Ka

by John Crowley

  Each day when they went to sea he’d ask the Terns to look for the boat of the Saints, and they said, Yes, yes, look, look, see, but he wasn’t sure they understood him. He had enough seamanship to know that if the boat found its way to this shore, it would need an inlet where they could put in: a cove or the emptying of a river, a bay protected by outer banks from the thudding surf. There was only one such he’d found, where streams of meltwater fell from the heights and filled a wide pool, whose overflow went out a channel to the sea; at high tide the sea came in with enough draft for a boat. He visited there every day to learn if the Saints had found it, seeing in his mind as he went the boat tied up there and its sail furled—only to find it, once again, not there.

  Meanwhile the long days were growing shorter. The Terns were stuffing themselves and their now-fledged young with quantities of food that Dar Oakley wouldn’t have thought would fit inside them. It was clear they were readying themselves for the long reach over open sea. If they went, he must go too. He couldn’t stay here; there was no here, not for him. And yet how could he go with the Terns? How, despite all their goodwill? Watching them dash and flit, training up their young in their trade, Dar Oakley thought a thought no Crow has likely ever thought before or since: that if only he could, he would become a being of another species; that there was a species better than his own to wish to be.

  But they weren’t going to leave him there anyway. When that ever-returning need to go passed over all the red-billed birds, then the ones who knew him best (at least it might be those ones, he really couldn’t tell) flew around him, swooping in and dashing away as though they could draw him up after them, as People’s whipped Horses draw a cart into motion. His stomach was full and his plumage sleek with fish fat; his head was crammed with their instructions and urgings and scoldings about how he should hold himself and his wings, rise on the rising air until he reached a stream of wind that would carry him almost without his needing to make any effort. If he was let down again he must find another rising wind, and be lifted up to join it again. It was all so simple.

  The air was filled with summonses. Fat white clouds striped with long thin ones walked the far sky, and surely the apprehension he felt was only the impossible journey ahead? But no, it was something else, something he went toward that at the same time, but faster, came toward him.

  He rose. What a story to tell other Crows, if he ever again met any.

  I don’t know, no one now can know, if the boat of the Saints and its cohort reached the continent across the western sea; if it returned to where it started, or if it only went on sailing, and still sails, ever deeper into Ymr.

  But of course one or another of them must have returned, or the story wouldn’t have gone on being told, and it has been; it was still being told five hundred years on, when it was first written down: the story of a voyage undertaken in a hide boat by Saints.

  But suppose it wasn’t one of the Saints who returned, or one of the fisher People; suppose it was the kitchen-boy, who knew how to rig a sail, who had named himself Branan, Little Bran. Alone and near dead, in the dismasted and oarless boat, after being blown clinging to the wonderful tiller for who knows how long by the prevailing westerlies, back to the islands of before.

  He feels a change in the sea; a smell awakens him. He struggles to rise from where he lies in the bottom of the boat and sees a shore, like the shore he once knew. A rising tide carries the little craft over the bar and into the cove. There it bobs for a time until fisher People catch sight of it and put out to see what it might be. They hail it—from afar, being suspicious folk. The kitchen-boy calls to them as best he can: Is this the island of the Gray Abbey and the Brothers in white?

  Yes, they answer. And who are you?

  I am he who set out with the Saints for the Isles of the Blessed, and how many centuries have passed since then?

  No centuries, they’d tell him, a few years only, three or five, no more.

  I’m afraid to come ashore, he’d call. When I touch earth, I will fall and crumble into grave-dust, as one dead for a hundred years.

  Don’t be a fool, they shout to him. Come ashore with us, and tell us what became of you, and of the Saints.

  And he’d come, and not crumble into grave-dust when his foot touched the shore.

  He could have lived long there too, and perhaps become a Brother in the Abbey in whose kitchen he had served, telling and retelling his tale, which would go on being retold (and changed, and added to) after he was dead.

  And it would be told how after they sailed west from the last island of the known world, the eight of them came upon a Mermaid in the middle of the sea, and watched her white breast rise and fall softly in sleep. How after that they reached the fiery Island of the Smiths, and heard the beings there cry, Woe! Woe! as they in the boat came near. Black hairy men came to the shore and shook fists at them, and one brought a burning mass of Hell-stuff in a tongs and flung it at them, but by God’s grace it fell short, and made a great steam and noise in the sea.

  Then how the twelve of them came to a crystal mountain in the sea. It was as cold as the black mountain was hot, and Brother Bran said it was a way up to heaven, just as the other was an outcrop of Hell. They found crystal Mass-vessels floating in the water there, and gathered them up, but soon they all melted away as though they had not been.

  It would be told how the twenty companions once pitched their camp on the back of a great Whale, thinking it was an island, and even lit a fire there, which caused the Whale to sink down into the sea, and them with it, which nearly drowned them all!

  And the Paradise of the Birds, in the farthest North, where uncountable numbers of white birds sang more sweetly than the Swans of Llyr, and had human faces: they were souls neither damned nor saved, awaiting Judgment Day.

  And the Fortunate Isles, where sin had never been, and maidens in silver raiment brought them golden apples out of Eden to eat and sustain them in their voyage. There Bridget the female Saint remained and perhaps still remains.

  The thirty of them then crossed a sea turbid and thick as stew, and passed through a fog into another sea transparent as air and still as glass, and they could look a league or more downward within to see fabulous creatures swimming. Beyond that they came to the Land they sought; but what land it was, whether time passed there or didn’t, if there were food and drink there or birds and beasts, and of what kind; if fresh springs there washed away memories of home; if there were swords and battles, or only prayer and praising God, the kitchen-boy couldn’t say, because before he could disembark he heard a Voice calling from shore, saying he was forbidden to enter that land until his life was ended. And after a long wait alone as the sun rose and set, the Boy Bran, Branan, turned the boat toward the rising sun and home.

  If anything like that happened, if such stories as those were remembered and added to over many years, it could be that the name that the kitchen-boy had chosen for himself later got conflated with the name of great Brendan, Saint and sailor, who lived (I’d guess) a hundred years on. And so when now we read of the events in the account of Brendan’s miraculous Navigatio, first written down centuries after that and circulated through Christendom in many copies, maybe we can glimpse the little currach of the three Saints far out on the deep sea.

  In none of those tales is there any mention of a Crow carried on the boat’s prow or the yardarm over empty sea, lifting his wings now and then for balance, turning his head this way and that toward the unchanging West; and his account—how he, at least, did cross the River Ocean to the other side—was never part of the tales.

  He kept up with the migrating Terns well for a time, whether buoyed by their training and their knowledge or just by his own hope—well, he tried not to think about that, and now and then when he let himself look down at the dark or shining sea far below, he’d feel the heart within him faint.

  Then Terns became fewer; he was alone. Which meant nothing in a practical way; either he could keep himself aloft and ben
t to the West or he couldn’t. When his eyes were open, he saw only sea and sky; also when they closed. He began to sleep on the wing, something he hadn’t thought was possible for him, though the Terns said they did it, oh many seabirds do, they do.

  After a length of nights and days—how many he doesn’t know—there came a change in the air, something vast moving over the sea: it was that fearsome thing that from the shore of the land of ice he had perceived lying in the distance and the future. And the first sign of it was that he saw the Terns returning. A daywise wind seemed to be bowling them along, one then two then three, going back the way they had come. Too far off to make any sign to him, so light they couldn’t resist the wind’s pressing. Through the day the thing grew stronger; the air became thick and warm, the wind greater. His flying was no longer flying; he was a captive thing, plucked up and swept along faster than his wings could beat; he’d been seized on the fly as by an Eagle, and carried off. The Terns were all gone, he couldn’t see any; he couldn’t see anything at all.

  “I thought they’d deserted me,” Dar Oakley told me. “That they knew something they couldn’t tell me, to flee somehow. What became of them, where they went, I don’t know. After a time the wind suddenly ceased, as though a big running beast had died, and I was alone in air like no air I’ve ever been in. Heavy air, you can sense it, air too heavy to breathe. I flew and flew and seemed not to move at all, as though a circling wind that I couldn’t feel turned and turned me in the same place. But always I knew I was moving, moving far fast. The whole dead air I hung in was moving one way. Once I saw a sea-being near me, one with many snaky arms, dead, flying like the demons who hunted that Brother, and turning as I turned. Then somehow it fell away. But if I was flying and he wasn’t, how could he have stayed by me?”

  At that he looked up and around my house, as though some answer lay in the vicinity; it’s a way Crows think, as a human might rub his chin. Then he said, “It was strange to me, it was nowhere I’d have thought could be, I was blind and deaf sometimes, I flew upside down in rain, this beast went by. But whatever it was, wherever I was, I knew this: I was not in Ymr. The air in my throat and the sense of my eyes told me so. And if I was in this world and not in that, I was going to die.”

  Why if it wasn’t Ymr?

  “In those lands of Ymr,” he said, “nothing is mortal. They say it’s where the dead are, but really the ones there aren’t dead and never die. I wasn’t there but here. And so I knew I would die, and really die.”

  I’ve tried to understand where he was, and I think that this is what happened: the Terns, and Dar Oakley following on, encountered a massive circular storm, an autumn hurricane or a nor’easter, moving up our coast in a great turning spiral. It may be that the Terns were caught in one spinning arm of it and were thrown outward, past Dar Oakley coming in, and they went on, pushed like leaves by the forward edge of the wind till they escaped, or didn’t. But Dar Oakley was drawn somehow deeper in, into the eye, where the rising air from the sea below kept him aloft. He felt the barometric pressure drop oppressively—I’ve learned that many birds can sense it. And there he was stuck, with other matter drawn up, lightning, salt rain falling upward. When at last he was flung out or fell out, battered nearly to death, he was far from the sea; he looked down, and through wild rainy air, he saw land.

  The Land Promised to the Saints. It must be, for never in that tumult had he lost his sense of the four ways, and no matter how often he’d been turned around, he knew he’d been moving west with the storm. He was now on the sea’s far side, where the Brother said there was no death.

  No death for Saints.

  He fell more than flew to ground, unable to wing any longer, his plumage soaked through, starving and ragged, down through gesturing trees greater and more numerous than any trees he’d ever seen in Ka. He was sure he’d collide with a branch of one of these trees, so close-grown he would never pass safely through. Somehow he did pass unstuck, but also unable to catch hold of any branch and cling on.

  He lay on earth. The leaves of the trees were impossible colors, orange and gold and red, torn and flung up by the wind like little brilliant birds. He can’t know how long he lay—he hardly knew he was there in life. He couldn’t escape if predators came near. Were there Foxes in paradise?

  He looked upward.

  On a low branch of a tree of red and orange leaves, a bird sat regarding him. A black bird: a Crow. He knew it for certain, even though this Crow was unlike the Crows where he had been born or the hooded Crows of the islands. It was large, deep glossy black, and heavy-billed. A Raven? No, not. He knew it for a Crow. The last thing he knew.

  “Kits,” he said. Not a call, only a name. Then he died.

  PART 3

  DAR OAKLEY IN THE NEW WORLD

  CHAPTER ONE

  It wasn’t so bad, Dar Oakley thought, having the Beaver for a wife. She swept the lodge and chased the vermin from the rugs and cooked the corn and peppers. When offspring appeared—a Fox kit, a Gosling—she taught them well, and their Beaver uncles approved.

  The Beaver had first set out to claim the Crow for a husband when she saw him high up in a dead Pine, his bill pointed sunset-wise, still and attentive.

  “What do you see, Crow?” she called to him.

  “I see nothing,” the Crow answered.

  That seemed pretty remarkable to the Beaver—the Crow’s eyes were so good he could see anything—he could even see nothing if he tried.

  “Is that all you see?” the Beaver asked.

  “I see trees and fallen trees,” the Crow said. “I see far mountains. I see sky and clouds. I see . . . nothing.”

  “So you do see nothing!” the Beaver cried.

  The Beaver’s hearing was sharp, and so was her nose, but she couldn’t see much better than a Mole. She thought it would be good if the Crow could be with her—he’d see enemies far off, and the Beavers could take to the water even before the lookouts spanked the water with their tails. A being who could see nothing at all could see anything.

  It was hard for a Beaver to woo a Crow—the bird had no taste for the Beaver’s favorite food, sweet young sprouts of poplar and aspen, stripped to the white or in their tender bark. But sometimes love makes love all by itself. The Crow, at ease in the Beaver’s damp lodge, pondered this truth, and how strange it was to know that it was true.

  That night the Crow had a dream. He dreamed that somewhere there was a thing that, if you had it, you would never die. You would live longer than the greatest trees, longer than the mountains; you would live until the First Beings returned and began the world again. And this thing was meant for the Crow, if he could find it.

  But the secret was that the thing couldn’t be sought because it couldn’t be seen or grasped; it had no shape, no size, no corners or holes or bumps, no skin or bones, no outside and no inside, no taste or smell. It wasn’t different from nothing at all.

  When day came the Beaver asked him what the dream was that had troubled him in the night. The Crow didn’t want to tell her, because he didn’t want any other being to find the thing before he could think of a way to get it for himself. So he said, “I dreamed of nothing, Wife.”

  “Nothing!” said the Beaver. “Was it just like what you saw from high up in the dead Pine long ago?”

  “It was nothing at all,” the Crow said. “Where is my breakfast?”

  “Husband,” the Beaver said, “if you dream of a thing, it means you should have it. The spirits will help you find it. Your clan and your family must help you get it.”

  “I dreamed of nothing!” the Crow cried.

  “Then Nothing is what you’ll get,” said the Beaver. “I will help.”

  She smiled and showed her great orange teeth. The Fox kit and the Gosling tittered at their parents’ argument, and the Beaver uncles awoke and blinked. The Crow pulled in his head and waited for the hilarity to pass.

  The Beaver said, “Old Turtle is the wisest being. He will know everything there is to know a
bout nothing. We’ll go find him.”

  The Gosling laughed; the Fox kit laughed so hard he nearly rolled into the fire. “Watch out!” the Fire said.

  “I’ll go pack,” said the Beaver. “It’s a long journey.”

  “No!” the Crow said. His stupid wife! But sometimes love and simplicity know more than wit and cunning. . . .

  At that Dar Oakley’d had enough; he could stand no more of this story. Ka, he cried aloud in exasperation, and flew up a limb or two higher in the tree he occupied. The People storyteller, whose name was One Ear, pointed to him, smiling, and his hearers looked and laughed: it was funny to have a being who was in the story listening to it being told. The storyteller hadn’t given the Crow in the story a name—Crow was all he said, and that bird listening was a Crow, and any Crow is every Crow.

  Well, Dar Oakley knew otherwise. The story was about him and not any other Crow or all Crows. He knew that because the storyteller had got it from him, and then for his People hearers he had turned it into a story like all his others, though Dar Oakley was pretty sure that in fact the storyteller knew better, knew that the Crow Dar Oakley had a name and nature all his own, just as each of the People gathered here around him did.

  Worse: the storyteller said nothing about why Dar Oakley wanted to find the thing without a name. It wasn’t in order to live forever. It wasn’t for himself at all; he didn’t need it, and knew enough not to want it. He hadn’t been selfish, or sneaky, though you could never convince People that a Crow of whatever kind wasn’t both, all the time.

  And Dar Oakley’d never dreamed a dream in all his several lives; he was sure he didn’t know what one was.

  In an autumn here many seasons before this, Dar Oakley had found himself living among a flight of deeply black, supremely self-satisfied birds—Crows like the Crow who had looked down on him from a black-limbed tree on his last day alive. In fact he found himself to be one of them, as big and black as they, primaries long and strong, breast a sheen of colors.