Ka

by John Crowley

  Myself, I thought—and I told Dar Oakley this—that he had to go with them because he had once stolen from People the thing the Saints were really going in search of: endless life, the Most Precious Thing. It had been theirs, not his, and though he’d lost it, he kept it still; he couldn’t shed it, nor give it away. But perhaps it could be found again.

  He told me no, that wasn’t it; he said that if he told it that way, it would seem he knew more of his story, and of himself, than he did. All he knew then was that he must go.

  The Brother, of course, had assumed all along that Dar Oakley would go with him. The Brother believed that Dar Oakley was his.

  So they stood on the edge of the River Ocean and looked toward the far bank, which no one they knew had ever seen or stepped upon. Morning had risen, but the West into which they would go was still dark. Their boat lay up on the sands, and all the stores and goods, the leather bags of water and milk, the furnishings for Mass, the smoked fish, the blessed crucifixes, the Saints’ relics, the woolens and furs, were piled up by it to be put in.

  When they had prayed, they all chose new names to go out with on the sea.

  “I’ll be Bridget,” the female Saint said.

  “I’ll be Bran,” said the Brother, and struck his breast, as though to put the new name into his heart.

  “I will be Dylan,” said the third Saint with a little sob. “Powerful in swimming, lord of the sea.”

  “I will be Bran too,” said the kitchen-boy, and he balled his fists and stuck out his chin; but he wasn’t allowed. They let him be Little Bran, Branan.

  Dar Oakley was given no name; he had never told his name to the Brother. (I suppose no one on that day said that in the language of the sea-island People, Bran means Raven, a bird that many of the People believed Dar Oakley to be.) The four fisher People who had elected to go with the Saints kept their names, or at least never spoke up to change them.

  When all that was done and the stores readied, the boat had to be brought to the water. Four fisher People could carry a little boat to water by crawling beneath it and lifting it by the gunwales onto their backs; seeing them stumble down the beach had made Dar Oakley think of a dark, many-legged sea-beast. But the new boat couldn’t be carried that way; it was too large and long. So all the People, male, female, child, picked up the boat with their hands under the gunwales and all lifted and carried it together to the water.

  Turning the big boat upright without losing it on the water or holing the bottom on the shingle took some labor and scolding. When it was right side up (Dar Oakley marveling again, always, at the cleverness of People with their things, how they thought it all out, what would happen if it were done this way, or that way, how to make the ends they envisioned come to be the ends they got), the fisher People and the kitchen-boy stepped the mast and fixed the yardarm and the tied-up sail and put the tiller in the notch made for it and secured it. The others waded to the boat with supplies and stowed them, what should be near at hand, what could lie down deeper. Day was full. On the sands and on the headland above, more People had assembled to see the beginning of this voyage that they couldn’t know the end of. Dar Oakley watched them point and talk and shake their heads side to side as People did when puzzled or doubtful.

  Lastly, the Saints boarded and the oars were put in the oarlocks; Dar Oakley was taken aboard, borne on Brother Bran’s fist like a Dux’s Hawk, and set like a figurehead on the prow. His part was to point them to the islands of the North, and when those islands were passed, over the empty sea to the West.

  All the People had come down onto the beach, and many waded into the water to push the heavy-laden boat out to sea. Feeling the sudden free rise and fall of it, his heart cold with fear, Dar Oakley made the call Ka, and the Saints called too, and the People, already falling behind, cheered. Ka, Dar Oakley cried, thrashing his wings mightily: a challenge flung into far Ymr, where anything might be.

  It’s an ancient tale, an old possibility, or impossibility. Not so far away from where I now live are the dim remains of stone structures that are said to resemble similar ones on the other shore. Tablets marked with what might be runes that no People who later came here knew or used. Why do we wish it might be so? Do I wish it were so? If I do, it’s only because those Saints, if they really did come, went back again having done no harm; and so the People of this land were left alone till another thousand years had passed. Only one member of the party that set out that day came and stayed, and he’s still here as I write. Just now he’s regarding the day out my window, after a breakfast of spoiled liver. He is that one and he is not that one, and of course his stories are also only stories. And actually he can’t tell me if the Saints and the Companions ever made it even this far.

  They sailed first toward islands that the People had long been able to reach: where fish could be caught in good weather, where small settlements had long ago been built. The Brother warned them that all those on such islands would be pagans (Dar Oakley didn’t know what variant of People this word described), but as they came near one tiny island they heard a bell rung; and when they found an inlet where the boat could be run in, they saw far-off a Brother in white. But on seeing them, this Brother went away up the rocks and out of sight, and the voyagers were disappointed. They spent the night in the boat. In the morning Dar Oakley was sent out over the island to see if he could find a church and dwellings, but when he returned, the Brother couldn’t understand his report. The fisher People observing their exchange said nothing, but it was clear they thought the Crow was either a lying demon or just a bird.

  There was no reason to stay. They climbed up to where they saw a spring in a cairn of stones, and filled their water-skins, and went on. Green water changed again to blue. Dar Oakley pulled in his head and blinkered his eyes against the salt spray. That island had borne a crown of trees; he’d heard birds. Should he have quit when he had the chance?

  They knew, from sailors’ tales passed down and from the Brothers’ books, certain places they would likely come upon on the deep sea. There was an island, no one knew quite where, to which the pagan dead had once been carried on boats handled by living People, who crossed from the western lands with their pale passengers to the isle of the dead in a single night—their boats seemingly empty but sunk almost to the gunwales with unhappy souls, who could be heard wailing as they went. Once, on a starless night, they in the Saints’ boat did for a moment hear something, some sound, come over the faintly glowing sea. Not Dar Oakley, though. Prayers were said.

  Also, in a certain place in the sea there lies the enormous sleeping body of a Mermaid who floats forever there. Farther that way, toward the northernmost lands, there is a black mountain island of monstrous Smiths, who keep huge fires burning; and ever and ever they beat their iron and the sparks fly up into the smoky sky.

  Dar Oakley remembers the Mermaid, lying still and as white as sea-foam. The People exclaimed and pointed to her, afraid that they might wake her, but when they came close enough, it was clear to them that she wasn’t sleeping but dead, and indeed had been dead for so long that she had turned to stone: her great closed lids and her scaly tail and her breasts, all stone. Dar Oakley, who’s never been able to perceive the likenesses of People that People see everywhere, saw only a long, low, bare white island.

  At the island of the Smiths they saw the fires, and the sparks from the forges flung into the smoky air, and they smelled a dreadful smell; hot stones fell from the mountain into the sea and steamed. But they saw no Smiths.

  “This is a place thrown up out of Hell,” the Brother said. “I was there, I suffered, I was judged. A thousand thousand damned souls were thrust into that fire.” But they couldn’t see any damned souls, either.

  They came in sight of a small white island too bright in the sun even to look at steadily. When they came nearer to it, they saw that it breathed cold breath continuously as though alive, and they wondered if it was a great shapeless beast, like no beast they had ever seen; but when they re
ached it and pulled in under an overhang of it so close they could touch it, they found it was all made of ice: its breath was cold evaporation. Chunks of ice floated in the sea around their boat. They pulled in several and found them to be sweet water, broke them, and put the pieces in their leather water-skins.

  They came into a pod of Whales of huge size. One rose almost underneath them, all covered with warts and scuttling crabs and seaweed, and regarded them with a piggy eye. It blew out its warm breath from its head, which fell on them like a shower of rain.

  “Suppose,” the female Saint said, “we were to mistake it for an island, and put ashore there.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “And suppose we spent the night on its back,” said the other Saint, Dylan. “How would that be?”

  “And we lit a fire there!”

  They laughed more.

  “And the Whale felt the heat in his hide, and sank beneath us, and carried us down under the sea!”

  At that the Whale, as though offended at being talked of that way, did sink away; his huge tail lifted and spanked the water and wetted them all. They were silent then, and sorry it was gone, and the sea empty again.

  He can tell me now, Dar Oakley can, where they were when they met the Whales, or when any island was reached—or rather he can tell me that he knew where he was: in what direction the Abbey island lay, and the daywise land from which he had come at first with the Brother to that island to do his penance; where the black mountain of fire lay, which way to go to return to where they had come from. But he has no map: no sense of how far they went, how many days or weeks they traveled, how long they spent on this shore or that, what distance they traveled until they came to the Paradise of the Birds.

  By then it was midsummer, and as the Terns had promised, the sun didn’t set—or hardly set. It approached the world’s edge slantwise, as though unwilling to dip itself into the dark; and when it slid beneath the sea it soon came out again, and began to climb a long, low loop to its zenith and then to its setting-place again. Darkwise and daywise here weren’t toward night and day: but still Dar Oakley knew where he was.

  They had been far from land for an unmeasurable time, alone with the hiss of the water over the hull and the dull snap of the sail. They followed where Dar Oakley pointed, but where he pointed was more like nowhere at all than anywhere he had ever been. The sea was everything and he was nothing. The sea—it couldn’t be so but he felt it to be so—desired his nonexistence; it was like an Owl or a Falcon and meant to destroy him in order to increase itself.

  Then before dawn there were birds. The sailors couldn’t see them but Dar Oakley could; he left his place on the yardarm and flew toward the specks he saw here and there against a curdled sky. When he was high enough above the sea he saw more, darting, flitting, like leaves torn from winter trees. A strange hope filled him. More birds, seeming to be gathering toward a space of sea as faceless as any other. He called down to the Companions: Follow!

  It was the Terns. Through the day the boat of the Saints passed among them as they dove at the water’s surface and delicately plucked out fish, swallowed and returned or carried their catch away. There were other birds too, but not for Dar Oakley. He called and called, but not even the strange boatful of People seemed to interest them, only the wealth in the water. The fisher People pulled out their dragnet and fished too, laughing and tugging while the Saints pressed their hands together, looked upward, and gave thanks. What care God took of these his creatures, to feed them in the middle of the sea! For how could birds have found this rich place without his guidance?

  Over and over through that day and the next Dar Oakley went up, crying out words he knew in the Terns’ language. But the cloud of Terns was too thin, too far-spread—they had made a place here where there was no place, but it was a huge place. He looked up, down, around, thinking he might see one he knew—but had he ever known one, been able to tell one of them from another?

  He heard laughter.

  He looked up. Terns were above his head, floating effortlessly. They were laughing at him.

  One flew down close to him. Crow of your kind! it cried. Are you?

  Others came near, stalling and hovering and looking into his face. Crow of your kind! We know of you! Terns, Terns have told, if you see Crow, help, help! Here we are!

  They flitted away, apparently expecting him to follow. Other Terns came around him to laugh. Stop flap flapping, Crow of your kind! they said. Rise up, winds go your way! But he beat on, slow and awkward amid their dance; they couldn’t know that Crows can only coast briefly on air. He hoped they wouldn’t grow bored with him and fly away. He coasted, sank, beat, rose.

  All this time—Dar Oakley just then became aware of it—he and the boat of the Saints had been drifting apart. The strong current was bearing them one way, the wind above bore him another. Unless he dropped right now and beat toward it with all the strength he had, he’d be left out over the water with nowhere to land. He had to, right now.

  Then he felt the oddest thing.

  A Tern had come up beneath him, and bumped gently against his belly. Birds never touch in flight! Then another did the same. They were driving him—in fact they were bearing him—upward. These little birds—he weighed as much as four of them. When one tired, another came in, crying, Up! Up!

  What did they want, what were they doing? Carrying him up: to stop the beating of his wings, to lay him on the wind. They wanted him to fly as they did, use the wind as they did; they thought it was easy. This high sea wind: he perceived it suddenly as a being, a being around him, the wind, and a friend of theirs. And if he just stopped beating, that being might support him for a time, yes, if he pushed out his wings, yes, like this, the tips curled upward like a soaring vulture’s, and let the wind sweep over them—make the wind sweep over them, or ask it to. He’d flown all his life and never thought he might change the way he did it. But he’d better, for now he was hopelessly far from the boat, a tiny thing bobbing on the water far away. He was exhausted: rations had been short, he was wasted to nothing, which was perhaps what helped him stay aloft, a weightless black scrap on the wind. Hold me, take me.

  And out of the morning mists that the wind pulled away he saw land. A low blue-black island that might have been a cloud bank but wasn’t, was certainly not. The Terns were flitting and streaming toward it past him, and Dar Oakley could perceive other birds too homing in on the place.

  Just lie on the wind: all he could do or tell himself to do. The Terns stayed with him, unconcerned, diving down now and then to fish, calling cheerful insults to one another. Beat once, no more; then once again. It was clear he’d have to fall down through the contrary airs stirred up by the sea and the lump of land before he could reach a landing, and his strength was nearly gone. But that bare point, there, reaching out toward him—the Terns and others didn’t care for it, it seemed, but it was as far as he could go, if he could go that far. The sea smashed against it, pointlessly furious as always, maybe about to have him for itself at last. But no: he made it, tumbling down onto stone, bleak stone, alive. For a long time he lay unmoving, bill open, wings splayed like a dead Crow’s, barely breathing, feeling his heart run. Run, heart, run, just stay within me.

  After a time of not-being he felt movement around him, and sounds, and he thought that if there were predators here he was done for, and it wasn’t worth even opening his eyes to see something he couldn’t fight off. Then a sharp tap on his bill woke him fully. Terns around him; they laughed to see him startled. One hopped close on its weak little legs and thrust a piece of something into his mouth. Food. Fish. Something. He swallowed, and they laughed and nodded at each other, and one came with more food.

  They were feeding him. They had brought him to this safety, and now they were feeding him.

  It was against every instinct of self-preservation that the world obeyed, the instinct that ruled all beings, even People. It was the only time in all his existence that beings not of his own kind an
d close kin had given help to him with no advantage to themselves, anyway no advantage that he could imagine, and it would never happen again. He swallowed. He got more. They came and went from the rock they had borne him to; they seemed even to compete to be the ones who fed him. It was how the Brother said People should be and never were.

  They wanted him to fly. Fly, Crow of your kind! Up, up! When he roused at last, they urged him to follow, follow them, follow from the little point to the long beaches and high cliffs farther darkwise, all crowded with birds, raucous with birds. Dar Oakley once aloft could see the long bitten coastline running on farther than his sight could reach, and glistening heights that went up into the day and the sun. This was no sea island but a great land, the one the Terns had told him of: the place of the warm sun in the land of ice. As he came close, he saw that all over the scrubby earth beyond the shingle, in the grass and sand, Terns were raising young: the gray fuzzy chicks were everywhere, just able to toddle out of the shallow nest-holes, waving stubby wings. So many. The adults coming in a steady stream to feed them—how could they tell which were their own? Did they know, or did they just push sustenance into any open mouth they saw? If they all did that, would all the young be equally fed? Or was he wrong and each mother and father recognized each little beaky face as one of their own? He didn’t know, and doesn’t know now.

  They went on feeding him, though his strength had returned. He couldn’t fish for himself, which seemed evident to them, and they brought him fish and dropped them before him, even tried to stuff them in his mouth. They fed him like a chick of theirs. Certainly they hadn’t mistaken him for one; what caused them to do it? There was no word in the language of Crows to describe it; he thought there would be no need for such a word in the language of the Terns. And it wasn’t that he didn’t need or want their care: as far as he ventured back beyond the sun-warmed rocks and beaches, food was scarce—not much for Crows, and no Crows either that he saw, though he glimpsed a great Snowy Owl and wondered how it lived.