Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  So happy was he, so wanting to bring her back within his compass, that he took her to see a thing that was his, which he had told no one, no other Crow, about.

  “What?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Close. Very near. Right there.”

  She laughed, seeing nothing. All around the grasses bent and gestured in wind. He had taken her to a little rocky outcropping hidden by a thornbush. He looked and listened, making certain no Crows were near. “Here,” he said. He poked his head in beneath the bush where she should look. She got to her knees and peered in under the leaves into a gap in the rocks.

  “Mine,” he said.

  Perhaps he believed, then when he was young, that no other Crow had ever gathered a treasure as he had done. Of course many do—they’re famous for it—but they never, ever tell where theirs is, or say a word of its existence. Older Crows know very well that their friends and neighbors might harbor precious things, and if a Crow is seen picking up a thing, inedible, useless but intriguing, and carrying it off, that Crow might well be followed; and if she sees herself followed, she might drop that thing as though it’s of no interest to her, rather than reveal where her true things are hidden.

  “You can’t have them,” Dar Oakley said.

  There was a half of a mussel shell, showing the opalescent inside—he turned it over for her to see. There were some pieces of mica, drab as dry leaves until he lifted them into the sun. Pebbles showing bands of glittering quartz. A fragment of a broken People silver bracelet—she recognized it—and a bit of glass. Dar Oakley doesn’t remember now all the things that were in it; he laughs to think of what they might have been, and what he’d later steal and hide in other times and worlds: some much worse than precious.

  “But it’s all,” Fox Cap began to say—all nothing—but she’d grown wiser as well as longer in that cold winter and that harsh spring. She only touched each thing gently, while Dar Oakley looked on in deep anxiety.

  Why do they do it, make these collections, visit them in secret to mull over them like misers? Only they know—they, and perhaps other beings who do the same, who also love to keep a hidden pile of glitter.

  “All right, all right,” Dar Oakley said sharply, unable to bear the exposure longer. Fox Cap was a threat to secrets, so noisy and obvious—who’d followed her, and spied on them? He decided he’d have to move it all to a new spot next morning.

  Fox Cap touched his head, smoothed the feathers there that he couldn’t reach, parting them gently with a fingernail. “I’m glad to see that,” she said.

  They went away from there to go around the snares that Fox Cap had set on the moor, and Dar Oakley from above directed her to a little Rabbit caught in one. She showed him how the snare worked, but he knew already: the Crows had found them, and seen the People collect the prizes, mostly too quickly for Crows to profit. She opened this Rabbit with a knife and put its innards before him: her thanks for his gift.

  “Tell me,” Dar Oakley said, when his bill wasn’t full. “What is a ‘realm’? Do you have a word for that?”

  “How can I know what a word in your speech means?” she said. Her sharp knees poked up atop her long forelegs where she sat in the grass. She wasn’t yet full-fledged, he thought, or however the People would say it. It took them so long, not just a season but year upon year.

  “A Raven said that word to me,” he said. “It’s not a word of mine or ours. This Raven said that the Ravens are a realm, and People are too; it’s not just a place where they are, or it’s not only that. You can be there but not go there, it seems.”

  Fox Cap thought about this, and plucked a long grass to chew and help her think. “So,” she said, “a realm is what you are where you are.” She thought more. “No. It’s where you are when you are what you are.”

  What was he? What he was when he was without Fox Cap wasn’t what he was when he was with her. If hers was a realm different from his own, how far would he travel in it before it was his own, and he couldn’t return?

  “This Raven told me,” Dar Oakley said, “that there is not only a realm of Ravens, and a realm of People, but also a realm of dead People; and in their realm they are not dead, or are alive still in some other way.”

  “Ravens are wiser than Crows,” Fox Cap said.

  “Is there such a realm? Where dead People are, but not dead?”

  “When they are there, they are what they are.”

  Dar Oakley shook his head; his thinking was running too fast. “Can you,” he asked, not knowing why he thought Fox Cap would know, just a child after all, huge as she was, “can you go to a realm, or be of a realm, where you aren’t what others are?”

  “You can sit beside others who aren’t what you are. You and I do.”

  “But you aren’t then in their realm. Are you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Can you go to, can you be in, or of, the realm of dead People if you are not as they are? Not dead?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “But I am I.”

  “Can I?”

  “You!” She leapt to her feet, startling him from the Rabbit (who was in no realm but this one). “You carry them!”

  “Carry who?” He was suddenly afraid, and defecated nervously.

  “The dead People,” Fox Cap said, displaying her open hands as though she had something in them, though there was nothing. “You carry them or take them or lead them. Your kind. Everyone knows that.”

  He gaped, open-billed.

  “Death-birds,” she said. The wind groomed the speechless grass. “It’s what you are when you are there.”

  Death-birds.

  Almost as one being the flock comes winging over the moorland by the lake, where below the fighters scurry on their feet and legs toward the fighters coming toward them. Seen from above, it’s as though their feet proceed from their hairy heads and then from their backs in turn. So many of them, each one seeming to go his own way, all scattering to engage the others one to one, but the Crows, no, all together above, single of purpose.

  It is no part of the Crows’ concern to wonder why the People do this. For these Crows it’s a living, the dead the People make, and insofar as any Crow heart feels gratitude, they feel it. They are first in the field, days before Ravens or Vultures, because they alone have learned the signs: the fires on the mountainside in the night, the thudding sounds that enlarge the People’s voices hugely, the penning of the beasts and children. A few days before this day, some of the Lake People who went off billwise returned, driving ahead of them a complaining herd of Cattle, which the ones in the settlement greeted with shouts and leaps and the beating of drums, and the Crows had come to recognize that as a sure sign that soon others would come and give battle, take back the Cattle if they could.

  And here they are, fighters, more than ever before. So far the People have always chased off those who come to contest with them, but it was easy to see that this could change. If the Lake People were driven back, these others would overrun their dwellings and fields. There would be provision in plenty for Crows then, too much to take. And if the Lake People were all killed and butchered, every one? The Crows have come to depend on the People and their waste and their battles. They have an interest now in all that happens on the beaten grass below.

  At dawn, before the two People bands engaged, the Lake People brought out of their settlement a number of males, bound in the way the People bind a Deer they have caught. Things that the Crows couldn’t name, strings of beads and stones and glitter, were hung around them; one looked sick and old; one struggled, the others didn’t, their heads hanging low or held high, waiting. The Singer in his wagon came out, and gave each of them drink from a cup he held to their lips. He sang or spoke a long while, and then two tall, strong ones stepped up and slashed with great weapons at the throats of the kneelers, who tumbled over gently into the grass. Females rushed ululating to them, and with pieces of the wrappings they make, they soaked up t
he blood.

  In all that time the opposing People were coming closer. At the death of the kneelers, they groaned a great groan—those that could see it done—but whether in rage or fear or excitement no Crow could say.

  Then it went forward as it did and does, and now the wheeling Crows look down at People who appear to them as lumps of joined heads and arms and feet; they perch in crowds in the trees and then again sail out across the field, impatient, hungry. Impossible to assess what’s going on below. Carriers drawn by Horses plunge in among those on foot—the ones in the carrier take great whacks at those who claw at them to drag them down. Do they all delight in this, as they seem to? Is it laughter, that sound they make with mouths wide? Some have got themselves right up onto the backs of Horses, and kick the Horses’ sides to make them run—they seem the gladdest, and when the attackers are turned back and begin to flee, they make the Horses run after them, stabbing at the fleeing ones with their long, fang-tipped spears and treading their fallen and squirming bodies under the Horses’ hooves. Then a Horse and rider are pulled down and a crowd of the others fall on them like their Dogs falling on meat.

  On this day, once again, the Lake People drive off the others. Those of their fighters left alive exult; they grapple with one another, not to do harm but, as it seems, in friendship, though no being that Crows know do that in sign of friendship. Those who didn’t fight gather around the fighters, and lift some to their shoulders, from where they raise weapons down which the blood runs.

  In the long bars of late light Dar Oakley on the field went from one dead fighter to another, looking into their faces, if they had faces to look into. Who are you now? he wanted to ask. Dead as you are, where do you go?

  Fox Cap had said to him, You carry them. Your kind. But that was absurd. How could Crows ever carry them, and why, lifeless and eviscerated as they were? Yet he felt they called or pleaded.

  “Afraid?”

  Dar Oakley started and leapt. It was that Crow named Eagle’s Tail.

  “No reason to be,” Eagle’s Tail said. “Not of these ones.”

  “No.” Dar Oakley lifted his head. “It’s late,” he said.

  Night came too soon for Crows to feast, a disappointment. Those who dared to begin on the dead even as the living went among them had got a taste. No matter: already flies were arriving to mate on this flesh and lay their eggs, and in the last of the hot days the wealth would only grow richer in the maggotry and the sun.

  When autumn came that year, the flock broke in two without ever agreeing on it, which they couldn’t have done. Many made a new roost, away from the old place by the river, amid the Alders and the Oaks of the foothills above the People’s settlement. From there they watched the People, which some at least visited every day, sometimes profiting, sometimes not. By the time the days were cold, their new roost was the larger one. It was where Dar Oakley roosted, though his parents, no.

  The Crows then knew only two seasons. In one, the days grew ever shorter and colder until they ceased to, and began to lengthen again. That season had one name. When the Crows began to feel the lengthening of the days and saw the sun rising each morning a little farther billwise, they called that season by another name. I’ve written spring and summer, autumn and winter, because we People have thought for so long in fours, but that wasn’t how Crows thought, or how they think now. Neither did People: not in that land then. The difference was that the People marked a single day, or night, when the season of the long sun changed to the season of the short sun. One day that led to winter, and one that led back into summer. Dar Oakley thought that perhaps Summer was a realm, and Winter another.

  Not long after the day in this year when (by the People’s reckoning) summer turned to winter, a day of silver mist and leaves golden and falling, Dar Oakley came down from the mountainside roost to find Fox Cap. He knew no more than before about what a realm might be, but when he talked to her—when he listened to her talk—the world around would alter, as when a mist lifts and things that seem vague and close are seen to be far-off and distinct. When he was alone with Crows, the world was simply wide and near and known. It was seen. With her he sometimes felt, deliciously, almost afraid to fly: What would he encounter?

  She wasn’t by the lake, nor on the tall rocks. She was not on the margins of the forest, cracking nuts and looking into the darkness of the trees. Not in her cap in her usual places, nor in his.

  She was gone.

  Now and then he had seen People pack things in a carriage, and with their beasts in tow go off billwise, the direction where the Raven said many, many more of them lived. They’d return, eventually, their carriage full of different things. Dar Oakley hadn’t ever seen one as young as she go with these travelers. But up on the palisade, by the skulls of enemy fighters—more were honored there now—he kept watch.

  So he saw the Singer carried out from his house one morning, two strong men bearing him, who seated him gently on the beaten and grassless earth. He looked up to where Dar Oakley perched, and gazed with his large, unblinking pale eyes at him. It made Dar Oakley quite uncomfortable. He looked away, preened beneath his wings, raised his head to study the sky, changed his place. The Singer went on regarding him. Dar Oakley expected him at any moment to begin to sing, and what would that song compel him to do? Instead a female came from the largest of the houses, the one from which the smoke never ceased rising, bringing a pot that she put beside the Singer. Still watching Dar Oakley, he put his hands into the pot and drew out gobbets of fat, broken bones with the flesh still clinging to them, other matter that Dar Oakley didn’t recognize. He laid it all on the ground before him. The other People, the Dogs, indeed everyone but a spying child half-hidden, went away. The Singer raised his hand to Dar Oakley, then with it showed him the feast.

  Of course the Crow wasn’t going to be taken in by that. Settle on the earth amid these People, whether they were in hiding or not, crippled or not? He laughed.

  It did look good. Fox Cap loved the Singer. How much did that count for? Dar Oakley was hungry, too: never not.

  Crows are hardheads, not easy to fool. That’s what they think about themselves, and they like to prove it by telling stories about a Crow who does get fooled—they laugh and laugh, to show they never would be. But there are stories too about a Crow so skeptical and wary that she misses something good.

  A story was beginning now, Dar Oakley knew that. He knew that he was in it, the example. He just didn’t know what kind it was. He shat, he felt his heart run fast, he let himself down into the compound.

  For what seemed like a long space the Singer hardly moved, only watched Dar Oakley eat and eat. With every bite the Crow looked up at the Singer and around the compound, then bent to eat, then looked up. Amid meats cooked in the way the People liked them there were uncooked meats. The Singer took one of these raw bits and chewed it slowly, but nothing more. Only when the bird ceased, crop full, did he speak.

  “I don’t know your speech,” he said in the People’s tongue. “But I think you may know mine.”

  Dar Oakley understood the words, different though the sound of them was from Fox Cap’s. He becked with all the courtesy he could. Except for Fox Cap—and those defeated fighters he had eaten—this was as close as he had come to one of the People. He wished he could ask this one where Fox Cap was.

  “She is gone,” the Singer said, startling Dar Oakley. “They came and took her cap of a Fox pelt. She went to take it back from them.”

  Dar Oakley wanted to question him, but he had only Crow speech. The Singer said no more. He put his hands flat on the ground on either side of him, lifted his body a little, and pushed himself backward a small distance. Then he did it again. He moved in this way back toward the dark doorway of his house, his thin legs trailing. Dar Oakley watched with one eye and then the other as the Singer bit by bit withdrew inside, a Fox into its den. Dar Oakley stepped to the door, but he thought nothing could induce him to go in. He could see the Singer in there, and the glitter
of a small fire, and things hanging that he couldn’t name. The Singer had lifted himself to a low seat, and busied himself with a small pot for his fire. Dar Oakley gave a hushed, inquiring call, but if the Singer couldn’t understand him, it was no use asking him anything. What could he do? He went inside, first his inquiring head, then a foot.

  The Singer, as though not noticing that a Crow was in his house, put the pot on the fire. With such pots and fires Dar Oakley had seen the People prepare their foods. This pot was empty, but as it heated, the Singer, speaking words meaningless to Dar Oakley, took up from somewhere a handful of dry leaves, which he threw into the pot, and then another handful of something else. Smoke arose.

  Crows are not excellent smellers. They hunt and forage by sight and find their cached food by memory. Not that they have no sense of smell, but for the most part they don’t go by it. Smoke, though, is another matter: they have a strange affinity for it. The smell that arose from the pot the white-hair set on the fire, that arose in the smoke and into Dar Oakley’s nostrils, would in a sense never go away from him; in later times, in places far from here, any whiff of it, or any air that bore anything resembling it, would carry him away, for a moment or for longer, to when he first went into the realm of the two-legs, where they spoke and said ymr ymr.

  Now, said the Singer to him, and Dar Oakley heard that word, and understood it, though at the same time he knew the Singer hadn’t spoken. Now tell me your name.

  Crow, Dar Oakley said.

  Crow, said the Singer, and smiled and laughed, pleased.

  He and the Crow not only understood each other now, but somehow they spoke the same tongue—not as Dar Oakley and Fox Cap had spoken together, each in a different one, but in the same—whether his, or the Singer’s, or another that was neither, he couldn’t know.