Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  He couldn’t find Kits in the winter roost, or among the Crows gathered at good feeding sites. He tried to ask after her, to learn who had seen her that day or the day before—but names were still new among the Crows, and the saying of her name brought no one to mind for most of them. Her children—or were they her children’s children?—could tell Dar Oakley nothing.

  She could have been lost anytime, he knew, in the years he had been in the Other Lands—so many things could have happened. But no, he hadn’t been gone long, only so long as it took to reach that man-shaped mountain, and return again.

  He saw her everywhere, of course: amid the Crows dismantling the bones of an old Dog whose corpse the People had dragged away from their dwellings; arguing over a dead Salmon by the water; walking the People’s bare fields in search of wintering grubs—none of them were her, none turned her head toward his call.

  Well, she was smart and tough, she went her own way. She’d return when she liked—and mock him for fretting about her, for thinking the worst, which often he now did think when winter nights came down, and the noisy roost settled, and the snow was pink in the last light of the short sun. He felt he was without half of himself.

  It was worse when spring came.

  He knew by then that he would never find her or see her again—for if he could have, he would have: she would have found him. Yet still he believed that she’d appear again, any day, because of how much he needed her to. That was what did the harm, knowing the one, believing the other. He thought it would kill him, that spring, but it didn’t; and when the next spring and the next came, he knew it wouldn’t. It was no longer something terrible happening to him, it had begun rather to be something terrible that once had: and that was bad in a different way, and would never be gone.

  In time the one whom only Dar Oakley now called Fox Cap really did grow old, though Dar Oakley didn’t. She took the Singer’s name for her own, not telling anyone what it was, not even Dar Oakley. Her daywise eye stayed as blue as a baby Crow’s, and with it on certain days of the year she could see what others couldn’t: the recent dead, striving to return or remain, unwilling to be gone for good. She never took a mate, no wife or husband, though (as the Singer had done) she drew to herself young ones who were unfamilied, unfriended, and from them she chose one to teach what she knew, the long songs and the knowledge of the tripartite world that Dar Oakley could not absorb. Of herself she could sing, as the Singer had once sung, I am a wave on the water:

  I am a tale yet to be told

  I am the eye of midsummer

  I am the flash of the Trout

  The Viper has heard my name

  For I am the honey of the Yew

  When she had lived a long life, and her settlement had grown great, with many dwellings and herds of animals and even a king in a tall whitewashed castle, with ground glass and mica in the wash to make it glitter in the low sun like the dwellings in the Other Lands, Fox Cap died.

  But Dar Oakley did not.

  When her death came near, Fox Cap went to a cave high in the stony mountain, where she was visited every day by one or another of the young People she had taken into her care, who brought her water and the food she began at last to refuse. Dar Oakley visited there too, sometimes, when she sat out in the sun on the rocks, as still as one herself, eyes closed but not asleep; though he wouldn’t venture into her dark dwelling.

  The last time he came to where she sat, she raised her head and hand to welcome him. He settled by her. She waited for him to speak, for he had come to speak, that was obvious, and yet for a time he only flitted, and raised his head, billwise, darkwise, daywise. At last he said to her what he had never said before: that he was sorry, sorry that he had lost the Most Precious Thing that she had gone in search of, in his unwisdom and greed, and now she had to die.

  “It’s all right, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea,” she said. “It’s a thing that can be sought and found, but it’s always lost again. That’s how the stories of it end. Every one. Mine too.”

  “And mine,” said the Crow, and hung his head.

  “It’s not good to die,” Fox Cap said. “But it’s not good to live forever, either. Grow old enough and you’ll know it.”

  Her eyes lost their farseeing gaze at that, and she looked right at him and smiled—for a moment he saw the child Fox Cap that he had known. She seemed to sleep again then, and he ascended away.

  The excarnation of Fox Cap was a great event among the Lake People. She was laid on a bier decorated with a hundred fluttering bits of weaving, and tall banners at each corner to draw in the death-birds (who were actually alarmed by flapping things, though they had grown accustomed to these, signals that it was time to come and do their duty). To the keening of the People and the thudding of drums, which the Crows had also to ignore, Fox Cap’s body was bared and opened. The keening turned to a great groan of awe as the black gang came in, gathering on the rocks above as they always did, first to study and converse, no matter how many of them had done this before. Then a few brave birds came down while big ones kept watch, and next others emboldened by them, settling their long feet upon the wealth, disputing, rising away and settling again at her head and breast, hard black bills striking.

  After a day Dar Oakley came down too. In the cluster of Crows around the body of her, tugging at her flesh, she seemed to him the person she had been when alive and yet entirely different. He partook as the others did—there was never much to her, and in her last seasons she’d grown as lean as a Deer’s shank—but though he wished to honor her and all that had passed between them, he found he couldn’t yak and quarrel over her fats with any will.

  He left them, and flew up to the ledge above, to which on a long-ago day Fox Cap had climbed to call him to carry the Singer to the Other Lands. Why was he unable to do the same for her now?

  It was because with her gone he was again always and only in Ka, where there are no other lands, just this one.

  But no, that wasn’t it: for in Ka a Crow or any being might eat any dead one; it was the way of things, everyone abided by it, even the dead themselves assented, if only by their patience. The one dead thing—the one palatable dead thing—that a Crow would not eat was another Crow.

  If he couldn’t eat his old friend, even for her own sake, then it must be that she had become like a Crow to him. What had made her different from her own kind had finally made her one of his kind. Or perhaps—there were Crows who said so, mocking him—it was he who, in his difference from Crow-kind, had become one of hers.

  That was dreadful to think: one of her kind. As though he’d been caught in the sticky stuff that People coated the branches of trees with, to trap small birds that settled on them unaware. Foolish birds, caught as no Crow would ever be.

  He lifted himself on wings that had grown heavy. It was those People words he had learned, the speech of hers he had drunk down like nectar: that was what had caused it, and they couldn’t be given back, spat out. He could go far from here, far from the lake and her People, but for him now there was no place in all of Ka where Ymr was not too.

  Let them carry her, then, those Crows who didn’t care where she was bound, or to what land. It was as well. She knew the way. It was her own land now, and she would come there honored as a singer, and by her singing be one of those who kept its secrets forever from the living. As for him, it was as true to say there was no land now that was his, no reason to be in one place and not another; no reason not to go someplace else, and no reason to stay.

  How far Dar Oakley went from the Lake People’s towns, how long he lived in the places to which he came, he’s unable to tell me. He sank back into Crow time, without history. He ate and yakked with the Crows of that region, who still had no names; he stopped counting the moons, and no one told him the day on which the summer ended and the winter began. Those Crows followed Ravens who followed the Wolves of the high forest and ate what was left of the Elk and the Deer that the Wolves brought down, after the Ravens had had their fill
. In time he was a Bigger there and sat on a branch and kept watch, waiting for the smaller and younger ones to eat before he descended: that was what a Bigger did. In winter roosts he took the center of the flock, exchanging talk with others of his status. Mostly they talked about the weather.

  He had a mate, and then another; he had young. They grew up, they grew old and died, but not Dar Oakley. As time went on, he’d now and then tell one or another of his stories, unable not to: to his offspring, before they could understand; to a Bigger who might beck in acknowledgment or shake his head in wonder but more likely’d pay no attention; to the trees.

  Then on a hot day in early summer, high bare sun suddenly intense, a band of Crows were laid out on a grassy slope in that peculiar state they get into sometimes in the hot sun: spread flat as though killed, unmoving, eyes hooded and bills open, “drugged” we’d say now by heat. Dar Oakley one of them. If you or I had been there, we could almost have picked him up unresisting.

  As they lay there, passing the occasional comment about warmth, or sun, or nothing much, a steady sound began to be heard off darkwise from where they lay, a high crashing or jangling, a thudding too that traveled through the ground and into their wings and bodies stretched over it. Most of the sun-stunned Crows paid no attention, but Dar Oakley felt an odd trepidation come over him, and after a time he pulled his scattered limbs together and arose, flying low and then mounting higher, just to see. He knew, he thought he knew, what it might be, what sort of thing. He rose up high enough to see them roll up out of the far daywise.

  It was People, yes, as he’d known it had to be, and lots of them, but not a kind of People he’d ever seen. They strode along all together, and the striking of their feet was what shook the ground, so many of them there were; and they were almost covered with metal plates, glossy and blazing in the sun, and high glittering caps, and long shields of metal that it seemed it would take great strength to carry. Ahead of all these stampers came a few on horses, also in shining metal—even their leg-wrappings and skirts seemed made of it. Banners and signs aloft, with birds attached to them, or signs of birds rather: raptors, you could tell that’s what they were meant to be. They were all on the way to battle, certainly, somewhere.

  Dar Oakley saw in his mind Fox Cap long ago raising her arm as though to bring forth the battles she saw were to come one day. They aren’t our kind, she’d said to him. They come from where we’ve never been. There will be many of them, and they can’t be stopped.

  The ones on horses in the front now pointed up at the Crow flying over, and laughed and spoke to one another. Dar Oakley banked, returning, watching them. Who were they, why did they laugh? He remembered the first People he had ever seen, how they had raised their spears to him. The Bigger of these—his cloak was red, they all looked to him—now called to one of the others near him; that one took from his back an instrument of some kind, drew from a carrier a slim stick, and combined the two. Dar Oakley circled, fascinated. The thing was pointed at him.

  He might have evaded the arrow if he’d known he ought to, but it was as when he and another Crow—a parent, a friend, Kits—would toss a stick between them, drop it from a height so the other could catch it, and again. This fast-flying stick struck him under the darkwise wing and pierced the plumage, went through the ribs and ruptured the aorta.

  Death is not an event in life, the philosopher says. We can imagine how the commander in red praised the archer, how the legion cheered, how they passed over the Crow body, their horses and shod feet kicking it apart. But Dar Oakley knew none of it. He was dead: dead as dead.

  PART 2

  DAR OAKLEY AND THE SAINTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  I want to understand about the dead, how it is they are in more than one place at the same time, or in no place at all, which is perhaps the same thing. I want to understand just as Dar Oakley does—I mean I want to understand, and so does he; and also I want to understand in the way that he can.

  Of course he may be telling me nothing at all, he may understand nothing. A sick Crow found in my backyard that I took up and cared for and fed, for no reason I could then have named. The little black head I peer into, the voice I think I listen to and transcribe, may be nothing more than a living Ouija board, voices heard in falling water. Maybe you could call it folie à deux: I came to believe he speaks, and because I believed it, he came to believe it too.

  My wife never cared anything for afterworlds or otherworlds, and though while she was alive my interest was carried on in what I would have described as a form of high irony, Debra suspected a greater commitment than I would admit to. She’d ask—sometimes without asking—how we two could have ended up together.

  What was odd about Debra’s this-worldness was how much she cared about the fate of her self and her life after death. She wanted to know where her body would eventually be put (I, she always said, not my body), and as soon as her diagnosis was clear and it was certain there wasn’t an effective treatment, she began to consider the disposition of what might be called her extended self: her things, repositories of memories like letters and diaries, gifts and messages for this and that person in her life. I was to keep careful track of all this and remember it when she couldn’t. She’d drill me on various clauses and sub-clauses of this evolving (and never actually written) testament. I still have it. In here.

  Isn’t that strange? Maybe it isn’t strange at all. She was sure that death closed her life like a book; she didn’t think that the physical books she gave to carefully considered recipients would cause her to live on in their possession or reading of them. And yet to her the continuation of her stuff was her continuation. Of course it was: her other world was this world. I couldn’t say to her that she seemed to be distributing the parts of herself through the world so that like Osiris she could someday be reconstituted. She’d have laughed at that. She was simply tidying up, with just time enough to do the job until the last list was handed off to me. For the ultimate continuation of her is me.

  When Dar Oakley came, when I first began to understand him and to learn his story, I thought he might tell me what it is to be dead, because he has been, many times; but he says that his own being dead is the one thing he can’t remember. Long, long times might pass for him in that realm, but all he ever remembers is finding himself in life, having begun again, acting in the midst of it with the understanding of one born and raised there. Until a day or an hour dawns and he knows who and what he is, Dar Oakley, sometimes in a place and always in a time far from where he’d been before.

  Ponies in winter out on a cold heath, a darkening day once upon a time, far East across the sea from where we are now.

  A sharp wind blew their tails against their flanks and hid their faces and their lashy eyes, closed against the cold. It was colder in winter now than it had been, Dar Oakley thought. A number of Crows held to the scragged and wind-bent branches of a tree; they too tended to sit with their backs against the wind, which kept their eyes from freezing, but allowed the wind to lift the feathers of their backs and necks and reach down to the flesh.

  The plan was Dar Oakley’s, though he had hardly got out the gist of it before the others took it up and yelled it from perch to perch along the tree line, each passing it on as his own, her own. It meant acting in concert, and it meant having an end in view; and while these Crows could do the one and do the other, whether they could do both at once was less certain.

  The four Horses now and then nuzzled the frozen grass, but mostly they stood still close together to share warmth (who doesn’t? Even Crows). The smallest among them was either a youngling or somehow stunted, a bag of bones.

  The Crows had gathered in silence, and been ignored by the Horses. They muttered low among themselves as more joined them.

  “Who’ll call a start?”

  “We’ll know when.”

  “I say now.”

  “Hush! Hush and wait.”

  “Look there,” one called.

  Far off ov
er the fields, one of the white-robed monks from a nearby abbey could be seen walking their way, with one of the farmers that the Abbey employed, perhaps coming to gather in these Horses before night. The Crows could see them, but the two of them were too far off to see the Crows, or the Horses either, who stood in the lee of a low hillock.

  “Now,” said another.

  “All together!” Dar Oakley cried, and the word passed through the branches and up and down until they were all yelling it. The Horses raised their heads—Crows making a ruckus will cause most animals to look up to see the cause—but before they could take it into their heads to move off, Dar Oakley gave another cry, and all the Crows rose up—not as one but in a long wave, one’s rising causing those nearby to rise. Then in a shrieking black crowd they descended onto the Horses. Dodging at their heads and flanks, crying at their ears, they got the four beasts moving in fright—that was the easy part. It was harder to separate the smallest from the other three, and chase him in a different direction: the Horses naturally wanted to stick together. Some of the Crows had to harry the little one daywise while the rest ran the other Horses darkwise, and it was hard for those Crows not to turn and join in chasing after the little Horse when it got separated, and keep driving the other three away. Dar Oakley had explained it—keep after the bigger ones until they were too far from the little one to find it, or lost the impulse to try. It was how the Wolves did it: cut out the weakest.

  The three bigger Horses ran as the Crows pressed them. Faces! they cried to one another. Eyes!

  Wolf! Wolf! the others cried at the stumbling little one. Run! Run!