by John Crowley
Later now, and the travelers have set themselves up in that unpromising place by the stream, and seem ready to spend the night; and night is coming. They look around themselves, into the trees, back the way they came, as though expecting to see what soon they do see: apparitions of impossible beasts, rushing toward them, gesticulating. They don’t run, they don’t prepare to resist though they grip their staves tighter; they cling together, and seem resigned, as certain animals can do in the presence of predators.
The People beasts have set up their ghastly keening, voices or instruments; their followers rush in after them, and the travelers sink farther into themselves; a Crow looking down thinks they have shut tight their eyes. One of the Wolves lifts his ax. At that sign, as though summoned by it, other People, armed too and yelling, burst out of the cover of the woods where they have hidden and charge the Wolves from behind; and from down the path leading from the rocks, horsemen, swords drawn.
The watching Crows, scandalized, mystified, rise up higher into the trees. What’s this? Who? Fly! Stay! Dar Oakley—just then arriving among them—looks on, not amazed like them but not showing that he isn’t, he hopes. What does amaze him, as the mounted People charge in among the Wolves, is to see the Brother among them, though he said he was forbidden to be. White skirts pushed up between his legs and his sandaled feet sticking out, he rides up behind one of his clan, raising a sword too, yelling too.
The Wolves are caught in the throat of the rocks between the ones on foot behind them and the horsemen ahead. Those “travelers” have fled away into the trees. The Dux coming in on a big dappled gray whacks at the bird-beast, who is trying to extricate himself from his disguise; he gets free and is trying to climb the rocky ledge when the Brother, who is also the brother of the Dux, comes at him. The rider twists his Horse in the narrow space and the Brother, on the Horse’s bobbing rump, brings his sword down on the bandit’s head, and again. The bandit falls, tries to touch his hurt head, tries to rise and can’t; lies still.
Dar Oakley watches the Brother raise his sword high and cheer (he can’t hear it in all the noise of the fight, but he can see the Brother’s exulting tongue and teeth). The other Wolves have thrown themselves on the ground before their attackers, faces down, hands up, and the Dux and his cohort stand over them, threatening but not attacking, like Crows around an Owl. None of the Wolves has escaped.
The Brother has slid from the horse’s back and kneels by the bird-beast, the man he has killed. An old grizzled man. Dar Oakley thinks of the time the Brother knelt to pray by the dead pony in the snow, when he and the Crows first met, which has brought Dar Oakley here now. The Brother crosses himself and covers his eyes with a hand.
“Kin, are we?” says a Crow at Dar Oakley’s ear. Dar hasn’t noticed Va Thornhill settle by him, but now turns to find the bigger bird’s eye on him.
You will betray.
Given the Crow’s reputation among us People, it’s hard to credit what Dar Oakley insists on: that a Crow can’t lie to another Crow, simply hasn’t the trick of it. Boast, evade, mock, exaggerate, confuse: but not lie. So to Va Thornhill he can answer nothing but nothing.
That’s how I have imagined it: what I would have seen if I had been in that glen at the place where the path narrows between the rocks. It’s what I make of Dar Oakley’s story as he tells it now, what he saw and what he could name then of People things and People acts. We can only think about those things we can name, and his thought is Crow thought and is not mine; but if he can think about me, and my kind, maybe I can think as he does, and as he did then. If he can be in Ymr, I can be in Ka.
In Ymr then—at least in that wide part of the human world, at whose western edge, I believe, Dar Oakley then lived—all People were divided into three: those who tend the land and the flocks; those who ride Horses and bear arms; and those who pray, make sacrifices, remember stories and tell them. It was as though there were different People species, and (like Crows and Rooks) they couldn’t mix. But they could, and did; stories from that world are full of People who behaved not as the kind they were born to be but as one of the other kinds, and some of them triumphed and lived happily, and some were made to suffer for it. The Brother had triumphed—Dar Oakley had seen it, in the shadow of the glen—and now must suffer.
“I took up arms,” he told Dar Oakley, as they went along. “A priest of God, my hands consecrated to his service. Those hands spilled human blood, and I have to do penance.”
Dar Oakley could perceive the Brother’s shame and sorrow, but really, People happily killed People all the time—at least those with weapons did—and why should this one feel sorry? What he’d done—it was good for People!
But he set out with the Brother again for the holy place to which the Brother had told his Abbot he would travel, to see what the Brother would do there, and what penance meant. The Crows of the region, Va Thornhill’s flock, angry at having their good living interfered with, pursued him and the Brother a long way, yelling threats and insults that Dar Oakley tried to ignore. What penance would he be made to undertake? Best to be gone till they forgot about it, if they ever did.
Soon enough the two of them had left that demesne and entered another, where Dar Oakley knew no one. He’d fly on far ahead of the Brother to forage—snails, grubs, small cadavers—being careful not to alarm or challenge anyone nearby; and then he’d return to the Brother, no matter how far they’d gone apart. That seemed miraculous to the Brother, but it was only that Dar Oakley could see him from a long way off, and follow his movements.
The Brother couldn’t or wouldn’t eat Crow food, though his discipulus (as he had come to call Dar Oakley) brought it to him like a good Crow parent. Instead, with his seashell he begged at houses and from travelers, giving blessings in return for food and small coins, asking the way to the place ahead, which he named and many of them knew.
“Saints have been served by beasts,” he told Dar Oakley as they went along. “The Saint we go toward now. When she was young, no one would listen to her preach. The pagans clamored to kill her, Discipule, and she fled to the forest. There she preached to the birds and the animals. A family of Foxes came, vixen and kits, and sat patiently to listen, and in time became devoted to the Saint; when she returned to the People and converted many to the Faith, this Fox family remained with her, serving her to the end of her days.”
The road had widened, and become plain, and there were more People on it. Some walked with sticks propped under their arms, some were carried in trundles pushed by others. So many of them, faces fixed on the way ahead. Dar Oakley, unsettled and oppressed, ascended away.
How many stories did that Brother know, and why did he have to keep on telling them? It was disturbing. When you heard one, you thought of yourself in it, seeing it happen, which it never had, not anyway to you. It put things into your eyes that your eyes hadn’t seen but now they must. De te fabula, the Brother would say when a story was done, lifting an instructing finger: the story is about you.
Thinking these thoughts, he’d gone on a good way, not paying attention. But something that had been growing in him all morning now came clear to him. In an elongated moment, wing beats slowing, he understood that he knew this place, which he should not know. He knew it, and he knew he knew.
Not the new road, and the People all going one way. Not the folded land all bare of trees now and covered with plowed fields and People houses like mushroom patches. But yes, the line of the darkwise mountains. The ragged shape of that long lake he was approaching, the silver shudder of sunlight across it and the waterbirds rising. He set out over it. There would be an island in the middle of the water, he knew, where he’d rested on the day that he, or the Crow he was then, had first seen People: and yes, there it was, where it had been. But that high round stone building that sat on it, stones laid on stones—that had not been there. Now treeless, the island seemed larger than it had been, as though the waters had receded and bared more land.
When there were trees t
here and nothing else, he had one day—hadn’t he?—convinced his flock amid their uproar and doubts and mocking that they could make a living from the People.
Once there was a Crow who learned how to feed his clan on the flesh of dead People, but now we have forgotten the trick of it.
That had been him, yes, he had taught them that then.
The land rising from the lakeshore, where the People had built a settlement: he recognized it. That rocky ledge breaking from the hillside above it, and the way up to it that the People had climbed, carrying their dead. He could see them climbing, though they weren’t there.
Fox Cap. He remembered Fox Cap.
Child lost in the woods within sight of home. Peacemaker neither male nor female. Walker into worlds where time didn’t pass. Through her he had come to know Ymr, how large it was, how it was all made of meanings, which fill it without taking up any space at all. She was—of course!—the reason why he had understood the Brother’s speech and his stories from the first. Why he was spoken to by People who were dead, from the realm of stories where they lived. He, Dar Oakley, was himself inside a story, which was also inside him, packed within him like another Crow, and he knew now why he had for so long felt both crowded and empty.
He banked over the eternal great cross of the ways—billwise, daywise, darkwise, otherwise. From the lakeshore, where now pilgrims milled and rickety houses of wood stood on posts out in the water, he had once seen the boat set out that carried the Singer’s excarnated bones to be buried. The boat that in time bore hers as well.
How long ago?
How many seasons had it taken to pile stone on stone to make that place, that People place that now stood in the middle of the island where four tall stones had watched alone over the Singer’s bones? He’d once seen the Brothers at the Abbey lay just one course of stone in a week of summer days. One single course. The courses of stone that made this building—uncountable. Moss grew on the slabs of its roof.
He wasn’t an old Crow. No Crow could be that old. Afraid and sinking, he turned away from the island and into the wind from shore.
I asked him: Was it then that you knew? Knew what had happened, how you had gone down into the Other Lands with Fox Cap and stolen life and lost it and yet in the stealing of it had earned this odd undying? And he said no, he didn’t know all of that then and isn’t sure of it even now; but yes, he had remembered Fox Cap, and how he had gone down with her into the Other Lands; and he thought that if he could go down again into those lands, again he would seek her there, and if he found her he would tell her that he persisted still on earth, and that however long he now lived he would not forget her again.
Bells tolled across the water like huge, slow heartbeats that displaced Dar Oakley’s own quick ones. Boats had come from the island, manned by black-clothed Brothers, who with the help of shore dwellers hauled the boats in and tied them. The People groaned and pressed forward to get places on them. The Brothers went among the People, listening, touching; those farther back in the crowd lifted hands to draw the black Brothers’ eyes toward them. A number were chosen to go onto the boats; Dar Oakley’s Brother was one chosen. Seen from above, the bowed heads of the People in the laden boat were a clutch of mottled brown eggs, with who knew what inside them. The long oars raised white blooms where they struck the gray water. Those left behind unchosen waded into the water as though to walk out to the island, following the boats.
The island the boat pulled toward was becoming for Dar Oakley the only island: not one of two—the island of then, the island of now—but just one. He lowered his wings, dove toward it.
First comes a Saint, the Brother had once told him, to where nothing is but earth and stone. In time that Saint’s bones are laid where God determines. Around them is put the altar; around the altar, the church, around the church, the Abbey. The Abbey draws in those who come to seek aid from the Saint; many stay to build houses and plant fields, and these spread farther. The whole land around is given the name of the Saint at its center.
This, he said, is how the world grows larger.
The long hide boat full of pilgrims reached the island. Brothers from the Abbey came out from their dwelling and made further choices among them, some to go on inside, others not. Dar Oakley, perched on a slab of the roof, saw one of the black-robes bend over the Brother, who clasped his arms and whispered in his ear. He was taken inside.
Dar Oakley overflew the buildings, some unfinished and unroofed, and looked in wide windows. Black-robes came and went. The Brother wasn’t in the public places of the church amid the kneeling People seeking aid, nor behind the curtain in the special place where on their behalf the Brothers did their hidden holy things. Nor in the cloister, where perhaps their Saint, like the Brother’s Saint, lived in a box.
You will never die.
But between the church and the cloister—in a small place accessible to Dar Oakley only through a high window narrow as a crack—yes, there he was, though Dar Oakley didn’t at first know it was he, for he lay facedown on the floor between two rows of standing Brothers. Before them a thing sat in the middle of the floor: a sort of dome, like the lid of a People’s cauldron, but larger than the lid of any cauldron Dar Oakley had ever seen. The Brothers ceased singing and helped the Brother to his feet—and he saw Dar Oakley above in the window. He lifted his arms to him.
“Corve,” he said. “Discipule. Venite.”
The Brothers all looked up.
“You can’t bring a Crow here,” one whispered.
“It’s the Crow who has brought me,” the Brother said.
They looked from him to Dar Oakley, displeased or alarmed; one waved a black sleeve at him; he lifted wings but didn’t go away. They decided to ignore him. Each of them in turn embraced the Brother, and two of them went to the black dome in the middle of the floor. With some effort they lifted it away. There was nothing beneath it. Less than nothing: a great hole, going down into darkness, its bottom unseeable.
“Domine me adjuvate,” the Brother whispered, kneeling again as though unable to stand. “Lord God help me now.”
The Brothers went away, casting a last doubtful look at the bird of ill omen, all but two who stood apart, hooded. When they were gone, Dar Oakley came down to where the Brother knelt, three wing beats loud in the enclosed space.
The Brother sighed, and sat back on his heels, which (Dar Oakley knew) kneeling Brothers were never to do. He clasped his hands together lightly in his lap. “Corve,” he said. “Two Saints lie together here, and have for centuries. One was lame all his life, and those who are crippled or lame now come to ask his help, either to cure their affliction or teach them how to bear it. The other Saint was she I told you of, the Saint of the Foxes.”
Saints? Saints were dead People separated from their bones but somehow still residing in them or with them, whose voices and faces the People who came near the bones could sometimes hear and see. The one whose voice Dar Oakley had heard. The naked boy climbing his golden ladder to the place Up, whose command had brought him and the Brother here. They were Saints. If the Singer and Fox Cap were Saints too now, and were anywhere but in their bones, they were—they had to be—Down.
“Those Saints, Corve, they watch together at this portal, which is the way to the place of sorrow and cleansing. It’s where I must go, and remain a day and a night. If I can endure that, and whatever befalls me there, I can be forgiven.”
His body, forever restless and unquiet, was entirely still, more still than Dar Oakley had ever seen it.
“I have been granted this,” he said. “It’s not for everyone. I have been examined, and I have made my offering, and I am permitted.” His eyes had not left the circle of dark downwardness before him. “I’m afraid, Corve.”
So was he, Dar Oakley, afraid and repelled, and yet he stepped a step sidewise to be nearer the Brother.
“After a day and a night,” the Brother said, “if I haven’t returned, the Brothers will know I never will. I will be damne
d, and will remain there forever.”
Dar Oakley thought, You don’t return from there. That land returns you here, when you have done there whatever you do. He wanted to tell the Brother that his one-day-and-a-night might take many seasons to pass. He had known all that once and knew it now again, but he couldn’t say it.
“We’ll go,” he only said in his own words of Ka. “Let’s go.”
The Brother seemed to understand that, and stood. He went to the hole. Grasses and weeds starred with white flowers had grown thick around the rocks the time long ago when Dar Oakley had gone down into it. The Brother sat on its lip, and weeping now, and groaning through gritted teeth, he let himself down within. When his shaved head had almost disappeared, he held out a shaking hand, palm up, for Dar Oakley to step onto. Time went away, then was now, Dar Oakley stepped onto the hand and was lowered into darkness. Above them the two black-robes lowered the iron cover over them.
It was a treeless, featureless place, as though the trees here, like those in the land above, had over time been cut and burned—but the trees he had once seen here hadn’t been trees (so Fox Cap had told him) and they couldn’t be cut, and there was no time here. No time, no lies, only one of each thing.
Unless this place now was not the same place.
You needn’t fear that you won’t return from here, the Brother said. They can’t keep you. In this land there are only immortal souls, and you don’t have one. You are but a beast, and can’t sin.
If that’s so, Dar Oakley said, then how can it be that I’m here at all?
Maybe, the Brother said, you are not a bird at all, but a spirit. I’ve wondered. They said so in the Abbey, that you were. An evil spirit, or the hiding place for one.
They walked on—the Crow hopping to keep up—over broken flints that showed a faint path: the only thing that made this place a place.