Small boys threw stones at her. Her betrothed returned the ox that had sealed the wedding pact. Her family then sold her to the first trader passing through. She was mute, the merchant said, though he did not know whether she had always been so, or if this was an added effect of her transformation.

The man asked to see her. She was brought in veiled, then unwrapped like a parcel piece by piece. The man fought back disappointment. Everywhere he looked on her body, bones clamored for his attention. He saw that her fingernails were broken and cracking, her skin harsh and brown as a man's. Puberty had ignored her thin flanks and high, boyish teats. Then the merchant removed the final veil from over her face. And the man saw that the storied wonder was true, and a trembling possessed his body.

Around the girl's eyes, which were large and nearly black, waved the tiniest of plumes, in the dusky pink of closed alcona flowers in his garden at home. They framed the eyes in unbelievable softness and delicacy, as if all of the womanliness in the thin girl's body had been concentrated there in favor of the usual places. He paid the merchant's asking price without a murmur and took her away with him that very afternoon.

He directed his steward to install her in an apartment on the upper floor of the house, facing east, away from the intrigues of his other wives and concubines. Two maids were engaged to dress her and tutor her in the accomplishments of a lady. He then put her from his mind for the next month.

When at the end of this time he came up to her rooms to check on her progress, he found the two maids delighted with their silent pupil, and eager to show her off. They had taught her, they said, to eat with the tips of her fingers, and to pour wine as gracefully as a queen. Her needlework was yet plain, but very sturdy and even, and they did not despair of teaching her to dance a little. When the man watched the girl enter the room, he was very pleased. Her angles now curved; even her newly-cut hair curled slightly at the ends. The feathered eyes were, miraculously, as beautiful as he remembered. He picked up one of her hands as the maids explained how they had stuffed her with cheese and honey to round her out, and soaked her hands in oil of roses for days at a time to soften the calloused skin. He told them they had done well. The hand he held was plump and smooth. It did not look as if it had ever drawn water or chopped wood.

What the man loved about women (and he was proud of his reputation as a great lover and protector of women) was their difference from himself. "You see, I am active and hard. So they must be soft. I must pore over accounts through the long hours of the night. So while I am with them, I like to see them treat gems worth a king's ransom as trifles. I am dark from the sun, riding in the fields so that the harvest of grain that will feed them will be brought in; they must then be pale as the moon. If I must sweat, they must give off vapors like the flowers in the garden," he told his friends, gesturing through the open window as they sat together after dinner. "Else why did Almighty God create two sexes?" All nodded, blowing from their pipes rings of smoke that were blue as the clouds on the mountains.

A little drunk, he came to her bed for the first time that night. She had been a virgin and wept when it was done. The tears caught in the feathers and trembled there. "You adorn yourself with more beautiful jewels than I can ever give you, my soul," he said and kissed her. She did not seem to understand and continued to weep.

He came to entertain his guests in her apartments, smiling behind his hands at their wonder when the plates of sesame cakes and butter-thick pastries were presented by the slender bird-eyed girl. He required her never to lower her eyes in the fashion of other women, common women. One man, a foreigner from the west, asked permission to sketch her standing out on the balcony with the wind in her hair. She stood straight and still under the painter's eyes, and the man felt his heart swell with pride.

One night as the man approached her apartments, one of the maid stepped out of the door with her brow creased. The man stopped her and asked what was the matter. The servant hesitated, then confided in a low voice that the young lady seemed to be losing her hair.

He ran in to find the girl still at her dressing table. He slipped his hand down the back of her heavy scented mane, and sure enough, the lock stayed in his hand when he drew away. His chest tightened as he thought of the feathered girl robbed of the glory of her hair, imagining brittle hennaed wigs, until he looked down to the place where he had pulled away the hair. A long dark blue plume was slowly unfurling itself underneath.

Shouting with joy, the man gave orders to brush her hair as vigorously as possible. By morning her head was covered with a veil of midnight blue plumage, her feet heaped over with discarded hair.

The man had spent his night in his library, among the works of ancient scholars and travellers who described creatures no longer seen in these climes: weretigers, lizardwomen, goats with the heads of lions. He pored over scroll after scroll, trying to catch what she was becoming. None of the authors described such a bird as was caged under his roof. In desperation he thumbed through the sacred texts as well, the ones that catalogued the angels in heaven, the spirits under the earth and the demons in the rivers, but the girl was not included there either.

He found that when he teased her, called her "chicken girl" and made her angry, all the feathers on her crest rose up as she paced around the room. Then when he soothed her, she shook her head and shoulders in a strange fashion, and the feathers subsided into a smooth wave down the back of her neck. He visited her nearly every night. His younger wives protested, tried to bribe servants to slip poison into her food, while the older wives laughed and said that his queer passions never lasted for long.

One night, perhaps a month after her hair had moulted, he lay in her bed after stroking her feathers and told her to put out the lamp. She turned and reached up - he saw a flash of red under her arm. He caught the arm in its upright position and examined. Yes, there was a layer of delicate red down where hair had once been. With a hope, he dove his hand down between her legs and cried out in triumph when he felt the unmistakable softness of feather. The girl shuddered. He threw back the covers, took the lamp off its stand and brought it close to her exposed body. Yes, red like the dawn, red like the wines she poured...

In the morning, he plucked a feather from above her eye, one from under her arm, another from her head, and put them in a small pouch. When the affairs of the morning were done, he went down to the docks where the men who had sailed to distant lands smoked. He showed them his feathers and asked if they had ever seen such plumage on a bird. No, not one of them had. One said he had seen the phoenix, whose feathers were gold and black like enamel, but never had he seen such feathers. When they questioned him about where he had found them, he withdrew hastily. Trembling with excitement, he went to a dark bar where the stevedores drank in the heat of the day and bought their brilliant foreign birds from them. He told the maids, "Perhaps she has forsaken human speech in favor of bird speech. Perhaps she will talk with them," as he hung up the cages in her room.

But to everyone's surprise, the girl hated the caged birds. In the morning when they all burst forth in song, she clamped her hands over her ears (which were gradually pulling into themselves like snails) and thrust her shining blue head under a pillow. Sometimes one of the maids set a cage out on the balcony to air, and then the girl would not go out, though it was her favorite occupation to lean on the low stone railing and gaze at the mountains in the distance. She wept bitterly when the man came to see her at night, pulling on her head feathers and gesturing to the cages with her eyes, as if to say that it was bad enough to become one of them without having to live with them as well. Reluctantly he consented to remove the cages from her room.

His joy soon returned. Down began to sprout all over her body in patches, here pale green, there brindled gold. He ran his hands up and down her body again and again until the sensations of skin and feather blended together in one texture more sublime than either alone. He held her breasts in his hands where the down was as soft and pale as the skin that had been there before. He remembered how when he was a boy, he threw stones at the pigeons in the courtyard. Once he picked up one of the wounded birds and held it beating in his small hands. After coupling, she panted the same way it had, silently, and he felt the same ability to cherish or destroy this tender creature with the simple weight of his hands.

Then came the spring rains, which threatened to wash away everything on the estate. The man found himself obliged to be away from the house for a week, directing the construction of dams, the rescue of livestock and the preservation of topsoil. When at last the danger was past, he took a hot bath in his chambers and donned his finest white wool garments, to climb up to the plumed girl's rooms under the eaves.

He found the maids in the corridor giggling. "You'll hardly recognize her, sir!" they greeted him. And the most precious words of all... "The last of her feathers have grown in." He did not stay to hear more, shouldering past them into her room.

The girl perched on the balcony, her sure feet gripping the stone railing. The man stood stock still. He had never seen her so beautiful. Truly her feathers were more magnificent than those of natural-born birds. The sun caught on them as if they were roughly cut jewels, the afternoon revealing each color freshly invented for the purpose. And how her body had shifted to accommodate her new plumage, the tender hollow of her back jutting out into tail feathers, her center of gravity shifting downwards... And her wings! How he marvelled at her wings as she slowly spread them, as if blessing the garden beneath her. He could hardly believe how right she looked as a bird. With this thought, his desire intruded, and he stepped forward to call her back into the room. She turned back and smiled -- but no, this he must have imagined, because only soft red lips can smile, not the hooked and polished beak of a bird of prey. Before the man could force a word up through his closed throat, her wings had caught the wind, and she was flying surely and steadily east. She was never seen again.

The man was ruined. He searched for her in ever widening circles, disappearing for days, weeks, even months at a time. He even made the long journey to her family's village on foot and wandered around the mountains of her birth, never finding so much as a moulted plume or an abandoned nest. When he returned home after years of searching, no one of his household recognized him. The servants set the dogs on the unknown vagabond.

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