Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  So that’s how Dar Oakley, who wished to go to a place where there are no Crows, became of all the Crows a traveler for real, and without flying far, to pass from his own realm into another, a realm so distant that life and death were different there, and then come back again with news of it, if back was where he came to. He believes that he was the first and only being not of Ymr to know such a realm—and though it may be that he’s wrong about that, he is certainly the first and only Crow to go on passing between Here and There from that far time down to this. How that long power or burden came to be his is the story that he tells—it might as well be called the story that he is.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When more years had passed, the Singer of the Lake People died. Though he had told the People that he would never die, that he was incapable of dying even if he wanted to, the People knew how to hear these words: they understood that like all the remembered dead he would forever be among them, that he would reach for their hands out of the places where he rested or feasted or went journeying (not far away, in fact as near to themselves as their own skins), and by his touch remind them of the honors still due him and of the many stories and sayings he had given them; and they in turn would take the hands of the unimaginable invisible ones who were not yet born but waited to be, one of whom would be the Singer again, at least in part, returning to them with new teaching and new help.

  His dying took a long time. Long before it came near, he had knowledge of it. There was time, then, to make provision, to bring about what the People of that place would need when he wasn’t any longer among them noon and night.

  There was the locating and circumscribing of forest groves where certain willful and tricksome powers known only to the People could be both honored and confined—Dar Oakley saw that some of the places were ones that Fox Cap had feared to enter when she was a child. His Crow mind could not perceive the faces and forms the Singer and the People cut into certain trees as warnings; but the warnings weren’t meant for his kind anyway.

  There was the education of Fox Cap to complete. Dar Oakley only knew that this education was going on because of what she told him, and he understood little of it as well; but for long days she was with the Singer in his house, and even when she was with Dar Oakley, she wasn’t with him as she had been. What had always divided them—that she saw the world as full of beings alive and alert and looking at her, and he saw few, all of them in their ordinary bodies—only grew. She had come away from the realm where he’d sought and found her, but in another way she hadn’t, and remained there still.

  “When you think about me and tell others about me,” she said, “you mustn’t say ‘she’ any longer. You must say ‘he’ instead.”

  He considered her from where he stood on a rock by the lake’s water. The wrappings that all People wore were different for males and females, and the ones she wore were both and neither now.

  “Why would I need to name you, or say ‘she’ when I think about you?” he asked. “And who would I tell about you?”

  She seemed not to hear him. “I can’t be as I was,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  She looked sidewise at him as though she thought he must know why not, but then her eyes went elsewhere, to something that was not before her.

  “Snakes shed their skin,” she said. “They come out new.”

  “New but the same,” he said.

  She thought. “Then I don’t know why. But it’s so.”

  The weakness and dimness that had possessed her in the Happy Valley had long passed, but she had grown strangely tall and long and thin, her legs and arms like bare bones sheathed in skin and tendon, her torso narrow as a Weasel’s and as limber. Her Fox cap she had hidden away and no longer wore. Only her own russet pelt and brows.

  “Well, I can talk that way if you like,” Dar Oakley said. “But talking can’t change that. Can’t change she into he.”

  She slid down the muddy lake-edge to a pool where she’d seen a thing growing whose leaves or root she wanted. When she had it and broke a leaf and sniffed it, she put a handful into a skin pouch slung over her bare chest. “It’s because I can’t be called ‘neither,’ ” she said. “But that’s what I am.”

  Dar Oakley wanted to say that in the language of Ka there was a way to speak of beings whose sex you didn’t know—it was so often hard to tell—though it wasn’t used if you knew them, no.

  “All right,” he said.

  She looked up at him from where she squatted in the wet, and he down at her, and an understanding grew between them: that they were both beings different from others of their kind, but not wholly different, and in that knowledge the difference between the two of them was lessened.

  In the long days of his last summer among his People, the Singer liked to be taken up on the rocks that broke out of the mountain’s base and into the rolling lands. A strong man carried him to the high ledge there, and when he could no longer cling to that man’s back, two men carried him in a bed of wood lashed with hide rope and withies. Fox Cap followed, and where Fox Cap went, Dar Oakley went. Often the two People sat so long in still silence that Dar Oakley couldn’t bear it, and he flew off fast and far, rolling over in the air to shed the tension; but he came back—often to find them talking together.

  “When we came here,” the Singer said to them, and his voice (which Dar Oakley knew now almost as well as he knew Fox Cap’s) was as strong and sweet as ever, “when we came to this place by that water, we were always sad, because our dead were not with us.”

  “Yes,” Fox Cap said. From the ledge the lake could be seen, and also the way toward the region the People had once come from.

  “Our houses had been built near where theirs were built, and we lived beside them. Then we were driven away, and they remained.”

  He lifted a hand to where Dar Oakley stood on an outcrop, a little way off so as not to presume. “Crows have no houses,” the Singer said. “They may have places where they live, but a house, listen, a house has a place where it lives.”

  Dar Oakley wondered if he should take this ill, but since he hardly understood it, he decided no.

  “We hoped to go back one day,” Fox Cap said. “That’s why.”

  The Singer nodded, so slowly that Dar Oakley wondered if he was dissatisfied with what Fox Cap said.

  “Hear me now,” he said, and his eyes were lidded. “Our dead should be with us. Not drowned or wandering in the air or the forest. Not far away, either, in the places of our enemies, who can break into their houses, despoil the dead, scatter their bones.”

  “They would never dare!” Fox Cap cried.

  “I wish that they don’t,” said the Singer. “But I’ve seen them, our old dead, put out to wander the trackless places.” He put out his hand to draw Fox Cap closer. “Whether this has happened, or is still to come, I don’t know.”

  Fox Cap rose suddenly from his side as though to take some action, but she only went to where the rock ledge ended and stood looking out, fists clenched. When she turned again, her face was—well, what was it? How hard it was to understand their faces! So much harder than to see the clear single meanings in a Crow’s regard. Her face was like her fists.

  The Singer’s eyes closed. After a time those whose task it was this day to carry him made their way up the steep path, and seeing them, Dar Oakley rose away. He never assumed that People coming his way meant him no harm, and doesn’t assume it still.

  At last the Singer ceased to come out of his house. Fox Cap was among those who were with him when he died, or seemed to die—she was unwilling to be so definite about it in speaking to a Crow. But Dar Oakley saw him carried out from the palisade, dead as dead. The People came around him, and with their music as Dar Oakley had learned to name it, a word of Ymr that had no cognate in Ka, they bore him from the village and up to the ledge of rock where he had liked to sit. Those who carried him, and those who went along beside, pointed out the single Crow that followed their tedious progress.r />
  Already built there—Dar Oakley had from a distance watched it being made—was a frame of thick boughs lashed strongly together, as high as Fox Cap’s head. Up onto this thing the bearers and others who could get near enough to lay a hand on the bed heaved the Singer’s carcass, and laid it there on its back, the bare face upward. Dar Oakley watched this from a high place, and when the People began again their skull-shaking noise, he went higher. From beside the bier (no word for that in Ka), Fox Cap spied him. She left the People and began to climb the rocks up to where he was. She had the fistlike face. What did she want of him? Should he get away? Down on the ledge they were pushing away the wrappings and strings of beads and shells from the Singer, exposing the long white flesh.

  “Call your kind,” Fox Cap called up to him. “Call them all now to come!”

  Dar Oakley’s bill opened, but he couldn’t ask Why.

  “It’s his gift, Crow!” Fox cap called. “His gift to you because you brought me home. To you and your kind. Don’t you see?” She flung her arm back toward the body lifted above the ground.

  Bared, and lifted up to where no prowling, crawling things would reach it, no Dogs, no Hogs. Only fliers.

  Yes, he saw.

  “Yes,” he cried to her. “Yes, I will!”

  Crows, who get much of their living from carcasses, haven’t the strength to get into them, not the big rich ones. They need the help of a carcass opener: a Bear, or a Lynx, or a Wolf, or the carcass’s own decay—but decay is not quick.

  On the first day of the Singer’s lying out alone on the bier on the ledge, some cautious Crows visited, summoned by Dar Oakley—hadn’t he led them to good things, hadn’t he changed their lives, and why were they dawdling on the ground eating bugs?—but there was little to get after the eyeballs were eaten and the black tongue tugged at. The People stayed away from the ledge of rock so that the Crows when they came would not be startled or intimidated, and over the next day and the next more came in, only to fly off again.

  Fox Cap was always there. She sat still, and sometimes covered her face; sometimes it seemed she spoke to someone. The few Crows at the Singer’s livid corpse were accustomed to her and paid her no mind; she wasn’t one of the children or the bent old ones who shooed birds from the grain or from meats drying by the fire. But when none of the Crows had done or been able to do the work required, she stood; she took up a fighter’s broad weapon, and clambered up onto the bier. Her face was wet. The Crows ascended with cries, surprised. After a moment—for gathering strength, overcoming reluctance, how would Crows know?—she lifted that weapon in both hands and drove it into the Singer’s breast beneath the bone. Bad airs were released, the bloated stomach sank. Fox Cap, crying strange cries, cut as far as she could down the Singer’s trunk, then cut across from side to side, pushing the skin and fat open with the flat of the weapon; the body jerked with the force of it and one arm was flung out. She threw the sword from her and climbed down and went to lie facedown on the rock ledge with her hands crossed over her head as though to hold it in place.

  All this the fleeing Crows in bits and scraps related to Dar Oakley, who was winging in on his rounds.

  So it was now. Dar Oakley called, the others called, Crows answered and came. A small black Crow crowd or cloud formed, and before day was done, they were clamoring at the bier, fighting for footholds, rising up and settling again. Dar Oakley too. Hungry too.

  The yellow fat under the skin, exiguous in a wasted old man; the thicker fat beneath the kidney skin, better. Ripe fruit of pancreas and liver; the Crows had no special words for such parts, knew only the good and the less good. The stronger and bigger Crows muscled aside the others and tore away the bags of tissue that held the wealth, and when the Biggers were sated for a moment, the younger and smaller ones would get theirs. Dar Oakley got no deference for being the one who’d led them here, but he found himself at the middle of them, foot and bill deep within his former traveling companion, if indeed this was the same being as that—what answer would he get if he asked? Even as he thought that weird thought the eyeless sockets began to regard him, and the slack jaw tried to speak. Then there was a Dar Oakley there who went on partaking of the food, and another Dar Oakley who listened to the Singer’s voice; and the deeper he worked his way into the Singer, the clearer he heard it: until at last he understood how large was the gift the Singer had offered, and what he, Dar Oakley, had to do to secure it.

  “Go!”

  That was Fox Cap, risen, arms wide, face raised to them all.

  “Go!” she cried again, waving them off. “Go, take him! Take him there, all you, bear him, carry him!”

  The Crows arose, angry or baffled or unwilling, and Dar Oakley yelled at them in their own tongue, Go! Go! Now! They couldn’t refuse that. The black cloud formed with a thudding of wings and as one being they went this way, then that. Where? they called, and Here! Dar Oakley called. The Crows all in a gesture turned in the air over Fox Cap, whom they saw turn below them with the turning earth; Dar Oakley, winging out from amid them, went toward the lake glittering in the last light far away.

  He felt the Singer beside him, or upon him, and he knew where he was to go even as he heard the Singer name it. The Crows complained, but had no reason not to follow as Dar Oakley led them to that tuft of trees and rock that was the island in the middle of the lake. People on the shore or out on the surface of the water in their boats with their nets, People who had long disliked the thieving Crows that stole their fish, looked up; but the Crows passed on, skimming the evening water, until at strength’s end they drove into the dimness of the trees.

  Dar felt a weight that was not a weight drop from him there.

  The other Crows, nearly but never quite colliding, found perches, still yelling. Why did we flee? What was that for? That was good eating! Where are we? What’s that Crow up to? I’m so scared now! They flitted and shat and told one another to shut up, shut up.

  Dar Oakley tried to yell over their voices, but gave it up and only waited. From his place in an Alder he looked down into the clearing, expecting to see . . . what? Something, some arrangement of stones, that he had seen when last he’d come here. But when had that been? It went away even as he thought it.

  Listen! he cried. Don’t talk, listen!

  That took a while, and even when they were quiet, he could hardly begin to explain before being mocked or cried down in incomprehension. And how could it be otherwise? How could he tell them what he knew, that the People died different deaths than Crows did, that they went on beyond their deaths, in some realm neither place nor not, yet to which they must be somehow guided or carried or borne? And that it was the Crows who now were to do that service for them?

  Across the water the People casting nets from their boats heard the commotion, and wondered at it, as People down through the ages have wondered about Crows yelling together, what are they carrying on about?

  But there had never been a colloquy like that one. It went on till night put an end to it and continued again when it was light; it was carried on from the island to the river, from one end of the demesne to the other and through the new freeholds that Crows were claiming near the People’s spreading settlement. Some talked of running Dar Oakley off far and for good, a danger to all of them—though it was hard to say just what that danger was—and others defended Dar Oakley and his idea, insofar as they understood it. It would be good for Crows! They wouldn’t wait for long seasons between one battle and the next, they wouldn’t be driven off the body of a child drowned and washed up on the lakeshore—remember that? They wouldn’t be cursed or given signs of hatred by the People at their smokehouses and middens, no, because the People knew that when they themselves died, a congregation of Crows would guide them to where they should be, and cry in mourning all the way. There was no such place? There could be no such place? What did that matter? Of course there was no such place—but that’s the place they had borne that white-haired being to—so the People believed—and if t
he Crows could somehow carry him off and also return and go on picking at his carcass on the rock ledge till there was no good left in it, and that didn’t confuse the People, then why should it stop the Crows? To eat them is to carry them!

  In the end no decision was come to, or needed to be. Crows do what profits them. It may be that some grasped what Dar Oakley said or described about the People; some who did thought it ridiculous, hilarious, and still do; and some—Dar Oakley’s Younger Sister, of all Crows!—were silent and almost sorry for the People in their never-ending deaths. Another world to suffer in!

  What Dar Oakley never told them—what he could hardly tell himself—was that he had entered that impossible place or state, and returned. The Happy Valley. He, a Crow, had been in two places at once, but remained always himself. There was no explaining that: not in Ka. They in Ka would long believe they were simply playing a wonderful trick on the living People, and Dar Oakley wouldn’t tell them that perhaps (as in the many stories the Crows tell of Crows outsmarting themselves) the trick was in the end on them.

  It is strange that beings who have no dead themselves, who shun death, who hardly know that they’ll each die someday, should have got that task, and kept to it for so long. Now there’s no call for such service, not in those parts of the world nor hereabouts, either. I wonder if they’re glad to have given it up, or if they even remember—all but one—how long they did it.

  “Now what are they up to?”

  A season had passed since the Singer’s transit. Three Crows sat on the dead branch of a tree a fair distance from the village, able to see clearly what the People did, but not why. One was named Kits, one was Cuckoo’s Egg, the third was Two Mates.

  “Those are the trees they knocked down last summer, cut up small.”

  “They are?”

  “Yes, those that they’re putting in the holes they’ve dug.”

  “With the stones.”