by John Crowley
How had the Brother escaped the judgment of the demon, Dar Oakley wanted to know. Well, the angel, blessed be she, had simply overruled the demon, and dressed the Brother in his priest’s garb again; and the demon in fury had flung the loathly burnt soul of the brigand at him, crying, Repent that!—and look, the black smuts of that were still on him.
“Oh,” said Dar Oakley.
It was toward evening on the third day that they parted, the Brother to go on to the Abbey now not far away, to confess all that he had done—as he now clearly remembered the angel had commanded him to do—and Dar Oakley to the night roost of his brothers and sisters. Both of them were apprehensive about their reception.
As he neared the old demesne, Dar Oakley detected Crows, all going one way, calling to others to follow, and he went after them. Soon he could hear calls from on ahead, where it seemed food had been found. The find was big, whatever it was. He’d likely find Va Thornhill there.
And there indeed he was. Atop something People had erected, made of lengths of wood and rope. People corpses were slung on it like killed Deer or Hares, ropes around their necks and binding their arms. Pretty far gone in decay. Crows upon them, searching for a grip in their filthy garb, putting their heads into breasts and bowels.
“Hello, Dar Oakley,” Va Thornhill called. “Where’ve you been?”
Dar Oakley didn’t answer that. He settled at a careful distance from the Bigger. “Your Wolves?” he asked.
“That’s right. As you see. There’ll be no more wealth to be had from them.”
“But,” Dar Oakley said, “here they are for you at least.”
Va Thornhill with a cold eye stepped sidewise along the gibbet toward Dar Oakley. “How true,” he said. He stepped closer. “You,” he said, “are one smart Crow.”
Dar Oakley moved off as many steps as Va Thornhill had come toward him, and his shoulder plumage rose. But the Bigger only laughed and lofted himself away, heavy with food.
Well, at least he hadn’t been driven off. Dar Oakley in the darkening day studied the dead brigands, eyeless and tongueless and burst-bellied. He was hungry. But— “You,” he said to one.
The Wolf-Bird brigand made no reply, though his single dangling eyeball turned toward the Crow. Dar Oakley spoke again, in the secret language of Ymr.
I know you, he said. I saw you, down there. Why are you out of Hell?
Why, this is Hell, said the lipless brigand; nor am I out of it.
CHAPTER THREE
For stealing the toe-bone of the Saint and giving it to the Dux his brother; for killing the outlaw with a sword; for going, without permission or preparation, into the Purgatorium of the lake island, where his immortal soul might have been lost; for keeping with him, in spite of all proscriptions, the Crow that had led him astray—for all these things the Brother was sent to the home Abbey of his order, which stood on a far sea island, there to live in solitude and penance for the space of five years.
High on the stone cliffs of that island’s western edge, on the flat stone shelf before his little cell, which looked like a large bee skep but was made of piled stones, the Brother sat chewing a fish-spine with a little goodness left on it and looking down at the beach below, where the waves crashed against the vast blocks of stone and were dissipated, over and over.
“I hate it here,” he said to Dar Oakley. He placed the fish bone before the Crow, who regarded it without joy.
After the hanging of the Wolves gang, when Dar Oakley’d found himself in bad repute with the Crows of that demesne, he decided that beginning again elsewhere might be easier if he followed the Brother, who would at least feed him if he was able. He could have had no conception of what awaited him.
The sea was terrifying. Even after he had snuck aboard the boat that carried the Brother to this island and put out, he couldn’t admit to himself that such a thing as the sea could exist. The blue-black waves topped with white fangs were like no water he’d ever seen, the vicious slap of them on the little boat’s flanks, their salt spittle, the creak of the oars in their locks and the groaning of the frame as though all of it suffered continuously—none of that was as bad as knowing that he was too far from land to return: there were no resting places for a Crow on the sea.
The Brother had once told him: the sea is the water round about the land. Even so Dar Oakley had believed that the land was large and the water was little. But it was the other way. From atop the Brother’s cell on the heights he could look over almost all of the Abbey island; but the sea lying all around went daywise to far shores dim as clouds, and darkwise as far as darkwise goes.
“I will die here before I have done all of my penance,” the Brother said. “And if I do die unshriven, what then? Damnation.”
Dar Oakley did not respond to this, having heard it before, many times. “Someone’s coming,” he said.
A figure with a staff and a bag was toiling over the rocks up toward the Brother’s cell, which was one among three nearly identical cells each facing away from the others. Inside each a Saint prayed and brooded. If they could avoid it, none of the three of them came out when either of the others was out. This visitor could be coming up to any one of them, to lay an offering of dried fish or meat, a loaf, some apples, at the door, and take away a blessing; but the Brother was the most popular of the Saints there, because of the tale he had to tell of the land underground, which grew more circumstantial the more he told it.
“Now she’s stumbled,” Dar Oakley reported, but the Brother didn’t turn to look. It was one of the bad days of his long penance. On some bad days he howled aloud in shame and boredom. “Ah, she’s up again now and coming along.”
With a wing beat he ascended away. Though he featured in the story the Brother told and retold, he knew that his actual presence nearby would be unsettling to visitors. Beneath him as he rose, turning, he could observe one Saint coming out of his cell, only to go immediately back in when the old woman appeared on the rocky track; and the Brother, retreating into his cell to await or avoid her; and the third Saint sitting oblivious on the cliff’s edge, face to the sky.
One Crow alone is no Crows: Dar Oakley was more alone here than the Saints were in their cells. In the island’s interior there were Jackdaws, and there were birds like Crows, who spoke a language Dar Oakley partly understood, and who lived like Crows—but rather than being solidly black, as he was, they were covered on backs and heads with pale-gray plumage. They looked to Dar Oakley like Crows wearing the hooded robes of Brothers. They showed no interest in him, didn’t respond to his calls. Heart-hurt—though he pretended to himself he didn’t care—he went away to where those hooded Crows didn’t usually go: the bare cliffs above the sea.
There were red-billed black birds nesting on the cliffs that might have been Jackdaws of a kind, playing games (he thought) on the fast-moving air. He saw now and then a few pairs of Ravens, flying high in their courtships, unconcerned with others—where they found provender he couldn’t ever learn.
A few People, too, lived by the sea. He’d observed them making their way down the cliffs to the beaches with care, always the chance of a loose stone or a misstep that would bring them tumbling over the sharp rocks; saw the timid young ones creep on their bellies to the edge of a high cliff, put their heads out and look over into the fearful height, in no danger at all of falling but clinging anyway to the turf as though to hold themselves on. He saw People let down on thick hairy ropes from the cliff-top to the ledges, where they gathered eggs or killed birds—sometimes such a one lost his foothold and was left spinning helplessly in air at the rope’s end and looking down.
But the rock-pools and the sea-winds were filled with birds, birds of kinds he’d never seen before, living in ways he couldn’t have imagined. He’d never had much interest in birds not his own kind—Crows do not. He had knowledge of the long-winged predators who had an interest in him; he knew when small birds laid eggs and hatched chicks—there was reason to know. Birds nameless to him had always b
een hidden in the trees around him; he’d heard their morning and evening chatter. Some were gone in winter, he didn’t know where, and returned from there in spring. He hadn’t pondered them.
These multitudes, though, he’d taken to studying. There wasn’t much else to do.
He loved how the gray-white shriekers, some black-capped, would hang stationary in the wind on their long cupped wings, studying the sea surface, then drop down and dip into the water and come out with a fish. Crows are agile enough, but Dar Oakley couldn’t do that—his wings rose, wanting to try, but he closed them, kept to his perch on the rocks. Black birds with bright-colored heavy bills crowded the rock ledges, so tightly packed together that one coming in to settle knocked off another. Those ones were fishers too. They were all fishers. Out at sea on rocks that lifted their brows above the water (yet sometimes didn’t; Dar Oakley had yet to understand the tides) were long-necked, long-beaked birds that leapt up and dove beneath the water, reappeared with prey, returned to their rocks and stood on long black feet, lifting their heads high for the caught thing to slither down their throats; then they spread their wings, apparently to dry them. Ducks rested placidly on the towering rolls of sea and dabbled as though on a pond. Shorebirds ran after the retreating waves to gobble worms or other food that appeared out of the sand for a moment, then turned to run away on sticklike legs from the next wave rushing up to collapse and sprawl over the sands.
The sea was full of food, if you had the means to get it, which Dar Oakley didn’t. Sometimes the incoming waves, which would never cease to alarm him, would fling onto the beach the bodies of dead fish, or of beasts of the sea as large as Boars, and the ashy-brown seabirds and their like would descend on them, squabbling like Crows, each out for itself—until Dar Oakley got up the courage to hop close and put his bill in, whereupon they’d join together to chase him off. Now and then he’d get a bite, minding his manners and staying at the margins.
And he listened.
Their speech wasn’t his, or like any birds’ he knew. But he began to learn it, and copy it. The pale-gray birds with black caps, the ones he most admired, never squabbled over dead things; they ate only at sea, hovering on wings sharp-angled as a Falcon’s until (like a Falcon) they’d close those wings with delicate precision and plummet toward the water—and into it, with hardly a splash, to emerge in a moment with a silver wriggling something; and again. Their bills were narrow and sharp and bright red. They could spend long times aloft, never tiring, rising and falling on the airs that rose from the cold sea and the sun-heated rocks, and when they gathered on the cliffs, they yakked and shrieked as though laughing together at their own careless prowess. Their words filled him with the same strange pleasure and longing as the Brother’s words for invisible and holy things once had. Now and then one would cast an eye at Dar Oakley on his perch, and take a little notice—he was something they didn’t see always—and he’d beck, and call what to his own ears sounded like their high call: but they couldn’t grasp that, or didn’t care to respond.
Some seabirds had a trick that reminded Dar Oakley of the Crows in his former land: they’d take up shellfish (it had been snails where he came from) and drop them from a height on a carefully chosen rock to break the shells and get the wealth. It was a good game, and it required some nice calculation: drop the thing from too low, and it wouldn’t break; drop it from too high and a thief might slip in and get to the tidbit before you could.
Dar Oakley had been a player back home, and (he thought) not so bad a one either. The way to play was to pretend no interest, peck around nearby looking elsewhere, but ready to take flight as soon as the shell was dropped. The things the dirt-colored birds dropped were strange to him—black or gray, some like pebbles that seemed to contain nothing, others large and hard that needed a big fall, allowing time for a snatch: like that one just now.
He played it perfectly: the shell of the thing—whatever it was—cracked neatly on the flat rock, bounced once, and came apart, and Dar Oakley was there and had the salty bit and was away before the shrieker was close. It was too fat and sloppy to swallow in flight, and a fragment of shell was stuck to it, he’d have to settle somewhere out of sight—
Dar Oakley sensed more than saw the bird closing on him, not from above but from below—what? Who? Not the original possessor of the shellfish. Its head came into sight near his—a long white head, a bill hooked like a predator’s, it snapped at him as Dar Oakley banked away, evading. Were there birds here that caught and ate other birds? He hadn’t thought so. But this cold-eyed one was certainly big enough. Bill clamped on his morsel, Dar Oakley couldn’t cry threats at it; he dropped low, but so did the other, a strong flier, better than he. He banked, rose, fell. The big bird followed, harrying; when its face came unbearably close to his, Dar Oakley couldn’t help opening his mouth to shriek, losing his bit of breakfast, which the other bird snatched as it fell.
It instantly lost all interest in the Crow, and winged away. Dar Oakley glimpsed its yellow eye, dulled now, job done.
He had been chased out over open water by the robber, and turning back now toward the shore, he saw a band of the red-billed birds on a pillar of rock. They were laughing extravagantly—at him, Dar Oakley was sure.
Skua! they shouted. Skua! Then laughed some more.
Dar Oakley, exhausted, hungry, afraid of the sea below, let himself fall toward those rocks poking out of the waves like People’s towers. He’d seen birds of different kinds ganging together there; why not he? He got a grip on a perch slimy with white droppings, looked around, and laughed himself. Ka ka ka ka! Funny! Fooled me! He tried out the sound they’d made, and the red-bills, delighted, called back: Skua, they cried, and nodded at one another.
It was the first word of their language Dar Oakley learned; Skua, the name of the robber-bird. He’d learn more soon enough.
Skua is what my bird book calls that bird that lives by harrying others into dropping their catches. A Skua will take eggs and baby birds if it can, but what it’s known for is driving close to the head of a Gull or Puffin or other bird, causing it to shriek in fear or anger and lose what it holds. It might be a Norse name—but the red-bills’ own name for it, which Dar Oakley shouted in telling me the story, sounds enough like Skua to my ears that I’ve used it. The next name he learned—the name the birds called themselves—is one I can’t spell out, but I can give the name they have in Ymr: they were Terns. More exactly, they were Arctic Terns, pausing there on their long yearly voyage. The way they live, the story of their life, is as remarkable to me as it was to Dar Oakley learning of it then. It hasn’t changed. And unlike many other stories he’s gathered from here and there, from then and now, from People and from birds and beasts, theirs is true. If it weren’t, Dar Oakley would likely not have come across the sea to here.
He never could learn to tell one Tern from another, and wondered sometimes whether they could tell themselves; or, if they could, whether they cared, whether it mattered to them. Crows flock, Crows gang, but they have freeholds they defend and families they know. The Terns all lived together, flung in a great rippling swathe over the cliffs, calling together, ascending and descending in waves. They thought it was hilarious to have him among them on their whitened rocks, big and black and slow and stupid—for we always think that those who don’t know what we know are stupid.
What is your kind? they asked him, again and again.
Crow, he’d say.
No, no, not you, not you a Crow!
Yes.
A Crow of what kind?
My kind.
Where are your kin, your ones, your others?
Far away.
They laughed and laughed to hear that: far away. They called it to other Terns, and they laughed too. For what could any Crow know of far away?
When he began to learn their language and imitate it, he heard enough to know that they weren’t always here, that this wasn’t their home, only a stop on an immense journey from world’s end to world’s
end.
Does the world have an end?
Yes, yes, they cried, oh yes, two ends, one end at each end, the end and the other end. Did you think you could go on forever ever? No, not!
They told Dar Oakley how Terns went from far to far, from one end of the world to the other. From the end they’d come from, all the way to the end to which they went.
They told Dar Oakley that if you go as far as they, you come at last to where billwise ends, and the land of the end of the world is all made of ice. And if you go the other way till the other way ends, a land all ice again.
Why not just stay here? he asked.
No! Too cold, too lean!
Then why go to lands of ice?
They told him—they argued and shrieked so that he could barely understand, much less believe—that in summer the ice lands are warm, and that’s because summer goes down the world day by day until it reaches the farthest lands. Did he know how the sun stays long in the sky in summer, or was he too dull to have noticed? Well, there in the ice lands, in the depths of summer, the days are so long that the sun never sets at all. They believed—though they are never there to see it—that in the days when the sun never sets in the billwise land of ice, it never rises at all at the world’s other end. Always day for Terns! Nice!
Dar Oakley said that such a thing couldn’t be, no matter how big the world was. It couldn’t be.
Oh yes! Great lands to billwise! they cried. Lands darkwise, too, that can’t be crossed, too big. So big a world. And Terns everywhere to tell about it. They laughed to see him baffled. Lifted by their laughter as on the sea-wind, they rose away from him to go to sea and feed, lifting his heart away with them.
It’s the longest seasonal migration in the kingdom of the birds: this I’ve learned. When autumn comes, the Arctic Terns set out from nesting grounds within the Arctic Circle, go out over the islands of the North Atlantic where Dar Oakley encountered them, down along the coast of Africa and out over open sea for a thousand miles to Antarctica, where spring will have just come. The seas are rich with food. There they molt entirely and regrow their plumage. As the days grow shorter in March, they return as they went, and reach the summer lands of the North. There, at the edge of the ice, they lay their eggs in scrape-hole nests on the ground, and when the young are fledged and the days grow short, they all fly south, adults and young, on their circling journey.
